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Modern
sociology usually traces its ancestry from the social contract theorists of the
Enlightenment through French liberalism and British empiricism, then on to the
venerable and eccentric Auguste Comte, who coined the term "sociology"
and infused the new discipline with an empirical, scientific, and mathematical
rigor. He also located the foundation of human society in a proto-Freudian
repression of sexual desire that, coupled with Durkheim's terror and Weber's
ambiguity toward sexuality, eliminated the body from sociological discourse for
three generations. The reverential attitude toward Comte has been neither
inevitable nor universal, and it did not proceed without challenge. For every
Aristotelian, there was a Platonist; for every Comte, a Condorcet. Many social
philosophers during the 19th century located the principle of social cohesion
not in the elimination of sexuality but in sexuality itself, viewing desire not
as a source of chaos and oblivion, but as a source of creativity and freedom. At
first these contentions was masked in the popular utopian and libertine fictions
of Diderot, Restif de la Bretonne, and the Marquis de Sade, but by the mid-19th
century, Fourier, Owen, Rapp, and a host of others were presenting them within
the blueprints of what they considered practical and workable new commonwealths.
Most
fictional utopias presented a scheme of social perfection through the usual
suppression of individual desires to group interests: rigid schedules prescribed
the proper activity for every hour of every day, tastes in everything from food
to political theory were dictated by various benign Big Brothers, and private
property was usually (but not always) eliminated.
Such utopias served to critique specific social disparities of the era
while promoting, as Engels states, "the idealized kingdom of the
bourgeoisie" (1978: 684). However,
certain transgressive utopias, or "amorous utopias," as Fabre
delicately terms them (1987), depicted social perfection as achievable through
celebration rather than suppression of individual tastes, passions, instincts,
and especially sexuality. Desire
was not constructed according to the prevailing heterosexual hegemony, with
"terrors" and "dangers" lurking in the margins.
Instead, a fluidity of desire was encouraged, even deemed essential for
civilization. While sometimes
criticized for leaving private property and social classes intact, transgressive
utopias had a broader project: they presented a critique of post-Enlightenment
empiricism itself, and by extension the ontological ground of social thought as
Comte and his successors envisioned it.
Complicit
with the hegemonic construct of an amorphous but implicitly heterosexual desire
suppressed into a sexless public civilization, Auguste Comte proved extremely
attractive to the sociological theorists of the 1950's and 1960's. He asserts,
like Durkheim, Weber, and more later sociologists than one could name, that the
heterosexual nuclear family is "society in miniature" (Thompson, 1975:
14), so that all contemporary civilization can be deduced from the "the
elementary couple which forms its basis." (1875: II, 109). He rejects
utopian realists like Fourier and Enfantin, the chief disciples of his former
mentor Saint-Simon, as "pretended reformers who, in defiance of all
experience, have striven not to dominate the passions, but to excite them"
(1875: II, 27). Most sociologists from Durkheim to Talcott Parsons would agree
that dominating the passions was necessary to evade the rumblings of chaos:
during the twentieth century all sorts of catastrophes, from the fall of the
Roman Empire to the rise of industrial slums to the AIDS epidemic, were blamed
on an unwholesome indulgence in irrational passions.
Reedy (1994) maintains that in the shadow of the French revolution, Comte, along
with Bonald and Saint-Simon, felt compelled to control humanity's
"unruliness" by presenting a stately, orderly progress of history from
barbarism to civilization; unlike social contract theorists of the past,
however, Comte extends the progress to a future utopia. He envisions a truly
nasty primordial world in which males ignore each other and thus cannot engage
in any cooperative civilizing projects, because an overwhelming heterosexual
instinct is compelling them to copulate with as many females as they can club
over the head. In a mythologizing tactic similar to Freud's in Civilization and
its Discontents, Comte theorizes that civilization arose when males, impressed
by the females' "moral purity" (that is, lack of sexual desire),
turned to wooing instead of grabbing and thus allowed their sexual instincts to
be "harnessed," rendered subtle and monogamous. Thus, the Social
Contract became the Marriage Contract; instead of the willful association with
others that we find in Locke and Rousseau, a world free of homosocial desire
allows men to "forsake all others" for the wedding bed. Since the
resulting progeny must be socialized, language, culture, religion, and finally
European technological civilization emerged (1875: II, 111). In order to
maintain the delicate balance between desire and suppression that is
civilization, men must unite with only one woman throughout all of their lives;
celibacy is imprudent, and the "temporary aberration" of divorce and
subsequent remarriage (1975: 377), which Comte asserts was devised by evil
Protestants, risks an explosion of unsuppressed sexual desire that will leave no
societal institution unscathed. must be outlawed. Even the custom of remarrying
after the death of a spouse is fraught with danger: "Voluntary widow hood,
while it offers all the advantages that chastity can confer on the intellectual
and physical, as well as on the moral, nature, is yet free from the moral
dangers of celibacy." (1975: 378).
We see in Comte, as in other sociological fathers (Sydie, 1994), a terror of the
heterosexual act itself, probably a product of nineteenth century medical
discourse which taught that male sexual excitation - even without orgasm -
depleted an irreplaceable biological essence and invited madness, disease, and
death (women did not become sexually excited, so they had nothing to fear).
Masturbation, nocturnal emissions, and even "impure thoughts" with no
physiological response at all had debilitating effects similar to severe blood
loss. Sexual relations even within marriage were unhealthy, therefore, and
should be approached with extreme caution (1891: 225).
