The Explanation For Everything

Essays on Sexual Subjectivity

Paul Morrison

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780814764183
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"The claim 'I'm straight' is the psychosexual analogue of 'The check is in the mail': if you need to say it, your credit or creditability is already in doubt." So begins Paul Morrison's dazzling polemic, which takes as its point of departure Foucault's famous remark that sex is "the explanation for everything."

Combining psychoanalytic, literary, and queer theory, The Explanation for Everything seeks to account for the explanatory power attributed to homosexuality, and its relationship to compulsory heterosexuality. In the process, Morrison presents a scathing indictment of psychoanalysis and its impact on the study of sexuality. In bold but graceful leaps, Morrison applies his critique to a diversity of examples: subjectivity in Oscar Wilde, the cultural construction and reception of AIDS, the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, the practice of bodybuilding, and the contemporary reception of the sexual politics of fascism.

Analytical, witty and astute, The Explanation for Everything will challenge and amuse, establishing Paul Morrison as one of our most exciting cultural critics.

1 The Explanation for Everything (Bad)

The claim “I’m straight” is the psychosexual analogue of “The check is in the mail”: if you need to say it, your credit or credibility is already in doubt. But such was not always the case. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, Foucault argues, the regulation of sexuality focused primarily on legitimate alliances. The right to privacy (as we now call it) did not extend even to a law-abiding bedroom; the married couple, much more so than the pervert, was the object of anxious scrutiny and control, and the normative were routinely obliged to justify themselves as such:

The sex of husband and wife was beset by rules and recommendations. The marriage relation was the most intense focus of constraints; it was spoken of more than anything else; more than any other relation, it was required to give a detailed accounting of itself. It was under constant surveillance: if it was found to be lacking, it had to come forward and plead its cause before a witness.¹

The modern world exactly reverses this “incitement to discourse.” The pervert comes to occupy center stage, endlessly declaring that he-is-what-he-is, even as the “legitimate couple” withdraws discreetly to the wings:

The legitimate couple, with its regular sexuality, had a right to more discretion [than in the past]. It tended to function as a norm, one that was stricter, perhaps, but quieter. On the other hand, what came under scrutiny was the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals; the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite sex.… It was time for all these figures, scarcely noticed in the past, to step forward and speak, to make the difficult confession of what they were. (38–39)

Exclusion from representation is conventionally held to be the unhappy fate of the socially marginal or the sexually aberrant. Exemption from representation, Foucault counters, is the singular privilege of the normative. To occupy center stage, to declare one’s heterosexual credentials, is already to protest too much. The only compelling proof of sexual “legitimacy” is the subject’s felt knowledge that no proof is necessary. “Don’t ask, don’t tell”: the policy of compulsory discretion that now governs gays in the U.S. military has long been the informing (if thoroughly internalized) decorum of normativity. Heterosexuality is the love that dare not speak its name.

Conventional wisdom has it otherwise. Homosexuality is the proverbially innominate love, although if it too is not to be named, it is for reasons that have little to do with gay reticence. Heterosexuality speaks the name of its demonized other only at some peril to itself. As Eve Sedgwick has shown, the dreary game of “find-that-faggot,” the ferreting out of latent or repressed or closeted homosexuality, is always troubled by the logic of “it takes one to know one”; too deft a hand at the game easily betrays a limp wrist.² But as Foucault suggests, silence is not “the absolute limit of discourse,” and it is easy enough to invoke the specter of homosexuality without ever once risking the word:

Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. (27)

