Hermeneutics and Erotics
[[DRAFT]]
[[NOTES NEEDED]]
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
"In place of . . . "
Literally, a total re-"place"-ment of one thing with another: Get rid of one thing, completely. In its place, some other thing, in its entirety.
(What is the "place" of "hermeneutics?")
(It's place is in what, exactly? Why? To do what?)
Replacement, although total, imposes an essential conceptual opposition only in terms of its own stipulated totality, i.e. as a consequence of itself. Meanwhile, in the conceptual content of "hermeneutics" and "erotics," there is not necessarily any opposition, or any particular opposition, just because Susan Sontag, writing in 1964, has proposed to put one "in place of" the other. That does not (yet) bespeak a conceptual opposition. It is just a prescription: "we need" to put the second thing "in place of" the first.
Obviously, if the prescription is actually to be considered, it will be necessary to try to say what can be said about it, both analytically and pragmatically.
Ostensibly some conceptual opposition can be found between "hermeneutics" and "erotics," if that is what "we" are out for, so long as it is agreed that these are not identical concepts. Still, any such opposition has nothing to do with Sontag's proposal. Anyone can propose the practice of replacement, and can specify the objects of replacement. Such persons do not need to have in mind two conceptual objects which really are interchangeable, in any particular way. A good proposal does not create interchangeability, just as a poor proposal does not eliminate it.
What effect does such a proposal have on the implicated concepts, if it has any such effect? Such a proposal speaks into existence a conflict of competing interests, a pragmatic antinomy. It cannot similarly create a conceptual or analytic antinomy out of thin air. Total replacement may be practiced, it may find its practitioners and they its objects, but it does not immediately metastasize into the semantics of those objects; it does not travel back in time to alter what these objects meant prior to the proposal (prior to the achieved practice of replacement).
(If the matter at hand is in any way important, perhaps it is inevitable that the mere fact of replacement does, later, ramify into semantic content. e.g. Once Sontag's proposed replacement is made, "erotics" becomes "the thing that replaced hermeneutics back in 1965." There is an unbounded infinitude of things that could mean, besides what it says. That, however, is a problem of foresight and hindsight. When it comes time to decide whether or not such a proposal is comprehensible, sensible, coherent, workable, and so on, there is only so much of this work for history and prophecy to do. Probably the bulk of the work ought to be done by philosophy, living or dead, analytic or pragmatic, exalted or homely; although that is almost never how such things really are handled.)
(Of course Sontag's proposed replacement has not happened. It probably never will happen, even though it is a very good idea. Perhaps it cannot actually happen and is therefore a bad idea in practice (pragmatically), in one sense at least, even if it is a good one in theory (conceptually). The ultimate aim here is to say precisely why this should be, and then to say what (if anything) is to be done about this. In any case, such a proposal cannot serve as a pragmatic case study if it has not happened at all. That is mere prophecy. Much more can be done, and done more coherently ad praesens, by way of conceptual analysis. Beyond that, Sontag's proposal does not await its own hegemony in order to be tinkered with. Perhaps the very nature of such a proposal is to be aspirationally hegemonic; that certainly seems to be the case here. Still, there have not been very many true hermeneuts nor true erotists ever to walk the earth; and again, it is beyond spurious to allow Sontag's famous essay to speak anathema into existence where there may be mere competing interests or differences of degree. No mere earthly proposal creates a cosmic clash. But what are the interests? What are the differences? It is necessary to be able to say what they are if the proposal is to be evaluated rather than merely talked through and talked past. It must not be analyzed to death, so to speak: conceptual lysis must not go the way of the cellular kind. But most of what Sontag is saying does not have to be merely guessed at, or shot at. Just try it sometime, or just think of what would be involved in doing so. And if any of that proves impossible, ask why that should be. Analyze that. Anyone can do this much. Perhaps this is not even philosophy, but it advances the problem to the point where it can be profitably confronted; to the point where communities can make the right thing of it, rather than every individual making of it what they may. That is all that is sought here. It matters only that it is achieved, not how it is achieved.)
"In place of" already suggests one axis along which there is no antinomy: If two things well and truly can occupy the same place (leaving aside for now what that even means), then already this joint ability-to-occupy just is a common property; or at least this is entailed by such a proposal, necessarily, if only implicitly. Short of the proposal ascending to hegemony, of course, there is only one other way to find out if this is indeed the case.
(How to decide whether this implied common property is
real?
And what would
that
even mean?)
Almost certainly the place-to-be-occupied here is the place of some practice. This pin-drop is pragmatic; it is not principled; not analytic. Neither foresight nor hindsight are at issue: this is a matter of contemporary practice, now an absolutely literal compound term rather than a mere transactional codeword.
To assume its place, to be a suitable replacement, the practice has to work. That is all. It does not have to be conceptually coherent or ethically pristine. It just has to work, and so its practitioners must decide (stipulate) what it means for something to work. This is at root a judgment of value, a value judgment. Very literally so, and (this time) in every other sense also.
(Is moral pluralism a truly viable lifeway? An underlying assumption of this study is that it is not, although it would be very nice if it was. That question lurks over everything here and cannot be put off forever. It is necessarily put off for the moment.)
