Freedom, Structure, and
the Passage of Time
By questioning, and then discarding the easy notion that the patriarchal
oppression of women within a system that worships male power exists because
men benefit from it being that way and therefore caused it on purpose, feminists
found themselves moving from the old, mechanistic understandings of power,
which were based on the notion of a rigid, innate connection between actors
and their social location within a fossilized social structure.
This was new; some of the women who thought along these lines and reached
theoretical insights such as those outlined here began to realize that these
theories they were formulating bore an interesting resemblance to concepts
in modern theoretical physics--
Space-time is really timeless; all events are interconnected but not
causally, and can be interpreted as part of a process of cause and effect
only when they are read in a single direction. Thus the world of subatomic
phenomena, that which underlies everything in the universe, is "feminine"--nonhierarchical,
fluid, transient, many-sided, and eternal.
If we apply the metaphor of subatomic phenomena to human existence, we discover
an exciting new model. Interconnection, interplay, is the cause of everything
that exists. Power is neither substance nor force precisely but the coming
together of particular things in a certain way, at a certain moment.
(French 1985, p. 499)
-and-
That everything is energy, that everything moves, that everything is
somehow discrete or separate, and interrelated or interconnected--these
seem rather vital scientific facts that politics would do well to examine.
Furthermore, as Arthur Koestler wrote, "The nineteenth-century model
of the universe as a mechanical clockwork is a shambles and since the concept
of matter itself has been dematerialized, materialism can no longer claim
to be a scientific philosophy".
Nor, I might add, can materialism any longer claim to be a political philosophy.
Both quantum physics and feminism are "second generation" critiques
of the old order, going even further than those "first generation"
revolutions which acted against the dominant theory of determinism.
(Morgan 1982, p. 291)
Traditional sociological concepts have posited social structures as the
determinants of the political situation of individuals, and emphasized the
deterministic quality of social composite categories such as gender and
class, which were seen as the fundamental "building blocks" of
the social structure. Feminist theorists equated these concepts with "wave"
concepts of matter and energy, to which the new theories of radical feminism
were adding the "particle" understanding and including them both
(Morgan 1982). Traditional "clockwork"
structural-functionalist views and political-social concepts were equated
with classical celestial mechanics, Newtonian and Cartesian mechanical physics,
whereas radical feminism was seen to resemble the dynamic theories of Faraday,
Maxwell, Einstein, and Capra (French 1985;
Morgan 1982).
This altered not only the vision of oppression, but also the vision of possible
social transformation. While retaining the revolutionary intent and adversarial
stance implied in previous conflict theory, radical feminists reconceptualized
revolution, seeing in individual initiative and personal participation in
the interactions of which society is formed the locus for revolutionary
social change.
Beneath every sociopolitical organization lies a more or less flexible
morality, an interwoven set of values in which certain qualities are central...Patriarchal
structures will alter as human ends change, and it is impossible to predict
what new forms will supersede them.
(French 1985, pp. 535, 537)
-and, ultimately-
Though the men own the outer world, that world is merely a reflection
of their totally reversed inner reality. Their having persuaded us to internalize
this chimera, to let them dominate our inner as well as our outer world,
is the triumph of a mirage, a sleight-of-spirit...
A corollary to thesis that since reality is only what we give the energy
of our belief to, what we feel as real, all systems are internal systems:
patriarchy does not have a separate existence outside us; it exists only
inside us and we project it onto our external screen. It follows, then,
that the instant patriarchy ceases to exist inside our hearts and minds,
it dies everywhere.
(Johnson 1987, p. 320)
The problem with these contentions for most sociologists will probably be
their resemblance to "presociological" popular assumptions about
people's freedom to live and behave as they see fit (and, therefore, their
personal accountability for how they do behave). Agency has indeed been
reintroduced here, in such a dramatic way that oppression again becomes
a difficult concept. Social structure has ceased to play the coercive role
of denying people their freedom and determining their circumstances. In
the worst spirit of New Age mysticisms, social reality would seem to be
redefined as whatever we (collectively) conceive it to be.
In a sense, these are not misconstruals of feminist theory, at least not
entirely. The spirit of optimism, and the conviction that social change
lies within our grasp as agents who can act freely, is very much a part
of the feminist vision. And yet, it is also important to see that radical
feminism does not denigrate or diminish the enormity of the problem, and
the real existence of structure and its capacity to oppress people is central
to its theoretical tenets--indeed, is central to its theoretical origins.
