The mastery of submission : inventions of masochism 9780801433450, 0801433452

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The

Master

of

submis

'/

sion

CORNELL STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF PSYCHIATRY

Edited by Sander L. Gilman and George J. Makari Keeping America Sane: P'lychlotry and Eugenics In the United States and Canada, I

by lan Robert Dowblaln

Madness In America: Cultural and Medkal Perceptions of Mental Illness before 1914

he Mas terY o f

brnissio n cornell Ithaca

Uni'lers itY pres s

& Lon do

n

Copyright© 1997 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 1485o. First published 1997 by Cornell University Press. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Noyes, John K. The mastery of submission : inventions of masochism I John K. Noyes. p.

cm.-(Cornell studies in the history of psychiatry)

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8014-3345-2 (alk. paper) r. Masochism.

2. Sadomasochism.

submission.

I. Title.

HQ79·N69

1997

3. Sexual dominance and

II. Series.

@)The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI

Z39-48-r984.

Cloth printing

10

9 8

7

6

5

4

Contents

Illustrations, vi Acknowledgments, vii

Introduction Inventions ofMasochism, I

I

Beaten Women, Biology, and Technologies of Control The Politics ofMasochism, I 5

2

Reason, Passion, and Nineteenth-Century Liberalism Kraffi-Ebing and Sacher-Masoch,

3

so

Technologies of Punishment, Penance, and Pleasure The Invention of Universal Masochism, 8o

4

Imperialist Man, Civilizing Woman, and the European Male Masochist, ros

5

Narratives of Mastery, Fantasies of Failure Freud on Masochism, I40

6

Beyond the Death Instinct History, Control, and the Gendering ofMasochism, I64

7 Disappearing and Reappearing Subjects Masochism, Modernity, Postmodernity, I98

Notes,

223

Bibiography, 24 3 Index, 255

Illustrations

'f'he Berkeley Horse, I 3

2

The Cully Flaug'd (England, eighteenth century), 83

3

Prostitute's equipment (Berlin, ca. I9oo), 88

4

English postcard (ca. 19oo), 92

5

Jose de Brito, A lv1artyr of Fmzaticism (Portugal, 1 895), 95

6

Hans Baldung Yon Grien, Aristotle and Phyllis (Germany, I 5 I 3), 99

7

R. Newton, The S!tz-ue Alaster (England, I 792), 128

8

Satirical drawing criticizing slavery in the United States (France, I8so), r 29

9

A. Willette, The Boss (France, 1902), r 30

IO

The Poor Husbmzd (Germany, I 505), I 32

rr

Visscher, The Drunken I lushmul (Holland, r6 r o), r 33

I2

French pamphlet(ca. r65o), 134

I3

F. Kurth, Slave Carriage (Germany, ca. r 86o), I 36

I4

Conjugal Yoke (French postcard, ca. I9oo), I37

I5

W Schertel, untitled (Germany, 1910), I37

16

JacquesVillon, Thef!tctoryOwner(France, 1912), 138

Acknowledgments

My special thanks are due to a number of people who helped make this book possible. First of all, Sander L. Gilman, who has acted as friend, sounding board, adviser, and critic from the time when the book was little more than a vague idea. Without his assistance, which came in many guises, I would not have been able to write it. Marco Schmitt was a motivated and reliable research assistant and an imaginative reader of Der Spiegel; his findings set me on some interesting paths. I am also indebted to Barbara Menne!, who, on the other side of the world but only minutes away on the Internet, helped overcome the limitations of Third World library research. Thanks also to Albrecht Koschorke, Irving Massey, and Thomas Anz for their encouragement. Discussions with Carlotta von Maltzan proved invaluable. Jo-Anne Prins provided a critical reading of Chapter 4, which was given an added dimension through Christian Gundermann's input on Pierre Loti. Emily Showalter's erudite and critical comments on the manuscript left an important mark on the final version. I am grateful for the support of the University of Cape Town, which granted me a year's sabbatical leave, allowing me to conduct research during the early stages of the project. The University of Cape Town also provided me with a Staff Development Grant to research the writings ofLeopold von Sacher-Masoch. The Center for Science Development of the Human Sciences Research Council, South Mrica, assisted with an Ad Hoc Grant for research into the historical writings of Sacher-Masoch. Chapter 2 is an expanded and extensively modified version of my paper "The Historical Perspective in the Works ofLeopold von Sacher-Masoch," ModernAustrianLiterature 2 7, no. 2 ( 1 994). Chapter 4 is an expanded version of "Civilizing Woman and the European Male Masochist in German Colonial Literature," Acta Germanica 23 (1995). The introduction was published in the Southern African Review ofBooks 42 (1996). The Center for Science Development provided me with a grant for postdoctoral research overseas, which enabled me to accept a fellowship in the Institute for European Studies at the Mario Einaudi Institute for International Affairs, Cornell University. I am grateful vii

to the colleagues at the Institute for European Studies for their kindness and assistance during my visit. The findings of my research do not in any way reflect the ideas or opinions of the Human Sciences Research Council. I am particularly indebted to participants in the "Masochism Discussion Seminar" at Cornell, who provided a critical and innovative forum in which I could pursue the ideas presented here. Many of the texts I quote were written in German and have not been published in translation. When German texts are quoted in English but listed in German in the bibliography, I have used my own translations. ].K.N.

viii ///

Acknowledgments

The

Master

of

v

Subrniss iOO

Introduction Inventions

of Masochism

nJanuary 1994, as South Mrica was preparing for its first democratic elections after almost fifty years of racist, white minority rule, a graduate student gave me a clipping from the German weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel. In the "Personalities" column, a stern-faced, uniformed woman in her late thirties gazed menacingly from the page. 1 Behind her, a young woman, scantily clothed in a studded leather loin-piece, was chained spreadeagled to the ceiling and floor. The uniformed lady, The Countess, proprietress of a club called Domizil in Dusseldorf, had just scored a coup. Scouring the flea markets of East Berlin, which were by now flooded with the unwanted trivia of a defunct era, she had managed to purchase all the necessary requisites for an authentic KGB interrogation room. Now she could offer her customers something more novel than the Hollywood-style dungeons and doctors' surgeries usual in her line of business. The uniforms, wooden cups, desk lamps, riding crop, Soviet flag, even the photograph of the former East German leader Erich Honecker, were all taken straight out of real life. Anyone prepared to pay 450 German marks per hour could play out tanta-

lizingly real scenarios of political persecution under The Countess's strict guidance. The student wrote at the bottom of the clipping: "If they hurry they might still be able to buy some old uniforms from the South African Police and the South African Defence Force." As an academic concerned with the critical interpretation of the texts and images our culture uses to present, represent, and perpetuate its identities, I was not sure what to make of this scenario. The thought of an upmarket dominatrix in the old uniform of the South African Police administering punishment to one of her respectable middle-aged customers was amusing, particularly if I imagined the customer as one who had, in days gone by, occupied the inside of the uniform. But the very idea that such a chillingly real scenario, which had been responsible for real deaths, real suffering, could suddenly be reduced to theater for the titillation of sexually bored, upper-middle-class men and women, was disturbing, to say the least. It wasn't the sexual scenario I found worrying, it was the props, the stage machinery. The thought of anti-apartheid activists such as Steve Biko and Neil Agett, or any of the other victims who had found death in similar scenarios, perhaps in the presence of the very same desk lamps, seemed to render the idea intolerable. And yet- wasn't this an infinitely better use of the uniforms and whips than the SAP and SADF had found for them? A scenario of consensual sexual pleasure in which no one gets any more hurt than they want to- isn't this the best of all possible scenes of violence? If it is, then sexual violence itself becomes problematic. Once scenes of violence are simulated in order to produce sexual pleasure, they begin to appear in an ambivalent light. Rosalind Coward has described this ambivalence in the depiction of sexual violence by woman writers in the 198os. Books like Kathy Acker's Kotby Goes to Haiti (1978) show a woman struggling to break free of the submissive role society has prepared for her and yet constantly confronted with the fact that her fantasies themselves are in some way just as selfdestructive as the stereotypes she wishes to escape. Coward calls this kind of female hero "a sexual outlaw, someone beyond the bounds of normal, respectable society, who acts out her desires, whether they be sadistic, masochistic, or scatological. And clearly," she notes, "the idea of the sexual outlaw resonates for a new generation of feminists." 2 Coward also draws attention to the growing tradition in lesbian fiction of using sadomasochistic imagery as a politics of writing about sex. Sadomasochism becomes a forced confrontation with women's inner fears and resistances. In this view, "the scenarios of masochism and sadism, which lesbian fiction is prepared to explore, arc allowing all women to experience 2 Ill

Introduction

the flow between aggression and passivity, domination and submission which seems to be integral to the experience of sex but often polarizes around gender." 3 This view is also becoming popular among producers of pornography for women. Nevertheless, Coward has reservations. Describing her personal reaction to this trend, she says she "can find it degrading and humiliating when we are touched and aroused by scenarios of submission and humiliation." In her opinion, there is indeed a relation between "widespread clicheed sexual fantasies and the way women are actually treated or, more important, think of themselves." Woman writers who search the depths of sexual submissiveness in pursuit of therapy might just find instead that "self-annihilation and death are the bedrock of masochism." Coward is worried that "as women begin to explore heterosexual lust, the dominant mood that emerges is not triumph but despair." 4 \Vhen gendered violence is eroticized, it clearly shares the same ambivalence as political violence. Rosalind Coward may or may not be right in her evaluation of sadomasochistic scenes in contemporary fiction. But the fact remains; in a society plagued by sexual and political violence, masochism is a disturbing phenomenon. It often threatens to blur the distinction between real and simulated violence, domination and humiliation. And sometimes it is just plain dangerous. Writing in 1990, Sina-Aline Geissler, a self-confessed female masochist, describes the violence to which she has been exposed: My admission to being masochistic was interpreted by many men as a carte blanche for the total suppression of my person. I had nothing more to say and was declared a slave without rights. But those were the tolerable cases. Much more sobering were other experiences. I was loosed upon by frustrated weirdos who as children had been subjected to their mothers' domination, found wives that represented this mother-figure, and now took thankful advantage of every opportunity to avenge themselves against women. In senseless rage they beat me, and they humiliated me in an inhuman manner. 5 The blurred line between simulation and reality in masochism poses a challenge to current views on sexuality and subjectivity. Even our postmodern age, which likes to theorize about the fluidity of reality, has to admit to the reality of suffering. It might be exciting to play political cops-androbbers in studded leather with Honecker watching, but what is the significance for any kind of political position that tries to work against suffering? I am reminded of Russell Berman's criticism of deconstruction, whose textualization of the world raises serious problems as soon as we address the Introduction

Ill 3

question of violence. According to Berman, speaking about reality as if representation is the best way into it is "fine enough, unless you happen to get in the way of a bullet." 6 So what does the masochist want? The masochist seeks controlled scenarios in which fantasies of being beaten and humiliated can be played out. This is something very different from wandering aimlessly into dangerous situations. The masochist makes sure that the person who administers the beatings knows the rules of the game and knows when to stop. Conversio Virium, the Columbia University coalition on bondage, domination, submission, and sadomasochistic play, states its guiding principles as follows: The very act of referring to any activity as BDSM defines it as being consensual. Any lack of mutual consent means that the acts in question are sexual assault or rape, not BDSNI. BDSM is not abuse. Abuse is no more likely to occur in BDSM relationships than it is in non-BDSM relationships. We condemn it in both. We support free and open exploration of one's basic sexuality, without pressure to follow any particular path, with the goal of self-acceptance always in mind. BDSM, like hetero/bilhomosexuality, is a legitimate sexual orientation, and is not a disorder. Nor does the mere fact of being involved in BDSM indicate anything bad about someone. We therefore regard complete tolerance of all BDSM'ers as a right and not a privilege.? Masochism takes control of the technologies that produce subjectivity as cultural stereotypes. It develops elaborate strategies for framing the collapse of socially sanctioned identities, and it performs this collapse as a pleasurable abandonment of identity. These strategies aim specifically to pervert the disciplinary technologies our culture uses in its everyday operation. Sadomasochism produces subjectivity through the performance of a sexual technology. It relies upon the pleasurable disappearance - and controlled reappearance- of the subject. Masochism also appropriates our culture's violent heroes and uses their identities to generate pleasure. "Vanessa," a practicing masochistic woman living in Germany, confided to the authors of a recent socioethnographic study of the contemporary German S&M scene that in the masochistic game, "the entire spectrum of popular culture and a wide body of historical sources serve as scripts. . . . These might be, for example, dungeon scenarios, maidservant games, or court proceedings and subsequent convictions, or the sado-masochistic experiences of the comic-book heroes Batman and Catwoman.... Not least, religious themes are used, such as crucifixions, 4 Ill Introduction

or the modification of a passion-play." 8 The authors themselves later augment this list: "Slave auctions in the ancient world, crucifixions, the martyr scenes of the Christian saints, tortures from the Inquisition, or the scenario of a concentration camp are the stuff of which these fantasies are made." 9 Societies that develop political technologies to control and discipline the bodies of their subjects must reckon with the possibility that individuals will put these technologies to alternative uses. This is what happens in the case of masochism. It draws on stereotypes of violence and technologies of control in order to convert them into technologies of pleasure. In the process it perpetuates these stereotypes, but it does this - so its proponents would argue - in a way that renders them harmless, parodies them. Masochism is a techne erotike in the truest sense. Consequently, the struggles we have come to associate with masochism are struggles for a technology of control. The body of the masochist is caught in a tug-of-war between technologies that want to render it productive and others that seek to produce sexual pleasure. The invention of the term "masochism" was itself an expression of this struggle for control. The most celebrated moment in the history of masochism is the year 1890, when the Viennese doctor Richard von Krafft-Ebing named a pathology after the Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. In his best-selling novel, Venus in Furs, Sacher-Masoch had told the story of Severin, a passionate and idealistic nobleman caught between the dictates of reason, domination, and control- everything society told him a man should be - and his own peculiar passion for submitting to the cruelty of dominant women. The tale of pleasurable submission is contained in a manuscript, the Confessions of a Supersensualist, which Severin hands to the narrator. In it he relates a love affair with the mysterious widow Wanda von Dunajew, who philosophizes about love and cruelty, and whom Severin gradually draws into his sexual fantasies, training her in the ways of the dominatrix. As the fantasies of bondage, chastisement, and slavery progress, Severin's love grows increasingly unrequited, and Wanda's cruelty grows ever more real. Throughout the Confessions, Severin struggles with his passions, until finally he receives a beating at the hands of Wanda's strangely androgynous lover - a beating that will cause him to turn his back, presumably forever, on his masochistic pleasures. This tale is framed in a short narrative in which we meet Severin after he has been cured of his peculiar fancies. In becoming cured, he has become aggressive and dominating, giving vent to the same old passions, but this time from the other side of the whip. Krafft-Ebing obviously thought that such poor souls should not be left alone in their struggles to gain control of their own bodies. In his study PsyIntroduction

Ill 5

chopathia Sexualis, he described masochism as "a peculiar perversion of the psychical vita sexualis in which the individual affected, in sexual feeling and thought, is controlled by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex; of being treated by this person as by a master, humiliated and abused." 10 He thought he recognized this perversion in the works, and in the lifestyle, of Sacher-Masoch. Rather than leave the masochist to seek out masters, Krafft-Ebing felt that mastery should be the domain of science. Where the individual relinquishes control, the scientist steps in. The Austrian satirist Karl Kraus had this to say about Krafft-Ebing: "Among those who explore the mind's widest reaches, he is the most narrow-minded." 11 And Sacher-Masoch was, in a certain sense, his victim. Krafft-Ebing's invention of the masochistic perversion takes its place among other liberal normalizations of subjectivity. One of the ongoing projects of the liberal imagination was to isolate the subject as a realm of normative sexuality, desire, intention, and free will, an "inside" that could be quarantined from the field of historical phenomena and social life. And this "inside" was thought of as existing in a dialectic relationship to the "outside" of sociohistorical phenomena. Its rationalization was seen to follow different rules, and complex principles were developed for relating the field of subjectivity to the social and historical fields. The masochistic subject was invented as a place where principles of aggressivity within the sociopolitical field could be reduced to a different set of principles, playing themselves out within the body of the masochist. The body of the masochist is also a place where this project failed. Masochistic imagery emerged on the fine line between the successful pathologization of nonproductive social violence and the return of repressed social violence in the forms of representation. The modernist imagination produced the masochistic subject as one of the places where representation failed to come to terms with subjectivity. Consequently, the body of the masochist became marked with the return of all those problematic sociohistorical aspects that had been banished when the liberal subject was imagined as self-determining and free, aggressive and self-controlled. It should come as no surprise that masochism, both as a pathology and as a highly popular code of sexual imagery, was an invention of the late nineteenth century. The obsession with control that characterized nineteenthcentury liberal thought made it virtually unavoidable that masochism would acquire the status it did. Mark Seltzer has shown that the age of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was obsessed with the interface of bodies and machines. The disciplined individual could be produced only by subjecting life processes to 6 Ill

