Put simply, Sapir and Whorf believed that the language we speak profoundly influences the way we construct our worlds. Saussure himself had stated that language is fundamental to human thought. “[T]hought is like a swirling cloud,” he says in Course in General Linguistics, “where no shape is intrinsically determined. No ideas are established in advance, and nothing is distinct, before the introduction of linguistic structure” (Saussure: 110[155]). But where Saussure took this relationship for granted, Sapir and Whorf investigated what it means that we think with language. The focus is not on the words themselves, the vocabulary, but on the system, in the Saussurean sense of the total language considered as a self-contained and integrated whole, wherein sounds, words, and grammar operate according to mutual relationships.

The effect of language on thought was especially developed by Whorf in his investigation of “covert” categories, systematic relations in language which are not overtly marked. A basic instance of this is the difference between “sheep” (singular) and “sheep” (plural), where the plurality of the second word is not indicated by the word itself, but by grammatical relations within the sentence. Covert categories were interesting to Whorf because they function on a deeply unconscious level and thus, Whorf believed, would have a motivational quality not easily resisted.

One covert category Whorf found especially significant is the case of gender in English. In contrast to other languages such as French and German, English has no covert gender markings for nouns. However, Whorf points out, many English nouns are not gender-neutral. For example, in Romance languages, female names are overtly marked with an “-elle” or “-ella” affix, as in “Danielle” or “Marguella”. In English, though, there are no clear differences between male and female names. Despite this lack of overt markings, it is still understood that George, William, and Richard are male, while Jane, Susan, and Betty are female. The gender of the named person is determined unconsciously, covertly; it is established through systematic relations within the entire language structure.

The implications of language for world-view are drawn more dramatically in Whorf’s comparison of Western European languages (called “SAE”, Standard Average European, for convenience) with Hopi. In SAE, non-real abstracts, such as time, are dealt with the same way real objects are. Thus time is spoken of in terms of measurable units (years, hours, days) and is counted as if those units were physical objects (1 hour, 10 days, compared with 1 chair, 10 walnuts). Furthermore, we apply spatial adjectives to temporal phenomena (“What a long day. ” “Is your week going smoothly?”). Hopi, on the other hand, does not treat time and other abstract concepts at all the same way. Where SAE expresses time in terms of units, Hopi expresses it in terms of the process of getting later. Thus, a “length of time” in SAE becomes a relational comparison of the difference in lateness between two events. Time units are not expressed as things which can be considered together, but as a measure of how far along in the process of becoming later an event occurs.

The metaphorical treatment of abstract concepts as reified entities recurs throughout SAE; words and ideas are treated as things which, when “relayed”, “carry” a message which, if “made clear”, a person could “receive”, and thus we “get a messages across”; substance qualities, such as “water” are used which treat them as if it were possible to apprehend them as a whole (“I’d like water” is said the same way as “The Earth’s surface is 70% water”). Hopi does not use metaphorical analogy in describing the world. Where SAE speakers say “water” as a description of any substance with that quality, the Hopi term describes the specific form in which it appears, so that it is unnecessary to use phrases like “a cup of… ” or “a gallon of… ” in order to give the water manipulable form. Likewise, instead of relying on spatial metaphors to describe abstract concepts, Hopi has “abundant conjugational and lexical means of expressing duration, intensity, and tendency directly as such” (Whorf: 146).

Whorf argues that the differences between SAE and Hopi linguistic systems are expressed in the cultural behaviours of their speakers. The Hopi linguistic expression of time as a process of becoming later is seen reflected in the Hopi cultural emphasis on preparedness and “constant insistent repetition” (Whorf: 151). Whorf says that, “To the Hopi, for whom time is not a motion but a ‘getting later’ of everything that has ever been done, unvarying repetition is not wasted but accumulated” (151). Similarly, the SAE linguistic reification of abstracts is held responsible for “materialism, psychophysical parallelism, physics… and dualistic views of the universe in general, Indeed… almost everything that is ‘hard, practical common sense’” (Whorf: 152).

Unfortunately, Whorf’s arguments are ambiguous as to the exact relationship between language and world-view. He seems to be arguing for a causal relationship: “Concepts of ‘time’ and ‘matter’… depend upon the nature of the language or languages through the use of which they have been developed” (Whorf: 158). However, his evidence does not prove causality–the statement quoted above could as easily read “The nature of a language depends upon the concepts which it has been developed to express.” Whorf himself admits that culture and its language system develop together in a state of feedback. It is no surprise then that at any given moment, linguistic structure is reflected in cultural world-views. To point out such correlations as exist at a given moment does not seem to be Whorf’s goal, anyway; besides, such correlations would shed little light on the nature of the relationship between language and culture. In keeping with Saussure’s notion of a language imposed on the individual from without, however, a sort of causal relationship can be inferred which has not so much to do with the relation between language and culture as between language and individuals, by saying that language as it is learned and used by individuals shapes the way they apprehend and construct their world. The problem is that this sort of argument necessitates dealing with language as an individual phenomenon, a situation which goes against one of the basic premises of Saussurean linguistics: that the object of study is langue, the level of language which is collective and shared by all speakers, and not parole, which is the level of language which is individual and variable. In order to study the motivational aspect of language in forming individual world-views, we should have to enter the forbidden realm of parole.

Saussure’s langue/parole distinction stood as a major factor in Sapir’s and Whorf’s failure to satisfactorily develop their Relativity Hypothesis. In Whorf’s writing, the tendency towards the field of parole is apparent. In “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language”, he uses examples from his experience as an insurance investigator to illustrate the relation between thought and language. For instance:

A drying room for hides was arranged with a blower at one end to make a current of air along the room and thence outdoors through a vent at the other end. Fire started at a hot bearing on the blower, which blew the flames directly into the hides and fanned them along the room, destroying the entire stock. This hazardous setup followed naturally from the term ‘blower’ with its linguistic equivalence to ‘that which blows’ implying that its function necessarily is to ‘blow.’ Also its function is verbalised as ‘blowing air for drying,’ overlooking that it can blow other things, e. g. flames and sparks. In reality, a blower simply makes a current of air and can exhaust as well as blow (Whorf: 136-7).

Whorf makes it clear that the accident described was caused as a result of habitual thinking which reflects linguistic usage. The word “blower” acts more powerfully to motivate behaviour than does the actual function of the device, to “create a current of air. ” However, this example, as well as the others he gives, is dependent on the context in which the speech act occurs. In other words, Whorf’s examples are all instances of language in use, that which Saussure designated parole and declared “ancillary and more or less accidental” ( Saussure: 14 [30]) and thus unnecessary for linguistic consideration. Much of Whorf’s ambiguity is the result of trying to study instances of parole according to the rules of langue. His failure to do so reflects not so much a lack of reasoning ability on his part but a weakness in the basic assumptions of Saussurean linguistic analysis. What is called for is a linguistic methodology for the study of language in use, and of the complex relationship between the shared system of meanings (langue) and the way those meanings influence behaviour in specific contexts (parole). While Saussure’s method is adequate for the study of language as a human trait, Whorf’s method begins to look at language as something which people do, for which Saussure’s method is sorely lacking.

While the Sapir-Whorf Relativity Hypothesis ultimately failed, it did so in interesting and even constructive, ways. As students of Franz Boas, Sapir and Whorf set out to prove the intellectual equality between Westerners and so-called “primitive” peoples. Whorf stresses that while the Hopi language and world-view are certainly different from our own. they are not inferior, and in many ways may in fact be superior as a way of perceiving and describing the world; “English compared to Hopi is like a bludgeon compared to a rapier” (Whorf: 85). While Whorf certainly succeeds in making this point, he fails in adequately addressing the greater issues raised by his work. Perhaps, had he lived longer, he may have transcended the Saussurean limitations on his work. Perhaps not. As it stands, he left a slew of unanswered questions, and a clue that the study of language has to be expanded it we are ever going to understand what it means to be language-using creatures.

References Cited
Saussure, Ferdinand de.

1972. (trans. 1983) Course in General Linguistics. La Salle, IL: Open Court.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee.

1956. Language, Thought, and Reality. Cambridge. MA: M. I. T. Press.

This post is a response to the increasingly heated thread at Feministe on Female Genital Cutting (FGC). Nearly every mention of FGC in our society elicits condemnation of the practices and the people who practice them as “bestial”, “barbarian”, “inhuman”, “uncivilized”, “heinous”, etc., which has a tendency to set me off. For a long time I’ve wondered about the incredible and disproportional response FGC incites in Westerners, feminists and non-feminists alike, responses which generally are very far removed from the reported responses and experiences of women who have undergone some form of FGC. Since I was obviously not able to make a meaningful intervention at Feministe, being limited by both the “sound-bite” nature of a comment thread and the increasingly furious response to my posts, I decided it would be best to bow out of that discussion before someone burst a vein (especially if that someone was me!) and build my arguments in the less-limited space of my own blog.

This post turned out to be well over 6,000 words (including footnotes and references) — for those who find reading long documents online uncomfortable, I have posted a PDF of the post (with minimal formatting) that can be downloaded and printed.

Few aspects of global women’s lives attract the kind of attention that Female Genital Cutting (FGC) 1 has in the last decade or so. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 100 – 140 million women living in 28 African nations (and a handful of women in Asia and the Middle East) have undergone some form of FGC. FGC practices include the cutting of the labia or clitoris, removal of the prepuce (clitoral hood), removal of the external part of the clitoris and/or the inner labia, and sewing up the vaginal opening, and any combination of these practices. Although often found in Muslim societies, FGC is not specifically Muslim and is looked down upon by most non-African Muslims; most likely such practices pre-date the introduction if Islam into North Africa and were carried forward with new meanings as groups converted.

Western attention on FGC has focused on two aspects: the potential health impact on women undergoing these procedures, and the potential impact on women’s ability to engage in and enjoy sexual intercourse. Because data in both areas has been scarce – the worldwide interest in FGC developed fairly recently, so long-term health trends are only now beginning to be apparent, and data on sexual enjoyment is nearly impossible to compile in any meaningful sense – FGC has proven an empty template for the projection of Western conceptions of sex and sexuality and their relation to individual identity. Most arguments against FGC see these practices as an attempt by native men to control the sexuality of “their” women, by reducing the ability of women to enjoy sex and therefore reducing the likelihood that they will engage in sex for any reason other than wifely duty. While people in some societies do describe their particular practices in such terms, this is hardly universal; women are just as likely to describe the empowerment and control they feel as a result of their procedures. Responses to FGC among the women who undergo such procedures are complex and nuanced, in a way that Western responses absolutely are not.

This piece has two aims. The first is to explore some of the ways that women who have undergone FGC talk about the practices of their own societies, both in first-person accounts and in second-hand accounts that make up the ethnographic record. The second is to look into the wide gap between the experiences recorded in the ethnographic record and the discourses that make up Western anti-FGC advocacy. What emerges is, I think, a classic example of the formulation put forth by Gayatri Spivak: “white men [and women] saving brown women from brown men” (1988). Spivak’s seminal article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, points to the willingness of the privileged to speak for and about the less privileged, generally in ways that reflect more the concerns of the privileged than anything familiar to the actual lives of the subaltern. In the case of anti-FGC advocacy, the voice of “brown women” is almost entirely absent, literally silenced by an insistence that the horrendousness of the practice precludes any possible positive evaluation, and therefore the only valid voices are those that condemn FGC. All contradictory testimony is dismissed as the result of “brainwashing”, “false consciousness”, “fear of male reprisal”, “anti-Westernism”, “ignorance”, or other forms of willful or unwillful complicity. For instance, Mary Daly wrote of women’s participation in carrying out these procedures, “Mentally castrated, these women participate in the destruction of their own kind” (1978, quoted in Walley 1997: 419).2

Context

Since few Westerners aside from those directly involved in FGC advocacy or research are familiar with the ethnographic context in which FGC occurs, I will begin by offering short descriptions of several different procedures and the conditions under which they occur. Given the wide range of procedures involved and cultural complexes in which they are situated, this does not aim to be anything like a representative sample – there are hundreds if not thousands of culturally-unique practices that are lumped under the heading of “FGC”. Procedures can be found taking place in elaborate ritual ceremonies, generally associated with a woman’s coming of age, or they can be performed by trained midwives under pseudo-medical conditions (some would have them done in hospitals, but as FGC is illegal in nearly every country in which it occurs, this is not a possibility) to either very young girls several years off from reaching maturity or to older women well past the age of maturity. There simply is no “typical” practice.