It requires but little ingenuity to speak of what one nevertheless declines to say: when denotation proves perilous, connotation can be relied upon to do its work.³ I am sometimes told, for example, that my prose is too mannered, but surely that is not all I’m being told. (Or perhaps it is. I am hardly in a position to argue otherwise, which is precisely the point.) By the same token, however, what one declines to say can be equally compromising. Speak of last night’s partner in gender-neutral terms, for instance, and your sexual proclivities are immediately apparent to everyone. A sexuality that falls too conspicuously below the level of representation is as suspect as one that rises too eagerly to it. Hence, the paradox: if heterosexual credentials are to prove convincing, they must never be offered or demanded, yet the subject’s felt knowledge that no proof is necessary must never feel like exclusion from representation. When imposed on gays in the military, the policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” merely guarantees the normative the triumphalism of their knowingness. (To be entirely pleasurable, sexual knowledge must be extracted from, not freely given by, the perverse subject.) When internalized by heterosexuals themselves, however, the same policy underwrites the strategic silence that envelops the norm. In the modern world, the norm is “stricter” but “quieter”—so quiet, in fact, that the very attempt to formulate it (one of the ambitions of the present study) presupposes a failure to attain to it.

The normative subject would thus seem to be in a highly vexed relation to what Foucault terms “the truth of sex”:

Between each of us and our sex, the West has placed a never-ending demand for truth; it is up to us to extract the truth of sex, since this truth is beyond its grasp, it is up to sex to tell us our truth, since sex is what holds it in darkness. (77)

But sex speaks (or remains eloquently dumb) only when the subject is in distress, and only the deviant or the dubiously normal seek out the ear of the doctor, the official custodian of the truth of sex. No one, of course, is obliged to do so. Between the subject and its sex the West has placed a never-ending demand for truth, but it compels no interventions. If we find ourselves on the head-doctor’s couch, it is only because we have gone looking for help. The social worker comes knocking at our door; the head-doctor simply receives us when we arrive (money in hand) and dismisses us when we go. The triangulation of the subject’s relation to the truth of its sex is occasioned solely by the subject’s felt need for it—there is never any question of involving the authorities—and the doctor intervenes only in the role of amanuensis, the translator of the opaque discourse of sex.⁴ Yet a subject in need of the ear of the doctor is by definition a subject out of touch with its needs and desires, which renders such voluntarism highly problematic. How is it possible to know what I don’t know, that I don’t know? How am I to decipher sex speaking when its language is opaque both to it and to me?

The genius of psychoanalysis is to insist that we never can know, at least with any certainty, although not to know has potentially devastating consequences for the subject. Heterosexuality remains the goal of all psychosexual development and much anxious social engineering, yet the Freudian premise of a universal bisexuality renders all sexual categories, heterosexuality included, problematic at best. Apologists for “the new bisexuality” argue that this is as it should be: “The new bisexuality, which is to say, the old bisexuality—bisexuality as eroticism, ‘unpigeonholed sexual identity,’ not bisexuality as the ‘third’ choice between, or beyond, hetero- or homosex.”⁵ Precisely: the new/old dispensation, the Freudian construction of sexuality, places bisexuality within, rather than between or beyond, the hetero/homo binary, which is thus no binary at all. But again, such was not always the case. The German Homosexual Emancipation Movement of Freud’s own day tended to construe homosexuality as a “special variety of the human species—a ‘third sex,’” but psychoanalysis would have none of it. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality explicitly opposes any attempt to separate “homosexuals from the rest of mankind as a group of a special character,” and the Freudian premise of a universal bisexuality carried the day.⁶ But why? Surely a “third sex” model of sexual difference, which preserves the integrity of the hetero/homo divide, would seem the logical corollary of our culture’s commitment to compulsory heterosexuality. For gays and lesbians, the choice of models may be academic: as David Halperin argues, both the psychoanalytic premise of a universal bisexuality and “third sex” models of homosexual deviance have proven effective arguments against the extension of basic civil liberties to the perverse.⁷ For the normative, however, the choice would seem to be of some consequence, and the normative seem to have chosen unwisely. Why did the psychoanalytic premise of a universal bisexuality, so apparently threatening to the regime of compulsory heterosexuality, nevertheless emerge triumphant?