Introduction

an increasingly unnatural- and hence perverse - regime of training and control. The perversity of control "is revealed, on the one side, in the unnatural disciplines of the machine process and, on the other, in the unnatural disciplines of naturalist sexuality." The masochistic perversion is like the Fordist dream of bodies and part-bodies attached to a productive technology. "From one point of view, such a fantasy projects a violent dismemberment of the human body and an emptying out of human agency, from another it projects a transcendence of the natural body and the extension of human agency through the forms of technology that represent it." 12 The invention of the term "masochism" articulates the fin de siecle's profound sense of crisis concerning sexuality and violence and what it means to be human in an age of rapid technological development. Elaine Showalter has argued that the fin de siecle's problems are also our own. Both turns of the century are times when gender boundaries are redrawn, rearticulated, and contested. 13 A century after Sacher-Masoch, the topic of masochism continues to express very real and unsolved issues that we have inherited from the previous century. We continue to be fascinated by the "shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather" and the "whiplash girl-child in the dark," of which Andy Warhol's Velvet Underground sang in "Venus in Furs" in 1967: Severin, Severin, speak so slightly Severin, down on your bended knee Taste the whip, and love not given lightly Taste the whip. Now plead for me ... 14 And when Lou Reed sings, "Strike, dear Mistress, and cure his heart," his ironic tone bears the same ambivalent message Sacher-Masoch had presented a century earlier: the story ends with the cure, but the pleasure arises from the blows. In the closing decade of the twentieth century, masochism is becoming a very hot topic. But our understanding of bodily pleasure and sexual identity has undergone important changes since the nineteenth century, and these affect our ideas on how violence relates to subjectivity and society. Masochism today perpetuates and redefines the problems and ideas of the age that coined the word. This book is about the set of problems that gave rise to the idea of masochism and how they have persisted and mutated over the past century. The story of masochism can be told in a number of ways, and it has already been told many times. A book that wishes to tell this story again must be able to claim something different or new, perhaps even something better in its own Introduction

111 7

telling. What made me want to embark on this investigation was my conviction that when masochism comes under debate, something important is usually left out. This "something" is first of all understandable by referring not to the psychopathological, psychoanalytic, and psychiatric discourses that took charge of the topic at the turn of the century, but by consulting the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. My research into Sacher-Masoch convinced me that what we call "masochism" really is only part of the story. The other part he tried hard to tell, not very successfully, and certainly not as captivatingly as he told of the passions that were to immortalize him. But these passions are understandable only together with this other partSacher-Masoch's fascination with gross social injustices and violence in Eastern Europe in the fading days of the Habsburg Empire. His masochistic passions arose within this context, and throughout his writing, social violence is never Yery far below the surface of masochistic passion. The f~1ct that this is almost never mentioned in connection with the masochism debate is easily explained; we continue to believe the psychopathologists when they tell us that masochism is about personal psychic structures. But if we are to do justice to the fascination that these passions held in the late nineteenth century and continue to hold today, we will have to return to the questions, uncertainties, and crises within which they became so problematic a hundred years ago. This does not mean returning to the theoretical models that first described masochism. The central thesis of this book is that masochism cannot be understood within the conceptual framework that we have inherited along with the term itself. This framework was a product of the late nineteenth century, and as such it bore all the crises and contradictions of latenineteenth-century thought. The figure of the European masochist arose out of intense inner conflicts and contradictions in discourses of liberalism and modernism, and it is inscribed with the same problems that continue to generate academic and popular debate concerning gender relations, stereotypes, and the exercise of power. To interrogate "masochism" is to interrogate these crises and contradictions in liberal thought. The invention of masochism both as an erotic practice and as a psychopathological and sexological figure was a symptomatic move, an attempt to resolve some of the crises in liberal concepts of agency. Our fascination with masochism today is a perpetuation, but also a recasting, of these performative stagings. Masochism as we understand it today is both a sexual and a social phenomenon. It is a model for articulating discrepancies between the pursuit of sexual pleasure and the abstinences required in social life. But as an erotic practice, it blurs the distinction between pain and pleasure. There

a

J/1 Introduction

can be little doubt that Krafft-Ebing, in naming masochism, was drawing on an erotic practice with a well-established tradition. According to Roy Baumeister, current evidence is that "sexual masochism first began to appear in isolated cases around 1500, it began to spread during the 16oos, and it became a widespread and familiar feature of the sexual landscape during the 17oos." 15 According to Gerd Falk and Thomas S. Weinberg, the "history of sadomasochism as an erotic, consensual, and recreational behavior can be traced back at least two hundred years to eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury England. During that period of time, private clubs, whose members often enjoyed whipping and birching as a form of recreation, abounded in London." 16 An erotics of pain existed long before Krafft-Ebing and SacherMasoch. However, the codification that emerged at their time cast these acts into an entirely different and problematic light. This recasting was not an isolated scientific invention. It was intimately tied to changes in the understanding of the nature of human beings and their biological constitution, sexuality, and social organization. Masochism was invented as male masochism. For this reason, much of the discussion in this book is concerned with male masochism. I have refrained from allowing this emphasis to be reflected in the title of the book, however, for it is not possible to discuss the invention of masochism without taking account of the variations in gender relations that have accompanied the thematics of masochism. I am also concerned to show how a thematics of feminine masochism and women's masochism emerged from the invention of male masochism and how this affected the idea of a general masochistic perversion. 17 As the title of this book indicates, I will be arguing that masochism was invented and that its invention was a response to a specific technical problem. The problem concerned how to deal with individuals in whom the economy of reward and punishment, upon which society was thought to be based, broke down and failed. This was coupled to a theoretical problemthe conceptualization of intersubjective and gender relations in a world that was increasingly obsessed with the correct and incorrect uses of aggression. The solution was a mode of conceptualization and a technology that allowed incorrect aggressivity to be identified and circumscribed within the body and dealt with according to a definite set of rules. The masochist's body was invented in the late nineteenth century as a machine that could do one of two things, depending upon how it was regarded, how it was used, or where it was positioned. It could reduce socially nonproductive aggressivity to an individual pathology, or it could transform social control into sexual pleasure. The one use of the masochist's body Introduction

Ill 9

supports the project of socially sanctioned aggression and the various stereotypes society has developed in order to invest cultural identity with aggressivity. The other use of the masochist's body subverts this project, initiating an unsettling process whereby cultural identity is parodied, masqueraded, and appropriated in the name of pleasure. These two uses initiate all the conflicts surrounding masochism as we understand it today. When I began this project, I intended to investigate how masochism had come to occupy this position between affirmation and subversion of cultural stereotypes. My research increasingly involved tracing not only the conceptual and discursive but also what would have to be called the "technical" transformations that have accompanied "masochism" in the century since its invention. Here the question of historical method arises, and the model that has been most important to me is Michel Foucault's histories of sexuality. When Foucault developed his now classic rejection of what he called the "repressive hypothesis" in the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1976), 18 he set out to demonstrate how various disciplinary discoursesprimarily medical and legal - have increasingly defined, delineated, and circumscribed bodily practices, incorporating them in a field that can broadly be called "sexuality." According to Foucault, this discursive field did not exist before the eighteenth century. What we call "sex" is an excess over and above the physiological determinations of human life, "something more, with intrinsic properties and laws of its own." 19 Foucault claims that "sex" did not exist before the nineteenth century. 20 The reason is that the discursive and institutional apparatus of sexuality was not yet in place. What we had before "sex" and "sexuality" is, according to Foucault, simply "the flesh." 21 The danger in such a claim, indeed in Foucault's project itself, is that it walks a fine line between essentialism and idealism. Of course Foucault is far from adopting either of these positions. His intention in the History of Sexuality is to show how a socially and historically specific field of bodily practices came under the surveillance of certain sciences, and how this gave rise to what he called the political technology of bodies. As such, his history of sexuality still seems to be one of the most useful tools in thinking about manipulation, coercion, and the regimentation of bodies. The challenge for a study of masochism today is how to rethink the sexualization of power relations in a culture that increasingly defines identity in terms of its participation in technologies of control. In 1948 Jacques Lacan identified a problem that will have to occupy any attempt to understand the functions and dysfunctions of masochism in society today. In an age where "we are engaged in a technical enterprise at the species scale," Lacan states, "the problem is knowing whether the Master/Slave conflict will find its reso-

o Ill

1

Introduction

lution in the service of the machine, for which a psychotechnique that is already proving rich in ever more precise applications will be used to provide space-capsule pilots and space-station supervisors." 22 When La can speaks of space stations and space capsules, he is referring to the human body. Already in 1948, Lacan was able to understand Hegel's Master and Slave as bodies whose power relationship is mediated by machines. The space of the human body becomes ever more defined in terms of the machinery that mediates its power over other bodies and its submissiveness to them. This development is a modern one. According to Foucault, by the late eighteenth century, the technologies of the body were firmly enough in place that man could in many respects be theorized as a machine and be used as one: The great book of Man-the-Machine was written simultaneously on two registers: the anatomico-metaphysical register, of which Descartes wrote the first pages and which the physicians and philosophers continued, and the technico-political register, which was constituted by a whole set of regulations and by empirical and calculated methods relating to the army, the school and the hospital, for controlling or correcting the operations of the body. These two registers are quite distinct, since it was a question, on the one hand, of submission and use and, on the other, of functioning and explanation: there was a useful body and an intelligible body. 23 Masochism collapses these two registers into each other. If the body is to be intelligible within the mechanistic paradigm, its participation in the regime of control and usefulness will have to be theorized as a desire for submission. And if the body is to be useful, it will have to be disciplined as a ·machine and theorized as desiring its own discipline. This is why, for Foucault, "disciplinary power appears to have the function not so much of deduction as of synthesis, not so much of exploitation of the product as of coercive link with the apparatus of production." 24 If we accept this view of discipline, then masochism becomes understandable as the reductio ad absurdum of disciplinary technique. Its subversive force lies (or is seen by its practitioners to lie) in the eroticization of the disciplinary technology that Foucault identifies. In the course of the nineteenth century, the eroticization of what Foucault calls the "body-machine complex" emerged parallel to disciplinary technology. Within this network of bodily spaces and mediating machines, masochism is not the love of submissiveness. It is not the pursuit of unpleasure or humiliation. It is a complex set of strategies for transforming submissiveness, pain, and unpleasure into sexual pleasure. But over and above this, it is the appropriation of the technologies that our culture uses in order to Introduction

111 1 1

perpetuate submissiveness, an appropriation that plays a subtle game with the machinery of domination. As such, masochism is the eroticism of the rnachine, or in Seltzer's words, "an erotics of discipline." 25 By raising this eroticism to an aesthetic principle, the subject has found a way to contemplate its eccentric position within the regime of machines. Masochism functions as the eroticism of human disappearance within a technology of bodily control. The techniques of discipline discussed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish are all targets of the masochist's eroticizing strategies. Where political technologies of the body design panopticons, masochism fantasizes scenes in which the subject is suspended delicately on the brink of death, helpless for all to see. Where factories and schools establish complex schedules for the productive regimentation of time, the masochist produces what Maria Marcus calls "a minutely perfected program of bondage with a repertoire of pain, spiced according to my personal taste." 26 Where institutions perfect language in order to isolate the particular qualities of the body they require, masochism eroticizes the power of language. "Everything," Marcus tells us, is only "a prelude to the actual fetish- the words." 27 And where instruments of punishment are applied to the deviant body, the masochist eroticizes these same instruments. What was intended as a controlling mechanism becomes appropriated as an erotic technique. In all cases, the masochistic move is to seize upon the machinery of domination and pervert its usage, attempting to derive nothing but sexual pleasure from machines that were designed to effect the smooth running of social structures. Sometimes, masochism even invents its own machines. In r828 Theresa Berkeley, the proprietress of an English flagellation brothel in Portland Place, invented a "machine 'to flog gentlemen upon'." 2H She called it the "Chevalet," or "Berkeley Horse." As Figure r shows, it was a simple wooden frame, designed to accommodate the anatomy of the customer. It was padded with leather, so that discomfort was experienced only on certain parts of the body. Punishment was meted out by the dominatrix of the day, who was paid to administer a sound whipping to her restrained customer. The Berkeley Horse was carefully designed so that the pain behind was compensated by pleasure in front. This was the purpose of the carefully placed openings in the frame, which allowed an assistant, customarily a less imposing, younger girl, to match the dominatrix's whipping with more pleasurable interventions. According to Ivan Bloch, Berkeley "was a past-mistress of her art, an expert in knowing the various whims of men clients, which she satisfied in the most refined manner." 29 This refined manner is described by the famous Victorian cataloguer of pornography, Henry S. Ashbee, who wrote under the name Pisanus Fraxi: "She had a dozen tapering whip thongs, a dozen 12 ///

Introduction

I

The Berkeley Horse

cat-o'-nine-tails studded with needle points, various kinds of thin supple switches, leather straps as thick as traces, currycombs and oxhide straps studded with nails, which had become tough and hard from constant use, also holly and gorse and a prickly evergreen called 'butcher's bush.' During the summer, glass and Chinese vases were kept filled with green nettles." 30 Steven Marcus describes the Berkeley Horse as "a large football blockingdummy" that "may be thought of as perversity's contribution to the industrial revolution." 31 Berkeley's machine demonstrated in the most literal way how mass-produced items could tie individuals to their own subjugation, while allowing the inventors or producers to make a profit. According to Reay Tannahill, Theresa Berkeley earned a net profit of £w,ooo in eight Introduction Ill

13

years on the production of the Berkeley HorseY In a letter quoted by Ivan Bloch, an "ill-behaved young man" informs Berkeley of an impending visit to London on parliamentary business. He has heard of her "famous apparatus," and offers her "a pound sterling for the first blood drawn, two pounds sterling if the blood runs down to my heels, three pounds sterling if my heels are bathed in blood, four pounds sterling if the blood reaches the floor, and five pounds sterling if you succeed in making me lose consciousness." 33 The ability to identify and implement the correct tools is what keeps the dominatrix in business. Berkeley made her fortune on the realization that, in Tannahill's words, "a workwoman was only as good as her tools." 34 The final decades of our century seem to want to replicate Berkeley's mechanization and commercialization of masochistic desire. A "bondage/ dominance/sadism/masochism purity test" recently posted on the World Wide Web shows how important the technology of control continues to be in masochistic practice. 35 Ropes, cuffs and other bondage devices, body bags, saran wrap, collars, straightjackets, leashes, floggers, whips, paddles, canes, nipple clamps, ball locks, violet wands, butt plugs, cock rings, handcuffs, suspension harnesses, corsets, et cetera are among the apparatuses of the sadomasochistic game. The production of sadomasochistic machinery and imagery has become a business, and it is entering the world of mainstream respectability. In the eyes of its practitioners, masochism is only peripherally attached to violence. Interviewed at the 46th International Film Festival at Cannes in 1993, the California producer of sadomasochism films Zachary Holland stated confidently that he makes movies for adults, not porn movies. Porn, he tells us, is something different. War films, violent films, films where people are shot or have their throats cut, these are pornographic images. "What we're showing," Holland tells us, "is sex for fun and fantasy." This self-perception is both correct and incorrect. On the one hand, masochism is a paradoxical strategy for removing social violence from the sexual scene. It is a limited and controlled enactment of violence, aimed at escaping the punitive and disciplinary function - the subjectivizing function which our culture attaches to violence. This is the case even when the masochistic staging produces a violence which is extreme and a hurt which is real. But on the other hand, masochism is a continuation of social violence. It defuses violence, rendering it harmless and profitable, while perpetuating its forms. And once the technologies of control become the object of erotic attachment, who is to say whether control is subverted by eroticism, or whether eroticism is reintegrated into control?