Philosophers may be equally bothered by the tendency of theorists to speak
as if the transformation from patriarchy to a feminist future is an inevitable
and irreversible process, outside of which the species could not survive
for much longer, and of such intrinsically perceivable value to all people
at all stations in life that its success would seem virtually preordained.
And yet, feminists are deeply concerned about the need to awaken people
to the priorities at hand, and engage them with these perspectives lest
silence and the lack of exposure take their toll.
As I said before, an intersubjectively shared but incorrect world-view of
society that separates feelings from analytical thought, once established,
denies people's actual lived experiences at the same time that it shapes
them in particular by lying about them generally, in terms of what things
mean and how they fit together. In contrast, in a context of interaction
free of the cognitive restraints created by (and as) the patriarchal world-view,
the fact that we all share the ability to assess our experiences and use
that ability to construct and update our intersubjectively shared patterns
of understanding would mean, more often than not, that the social check
of communication would reveal compatibility of our individual images of
reality with the images that other people have
.
These are two different possible situations, with aspects and elements of
each situation involved in our present-day social reality. Their coexistence
being ultimately irreconcilable, this implies that our current situation
is a bit of a battlefield of world-views and world-possibilities. The enormity
of patriarchal oppression seems to exist, paradoxically, alongside of the
vitality of our capacity for deliberate social change and the virtual inevitability
of eventual social transformation. One thing that may clear up these apparently
contradictory assertions is a more thoughtful inclusion of the Einsteinian
fourth dimension, the passage of time. Our normative notions of social arrangements,
structure and power do tend to be three-dimensional: static and materialist
(describing the state of being as a thing in itself). To move towards the
post-materialist vantage point advocated by French and Morgan, it is necessary
to do some conceptual housecleaning, altering social theories wherever they
depend on descriptions of reality that do not include the unfolding of relationships
over time as well as across other dimensions.
Lest my own theoretical house be out of order, the first of these conceptual
housecleaning chores I wish to address myself to is a critique of Pirsig's "instantaneous" (p. 233)
romantic quality experience. The hypothetical person seeing a tree cannot
really experience a preanalytical timeless sense of self-in-relation-to-tree
after all, since nothing occurs instantaneously. Pirsig's own critique of
intellectuals who believe that events and things can only be experienced
through intellectual concepts that interpret them begins with their tendency
to overlook the time lag between sensory reception and intellectual awareness:
You can't be aware that you've seen a tree until after you've seen the
tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must
be a time lag. We sometimes think of that time lag as unimportant. But there's
no justification for thinking that the time lag is unimportant...The past
exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is
our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because
of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal...Reality
is always in the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place.
This preintellectual reality is what Phaedrus felt he had properly identified
as Quality.
[Intellectuals] usually have the greatest trouble seeing this Quality, precisely
because they are so swift and absolute about snapping everything into intellectual
form. The ones who have the easiest time seeing this Quality are small children,
uneducated people and culturally "deprived" people.
(pp. 221-222)
But since light does not travel from place to place instantaneously, but
instead has a velocity, the tree that is preintellectually sensed is also
already in the past. In fact, impulses travel down human nerve fibers at
a much slower rate, so the time lag between light leaving tree and light
hitting eyeball is followed by a much larger time lag between light hitting
eyeball and brain receiving it as visual sensory stimulation.
This does not mean that Pirsig's distinction between romantic and classical
Quality assessments is based entirely on faulty foundations, though. It
is still reasonable to theorize that sensation and emotion precede comparison
with memory and intellectual categorization of one's experiences. Thus,
while the mystical authority of immediate here-and-now realness that Pirsig
claims for the romantic Quality assessment does not hold up, the notion
of a sensory and emotionally-driven response to reality prior to intellectual
interpretation retains its political implication for sociological purposes:
it can explain perception and knowledge that is not fully enslaved by culturally
shared notions and ideological distortions of reality.
Not all social theories survive a consideration for the passage of time
with their original implications unscathed. Traditional structurally-based
theories have viewed the social order, which forms the backdrop for any
individual's behavior, as if it were a static, timeless entity to which
the individual must respond. It is as if the patterns of human behavior
that form structures were things in themselves, formed of mindless concrete
like a fortress, rather than patterns of individual people who act and respond
in the same time frame as the single hypothetical individual whose behavior
is being explained. Traditional interactionist theories, meanwhile, have
conceptualized individual human beings as if the universe had been brought
into being the very instant before the micro-level interactions under consideration
start to take place, so that the objectives, perceptions, and values of
individuals are treated as rationally derivable from analysis of the immediate
situation or else built into the human package as drives and instincts.