Consider the Mende of West Africa. After the onset of menarche (first menstruation), a group of girls are taken into the wilderness for a coming-of-age ritual lasting weeks or even months. During this time, they dress in short skirts and strings of beads, their bodies smeared with a white clay mixture that is intended to protect them from malicious supernatural forces during the incredibly vulnerable transition period. The rites are led by women from the Sande, the women’s society into which the girls are being initiated, who will teach their charges the meanings and obligations of womanhood in Mende culture. The rites are characterized by a great deal of singing, dancing, story-telling, and feasting, creating a festive, celebratory atmosphere reflective of the value placed on womanhood. Surrounded by their friends and mentors, the girls undergo the removal of the external clitoris and part of the labia minora, the pain of which is meant to mimic and prepare them for the pain of childbirth. The ritual is a promise of solidarity for the Mende – as they undergo the pain of clitoridectomy surrounded by and supported by the women of their community, so shall they experience the pain of childbirth and the other sufferings that life may have in store for them. The procedure also removes the last vestige of maleness from the female body, as the male circumcision removes the last vestige of femaleness from the penis; female genitals are totally hidden and internal after the procedure, as male genitals are fully exposed and external after theirs. Upon completion of their training, the new-fledged women are bathed in a special brew of herbs and leaves, removing the magical protection, and reintroduced to their communities as women fully cognizant and in control of their sexuality (Haviland et al. 2005: 352).

Other FGC procedures occur in the virtual absence of ceremony. Among the people studied by Janice Boddy in Sudan (she calls them the “Hofriyat” to protect their identity), genital cutting procedures are performed in a relatively straight-forward, medicalized fashion, without any concurrent religious observations. The Hofriyat practice what they call “Pharaonic circumcision”, the removal of the clitoris and labia minora followed by the closing up of the vaginal opening. The procedure today is performed by a trained midwife and with the use of anesthesia, and using modern equipment; before 1969, it was practiced by elder women, without anesthesia, who used L-shaped thorns to close the vaginal opening. Boddy describes a procedure she witnessed:

A crowd of women, many of them grandmothers, has gathered outside the room, not a man in sight. A dozen hands push me forward. “You’ve got to see this up close,” says Zaineb, “it’s important.” I dare not confess my reluctance. The girl is lying on an angareeb (native bed), her body supported by several adult kinswomen. Two of these hold her legs apart. Then she is administered a local anesthetic by injection. In the silence of the next few moments, Miriam takes a pair of what look to me like children’s paper scissors and quickly cuts away the girl’s clitoris and labia minora. She tells me this is the lahme djewa (the inside flesh). I am surprised that there is so little blood. Then she takes a surgical needle from her midwife’s kit, threads it with suture, and sews together the labia majora, leaving a small opening at the vulva. After a liberal application of antiseptic, it is all over.

The young girl seems to be experiencing more shock than pain, and I wonder if the anesthetic has finally taken effect. The women briefly trill their joyous ululation and we adjourn to the courtyard for tea. While we wait, the sisters receive the ritual ornaments that will protect them from harm as they recuperate (1997: 310).

Among the Hofriyat, the performance of the Pharaonic circumcision does not transform one into a woman; it makes her marriageable, but she does not assume full womanhood until she is actually married.

Although in the vast majority of cases it is women who perform and attend FGC procedures, in some areas this is a man’s responsibility. Many people have seen the mid-90′s film produced and aired by CNN that depicts a screaming girl held down while a male barber performs the operation. Although the film was widely criticized for its lack of cultural sensitivity and contextualization, forcing CNN to defend itself against numerous lawsuits, nobody seems to deny that FGCs do occur in this manner. In other places, FGC is wholly dissociated from the transition to womanhood, sometimes occurring as early as age 4 or 5 or some time after she has assumed womanhood. The Bedouin women in Lila Abu-Lughod’s Writing Women’s Worlds suggest that infibulation might be practiced as an occasional thing, to assure a husband that his wife or wives are faithful while he’s away (1993: 106-7).

Responses

With such a wide range of practices and of meanings attached to them, one would suspect that there would be a wide range of responses by women who live in societies where FGC is practiced, and one would be correct. I do not intend here to represent the entire range of possible responses; the mainstream media is over-saturated with voices condemning FGC which, while they may represent the mainstream of Western thought, do not seem to correspond with the responses of even those native women who actively oppose FGC. My intention here is not to represent fully the complexity of the issue but rather to restore some of the complexity that is often glossed over in debates among Westerners.

Given the unremitting horror with which FGC is reported and discussed among Westerners, it may come as a surprise that many women in societies that practice FGC utterly reject the description of themselves as “victims”. In an interview with anthropologist Fuambai Ahmadu, a Kono woman named Leunita exclaimed:

What gets me mad, is when people say we are ‘victims’. And I say, victims of what? The women of the Bundu [cut women] are not victims! For us, the one you would have to pity is the woman who is not of the Bundu! (Burdick)

For Kono women like Leunita (and Ahmadu herself; see below), FGC is both a source of and recognition of the power women wield in the world. “The secret power we exercise — and why men fear us — is our ability to have children. Without being cut, the ancestresses will not want to release to you the powers of your own body” (Ibid.). Boddy noted a similar concern with fertility among the Hofriyat, where she reads FGC as a de-emphasis of (external) sensuality and enhancement of the (internal) reproductive capacity. Thus women are defined – define themselves – not as objects for the sexual gratification of men (or of themselves) but as “mothers of men”, men who, as she assumes eldership in the society, will “listen to” her and through which she will exercise power in her community (313-4).

Fuambai Ahmadu is an interesting spokesperson for women who perform and undergo FGC. A Kono woman herself, educated at the London School of Economics, at the age of 22 Ahmadu decided to return to Sierra Leone and complete the traditional coming-of-age ritual. In justifying her decision, Ahmadu wrote:

It is difficult for me – considering the number of ceremonies I have observed, including my own – to accept that what appears to be expressions of joy and ecstatic celebrations of womanhood in actuality disguise hidden experiences of coercion and subjugation. Indeed, I offer that the bulk of Kono women who uphold these rituals do so because they want to – they relish the supernatural powers of their ritual leaders over against men in society, and they embrace the legitimacy of female authority and particularly, the authority of their mothers and grandmothers. (2000, quoted in Shweder 2003: 169).

About as widespread as beliefs about reproductivity are concerns about aesthetics. Nearly all women in societies that practice FGC describe circumcised or otherwise cut genitals as more attractive than uncut genitals. Indeed, it is for this reason that many researchers reject the term “female genital mutilation“, which is preferred by many advocates; very few women see their genitals as “mutilated” by FGC. As Sandra Lane and Robert Rubinstein note:

Among these groups, in fact, the resulting appearance is considered an improvement over female genitalia in their natural state…. In the rural Egyptian hamlet where we have conducted fieldwork some women were not familiar with groups that did not circumcise their girls. When they learned that the female researcher was not circumcised their response was disgust mixed with joking laughter. They wondered how she could have thus gotten married and questioned how her mother could have neglected such an important part of her preparation for womanhood (1996: 35).

Luanita told Ahmadu that “I think one of the most beautiful things is after a woman is cut. There can be no question that she is more beautiful that way. Very beautiful” (Burdick). The Hofriyati women in Boddy’s study described their cut genitals as clean, smooth, and pure (313), assessments which are in agreement with similar descriptions across the range of FGC-practicing societies (Shweder: 181).

Given these positive assessments of such practices, it is not surprising that an overwhelming number of women choose to have their daughters cut.

According to the Sudan Demographic and Health Survey of 1989-90 conducted in northern and central Sudan, of 3,805 women interviewed, 89 percent were circumcised. Of the women that were circumcised, 96 percent said they had or would circumcise their daughters. When asked whether they favored continuation of the practice, 90 percent of circumcised woman said they favored its continuation (Shweder: 179).

The women interviewed by Land and Rubinstein were no exceptions:

In interviews we conducted in rural and urban Egypt and in studies conducted by faculty of the High Institute of Nursing, Zagazig University, Egypt, the overwhelming majority of circumcised women planned to have the procedure performed on their daughters (35).

Sexuality

Although health concerns make up the public face of anti-FGC activism, it is the issue of sexuality that is the “hook” in mainstream debates. Many of the claimed health risks associated with FGC have been discredited (Obermeyer 2003) and many of those that haven’t are risks associated with a wide range of other practices that attract little or no attention. For example, any cutting of the body provides a vector for infection, but there is very little outcry about the scarification practices that often accompany or occupy the same place as FGC in coming-of-age rituals. This is not to say there are no health risks associated with FGC, but rather that the attention paid to those health risks is greater because of the salacious interest in women’s sexuality.

The root of this concern is the loss of sexual pleasure associated with damage to or removal of the clitoris. Since the release of the Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response (1966) and especially The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality (1976; excerpts in Hite 2006), the clitoris has been recognized as central to women’s ability to reach orgasm. It thus stands to reason that the loss of this organ would reduce women’s ability to have orgasm and, therefore, to enjoy sex.

Compounding the loss of the clitoris is the discomfort and even pain that may accompany intercourse for women who have undergone FGC. Most procedures leave some degree of scar tissue, which may make sex uncomfortable or painful, and infibulation greatly restricts the vaginal opening, which can cause significant pain in some women.

It may be surprising, then, that many, though by no means all, women who have experienced FGC are able to engage in and enjoy sex. In one medical study cited by Obermeyer (407), 43% of women who had some form of FGC experienced a lack of orgasms, while only 18% of those who had not undergone FGC had the same problem (another study found a 12% rate of anorgasmia; Obermeyer’s review found the methodology of both studies to be highly suspect). While this is a significant effect, it bears noting that 57% of women who had had FGCs were therefore achieving orgasm. It also bears noting that studies of American women claim that as many as 40% have never experienced orgasm (Health24).

On the other hand, many women express clear satisfaction with their sex lives. At a Swedish conference on female circumcision, a Somali woman spoke up to make her satisfaction quite clear:

A Swedish minister raised his voice during the seminar and expressed his resentment at the fact that so many women were deprived of their possibility to feel sexual pleasure. Then a Somali woman in the audience stood up, turned to this man and the rest of the audience, and talked about her own experiences. In a calm and a bit shy voice, she witnessed that she herself was infibulated, but that she had a rich and satisfying sexual life despite this state of her genitals (Johnsdotter, et al. 2004: 2.

Ellen Gruenbaum was also confronted by women who insisted that they “finished” during sex:

I pressed for a clearer description. Somewhat exasperated that I didn’t seem to understand plain Arabic, a visiting midwife named Miriam grabbed my hand, squeezed my fingers, and said, “Look, Ellen, some of us do ‘finish.’ It feels like electricity, like this . . . ” and she flicked her finger sharply and rhythmically against my constricted fingers. [2001; quoted in Gruenbaum 2006: 127]

While the capacity for sexual pleasure is to some degree affected by the extent of cutting involved, there are clear cultural factors at work as well. Fuambai Ahmadu says that many women who, like herself, had sexual experience before their excision may experience no difference or even increased sensitivity (in Bell 2005: 138), which suggests that the ability to experience sexual pleasure is learned and subject to training. Among the Sabaots studied by Christine Walley, for instance, earlier anthropologists had noticed extensive – and socially sanctioned – sex play to the point of orgasm between young men and women who had not yet experienced FGC (although penetration was explicitly forbidden) (1997: 415-6). Given the commonness of extramarital affairs among both men and women in this society, it seems likely that women continue to enjoy sex throughout their lives – and that perhaps this early development of sexual faculties helps prepare women for whatever loss of physical sensation they may experience after their initiations.

The chart reproduced from Orubuloye et al. (2000) presents an interesting comparison between the responses of urban and rural Yoruba women to their FGCs. Asked “Whether they believe their ‘circumcision’ has reduced their enjoyment of sexual activity”, 53% of rural women replied that it had increased their enjoyment of sex (with another 40% saying it had no effect either way) while only 16% of urban women answered the same (with the same number saying it had decreased their enjoyment of sex, and 63% citing no effect either way). These figures suggest a significant difference in the way rural and urban women experienced their bodily sensations in general and sex specifically.