For now, proceeding inductively (throwing darts), pick a value-orientation for "erotics" that seems likely to enable a determination of either "it works" or "it doesn't work" in respect to some practice that prima facie belongs to the "erotics" domain. Be sporting about it, for now. e.g. For instance, say that a practice of "erotics" works if "each partner gets off," and if not then it does not work. Then say that no one gets off on "hermeneutics." (Just say.) In that case, "hermeneutics" doesn't work as "erotics." There would then be at least one true conceptual opposition between the two practice-concepts insofar as someone, somewhere, has actually proposed to replace the one with the other. (Perish the thought.) Perhaps the conceptual opposition is not total; perhaps the pragmatic opposition is not irreconcilable. There is an opposition, that is all; and yes, it seems substantial.
All of this as it is, nota bene: If no one ever proposes that "we need" to make the replacement, then none of this ever matters at all. The fact of this does not seem too important, but it seems like it could become important. File it away, for now.
Moreover, nota bene: The "opposition" is wholly determined by the value-orientation. If "erotics" were to be valued instead as, say, a vehicle of self-knowledge, suddenly there is a more obvious possibility of coherent conceptual overlap with "hermeneutics," and therefore of actual re-"place"-ment of the former by the latter. (Perish the thought, again, just to be safe.)
(This only begins to suggest just how much more is riding on value judgment than moral pluralists would like to acknowledge.)
In examples such as the above, presumably the stipulated value orientation should have something to do, somehow, with the analytic concept to which it is thereby attached.
Getting off
is
prima facie
more central to "erotics" than is
self-knowledge,
but only a sociopath or an asexual could plausibly deny the latter entirely.
It is unclear, however, that a left-field value, say
economic prosperity,
really serves the example any less ably. The mere specification of a value orientation seems to be crucial, regardless of what it is; resonance of the value orientation with the analytic concept does not seem to effect the final determination. Say that "erotics"
works
if the national economy is growing, or if the person
getting off
becomes a bit richer, literally, with each expenditure; say that some sufficiently robust empirical connection can be established, somehow; these remain strange things to say, if not actually
dangerous ideologies.
(And if the latter, that is for reasons quite far afield of the present discussion.) The point is, nonetheless: If the empirical connection is sufficiently robust, then it is simple to say
Yes
or
No
to the question,
"Does it work?"
If it is just this robustly established that the economy grows whenever "erotics" are
working,
then an economic downturn necessarily raises one uncomfortable question or the other.
What about replacement vice versa? It remains to be said what might work as "hermeneutics," so the conclusion that "hermeneutics" cannot work as "erotics" says nothing about the reverse.
What about it, then? This
is
Sontag's proposal, and it is a very good one. So, having sufficiently toyed with hypotheticals, it is time to introduce particulars; ideally the ones which really are implicated in the proposal.
When it comes to "hermeneutics" there are a handful of canonical value orientations to choose from: heightening appreciation; revealing hidden meaning or intent; situating an artwork in its context; and who knows what others.
Sontag of course does not quite see the "value" in "hermeneutics" (interpretation). That is most of her point. So, what is above called a "value orientation" may just be an "orientation" whose "value" is precisely what is contested. This is a long way of saying very little. The important part is this: Sontag, for example, says that the practice of "interpretation" originates not in a value per se but in a dilemma:
for some reason a text has become unacceptable, yet it cannot be discarded.
There are "values" implicated here, certainly. Probably there are two values that are particularly important in any such scenario: "unacceptable" marks one of them, "cannot be discarded" the other. e.g. Death by stoning is "unacceptable" in most contemporary "value" systems, but some of the groups who hold these values "cannot" just yet afford to "discard" the Old Testament. Call the anti-stoning value compassion and the pro-Old Testament value devoutness. These are the sorts of values implicated in the problematic of an "unacceptable text;" but, nota bene, they are not what is here called the "value orientation" of the problematic of interpretation. Oddly enough (it is the fault of the present analysis that this appears odd, not a fault of Sontag's writing), the "value orientation" of the interpretation problematic is marked by the word "cannot" and by then it matters not what (non)words may or may not follow it. The word that marks it is barely a word at all, yet it does mark, for present purposes, the crucially determinative "value orientation."
With this example Sontag is saying that the standard for whether or not the practice of "hermeneutics" (interpretation) has worked is whether or not it has permitted an "unacceptable text" to be salvaged rather than "discarded."
(What is the analytic opposite of "discarded?" "Preserved" is not quite right, nor is "retained." "Salvaged" is a consequentialist locution, but it will do for now.)
Now, once again prima facie but very persistently so, there seems to be no coherent analysis of "erotics" which could pragmatically justify putting it "in place of" the above-described practice of "salvage." If nothing else, the latter is just incredibly specific and ephemeral, whereas "erotics" arguably is an abiding and timeless human problem. (And Sontag has dared to suggest that it ought to occupy more territory even than this!) So, in at least that general respect it seems that it would be difficult to analyze a single common property out of "salvage" and "erotics," or at least a property which is salient to any known human concern. Hence the value orientation: "salvage" seems not actually to mark Sontag's object of replacement. Perhaps she has another in mind. Perhaps this other is
the contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation,
a "project" which
is often prompted not by piety toward the troublesome text . . . but by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances. . . . The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys . . .
Here the prospect of re-"place"-ment by "erotics" can be coaxed out of the relevant analytic concepts. It is not easy to do (such a thing never is). Presume for now that it can be done. (Keep in mind that the alternative is another sprawling paragraph attempting to actually do it. That should be enough.)
So,
In "place" of "aggressiveness," love.
In "place" of "contempt for appearances," aestheticism.
In "place" of "excavat[ion]," boundaries—ecology—catch-and-release.
Here is a substantive conflict of values. Arguably it is one of the very most substantive such conflicts. Many of those which purport to be more substantive and urgent are (arguably!) in fact merely supervenient upon this one, right here. There is much to be said about this. Perhaps there is too much. For the moment it is enough merely to mark the occasion without (yet) marking the concepts.
Now, who are the enemies of love? Of healthy boundaries? No one at all, not in their own minds at least.
Of the concepts enumerated so far, "appearances" have by far the most and the most vicious enemies. The enemies of appearances (as well as the proponents) are most willing to own their beliefs, and to go to paper, often eloquently and profoundly. Of course this hardly exhausts the question, but perhaps it covers most of the relevant ground, already. Perhaps that is the whole thing, right there; and perhaps there really is nothing more to say about it. Perhaps.
As Sontag duly notes,
The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation.
These "modern doctrines" in fact originate in very powerful justifications for the practice of "aggressive excavation." In short: Human beings create illusions faster than they can dispell them; ergo, some countervailing practice of demystification is necessary; otherwise then illusion will reign supreme.
It would be beyond foolish to reject these particular premises in the course of the present work, to which these premises, as given, are in fact just as central as they are to Freudians and to Marxists. Philosophy also is concerned with (or else, it very well ought to be used for) more or less the same project of demystification. Demystification is a worthy and necessary project. Does Sontag really think it is unworthy and unnecessary?
Of course not. Her point seems to be, rather: If there is no illusion to demystify, then there is no need for any "modern doctrine" of demystification. That is the crucial unstated premise of her benediction. She was right to leave it unstated, so that those for whom it is anathema might show themselves in their very dissent.
What do these people "show" thereby? It is impossible to say with certainty, but there are a few obvious possibilities.
They may show that art is mystifying to them in a way that it is not to the commoner, although their "interpretations" arrive stamped with precisely the obverse belief.
Or,
more likely, they show that demystification is not actually their project. Demystification is not their value-orientation at all. Rather, there are "doctrines" afoot which posit demystification as a necessary practice, but it is the passagework of demystification and not its value-orientation which appeals to these people. They are mimes rather than classical actors. They gesture rather than speak. This is the "modern doctrine" of "hermeneutics" (interpretation) in capsule. Much is said, but to really understand the gesture is to understand what is done. Further, it is to understand just what a critic is claiming an artist has done, not (or not only) what the critic claims the artist has said.
(Incidentally, it is far easier to understand doings than to understand sayings. Actually it is comically simple and very nearly automatic. The hard part, for most people, seems to be the
see-do
distinction; this in spite of myriad well-worn pieces of folk wisdom on the matter, and in spite of myriad artifacts of the human sciences which have long since been popularized.)
The reason, then, why the relevant area of overlap between "hermentics" and "erotics" cannot quite be coaxed out of these concepts analytically is because it is not analytic to both of them; that is, as they are commonly construed. Their foremost common property for present purposes is simply that they both are practices, or at least acts; things that are done. This seems too obvious to be useful, once it has been stated as if it were profound, but it is not a conventional construal, especially not if some modicum of cognitive granularity and individual divergence may be assumed in the most profligate construers.
"Hermeneutics" always seems, conventionally, to involve much saying and little doing. Perhaps this is precisely what "hermeneutics" is: it is the practice of those who can't do, as one popular aphorism suggests; or it is one such practice, anyway; or, perhaps this abiding accusation against professional educators is merely an interested ideological slanting of the facts.
"Erotics" meanwhile appears as little more than a practice-of-acts. To perform the paradigmatic erotic acts is to do it. Those so implicated probably were not thinking straight by the time their acts began to work; or perhaps the thinking was done with the genitals instead of with the brain (another aphorism), and perhaps this mistake was made (is made) long before and aside from any eventual acts. Still, it is mostly the acts and hardly the thinking which become fixations, later, and which thereby become, if they do, part of the very concept of the erotic.
If nothing can be essential here, still it is not yet overreaching to say that these are endemic construals, perhaps even conceptually hegemonic ones in some contemporary societies. This will not do, however, even there, if something that really needs to work has stopped working. (Perish the thought that it never did work.)
Hermeneutics has never worked very well and is not very important. The effort to get it up and running has by now gone long over-time and obscenely over-budget.
Erotics, conversely, counts as a central human problem and will go to work even if the trains are not running.