14 ///

Introduction

Technologies of

The Politics of Masochism

The categorization of mental disorder is usually not the kind of problem that inflames popular imagination. In the mid-nineteen 198os, a vehement debate took place within psychiatric circles, temporarily forcing the limelight onto the decision-making processes of psychiatry and the politics of mental disorder. As a result, the psychiatric profession was split into two camps, the patriarchal conservatives and the feminist reformers. Suddenly it was the minds of the masters that seemed to be squirming. The cause of consternation was the definition of masochism, and its focus was the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, generally known as DSM. This is a systematic and rather dry encyclopaedia of all conditions of the mind that might conceivably fall outside the bounds of the normal, and it is the most important diagnostic reference work employed by psychiatrists in the United States. Between the years 1985 and 1989, the pages of Time Magazine, Cosmopolitan, New Statesman and Society, and Psychology Today all made room for the attacks and counterattacks that the psychiatric profession launched in the IS

name of masochism. On the surface, the issue was that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual- and with it not only the entire psychiatric profession but also the legal apparatus that relied upon psychiatry - seemed to support the popular conception that women are naturally passive and that they appear to take pleasure in being victims of violence. But it soon became clear that the debates over definitions of masochism concerned much more than just psychiatry. Masochism became a way of articulating struggles over deep-seated beliefs concerning gender, power, violence, and role-playing in society. In the I98o edition of DSM, Sexual Masochism could be diagnosed as if either (I) or (2) holds true: (I) a preferred or exclusive mode of producing sexual excitement is to be humiliated, bound, beaten, or otherwise made to suffer (2) the individual has intentionally participated in an activity in which he or she was physically harmed or his or her life was threatened, in order to produce sexual excitement 1 These criteria make it quite clear that the performance of these acts "the diagnosis of Sexual Masochism is made only if the individual engages in masochistic sexual acts, not merely fantasies" (DSM-III, 2 74)- is intimately linked to the performance of power relations as they exist or might be imagined to exist in society. 2 As Deborah Franklin has observed, what might easily be mistaken in therapy and the courtroom for sexual masochism can just as well be understood as a perfectly logical reaction to an environment characterized by sexually codified violence. Cases of battered women indicate that behavior which appears self-defeating may in fact be a rational reaction to a violent environment. "Its like calling black people living in Soweto paranoid .... Maybe they do exhibit classically defined paranoia, but, for many, it's justified." 3 The easy and widespread identification of masochism with the nature of women prompted bitter resistance from feminist psychiatrists. Therapists such as Lenore Walker and Paula Caplan objected to moves to include masochism in DSM under personality disorders, since they felt this was a continuation of the Freudian concept of feminine masochism. 4 In I924, Freud had formulated a theory that seemed to express in psychoanalytic terms the popular nineteenth century belief- supported using myths of female passivity in sexual and social relations- that women possessed a biological predisposition to masochistic behavior. But Freud's "feminine masochism" was only a fleeting and indistinct encounter with these myths. In a number of his successors, most notably Helene Deutsch, it had solidified into a blatant 16 Ill THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

statement of woman's biological predisposition to masochism. By including masochism in its diagnostic manual, the psychiatric profession appeared to be unwittingly perpetuating nineteenth-century myths of sexuality, gender, and power. This perpetuation was seen to lie not only in the diagnostic category itself but in its almost inevitable association with actual misuses of power against women. Feminist critiques of DSM-111 pointed out that it is a small step from the doctrine of feminine masochism to the doctrine of women's masochism and professional speculation "that victims of wife beating stay with their mates because of a secret liking for punishment," whereas in actual fact "the women are demoralized or terrorized." 5 The untenability of this claim had already been forcefully argued in the late 1970s by therapists such as Alexandra Symonds and Natalie Shainess. Drawing on Karen Horney's critique of Freud, Symonds cites studies into victims of violence to explain why a battered wife will often refuse to leave her husband, in spite of the grave physical danger she may face by remaining with him. 6 Shainess takes Horney's ideas even further, claiming that masochistic behavior in women is not simply a psychotherapeutic myth. It may well be the result of the same patriarchal models that gave rise to the myth of male domination and female submissiveness. In other words, "gender restriction in society has played a part in the evolution of a submissive and self-destructive style which does indeed increase [women's] vulnerability to violence." 7 Symonds concludes by urging therapists to abandon "the myth that women who are the unfortunate victims of violence are bringing it on themselves. This malignant belief has materially contributed to preventing mental health professionals from coming to the aid of large numbers of suffering victims." 8 For Symonds, psychiatric practice is an attempt on the part of men to legitimate their position of power. This point is also argued by Birgit Rommelspacher, who refers to instances of violence against women and children in which women project the blame onto themselves and exonerate the male perpetrators. 9 Rommelspacher argues that it is necessary to approach women's masochism as both a theoretical problem concerned with the mythologizing of power and a practical problem concerning the adaptation of women to a male monopoly on power. In this view, the struggle over the diagnosis of masochism appears in a completely different perspective. What the psychiatric profession has stubbornly regarded as a mental disorder may in fact be an elaborate performance of the powerlessness of victims, which has its origins in social relations of power and whose aim is to neutralize or at least render tolerable the misuses of power. For this reason, the subject diagnosed as a masochist or a Beaten Women and Technologies of Control

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sexual masochist may simply be acting out a ritual of self-protection masked as self-defeat. In 1987, Deborah Franklin pointed out that the definition of masochism may also have legal repercussions for female victims of violence, since DSM-III had become "an extremely powerful basis for decisions in court cases." 10 DSM is also potentially powerful in medical and insurance matters. Rommelspacher shows how in legal cases therapists and psychiatrists can play ambivalent roles by using psychiatric theory to render male violence understandable to the juridical administration, the perpetrator, and the victim. Violence is thereby explained away, and the male perpetrator's legal guilt is reduced. Rommelspacher speaks of a contest for different interpretations of events and ultimately for different- and sometimes mutually exclusive - representations of reality. What Rommelspacher has pinpointed is the way that the sexualization, mystification, and ultimately the legitimation of power relations are written into psychiatric practice. For this reason, the political struggle over the diagnosis of masochism is at the same time a struggle to relativize psychiatric knowledge. Rommelspacher suggests that it may be wise to do away with the concept of feminine masochism altogether, since "it veils the causes, conditions and roles in the arrangement of sexual hierarchies. Instead, we should concentrate on concepts that emphasize the problems of adaptation and adjustment of men and women to a male-dominated society." 11 If the concept of masochism is to survive at all, it will have to survive as a politicized one. In the words of Lynne Bravo Rosewater, head of the Feminist Therapy Institute, those who oppose attempts to reform the definition of masochism "accuse us of bringing politics into a scientific discussion .... What we're saying is that developing these categories has been a very political process all along, and all we've done is identify the politics." 12 The idea of politicizing psychiatry is certainly not a new one. Since the first generation of Freud's pupils, most notably Wilhelm Reich, the politicization of the profession had been debated among both radicals and conservatives alike. In the 196os, this debate was kept alive by the schools of radical psychiatry surrounding such figures as R. D. Laing. Laing prefigured the feminist criticism of masochism when he claimed that schizophrenia should be regarded as a strategy for living in a hostile environment. But this kind of critique of mental illness had been successfully kept out of DSM. When DSM appeared in 1952, it was the first official manual of the American Psychiatric Association to contain a glossary of descriptions of the diagnostic categories. The categories chosen were devised on the basis of Adolf Meyer's psychobiological view of mental disorders, which under18 Ill THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

stands them in terms of reactions of the personality to factors of a psychological, social, or biological nature. A second revised edition of DSIVI, which appeared in 1968, abandoned the use of one particular theoretical framework and chose instead to produce a pan-conceptual and objective glossary for the psychiatric professions. In order to achieve this objectivity, DSM-11 was coupled to the eighth edition of International Classification of Diseases (/CD-8), a statistical compilation of causes of morbidity, congenital abnormalities, accidents and violent deaths, and various other ill-defined conditions. It had been revised at approximately ten-year intervals, beginning with the First Revision Conference of the International List of Causes of Death, held in Paris in 1900. DSM-11 listed masochism and sadism under the general heading of"sexual deviations." By coupling sexual deviation to a latenineteenth-century compendium of causes of death, psychiatric concepts of masochism reinforced some of that age's most cherished assumptions about human sexual behavior. But the classification of masochism in DSM-11 was also accompanied by a growing discontent with concepts of normality- more specifically, biological normality. This gave rise to a number of serious misgivings concerning the diagnosis of masochism as a mental disorder. If masochism is not an entirely biological disorder, under what conditions and in what social contexts is it reasonable to diagnose it as a mental disorder? This seemingly manageable question opened onto a considerably more difficult one. As soon as we take social context into consideration, not only the diagnosis of masochism hut also the very concept of mental disorder become problematic, perhaps even untenable. In DSM, this problem first had to be confronted with respect to homosexuality. In December 1973, the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association abandoned the category of homosexuality as a mental disorder, replacing it with the category "sexual orientation disturbance." This category was a compromise arrived at under intense pressure from a strong gay lobby. Psychiatrists sought the degree of mental disorder in the individual's subjective response to his or her sexual orientation. The sexual orientation disturbance could be diagnosed as a mental disorder only in those cases where homosexuals are "disturbed by, in conflict with, or wish to change their sexual orientation" (DSM-111, 38o). When DSJW-/11 appeared in 1980, the category of sexual orientation disturbance was replaced with "ego-dystonic homosexuality," which supposedly retains the specificity of homosexuality while taking the "homosexual's" subjective satisfaction or dissatisfaction into consideration. An appendix to DSM-111 observed that a "significant proportion of homosexuals are apparBeaten Women and Technologies of Control

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ently satisfied with their sexual orientation, show no significant signs of manifest psychopatholot,'Y (unless homosexuality, by itself, is considered psychopatholot,>y), and are able to function socially and occupationally with no impairment" (DS!Vl-ITI, 38o). As John Leo points out, "ego-dystonic homosexuality" became "the world's first mental disorder that is only a disorder if the afflicted person thinks it is." 13 What had become apparent in the attempts to categorize homosexuality was that tried-and-true concepts of normality were beginning to succumb to political pressures aimed at loosening the constraints on sexual behavior. And in the process, they were beginning to encounter the fact that the psychiatric concept of normality has an ideological, a biological, a subjective, and a functional dimension, and that none of these dimensions corresponds on a one-to-one basis with the others. Or to put it differently, the question of sexual normality accented the fact that the modern subject is caught up in various systems of rationality and that these systems do not necessarily yield the same imperatives on social action. In DSlvl-111, the category of masochism also underwent a modification. As in the case of homosexuality, debates surrounding masochism began to understand mental disorder less in terms of "the etiology of the condition" and more in terms of "its consequences and the definition of mental disorder" (DSM-111, 380). This was to have far-reaching implications for the psychiatric- and popular- conceptions of what it meant to act in a biologically dysfunctional manner, and what it meant to act out the socially sanctioned performances of subjectivity. The new category of "sexual masochism" was intended to "avoid any confusion with non-sexual meanings" of the term (DS1V1-III, 380). The distinction aims at differentiating "masochistic personality traits, such as the need to be disappointed or humiliated" from those cases where "sexual excitement [is] produced in an individual by his or her own suffering" (DSM-III, 273-74). Psychiatry seemed to want to distinguish asocial behavior from unusual forms of sexual stimulation. In the introduction to DSM-III, care is taken to emphasize that the interest of psychiatry lies not with disturbed relations between an individual and society but with the actual "behavioral, psychological, or biological dysfunction." It was felt that "when the disturbance is limited to a conflict between an individual and society, this may represent social deviance, which may or may not be commendable, but is not by itself a mental disorder." 14 This observation comes at a time of increasing liberalization and tolerance with respect to sexual preferences. A person may practice unusual forms of sexual stimulation in private and still function publicly in a socially condonable manner. Later, Roy Baumeister was to state 20 II/ THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

that most masochists are "remarkably normal people" who are well educated and belong to above-average income and occupational groups. 15 Baumeister also notes that there is "a high quantity of masochistic sexual activity among successful politicians, judges and other important and influential men." 16 Psychiatry's increasingly liberal approach to questions of sexual preference was accompanied by ever greater attempts to separate private sexuality from public and social life. In the definition of masochism, this liberal move itself began to be problematic in an important way. The problem was the concept of normality. If practicing masochists cannot be thought of as suffering under any social dysfunction caused by their sexual habits, where does the dysfunction in masochism lie? DSM-111 clearly regards functional impairment or disability in masochism as a biological dysfunction. The biological dysfunction of the masochist can be thought of only as a refusal to seek physical pleasure in the first instance in the reproductive act itself. This is in itself a normalizing appraisal, and it casts a problematic light on the attempt to distinguish between disturbances that are "limited to a conflict between an individual and society" and those that are dysfunctions or impairments of biologically normal behavior. But how do we separate these two behavioral modes, if normality is itself socially determined and sexual activity a socially determined form of role-playing? What if that privileged sanctum of Western subjectivity, the bedroom of the heterosexual couple, in fact has fictional walls opening on all sides onto the social landscape? As a result of pressures brought to bear by feminist psychiatrists, the revised DSM-111-R (1987) included a category called "self-defeating personality disorder." This was intended to dissociate practices of sexual masochism from practices in which pleasurable experiences are avoided, or a person is "drawn to situations or relationships in which he or she will suffer, and prevents others from helping him or her." 17 The concept of self-defeating behavior was introduced "to avoid the historic association of the term masochistic with older psychoanalytic views of female sexuality and the implication that a person with the disorder derives unconscious pleasure from suffering" (DSM-111-R, 371). As this definition indicates, as soon as suffering is dissociated from pleasure, the pathological aspect of the "disorder" begins to become indistinct. What distinguishes the self-defeating personality disorder from such behavior as early-morning jogging, playing football, or wearing high heels? 18 In spite of this conceptual fuzziness, the new category represented an attempt to do justice to the legal implications of pathologizing masochism. The self-defeating personality disorder was not diagnosed if the behavior "occurs only in situations in which the person is responding to or anticipatBeaten Women and Technologies of Control

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ing being physically, sexually, or psychologically abused" (DSM-111-R, 37 1 ). In other words, behavior that might appear self-defeating could in fact possess a strategic value in cases of real physical danger. A cautionary statement at the beginning of the manual also warned against the applicability of clinical diagnoses to legal judgment. In addition, a note was added to the introduction to point out the cultural relativity of some diagnostic criteria. These conciliatory and cautionary moves did not prevent masochism from remaining a problematic category. When the fourth edition of DSlvi appeared in 1994, the proposed category of self-defeating behavior was abandoned.19 Here the reservations concerning the juridical application of DSM were stated in even stronger terms. Not only does the use of the "categories, criteria and textual descriptions" for forensic purposes involve "significant risks that diagnostic information will be misused or misunderstood" (DSl'vi-IV, xxiii), doubt is expressed concerning the interchangeability of the psychiatric and the legal diagnoses of mental disorder. "In most situations, the clinical diagnosis of a DSM-1V mental disorder is not sufficient to establish the existence for legal purposes of a 'mental disorder,' 'mental disability,' 'mental disease,' or 'mental defect'" (DSM-1V, xxiii). Such attempts at a radical dissociation of the psychiatric and legal fields hardly solves the diagnostic problems surrounding mental disorder in general and masochism in particular. Masochism continued to challenge what might be called the philosophy of psychiatry upon which the idea of a diagnostic manual and of mental disorder had been based in the first place. And it continued to challenge the idea of a clinical categorization of sexual practices. The introduction to DSM reflects on the difficulty in the concept of mental disorder. This difficulty does not simply result from "a distinction between 'mental' disorders and 'physical' disorders that is a reductionistic anachronism of mind/body dualism" (DSM-1V, xxi). This is certainly a weakness inscribed in the concept, but the real problem goes much deeper. It should by now be a commonplace that mental disorder is a by-product of mental order, or the various mental orders constituting subjectivity. The category of mental disorder articulates the disparity in the various rationalizations that situate subjectivity in a social field. If mental disorder is to be identified as a biological dysfunction, and if it is to be consistently dissociated from culturally determined behavior ~ and the DSM has attempted both since 1987 ~then the central concept upon which mental disorder is based dysfunction~ itself becomes difficult to uphold. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari observed in Anti-Oedipus that the subjective machine functions only by breaking down. 20 We could restate this, by saying that subjectivity functions within the social field only as a biological dysfunction. 22 Ill THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

Consequently, the distinction between the behavioral or psychological dysfunction on the one hand and political, religious, or sexual deviance on the other, becomes exceedingly difficult. Psychiatric debates on masochism, however, appear to be preoccupied with removing masochism from its social context in order to be able to talk about it in clinical terms. In this connection, it comes as no surprise that critics of psychiatric practice suspect the profession of doing little else than policing the limits of normality. Regarding clinical categorization, the concept of sexual masochism, which has been retained in DSM-1V, remains highly problematic- in fact, even more so than when it was introduced in DSM-1II. This is because of a slight modification in the diagnostic criteria in DSM-111-R and DSM-1V. Here the diagnosis of masochism comes to depend on "the act (real, not simulated) of being humiliated, beaten, bound, or otherwise made to suffer" (DSM-II1-R, 286-87; DS"~1-IV, 529). Such an easy distinction between the "real" and the "simulated" acts in masochistic rituals is impossible to uphold. Masochism is aimed at unsettling the boundary between the two, and even if it does nothing else, it succeeds in this. To disregard this point is to overlook one of the most important aspects of the literature on theories of masochism at least since the 1940s, if not since Freud's article of 1924- It is also to disregard extensive evidence on what masochists really do. Although the debates arising from DSMs classification of masochism bear the marks of a typical late-twentieth-century conflict concerning the limits of personal rights, the terms of these debates were clearly delineated in latenineteenth-century discourses on human sexuality. The concept of masochism is still marked by struggles that saw their heyday in the previous century. When we argue whether masochism can be considered a typically feminine trait, or where to draw the limits between masochism and normal sexual behavior, the issue is not only this single perversion. The concept of masochism is inextricably bound up with fundamental assumptions concerning the nature of the human being as a biological being and a social animal. In late-nineteenth-century thought, subjectivity was almost always mapped onto a broad theory of the biological constitution of the human species. At the same time, however, it was believed that such a mapping could not take place without at least some attempt to take account of the social and historical contingencies surrounding human individuals and groups. The two modes of mapping subjectivity- the biological and the sociohistorical- could not be completely reconciled. The result was the persistence of the famous nature-nurture debate within most of the human sciences. This debate was largely displaced by a number of developments in the early twentieth century- Freudian psychoanalysis, open systems theory, and an Beaten Women and Technologies of Control