Anthropologists have long recognized a difference (or, rather, set of differences) in the personality formation typical to, on one hand, agriculturalists and pastoralists, and on the other, urban dwellers and foragers (see, e.g. Barry et al. 1959). In societies where subsistence is dependent on long-range planning and the cooperation of their members, personality formation emphasizes obedience, solidarity, and responsibility, a complex generically referred to as “dependence training”. Dependence training is generally associated with agriculture and herding, where individual initiative or deviance from tradition can have disastrous consequences – for instance, by failing to produce an adequate harvest, or by weakening the overall quality of the herd. In societies where resources are accumulated on a day to day basis – the hunting and gathering of foragers, for instance, or the hourly wages of urban employees – the need for such interdependence is significantly weaker and individual initiative, achievement, and self-reliance are emphasized through “independence training”. There are many different practices that contribute to overall enculturation, ranging from infant feeding patterns to playtime activities to punishment regimes to the assignment of household chores; the treatment of sexuality is an important factor in how an individual will relate to the rest of their society. Where independence is important, individual desire and achievement of its satisfaction is emphasized; children are often encouraged to experiment freely with sexuality, and adults choose their own mates. Where dependence is important, on the contrary, individual sexuality is a resource of the community, and individuals are assured that their needs will be addressed by and for the community as a whole; childhood sexuality may be allowed but subject to clear rules, and marriages tend to be arranged. The potential for conflict posed by sexuality is a much greater threat in agricultural and herding communities, where the smooth interrelation of members and lineages is necessary to survival.

These differences are linked to another, related factor: the role of consumption in a society. Jonathan Ned Katz (2004) has detailed how American conceptions of the meaning and function of sex changed as the US was transformed into a largely rural, agriculture-based society to a largely-urban, industrialized one, and I think the general outline can be applied wherever such transformations have occurred or are occurring. In pre-industrial America, Katz writes, “Middle-class white Americans idealized a True Womanhood, True Manhood, and True Love, all characterized by “purity” – the freedom from sensuality…. The human body was thought of as a means toward procreation and production; penis and vagina were instruments of reproduction, not of pleasure. Human energy… was to be used in producing children and in work, not wasted in libidinous pleasures” (70). With the shift of the vast bulk of the American population into urban centers, and consequently from a lifestyle in which the bulk of their subsistence was produced and processed by themselves to an economy characterized by the consumption of goods and services produced by others, notions of sexuality changed.

The transformation of the family from producer to consumer unit resulted in a change in family members’ relation to their own bodies; from being an instrument primarily of work, the human body was integrated into a new economy, and began more commonly to be perceived as a means of consumption and pleasure (71).

It seems very likely that the way rural and urban women experience sex and perceive the effect of FGC is very different, practically incommensurable. This hypothesis is lent credence by the work of Sara Johnsdotter and Birgitta Essén with Somali, Eritrean, and Ethiopian refugees now resident in Sweden. In interviews, Johnsdotter and Essén were surprised to find that their interlocutors were quite willing to speak frankly about sex, and that many of them expressed contentment with their sex lives:

[Omar interprets the words of a Somali woman in her 50s:] – Even we who have pharaonic circumcision, we never have problems. [The three of us start laughing, since the woman with her facial expression shows that she alludes on sex.][The woman speaks again and Omar interprets:] – Maybe we are more sexual than you [everyone laughs again]… and we don’t have any problems…She says we have nothing, no problems and good sex. We are equal in that. We are like Swedish women; maybe we are more…active. And everything comes from the heart and comes from the pain you know.[Johnsdotter says:] – But…the wedding night…[Omar interprets:] – It was worst that night. It was something that you never forget, but after that it is good (2).

In their interviews, though, many of the women noted explicitly that this was not something they had ever thought about prior to coming to Sweden, and compare their experiences not with those of other refugees, with whom they claim to have never spoken of such matters, but – like the woman above – with Swedish women. For many, like the elderly Ethiopian woman quoted below, it was not until they came to Sweden that they even thought about FGC as something that had happened to them ,that they should have thoughts about:

[Johnsdotter asks:] – Do you remember when you first heard of it [female circumcision] in Sweden?[An Ethiopian woman in her 60s:] – I think it was in -’80. Maybe -’83.- What did you hear then?- There was talk about circumcision, and that it is no good, that you destroy the girl’s sexuality and all that, and that it is something bad.- What did you think when you heard that?- Well… I thought that it is probably true. In our country we were raised to… Those who come from [a district where girls are not circumcised], they are different in their behaviour towards a man or a boy. Yes… their sexuality… behaviour… well, they are sexier, you could say. They behave differently… when it comes to intercourse- Are you talking about ability to enjoy…?- Yes. If they are not circumcised.- Did you think of this while you lived in Ethiopia?- No, I never thought of it then. Nobody does.(5; bold emphasis added).

Action

Although not all assessments of FGC are positive or even mixed (as some of the responses reported above are), the wide range of responses suggests that the terms in which much anti-FGC advocacy – and, even moreso, mainstream responses – couch their opposition to these practices are overly simplified and based not so much on the lived experiences of the Africa women on whose behalf they claim to speak but on their own, culturally-bound perceptions of these practices, what I call the “if-it-was-me” response. While I believe that it is possible to attain some degree of understanding of the experiences of people vastly different from one’s self, doing so requires an effort that very few are willing or even able to muster. However, I believe such an effort is necessary and vital where FGC is concerned, as the potential for damaging and counter-productive action is significant. Even where our actions may not impact the lives of African women, the way FGC is spoken about in Western society is often racist, ethnocentric, and disrespectful of the lives and cultures of the women who experience FGC.

This piece is not intended as a defense of FGC or even to dissuade activism intended to help women for whom FGC is a part of their daily lives. Rather, it is hoped that by complicating the over-simplified representations that make up the bulk of anti-FGC discussions, more effective action can be developed that, while it may not directly address the end of FGC, can improve the lives of women overall and indirectly address the issue at hand.

I am hardly alone or even in the lead with these concerns. African Anti-FGC activists have been bitter in their condemnation of efforts by Western “supporters” on their behalf. Nahid Toubia, founder and president of the anti-FGC group Research, Action, and Information Network for the Bodily Integrity of Women (RAINBO), has argued that:

The West has acted as though they have suddenly discovered a dangerous epidemic which they then sensationalized in international women’s forums creating a backlash of over-sensitivity in the concerned communities. They have portrayed it as irrefutable evidence of the barbarism and vulgarity of underdeveloped countries… It became a conclusive vindication of the primitiveness of Arabs, Muslims and Africans all in one blow (quoted in Lane et al.: 36).

Alice Walker’s film Warrior Marks and novel Possessing the Secret of Joy, which have done so much to consolidate anti-FGC sentiments in the US, have come in for special abuse by African activists such as Seble Dawit and Salem Mekuria for portraying a village in which “the respected elder women of the village’s secret society turn into slit-eyed murderers wielding rusted weapons with which to butcher children”, to which the “heroine-savior” Walker has come to “articulate their pain” (1993; quoted in Walley: 428).

The UN Decade for Women (1975 – 85) turned into a platform for such criticism of Western feminist anti-FGC work when a group of African women threatened to walk out of the mid-decade conference in Copenhagen in 1980, objecting to both the tactics of First World anti-FGC activists and to the overall power dynamics between Western and non-Western women (Ibid.: 419). As the example of Alice Walker’s book, written over a decade later, and ongoing mainstream concern about FGC illustrate, very little has changed in Westerner’s conceptions of the problems with FGC and what should be done about it.

This criticism is not intended to convince Western women to “butt out” of issues they have no business being concerned with; rather, the issue is how Western feminists and other activists will use their power and privilege in relation to non-Western women’s lives. As Kenyan anthropologist Achola Pala-Okeyo puts it, “the role of [Western] feminists is not to be in front, leading the way for other women, but to be in back supporting the other women’s struggles to bring about change” (quoted in Walley: 430). This is good advice in general; however, the complexity of FGC and its embeddedness in local cultural practices suggests that the focus on the eradication of FGC is misplaced altogether. It is not a simple matter of recognizing the importance of FGC as a “tradition”, educating natives about the potential health risks associated with it, and creating new, more acceptable alternatives; FGC is deeply imbrecated with local and global economic structures that need to be taken into account. What African women need is not the elimination of FGC; they need adequate health care and economic well-being regardless of whether FGC continues to be practiced or not.

One of the major contributing factors to the persistence of FGC, despite 30 years of intense Western opposition preceded by 70 years of colonial opposition, is the ongoing economic inequality that shapes women’s lives. As Lane and Rubinstein note (following Gruenbaum), “economic changes associated with development increased women’s economic dependency on men, which caused them to focus on maintaining ‘their marriageability and to prevent divorce by keeping husbands sexually and reproductively satisfied’. The resulting economic insecurity made it extremely unlikely that parents would risk leaving their daughters uncircumcised” (34). These economic changes also made the solidarity with other women engendered by FGC incredibly important. In places where other means of establishing women’s solidarity have been established – such as local savings circles, environmental groups, and cooperative enterprises – the practice of FGC has decreased (Walley: 418). This suggests that Western energy is likely better spent on ameliorating the effects of globalization and promoting strong local associations than in confronting FGC directly – which is often perceived by local men and women as an extension of the imperialism and global capitalism that engender resistance to anti-FGC efforts.

While the medical evidence remains cloudy or inconclusive, it seems clear that no medical benefit comes of FGC and that some degree of harm is inflicted by many of the practices. 3 Given the unlikelihood that FGC will cease in the immediate future, the resistance Western activists have posed to medicalization seems cruel and inhuman. Most of the potential medical dangers posed by FGC can be eliminated or drastically reduced by access to adequate health care, both in the performance of the procedures and in dealing with any complications that arise. While there may be some truth to the contention that allowing FGC to be performed under hospital conditions will delay its eradication, this seems a reasonable trade-off for the suffering that might be alleviated. This argument should not be foreign to Western feminists, many of whom have relied on a similar argument in defending the availability of abortion.

On an ideological level, it is imperative that Westerners, particularly Western feminists, abandon the moral condemnation in which their opposition to FGC is so frequently couched. Lane and Rubinstein write that:

[T]hese procedures… are not torture, but are arranged and paid for by loving parents who deeply believe that the surgeries are for their daughters’ welfare. Parents fear, with much justification, that leaving their daughters uncircumcised will make them unmarriageable. Parents worry about their daughters during the procedures and care for their wounds afterward to help them recover. Even if we disagree with the practice of female circumcision, we must remember that the parents who do this are not monsters, but are ordinary, decent, caring persons (38).

Feminists have long recognized the relationship between sexism, classism, and racism; challenging what many see as a sexist practice through the use of racist discourses backed by Western power and privilege cannot be taken as an adequate response to FGC.

What’s more, objections to FGC in the West may well be as sexist as they are racist. As Ahmadu notes (quoted in Bell: 138), Western anti-FGC discourses suggest a conception of both gender and sexuality that feminists have long opposed:

One… assumption is that human bodies are “complete” and that sex is “given” at birth. A second assumption is that the clitoris represents an integral aspect of femininity and has a central erotic function in women’s sexuality.

Many FGC practices are based on the explicit contention that women are made, not born – a formulation not entirely unthinkable to Western feminists. Neither gender not sexuality are fixed in the body; both are constructed from both physiological and cultural realities. The notions that the physiological function of the clitoris is the only valid part of sexual experience or that orgasm is the only measure of the pleasurableness of sex would not only be rejected by most Western feminists but are directly contradicted by the claimed experience of African women themselves.Female genital cutting represents a challenging test of Western ideals and highlights the ongoing contradiction between, on one hand, the desire to end unnecessary suffering and, on the other, the desire to respect cultural and individual autonomy. It is difficult to accept that practices that seem most clearly to demand outside intervention might be the ones we should think twice about interfering with, or that the suffering engendered by those practices might be preferable to the dangers posed by such intervention. While opposition to FGC is not necessarily bad in and of itself, it is important to remember that FGC does not exist in a vacuum, that the anti-FGC movement is just the latest in a long string of Western intervention in native practices carried out “for their own good”, and that like the proverbial bull in the china closet, the exercise of our power may well create disastrous consequences that cannot be undone.