Already the proposal gains some contour from this juxtaposition of contrarieties, though it remains a proposal of replacement and not one of anathema: perhaps "erotics" really needs little help re-"place"-ing other practices, no matter what those practices might be. Perhaps it needs only for some other practice to cease, so that there is some unoccupied territory, anywhere at all, for it to conquer; and then conquer it will. Perhaps it mounts constant conquests against all of its weaker neighbors; it is a dangerous autocracy with grand imperial ambitions. Perhaps this is something to be guarded against, vigorously. Perhaps hostile occupation is precisely what has already happened in myriad other human domains, to the grave detriment of the human beings who inhabit those domains. Perhaps it is unnecessary, after all, merely to guess at (to analyze at) the pragmatic side of this problem. Perhaps it has long been known what happens when "erotics" mounts a conquest of some other conceptual-practical domain. Perhaps many people have learned how bad this is but have preferred to forget. And then, perhaps Sontag's awful proposal is merely a reminder of what a terrible idea this is.
This is mostly how Sontag's benediction has been construed by people who have read only that much of her essay, who have not bothered to read any of her subsequent essays, and who prefer mechanistic biography and ad hominem argumentation to measured curiosity. It is true that erotism was in the air when and where the essays in Against Interpretation were written, and that this erotism had no trouble recruiting such dupes as imperial powers seldom lack. Sontag is not one of these dupes, however, at least not intellectually. There is no whiff of Debordian revolutionary desire in Sontag's thought. Debord thought that art had stopped working; he thought that it had been driven into the ground, to the edge of the pavement, to a stretch of undeveloped land which it was not fit to traverse yet could not avoid. Sontag could see, however, that this was mere operator error, that art really is a self-driving über-vehicle, but that some idiot had gotten behind the wheel and tried very hard to steer it off-road, just for kicks.
Desire had been unleashed, indeed. The needed solution, she says, is to put erotics in place of hermeneutics. But then, in the above metaphors that seems nonsensical: with erotics already running amok, what could be the use in granting it greater domain? Is the reverse not called for?
The apparent contradiction here is resolved, to start, by amending a pet metaphor: Hermeneutics is a kink. It is not true that no one gets off on it. There are always a few such people around, tiny in number but each brimming with libido. Now, the intuition that this too is an erotic libido was tested and discussed with maniacal devotion for the entire first half of the twentieth century, and still the resulting work, when and if it is read, ends up showing unambiguously that the intuition was not correct. By that time, any conception of libido which could encompass, say, both hermeneutics and erotics per se, was no longer libido in any but the now-discredited sense. The two concepts were exclusive enough that to encompass both was to become uselessly vague.
In fact one of the very first and most acrimonious dissidents from Freud's libido theory had cracked this problem already by 1932. He really cracked it! The time was not yet ripe for this breakthrough to be understood, much less for it to be accepted, but Otto Rank had already figured out that the hunt for psychic causation, for the kind of causal theory that could explain a whole panoply of divergent social practices and concepts, that this fool's errand could not turn up anything truly causal. Rather,
individual means meta-causal, transcending causality.
The foremost later exponent of Rankianism is Ernest Becker, who found in Rank's work a
"closure of psychoanalysis on Kierkegaard"
and a searing vision of the
"existential dilemma"
that all human beings face. Here, at last, is the conceptual
peripeteia
that can set a mystified reader of Sontag facing in the right direction. Before that can happen, though, the e-word needs to be liberated from its faux-intellectual shackles: from literature and from berets; from introspection, histrionics, melancholia, and all that kind of thing. None of this has the least bit to do with Becker's "closure." Rather: By the time a self-aware creature may ponder itself as "an existent," as something (some-thing) that exists, that creature has quite literally
objectified
itself; they are no longer situated within and looking outward but, rather, are situated on the outside, from which point even a self-aware creature confronts only surfaces, exteriors. A creature viewing itself from the outside really has
eliminated
introspection and self-awareness from its perceptual field. Perhaps that is not what the great French Existentialists of the twentieth century, nor their readers, thought they were doing. All the same, this is what it means to abandon the search for psychic causes and to take up the study of
conditions of existence.
The so-called existential posture is of a piece with an absolute skepticism about psychic causality. That is to say, the existentialism of Rank and Becker really is
eliminative materialism
in embryo.
In Praise of Dick-Thinking
How could anything ever work once 'mental states' have been 'eliminated' from the Great Causal Chain?
Rank appeals often to "the desire for immortality," and Becker to such things as "heroic death denial" and "a feeling of primary value." Are those not mental states?
Indeed they are, but this really is no obstacle to the the closure of Existentialism upon Eliminativism. This section elaborates the specifically "erotic" clue, poignant but unsightly, which suggests this closure; indeed, which cannot suggest any other, at least not to anyone who has been clued in by circumstance.
First (and briefly), the clean version.
Once upon a time, at the waning of the great Age of Erotism, Arthur, King of the Interpreters, itchily decamped to Versailles, on a whim, taking all of his kingdom's scribes and learned scholars along with him for the journey, and leaving the keys to the kingdom underneath the doormat, where he assumed no commoner would think to look for them. However, his bitterest enemies, the Eliminativists, alone knew exactly where to look, and so they soon came charging through the gates, small in number but possessed of absolute belief, thereby liberating the King's subjects forever from the tyrannies of critical erudition, historical contextualism and authorial intent.
