Everyone's mistake

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By LEDA TENÓRIO DA MOTTA*

It is generally in line with the structuralist method and what comes out of it that people come to the field to denounce discrimination against men and women.

1.

“Good evening to all, everyone, everyone” is a kind of rhetorical preamble clause that is increasingly being used in politically correct speech today. There is something of a language reform movement there that, even to measure the felicity of the formula, in all its innocence, is worth recovering.

Scholars of modern poetics are familiar with a certain passage by Paul Valéry – immediately referring to the lack of language as pointed out by his master Mallarmé – in which he mentions an anecdotal clash between a scientist and an aristocrat, which is a perfect semiotic note. This is in a chapter on the great French symbolism, which is none other than the curse, belonging to the collection of texts gathered under the unpretentious title Variety, in Brazil varieties, masterful critical collection that constitutes the entire first volume of the author's complete works in the Pléiade.

The poet here recalls the astronomer Arago's reminiscences about a strange conversation that the latter had, sometime in 1840, when he was in charge of the Paris Observatory, with an august figure from the then Tuileries Palace. The princely creature was heading to the old XNUMXth-century establishment – ​​formerly linked to the French Academy of Science, today an institution of higher education near Montparnasse, on the Boulevard rightly called Arago – to ask the wise man from this other earthly kingdom to show him the sky more closely.

In order to serve the distinguished visitor as promptly as possible, Arago hands him a telescope called the Grande Lunette, a technological innovation proudly displayed by the spirit of French progress at the 1900 Universal Exhibition, and invites him to contemplate through its lenses the most beautiful of stars: Sirius. The story goes that, after peering into the sky for some time, the Monsignor turns to the man who is welcoming him and, with the confidential expression and knowing smile of someone who is not fooled, asks: “Between us, Mr. Director, are you absolutely certain that this magnificent star is really called Sirius?

This unusual event gives rise to Paul Valéry’s reflection, typically Mallarméan and fundamentally related to what his predecessor poet called the “crisis of verse,” in the sense that “every word is an endless abyss.” Not only is it typical of poetics that understand the work of the modern writer as a vain attempt to recreate his instrument—hence the formula “poetic language,” which since the end of the 19th century has referred to the claim of carving out a language within language that would escape ordinary communication—but it is a central argument of modern linguistics that, more or less at the same time, is shifting the focus of traditional comparative historical grammars from the question of the evolution of languages, with all that their etymological research implies in terms of the logic or philology of original meaning—to the question of the break between the signifier and the signified.

2.

Along with this, they are redefining language as an abstract system of articulated elements, some functioning in relation to others, as in a game of chess, according to Ferdinand de Saussure's metaphor, in which the pawn words are distributive conceptual values. In this invariant operating system, the play of language depends on this mechanics of meaning. It is this systematics that the so-called French linguistic turn will designate as “structure”, and this is the trigger for the movement we call “structuralism”.

In fact, Valerian's joke is serious. The nomenclatural doubt of the suspicious visitor that takes the prepared researcher by surprise does nothing less than raise, in its own way, the semiotic question of the fit or lack of fit between the representative and the represented. Or to put it linguistically: the topic of the arbitrariness of the sign. In all its simplicity, it is an insinuation of the problem of the relationship or lack of relationship between the representative and the represented, the word and the thing. And if this interests Paul Valéry, it is because it alludes to what is at the very heart of the aforementioned crisis: the feeling of late literatures that they are no longer more than language.

“Classical art could not feel itself as language, that is to say transparency,” wrote Roland Barthes formulaically in The zero degree of writing (1953). Adding that is “unhappy conscience” of those who realize the limits of their form that dramatically founds “writing” – for him a “morality of form” – and separates the function of literature from the utilitarian function of language and common sense.

Less constrained by tradition, at least until the structuralist turn that pushes contemporary and ultra-contemporary philosophies towards anti-logocentism or anti-phalologocentrism, which will end up questioning the connection between the word and the thing, a dialogue by Plato, the Cratyl, we were already returning to the problem. Thus explained in the subtitle, in one of its possible translations: On the correctness of names. With the difference that, in this case, there are two who come to seek to know the heaven of truth more closely, and there is controversy surrounding that correction of words that the nobleman of Boulevard Arago visibly disbelieves in.

A perhaps Parmenidean, the Cratylus of the title, defender of the idea of ​​the stability of everything in this world, and a perhaps Heraclitean, if he was not a sophist who saw man as the measure of all things, Hermogenes, more inclined to consider the general cosmic instability, which for him can be found in the flow of discourses. The first being certain that everything that repeats itself constantly is therefore well named, the second convinced that neither things always exist in the same way, nor can stable naming agree with eternal change.

There, as in Arago's domains, there is a conversation that is largely in a joking tone - so much so that Socrates dwells on fanciful etymologies, especially with regard to the Homeric verb, all the more calmly because, for his part, he is certain that the reason for the Logos goes beyond our low colloquies –, which replaces and complicates the Valerian scene.