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increasing attention to the function of social coding in human behavior, to mention but a few. There are, however, some basic ideas about the human being as a biological animal that have persisted, and these are essential for an understanding of current debates on masochism. In this view, there is something about the human condition that predisposes human beings to masochistic behavior. The biological essentialism inherent in this belief is sometimes countered with what might be called historical universalism, the claim that a masochistic disposition is inherent in all human social arrangements. To debate masochism in these terms is clearly to protract the nature-nurture debate. It may seem strange that we continue to cast pressing social issues into this latenineteenth-century mold. However, the persistence of biological essentialism and historical universalism is still widely in evidence in debates on masochism. The reason for this is simply that masochism as a concept relies heavily upon the juxtaposition of panhistorical universalism and biological essentialism. These two basic models have determined the concept to such an extent that they serve as epistemological axes onto which virtually all concepts of masochism continue to be plotted. This process is so pervasive that it seems almost impossible to discuss masochism without hypothesizing a biological necessity determining the masochistic impulse and, simultaneously, assuming that the social milieu is to be understood in terms of a sociological climate in which this essential biological force can flourish. In a pioneering paper on sadomasochism published in 1969, Paul Gebhard discusses the sociology of sadomasochistic behavior while placing it within a general biological framework. Gebhard claims that "it is no surprise to find sadomasochistic behavior in human beings," since analogous behavior is "common among other mammalian species wherein coitus is preceded by behavior which under other circumstances would be interpreted as combative." 21 The assumption "that we humans have built-in aggressive tendencies," 22 which was repeated tirelessly by the age that invented masochism as a perversion, was used as the foundation of a whole set of beliefs about aggression, civilization, and perversion. Gebhard is evidently drawing on the behaviorist vogue for understanding human behavior as an extension of animal behavior. This was particularly prevalent in the late 196os when Gebhard was writing, and it continues to be a powerful argument, not only in explaining the forms of social intercourse but also in claiming the ability and responsibility of civilized society to overcome the raw instincts of animal life. Writing in 1975, R. L. Sack and W Miller discuss the "biological influences of masochistic behavior." They cite a number of behaviorist experiments which point to essential masochistic 24 /// THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

responses in animals. Most of these experiments are aimed at demonstrating how a painful stimulus may evoke a positive response, sometimes a more intense positive response then a similar stimulus with a minimized painful element. Sack and Miller are cautious when it comes to the question of transposing these results onto human behavior, but in my opinion not cautious enough. Thus they question the relevance of behavior in young birds which "would seem to be quite 'masochistic' in the sense that punishment emanating from a stimulus increases the attraction rather than decreasing it." 23 But for reasons not explained, they accept similar results obtained with monkeys as evidence of biologically grounded masochistic behavior transposable onto the human situation. Presumably the birds are not close enough to humans to make their behavior analogous, whereas the monkeys, our close cousins, do the same things we do when we shed our civilized clothes. The view of masochism as a biologically founded condition is also perpetuated in the mythology of practicing masochists. "Nikolaus," a sixty-four-yearold heterosexual masochist interviewed by Thomas Wetzstein, put it like this: Man is a herd-animal. The strongest male leads the pack and all females belong to him, since the offspring has to be strong and fit for survival. The other males challenge the rights of the strongest, and they fight for the females. They lose time and again, making the females despise them. The strongest becomes more and more worthy of admiration and worship in the eyes of the females. With respect to him - and him alone - there develops an ecstatic feeling of dependence and protection, submission and belonging. Female slaves, if you want. At some stage the strongest stops being the strongest, is defeated and chased away, and now he experiences the despise of the females and the others. The losers have to live with this despise. They have no sex at all, although nature has equipped them richly for it.... The result is that young women tend to be slaves of a single master. If he's out of the picture, their submissiveness ends. He's despised and sent into the desert .... That's why the ageing man becomes more and more masochistic, if he follows his instinct. But if he follows his education, he wants to keep being "the woman's head," he makes himself ridiculous and causes problems. So the result is that young women and old men are (potentially) masochists, while young men and old women tend to dominance, which, with masochistic partners, can extend to sadism. Sadism as such isn't something that a person is born with. It follows the wishes of the masochistic partner - the despise for the loser. 24 As this comment indicates, the idea of a biological foundation for sadomasochistic behavior can serve as a self-defining myth propagated by its proBeaten Women and Technologies of Control

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ponents. It has the function of what Wetzstein, following A. Hahn, calls "biography generators," aimed at "generating and stabilizing" identities within the subculture. 25 Writers who emphasize the biological foundation of masochism not only lend theoretical credence to some of the most powerful myths of masochism and of human sexual behavior, they also participate in the generation of masochistic identity, as members of the subculture understand it. Assumptions about aggressive human nature are fundamental to most liberal accounts of the individual in society. This is why some of the most often cited and unreflective commonplaces of liberalism are founded on the insights of ethology. Ethology is the comparative science of human and animal behavior in a natural environment. It understands character as a result of the individual organism's relation to its environment. Liberalism has always had a close affinity to ethology. It emerges most eloquently in the classic contemporary statement of man as a social animal, Robert Ardrey's The Social Contract, published in 1970. 26 Ardrey self-consciously refers to Rousseau in his title, since he wishes to emphasize what he considers to be the latter's understanding of man as an essentially biological being, a component of nature. [Rousseau] looked to human origins for better understanding of the human outcome. From many a hint one may gather that he pondered over the way of the animal as of significance to the way of man, and one must bow to a visionary who centuries before the coming of ethology glimpsed a truth. And finally one must recognize that Rousseau's objective, no less nor more than my own, looked to nature and natural law for human solutions. 27 In a move that includes a deliberate nod to Darwin, Ardrey extends nineteenth-century models of the human animal in order to explain contemporary society. These models, he claims, are particularly pertinent when it comes to human aggression. Drawing on the work of Konrad Lorenz, the founder of ethology, Ardrey develops a concept of creative animal aggressivity fundamental to human society and to life itself: We obey a law that, for all we know, may be as ancient as life on this planet. We seek self-fulfilment. Within the limits and the directions of our individual genetic endowment we seek such a state of satisfaction as will inform us as to why we were born. We have no true choice. The force that presses on us is as large as all vital processes, and were it not so, then life would return to the swamp. If there is hope for men, it is because we are animals. 28 Like the nineteenth-century sexologists, Ardrey sees the essential force of life expressed in terms of the individual's aggressivity toward the world. 26 II/ THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

Ardrey's view on aggression in animals and humans is important for any study of masochism today, since it perpetuates the philosophy of human nature from which the theory of masochism was born. Paul Gebhard makes this clear when he explains that "sadomasochism is embedded in our culture since our culture operates on the basis of domination-submission relationships, and aggression is socially valued." 29 Statements like this indicate how close the current liberal debates surrounding violence remain to popular political issues of the age that invented masochism. Referring to these issues, Peter Gay notes how "the ethologists' and sociobiologists' perspectives barely conceal a conservative, even reactionary program for ruthless laissezfaire in the political and economic struggle for survival." 30 In his own characteristically lucid prose, Ardrey describes the "aggressiveness that commands us all, hickory trees or human beings," 31 as that positive force motivating human competition and ultimately all human achievement worth speaking of. No matter how this achievement is conceived, argues Ardrey, it must be understood as a manifestation of the inherent biological aggressivity that governs life. The challenge to liberal thought is to find that happy medium where aggressiveness, "the principle guarantor of survival," 32 is allowed to pursue its natural course, but not to proliferate to the extent that it works against the healthy constitution of society. The liberal mind has to come to terms with a concept of aggressiveness as both essential to human society and potentially threatening to it. The key question here becomes a formal one: which forms of expression of life's creative aggressivity are acceptable and which deserve censure? For the liberal concept of aggressiveness, it is not a question of suppressing aggression, but of safeguarding society's rules. As no population could survive without sufficient numbers sufficiently aggressive, so no population could survive were competitions customarily carried to deadly decision. And so has evolved throughout the species that body of rules and regulations of infinite variety which, while encouraging the aggressive, discourages the violent. The problem of man is not that we are aggressive but that we break the rules. 33 In this view, the positive achievements of human society have emerged from redirecting and developing the innate aggressivity of humans in a manner that curbs individual desire for the benefit of the species. Such a viewpoint leads straight to the heart of the liberal dilemma regarding violence. While recognizing the necessity of aggression as the fundamental expression of the organism's will to survive, liberalism must define with the utmost thoroughness which expressions of innate aggressivity are permissible and Beaten Women and Technologies of Control

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which are harmful. In other words, the liberal commitment to positive aggressivity is a commitment to a thorough juridical codification of social life. It is not possible to argue this point of view without a corresponding psychoeconomic theory of aggressivity's dispersal. Such a theory is required to explain what happens to the individual's drive for aggression when it is inhibited in the name of the common good. And alongside a psychoeconomy of aggression is a technology of control that centers not only on the identification and regulation of undue aggressivity but on the ways in which identification and regulation can themselves lead to denaturalized forms of expression in individuals. Accompanying the juridical technology of restraint is a sexual pathology of restraint's symptoms. The liberal commitment to controlled aggressivity can be upheld only within the framework of a meticulous technology of juridical control combined with a medical technology of individual pathological deviation and its therapy. These two social technologies are direct results and essential adjuncts to the theory of aggressivity propounded by the social Darwinists ever since the mid-nineteenth century. Liberal doctrines of controlled aggression are increasingly difficult to uphold. \Vetzstein notes that the context of sadomasochism today is a liberal \\Testern society that finds itself faced with a moral crisis in the apprehension of violence. 34 The difficulties facing young adults in integrating themselves into a social environment determined by work, education, law, and politics along with their accompanying technologies of control lead to the formation of subcultures, often characterized by alternative codifications of violence. In the political arena, parliamentary democracies repeatedly face their own failure in adequately dealing with widespread violence. The crises of the mid- I 990s in Somalia, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Ruanda, and various other parts of the globe indicate an essential tension between liberal discourses of inhibited violence and the need to employ violence in the name of liberal moral codes. In the extra-parliamentary sphere, alternative interest groups and alternative moral codes find the most adequate expression of resistance in a "dramatic staging of conflicts," 35 a staging that co-opts the media in order to render the resistance as effective as possible. The media in turn, responding to their own interests, produce a visual culture of ubiquitous violence, in which it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish "real" violence from "staged" violence. The question that these and other developments pose for liberal culture is how to define modes of defusing violence and regulating conflict in a world where violence is being increasingly simulated and dissimulated. A confrontation with masochism today faces a decisive difficulty- an understanding of the problem hovers at this moment between two hermeneutic 28 /// THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

frames. The hermeneutic frame in which masochism was invented is the biologistic mode, the agonistic mode we have inherited from the nineteenth century. In this mode, the masochistic move is interrogated as a deviation from what nature has offered the human species - a deviation that has arisen out of the social contract. The frame in which it has come under increasing scrutiny is the performative mode, interrogating the forms in which social interaction is carried out, a mode that requires a completely different story about "nature" from that offered by biologistic essentialism. If the model of agonistic nature seems adequate to masochism, this may be only because it has been inherited from the same hermeneutic frame out of which the perversion was invented. In this case, a study of masochism today might find itself confronting an entirely different model. The need for a new model is evident in a number of recent studies that attempt to understand masochism as communicative behavior. In spite ofhis ethological assumptions, Gebhard points to the importance of cultural imagery in creating the kind of stereotypes that sadomasochism likes to use. He emphasizes the way stereotypes resulting from the social valuation of aggression are shored up by mass-distributed media imagery. Consequently, aggression cannot be talked about only as a biological given. It is also culturally coded and valorized. "Even our gender relationships have been formulated in a frame work conductive to sadomasochism: the male is supposed to be dominant and aggressive sexually and the female reluctant or submissive." 36 As soon as we add this dimension to the concept of aggression, the question arises whether sadomasochism is really about biologically aggressive behavior or whether it is an enactment of cultural coding. The four decades since the appearance of the first edition of DSM have also been characterized by an increasing tendency to regard masochism as a social phenomenon. By the late 196os, deviant sexual behavior, a field that had traditionally been in the custody of psychology, criminology, and psychoanalysis, had increasingly been accepted as a legitimate field of study by sociologists, ethnologists, and anthropologists. This acceptance is evident in the foreword to Wetzstein's study, written by Erwin J. Haeberle, president of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Sozialwissenschaftliche Sexualforschung (German Society for Sociological Sexology): In contrast to therapists who have previously made a name for themselves in this field, such as Krafft-Ebing, Freud, Albert Eulenberg or Theodor Reik, researchers today should not occupy themselves as much with the study of individuals as with the psychological and social context in which they move. As more recent trends in American sexology have repeatedly Beaten Women and Technologies of Control

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emphasized, sexual behavior is "scripted behavior," that is, it follows certain interactively acquired individual and social "scripts," i.e., examples, patterns or definitions for sexual events and situations and their interpretations.37 The authors of this study, the Working Group for Social Research and Training at the University ofTrier under the leadership ofThomas A. Wetzstein, are careful to define the field of their research in terms of scripted behavior in a social context. Indeed, they conceive of their work as an "ethnologically oriented cultural analysis concerned with our own society," whose task is to "understand the patterns of meaning incorporated in the acts, rituals and objects with which members of special cultures communicate with one another." 38 This understanding of the role of research into sexual pathology is a radical departure from previous modes of investigation. It may ultimately require abandoning the concept of sexual pathology itself, since it attempts to do without concepts of normality and their accompanying value judgments. 39 A similar point of departure is found in studies of sadomasochism published by Thomas Weinberg and G. W Levi Kamel in I983 and by R. J. Stoller in I 99 I. 40 Such studies show that masochistic behavior cannot be understood simply in terms of biologically motivated aggression (be it active or passive) in association with sexual pleasure. It may be true that aggressive emotions are localizable in psychobiological terms, just as human aggression may be morphologically similar to primate aggression. But as Wetzstein's book eloquently shows, the foundation of masochism in biology (assuming that this can be demonstrated) becomes more or less irrelevant once we recognize the communicative dimension in masochistic behavior. Masochism is a staged acting out of aggression that acquires significance through its distinction from truly aggressive or violent behavior. As staged aggression, it may even be in a position to defuse social violence and to put forward alternative and socially viable models of coping with aggression in a manner that minimizes its negative effects. According to Wetzstein, one of the prime features of the sadomasochistic subculture is its ability to show that "it is, in principle, possible to find new rules of how to deal with destructive emotions." 41 This aspect of masochism is important, since it allows us to understand it as a strategy of recodification. Actions and emotions generally regarded as central to the aggressive self-fulfillment of socially sanctioned identities are redefined as play, as a game whose sole purpose is sexual pleasure. In order to achieve this end, masochism's practitioners have developed an elaborate recodification of the cultural stereotypes associated with violent 30 Ill THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

domination. Baumeister observes that masochists attempt to "remove their normal identity from awareness" and "construct an entirely new identity, at least in play or fantasy." 42 The construction of a new identity requires the solicitation of cultural stereotypes that can be recoded in the service of this new identity, but recoded in such a way that their activities do not exceed the bounds of the fantasy. This kind of game with violent emotions is, in Wetzstein's opinion, concerned with the relationships human beings have to themselves. Humans "not only suffer from emotions of fear and aggression, they also produce them, as children's games of Indians and martyrs at the stake already clearly show." 43 The dungeons of medieval castles, the torture rooms of the Inquisition, interrogation cells of the KGB, scenarios of the martyrs - these are but a small section of the repertoire of stereotypes that the S&1VI scene employs to this end. And in all cases, the stereotypes are recoded to function as actors in the masochistic play. The violence inherent in sadomasochistic behavior functions in a sexually stimulating manner only if it is marked as bearing the message "this is play." If we do accept an analogy between animal and human behavior- and I wish to reiterate that any such analogy should be treated with the utmost caution - then it seems at least here to offer some kind of insight into the nature of masochism. The coding of sadomasochistic behavior as play places it together with those modes of behavior that Gregory Bateson, writing in 1955, termed metacommunicative. 44 According to Bateson, communicative behavior, both in the animal and human spheres, can be understood only if we recognize how metacommunicative techniques render it meaningful. Metacommunication involves outlining certain acts or statements and contextualizing them on a more abstract level, in order to mark the information they contain as information and not only as action. 45 One of the most important metacommunicative contextualizations that Bateson observed was the marking of aggressive behavior as play. 46 When two monkeys engage in play, they may be performing what appears to be aggressive acts, but these acts are accompanied by metacommunicative markers containing the information "this is play." Consequently, the act of biting is recoded as nipping. The nip becomes a simulation of the bite, and consequently the player's relationship to the physical sensations it causes is modified. The significance of this observation for a theory of masochism is plain to see. Well before Ardrey formulated his views on the foundation of human action and society in biologically determined aggressivity, Bateson had provided the tools for differentiating between aggressivity as a performance of biological drives and aggressivity as communicative behavior. And he had shown how communicative framing could negate actions that otherwise apBeaten Women and Technologies of Control