Now, the unbowdlerized account.
Before finally succumbing to Hegelian obscurantism, Arthur Danto had already churned out a bumper crop of exemplary Analytic monographs on canonical Analytic topics. One of these, his Analytical Philosophy of Action, in fact takes one of its central questions from the arena of Erotics.
it was Augustine's curious view that Adam, in paradise, indeed . . . could perform what I have termed basic actions with his sexual organ, and hence achieve the sexual act immune from the contaminations of sin. It is thus not sex but lust which is the root of sin, and hence the domination by the flesh of us rather than the domination by us over our bodies, which is the fallen state.
The Analytic Danto then flashes forward to a characteristically brilliant observation, one which the later, Hegelian Danto quite characteristically ends up ignoring entirely.
a man who were able to erect at will might in fact be impotent in the received sense, which is an incapacity for genuine sexual response; where response implies precisely the absence of that order of control Augustine supposes [in Adam] . . . A man who had direct control, or who was obliged to exercise direct control, would be a man without feeling, erection being the common expression of male sexual feeling. And it is in some measure a logical truth that if erection were an action it would not be an expression, and the entire meaning of sexuality would be altered . . .
Now, can such a "direct action" ever be an "expression?" Yes, presumably, just so long as this really is the "common" understanding of that action. Danto's chapter title is "Gifts," and that is a fine enough example: gift-giving need not be sincere, but if it is presumed intentional at all, then it is, for present purposes, an "expression." Wherever there really is no such benevolent intent, "gift" is a metaphor, as in the colleague who "gifts" the entire office with endless sob-stories. But the house cat who delivers a badly maimed sparrow to the lady of the house may really be giving a gift: to absolve the cat of its intent, and the lady of her understanding, seems prima facie incorrect (though clearly this all becomes quite complicated upon the slightest empirical elaboration.)
But what about Danto's Erection? (Or is it Augustine's?) What if "the common expression" of some "feeling" is truly un-intentional? Then here is one feeling, at least, that direct action cannot express. Whatever voluntary erection would "express," the involuntary kind (the "common" kind) expresses something else.
(Yes, it would be ideal to hear from a woman here, certainly, before moving along quite so hastily. Failing that, it can at least be said that if female heterosexual response were shown to be all "action" and no "response," this would be the kind of front-page news that most who read it still would not believe, not even if they once believed it themselves.)
Whatever it is that Eliminative Materialism eliminates, Danto here is most of the way towards eliminating it from the unkinky plurality of erotic practice. He has not done anything to eliminate it from gift-giving, say, nor from much of anything else besides Erotics. Why? Because only Erotics (and then only a plurality of it) evinces this particular absence-of-something. So far, at least.
Sontag, meanwhile, has said that "erotics" must be practiced on texts "in place of" the practice of elaborating their meaning. She almost certainly does not have Danto's problematic of voluntarism front of mind; rather she is concerned to "recover our senses" from the bloat of "redundancy" that is post-industrial life. This is among the least original thoughts she ever had, and it is ultimately the wrong means to the posited end; for sensory attenuation is a survival strategy, and it is (like sexual arousal) substantially autonomic. But she also says that the "already classical dilemma" of this culture is "the hypertrophy of the intellect," the rage "to set up a shadow world of 'meanings'" which "deplete" and "impoverish" the world, which "poison our sensibilities" much as the "fumes" of industry "befoul the urban atmosphere;" and in this imagery of intellection as "stifling" she does land upon the same erotic subdomain as has Danto above. Here interpretation indeed is a sort of voluntary erection. Art-response is "without feeling" if it is a voluntary response, a direct action. This is often done, but it does not work. Art does not work this way, according to Sontag. In order for art to work, the response to it must actually be the kind of response that an ordinary erection is. After all, such response "implies precisely the absence of that order of control" that goes into "direct action."
This is Sontag's 'value-orientation' vis-à-vis the problematic of interpretation. She believes that this is how art works. Not how it ought to work, but how it does work.
Is she correct? Is her proposal a good one?
It all depends. How is intellection supposed to work, if it can work? How is erection supposed to work, if it does? And then, what about art? What about life itself?
The "received sense" of true sexual response as free of "direct control" does have "some measure" of "logical truth" to it, but if this idle thought is to do any heavy lifting on behalf of a grander theory, it needs to have some real empirical plausibility, too. After all, "common" understanding can be wrong, and it usually is. Moreover, to gain the 'right' understanding of some parochial issue can indirectly cause some master practice to collapse, to stop working, if that practice was subtly dependent upon the old falsehood; and then, inevitably someone will propose: "in place of an awareness we need an ignorance of x." Is this the case with the notion that erection would not be an expression if it were an action? Is this a dangerous truth? An innocuous lie? Or what?
Consider here another male writer who thinks with his dick, Dr. Herb Goldberg, specifically his book chapter entitled "The Wisdom of the Penis."