For Socratic irony, two theses are opposed in the dialogue. One is called naturalist, according to which each object received the name that suits it, according to a natural convenience. And another is called conventionalist, according to which the names result from customs, or from an agreement previously passed between the speaking subjects, there being no correspondence other than extrinsic between what is evoked and what really is.

Thus, for example, for Cratylus, Agamemnon and Dionysus would be fair words, because “agastos epimomé” means “the admirable persevering one”, which is the name given to the supreme commander of the Greeks in the Trojan War, and “didous oinon” means “the one who brings wine”, which also applies to the god of drunkenness. While from the other point of view, the naming is so much a question of usage that Hermogenes himself is not convinced of the relevance of his name, which would clash with Hermes, the messenger, whose beautiful gifts of communication he unfortunately did not inherit. This is also what he thinks of the names of domestic servants, for example, who come promptly whenever called, whatever their name. (The Brazilian slave culture provides proof of this – one would say – when the enslaved person takes the patrician name of the farmer’s family.)

Socrates' lesson, in the end, will be that inherent in the transcendental alibi of metaphysical realism, which establishes a connection between truth and being. Yes, the philosopher thinks, down here words are generally conventional and unjust. But on the high plane of ideas, the perfect namer, the true nomothete - a designer of language, we would now say, to name the poet – he arranges them. “Is it not true, Hermogenes, that all the things that the mind and intellect produce are praiseworthy, while those that are not produced by them are blameworthy?”, asks Socrates to the until then defender of the abyss of the word. To which he replies, momentarily defeated: “Totally”.

If the dream of the perfect language never dies, as Gérard Genette shows in Mimologiques: voyage in Cratylie (1976), where we have an exhaustive review by a structuralist of poets and poetry theorists divided between the feeling of perfection or imperfection of their material, the fact is that modernity and postmodernity are rather hermogenist. This ranges from the artistic avant-gardes that ruin poetic reason with their nonsense to the new philosophies and new criticisms that work from the text inwards, attesting that what language speaks of… is language.

3.

Now, it is with these same epistemological disarmaments that the most prestigious gender studies work today. Since it is generally in line with the structuralist method and what emerges from it that they come to the field to denounce the discriminations of the masculine and the feminine, understood as pure representations, or injunctions of the signifier, lacking in substance and discretionary. With emphasis on their claim for the discursive treatment of sexuality in Michel Foucault.

This is what can be seen, for example, in Judith Butler, ready to recognize, in gender problems (1990), which the author of History of sexuality (1976) knew how to give sex as the “effect or production of a regime of sexuality” and identity difference as the result of a “regulatory fiction”. At the point where the book arrives at the famous Foucaultian reading of the diaries of the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, who saw herself as a woman and was seen as such, but on whom the judicial institutions of the XNUMXth century imposed the name and sex of a male citizen. To highlight how the philosopher operates by handling narratives, in this process, including notarial ones.

Michel Foucault being the one who, upon entering the spaces of France secondary school, in 1970, like the visitor to Boulevard Arago, is not at all convinced that the order of language coincides with the order of the world. The one who proposes, literally, in his inaugural lecture at this other venerable institution of the era of kings – delivered in 1970 and published that same year under the title The order of speech –, that the domains of the object are inseparable from the powers of affirmation of discourses. This is what will make him measure the control of sexualized bodies, before the social construction, even though he is perfectly attentive to the objective march of history, to textually regulated norms, at the heart of the written documents that he will conscientiously set about unarchiving.

In fact, in Foucaultian terms, all disciplinarization that affects not sexuality itself, but the discourse of sexuality, is compatible with the set of chronicles – literary, religious, ethical, legal, psychiatric, biological… – in which it is codified. Always in terms of the “legitimate and procreative couple”, as the first lines of the first volume of the book say. History of sexuality, subtitled The desire to know. Here, the analysis of external reality is from the perspective of the textuality or structure of the documents.

Hence the philosopher can affirm, as we read in these pages, that sex is an “idea”. Telling us that this idea is all the more “necessary for the establishment of customs and traditions” because sex only exists as something repressed, which is under “prohibition of naming”. “Concerning sex we must remain silent”, we find at the beginning of the book.

It is in this seemingly paradoxical direction that the subtitle of the first volume of the great work can be understood. It is about making sex “say what it is”, based on the very establishments of the censorship devices launched in the annals of culture. In fact, it is about challenging the established controls of prohibition. In Foucaultian terms, power and knowledge are not separate, they come together with each other, confusing action and locution. Which redefines the entire understanding of politics.