Footnotes

1. The language used to describe these procedures is a tricky and sensitive area. While the WHO uses the term “Female Genital Mutilation”, for an anthropologist this feels like the worst sort of ethnocentrism, implying an aesthetic and moral valuation that is directly at odds with the values of the people who practice these procedures, most of whom describe the procedures as making their genitals cleaner, better, or more attractive. While “FGM” is a popular term among advocacy groups, it has little currency among researchers, who are very aware of the way that language can bias their outcomes. I have chosen to use the relatively neutral term “cutting” (from several alternatives in use among researchers: “alteration”, “surgeries”, “modification”) as it seems to be the most widespread usage and the most plainly descriptive. [BACK]2. I am, of course, aware of the irony in my stepping forward as a spokesperson for the subaltern; yet again, the subaltern cannot speak, and we must speak for her. As much as possible, I intend to rely on the recorded comments of women who are affected by FGC, and barring that the second-hand accounts by those who have worked directly with them, but ultimately I recognize that my own privilege must necessarily mediate their voices. It is my hope, though, that if a crack in the wall of anti-FGC advocacy can be opened, it may help to create a space for more first-hand voices. [BACK]3. I have ignored here the medical research on the harm posed by FGC, for two reasons. First, as Obermeyer (2003) has shown, much of the medical research is based on faulty premises, defective methodology, and misanalysis of evidence (when it’s based on evidence at all). Second, arguments about medical issues caused by FGC seem too often to be a smokescreen for moral arguments; as noted in this paper, very few practices that pose risks as great as or greater than FGC go uncommented by anti-FGC advocates and the Western mainstream alike. [BACK]

Work Cited

Abu-Lughod, Lila.

1993. Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Barry, Herbert, III, Irvin L. Child, and Margaret K. Bacon.

1959. Relation of Child Training to Subsistence Economy. American Anthropologist 61(1): 51-63.

Bell, Kirsten.

2005. Genital Cutting and Western Discourses on Sexuality. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 19 (2): 125-148. Available online at http://www.cirp.org/library/anthropology/bell1/.

Boddy, Janice.

1997. Womb as Oasis: The Symbolic Context of Pharaonic Circumcision in Rural Northern Sudan.InThe Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy. Roger N. Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo, eds. New York: Routledge. 309-324.

Burdick, John.

2000. Female Genital Cutting in Africa: A Second Layer of Cultural Meanings. PowerPoint Presentation. Available online at http://www.health24.com/sex/Problems/1253-1264,22052.asp.

Hite, Shere.

2006. The Shere Hite Reader: New and Selected Writings on Sex, Globalization, and Private Life. New York: Seven Stories Press.

Johnsdotter, Sara, and Birgitta Essén.

2004. Conference Presentation: Sexual Health among Young Somali Women in Sweden:Living With Conflicting Culturally Determined Sexual Ideologies. Advancing Knowledge on Psycho-Sexual Effects of FGM/C: Assessing the Evidence. Alexandria, Egypt. 10-12 October, 2004. Available online at http://ask.lub.lu.se/archive/00018019/01/Alexandria2004.pdf. [PDF]

Katz, Jonathan Ned.

2004. The Invention of Heterosexuality. InRace, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study, 6th ed.. Paula S. Rothenberg, ed. New York: Worth Publishers. 69-80.

Lane, Sandra D. and Robert A. Rubinstein.

1996. Judging the Other. Responding to Traditional Female Genital Surgeries. Hastings Center Report 26(3): 31-40. Available online at http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/rar/Papers/1996%20Judging%20the%20other–Responding.pdf.

Masters, W.H. and V.E Johnson.

1966. Human Sexual Response. Boston: Little, Brown.

Obermeyer, Carla Makhlouf.

2003. The Health Consequences of FemaleCircumcision: Science, Advocacy, and Standards of Evidence. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17(3): 394-412. Available online at http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/articles/MAQ%20Jul%2003.pdf [PDF]

Orubuloye, I. O., Pat Caldwell, and John C. Caldwell

2000. Female “Circumcision” Among the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria: The Beginning of Change. In Female “Circumcision” in Africa: Culture, Controversy, and Change. Bettina Shell-Duncan and Ylva Hernlund, eds. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. 73-94.

Shweder, Richard A.

2003. Why Do Men Barbecue? Recipes for Cultural Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Spivak, Gayatri.

1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, eds. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 271-313.

Walley, Christine J.

1997. Searching for “Voices”: Feminism, Anthropology, and the Global Debate over Female Genital Operations. Cultural Anthropology 12(3): 405-438.

Human beings are not passive observers of the world around us, but are active participants in it. Our perception of the world is not merely the objective recording and labeling of things “out there”, but instead the product of a complex and often invisible interaction between our needs at the moment, our culture, our personal history, our creativity, our class background, our educational achievements, our desires and our fears. What we see (or hear, or understand, or experience in any way) is not the “raw” stuff of reality but reality as processed by our minds. The categories that we put things into – gender, race, class, and so on – do not exist “out there” in the world, but are instead ways of organizing the vast number of stimuli our brains receive into some sense of order, some state that will allow us to act on and in the world.

The process of organizing, categorizing, and comprehending the world we live in is known to social scientists and philosophers as “social construction”. Social constructions emerge from our collective attempts to understand reality, and exist in society by virtue of conventions – the collective “agreement” that a particular social construction is not only the best but the right way to represent the world.

Games are a clear example of social constructions. Consider chess: without conventions – the rules we all agree to play by – chess simply does not exist. It is a piece of wood and a bunch of carved pieces. It is our agreement that the figure that resembles a horse should occupy a specific starting position on the board and should be allowed to move two spaces in any direction and then one space perpendicular to the initial direction, jumping over other pieces in its way, that constitutes the carving as “a knight” and gives it meaning. Likewise with all the other pieces: we agree that this piece shall be called “a pawn” and move one way and that piece “a bishop” and shall move a different way. The rules impose limits, but they also impose possibilities; without the rules, the pieces can move any way you want – up, down, thrown across a room, dropped out of a window, hidden behind a book – but their movement has no meaning, because there is no game to “mean” in.

Social scientists describe the conventions that make social living possible in the same way. We break the world up into manageable “chunks” by categorizing the objects and people in it. For instance, we commonly think of objects as animal, vegetable, or mineral. This is a meaningful distinction for most of us, although for scientists, it is not useful enough. For the working biologist, there are plants and animals (technically Animalia and Plantae), but also Monera (prokaryotic bacterium), Protista (slime molds and such), and Fungi. Many scientists now make use of two Superkingdoms, Prokaryota and Eukaryota. The distinctions that matter to biologists, though, rarely matter to us in our everyday lives – and may not matter to members of cultures different than ours, or people with different goals than our own. Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine author, imagined a classification scheme that he ascribed to an (invented) Chinese encyclopedia, in which animals were categorized as follows:

1. belonging to the Emperor
2. embalmed
3. tame
4. sucking pigs
5. sirens
6. fabulous
7. stray dogs
8. included in the present classification
9. frenzied
10. innumerable
11. drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
12. et cetera
13. having just broken the water picture
14. that from a long way off look like flies

We can recognize each of these categories as valid in and of itself (well, most of them…) “tame animals” or “embalmed animals” seem like reasonable enough distinctions. But Borges’ classification seems absurd to us because it simply does not offer us enough meaningful information about the differences, and similarities, between them. Of course “sucking pigs” are different from “stray dogs”, but so what? Still, there’s no objective reason to reject Borges’ categories out of hand – someone else might look at our own classification of animals, plants, and minerals and also ask, “So what?”

Social constructions are not just categories imposed on the world, however; as the name suggests, they “construct” – they make – the world. Consider sex, for instance. No, not that kind of sex – the biological sex of a newborn child. We are accustomed to thinking about the sex of an infant as a given fact: it’s either a boy or a girl. Yet according to research by Anne Fausto-Sterling, 1 out of every 100 live births are intersexed in some way – they have ambigious genitalia, external genitalia different from those predicted by the presence of an “X” or “Y” chromosone, or extra “X” or “Y” chromosomes. Simply put, about 1% of us are born neither clearly “male” nor clearly “female”. And yet far fewer than 1% of the people you meet are neither male nor female; by and large, we rarely meet anyone who we do not consider – and, more importantly, who does not consider him- or herself – clearly male or female. Ambiguously sexed infants are generally assigned to either one or the other sex, often with the use of reconstructive surgery (although, given the lack of a “proper” sex to “go back to”, the “re-” is a little misplaced; we may as well call it “constructive surgery”), using criteria that by any standard are arbitrary and even crude. “It’s easier to poke a hole than to build a pole.”

If something as seemingly apparent as biological sex can be arbitrary and based on criteria that have little or nothing to do with a person’s actual biology, how much moreso must “gender”, the behaviors and personality characteristics associated with sex, be? Although in our species there is some small amount of average physical difference between men and women, there is not nearly enough variation to account for either the different expectations of men and women within any given society, nor for the variation between expectations of either gender in different societies. Anthropologists often find that what is considered an ideal woman in one society may well consist of characteristics associated with women in another, and vice versa. Even when it comes to physical strength, many women in our society best many men – and yet we divide participants in sports and other activities where physical strength is important not by physical ability but by gender.

Race is another biological “fact” that is socially constructed – the way we categorize people has little to do with underlying biological difference, and much to do with the history and structure of a given society. Humans are among the least diverse of mammal species, and yet scientists not so long ago argued over whether there were 35 or 50 races of humans. Today, we generally accept a division of the world’s people into 4 races: black, white, Asian, and Native American. Some lump Asians and Native Americans together; others all non-Africans (and some Africans). These distinctions may have some validity when tracing ancestries (although most of us are so mixed that the utility of even simple distinctions becomes questionable) but have little utility for just about anything else. And yet we behave as if these distinctions were not only very real but very meaningful – and they are.

Class is not usually considered a biological reality (although there are some who feel that a high position in society represents a very real, innate superiority), but rather an economic one. But class correlates only superficially to wealth. Someone who rises from poverty to amass great riches may find it exceedingly hard to fit in upper-crust society; likewise, someone who loses their fortune and is forced into abject poverty may find a distinct lack of acceptance from their fellow poor. Things like the way you dress, the art you enjoy, the kind of cars that appeal to you, the music you listen to, the food you eat, and the way you talk and carry yourself say much, much more about your class than how much money is in your wallet.

Now, a common mistake is to assume that when something is described as “socially constructed” that the speaker is saying it doesn’t exist, that it’s not really real. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Our social interactions, our economic status, our lives, even our very selves are profoundly shaped by the way sex, race, class, and gender are constructed in our societies. The conventions surrounding these categories not only limit our actions (“that’s not ladylike!”; “you have no class”) but make them possible. We act in the world as men (or women), whites (or blacks, or Asians, or…), working class (or middle or upper class) agents, constructing our actions and our selves from the “material” our society provides. And, in fact, for all their power in society, none of these categories is beyond challenge – norms change (people change them), but even more importantly, people act “outside the lines” all the time. Transvestites, actors, light-skinned blacks or dark-skinned whites, gays and lesbians, inter-racial partners, and many, many others – including, in the end, most of us at one time or another – may act out roles different from those prescribed by society, although often the cost is high. But even when we act in ways that “break the rules”, the rules give our transgressions meaning.

If we accept that we live in a world that is socially constructed, then our constructions are more real than reality – in fact, they are our reality. They are the world imbued with meaning by us, the world in which we dwell. This can be hard for us to accept, as we’re accustomed to thinking of the real and the imagined as two very different categories. Alas, those categories are, of course, socially constructed.

Work Cited

Jorge Luis Borges.

1969. The Book of Imaginary Beings. New York: Avon Books.

Anne Fausto-Sterling

2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books.