Confronted in the 1970s with an epidemic of male impotence and "an almost maniacal preoccupation" with it in American culture at large, Goldberg dared to identify it as "a two-way problem," "almost always a pair-specific phenomenon."
My clinical experience indicates that the man who diagnoses himself as impotent is often experiencing something within his relationship or about his partner that is killing his desire. However, the feeling message is only being telegraphed by his body response and is not being recognized in his conscious brain.
According to Goldberg, many of these men had
allowed their sexual spontaneity to be mired in the intellectualizations about "sexuality," derailed by abstractions about "meaningful relationships" and "sharing," alienated from their own experience by a destructive emphasis on techniques, and numbed by scientific teachings about the physiology of the woman and himself.
Goldberg's dissent from "the so-called new sexual enlightenment" along with his account of the woman-in-bed as "a sometimes supportive, sometimes resentful spectator" unaware of her half of the man's problem made him an instant pariah among feminists. If he is at least telling the truth about his patients, however, then nothing he says in these pages necessarily absolves the man of responsibility for his own discontent. If mere talk of "meaningful relationships" or a small hint on technique causes a man such distress that he becomes impotent as a result, then perhaps the problem really is with him, at least in the conventional sense. This is how the other half of the problem may be again pinned on the man, if it may be, without touching the larger point; and it is more or less Danto's same point, now with a suggestion of just where to look for empirical verification.
(Full-stop verification cannot be pursued here. Of course the reader is encouraged as always to look and see.)
This is incomplete evidence, the bad news which travels faster than good, but it is fair enough for the hermeneut, put on the defensive by Sontag's benediction, to ask whether Erotics works at all, on its own, if the above is what it all comes down to; and if it does not work very well on its own, then it is not a good re-"place"-ment for anything that works better than it does itself. It seems that if erotic art-response is put in place of hermeneutic response, not only will very few people ever get off, few will even get hard. What Goldberg calls "total arousal" is "pair-specific." If art audiences start holding out for that, there will in fact be exceedingly few "erotic" encounters. Should not audiences and erotists alike simply get over themselves, or perhaps lower their standards? If art-response ought not be hermeneutic, must not it be at least Platonic? Casual? Polyamorous? What could be the harm of a little "direct action" here and there? Dr. Herb's patients show that abiding monogamous partnership requires rare chemistry; and perhaps this matters for the health of an entire society. Art, however, is not 'monogamous' in this way, nor does art 'matter' much at all.
Is this not precisely the crucial difference between art and sex, the difference that both the heady '60s and stilted '80s failed to make the right thing of?
This line of argument ends up supporting the replacement rather than contraindicating it, but this is not obvious, because one of two things has happened to Sontag's proposal by this time: either the present anaylsis has made a hash of it by over-interpreting, or else Sontag's call to "recover our senses" really is an outright contradiction of her appeal to Erotics, and it is then necessary to choose one or the other of these if her broader project is to be viable.
We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.
This sounds like the heady '60 speaking, and it really is very bad Erotics. More is less here, and Sontag has already said, eloquently, exactly why: a person intent upon thinking their way out of this dilemma only sinks deeper into it. Danto too has pinpointed the problem: good erotic actions appear, quite paradoxically, to be products of will without being wilful; products of the brain but not of cognition. And Dr. Herb too has said the quiet part out loud: the reason why erection can be considered an expression of sexual feeling is because impotence can express the erotic anathema. Impotence too is an expression. Impotence outers an inner void, one which used to be the seat of "sexual feeling" but from which that feeling has long since been chased out, from which it has been cast out into the wilderness wearning only a bedsheet.
To put one excess "in place of" another cannot be worth the trouble, and so the replacement of Hermeneutics by Erotics requires, first, that the more-is-more thesis of sensory recovery be abandoned and that the less-is-more fatwa against "hypertrophy of the intellect" be given the run of the place.
This is as simple as noticing the bracketing of intentionality, which now is easy to do because Danto and Goldberg, along with generations of unpublished men, have shone a flashing red light upon it. Once this is noticed, there is then no mistaking Sontag's Erotics for an Aquarian liberation of desire. Again the Situationists, famously: "It is forbidden to forbid." This is the way to read the final sentence of "Against Interpretation" only if that sentence is read alone; but it is just the final sentence and it is preceded by a dozens of others and followed by thousands more; and these, taken together, point unequivocally to Danto's and Goldberg's Erotics and away from Debord's and Vaneigem's.
Goldberg's adduced "miring" of "sexual sponteneity" in "intellectualizations" is more than superficially reminiscent of Sontag's "revenge of the intellect upon art." Danto's notion of an "expression" which cannot be a "direct action" is more elliptical but really is pointing to the same thing. This "common" construal could be wrong, but Goldberg suggests that it is uncannily accurate: a man really may not "recognize in his conscious brain" everything that is "being telegraphed by his body response."
(Indeed, "telegraphed" now, rather than "expressed." Suddenly Goldberg has 'eliminated' something from Danto's account, and suddenly everything falls into place. Less is more yet again.)