Unlike the terms of the critique of capitalism, here, engaging against the established is not proposing the implementation of a new political praxis, new universals, another ethic. Acting politically is challenging any and all standardization. “Critical analysis focuses on the systems of covering discourse, seeks to detect the principles of ordering, exclusion, and rarefaction of discourse,” we read in the order of speech (Foucault, 1976). For experts, this detection – which we could call decoding – exhausts Michel Foucault's politics. Although Foucault's philosophy serves today as revolutionary battle cries, from this perspective, there would be no ideological combat that would not already involve, from the outset, the reimposition of a new ideology.

Given all this, one might think that there is something misleading in the reference of the current Gender studies to French linguistic circles, among which, in fact, some of its most welcomed representatives were formed. On the one hand, they evoke Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, passing through Jacques Lacan, to give the generic cut by somatic fiction. Or, as Lacan, who claimed to be baroque and, like the poet, spoke in a strange language, would have it, calling gender identities “semblants” and being “parletre"(speak), by mixing ontology and speech. On the other hand, they continue to refer sexual discrimination to heterocapitalism.

This is how the entire theory of Paul B. Preciado, a student of Jacques Derrida, goes against contemporary life empirically manipulated by a post-global industrial regime that imposes a technological management of bodies. For the cult author of Text Junkie (2008), our bodies have been, since the Second World War, imperially governed by very concrete control mechanisms typical of technological societies. “During the second half of the XNUMXth century, a pharmacopornographic regime was materialized in the fields of psychology, sexology, and endocrinology…”, we read in the chapter of the book called “The Pharmacopornographic Era”. Hence the response that his entire work proposes to give to capitalist violence: to use the same existing “technobiopolitical” resources to manufacture a new corporeality, another subjectivity, without identity marks. This is what the book is about. Contrasexual Manifesto (2000)

Here, everything reverts to performative practices of behavior. The aim is to overthrow the sex-gender system, as gender comes to be called, with hormone injections, phalloplasties, prostheses, and other practical interventions. Thus, what was archaeological becomes present and dated, a question of time. What was ritual becomes social. The semiotic becomes “semiotic-technical,” in the words of Paul Preciado himself. Patriarchal culture – which Claude Lévi Strauss, as a new ethnographer, related to the masculine ordering inherent in its symbolic foundation, because it is inseparable from the regulation of the prohibition of incest and the inscription of the paternal law that organizes human clans – opens itself up to the proposal of a change that is nothing less than physiological.

It should be added that such pragmatisms also belittle the conceptualizations of so-called decolonial or decolonial thoughts, which also move in the sphere of critique of Logos, arguing that it is above all language that presides over the hierarchies of dominant cultures, thus logically or logologically passed on to the dominated.

Even in bilingual cultures – notes Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne, an African-French-American who studied with Jacques Derrida in École Normal Superior, in Paris, in the 1980s –, one language is more important than the other and the “lesser” language seeks the center, the language of the other. Servitude and its relations with language is the theme of the intriguing purposes of his From one language to another. The hospitality of translation (2022). The stipulations of language reach mentalities, including with regard to the division of sexual labor. This explains the praise of translation in this new field focused on diversity.

4.

Returning to “todes”: in its use by the French, the dream of a neutral language that countersexual activists are now dreaming of also seems to be misleading. And the claim of “todes” is particularly vain. After all, if language is not a neutral place from which the reality of the world is enunciated, and if the language machine is by definition stereotypical – hence the modern poet who deactivates it – and if in this engineering the sign sends general and universal categories of dichotomous output, by the force of the opposition of the signifier and the signified, what difference can a simple inflectional ending or suffix make in the defense of the antibinary?

*Leda Tenório da Motta She is a professor at the Postgraduate Studies Program in Communication and Semiotics at PUC-SP. Author, among other books, of One hundred years of Modern Art Week: The São Paulo cabinet and the conjuration of the avant-gardes (Perspective). [https://amzn.to/4eRXrur]

References


BARTHES, Roland. Le degré zero de l`écriture: Paris, Threshold, 1953.

BARTHES, Roland. Lesson. Paris: Seuil, 1978.

BUTLER, Judith. gender problem. Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge & Chapman Hall Inc, 1990.

DIAGNE, Souleymane Bachir. From language to language. L´hospitalité de la traduction. Paris: Editios Albin Michel, 2022.

GENETTE, Gerard. Mimologists. Voyage in Cratyie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1976.

FOUCAULT, Michel. History of sexuality. The will of savoir... Paris: Gallimard, 1976.

FOUCAULT, Michael. The order of speech. Lecture inaugural at the Collège de France, December 1970. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1971.

PRECIOUS, PB Text Junkie. Sex, drugs and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. Translated by Maria Paula Gurgel Ribeiro. São Paulo: N-1 Edições, 2018.

PRECIOUS, PBContrasexual Manifesto. Subversive Practices of Sexual Identity. Translated by Maria Paula Gurgel Ribeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2022.

SAUSSURE, Ferdinand. Cours de Linguistique Generale. Paris: Payot, 1972.

VALÉRY, Paul. Variety. Oeuvres. Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1960.


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