It is as if no individual had the capacity to observe human interaction
and notice patterns that would enable her to predict outcomes that would
result from various possible behavioral choices. Both structuralist and
interactionist perspectives, therefore, tend to be "flat", lacking
a fully integrated sense of the passage of time. A more accurate perspective
acknowledges that history is real and tends to be taken into account by
interacting people; but also that social structures are structures of
dynamic motion rather than being static, and are visible only over a
period of time, during which all of the individual participants can act.
Social structures are the afterimages of the behaviors and interactions
of individuals who have the capacity to independently perceive reality and
behave with agency and purpose. The historically emergent patterns called
social structure allow for predictions about outcomes of behavior which
can be taken into account by individual actors in their interaction with
other people because they all have locations and roles within that structure.
The patterns that form those structures are alterable through the process
of altering one's own individual behaviors and, especially, by intentionally
affecting other individuals so as to encourage them to alter their behaviors
as well. Thus, social structure patterns are both recreated and yet modified
by the composite total of individual behavioral patterns. Social structure
and micro-level interaction between individuals are two aspects of the same
thing: they exist in a relationship with each other that is itself
interactive; and as a unified thing, this relationship between individual
interaction and social structure describes the human social condition as
neither aspect alone can sufficiently do.
These assertions may not represent an obvious revolutionary departure from
conventional sociological perspectives. That human interaction and social
structure are aspects of a unified whole is actually a cornerstone concept
of the discipline. But, to paraphrase Heidi
Hartman, the marriage of structure and interaction within sociology
is like the old English common law marriages: structure and interaction
are one, and that one is structure. Individual behavior is accounted for
by reference to location in the social structure and exposure to the cultural
milieu of ideas and concepts. Social structure is seldom accounted for by
reference to individual beliefs, perceptions, observations, and resultant
interactive behavior patterns.
One direct result of this unquestioned belief in the primacy of structure
is the widely shared and seldom questioned belief that social order, if
it is to exist at all, must be imposed and enforced. Social structure, rather
than something that emerges from the communication and interaction of equal
and unoppressed people, is thought to require (or even consist of) a hierarchy
of decision-makers in which those above have authoritative power over those
below. The sociological perspective may lack the direct insistence
on a necessary agent to impose social order, but in a more indirect fashion
tends to see social structure as primarily causative of adequate social
functioning, and since it is not seen as emergent, the imperative of having
viable social structure translates into the same requirement of a hierarchy
of decision-makers to maintain social order.
Radical feminists do not share this assumption. French
(1985, p. 500) posited that "Anarchy--order without dominance--may
be a possible form for human life as well as subatomic phenomena...anarchy
is not the absence of order, but a delicate interaction." By necessity,
in order for such a program of interactive social change to be realized,
with or without a structural blueprint for the postpatriarchal world, order
of some meaningful sort adequate to address the communicative and interactive
problems of individuals for which societies exist must occur without reference
to any type of structured authority, without the existence of power over
other people.
The ability and innate tendency of individual free human beings to observe
and notice patterns in the world around them directly implies that they
would make predictions about the behavior of other people on the basis of
social patterns that they observe, and that they would take these predictions
into account in determining their own behavior. Call those observable patterns
"social structure", and this becomes an assertion that individuals
will notice and adapt to social structure without any formalized system
of norm enforcement or systematic organization of hierarchical authority.
Call this system "anarchy" and it becomes an assertion that anarchy
will seek its own stable social structures without anyone having to impose
them upon anyone else. It may be true that some sort of formal structure
would be necessary to organize communication patterns if a highly efficient
and densely populated society is to function as an anarchy. The important
point is that the processes by which informal social norms constrain people's
behaviors do function and do play a major role in establishing and preserving
social order, and do not depend on authority, coercion, and official mechanisms
for punishing nonconformity as do laws. Although existing societies may
differ in the extent to which people are individually intolerant of nonconformity
in general, a certain degree of cohesiveness or social gravity tends to
arise from the fact that people do need each other physically, emotionally,
and intellectually, and from the fact that ultimately we all share the same
world and are capable of understanding each other's experience.
Not everyone considers themselves to be oppressed, and among those who do,
there are a great many who would have objections to the assertion I've made
here, that under patriarchal constraints we are all oppressed, albeit to
different degrees. In a world where the most powerful are disposed to preserving
the status quo in general and deliberately accumulating more power over
other people for themselves in particular, it is easy and feels right (at
least some of the time) to blame them for maintaining patriarchal oppression.