The upshot is not to pile on ever more "intellectualization" so as to willfully cultivate "conscious recognition." Far from it. The way out is simply to heed "the wisdom of the penis." And in this, finally, this discussion has hit on a "common" understanding that is very wrong, i.e. the notion that
thinking with your dick
is un-wise. What is unwise, here at least, is the thinking part. That is all. But
the body keeps the score,
and scores
per se
are for tabulating and for admiring, not for interpreting, explaining, rationalizing, envying.
What is dick-thinking, then?
Here is the paradigmatic version:
Some young man, A, mired in the ineluctable throes of young-man erotism, feels "sexual feeling" for some woman. This woman, however, is the 'wrong' woman, in one respect or another. (Most likely in several respects, perhaps in all.) The young man is awake to the wrongness, or at least not asleep to it; but this either is not "recognized in his conscious brain" or is rationalized away.
A has a close friend, B, another young man caught in the same throes but now treated to a view from the outside. B immediately sees something wrong with the "pair," and he sees just what it is that is wrong. There may be no pair at all, not just yet, but still B sees the trouble brewing. B is not looking for trouble. He sees it, immediately and with the shock of recognition.
A and B are intimates. They are not lovers. In contemporary parlance they are besties. In that kind of relationship, one is entitled to tell the other, bluntly, that a pairing does not work; and if the pairing is wrong enough to stake the friendship on saying so, then B is likely to be proven correct in the end.
Nota bene: It is the pairing that is deficient, not the woman. The words that come out of B's mouth probably will denote, literally, that the problem is with the woman; that may be the only way to get through to a man with a boner; but the tactics hardly matter, for reasons which should be clear enough by now. A is clearly 'thinking with his dick.' He is looking so hard for a quick lay that he cannot see very much to be wrong with any woman at all. The problem with him is the problem. This is very explicit and conventional in the expression itself. It is not an anti-woman expression, nor is it pro-man.
The saying, then, is pro-the-friend. It is in favor of exactly one man, a particular, a friend and intimate, a bestie, of whom there may be just one, or perhaps a small handful, but (definitionally) no more than that.
By extension, the saying is anti-the-pair, which is so far from being anti-the-woman that anyone who jumps straight to this can be safely ruled out as either a good friend or a worthy partner.
(Perhaps if the woman, C, and the ranking bestie, B, also are Platonic intimates, perhaps siblings or business partners, then the saying cannot help but be against C too; but if B is not accountable to C in any way beyond basic dignity and prevailing norms, then the effort to unpair the pair is no judgment of her. The triangular scenario is not paradigmatic to the saying, but it is (also) a very important scenario in what it teaches about human association: Accountability is a condition of existence. It is not a social institution or practice, and the effort to make it into a value is profoundly unseeing. Intimacy creates accountability, but accountability does not create intimacy; it is more likely to destroy it, actually. A grandparent would admonish all three young people here: "Easier to get into something than to get out of it.")
In one respect, at least, all of this cuts against Husky Erotics rather than jibing with it. A is not impotent with the 'wrong' woman. He is so potent with her, actually, that his young body has miscounted the score, and perhaps also overlooked its hand. If the penis is so "wise" then the intervention of fellow neophytes ought to be superfluous.
All of that is true, and it is crucial, for it fleshes out the argument here; but as of yet it does not cut against the argument at all. Why? Because B is trying to prevent a consummation that has not happened yet. Or, if it has happened, it has not happened very many times, not in the scheme of things anyway; and in that case B is always trying to prevent the next erotic act. In other words, B is a seer who claims to foresee the peripeteia of Wise Impotence. Further, he sees (or perhaps believes from experience) that getting out is harder than getting in. He is trying to protect A from falling into a terrifying condition of existence, a condition from which no one emerges unscathed. Perhaps he is self-interested too; not himself interested in sexual congress with C, that is, but interested in A, so to speak; interested in keeping the Platonic boat afloat and the intimacy ocean in motion.
Paradigmatically, B is right about A and C somewhat more than he is wrong, and he is wrong about himself and D almost every time. So, even if B is wrong in a given case, A and C may, if they are well-integrated into a community of fellow uprooted young people, and if they are half-reasonable people themselves, understand quickly that B was right to speak up even if he happened to be wrong, this time, in his assessment.
Perhaps that realization closes the book on a real life (paradigmatic) case of dick-thinking, but for present purposes this is just the opening of the central problem: How can B reasonably claim to know what he 'just knows?'
He cannot know at all, not unless he is granted a justified knowledge-claim from introspection. This is how he 'knows,' again in scare-quotes, but the formal claim to this effect is invalid.
The reason for this has nothing to do with the viability of introspective knowledge claims generally. Here things are far simpler than all of that: The thing he 'knows' is not the thing he observes, nor is it something he has reasoned out, from observation to deduction. Rather, he listens to himself, he hears a knowldge-claim, and he stakes it. But such a claim cannot be granted, not formally, not even if the strongest possible general case for introspective knowledge is granted. Why not? Because here there is no principled epistemic nexus between A's observable actions and B's introspection, nor is there any principled reasoning which can deliver such a nexus. Rather, B 'just knows.' He merely thinks he knows, that is all. And while that is a lovely pragmatic fudge for certain problems of human intimacy, most of those problems, even, do not fit their paradigm cases very closely, to say nothing of all other sorts of human problems wherein such epistemic hubris can get everyone killed.