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peared aggressive. In spite of insights such as these, theories of masochism continue to disregard its essentially communicative orientation, treating actions that are marked as information as if they were only actions. The result is that masochistic behaviors are divorced from the sociohistorical matrix that makes their communicative coding possible. They are then mapped onto a mythology of the human animal's universal biological constitution. Recent attempts to develop a sociology of masochism emphasize the importance of cultural specificity for an understanding of masochism. Aggression, violence, and its enactments can bear very different meanings in different cultural contexts. In his short foreword to Weinberg and Levi Kamel's collection of essays, Vern L. Bullough emphasizes that sadism and masochism are not only psychopathologies along the lines in which they were styled at the beginning of the twentieth century. They are "also forms of social behavior .... To look upon sadomasochism as a deviance or psychopathology is not enough; we must also take into account the fact that it reflects a deepseated ambivalence about sexuality in our society." 47 This perspective brings with it a willingness to pose questions concerning "the essence of S&M as a social behavior." 48 And like all social behavior, it is "characterized by socially produced and shared fantasies." 49 Writing on the cultural valorization of pain, David Morris objects to the argument that sadism and masochism "represent permanent dispositions of the human psyche. Psyches, like pains, ... always exist in people who inhabit specific cultures at particular moments in time." 5° Freud showed us that a disposition of the psyche is always overdetermined with respect to cultural coding. As I have attempted to indicate above, however, cultural coding is too easily reduced to "human nature" when it comes to the question of masochism. The way in which culturally coded identities are produced as "dispositions" provides the focus for Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. In this book, Butler attempts to show that the biological constitution of gender, which is generally taken as the ontological foundation of culture, is itself a cultural product. 51 The use of the word "disposition" by both Butler and Morris should indicate that a similar mechanism is at work in the construction of gender and in the cultural valorization of aggression. Culture does not issue from a spectrum of biologically given and fixed dispositions to sexuality. It produces these dispositions. The modes of behavior that tie violence to sexuality- modes involving domination and submission, the exercise of power, and the marking of power's victims - are not to be explained through recourse to a biological model of sexuality. Instead, the biological model itself issues from the way power and sexuality are connected in cultural practice. Because biological essential32 Ill THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

ism seeks to disguise the cultural production of gender, the dispositions that seem to form the natural foundation of gender are themselves inscribed with attempts to conceal the process of cultural production. They are "the result of a process whose aim is to disguise its own genealogy." Any attempt to understand the disposition to gender must recognize it as "traces of a history of enforced sexual prohibitions which is untold and which the prohibitions seek to render untellable." 52 In such a view, one of the central aims of speaking or writing about sexuality must be to show how culturally determined prohibitions work to tie sexual practices to fixed gender positions. Another aim is to show how at the same time these prohibitions are subject to strategies that seek to mask this process. Although Butler does not discuss the problem of masochism, certain issues arising from her argument will have to be considered. One such issue is the question of the biological foundation of gender. The manner in which Butler formulates her argument indicates that biologistic arguments on human behavior, such as Ardrey's, can still generate vehement counterdiscourses. If sexuality and gender are determined by biological predispositions, then it makes sense to explain aggressivity as biologically founded, as Ardrey does, and to understand aggressive sexual behavior in biological terms. If, however, they are seen as cultural constructs, then aggressivity and violence take on a completely different significance in sexual life. They become accessories to the cultural stereotypes informing our understanding of gender, and consequently the struggles surrounding aggressivity in sexuality are inseparable from struggles surrounding cultural stereotypes. As a result, inquiries into the nature of masochism enter the arena of cultural critique, which, in Butler's words, seeks "to expose the contingent acts that create the appearance of a naturalistic necessity." 53 This unmasking effect is built into the practice of sadomasochism, as the advocates of S&M emphasize time and again. Writing on Pat Califia's Macho Sluts, Ian Barnard uses Butler's theories to examine the ambiguity of representing S&M practices. 54 Califia, whose collection of stories was published in 1988, is one of the most outspoken proponents oflesbian sadomasochism. In Macho Sluts, she gives a complex picture of the ambiguous practices and fantasies of S&M in the self-image of lesbian sexuality. This ambiguity centers around the question whether the violence in S&M scenarios and fantasies is real or not. Barnard argues that Califia's writing shows how S&M unsettles the distinction between reality and fantasy. Following Butler, he emphasizes that "because the 'real' is itself a construct ... the 'real' is always determined in relation to fantasy." 55 Since shared fantasies are always historically determined, this requires us to view masochism in historical terms, Beaten Women and Technologies of Control

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resisting universalizing theories of subjectivity. It is precisely this historicizing moment that has been lacking in debates on masochism. Probably the most difficult aspect of sadomasochistic imagery is the complex game it plays with reality. As Barnard notes, masochism cannot do without this game. It draws its titillating function from the blurring of boundaries between fantasy and reality. This is clearly evident in the most contentious aspect of S&M representation, sadomasochistic pornography. Like all pornography, the sadomasochistic variety relies heavily upon its ability to guarantee the reality of its scenarios. Barnard observes that "among consumers of nondocumentary film genres, porn viewers are unique in their demand that the action represented 'actually' be taking place." 56 There are a number of codified guarantees which operate to this end. Linda Williams notes the hard-core (male) pornographic camera's insistence on peering into orifices, catching moments of penetration and folluwing trajectories of sperm. The porn film knows no limits to the banality of its scripts, and this is of no consequence, as long as the fucking looks real. A further guarantee of pornographic reality is, according to Barnard, its ability "to turn the reader/viewer/listener/participant on." ' 7 This ability in turn relies upon the codified guarantee of referentiality. Here sadomasochistic pornography operates with its own set of codes. The sadomasochistic porn consumer places little value on the sight of sweating bodies squirming in the missionary position. What he (or she - if we believe the producers of this genre) 58 wants is visible marks on the flesh, authentic looks of cruelty or pain in the eye, real blood, real blows, real tears. In this respect, S&M porn shares Judith Butler's discontent with the way culture and theory map sexual desire onto sexual stereotypes. Both seek ways of representing masochism outside medical and legal discourse or any other discourse aimed at normalizing human sexual practices. But unlike Butler's theoretical representations, those of the S&M subculture constantly seek to elude academic language. Academic language characteristically tries to understand or to categorize the subcultural experience, whereas the practicing sadomasochist wants neither to be understood nor categorized. The self-representation ofS&M tries hard to circumvent the controlling strategies that our culture has built up around representations of sexuality. Like all subcultures, the S&M sexual subculture is engaged in an ongoing struggle to retain its distinct identity. This is often a difficult enterprise, since it conflicts with attempts to portray sadomasochism as an alternative sexual practice which our society should tolerate and not stigmatize. The characteristic insider images of sadomasochism, and with it the iconography of S&M pornography, are not the concern of this book. 59 What 34 Ill THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

interests me is the way subculture-sadomasochistic imagery filters into mainstream cultural representation, influencing the way we think about subjectivity and sexuality. One of the representational forms most decidedly influenced by sadomasochistic imagery is the cinema. Masochism as a theme has arguably accompanied cinema since its early years. This seems particularly applicable where masochism is interpreted as socially coded feminine submissiveness. Films of the 1930s and 1940s have attracted attention in this respect. Gaylyn Studlar has analyzed the collaboration of Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich in the 1930s, attempting to isolate a masochistic aesthetic inherent in their work. 60 Seen in this way, it becomes apparent that masochistic themes are very important in our culture as a way of articulating power and sexuality. And if we take into account the way late-nineteenth-century European culture stylized woman as a predatory beast, there seems to be a direct thematic continuity between the dominatrices of that period and Marlene Dietrich's singing "Falling in love again ... can't help it." The iconography of masochism in these films remains relatively subdued - perhaps even desexualized - compared with a number of films of the 1970s and 198os. Here, sadomasochistic imagery is used increasingly in more or less mainstream cinema in order explore sexual relations as relations of power. Carol Siegel has recently provided a useful reading of the masochistic theme in Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974). 61 In the 1940s, Wilhelm Reich was already openly addressing the connections between sexual submissiveness and fascism, thematized in Cavani's film. David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) was a highly successful film that used sadomasochistic imagery to sketch the dark and perverse double life lurking behind the well-tended gardens and manicured lawns of suburban America. What is striking about such films is their insistence that this kind of imagery is not only a useful tool in understanding sexuality and subjectivity but also a widely accessible one. The implication is that the subjective and sexual ambivalences of which masochism speaks are issues that concern a group much wider than the subcultures engaging in sadomasochistic rituals. The critical attention given to masochism in film seems to confirm its importance as a way of articulating ambiguities in gender and power. Critics are divided about whether to reject masochistic themes (particularly women's masochism) as ideologically suspect or to praise their ability to subvert ideologically loaded stereotypes. On the one hand, critics tend to read masochism in film as a female sexual stereotype; they regard masochism as an entrenchment of the cultural conventions that assign women to positions of powerlessness in social life. This position was initially stated in an influential Beaten Women and Technologies of Control

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article by Laura Mulvey, which relies heavily upon Freud's early attempts to align masochism and scopophilia. 62 In 1905, Freud mapped the masochistic or passive form of the sexual drive onto the passive form of scopophilia (exhibitionism). Sadism is similarly mapped onto voyeurism. This model continues to hold much critical force. Critics such as Jan Mouton still argue that since "the female spectator is called upon to identify with a female figure who is powerless, victimized, ill, and/or wounded, she cannot derive pleasure from this experience, but only a greater sense of worthlessness." 63 There have, however, been a number of voices arguing that masochism in film might serve not to reinforce cultural stereotypes but to subvert them. This is the basis on which Studlar criticizes Mulvey. 04 Julia Knight has also put forward a strong case in support of the subversive potential of masochistic imagery in the New German Cinema. 65 Knight citesJustJaeckin's film version of Story of 0 in support of this view, claiming that here masochism presents a real possibility of "sexual pleasure for women." 66 The critical view that masochism can subvert culturally coded stereotypes has been important in film representations of masochism. This can be seen in Monika Treut and Elfie Mikesch's Seduction: The Cruel Woman (r985), a film version of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs. Treut wrote her dissertation on the image of woman in Sacher-Masoch and SadeY In her film, she uses male masochism to reverse the power game that SacherMasoch had built up around masochistic rituals. Treut portrays her male masochist as a pathetic creature playing his last hand in a desperate bid to force love from his female idol. What he reaps instead is scorn. This fits nicely with his masochistic designs, however, and the woman must seek alternatives to domination if she wants to free herself entirely from the male masochist's power games. Finally, she finds liberation only in laughter, a laughter that refuses to play the masochistic game as a game of power, insisting instead that it is a game of pleasure. The unsettling force of laughter is also the final statement in Robert van Ackeren's A Woman in Flames (Die ftambierte Frau) (1982-83). Like Treut, van Ackeren uses masochism to question stereotyped gender roles. And like her, he ends his film with the triumphant communal laughter of women. However, van Ackeren was able to transcend the relatively small cult market that Trent's film captured, and A Woman in Flames became his most successful film to date, both within Germany and internationally. By the time A Woman in Flames appeared, Van Ackeren had been experimenting for anumber of years with film depiction of the "'everyday terror' of bourgeois society, particularly in love relationships." 68 The film's tone varies between softporn and kitsch and is appropriate to its theme. The 1984lexicon of German 36 Ill THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

Cinema CineGraph describes the main concern of the film as the discrepancy between "'marketable' and 'genuine' feelings, love and business relationships." In van Ackeren's depiction, the genuine and the marketable, love and business, come to revolve increasingly around what CineGraph refers to as the protagonists' "discovery of unexpected abysmal depths within themselves." And this discovery is tied to sexual violence and the ambivalent desires it can arouse. Van Ackeren uses male masochism to articulate the difficult place of male and female desire within stereotypical configurations of sexuality, money, power, and their institutions, particularly marriage. The film tells the story of Eva, who leaves her marriage to a successful husband in order to become a prostitute. This move follows the same logic of desire that Eva has discovered within marriage. Later she tells her husband: "A woman who's married doesn't get paid for it. Unmarried women who live off of men are flirts. And if you do it professionally, you're a whore. And I'm going to be the best paid whore, because I offer men the least." Sexual desire finds its expression in bourgeois society only by entering a marketplace, whether this be the market of marriage or of prostitution. Taking this assumption as its starting point, van Ackeren's film asks whether it is possible to imagine a realm of sexuality that can withdraw from the marketplace. In other words, is there a sexuality that escapes the commodification of bodies, and are there movements of desire independent of the movements of money? Van Ackeren explores this question by placing Eva within a relationship where the marketability of sex is unproblematic from a moral standpoint, and where private relationships appear to be independent of the demands of money. Eva falls in love with Chris, a male prostitute. The two move into an apartment together, and their relationship soon blossoms into a beautifully ironic situation where each pursues his or her own "work" and spends leisure time with the other. By isolating a marketable sexuality outside of their relationship to each other, and by openly admitting to the monetary foundation of sexuality in society, they hope to preserve a realm of subjective desire where sexuality has become freed from the forces of money. However, things soon begin to sour, and it is here that male masochism reveals itself as a problem in the regime of sexuality and power in which Eva and Chris find themselves. The first problem lies in the different approaches that Chris and Eva hold toward the marketing of their own sexuality. Chris sells stereotypes of male sexuality to women, on the understanding that all they want from him is the kind of reassurance and protection that they are not getting from their husbands. Eva, however, is pursuing a more demonic line of sexuality. She soon Beaten Women and Technologies of Control

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discovers that her clients believe it is her obligation in their contractual agreement to fulfill their seA'lial fantasies, which turn out to be almost exclusively based on cultural stereotypes. Meanwhile, Chris believes that Eva is occupied in giving her customers "what they want," just as he is. For Chris, the marketing of stereotypical sexuality is a temporary arrangement, a way of earning money to invest in order to be able to buy a restaurant and lead a normal life. For Eva, it is a way of exploring the limits of sexuality as a commodity. As the story draws to a climax, Chris becomes ever more curious and ever more insistent in demanding why Eva is so successful. Chris: You can't tell me these guys pay you so well for something they could get anywhere. I want to know what you do to earn so well. Eva: I just mistreat them. And the worse I treat them, the more they pay me. Chris: You take money for humiliating them!? I don't want you to mistreat men! \:V'hereas Chris believed that Eva's marketing of sexuality was a simple commodification of the "normal" sexual act, he now discovers masochism at the heart of male desire; and whereas Eva believed she was pursuing the logical consequences of sexuality in society, she now discovers her own sadism. Repeating the fin de siecle stereotype of woman's hidden sadistic nature, she asks: "\:v'hat am I capable of? ... The idea scares me." The climax and break between Chris and Eva comes when Chris spies on one of her sessions. Van Ackeren treats the viewer to a prolonged and intense interchange of gazes between Chris and Eva. Chris looks on with fascination, disgust, and horror as Eva ties her victim to a chair, gags him with a chain and applies nipple clamps. Eva, who soon becomes aware that she is being observed, looks back with pride and defiance. The situation that van Ackeren depicts is complex, and it disallows a simple mapping of masochism onto gender. In a model of scopophilic desire in cinema apparently conforming perfectly to that proposed by Mulvey, Van Ackeren begins with the most obvious application of Freud's theory of scopophilia to cinematic representation. He assigns the male the role of active observer, since Chris's desire is to solve the central enigma of the narrative. The female is the passive object of the gaze, since it is in her actions and her body that the solution to the enigma is sought. Woman becomes the "image" and man the "bearer of the look." Nevertheless, van Ackeren reveals how simplistic such a cinematic Freudianism can be when it comes to representations of male masochism. Chris's active gaze encounters not a passive female body but an active one, and the object of feminine action is a man 38 II/ THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

whose pleasure lies in a passive sexual role that he has actively initiated. And in looking not only onto Eva's body but into her eyes, Chris's gaze encounters another active gaze. This gaze challenges any claim Chris might have to domination. But it also goes further and challenges the foundations of the film itself, the active probing into enigma, the demystification that the narrative seeks to achieve. Chris's search for truth does not simply encounter male masochism in one particular individual. He encounters the helplessness of his own position, a man seeking to master both Eva and his own life. And consequently he encounters the failure of his own epistemophilic and scopophilic desire. The masculine stereotype of probing activity is cast into a forced passivity. Chris becomes the victim of a scopophilic rape. This moment is probably the most disturbing moment in van Ackeren's film. It is here that Chris encounters an ambiguous mixture of masochism and sadism at the heart of male sexuality. But what he discovers in the process is the secret of Freudian sexuality- its impossible attempt to combine selfpreservation with self-destructiveness and its realization that there is no difference between the two. Kaja Silverman has demonstrated that a response to male masochism such as that expressed by Chris must be seen as a response to a deep-seated crisis in male subjectivity. In a discussion of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, she shows how Fassbinder uses male masochism in order to articulate a utopian principle which he couples to destruction and self-destruction. Masochism also serves to express homoerotic desire. Consequently Silverman understands male masochism as a ruin of male subjectivity.69 This function of masochism is also found in Fassbinder's In a Year ofThirteen Moons. Here masochism allows the subject to refuse those cultural imperatives that structure subjectivity according to stereotypical models of sexuality and dominance. In Silverman's reading, Fassbinder presents male masochism as a strategy for survival in the face of "life situated at the razor's edge of negativity, predicated upon the absolute refusal of all of those cultural fictions which work both to cover over the abyss at the center of subjectivity, and to disavow the terrible realities of sexual, social and economic oppression." 70 This reading of masochism as a survival strategy is becoming one of the most widely popular ways of looking at it. But masochism is more than a strategic response to an existential crisis or to a breakdown of culturally endorsed identities confronted by an abyss at the center of subjectivity. It is an erotic attachment to the breakdown of identity- an attachment that produces the abyss in the name of bodily pleasure. This returns us to a central problem in the concept of masochism. Is the kind of destmctiveness and self-destructiveness that sadomasochism celebrates the real nature of sexuality, or is it simply a representational strategy Beaten Women and Technologies of Control