"Postmodernism" is hard to define–made all the harder by postmodernism’s rejection of fixed definitions. We might start by at least sketching out some rough borders, by laying out a few things that postmodernism is not. It’s not a time period, despite the "post-" prefix. Although certain of its trends or tendencies date to the early ’70s, postmodernism and modernism exist since then more or less side by side, and elements of postmodernism can be found as far back as the mid-19th century (many of the features of capitalism outlined by Marx we today see as hallmarks of postmodernism). Its also not "outside" of modernity or modernism — postmodernism is more fruitfully thought of as a "phase" of modernity, or even as a "quality" of the modern. It is not "anti-modern" or "non-modern" or anything else–it is part of the modern.

Because the "postmodern" label was first applied to architecture, from which the label spread to other domains, it bears examining just what postmodern architecture is. The postmodern architects rejected the unadorned glass-and-steel boxes of the modernists in favor of an architecture that was more sensitive to concerns of place and use. Unlike the modernists who viewed their sleek celebrations of the latest building techniques as suitable to every milieu, the postmodernists designed buildings that explicitly referenced local traditions, local history, and the local landscape. They also rejected the modernists strict separation of habitable space from the functioning "innards" of the building, exposing air conditioning and heat ducts, plumbing, light fixtures, elevator cables, and other elements that the modernists had hidden from casual view. The "Discovery" in 2001 is modernist; the "Alexi Leonov" in 2010 is postmodernist. The difficulty in clearly delineating "modernism" and "postmodernism" is clearly apparent in the postmodernists appropriation of local landscapes, referencing the work of ur-modernist Frank Lloyd Wright.

Postmodernism soon began to "pop up" in domains far removed from architecture. In literature, post-structuralists like Derrida and Foucault set the stage for postmodernism in their challenges to narrative and discursive authority in the text. Where the New Criticism had separated the text from the life and times of its author, Foucault insisted that the text be understood not simply as influenced by the culture around it, but as a part of that culture, capable of exerting its own influence in the world. Derrida went a step further, privileging the multiplex readings any text can give rise to over the author’s intentions. In challenging the idea that a narrative should give rise to a limited set of meanings reflecting an author’s intentions, Derrida came up against the larger narratives that (attempt to) give meaning to entire societies, the so-called Master Narratives. If the internal structure of a narrative like Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques could be upset or "put into play" as Derrida showed in Of Grammatology, so that meanings that seemed apparent were turned upside down and inside out until they seemed to mean the opposite of what the author intended, so to could the structure of society and of the narratives — the myths, histories, and "common sense" ideas — that structured it.

In political economy, the term was best invoked (in my opinion) in David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Harvey uses "postmodern" to describe the economic system characterized by flexible accumulation, and in opposition to "modern" Fordism (the expansion of Taylorist production methods into a full-blown social order). Fordism represents not just the technical model of production perfected by Ford (the assembly line, the fine-grained deskilling of manufacturing jobs, the Taylorist disciplining of individual labor, products aimed at a single mass market, and so on) but the creation of a consumer market in which Fordist production could flourish. Ford’s belief in a body of workers who could afford the products they made, his erection of worker housing complete with company-paid recreation directors, his purchase of and editorship over the newspapers his workers would read, and other acts worked to assure that off-hours Ford workers used their leisure time within the enveloping culture of the company itself, and recognized that workers were also consumers. In conjunction with the Keynesian state to carry the burden of a surplus labor force necessary to accommodate American industry’s rapid but uneven growth following WWII, the Ford’s model of an affluent worker/consumer society dominated American economic life until well into the ’60s.

With the development of a host of new technologies, though — computers to handle inventory and order fulfillment, automated production machinery to reduce the "changeover" time needed to gear up for a new product, television advertising and a sophisticated marketing industry to help target products more efficiently to the people most likely to buy them — this model began to be eroded by a new model for organizing labor and consumption, flexible accumulation. The new technologies greatly reduced the economies of scale that Ford and his cohort had exploited to build their empires. Instead of offering one model in one color to the entire population, it was now profitable to offer several models or even several different kinds of products, to several smaller "niche markets". On-demand production made it not only easier to quickly retool to produce another product, but reduced the risks associated with production by filling orders as they came in, rather than producing a massive inventory up front, before the demand could be assessed. The most successful companies no longer produce anything at all — companies like Nike don’t own a single factory, instead controlling a web of contractors and sub-contractors. The everyday tasks of doing business — payroll, order fulfillment, procurement, maintenance, and marketing — are increasingly outsourced. The effect on labor has been marked: where the "model" worker of the ’50s and ’60s might have looked forward to life-long employment, union representation, and a fixed pension, the "model" postmodern worker is a temp or independent contractor with (if s/he’s lucky) a 401k or IRA which (again, if she’s lucky) might be worth something when s/he reaches retirement age (and, if not, there’s always room for another part-time greeter at the local Wal-Mart).

The change in production techniques was paralleled by a change in consumption, too. With the social fragmentation of the ’60s, both the rise of ethnic identity politics and the nascent Me Generation’s clamor for ways to stand out from "the rest of the crowd", there no longer existed any single market. Instead of "keeping up with the Joneses", the consumer of the early ’70s sought ways to distinguish themselves from the Joneses. Ethnic groups, having long subscribed to modernist universalism as the ticket to equality, began to celebrate their differences from the white majority, and producers stepped in to meet this growing need. Rather than a single mass market, there emerged a multitude of niche markets, smallish "clumps" of demand often formed in direct opposition with other niches.

As in architecture, the arts also experienced a postmodern opposition movement, set off in the early ’70s by the feminist movement and pop art and later expressed through the incorporation of folk art and other "outsider art". In something of a reversal of postmodernism in literature, in the arts postmodernism entailed a return to narrative following the modernists total rejection of narrative (along with figurativity). If the color field paintings of Rothko or the drip paintings of Pollock stand as the height of modernism, the paintings of Lichtenstein stood explicitly as "slices" of a hinted-at narrative. The total negation of self in the finished work of the modernists (one critic, though which one I can’t remember at the moment — maybe Greenburg — defined modernism exclusively in terms of the diminishing visibility of brushstrokes, the mark of the painter’s presence preserved in the surface of the finished work — prompting Lichtenstein to reply with a series of paintings depicting brushstrokes) was rejected by women and minority painters who explicitly drew on their own life histories and ethnic identities for source material, as in Basquiat‘s incorporation of urban street graffiti and Black history and personal life events. Another difference between modernist and postmodernist art lay in the attitude towards the medium. Modernist painters like Pollock reveled in the sheer "mediumness" of their medium, essentially making paintings of paint. Their postmodern descendents include photorealists like Chuck Close and Richard Estes whose work so closely emulates the world around them that it is hardly recognizable as paintings at all.

Irony is a common thread running through all domains of postmodern life (and rumours of its death have been, I fear, greatly exaggerated). A sense of ironic detachment is a central survival adaptation in a world dominated by mass media, market-speak, and profit-driven newsrooms. The postmodern citizen lives in a world constructed almost wholly of lies and image: 4 out of 5 dentists do not recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum (nobody ever asked them), the newest toy advertised on Saturday morning will not do half the things it is shown doing, drinking beer will not make you more attractive, whatever product is mentioned in the 11 o’clock news program’s scare segment will not kill you or scar your children, neither Cosmo nor Maxim will make you a better lover, neither "the leading brand" nor its competitor will get grass stains out of your pants, and no matter what you buy you will generally not be a happier or healthier person because of it. We live in a world in which the only choices are products and brands that have made ridiculous claims that we know to be false, but we also have to eat, drink, wash our clothes, and so on. How else but ironically can we buy Palmolive dish soap when we know, absolutely know, that it will not make our hands softer?

This goes somewhat deeper than just our response to consumer products. The rise of the self-help movement, for instance, and its cousins in New Age philosophy and Oprahaic therapy has filled our everyday vocabulary with a host of platitudes and cliches that we know are simply not true but which are all we have with which to construct our verbal responses to the tragedies that befall ourselves and others. How can we loudly and repeatedly profess our disdain of money — "Money isn’t the only thing in life", "Money can’t buy happiness", "Money is the root of all evil", "The best things in life are free", and so on — when almost all our actions in life are focused around money? Irony. Irony allows us to refrain from laughing when a supervisor describes our workplace as a "family" and speaks of loyalty to a company — a company that, we know, will lay us off without the slightest hesitation if a reduction of "redundancies" (i.e. workers) will boost the next quarter’s profit margin. In the postmodern world, earnestness is lethal — to truly believe in something, without the slightest reservation, is to make oneself vulnerable to all sorts of disappointment, from the pain of the "painless" Epilady to the shock of finding one’s insurance cancelled as one faces a grave illness.

The thing that comes to most people’s mind in response to postmodernism is the jargon. Although postmodernism describes a much wider swath of social life than just the limited academic movement, it is the academic work struggling to comprehend and explain the postmodern that has become most associated with postmodernism. And that work is, by and large, admittedly difficult reading. A host of "hegemonies" and "always-alreadies" and "subjectivities" and other big-dollar words tend to scare off all but the most committed readers. Alan Sokal’s postmodern hoax, in which a completely fabricated scientific paper heavy with postmodernisms was accepted and published, stands as the model of how postmodernist jargon is used to hide a lack of substance and insight — which is not a totally fair assessment. Although surely a lot of hot air is made intellectually acceptable by postmodernist language, I would venture that this is no more common that it has been in any other field of endeavour, from middle-age scholasticism to Enlightenment-era scientism to 19th century scientific racism to high modernism. Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word mocks the pretentious language of high modernist art critics (and patrons of Pollock, Rothko, Jasper Johns, and the other great modernist painters) Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, and Leo Steinberg, accusing the modernists, like Sokal to the postmodernists, of using fancy language to hide the total lack of content in their favored art movements.

The denseness of postmodern theory comes from a number of sources. Of course, it’s theory, and theory can be dense, no matter what the field. The same problems we might have reading, say, Baudrillard we would also have reading advanced mathematical theory, or physics. It’s just not always possible to describe complex systems like society, culture, or economy in a simple, straight-forward manner. But I think a lot of the trouble comes from other factors. First, a lot of postmodern theory comes from specific fields — philosophy, literary criticism, social science — each of which has its own specialized style and vocabulary. Second, a great deal comes from France, which presents two problems for English-speaking readers. The French intellectual system is very different from that of the British, American, Canadian, and most other English-speaking peoples (with India being a notable exception, and Indian theory is, likewise, rather dense for non-Indian tastes). More important, I think, is that complex ideas in French tend not to translate well into English, and translators tend to make choices that act as barriers to English-speakers. Third, there’s the politics of academia — like it or not, for better or worse, knowingly or unknowingly, academics erect boundaries around their tiny domains of expertise, opening the gates only to those with the determination and talent to learn the "secret language" of the masters. Fourth, in a field founded on Derrida’s distrust of narrative and Foucault’s distrust of discourse, postmodern theorists are prone to experiment with language, to write in ways that often intentionally deny any fixed interpretation, to leave much of their argument implicit and open to interpretation. Sometimes this is pretentious — "Let’s see what they make of this!" — but it can as easily be a product of humility — "How can I pretend to have the answers in a world where there are no answers?".

Postmodernism is, by and large, a reaction to the universalizing tendencies of modernism. In its attention to the particularities of place, identity, and context, postmodernism denies the basic modernist orientation towards "Man" (or "humanity"). When Hollywood made The Diary of Anne Frank into a movie in the ’50s, it expunged or downplayed nearly all the "Jewish" details in favor of a story with a universal message. The Holocaust was not bad because of what it did to Jews, and especially not for what it did to the specific young woman on whose diary the movie was based, but because Anne Frank could be any of us (as could her oppressors, as Hannah Arendt showed in another modernist work, Eichmann in Jerusalem). Today, Jewish people such as Elie Weisel jealously protect the Jewish specificity of the Holocaust (and the Broadway version of Diary of Anne Frank restores Anne’s Jewish specificity to the tale). At the root of postmodern society is the growing recognition that what is right in one place at one particular time may not be right in another place or time. This is, I propose, deeper than the easy (and all-too-often dismissive) label "relativism" suggests, implying a kind of deeply-situated pragmatism in our relations with the world. In a globalized world without the benefit of a clear-cut path to "salvation" (or "success), for that matter), we find ourselves forced to reckon with all the varied ways of doing things — with the full knowledge that, though they may differ from our own, they may well be better, or at least as effective as the ways that are familiar to us. Thus a kind of ironic detachment emerges even towards our own thoughts and actions — we must act as if we knew our way was the "right" way of doing something, or risk a total paralysis. But we do so always knowing that others might do things far differently, and that in another context our own ways might not only appear strange but become, in fact, useless.