Freud offers the paradoxical assurance that there is no form of heterosexuality sufficiently coincident with itself that it cannot be shown, when need arises or convenience dictates, to be inhabited by its demonized “other.” The procedure is not, however, reversible:

Rather than naming an invisible, undernoticed minority now finding its place in the sun, “bisexual” turns out to be, like bisexuals themselves, everywhere and nowhere. There is, in short, no “really” about it. The question of whether someone was “really” straight or “really” gay misrecognizes the nature of sexuality, which is fluid, not fixed, a narrative that changes over time rather than a fixed identity, however complex. The erotic discovery of bisexuality is the fact that it reveals sexuality to be a process of growth, transformation, and surprise, not a stable and knowable state of being.⁸

The new sexual fluidity has little patience with what it takes to be the old identity categories of hetero and homo, but even given “the erotic [re]discovery of bisexuality,” a crucial asymmetry obtains: for all practical purposes, homosexuality is an achievable identity; heterosexuality isn’t. The question “Was Shakespeare really gay?” is “really” (and only) the question “Was Shakespeare really straight?” This may seem a distinction without a difference, but to conflate the two is to misconstrue the practical politics of sexual knowingness, if not “the nature of sexuality” itself. (Claims to normativity are characteristically met with skepticism. Only parents doubt confessions of deviance.) Oscar Wilde, to cite an obvious example, was the married father of two children, yet he is now received as virtually the Platonic Essence of Homosexuality, and his identity seems secure enough. Certainly no one feels compelled to ask whether he was “really” gay. Or, for that matter, “really” bisexual. True, he is sometimes celebrated as sexually “fluid” or “ambiguous,” but as Lee Edelman notes, nothing is more punitively “known” in our culture than sexual ambiguity.⁹ (Sexual ambiguity isn’t.) Sedgwick argues that the very “insecurity”—I would say impossibility—of heterosexual identity allows for the effective regulation of the many by the specific oppression of the few:

Not only must homosexual men be unable to ascertain whether they are to be the objects of “random” homophobic violence, but no man must be able to ascertain that he is not (that his bonds are not) homosexual. In this way, a relatively small exertion of physical or legal compulsion potentially rules great reaches of behavior and filiation.¹⁰

Even better, at least from the perspective of all things normative: the criminal or merely reprehensible behavior and filiations of the many can be explained—again, when need arises or convenience dictates—as a latent or repressed form of the sexual perversions of the few. When no man is able to ascertain that he is not (that his bonds are not) homosexual, there is no atrocity that homosexuality cannot be made to explain (away).

No man, but what of women? The claim “I’m lesbian”—at least when the speaker is sufficiently femme—is routinely taken to mean “I have yet to meet the right man.” Our culture is wonderfully adept at ferreting out male homosexuality anywhere and everywhere; it remains willfully blind, however, to all but the butchest manifestations of female deviance. Hence, the curious asymmetry: no man must be able to ascertain that he is not (that his bonds are not) homosexual, but no lesbian, no matter how homosexual her bonds, must ever be received as irredeemably lesbian. Gender trumps sexuality. A lesbian is, after all, a woman, and a woman is defined by her sexual availability to men. The Pussy Galore of James Bond fame is typical. James to Pussy: “They told me you only like women.” The newly heterosexualized Pussy to James: “I never met a man before.” Our culture’s paradigmatic (non)lesbian is a heterosexual-in-waiting.¹¹

Yet if actual lesbians are nowhere to be found, the charge of lesbianism remains generally available. Thus military women who bring sexual harassment suits against their male counterparts are frequently met with the countercharge of sexual deviance. “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” but to resist normal male heterosexual flirtation—and only a man-hating dyke would mistake innocent flirtation for sexual harassment—is itself highly telling. (How else to explain the otherwise inexplicable? She has no sexual interest in me.) Janet Halley suggests that the Clinton “compromise” on gays in the military may be fueling incidents of sexual harassment against women, which, in its own way, is hardly surprising.¹² The legally acknowledged tolerance of closeted homosexuals necessarily calls into question the heterosexual credentials of all military men, who thus feel compelled (or so I imagine) to seek conspicuous re-accreditation. Boys are under immense social pressure to be boys, and what better way to become one, to be publicly acknowledged as one, than to act under the compulsion of an allegedly irresistible biological imperative? (“Don’t ask, don’t tell” raised either testosterone levels or anxieties about the nature of male homosocial bonding. I suspect the latter, although the former does have a certain pornographic appeal.) An unwelcome sexual advance always risks legal action, but even a failed assault succeeds in ferreting out a closeted lesbian. Male sexual predators of whatever variety tend to be construed as homosexual, actual or latent. (Is he “a homosexual or a necrophilic,” Freud blithely speculates, as if the difference were both academic and difficult to negotiate.)¹³ Female resistance to routine sexual harassment is received as evidence of lesbianism, actual or latent. In either case, heterosexuality can’t lose.