If they were not deliberately oppressing us, there would be nothing
between us and the freedom we seek, the oppressed might say. It may be true
that being oppressors does not benefit the oppressors, but they certainly
seem to think it does, and they behave accordingly, with great zeal.
In the face of ideology that denies the existence of oppression and social
inequality, it can be very liberating to give voice to the righteous anger
that the oppressed feel, and anger tends to seek a target. No culprit oppressors?
It's not their fault? Such claims can easily sound as they do to Mary Daly, who accuses feminists who don't blame
men of intellectual cowardice; such claims can sound like apologist ideology
that negates the validity of anger and the energizing effect it can have
on those who seek liberation.
A third and final bit of conceptual housecleaning of the temporal-dimension
sort contends with this phenomenon. There is a tendency for the less oppressed,
more powerful people in the system (adults, especially men, especially materially
wealthy men; etc.) to see themselves as benefiting from maintaining power
over other people, despite the fact that it costs them in the long run to
do so. This is important, since the tendency to see their hegemony as desirable
leads to power-seeking and counter-revolutionary anti-feminist behaviors
on their part (e.g., see Faludi 1991).
I have already said that the sexual polarization process distances men from
their own emotional sensitivities, which greatly cripples their ability
to critique the social analogues of reality that are passed on to them even
when these analogues do not mesh with their actual felt experiences. However,
there is another major factor operating in harmony with that tendency. There
would have to be: men in general may be strongly alienated from their feelings
when compared to women, but no one would be able to make even simple decisions
if they were completely divorced from feelings, and history shows that men
are in fact able to interpret their own feelings of being oppressed by other
men, despite ideologies to the contrary, and often rise up in rebellion.
The simple term for it is attention span. To use force and coerce another
person in order to realize one's will does, in the very long run, contribute
to a global pattern of destructiveness that endangers the species as well
as many other of our companion species on this planet--patriarchy is ultimately
very dangerous. Even in the middle span of one's own life from year to year
and decade to decade, a person is far better equipped to get what he or
she wants through the non-violent forms of communication and the building
of trust and cooperative networks, because the cost and energy expenditure
of coercion is so high (especially in those areas of human need that are
most obvious only over a period of years: emotional belongingness, the good
will of one's neighbors even under conditions of vulnerability, etc.). But
in the immediacy of a situation in which one's will is at least momentarily
thwarted by other people's opposition or disinclination to voluntarily cooperate,
coercion may indeed seem to be less time-consuming, and if one could coerce
without long-term consequences, it would be. Sometimes, such is the case.
Sometimes, indeed, small-scale social conflicts may be best addressed by
adrenalin-backed flight or fight response. As Marilyn French warns, it is
most likely impossible to completely eliminate coercive power from human
interaction, although it is probably possible to cease to base our entire
social apparatus on it as the central principle. The politics of attention
span, therefore, are critical to maintaining a false sense of the advantageousness
of oppression. Whenever non-coercive tactics can be made to work without
very high short-term costs, they tend to be far more efficient tactics because
of the much more expensive results of coercion in the long run.
Attention span in the general sense is a gender issue. Some researchers
and theorists attribute patriarchy and coercion to a male tendency to be
irritable, easily frustrated, and impatient, and declare these to be innate
biological characteristics of the sex. Others are more inclined to deny
the importance of hypothetical predispositions of this type in males, and
emphasize that irritability and impatience are culturally constructed as
"masculinity" (e.g. see Miedzian
1991).
Where attention span becomes politically crucial is in the process of interpreting
one's feelings, the mechanism by which one gains first-hand knowledge of
one's social circumstances. Immediate situations yield immediate and visceral
sensations and corresponding emotions, but social situations of great complexity
cannot be felt immediately because the pattern that carries their meaning
can only be observed over a long period of time. A person who has been effectively
taught that feelings are ignorable and dismissible as valid sources of cognition
is probably not much less likely to have immediate emotional reactions to
being attacked and bitten by a pit bull, and to react on the basis of those
feelings. They are, however, less likely to pay serious attention to more
vague, complicated feelings full of ambivalences and curiosities and uneasinesses
if those feelings don't seem to have anything to do with obvious and immediately
understandable circumstances. Such a reduced emotion-driven attention span
is a widespread condition under patriarchy, and particularly so among men.