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aimed at enhancing sexual pleasure? Once again, we are facing questions of representation and reality. And again, we have to realize that the production of masochistic pleasure relies upon blurring the boundaries between reality and its representations. In this way, it forces us to ask difficult questions about how representations of reality are used both to produce pleasurable situations and to produce and reproduce situations of domination and exploitation. This blurring of boundaries emerges in Carol]. Clover's discussion of the film genre that has become the most popular coupling of sexuality and domination: the horror film. Arguing along lines similar to Silverman's, Clover claims that masochism in horror films functions as a subversion of the social order of subjectivity. But at the same time, she points to its essential ambivalence. On the one hand, the "masochistic aesthetic is and has always been the dominant one in horror cinema." 71 In its most abhorrent form, the horror film uses an ideology of female masochism and an aesthetics of submissiveness, turning sexual violence against women into a visually captivating experience. Here Clover claims that rape sequences in horror films allow men to identify pain with pleasure and to convince themselves that rape is a situation invited by the victim. On the other hand, Clover goes on to show that the simple mapping of sadism and the active gaze onto masculinity, and masochism and the passive gaze onto femininity, does not work in the horror film. This is because the horror film characteristically explicates male sadism and resolves narrative enigma by the agency of an active female figure who, in an act of supreme violence, metes revenge upon the male sadist. This resolution is, according to Clover, an unsettling of gender roles, since it casts male sadism into a masochistic receipt of violence, and it portrays the avenging female in command of a stereotypical array of phallic symbols - the knives, chain saws, and various other phallic instruments of revenge. Gender becomes a theatrical posture that can easily be adopted by the "wrong" sex. This allows Clover to claim that the horror genre uses male masochism to undermine male subjectivity. Where the bulk of the film narrative concerns itself with the violent exposition of male sadism, the pleasure of the viewer lies in the unsettling of sadism and masochism, of looking and being watched. In Clover's reading, the pleasure that the horror film accords its predominately adolescent male audience lies not in male sadism but in the precarious clandestine dismantlings and reversals of gender stereotypes. Williams holds a similar point of view. In her 1990 study of pornography, she claims that hard-core sadomasochistic pornography, like the slasher films investigated by Clover, depends upon a central subversion of the simple "male sexuality is active" and "female sexuality is passive" equations. Al40 Ill THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

though she believes that "bisexual identifications may ... not be quite so subversive as Clover suggests," she agrees that they introduce a fluidity into the biological categories of sexuality, thereby making it easier for certain kinds of viewers to interrogate the boundaries of stereotypical dualities, such as masculinity/femininity, sadistic/masochistic, active/passive, and oedipal/ pre-oedipaJ.7 2 Williams argues that hard-core representations of sadomasochistic sexuality add an additional complexity to such dualities by unsettling the functions of power that have traditionally been assigned to male sexuality - even, she claims, in cases where women are cast in the masochistic roles. This is because, contrary to Mulvey's analysis of film identification, pornography relies upon an unconscious "projective identification with the pornographic female." 73 This identification with the female masochist places the female viewer in the paradoxical position of actively seeking her own pleasure through the masochistic ritual. This is not an unproblematic claim. It leads directly back to psychiatric and juristic questions surrounding masochistic acts as legitimate forms .of pleasure seeking. Although masochistic codifications may blur the boundary between real pain and the representation of pain, and although they may use stereotypical images of sexual and cultural violence to do so, we are still faced with the problem of an adequate legislative definition and codification of sexual violence. But claims regarding the subversiveness of masochism also force us to ask whether a representational code that uses stereotypes of domination can ever free itself entirely from the domination inherent in those codes. The psychiatric and juristic problems surrounding the definition of masochism are closely connected to the question of gender stereotypes in popular representation. These problems share a central uncertainty about how domination and sexual violence relate to stereotypes of sexuality. This uncertainty is found in juristic debates, in controversies such as that surrounding DSM, and in cultural productions using masochistic imagery. In all these cases, we see a central ambivalence in the concept of masochism. If we are to understand what makes masochism important in our culture today, we will have to think of this ambivalence in terms of an essential uncertainty in liberal society concerning how performances of bodily pleasure can and should be mapped onto cultural constructions of gendered identity. And accompanying this is an uncertainty concerning the technologies of control which our society finds appropriate and adequate to enforcing this mapping. These uncertainties are probably the central moving force in the emergence and vicissitudes of masochism, not only as a theoretical and clinical construct, but as a self-conscious staging of sexuality. Beaten Women and Technologies of Control

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The ambivalent use of technologies of control forms the focus of the classic contemporary work on masochism, Story of 0. This novel appeared in July 1954 with the French publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert under the title Histoire d'O, written by an unknown author, Pauline Reage, and prefaced by the eminent critic and later member of the Academie Franc;aise, Jean Paulhan. 74 The enigma of Pauline Reage gave rise to a great deal of speculation concerning the true identity of the author, since it was generally agreed that such an accomplished book could not be the work of a newcomer. The identity behind the pseudonym remained a mystery for many years. It now seems certain that Pauline Reage is the pseudonym for Anne Declos, a French critic and translator better known under another pseudonym, Dominique Aury. The undeniable stylistic competence of the author together with Paulhan's endorsement certainly contributed both to the novel's status and to the divided response it received. Although it was treated as a serious work of avantgarde literature and awarded the Prix des deux Magots in 1955, it was also decried as a pornographic and scandalous work and was the subject of police investigations, including the interrogation of Pauvert and Paulhan. Story of 0 tells of "the progressive willful debasement of a young and beautiful Parisian fashion photographer, 0, who wants nothing more than to be a slave to her lover Renee."c' In Susan Sontag's description: The narrative opens in Paris ... but most of the subsequent action is removed to more familiar if less plausible territory: that conveniently isolated chateau, luxuriously furnished and lavishly staffed with servants, where a clique of rich men congregate and to which women are brought as virtual slaves to be the objects, shared in common, of the men's brutal and inventive lust. There are whips and chains, masks worn by the men when the women are admitted to their presence, great fires burning in the hearth, unspeakable sexual indignities, floggings and more ingenious kinds of physical mutilation, several lesbian scenes when the excitem~nt of the orgies in the great drawing room seems to flag. In short, the novel comes equipped with some of the creakiest items in the repertoire of pornography. 76 This "creakiness" extends to the narrative structure. Reage's book is a string of erotic episodes loosely held together by a syntax of sudden and violent seductions. It follows the cliches of sadomasochistic settings, characters, and actions, as they existed in abundance at the time of the novel's appearance. These cliches center on technologies of control and their attendant gestures and attitudes. The whips, chains, and masks that Sontag men-

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tions are rendered "creaky" in the masochistic narrative because they must first become cliches before they can become erotic. Nevertheless, there are aspects which set this novel apart from the large number of S&M porn novels with which it might be confounded. Chief among these is its narrative complexity. The novel begins with the delivery of 0 by her lover Renee into the hands of a community of libertines of which Renee is a member. A third-person narrator describes the scene in the present tense. The narrator struggles to find the adequate perspective and style for the events in question. Stylistically, the closest comparison is to be found in Kafka, and not in those authors who might spontaneously spring to mind - Sade, Sacher-Masoch, Genet, Baudelaire, or even the considerable corpus of under-the-counter S&M pornography sold at that time. 77 Like Kafka, Reage uses a technique of oscillating and ambiguous but realistic narrative perspectives, interspersed with reflections on these oscillations, in order to cloak events in a dreamlike atmosphere. And like Kafka's, Reage's eroticism is an erotics of control and its technology. Sontag compares the novel to one of Sade's and credits it with having "a definite movement; a logic of events, as opposed to Sade's static principle of the catalogue or encyclopaedia." 78 Its literary merit is evident in the comparative modeling, will, and development of the central figure. 0 learns, she suffers, she changes. Step by step, she becomes more what she is, a process identical with the emptying out of herself. In the vision of the world presented by Story ofO, the highest good is the transcendence of personality. The plot's movement is not horizontal, but a kind of ascent through degradation. 0 does not simply become identical with her sexual 1 availability, but wants to reach the perfection of becoming an object.7 9 In other words, Stmy of 0 is a perverted Bildungsroman. The telos of O's personal development is precisely this negation of person that Sontag observes. But her negation is quite different from that which marks more traditional novels of entelechy. In one of the most famous representatives of the Bildungsroman genre, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795), the personality of the protagonist attains maturity through the subordination of will to the good of the community. The willful and egotistic young man of the opening pages turns into a philanthropic member of a society of noble individuals. This is the process that 0 perverts. She goes through gestures of subordination whose purpose is to uphold a fiction of devotion, her love for Renee. But when devotion becomes masochistic, love becomes perverse. Consequently, O's idealistic attachment to Renee becomes displaced onto an

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erotic attachment to the performance of submission. And submission centers more and more on the detached body parts and the mechanical instruments with which submission is enforced, rendering the persons who administer punishment increasingly peripheral. The moving entelechial force of the story is the eroticization of the machinery of punishment. Replacing eroticized individuals is a dialectic of control over and submission to this machinery. 0 moves in a world in which the technology of torment is eroticized, not the tormentors. Story of 0 thus tells of a struggle for subjective control over an increasingly monstrous and increasingly erotic technology of domination. O's problem is not how to escape punishment but how to perform her own subjective attachment to the machinery which holds her suspended between her erotic nonbeing and her actual destruction. This quality seems to support jessica Benjamin's reading of the novel as a Hegelian parable of the masochist's quest for protection and recognition. "Story of 0 confronts us boldly with the idea that people often submit, not merely out of fear, but in complicity with their own deepest desires." 80 But the actions of 0 are not only a submission in search of affirmation. They are a submission which is required by an eroticization of control. No matter how hard the narrator tries to convince us that 0 sustains her courage through the power oflove, the narration itself reveals something quite different. For, as Michelle Masse has convincingly shown, the "love" relation in the story is constantly disappearing behind the pornography of submission and what might be called a theology of assent. RI O's assent to humiliation is presented as an act of free will, which "bound her as much as had the leather bracelets and chains" (SO, So). It is not an erotic attachment to her tormentors that motivates 0. On the contrary, her willful submission to Sir Stephen is erotic because it evokes an already eroticized technology of bodily control. The book's erotic force emerges wherever we find tormentor and tormented alike joined together as peripheral actors in a technology of control. This is evident in any of the numerous scenes of torment in the novel. When bodies become erotic objects in Story ofO, they do so by becoming machines attached to this technology. They become collections of dismembered and mechanical body parts which, in working O's torment, have ceased to be part of a human subject. Thus after having been beaten by Sir Stephen, 0 reminisces on "all the mouths that had probed her mouth, all the hands that had seized her breasts and her belly, all the members that had been thrust into her" (SO, 108). She regards this as proof of the sanctity of her submission. And again, these dismembered body parts are not erotic as a result of their belonging to an erotic person; the actors become erotic through being attached to eroticized body parts. Thus when Sir Stephen 44 Ill THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

brushes the tip of O's breast with his finger, 0 observes that for him this was "a game, or the guise of a game, nothing more, or a check, the way one checks to ascertain whether a machine is functioning properly" (SO, 85). The erotic surrender of control extends to the narrative itself. Mter the conventional, if slightly unusual beginning, the novel begins again, shifting tenses: "Another version of the same beginning was simpler and more direct: the young woman, dressed in the same way, was driven by her lover and an unknown friend" (SO, 5). What is strange about this second beginning is that although it repeats the same basic sequence of events, it differs in a few central points. In the first beginning, Renee, without exchanging a word with the driver, orders 0 to roll down her stockings, remove her garters and panties, instructs her how to sit, and removes her brassiere. When the car has come to a halt in front of a small private home, he orders her to go to the door, ring the doorbell and follow the orders of whoever should open. In the second beginning, it is the driver who "explained to the young woman that her young lover had been entrusted with the task of getting her ready, that he was going to tie her hands behind her back, unfasten her stockings and roll them down, remove, her garter belt, her panties and her brassiere, and blindfold her" (SO, 5). In the first sequence, 0 is neither bound nor blindfolded. Both versions, however, are told in the same descriptive and authoritative language. Consequently, our reader's faith in narrative authoritythat faith which, as always, motivates our seduction into the story -leads us into a sequence of events over which narrative control is constantly threatening to falter. At the same time, the willful play with reference introduces a violence into the narrative, in which the reader appears to be a victim of an arbitrary violation of narrative convention. At the same time, the reader is cast into the fetishist role that 0 will soon adopt. In the two beginnings, the reader is forced to see the persons surrounding 0 as arbitrary and interchangeable, while what remains constant is the technology of control to which she submits. This initial interplay of seduction, failure, and violation on the level of narrative control prefigures the way in which 0 willfully allows herself to be seduced into relinquishing control over her body and her sexuality. Reage is doing something more than presenting the protagonist's masochistic submission to a sexuality determined by powerlessness. She is also allowing the presentation to be "contaminated" by this same collaboration of the erotics and power of narration. Consequently the reader enters O's game, in which erotic experience centers on a constant struggle for control. The technical medium of control itselfbecomes erotic: for the reader, the book; for the protagonists, the whip and chains. In light of Reage's skillful manipulation and violation of the implicit comBeaten Women and Technologies of Control

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mitments that constitute the act of reading, it is not surprising that the book was launched under the caption "dangerous." The books sets seductive traps, not only for 0 but for the reader. It seems to describe victimization and to produce it in reading. In his critical introduction to Reage's book, "Happiness in Slavery," Paul han consciously reflects on the book's danger: From every indication, Story ofO is one of those books which marks the reader, which leaves him not quite, or not at all, the same as he was before he read it. Such books are strangely involved with the influence they exert, changing in accordance with that influence. Mter a few years, they are no longer the same books, and consequently the initial reviewers soon seem to be a bit simple-minded. 82 Of course, Paulhan himself is one of these initial reviewers, and he himself is one of the "marked" readers. His experience of being marked is one of submission to the book's influence, of abandoning the critic's insight in the face of the book's dreamlike power. The act of submission casts the critic into a masochistic mode of aesthetic pleasure, where "the simplest thing for me to do is admit that I hardly know what to make of it, or what it all means. I advance through 0 with a strange feeling, as though I am moving through a fairy tale" (HS, xxiii). Paulhan's seduction is like O's. It follows from an unexplained and Kafkaesque- yet purposeful, reflective, and highly pleasurable- abandonment of the critical will. Sabine d'Estree, the translator of the English version, is even more explicit in her will to repeat O's victimization. In her translator's preface to the English edition, she claims that "Story ofO, written by a woman, demands a woman translator, one who will humble herself before the work and be satisfied to render it, as faithfully as possible, without interpretation or unwanted elaboration .... Like 0, therefore, I have tried to humble myself, to remain as faithful as possible (although, if the reader will forgive, I have attempted to stop short of slavishness) to the intent and style of the author." 83 The female translator may see no problem in subordinating her own will to the book's violence, but for a male critic writing in the mid-r95os, authority is still at stake. Paulhan's admission of victimization is only a conditional one, and he tries hard in the remainder of his introduction to rescue himself from its logic. He does this by incorporating victimization into a rationality of stereotypes. For Paulhan (and presumably he was far from alone in this response), he has found in 0 "at last a woman who admits it! VVho admits what? Something that women have always refused till now to admit (and today more than ever before). Something that men have always reproached them with: that they never cease obeying their nature, the call 46 Ill THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

of their blood, that everything in them, even their minds, is sex. That they have constantly to be nourished, constantly washed and made up, constantly beaten" (HS, xxv). This is "a virile ideal. Virile, or at least masculine" (HS, xxv), since it is ruthlessly and mercilessly honest about what so many men consider to be the true nature of woman. Thus the novelty and success of Story of 0 depends upon its combination of the biologically feminine drive to submissiveness and the culturally masculine drive to expressiveness. Paulhan's essay is ironic. It describes its own strategies of reading. The male critic reads O's narrative as an account of the biologically feminine, submitting itself to masculine imagination. And in the process, he demonstrates that feminine submissiveness can leave the realm of nature and become art only through the intercession of the masculine imagination. Inherently perverse woman can write literature only through recourse to a male voice within her, just as the fictive female author, Pauline Reage, requires the patronage of the renowned male critic to elevate her ideas from pornography to art. Paulhan counters the inherent sexism of this argument by elevating O's submissiveness to the status of a universal human condition. If "love implies dependence" (HS, xxxiii), and if dependence is about bondage, debasement, and captivity, then how can anyone desire freedom? "As for freedom ... any man, any woman, who has been through the experience will rather be inclined to rant and rave against freedom, in the vilest, most horrible language possible" (HS, xxxiii). Paulhan illustrates the unbearable lightness of freedom with an anecdote about an uprising in Barbados. In the course of the year 1838, the peaceful island of Barbados was rocked by a strange and bloody revolt. About two hundred Negroes of both sexes, all of whom had recently been emancipated by the Proclamations of March, came one morning to beg their former master, a certain Glenelg, to take them back into bondage. An Anabaptist minister, acting as spokesman for the group, read out a list of grievances which he had compiled and recorded in a notebook. Then the discussion began. But Glenelg, either from timidity or because he was scrupulous, or simply afraid of the law, refused to be swayed. At which point he was at first mildly jostled, then set upon and massacred, together with his family, by the Negroes, who that same evening repaired to their cabins, their palavers, their labors, and customary rituals. (HS, xxi) Told on the eve of the Algerian revolution, these events -like the incidents of O's debasement- must have seemed a little too close for comfort. Paulhan, reading the historical events from the perspective of Reage's fieBeaten Women and Technologies of Control