So, now there really is a serious complication for the Husky argument. It is a more immediate complication for the counterargument, actually, since Hermeneutics itself depends almost entirely upon the outer-directed claim from introspection (hereafter, the 'dissociative claim.') Still, Husky Erotics has a grave problem too: The 'wise penis' heuristic itself is a renunciation of what might be called first-order introspection, i.e., a claim from introspection in which the person making the claim also is the object of the claim. The second-order reinscription of this (hereafter, the 'existential claim') is, in fact, a reinscription of the first-order claim, i.e. it demands the introspector to observe something about themselves as if that something were external to them, and then to make the 'dissociative claim;' to make that claim themselves, now about themselves.
e.g. In terms of the above 'paradigm case,'
(1) B 'observes' his flaccid penis each time he attempts to consummate his relationship with C (he does not really have to 'look' for this);
(2) B first finds this perplexing because it is perfectly opposed to his conscious desire to stuff her silly;
(3) finally, B realizes, essentially, that if he were watching this happen to someone else he would know exactly what it means.
(Just how he may 'realize' this, and think he 'knows' it, is the next point to be litigated.)
But where is the 'principled nexus' that would finally make this all work? That nexus does not seem to have been produced merely by changing the object of observation. Now this is self-observation rather than 'introspection,' self-objectification rather than other-objectification. But from here, all the same, the final step of 'claiming,' for realz, that this is knowledge rather than informed conjecture, this final step does not work. The mere inclination to bracket conscious desire is surely significant, perhaps even admirable. Surely it makes for cleaner living, again on the whole, but if this still cannot produce knowledge then it is not worth very much to the argument being advanced here.
The 'existential claim,' then, looks a bit too much like the 'dissociative claim,' and the latter looks exactly like the 'claim' staked by the Cognitive Revolution, at least ever since that movement became an explicitly progressive one, populated almost entirely by progressives and operationalized all-but-exclusively to progressive ends (just as its precursor, Behaviorism, once was, a short century prior, an explicit and self-consciously progressive enterprise). The claim that human beings are more than half-right about what what others are thinking and feeling just is dissociative. That is very nearly what the d-word means. It means this both in technical psychiatry and in the dictionary, and this marks the two levels of "disconnection or separation" (google, 5 jul 25) that are implicated in the present analysis:
first, there is the real 'separation' between the object-of-observation and the object-of-introspection, of which the 'claim' takes no account;
second, there is the introspective 'disconnect' which simply plows over and through the limits of introspective knowledge-claims generally, to arrive at an interested guess which is burnished into a burning truth.
Revolutionary Cognitivists dissociate, then, a bit further with each ensuing meta-claim, with each insistence that such blind stabs are not entirely wrong even when they are less than half-right. This is voyeurism, and it is not even epistemology. Yet it is not just a Cognitivist problem, nor an Eliminativist problem; more likely it is everyone's problem, the same after as before the fact of 'elimination,' because even after all of this has been realized, there is nothing anyone can do about it, nor even to prevent themselves from doing it, pretty much constantly. Only the abstract validity of the claim can be kept fully in check, and this is achievable only through reams of formal dialogue that most people will never read, and which they really ought not read anyway; beyond that, it is something that everyone does and cannot help themselves from doing. Human beings are helpless to stop this in exactly the same way that a man may be helpless to become erect with a woman he deeply resents. Hence there really is no way to 'eliminate' these first- and second-order 'claims' from everyday life, and the earnest aspiration to do so is, really, a very bad idea, if only because it cannot ever succeed and so would threaten to inspire such wicked measures as are the outgrowths of projects to realize the impossible.
Still, the 'dissociative claim' is a plainly false claim in any case, and one which, if 'granted' anyway, explodes into a bloodthirsty Leviathan which will soon destroy all parties to the intercourse. That is most of what is wrong with Hermeneutics, and it is implicated to some degree in every human matter.
There is a simple solution, in two parts. Simple, perhaps, but not very useful.
(1) For any and all parties to the formal dialogue, published or otherwise: Do not ever formally grant the 'dissociative claim.'
i.e. Do not accept (or allow it to be accepted, or presume it to be accepted) that anyone can 'just know' what someone else is thinking or feeling based on intro-spection in the wake of an other-observation.
A great philosopher turns in his grave with each transgression of (1). Let that be a motivation if no better one can be found.
Next and finally,
(2) For anyone and everyone: Do not stake anything important on any such claim as cannot be formally granted.
It matters not in the least that 'importance' be assigned rationally or agreed upon uniformly, just that
(2)
actually be observed by everyone according to their own values. If it is not observed by everyone, however, it will hardly work. This 'solution' is absolute. If it is not absolute then it is no solution at all and things will remain as they have been. That is not the worst thing, and the failure of this solution would be (or already is) highly informative.
Wherein It Takes One To Know One
Is this solution practicable? It all depends.
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