Finally, I conclude this piece with some random thoughts that occurred to me as I thought all this through, offered as illustrations of a sort. I haven’t worked through all of the implications of these thoughts; for the most part, they just "feel" right:

• For modernists, the medium is the message; for postmodernists, the message is the medium.
• Modernists believe that racism will end when humanity accepts its similarities; postmodernists believe that racism will come to an end when humanity accepts its differences.
• Chock Full O’ Nuts is modern, Starbucks Blue Mountain Blend is postmodern.
• James Joyce’s Ulysses is both modern and postmodern. Go figure!
• "Leave it to Beaver" is modern; "Sesame Street" is postmodern.
• The American Melting Pot is modern; the American Salad Bowl is postmodern. Ironically, though, most initiatives that claim to celebrate the American Salad Bowl are entirely modern.
• Al Jolson’s Jazz Singer is modern; John Zorn’s Masada is postmodern.
• Free Market ideology, with its focus on individual choice and competition, tends to be postmodern, but the corporations and politicians that advocate the Free Market tend to be very, very modern.
• Jazz is modern; Hip-Hop is postmodern.
• Doctor’s orders are modern; support group-driven research is postmodern.

So a couple of posts about “third places” caught my attention. The first is a definition and short historical examination of the third place in American life; the second, a contribution to the current buzz about Starbucks’ policy on photography inside their stores. In the first, we learn of the basis and post-War decline of third places, while the second describes Starbucks’ conscious effort to craft new third places appropriate to the demands of the ’90s.

So what’s a third place? The rise of industrialized labour (including the service sector) over the course of the 19th century was paralleled by a new focus on the division of space into public and private spheres. Against the pressures of the “public” world of politics and commerce, the family and home were constructed as an asylum of sorts, a place where even the lowliest working man and we are speaking here, for the most part, of men, despite the large numbers of women in the workforce) could escape the dramas of workaday life. Likewise, the home as a site of consumption was opposed to the workplace as site of production: at home, a man was free to enjoy the fruits of his labour.

This geography of social life was felt across the board, in domains as diverse as the development of modern art (e.g. the turn from massive, celebratory historical or mythological scenes to more appropriately-sized images drawn from the world familiar to an urban peit bourgeoisie), political economy (a common critique of Marx’s work is that his view of economics ends at the threshold of the home, and so ignores the contribution that women’s free domestic labour contributed to lowering the costs of the reproduction of labour), the characterization of women as consumers and men as producers (even as women and children toiled away in the mills of the North East, the sweatshops of the urban centers, and the farms of the rural hinterlands), and so on. It is not too much of stretch to say that the multiply inflected opposition between public and private lies at the core of the modern Western worldview–consider our efforts to legitimize what goes on between consenting adults “behind closed doors”.

Third places were spaces in which the conceptually separate worlds of public and private were mediated. For instance, while complaining about unfair labour practices at work could get one fired, and complaining at home might get you sympathy but rarely any satisfactory understanding, the local pub offered a place for workers to share their complaints without fear of management repercussions. Pubs, cafes, restaurants, social clubs, parks, shopping centers (such as the famous Parisian Arcades), museums, even department stores became consciously seen as spaces for sociability, more inclusive than the confines of the home but free of the pressures of the workplace. Partaking of equal parts commerce (networking, deal-making, job-tip-seeking, and other economic activities thrive in third places), politics (Marx’ International met in a pub just south of the British Museum; Hitler’s putsch was launched from a Munich Biergarten, Jewish immigrant socialism thrived in the cafes of the Lower East Side), and a highly constructed privacy (maintained as often through attitude and discretion as through physical barriers). third places provided an outlet ofr expression that neither the workplace or the home could produce.

It is no overstatement to say that the third place has virtually disappeared from American life in the wake of WWII. The rise of suburbs and the interstate beltways ahve moved our homes ever-further from our workplaces and scattered our coworkers–the people that we are most likely to know well–across wide swaths of suburban geography. Americans are often surprised when visiting Europe at the great deal of activity in pubs, cafes, and other public spaces–the piazzas of Italy, the Biergartens of Germany, the British locals. Seeing a family, complete with toddlers, socializing in a smoky pub in Aberystwyth was one of my more surreal moments abroad, running deeply counter to my conceptions of public space. Europeans, on the other hand, often find American bar culture to be highly suprficial, over-eroticized, and asocial.

Over the last decade, however, Americans have seen the rise of new kinds of third places. The Internet has probably been the most significant force in the creation of new spaces for expression and sociability, despite the questions of identity and security that have accompanied its penetration into American consciousness. But the Internet cannot completely fill this apparent need for social interaction. One important factor of third places is their local-ness, their ability to focus on local concerns and identities, and the Internet has, so far, been very lacking in addressing local concerns.

The late ’80s began to see an upsurge in coffee houses, wine bars, brew pubs, and other post-Yuppie third places. At the same time, marketeers began more consciously exploiting the sociality of such places as part of corporate branding efforts. Among the most successful of these establishments was Starbucks, at the same time fueling and exploiting a newly-developed taste for gourmet specialty coffees. ALthough a number of factors played into Starbucks’ success–most notably the disaggregation of the American mass market into an ever-multiplying array of micro-niche markets), among them is their self-conscious efforts at creating third places where coffee-drinking would provide the focus for social existence.

Of course, its a different social existence than that of the local pub in Wales. Starbucks is, first and foremost, a professional’s third place. By virtue of price, design, and location, Starbucks makes it’s audience clear. What’s more, Starbucks is a space for small groups of such people, or solitary people. I once had a housemate who would go to Starbucks to write poetry, apparently drawn by its literary atmosphere. It is unlikely that the next revolution will start in a Starbucks.

But the attempt to capture “third place-ness” as part of a corporate brand is a risky one, and as Brian of Op/Edit (home to the second post mentioned above) points out, the demands of corporate existence are often at odds with the social needs of a third place. A long-time Starbucks employee, Brian describes the origins of managers’ restrictions on in-store photography as a means to combat corporate espionage at a time when the third-placiization of Starbucks was a relatively new and shaky premise. Starbucks has been highly successful in this effort, however, and now managers’ attacks on photographers mainly hamper the fairly widespread social behaviour of taking snapshots of your friends. Corporate concerns demand that Starbucks control the use of its branded space, a demand that is ultimately opposed to the needs of a third place.

I am not about to predict the imminent demise of Starbucks–Americans have shown time and again their willingness to adapt to the social controls of corporatized space, and I doubt that, some miscreants aside, much will come of efforts to subvert Starbucks’ control.

Let me first say that we’re talking about a piece of popular culture here, and like any pop culture artifact, we approach it subjectively, with all the baggage of taste and experience that makes us who we are. I happened to like the new Matrix, though it’s not going to be one of my favorite movies. It was, I thought, good blockbuster material, even if you didn’t understand–or didn’t like–all the philosophical mind-gaming. But the meaning of movies, and their impact on cultural thought, has to do with more than just whether we liked a movie or not–heck, some movies can influence the way we think and feel even if we’ve never even seen them. So don’t take this as a review or my attempt to convince you to like a movie you haven’t seen or didn’t like.

The big question about the movie is the ending. After his encounter with the Architect, where he learned that there have been 5 previous iterations of the matrix and that each one gave rise to a "One" as a sort of error-recovery tactic, Neo leaves the matrix to find the Nebuchadnezzar under attack from a troop of sentinels. As the crew flees the ship on foot, the sentinels hot on the heels, Neo has a realization. Muttering, "Something’s different," he turns, holds his hands up, and *wham!* kills sentinels dead. The buzz in the blogosphere is that Neo could do this because he suddenly realized that the "real world", the world where Zion lays, is not actually outside the matrix at all, but is a simulacrum of the outside, developed ostensibly to keep the "errors"–the people who chose the red pill–from contaminating the system.

Many, many commentors found this utterly unsatisfying, a sort of "the last season of Dallas was a dream" cop-out. Despite some earlier reservations, though, I’m beginning to think that this may, in fact, be the correct interpretation. But rather than being disappointed, I find it highly intriguing.

William Blaze sees this as a commentary on the way society controls, contains, and disarms political dissent–a particularly powerful statement given the current vilification of dissent under the Bush administration particularly and contemporary American society in general.

The way the Matrix Reloaded points out the multiple layers of control built into society is perhaps the most potent of the messages it carries. Its one thing to make people aware of the first layer of control. Its far more powerful to make them aware of the way that a built in "resistance" can be used to solidify the power structure.

These are powerful seeds for any campaign to make the American public aware of the way the Bush administration is using the rhetoric and the media to sell a system of control. The left has been pushing these ideas for decades now, and the general public couldn’t give a fuck.

The most effective means of establishing and maintaining control, said Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, is through desire, or more properly the manipulation of desire. It is desire that defines markets–desire harnessed and channeled by the PR and marketing machines of corporations–and it is desire that drives the matrix (recall Cypher’s desire for the–illusory–pleasures of the matrix, discussed over a glass of wine and a steak). Because that which is desired is perceived as, well, desirable, the fulfillment of our desire is felt as a choice, and thus also the acquisition of that which fulfills it. The Architect describes the first iteration of the Matrix as "perfect", a system in which all human desires were easily met, and thus flawed; the second and later iterations all included (the illusion of) choice–looking remarkably like late 20th-early 21st century North America–and one very real choice: each denizen of the matrix chooses the matrix, in act after act of desire fulfillment.

Although their desires differ (though highly commodified, Gap-esque party style apparently remains a universal of human desire), the denizens of Zion (I hesitate to say "Zionists")are no less ruled by desire–the desire for change, for revolution (for revolutions sake, maybe?), for love, and ultimately for meaning. Which brings me to the crux of this discussion. Foucault wrote that their is no point outside society, outside the system, from which an attack on society or system could be mounted. As products of society, we are by definition of society, even as we imagine it in some other form. Neo’s sudden insight–along with the words of the Architect, and other hints throughout the movie as a whole–suggests that there is likewise no point outside the matrix from which an attack on the matrix can be mounted. In a scene with one of Zion’s councilors–the kind of scene whose "hidden meaning" is apparent through its seeming pointlessness–Neo visits the Zion machine room. All these machines, the councilor points out, grind away, day after day, to make the city of Zion habitable. Though crude in comparison to the matrix, the machines of Zion act as yet another means by which the society of (Zion’s) desire is realized.

If Zion is simply matrix writ in cruder code, then there truly is no escape from the matrix. Or at least that’s what the disappointed commentors seem most worried about. Two interlocked dicta of Foucault’s thought address the issue of resistance. The first is that power is not only destructive–the power of the sentinels, of the Agents, of society as a whole to grind down, wear out, and ultimately destroy non-compliance–but is also constructive–the power to build coalitions, to create, to imagine and to reimagine. This is the One’s power, to reach into the code of the world and to rewrite its rules. The second, trickier dictum is that even the subversive can be subverted. This is the principle of the matrix–that the subversive elements can be isolated and contained in the subverts paradise, Zion–but it is also the principle of Morpheus–to challenge, even to destroy, the nascent hierarchies of Zion if doing so can produce the conditions for real freedom. (And suddenly it dawns on me: Foucault defined "power"–mysteriously, mystically–as "polymorphous perversity"; I just defined it as poly-Morpheus subversity…)

Foucault would have loved the Matrix movies, I think. A consumer product created largely through the manipulation of signs, fueled by a marketing campaign stretching back months, even years, to build up a desire to see the films (in many cases, perhaps, building a desire too strong to be fulfilled by what was ultimately released), about a world explicitly constructed by the manipulation of of signs, in which both resistance and compliance are mediated by the matrix, the machines that humans have constructed in their desire for a desire-free world. What remains to be seen is how Neo–although I still have a long shot bet on the Kid as the "real" One (or maybe just the Tall Cool One, with a nod to Robert Plant; kidding aside, the Kid was able to free himself from the matrix without the intervention of a Morpheus or other herald, without the act of choice–red pill or blue pill–that Neo and all others before and after him had to make to break the matrix’s hold, and I think we’ll be seeing more of him)–resolves the paradox of choice and desire in the third installment. Foucault’s vision could be bleak–not willing to hand over the reins of his own desire, he threw himself into a life of ever more extreme sex acts, in the course of which he contracted the AIDS he ultimately died of–but apparently did not share his critics’ misgivings about the political implications of his work. Although his work is often seen as undermining political activism (if the subversive can be subverted, then so too can the subvertor of the subversive), Foucault himself was active on behalf of prisoners, immigrants, mental health patients, and the politically oppressed. Neo’s sex life is considerably tamer–we’ll have to wait and see if his revolution proves equally tame.