Situations that a woman might see as consequentially connected to behaviors
of months or years before and the feelings that they caused in other people
might be perceived by a masculinized man strictly in terms of the more immediate
events and attitudes in evidence in the current situation. Ongoing discrepancies
between actual experiences and the social analogue of expected experiences
and their supposed meanings can be recognized as a pattern, but only if
one has the attention span to notice them over time and make the connection.
The type of non-goal-directed, introspective, feeling-oriented thinking
that is necessary for these processes is not encouraged in men, and does
not mesh well with the defensive strategic considerations of competitive
endeavors that are. Since the desirability (for men) of power and authority
over other people is directly promoted by the social analogue of patriarchal
society as a fact, the process by which oppressor males would come to recognize
that oppressing others is not in their best interests would involve their
long-term engagement with their own feelings about the life they are living
(which would be a deviant process for them). Even if it led them to question
what they have been taught about the desirability of having power over other
people, that desirability is closely tied in with explicitly sexual notions
of masculine viability (i.e., sex defined as domination of women), which
would imply having to question the entire conceptual construct system of
what masculinity is, what heterosexuality is, and what a woman is. The process
by which an oppressed male might come to recognize that another group of
men have power over him is far less complicated, since it doesn't necessitate
questioning the desirability of power over other people, but only of the
fairness of the circumstances under which some category of men exist in
power over him. Indeed, it is worth noting that male revolutions against
male oppressors have abounded, but have mainly tended to replace the old
bosses with new bosses, leaving the patriarchal system of power over other
people, and the belief in its desirability, intact.
Nevertheless, if we respond to willful oppression and the belief of oppressors
that they benefit from oppression by blaming them and believing that they
do indeed benefit from the situation, we allow them to project their oppressive
world-view as reality. Angry and determined revolutionaries who decry the
injustices of the world are everywhere to be found, but so long as they
concede the desirability of power over other people, they convey little
besides the jealous conviction that they'd like the world better if they
were the ones running it, and even though their tirades against the injustices
perpetrated by the powerful often fall on sympathetic ears, they ultimately
have little to offer as an alternative. The rhetoric of cynicism about those
in power, so long as it is still coupled with a cynical affirmation of the
desirability of such power, is the voice of those who would exchange old
bosses for new bosses.
The possibility of liberation lies with a different vision and a decentralized,
perpetual individual politics of everyday interaction. Without a widely
shared vision, and its activist expansion through communication, individual
changes in interaction will accomplish little. However, each individual
commands resources in the form of energy and the potential for cooperative
endeavors, and if those resources are deployed in such a way as to support
non-archist egalitarian interactive arrangements, and are made available
most commonly to other individuals whose interactive modality is in keeping
with such a vision, the energies of our agency and our belief systems goes
increasingly towards realizing a feminist world and moving beyond the patriarchal
one. Each individual must move against the backdrop of the social structure,
and the system of social rewards and punishments leads each of us to make
decisions and participate in endeavors that are profoundly patriarchal,
at least some of the time. Nevertheless, at any given moment, each of us
is part of what the rest of us experience as the social structure, and can
make a difference in the outcomes of another's behaviors. This is rendered
effective through communication, so that the likely behavior of people with
the different vision of feminist interaction is known and can be predicted;
therefore just as the personal is political, the theoretical is tactical.
In the absence of real shifts in the ways that people make themselves available
to each other, though, radical feminism is just another set of idealistic
dreamware; the personal is political, it is the political,
it is where politics is located for all practical purposes. There
will be no meaningful opportunities to "overthrow a structure",
because the problematic structures are maintained in reverberating interaction,
constantly, through our everyday and moment-to-moment behaviors and belief-systems.
Freedom begins with spontaneity and initiative. I can write of the inevitability
of feminist transformation with confidence because I am, in fact, writing
about it, and so know that action is being taken. Whatever predestination
evinces a feminist outcome to the modern struggles may be evoked to explain
my participation in the feminist enterprise, and in this sense it is true
that the social context in which I live, when taken in its entirety and
in all its complexity, might be said to be causing my behavior. However,
that is not how I experience it. Ultimately, when agency is removed
from consideration, causation tends to depart with it, leaving one with
correlated conditions. There is much to be said for speaking from one's
personal experience--that is the point from which one attains one's perspective
on things--and although structure and interaction are unified and need to
be understood as unified if we are to comprehend society, our perspective
is the perspective of the particles that are doing the interacting. From
our vantage point, structure is a verb and every one of us is engaged in
its activities. History, and revolution, are ours. We make it happen. And
so it is and shall continue to be. As Robin
Morgan says (1978, p. 306), "May your insurrection and your resurrection
be the same".
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Table of Contents
Home