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tion, concludes: "the truth ... is that Glenelg's slaves were in love with their master, that they could not bear to he without him" (HS, xxxvi). The truth of woman, like the truth of slavery, is her natural submissiveness, her desire to suffer pain and degradation at the hands of one she loves. The two readings require each other. The reading of Story ofO describes O's subjectivity as a trajectory of feminine desire. Caught between the numerous violations of bodily integrity to which she submits and her imaginary restorations of this integrity, O's desire remains at all times physiologically founded. In order to convince his readers that feminine desire is always essentially physiological, Paulhan requires the story of the Barbados slaves. If love turns slavery into happiness, feminine writing is closest to truth when it is closest to slavery. But the tale of the Barbados slaves is also a political parable in its own right, and it describes subjectivity in terms of the logic of production. Here, the violation of bodily integrity which 0 recounts is compared to the selfimposed limits to pleasure that productivity demands. Productivity, like sexuality, requires a self-sacrifice, a submission and debasement in the name of pleasure. Paulhan needs his fiction of feminine desire in order to argue that submission is a natural characteristic of relations of production. The idea of happiness in slavery is neither a sexual nor a political idea it is both. It mobilizes a circularity of metaphors in order to imagine the subdued body as the place where subjects incur identity. This is how the culture of late capitalism seeks to construct bodily integrity- through aligning what Jean Baudrillard calls "the energetic of labor power" and "the body we dream of today as the locus of desire and the unconscious." 84 Paulhan insists that Reage's book, and with it his introduction, is not about masochism. He sharply dismisses the term "masochism" as meaningless, since for him it is little more than a simplistic equation of pain and pleasure (HS, xxix). But by using interwoven metaphors of sexual and political submissiveness to construct an ideology of subjectivity, he is writing about masochism. Like almost all writers on masochism since it was invented, he imagines subjectivity as existing within a natural regime of sexual and social domination. The interaction of bodily pleasure and displeasure, the exercise of power, and the functioning of the individual in a social context are all understood in terms of the natural order of domination. Paulhan does not need the word "masochism." Given the fiction of happiness in slavery, masochistic desire is easily shown to be the form of desire in which woman reveals the truth of love; and given the fiction of the willful pursuit of self-degradation, masochistic social behavior is easily shown to be the form of production in which the slave reveals the truth of labor. 48 Ill THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

In his reading of Story of 0, Paulhan has rediscovered the dialectic of the physiological and the imaginary, of love and labor, which has been repeatedly inscribed into the concept of masochism since it was first formulated. And in his ironic presentation, he repeats the mode of narrative proper to masochism. When the presentation of truth comes into conflict with the truth it seeks to present, irony is the only choice left for the writing subject. And since it presents the regime of truth as inherently self-defeating, this is how the rhetoric of masochism must deal with desire and social behavior. For this reason, masochism has come to be a presentation in which ontologies of gender relations and relations of production confront their own breakdown. In the process it demonstrates the fact that the human body, that space whose natural givenness seems so fundamental in any discussion of sexuality and politics, is a construct that can be conceived of only within a technology of control. And writing itself is part of this technology. The great achievement of Story ofO is to demonstrate how masochistic writing and masochistic practice produce subjectivity as that place to which pleasure accrues when the technology of subjective control and its dialectic of pain and pleasure fail. But at the same time, pleasure is possible only through attachment to this technology. The pursuit of pleasure casts subjectivity into an impossible position, where it can imagine itself only as a moment of pleasure in the act of disappearing. The masochistic subject ceases to be describable as a place either outside or inside of this technology of control, this dialectic of reward and punishment, of pleasure and pain. The masochist subject occupies an ambivalent position with respect to technologies of control and their intended sphere of power. In writing and in acting, she opens up a dialectic of selfabandonment to technologies of the body and self-reflection upon the act of abandonment. Faced with her own disappearance, the only hope for the masochistic subject is an aesthetics of domination's technologies, where the disappearance of the body may be suspended, enjoyed, reflected upon. This is the lesson that the writers of the DSM could have learned from Pauline Reage. And, because technologies of domination are always politicized, as are the forms of representation in which subjective disappearance are imagined, masochism is always a performance of the subject's immersion in the political field. This process was central to the struggles for identity that raged around the idea of masochism in late-nineteenth-century Europe, and we can understand better the way we continue to play out these struggles if we go back a century.

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Reason, Passion, and Nineteenth-

Century Liberalism Krafft-Ebing and Sacher-Masoch

Jean Paulhan's reading of Pauline Reage reenacts another famous reading of another infamous writer, the Viennese pathologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing's (1840- r9o2) reading of his contemporary, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Sacher-Masoch (1835-95) was the historian and poet whose ardent and self-sacrificing male protagonists inspired Krafft-Ebingto describe similar medical cases as masochists. When Krafft-Ebing published the 1890 edition of his Psychopathia Sexualis, which had become a nonfiction bestseller of the day, he proudly announced his newly found pathology to the world: By masochism I understand a peculiar perversion of the psychical vita sexualis in which the individual affected, in sexual feeling and thought, is controlled by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex; of being treated by this person as by a master, humiliated and abused .... I feel justified in calling this sexual anomaly "Masochism," because the 50

author Sacher-Masoch frequently made this perversion, which up to his time was quite unknown to the scientific world as such, the substratum of his writings. 1 Not only did Sacher-Masoch make the perversion the substratum of his writings, he also adopted it, Krafft-Ebing assures us, as his own preferred form of sexuality. At his most innovative, Sacher-Masoch treats submissive sexuality in a manner similar to Reage, unsettling his culture's gender stereotypes by drawing pleasure from submission - in this case masculine submission. And Krafft-Ebing, like Paulhan, finds it easiest to speak about this process by restoring the stereotypes shattered in the subversive moves of fiction. Sacher-Masoch's imagery of male masochism lacks the unflinching and brilliant perversity of Reage's feminine suffering, and Krafft-Ebing's theorization of masochism lacks Paulhan's ironic ambivalence. But Paulhan's reading shares Krafft-Ebing's will to found perverse sexuality on inherent and unshakable principles of nature. Apart from the obvious differences of gender (both the author's and the masochistic protagonist's), Sacher-Masoch was a very different kind of writer from Pauline Reage. Instead of hiding behind a pseudonym, he reveled in the fame his fantasies of perverse pleasure earned him - even if, in the end, he was most displeased by the adoption of his name in KrafftEbing's psychopathology. Sacher-Masoch felt that he was being immortalized for the wrong reasons. His son Alexander liked to joke that his father had given the world Sacherism and the Masoch- Torte. By the time the term masochism was invented, Sacher-Masoch was a wellestablished writer of historically colored novellas. The majority of his works concentrate on political struggles in Eastern Europe and Austria-Hungary, expressing a vague liberal concern with issues of social unrest, upheaval, and rebellion. For Sacher-Masoch, Eastern Europe provides a landscape where "a freedom which no one can infringe upon still lives," where "the spirit and the heart rise up and rebel against the slightest repression and tyranny. These plains, these steppes are the cradle of freedom and religion." 2 The themes that Krafft-Ebing was to call masochistic emerged gradually out of these concerns. Although he began his career as a historian at the University of Graz, the writing of history wasn't sexy enough for SacherMasoch. Sex and violence were what he wanted to portray. This is evident in both his historical and belletristic writings, beginning with his earliest historical studies. When he described someone like Kathelyne van Haverbecke in The Rebellion in Ghent under Emperor Charles V, 3 he liked to linger on the scenes where her punitive charms came into play: Reason, Passion, and Liberalism

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She abused certain Government officials, declaring that they should be seized and forced to turn out their money-bags .... She proceeded to do her best to persuade those present, especially the younger men, to join the revolt. Those whom her sharp tongue could not convince she ensnared in the shining meshes of her luxuriant hair and went so far as to alternate her invectives and face-slappings with affectionately smiling and admiring glances, fondly caressing handclasps and kisses. 4 In Sacher-Masoch's treatments of social conflict, violence is displaced into the realm of sexuality. The violent context itself is realistically drawn and never far from the foreground, but actual descriptions of public violence are few and far between (for example, in his story "People's Court" or in the collection Social Silhouettes). 5 Usually, instead of depicting scenes of civil violence and unrest, he transposes these into the private lives of his characters. Violence finds its most important expression in the private relations of men and women. Sacher-Masoch clearly saw his fictional writing as an extension of his historical studies. His first important work of fiction, A Galician Tale, 6 dealt with the Polish rebellion of 1846, a topic to which he was to return repeatedly. Here he develops one of his favorite devices, imagining private scenes of conflict in order to explain the course of historical events. The same approach is used in The Emissary/ which appeared in 1863. The three main figures - Roman, the Polish nobleman, Burg, the Austrian official, and Karola, the Austrian daughter of Slavic and German parentage - represent a conflict-laden mixture of ethnic and class groups typical ofSacher-Masoch's fiction. The differences between the two male protagonists are compounded by an essential difference in character. Roman is the practical, masculine forerunner of Sacher-Masoch's later figure of the "Greek" (described by Bram Dijkstra as the "executioner" who proves "that supermen are still men"), 8 while Burg is the sentimental and supersensual idealist, later to evolve into the "masochist" male typified by Severin in Venus in Furs. The unfolding of this personal relationship is interwoven into the events surrounding Polish involvement in the Vienna uprising of 1848. There is a logical consistency in Sacher-Masoch's gradual move from mainstream historical discourse to biography, historical romance, and erotic fiction. Any early traces of his later "masochistic" preoccupations are expressions of what Sacher-Masoch felt to be a historiographic necessity. They provide a fiction of private relations of power which the historiographer requires, if not to explain, then at least to narrate the historical events he observes. By relating events that are manifest and public to motivations that are 52 /// THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

private and sexual, Sacher-Masoch's historical and autobiographical writing remains at all times psychoanalytic. He takes his place among those fin de siecle producers of cultural imagery who, as Bram Dijkstra has shown, gave shape to popular (mis)conceptions about the nature of sex, thereby providing the fertile ground in which psychoanalytic theory could grow. 9 This is why, if we want to understand Krafft-Ebing's formulation of the masochistic perversion, we have to look beyond the psychological constitution of his favorite author. Sacher-Masoch's representation of desire and sexuality should be seen in relation to his preoccupation with a repressive and turbulent sociopolitical environment in Eastern Europe in the midnineteenth century. The "masochistic" thematic for which he is remembered cannot simply be explained in terms of the poet's biography. What we are dealing with in Sacher-Masoch's writing is not simply a personal predilection or perversion that could be understood in psychoanalytic terms alone. On the contrary, Sacher-Masoch's "masochistic" thematics must be seen in the context of his preoccupations with the political climate of the day, and ultimately as a strategic response to the demands of a liberal historiography. Sacher-Masoch's writing encapsulates all the contradictory positions of nineteenth-century liberalism. He remains committed to a realist aesthetics, and even as he portrays the most fantastically demonic women with whips and cowering male submissives, he tries to convince his readers (and often succeeds) that his depictions are, in the words ofE.J. Gorlich, "not derived from an abnormal inner life, but from social circumstances." 10 When developing images of sexual excess, Sacher-Masoch was convinced that he was remaining true to the social milieu he was describing, particularly the Slavic character. So were those critics who defended him. The eminent critic Ferdinand Kiirnberger praised Don Juan of Kolomea as symptomatic of a "great fertilizing stream of sensualism directed against old book-manured Germany," and he saw the origins of this sensualism in the fact that Eastern Europe was a realm of "natural peoples" from whom issued the poetry of "a natural land, not a land of bureaucrats." 11 Albert Eulenburg saw SacherMasoch's writings as realistic depictions of the kind of more primitive sexuality found in Slavic lands, where love was seen "essentially as a battle of the sexes, and woman as the stronger, victorious party." 12 Exotic sexuality in Sacher-Masoch's writing was intended as an identification with the minority experiences of Slavic life. The causes of minority or exploited groups, such as Eastern European Jews and Ruthenian peasants, provided him with an excuse for plunging his male heroes into delectable bondage, but at the same time it provided a platform for a literary politics aimed against the dominant Reason, Passion, and Liberalism

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Prussian tradition in German letters. What Krafft-Ebing called masochism permitted a liberal stance and a championing of repressed minorities - at least that is how Sacher-Masoch saw it. Or, to put it in terms that may be more familiar within the "masochism" debate, it allowed the author to take on a position of relative powerlessness and at the same time retain power over this position. Sacher-Masoch's understanding of social circumstances is decisively influenced by the rampant social Darwinism of his day. Albrecht Koschorke notes the importance for Sacher-Masoch of the current "Schopenhauerboom, mixed with a Darwinist concept of a struggle for life." 13 When Peter Gay describes the late-nineteenth-century "vision of the world as a battleground, a blood-bespattered arena fit only for gladiators," 14 he has described Sacher-Masoch's liberalism. But where his contemporaries generally agreed that reason was the faculty that would permit modern man to vanquish the beast within, Sacher-Masoch saw reason as just another beastly attribute. In his mission statement on love and life, "The Wanderer" (1873), SacherMasoch has one of his figures describe human beings as "nothing but beasts ... the most reasonable, bloodthirsty and cruel of beasts. No other is as inventive in stealing from and enslaving its brother. And so wherever you look, in human life as well as in nature, the struggle for existence, for life, is at the cost of others, murder, thievery, deceit, slavery." 15 The problem with reason is that it works in the service of passion. Passion is both the passion of power and sexual passion, and this determines Sacher-Masoch's sexual and his political philosophy. Dijkstra convincingly situates Sacher-Masoch within the fin de siecle tradition of projecting all that is base and despicable about modern man's life-and-death struggles onto woman. 16 "The masochism ... of the late-nineteenth-century male, and his manipulation of the image of woman as an all-destroying, rampaging animal was an expression of his attempt to come to terms with the implications of his own marginalization, his removal from the true seats of power in his society." 17 For Sacher-Masoch, speaking of sexual power was no different from speaking of political power. As a liberal historian of Europe, he dreams of a historical progression from "the wretchedness and the economy of absolute monarchy" via "the deceit of constitutionalism" and a "rescue through democracy" to the point where he can envisage a "United States of Europe" and a "common legislation." 18 As a "productive poet," he sees himself representing "the revolutionary element in literature. The poet flies boldly ahead while the critic must limp painfully after. The critic represents the ideas and principles of the past, the poet those of the future, and for this reason they must always come into conflict on the ground of the present." 19 54 /// THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

And as a connoisseur of submissive sexuality, he fantasizes a future where the relations of the sexes will be characterized by equality. Sacher-Masoch's letters, his critical comments, and the general outline of his work all indicate that although the emphasis of his work lies in the depiction of conflicts, his goal is to provide solutions. Nevertheless, the models of synthesis that he offers remain weak and unconvincing in comparison to the conflict he sees inherent in the human condition. In keeping with his time, he sees salvation in a mixture of work ethic, ascetic self-denial, and a strong sense of duty. Wherever he sees state corruption, unequal power relations, and political injustice, he projects it onto the life of the individual, and thus it is here that he seeks political solutions. In this way he is able to consider his erotic writing compatible with his political sympathies. His ultimate decline as a writer, to the point where his work is little more than the repetitive portrayal of stereotypes, need not be interpreted as a symptom of his pathological condition. It can just as well be seen as the only logical response of a liberal writer committed to extracting maximum pleasure from a world condemned to the endless repetition of struggle. This "Enlightener in furs" 20 was not all that different from the physician who made him famous. Koschorke describes Krafft-Ebing and SacherMasoch as kindred souls. Both writers sought a mode of description that would allow them to address the most essential problems of humanity, and perhaps pose a solution to these problems. Both also found a mode of description for what had hitherto been regarded as too intimate for open discussion, and both thereby achieved colossal sales. 21 To this may be added that both presented masochistic fantasies in the realist narrative appropriate to their individual disciplines. And in both Krafft-Ebing and Sacher-Masoch, masochism is used as a means of displaying and attempting to resolve various conflicts in current discourses of subjectivity. Krafft-Ebing's formulation of masochism takes place within the context of an ambitious catalogue of perversions, ranging from anthropophagy and necrophilia to sadism directed against animals, fetishism, androgyny, homosexuality, and of course sadism and masochism. The classificatory project is accompanied by a large number of case studies, some derived from his own experience, others collected from colleagues, friends, and occasionally literary sources. Krafft-Ebing narrates the details of the cases he catalogues in a candid manner. The more sordid of these are presented in Latin, a gloss intended to mark the narrative as distinctly scientific- yet a very thin gloss, considering the extent to which Latin could be deciphered by the educated reading public, and considering the explicitness of the German text. KrafftEbing has no difficulty relating the story of Sergeant Bertrand, who excaReason, Passion, and Liberalism