As I mentioned, I believe a major weakness in Whorf’s thinking stems from his too-great reliance on Saussure, particularly Saussure’s separation of language into langue and parole (roughly: “language” and “speech”), and his insistence on langue (language as the total system, carried in our heads) as the correct object of scientific inquiry. Saussure was defining a particular kind of research program, a way of examining the internal structure of a language, and his exclusion of spoken language (parole) makes sense for his ends. Linguists would be utterly lost if they had to account for every possible variation in individual mastery and usage in their models–instead, Saussure provides a means to abstract these variations into a single “object” for study: a language. These standardized languages are not the languages we speak–they’re the whole language, even perfect speakers speak only part of the whole in any given utterance. After separating langue from parole, Saussure completely ignored the study of parole, and most linguists followed suit, for decades. So there was really no model for approaching spoken language, and especially discrete acts of speech, during Whorf’s career. The work of several later theorists–notably Émile Benveniste , JL Austin , and Roman Jakobson –starts to fill in this area, in ways that I think expand Whorf’s hypothesis greatly.

Benveniste’s most significant contribution (or one of them, at least) is his discussion of “shifters”. In Saussure’s schema, any given sign (in the case of language, a word) signifies something real in the world–an object, an action, a feeling, an idea. “Cow” signifies an object, “running” an action, “love” an emotion, “Communism” an idea. The signified does not have to be real–a faerie can grok a tralfamadorean. Colourless green ideas can sleep furiously. The point is that each sign has a fixed referent–”cow” doesn’t mean a bovine animal today and a toaster oven tomorrow (note: homonyms are different signs, e.g. “cow”–the animal–and “cow”–to hide in fear–are two separate signs, even though they sound the same in English). But Benveniste noticed that there is a class of words, mostly pronouns, that do not have fixed references, and these he called “shifters”. Consider the sentence “I want that for him, but you think they will be angry.” This sentence contains 5 words–”I”, “that”, “him”, “you”, “they”–whose referent is entirely dependent on the context in which it is spoken. Their referents “shift” depending on who is doing the speaking, who is listening, who is the object of the sentence, what the speaker wants for the object, and who the listener thinks will be angry if the object gets whatever the speaker is talking about. While the structure of this sentence can be sussed out as langue, the meaning only exists in the realm of parole.

What’s interesting about this is that it’s reflexive–the context of the sentence is constructed in the speaking of the sentence. “I”, “that”, “him”, “you”, and “they” only take meaning as they are spoken, in the moment of their utterance. What’s more, we construct ourselves as acting subjects–I become the “I” of the sentence in speaking it. Consider the alternative: “Dustin wants that…”–the subject of that sentence is removed, distanced from the speaker of the sentence, even though they (we) are ostensibly the same person.

This ability to construct and shape the context in which we find ourselves is not limited to shifters. Benveniste opens discussion on another class of linguistic acts he calls “performative speech” or just “performatives”. Performatives are sentences that actually do what they say, that act on the world. “I now pronounce you man and wife”–spoken under the right circumstances by the right “I” actually changes two unrelated people who happen to like each other an awful lot into relatives, into a family. They are no longer the same people–their legal status has changed, their names might be changed, their social role has changed–all because of a sentence. “I hereby declare War on Syria” creates a state of war with Syria. “I christen thee Christopher Robins” confers a name onto a nameless infant–and in some cases, a soul. And so on. Performatives not only shape the way we see the world, as Whorf saw language doing, they shape the world itself.

While Benveniste might be credited with the “discovery” of performative speech, it was Austin who developed the idea, in his insanely frustrating How to Do Things With Words . Austin begins innocently enough, well within the bounds of Benveniste’s work, but at each step he finds himself frustrated by a too-narrow conception of what usages actually qualify as performative usages. Ultimately, he arrives at a conception of all language as performative, and all utterances as “speech acts”. What this means in practical terms is that saying something is an act, and particularly an act of power. “The sky is blue” is not merely a reflection of an external reality, it is an assertion about that external reality. Furthermore, it is not an assertion made in a vacuum, but an assertion made by a speaking subject (an “I”) directed towards a listening audience (a “you”). It is an assertion intended to persuade that “you” of my world-view, and thus to define the relationship between us.

At first glance, Jakobson doesn’t seem to follow from what I’ve said. Jakobson wrote literary analysis, especially on the use of “parallelism” in language. Parallelism is the use of linguistic devices that enlarge and reinforce the message of a statement. For instance, the use of alliteration, consonance, rhythm, and rhyme in poetry imparts a subtle palpability to the lines, making them more effective. Consider this line from Poe: “While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door…”. “Nodded nearly napping”, with its rhythm and alliteration, conveys the idea of being almost asleep in a way that “While I was nearly asleep” does not. Consider a non-poetic translation of the phrase: “While I was nearly asleep, I heard someone knocking at the door…”. In Poe, you can actually hear–even feel–the person knocking at the door, waking the speaker out of his near-sleep, adding a layer of sensation to the literal meaning.

What this has to do with Austin is two-fold. First, parallelism performs the meaning of the utterance. Think of the rhythm of Poe’s “The Raven”–a good drummer could probably convey the sense of the poem without uttering a word. Second, because of the almost over-abundance of meaning, parallelism makes utterances far more persuasive–they add to the power of the utterance–even more so for being almost subliminal. Parallelism works below the level of conscious thought, conveying meaning almost viscerally.

Parallelism is yet another way in which meaning is conveyed outside of the formal boundaries of Saussure’s langue. In fact, Saussure explicitly denounced what he called the “bow-wow” theory of language–theories that located the origin and meaning of language in its mimicry of sounds found in the real world. Saussure insisted on the the arbitrariness of signification–that is, that the sound of a word had nothing to do with its meaning. Jakobson’s parallelism directly challenge Saussure on this point, showing that, in some cases, the sound of a word does, in fact, impact it’s meaning–and can add meanings to the word that have nothing to do with the “official” referent of the word.

Whorf’s conception of language had seen it determining the ways in which its bearers perceive and act in the world. The work I have discussed here expands on that conception, seeing language more as a medium through and in which we encounter the world–and each other. Through language we not only apprehend the world, but actively engage and construct it. Furthermore, in relation with the world and one another, we change and adapt our language. To be fair, Whorf allowed for the possibility of a sort of “feedback loop” between language and culture, but understanding the process of change over time was not really on his agenda. Following from Saussure, he viewed language as something external to individual actors, something more or less fixed and constant that individuals took on as a whole. Following from Benveniste, Austin, and Jakobson, we might think of language as something that emerges in the interaction between social actors. In this view, the vocabulary and grammar of a language are only a part of the overall phenomena, the building blocks out of which social interactions are forged.

Such a view is not inconsistent with the general principles of Whorfian Relativism. The basic principle–that language, thought, and reality are intertwined in our relations with the world and each other–still stands. What’s changed is the level at which relativism is applied: Whorf saw cultures and languages as discrete “units”, each culture-language pair tied to a particular social, economic, political, and ecological reality. The Inuit world-view differed from the Nambikwara world-view because the realities they inhabited were different. The work of Benveniste, Austin, and Jakobson applies at a much more local level than that, ultimately to the specific interaction between individuals. It is in the multiplication and recurrence of such interactions that culture occurs, not at the artificial unit of “the culture”, and we see in every conversation a reshaping of the cultural world in which its participants live. Rather than language determining culture, as in the original S-W formulation, or language as a part of culture as some opponents of S-W assert, language is culture, and vice versa.

So, first of all, what is it? Sapir and Whorf were anthropologists in the early part of the 20th century, students of Franz Boas and strongly influenced by his largely undeveloped (by Boas, that is) relativism. A common sort of relativist device is to examine a cultural trait or complex of traits, something that may seem primitive, silly, or even stupid to outsiders, and to show how it “fits” into the world-view of it’s practitioners. Sapir and Whorf were arguing against the idea that Western languages were more “developed” than “primitive” languages–that they were better able to describe the world, and to describe it truthfully (i.e. scientifically) than non-Western languages–and were therefore a mark of the inferiority of non-Western peoples. Thus the famous example of the many Eskimo words which describe the multitude of variations that English-speakers refer to simply as “snow”–Whorf showed that in matters where it mattered to them, Eskimos could be every bit as precise, indeed even more precise, than their Western counterparts. This is more than simply a matter of vocabulary, however–Whorf saw this as an example of the differences in the way people actually saw and interacted with the world around them. The Eskimo doesn’t see “snow” and then categorize it–s/he perceives the different kinds of crystalline water the same way we perceive the difference between a tree and a car: immediately, unconsciously, directly. Drawing on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structural linguistics, Whorf saw language as the instrument of categorization, in effect saying that our language determines the way we perceive and act in the world.

The problem is that most people get stuck at the level of vocabulary suggested by the “snow” example, while Whorf and Sapir are both fairly clear in using this as an illustration, not as evidence. For instance, of the ” Great Eskimo Snow Silliness”, Stavros of Emptybottle says “This… is where the argument runs off the rails for me” (but later reddems himself by embracing a strong Whorfian Relativism while attempting its critique). Fleming Flunch of Ming the Mechanic writes “For an English speaker it is obvious that noodles is plural, because there are many noodles on a plate. A Chinese person is just as likely to call it “noodle”, not because he can’t count, but because he’s seeing it differently. I suppose focusing on the substance, not on the individual pieces”–a good example of the power of vocabulary in shaping perceptions, but only a tiny foray into Whorfian territory.

The real action in Whorf’s theory–as befitting one strongly influenced by Saussurean structuralism–takes place at the level of structure: grammar, syntax, semiotics. For instance, a standard sentence in most languages (maybe all–I’m not much of an expert in comparative linguistics) has a “subject-predicate” structure–that is, a subject performs an action. According to Whorf, this deep structure of language shapes the way we interact with the world around us, that it shapes the way we imagine ourselves as actors in the world. Whorf saw this “deep structure” as varying between populations, though–good Saussurean that he is–he doesn’t get into the problem of origins. A debate arises with Chomskyans who see many elements of linguistic structure as innate, but I don’t think it matters–if there are universal structures, there may very well be elements that all world-views share. I would say that the subject-predicate structure is fairly universal, although Whorf describes some languages he feels don’t share this structure. Though his linguistic knowledge was undoubtedly superiour to mine, I don’t find these examples very compelling; I see them as variations on a theme, rather than a different order of things. Regardless, even the Chomskyans recognize that linguistic variations exist, whether or not it is constrained by inborn tendencies, so there is still a lot of world-view left unaccounted for.

Which is not to say that Whorf had all the answers. I’ve called attention to the Saussurean influence because, in some ways, I think Saussure led Whorf astray. I wrote an essay some years ago on S-W some years ago that explains my thoughts in full–as well as providing a much more fulfilling look at Whorf’s work than I feel comfortable making space for here–which, to keep this already lengthy post from becoming ungodly, I have posted separately: Notes on Whorfian Relativism . Basically, I see in Whorf an attempt to force a model that Saussure intended for studying language in the abstract into service to study the concrete use of language–which Saussure explicitly excludes. Whorf made excellent use of the best tools available to him at the time, but the best tools weren’t quite good enough.