Can’t lose, moreover, even when all bonds are exposed as homosexual. Queens are everywhere, Luce Irigaray cautions, and queens rule: “Reigning everywhere, although prohibited in practice, hom(m)o-sexuality is played out through the bodies of women, matter, or sign, and heterosexuality has been up to now just an alibi for the smooth working of man’s relation with himself, of relations among men.”¹⁴ A hundred-odd years of compulsory heterosexuality—who would have known?—turn out to be little more than a beard for the smooth workings of relations among men. The antidote to the patriarchal oppression of women is thus an authentic heterosexuality (and, presumably, a more thorough oppression of de facto as well as de jure homosexuality). The exculpatory appeal of the argument is obvious—with enemies like Irigaray, heterosexual patriarchy hardly needs friends—and it has the added advantage of being universally applicable. The admission of a little (theoretical) bisexuality is a small price to pay for a grant of unlimited political immunity, and when homosexuality is construed as internal to heterosexuality, everything else unsavory can be dismissed as external to it. As Edelman notes,

The field of sexuality—which is always, under patriarchy, implicated in, and productive of, though by no means identical with, the field of power relations—is not … merely bifurcated by the awareness of homosexual possibilities; it is not simply divided into the separate but unequal arenas of hetero- and homo-sexual relations. Instead, homosexuality comes to signify the potential permeability of every sexual signifier—and by extension, of every signifier as such—by an “alien” signification. Once sexuality may be read and interpreted in light of homosexuality, all sexuality is subject to a hermeneutics of suspicion.¹⁵

All sexuality is subject to a hermeneutics of suspicion, but there is only one (the usual) suspect.

Consider, in this context, Freud’s most explicit excursion into the realm of social psychology, his reading of the two “great artificial groups, the Church and the army”:

The love relation between men and women remains outside these organizations. Even when groups are formed which are composed of both men and women the distinction between the sexes plays no part. There is scarcely any sense in asking whether the libido which keeps groups together is of a homosexual or a heterosexual nature.¹⁶

Psychoanalytic readings of fascism characteristically take their theoretical bearings from Freud’s analysis of these two “artificial”—and, tellingly, all-male—groups, which he initially construes as innocent of the hetero/homo divide. But exactly one paragraph later:

Love for women breaks through the group ties of race, of national divisions, and of the social class system, and it thus produces important effects as a factor in civilization. It seems certain that homosexual love is far more compatible with group ties, even when it takes the shape of uninhibited sexual impulsions—a remarkable fact, the explanation of which might carry us far. (141)

A remarkable fact indeed, although the explanation that underwrites the political innocence of the regime of compulsory heterosexuality is never in fact given. (If normative sexuality “breaks through the group ties of race, of national divisions, and of the social class system,” heterosexuality can hardly be implicated in racism, nationalism, or classism. And fascism was, of course, given to extreme forms of all three.) Elsewhere, Freud characterizes homosexuality as an innately antisocial form of narcissism, which renders the very notion of a gay group or collectivity a contradiction in terms;¹⁷ in Group Psychology, he construes homosexuality as the logic of the social itself. All in all, he credits deviance with a wildly promiscuous, if logically dubious, explanatory power. Opponents of gays in the military can thus point to the incompatibility of homosexuality and any group tie; liberal oppon...