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vated some fifteen corpses in 1847 and 1848, cut them open with his saber or pocket knife, "tore out the entrails, and then masmrbated" (PS, ro2- 3). Or a thirty-year-old man who visited two prostitutes, "had his sexual member rubbed with shoe creme, undressed, allowed a cord to be tied to his penis and was led around the room on all fours, whereby one of the prostitutes had to strike him with a whip." 22 And so on, over more than four hundred pages and in excess of two hundred cases. Krafft-Ebing's encyclopedia of the perversions provided "the grounds for speaking of things which would otherwise have been unspeakable." 23 It treated his liberally minded audience to exciting glimpses of sexual deviance, while speaking to them in a language certain to confirm their most cherished preconceptions about the namre of man and woman. Krafft-Ebing's case studies promote a normativeness that is all the more effective for its seeming lack of arbitrariness, its biological substantiation. This is achieved by associating individual behavior and individual inclination with the ideal development of the species. In the p,:vchopathia Sexualis, the masochistic individual becomes a problem for the understanding of subjectivity. Here, the masochist raises the question of how to tic the juridical conception of subjectivity and agency to the biologistic modes that had come to dominate medical discourse, and how to do so without unsettling current beliefs concerning the historical development of humanity. Krafft-Ebing's establishment of a forum for speaking the unspeakable relies upon currently popular notions of how individual behavior in all its manifestations and deviations relates to concepts of humanity as a whole and to the development and perfection of the human race. In other words the speaking of the unspeakable required a specific conception - perhaps even a philosophy- of history. The case smdies in P.sychopathia Sc"1:ualis appear in a historical void; the reader today is struck by the way Krafft-Ebing is able to overlook the political context of his cases. Does he really fail to sec any connection between a soldier's fascination with the sexual allure of slitting a corpse and the tensions that flooded through Germany in the days between the rebellion of the Silesian weavers in 1842 and the street battles in Berlin in March 1848? For Sacher-Masoch, this eroticization of political violence would have been material for a story or two. But it falls on a blind spot in current medical discourse. After all, Krafft-Ebing thought he was describing human namre not political contingencies. In spite of his failure to link symptomatology to politics, however, KrafftEbing was in no doubt as to the concept of history that would enable him to explain the fact of sexual perversion in his society. A story about history frames his book, and the collection of succinct cases is intended to be read 56 Ill THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

from the perspective it provides. Whereas the case studies run the risk at all times of appearing to his contemporaries as unjustified descents into the everyday world of degradation and abnormality, the macrohistorical perspective promises to provide the universal framework within which the degenerate and the perverse can be understood. Krafft-Ebing's convictions concerning the historical dimension of masochism are unfolded in his introductory chapter, "Fragments of a System of Psychology of Sexual Life." The basic premise is that "sexual feeling is really the root of all ethics, and no doubt of aestheticism and religion" (PS, 2). In arguing this point, Krafft-Ebing is expressing one of the central preoccupations of late-nineteenth-century thought, a preoccupation that was to crystallize later in Freud's famous essays on the origins of culture. This was the question of how human existence, which is characterized by a struggle between morality and desire, can have emerged from the realm of instinct to which nature consigns the animals. In answering this question, KrafftEbing's reasoning runs like this: the human organism is first and foremost an instrument for the propagation of the human race. This urge for preservation of the species is "not left to mere accident or the caprices of the individual, but is guaranteed by the hidden laws of nature [Naturtrieb] which are enforced by a mighty, irresistible impulse" (PS, I). The natural urge is reproduced on the individual level by subjective experiences of sensual pleasure and physical well-being in the sexual act. Accompanying these physiological responses of the individual organism are, however, other responses which would best be termed metaphysical and ethical. These comprise "higher motives and aims, such as the desire to continue the species or the individuality of mental and physical qualities beyond time and space" (PS, I). Krafft-Ebing's outline of the emergence of ethical impulses from the biological nature of life is so terse and confidently stated that he must have assumed his readers to be already familiar with his argument. Indeed, he draws upon and quotes a number of contemporary authorities to support his point of view. He cites Henry Maudsley, stating that "sexual feeling is the basis upon which social advancement is developed" (PS, 1). Edward Westermarck, Cesare Lombroso, and Hermann Ploss have also clearly left their marks on his thinking. 24 The underlying assumption in Krafft-Ebing as well as his authorities is that human life is characterized by a dual relationship with the force of nature. The human individual is determined by his biological constitution but is constantly at odds with the slavery to which the blind forces of the biological world would consign him. In this popular view, the individual becomes the place where morality enters battle with nature, where social institutions confront the biological drives, where what Krafft-Ebingso Reason, Passion, and Liberalism

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pictorially designates the "sublime pedestal" of "chaste love" encounters the "quagmire of sensual enjoyment and lust" (PS, 5). And it becomes the moral obligation of the individual to completely emancip::~te himself from sensu::~lity through the exercise of his willpower, in order to "enjoy the pure pleasures of love and pluck the noble fruits of earthly existence" (PS, 5). The conception of the individual's struggle for the triumph of culture over nature was an extremely important guiding principle in a wide number of disciplines and debates in the second half of the nineteenth century. Krafft-Ebing rem::~ined optimistic :Js to the outcome of this struggle. There can be no doubt, he assures us, "that, comparing the various stages of civilization ... despite periodical relapses, public morality has made steady progress" (PS, 6). The nineteenth-century fixation on natural struggle was concerned less with developing those combative techniques that might best equip the individual to overpower his fellows than with discovering how, through the advance of morals and civilization, humanity could remove itself from the arena of combat. And this meant displacing the biologically determined struggle between individuals onto a struggle within the individual. One highly influential figure who voiced this struggle, and a figure well suited to demonstrating the contradictions of the doctrine of agonistic nature, was Herbert Spencer. In his Social Statics, Spencer outlined the conditions under which he believed the human race could achieve general happiness. According to Spencer, nature prevails by a constant self-purification. This is social Darwinism at its most sinister: human happiness depends on a constant struggle resulting in the extermination of the weak. Spencer waxes apocalyptic when expounding this view. The "predatory instinct," he tells us, "has subserved civilization by clearing the earth of inferior races of men. The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way, with the same sternness that they exterminate beasts of prey and herds of useless ruminants." 25 Spencer's racism is as self-contradictory as it is alarming. By exercising the power of self-purification, nature reveals itself as the basest and most regressive aspect of human society. The old predatory instinct provides the conditions out of which human happiness may emerge by killing everything that stands in its path. But it has also "retarded civilization by giving rise to conditions at variance with those of social life" (4r6). By drawing a sharp lin2 between social life and natural forces, Spencer allows himself to argue genocide while speaking of morality, restraint, and the advancement of civilization. The contradictory moments in Spencer's argument did not prevent his readers from finding him overwhelmingly convincing. These contradic58 II/ THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

tions are tied together by a concept of history virtually identical to KrafftEbing's, a doctrine of civilization emerging from barbarism. Let not the reader be alarmed. Let him not fear that these admissions will excuse new invasions and new oppressions .... Rightly understood, they will do no such thing. That phase of civilization during which forcible supplantings of the weak by the strong, and systems of savage coercion, are on the whole advantageous, is a phase which spontaneously and necessarily gives birth to these things .... As soon, however, as there arises a perception that these subjugations and tyrannies are not right- as soon as the sentiment to which they are repugnant becomes sufficiently powerful to suppress them, it is time for them to cease. (41 7- 1 8) The fulfillment of nature's destructive forces gives rise to a human society infused with morality. It does so by providing the civilized individual with the consciousness of what morality means and the willpower to suppress base nature within himself. In civilized society, "the private will of the citizen, not being so destructive of order, has more play. And further progress must be towards increased sacredness of personal claims, and a subordination of whatever limits them" (434). The advance of civilization is accompanied by a displacement of conflict from the blind struggle for survival to a struggle of individual will and morality against nature itself. Spencer's understanding of the struggle against nature assigned woman a special status in human society. This is because the relations of men and women encapsulate the relations of men to one another, both relations being constitutive of a society's degree of civilization. "Look where we will, we find that just as far as the law of the strongest regulates the relationships between man and man, does it regulate the relationships between man and woman. To the same extent that the triumph of might over right is seen in a nation's political institutions, it is seen in its domestic ones. Despotism in the state is necessarily associated with despotism in the family" (r6r). The imperative on civilized man to replace barbarism with moral action in his relation with other men is extended to his relation with women. This conviction allowed Spencer to adopt a liberal position concerning the need for the empowerment of women. "Proof has been given that the attitudes of mastery on the one side, and submission on the other, are essentially at variance with that refined sentiment which should subsist between husband and wife .... [I]t has been shown that the objections commonly raised against giving political power to women, are founded on notions and prejudices that will not bear examination" (171). Krafft-Ebing was never that explicit about the need for giving women Reason, Passion, and Liberalism

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political power. But he shared Spencer's conviction that the status of woman is central in the progression of civilized society. V/hen he describes the mechanisms through which morality has triumphed over instinct, it is woman who provides the focal point and developmental impetus. It is she who has raised humanity from the primitive state of the animals. And thus it is she who has allowed sexuality to advance from the violence that characterizes it in the animal world. This civilizing function of feminine sexuality distinguishes the advanced races from their more feral cousins. In his description of primitive human existence, Krafft-Ebing paints a picture in which human beings allow their lives to be determined by their sexual needs. Much as it is among animals, sex among early humans is a biological drive played out in acts of aggression and violence. "Sexual intercourse is done openly," he asserts, "and man and woman are not ashamed of their nakedness.... Woman is the common property of man, the spoil of the strongest and the mightiest .... Woman is a 'chattel,' an article of commerce, exchange or gift, a vessel for sensual gratification, an implement for toil" (PS, 2). The seeds of civilization are sown at the moment when feelings of modesty emerge -when one experiences an unwillingness to display one's own nakedness and a need to conceal the sexual act. Here Krafft-Ebing finds a convenient (and commonly held) motivation for claiming that the temperate regions of the earth produce advanced civilization earlier than the tropics. The cooler climate provides the cause for covering the naked human body, a custom which very rapidly comes to be associated with modesty. Following on the development of modesty is a changed status of woman, who "ceases to be a "chattel." She becomes an individual being" (PS, 3). From now on, woman "is conscious of the fact that her charms belong only to the man of her choice. She seeks to hide them from others" (PS, 3). Through the emergence of human modesty and female will, the sexual nature of humanity has acquired its ethical dimension. The cultivation of female choice in the selection of partners is essential if civilization is to advance. The prime institution which expresses choice in developed cultures is marriage, and the success of marriage in promoting the advance of the species depends upon the woman's ability to exercise her civilizing choices over the man's regressive passions. This becomes clear in the closing pages of the introductory chapter of Psychopathia Sexualis, where Krafft-Ebing discusses fetishism. Fetishism is normal as long as it forces the civilized individual to transform biological urges into metaphysical impulses. Fetishism "of body and mind is of importance in progeneration, in so far as it facilitates natural selection and permits

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the inheritance of positive spiritual and physical attributes" (PS, 2 3). When Krafft-Ebing discusses normal male fetishism, he lists those parts of a female body that may arouse impulses of sexual desire. When it comes to female fetishism, however, he refers to cases in which women are attracted not to a man's physical characteristics, but to his mental and spiritual faculties. "In the upper 'strata' of society this is more apparent" (PS, 2 3). Since a woman chooses elevated qualities in a man, her fetishism can contribute to the advancement of the species. Nineteenth-century male liberalism's pleas for women's equality are dubious. Dijkstra claims that Spencer's "arguments on behalf of women were more likely an attempt to maintain the logical continuity of his thesis in favor of the rights of the individual than a reflection of any special concern for the position of women in society." 26 Krafft-Ebing can be criticized on a similar count for being more concerned with domesticating woman than with liberating her. In spite of this, in Krafft-Ebing's scheme of historical development, the emergence of a moral consciousness from the natural sexual instinct is tied to the social, religious, and legal equality of women. If there are phenomena, opinions, and attitudes in his society that oppose the empowerment of women, he shows quite clearly that these attitudes must be identified as regressive. Woman is not only an emotional or mythological bearer of culture. The achievements of human civilization depend upon a statutory entrenchment of her equality with men, at least when it comes to her marital status. Just how far beyond this rudimentary equalization Krafft-Ebing was prepared to go remains unclear from a reading of Psychopathia Sexualis. At no stage does he speak in favor of enfranchisement as explicitly as Spencer. He does hint that his concept of equality includes political equality, but he misses many fine opportunities to state this conviction- if indeed it was a conviction - with force. Given Krafft-Ebing's optimistic view of civilization's advance, the persistence of perversion in his own time will require some explanation. If history is the story of the continual progression of human morals away from the baser animal instincts, he will have to provide a historical account for the perversions he takes as the focus of his book. Again, the explanation he puts forward is very much in keeping with current popular thought. His primary explanation is historical and could even be called dialectical. For KrafftEbing, the advancing morality of civilized individuals does not imply (as it does in Spencer's thought) a change in the biological force of sexual desire. What changes is the individual's genetic constitution, moral consciousness, and willpower, all of which in combination render him capable of sublimat-

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ing and resisting sexuality's inherent violence. Instances of perversion or sexual degeneracy could even be a "positive force as it moves humanity to the necessary changes in forms of human interaction."' 7 The violence of sexuality persists as a substratum of social life. Some of life's most intense experiences (most notably sexual and religious experience) exist in close proximity to nature's violence. This renders them extremely perilous with respect to individual willpower and morality. When it comes to religious or sexual impulses, the higher love so cherished by Krafft-Ebing can easily degenerate "into acts of cruelty, either actively exercised, or passively endured" (PS, 10). In the sphere of sexuality or religion, this is intensified by the fact that advancing civilization is accompanied by an increased constitutional instability of the individual. "Nervousness" was the favorite epithet for this instability, and it resulted in part from the burdens that civilization placed on the individual. The civilized individual, as conceived by Krafft-Ebing, Spencer, and others of their day, was weighed down with the responsibility of resolving the intense conflict between nature's forces and civilization's restraint. George M. Beard, the American neurologist who had coined the term "neurasthenia" in 188o, saw "modern nervousness" as "the cry of the system struggling with its environment." 2 " This environment \vas seen to be increasingly conducive to pathological regression into the realm of violence. Nervousness and its attendant pathological symptoms were also due to the changing quality of life in the modern world. The interaction between the organic system and its environment thus became a major theme for articulating fundamental doubts about the ability of the (male) individual to master his biological instincts by willpower alone. Not even Krafft-Ebing's historical optimism was exempt. Like virtually all of his contemporaries, he saw the environment of his time as conducive to a softening and weakening of the human constitution. For him the metropolises of the day were "hotbeds in which neuroses and low morality arc bred," comparable to Babylon, Nineveh and Rome (PS, 7). The problem was that human history may indeed be constantly progressing toward new moral and intellectual heights, but within this general advancement individual societies reach a zenith and then weaken and fade. The episodes of moral decay always coincide with the progression of effeminacy, lewdness and luxuriance of the nations. These phenomena can only be ascribed to the higher and more stringent demands which circumstances make upon the nervous system. Exaggerated tension of the nervous system stimulates sensuality, leads the individual as well as the masses to excesses, and undermines the very foundations of society, and the mo62 /// THE MASTERY OF SUBMISSION

rality and purity of family life. The material and moral ruin of the community is readily brought about by debauchery, adultery, and luxury. Greece, the Roman Empire, and France under Louis XIV and XV, are striking examples of this assertion. In such periods of civil and moral decline the most monstrous excesses of sexual life may be observed, which, however, can always be traced to psycho-pathological or neuropathological conditions of the nation involved. (PS, 6) The stage is now set for a theory of the perversions compatible with the theory of human advancement. The debilitating environment of modern metropolitan life, compounded with the inherent weakening of the willpower of susceptible individuals, calls forth the aberrations in sexual behaviour that Krafft-Ebing examines. Faced with this assault from the environment, the individual either adapts or succumbs and perishes. This is the tenor of the monumental work on degeneration by Max Nordau, published in German in 1892 and translated into English in 1895· For Nordau, degeneration is symptomatic of an inability to adapt to progressive changes in the environment of the modern world. Lawrence Baron explains that "as a Darwinian, Max Nordau believed that the inhabitants of modern industrial cities would eventually adapt to the myriad of stimuli which incessantly assaulted their senses. He diagnosed all those who could not adapt to this commotion as 'degenerates, hysterics, and neurasthenics.'" 29 Whether the urban environment was regarded as the appropriate environment of a civilized race or a monstrous source of pathology, the manifestation of urbanity's negative side depended upon the individual's susceptibility. For Krafft-Ebing, the idea of the susceptible individual was a key concept in explaining why certain persons fall prey to their environment while others survive and flourish. It also provided the conceptual link with social Darwinist ideas. According to Frank Sulloway, "Krafft-Ebing's theory of hereditary perversion was really just an elaboration of Charles Darwin's views in the Descent ofMan (1874) concerning the hereditary transmission of marked moral qualities within the same family." 30 Darwin was convinced that criminal behavior and insanity were transmitted by inheritance within the same family. In his case studies, Krafft-Ebing places a great deal of emphasis upon the individual's genetic susceptibility for pathological conditions. These are just a few typical examples of how he introduces his cases: Case 2 5. Mr. X, aged twenty-five; father syphilitic, died of paretetic dementia; mother hysterical and neurasthenic. He was a weak individual, constitutionally neuropathic, and presented several anatomical signs of degeneration. (PS, 106) Reason, Passion, and Liberalism

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Case so. Mr. Z, age twenty-nine, technologist, came for consultation because of fear of tabes. Father nervous, died tabetic. Father's sister insane. Several relatives very nervous and peculiar. (PS, r 34) Case 67. Mr. Z, aged twenty-two, single, was brought to me by his father for medical advice, because he was very nervous and plainly sexually abnormal. Mother and maternal grandmother were insane. His father begat him at a time when he was suffering from nervousness. (PS, r62) Krafft-Ebing's case studies are littered with descriptions of mentally ill parents, deranged relatives, fathers with manic depression, mothers with menstrual mania, neuropathological patients with cerebral deformations, compulsive masturbators, and various individuals struck with tuberculosis, neurasthenia, or drunkenness. One of his favorite terms is vorbelastet (genetically tainted), used to describe a patient affected with a hereditary deficiency. This deficiency renders the individual incapable of resolving the internal conflict between the instincts and the institutions of civilization, which require their healthy bridling. The precariousness of the bridling process results from the fact that there exists a fluid transition from the normal to the perverse. The perversions and pathologies that Krafft-Ebing investigates are all shown to have their roots in normal sexual beh