Of course, the production of future generations requires that at least a few
people engage in heterosexual coitus, so Comte offers a solution: men should
envision their partners as mothers, not wives, and attempt to conduct their
conjugal duties without desire. If no desire is aroused, the depletion of the
male biological essence will be minimal. If wives assist their husbands by
continuously encouraging them to think "pure" thoughts, the
"coarsely personal" heterosexual desire will decrease in each
successive generation, until sexual relations can safely proceed without any
physiological damage, and finally cease altogether. Future generations will
evidently emerge through parthenogenesis: "civilization not only disposes
man to appreciate woman, but continually increases the participation of the
female sex in human reproduction, ultimately reaching a point where birth would
emanate from woman alone"(Manuel and Manuel, 1979: 732).
Comte does not merely acknowledge the existence of sexual desire between men and
women, or rather from men to women; he privileges such desire as both creative
and destructive, the root of civilization and the potential cause of its
downfall. He seems completely unaware female heterosexual desire or same-sex
desire of any sort exists; logically, according to his scheme, same-sex male
couples would have no one to civilize their base instincts, and since women do
not experience desire, same-sex female couples are a logical impossibility. This
absence deserves comment: one might not expect an overt description of gay male
sexuality in the 19th century, but other writers in the era constantly praised
Whitmanesque romantic friendships and highly eroticized male partnerships. Comte
is evidently unaware of homosocial desire, and believes that members of the same
sex are incapable of mutual interactions more meaningful and intimate than
common courtesy: "no doubt there are a multitude of men well enough
organized to love their fellow laborers…but such a sentiment, arising from the
reaction of reason upon the social feelings, could never be strong enough to
guide social life…It is only in domestic life that man can habitually seek the
full and free expansion of his social affections"(1875: II, 117). This is
the logical end of the hegemonic privileging of heterosexuality, which conceives
of human social relations strictly in terms of husband-wife and parent-child
binarisms and allows other relations to exist only as threats, aberrations, and
monstrosities.
During the last twenty years of his life, Comte molded the heterosexuality which
French society was just beginning to elevate to hegemonic status into a new
"positivist religion," which actually gained some 20,000 devotees in
the 1840's and 1850's and attracted the attention of a number of eminent
writers, artists, and philosophers, including John Stuart Mill. The positivist
emblem, "Order and Progress," can be seen today on the flag of Brazil.
"New religions of humanity" had been proclaimed, of course, since the
Enlightenment (Martin 1962: 277), but other prophets, such as Bousset and
Proudhon, envisioned their new religions as the products of scientific inquiry,
quests after ever increasing knowledge that would transform the world. However,
there was no room for increased knowledge in Comte's religion, no transcendence,
no change: everything one might ever need to know, was already known. The
thirteen-month positivist calendar (modeled after the French Revolutionary
calendar) devoted days and weeks to historical, philosophical, scientific, or
literary figures such as Moses, Dante, Caesar, and Pericles, as well as a few
non-Western religious leaders (Mohammed, Kamehameha, and the mythical Manco
Capac) and seventeen women, but there is no room for the commemoration of
philosophers or scientists yet to be. Civilization had already achieved its
highest possible level; only the five "advanced populations" -- the
French, Italians, Germans, Spanish, and British -- will make the transition from
civilization to utopia. Comte saw the future not as experiment, but as liturgy;
not as knowledge, but as faith; not as discovery, but as ritual. This curious
absence of change was quite attractive to the sociological fathers and their
structural-functional descendents who believed that modern northern Europe was
the epitome of human culture and the end of social evolution; and during the
social and political upheavals of the 1960's, its implicit privileging of the
status no doubt retarded the recognition of feminist and queer theory and
virtually eliminated nonmale and nonwhite voices from sociological discourse for
decades.
Comte's positivist religion borrows from contemporary popular culture in its
depiction of gradually increasing moral perfection based on decreasing
heterosexual passion, but here heterosexual passion is suppressed neither
through the homosocial bonding of muscular Christianity and the Victorian secret
societies, nor through the soul-cleansing of the revival tents, but through the
mediating power of morally perfect (that is, sexless) women. Thus, the
positivist liturgy involves mostly a worship of women, a celebration of how, in
the future utopia, the original sin of heterosexual desire need no longer be
suppressed: it has been "washed away" by the saving grace of the
Divine Feminine (Standley 1981: 102). The French Revolutionary calendar devoted
eight of the thirty required festivals to types of familial discourse (Reid,
1993: 37), but Comte's calendar of social worship dedicates an entire month to
Marriage, which is the "primary Social Relation" (other social
relations do not rate their own month). Another entire month is dedicated to
Women, and on leap years, devotees can participate in a General Festival of Holy
Women.
Comte replaces the Christian Trinity with a triad of goddesses which symbolize
the three roles women play as they embark upon the project of civilizing male
heterosexual desire: Rosalie Boyer, his mother, is venerated as the archetypal
parent; Clotilde de Vaux, the women he unsuccessfully pursued for a year before
her death, is adored as the archetypal "spiritual wife"; and Sophie
Bliaux, his "adopted daughter," is cherished as the archetypal child.
The greatest of these, of course, is Clotilde, whose lock of hair became an
object of daily obeisance to Comte and the other positivists. As the "New
Virgin Mother" (Standley 1981: 113), Clotilde gives birth yet refrains from
sexual intimacy; thus, she incorporates the "spiritual" and eliminates
the "carnal" aspects of mother, wife, and child, with no male
heterosexual intrusion necessary to replicate the sacred triad. Juliette Grange
(1997) finds in this new Blessed Virgin a symbol of the French Republic:
nationalism supercedes the antiquated role of universal Christiandom in a sort
of precursor of Durkheim's worship of society. Regardless of her political
import, however, Clotilde functions as the object of a grammar of male
heterosexual desire, and yet paradoxically eliminates desire. In the Comtean
eschatology, compulsory heterosexuality will become its own undoing: men's
desire for women will draw them closer to women, until they leave the
"coarse parts" behind and both become sexless, in effect bodiless, and
divine.
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