I have more on this, but this is enough for now: what I want to get into more is the linguistic structuring of the relationship between subjects and the world around them, as well as the way language changes and is reshaped by speakers. The über-hangup for most people thinking about Whorf is the determinism, which implies both a lack of agency on the part of language users and an inflexibility in the language itself. As I noted, Whorf left the question of language change unaddressed. This follows directly from Saussure, and fits quite comfortably with the anthropology of his time, which tended to ignore history and focus on the “ethnographic present”, the unchanging now to which the researcher has access. But I don’t think Whorf’s thinking is strictly opposed to these considerations–they just weren’t his considerations. But more on this when I get my head together.

Like I said, I’m not a particularly big fan of X-Men–in fact, I only saw the first one a few months ago, after seeing the preview for the new one. I enjoyed both movies–they’re pure summer blockbuster entertainment, which is sometimes good enough, but there’s something else. They’re smart, in an understated way. I mean, on the face of it you have these petty romantic entanglements, hammy performances (not “bad performances”–these are good actors playing tights-wearing superheroes, they’re supposed to ham it up a bit), somewhat predictable plot devices (which never fail to keep us on the edge of our seats, of course), all the earmarks of superhero movies. But X-Men has this other thing going on under the surface, this very intelligent parallel to the oppression of “genetically inferior” Jews, Slavs, Rom, disabled persons, and homosexuals under the Nazis. In addition to saving the world from the Bad Guys, the X-Men (who are about 50% female, go figure–I guess you take the smart with the dumb with these movies) are embroiled in the moral quandary around their relationship with their fellow, non-mutant humans, who hunt and persecute them mercilessly. In one scene in X-Men 2, one of the younger characters has to “out” himself as a mutant to his parents, a situation that is portrayed with all the tension and awkwardness that young gay people face–or often avoid–with their parents (although I doubt if any gay person has ever been asked to demonstrate his or her “difference” to the rest of the family…).

As well, the movie obliquely references present day anti-terrorist hysteria, with family members phoning in tips and the actions of a political fringe being used to criminalize an entire minority population. The bad guy seems to come straight out of George Bush’s cabinet. The civilian population in X-Men is terrified and easily led to complicity in the inhumanity of an explicitly Holocuast-modeled state.

In pitting these super-human outsiders against the ills of the time–as well as in using explicit Holocaust references, e.g. in the opening scene of the first movie, and in the bios of both Xavier and his arch-nemesis Magneto–X-Men pays homage to the comic books’ “Golden Age” in the years before and immediately after WWII. I’ve said I don’t really read comic books, not so much out of distaste or a feeling that comic books are for children–some of them are most emphatically not for children–but because at some point I just sort of stopped. As a teenager, I followed several series intently, although I was never really drawn to the superhero comics. I read Lone Wolf and Cub and Area 88, both of which were plotted around intractible ethical dilemmas that inflected the action with a sort of sadness and despair that was only starting to seep into the superhero comics at the time. But I’ve been very interested in the deep history of superhero comics in the years leading up to WWII, when young, mostly-Jewish men with a passion for illustration in the service of the fantastic invented characters like Superman and Batman and their derivatives. This period forms the backdrop in the novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, about two young Jewish cousins who invent a superhero called “The Escapist” who vicariously carries out Czech exile Kavalier’s revenge fantasies against Hitler and the Nazis. The first half is an excellent introduction to what exactly was going on with comic books in those years, the various ways they intersected with and engaged the major issues of the day, although the book degenerates in the second half, becoming somewhat formulaic, although still managing a pretty good exposition of the McCarthy-era crackdown on comic books as a threat to the morals of the youth, especially in the way it deals with the links between anti-communist furor on one side and anti-Semitism and homophobia on the other. In its conscious use of the Holocaust as a moral backdrop, X-Men explicitly references these years at the dawn of the superhero era.

Superhero comic books were a very American way of dealing with the issues around the rise of Nazism and fascism, both abroad and closer to home, although they lost some of that moral complexity in the years after the war when, their ranks thinned by anti-communist purges, comic books were enlisted in the Cold War. Although comic books still reflected the underlying anxieties of the nuclear age (think of Hulk and Spiderman, both victims of nuclear accidents), the structure of anti-communism did not leave them much room to maneuver. When comic book artists were attacking Nazism, they did so as minorities, immigrants, and sons of immigrants, with all the fierce loyalty and pride in the new homeland that engenders, as well as with an awareness of their own exclusion and marginalization in a society that was, for instance, actively excluding Jewish refugees from Nazi countries, using many of the same excuses of cultural and genetic purity that the Nazis had mobilized. Anti-Nazi comic books, particularly before America’s entry into WWII, were aimed not at the Germans but at fellow Americans, at an America that had refused to fight fascism in Spain and was balking at fighting it in Germany. In the service of anti-communism, however, there was no home audience to convince, to persuade, to expose the evils of communism to. There was no room for moral ambiguity in the face of an audience that demanded simplistic confirmations of their moral superiority. As well, the anti-comics crusade had eviscerated comic books, demanding they be “child-safe” and thus virtually defining them as children’s literature. This one-two punch led to the rapid decline of comic books in the Cold War era, a blow that they didn’t really begin to recover from until the last decade.

One of the consequences of this history, both of the origin and of the decline of comic books, is that superheros became and remained American superheros. Metropolis and Gotham were American cities, the Justice League an American institution. Like Superman, superheroes in general were drafted into service of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way”–many of them even served in the American armed forces. X-Men 2 follows this path, with the first movie opening (after the “prologue” set in a Nazi death camp) in the US Congress and the second in the White House. Superman, of course, is the most American of superheroes, and nothing sums up this association better than the scene at the close of Superman 2 where Superman replaces the dome of the White House, the American flag billowing behind him as he flashes the President his All-American grin. As the first and most prominent of superheroes, Superman was perhaps the most obvious victim of anti-communist co-optation, and his middle years became stagnant and dreary. As I came out of X-Men 2, I started wondering about this essential tie to America, and wondered especially how American superheroes might fit in, say, Paris, or Berlin. I even imagined a story arc–a black soldier who is captured by Germans and, in contravention of the regulations on prisoners of war, is used for Mengele-ish medical experimentation which bestow him with super powers (but also, maybe, a touch of madness). Like many black American soldiers, he returns home after the war to a society that rejects him as surely as the Jews were rejected by the Nazis he helped to defeat–a society where blacks are also used in medical experimentation (though that wouldn’t have been revealed at that time). Again, like many black American veterans, he flees America for the relative security of France, where he begins to become aware of the extent of the changes rought in him by the Nazis, and thus begins life as a superhero. What kind of villains would he fight in France (or Europe in general)? How would French society react to him? Would he live a Batman-esque life of seclusion on the margins of society, or would he be embraced by the French as they tended to embrace American expatriates in general?

Anyway, that though experiment was running through my mind when I came, quite by accident, on a link to this interview with Mark Millar, who has worked on the X-Men and Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight series. Millar describes his new series, a three-parter entitled Superman: Red Son, which stems from the premise that young Kal-El’s ship crashed in Soviet Ukraine instead of middle-American Smallville. In Red Son, Superman is raised as a champion of Truth, Justice, and The Communist Way, and grows into a functionary for the Soviet government in their work to unite the workers of the world. Along the way he encounters the Sovietised Batman, an anti-Stalinist revolutionary terrorist, who brings home the moral ambiguities of Superman’s communist nationalism. This definitely looks like a realization of the promise of comic books, and certainly like a realization of some of the questions I tried to work through with my hackneyed outsider’s “faux” comic book story. The first installment just came out, and if I can find it and scrape the money together, I’m going to buy it–my first comic book in I don’t know how long. Of course, it’s been so long, that I’m really not sure even where to buy it–my neighborhood book store, while carrying comics, doesn’t seem to carry it. And I don’t know anything about the various formats that seem to have emerged since my teenage years, when graphic novels were still a rarity, especially as a format for original work. But these obstacles, I’m sure, can be overcome. Where’s Superman when you need him?!

Thus we step further into the Age of Unreason. I often wonder what it must have felt like on the day that Germany took its first baby step towards the Third Reich. Such a big thing happening, and yet on that day, it must have been invisible, something far off and not especially worrisome. The same with the second step, and the third. Heck, for years even Germany’s Jews felt that things would get better, that their worst fears–which didn’t even approximate the real future in store for them–were so unrealistic as to be laughable. There’s a brilliant film, Jew Boy Levi, set in the Black Forest in 1935. Levi is a Jewish cattle dealer who makes a circuit of all the towns and hamlets in the region, buying cattle to take to market. He is well-liked by his clients and is planning to marry a young Catholic woman in one of the villages when a team of Nazi Party functionaries set up in town while working on the railroad line. Through an excruciatingly subtle series of rumours, backroom dealing, differential treatment, and eventually outright incitement, this village full of upstanding, friendly, and endearing Germans is brought to bear against Levi. The anti-Semitism that turns Levi from a beloved member of the community into an outcast Jude progresses not in one fell swoop, but by baby steps, each moment only minutely more charged than the one before it.

Or consider McCarthyism. Not just Senator McCarthy’s campaign, but the whole complex of paranoia and backstabbing that enabled McCarthy’s work and those of his successors. Taken alone, no particular act in this march towards absurdity seemed poorly intentioned or evil, but they all added up to a criminal campaign against the bedrock values of the American system.

What is insidious about these examples is not so much that the respective governments actions against their subjects–which is certainly bad, but at least they were public actions–but the actions of those subjects against each other, the rumour-mongering and petty exclusions and power-plays of scurrilous neighbors peeking over the fence at each other’s backyards. For all her gardening skills, Donna Schaper’s backyard is not in order. She writes of the steps she might take to fall in line, ironically and perhaps unintentionally repeating the ideals of the German native plant movement that fed into the racial science of Nazi eugenics:

Perhaps I should write a new book called “Politically Correct Gardening.” In it I could show the single right way to plant, hoe, seed and compost. I would focus on native plants (or ones that originated in countries among America’s coalition of the willing). I would avoid pink flowers altogether [because of the colour’s association with communist sympathizers]. Nothing French would be mentioned. All plants would have to look good in [red, white, and blue] bunting.

For all that gardening seems an innocuous enterprise with little or no greater political relevance, it is a powerful field for the cultivation of nationalism. People who grow things, who bring a harvest forth from the earth, have long been symbols of the strength and fitness of a nation, a role easily pressed into the service of the worst forms of nationalism. I have already mentioned the role of “innocuous” gardening in cultivating the ideas that would fuel the Nazi Party–consider as well the role of the kibbutz in the establishment of an Israeli national identity, the mythological status of those who “made the desert bloom”. Consider the exclusion of “aliens” from owning farmland in California under the Alien Land Laws of the early 20th century. Or the French settlers in Algeria who blamed the local population’s inferiority for allowing the land–once called the “breadbasket of Rome”–to lapse into desert, and the belief that noble Frenchmen could turn it back into the breadbasket of Greater France. Or the Dutch settlement of New Guinea, driven by an ideology seeking to redeem a degenerate land from its stewardship under a degenerate people.

Farming, gardening, ranching, logging, all tie a people, literally and figuratively, to the earth, to the land in which the nation itself is rooted. In the industrial era, we might also include mining and oil drilling as providing the fuel for nationalism–certainly they are an active part of today’s American nationalism–but these industries place us at a remove from the land itself in a way that farming and especially gardening do not. People who work the earth with their hands play a special role in the definition of a nation–their ideas about our relationship with the physical land become our ideas about our relation with the ideological land. They wield a lot of power with their hand shovels and trowels, and it is frustrating to see that power turned to a policy of exclusion, of blind loyalty to a government that is becoming increasingly oppressive. It is also frustrating to see a group–any group–turning its back on dissension and debate, to see a man or woman denied a platform for expression–on whatever topic, be it baseball, charity, poetry, literature, or gardening–out of the fear that they may speak their mind on politics. Not because it is harmful to people like Donna Schaper (or actors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, or poets like Marilyn Nelson and Jay Parini, whom she mentions in her article) but because it degrades citizens like those in the Coral Gables Garden Club. It shows them up as cheap, petty, and thoughtless, unwilling to even entertain the idea of dissent, and eager to play bit parts in whatever the next baby step in the Age of Unreason might be. My admiration is reserved for people like Schaper, people who stand up and challenge such small-mindedness. Alas, history has rarely been kind to the excluded, but we shall see.