The AIDS Notebooks PDF
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Page i The AIDS Notebooks Page ii SUNY Series in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences Lenore Langsdorf Page iii The AIDS Notebooks Stephen Schecter STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS Page iv Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 1990 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y., 12246 Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Schecter, Stephen, 1946 The AIDS notebooks / by Stephen Schecter. p. cm. — (SUNY series in the philosophy of the social sciences) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0791403335. — ISBN 0791403343 (pbk.) 1. AIDS (Disease) — Social aspects. 2. Phenomenological sociology. I. title. II. Series. RC607.A26S37 1990 362.1'969792 — dc20 8921824 CIP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 Page v Contents All That Is Left Is the Individual vii A Preface by Lenore Langsdorf "Perdido Street Blues" 1 A Strand of Something More Malign: Medicine, Technique, and Progress 7 Community as Absence 19 Devant la douleur 29 What Makes AIDS a Modern Disease? 37 But Also a Postmodern One 45 Interlude 53 Aron on AIDS: Homosexuality as Absolute Difference 57 No Man's Land 65 On the Importance of Regret 87 Isn't Sex Something Else, Now? 97 Stories 117 In Pain 123 Messiaen: Quatuor Pour La Fin Du Temps 129 And Still These Words 143 Notes 153 Index 165 Page vii "All That Is Left Is The Individual": A Preface To The AIDS Notebooks Lenore Langsdorf A book about AIDS is somewhat like jazz, especially blues, because it has to try and make sense of the pain. So the book has to talk about history and society, but also about life and death, evil and beauty; also about their intersection. Which was in a way what sociology was always about: the socially organized structure of meaning and its absence. Think of Durkheim on suicide, Weber on the disenchantment of the world, good old Marx on socially produced alienation. (p. 6) And Schecter on AIDS. The structure that he uncovers in these notebooks is that of the self and society of modernity. He tells us of the life of both, as they emerged from the Enlightenment as two apparently different phenomena. As phenomenological and hermeneutical sociologist, however, he overturns that appearance to reveal the meaning — and absence of meaning — that unify society and self. "Concerned from the start with absence" (p. 150), he knows that the meaning he constitutes isn't apparent on the surface of this past decade. What's happened is all too apparent: the phenomenon of AIDS has overcome the fragile conflation of sociality and sexuality that offered itself as a postmodern possibility for society and self. But as for what that means: this is the story that Schecter uncovers as a theme that traces its own path through the stories he keeps in his notebook. I rely on bits of quotation in order to bring that theme to the foreground in this preface. For those fragments seem to me to be the best way to suggest the broader story that can tell itself in the margins of what he writes. That telling would be of a postmodernity that appropriately denies representations of self that have dominated us. In doing so, however, it appeals to a self who comes to be in the center margin: a self who exists between, and because of, the densely written pages that are the history of our sexuality and sociality. I say that this story can tell itself — not, that it does — because Page viii the account on the pages displays only statistics and aetiologies. Schecter discerns there a story that is AIDS, but is also more than AIDS. Before saying a bit as to how he does that, we need to recognize the "socially organized structure of meaning and its absence" which is his starting point. The meaning is epitomized in Romanticism: the self bore "a larger than life burden, porter of that mission to liberate the self from the tyranny of modern society . . . yet the task was wellnigh impossible, demanding of the self to be more than it is just as bourgeois society demanded that it be less." (p. 72) The absence is epitomized in "the rise of the welfare state . . . accompanied by a growing medical definition of social reality": bourgeois society's "promises of freedom and progress, reason and order" rested on a ''social structure that pressures us to approach life dilemmas in terms of control." (pp. 10, 11, 15) Increasingly and then pervasively (as Schecter reads our history from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries) the dissolution and even "abolition of transcendence in the public sphere" (p. 77) obliged an obsession with the self. "What could be done replaces the question of what should be done. . . . Public policy is formulated less in terms of hallowed norms oriented toward a social purpose framed in universal language, than in terms of its feasibility and selfevident necessity." (p. 13) We constructed a social reality which required an "inflation of the individual who cannot bear everything alone." (p. 24) In other words: in the absence of transcendent norms, the self was to be the agent of that control which became our primary value. However: "Some things cannot be controlled, should not be controlled, and the recognition of their uncontrollable nature might be the first step in dealing with them intelligently. . . . Sex, for example." (pp. 15–16) And so Schecter tells us also of the death of both self and society, beginning from that great fissure in modernity that is World War I. He finds both evil and beauty in this story that he tells, and for which AIDS is the emblem. The evil: "modern dynamism proved to be murderous." (p. 49) Even as the self was promoted as sole agent of control, the conditions for its presence became absent. The "abolition of transcendence" left only an emancipated self that "turns round and round in its own subjectivity," until that self is "pulverized" and "all that is left is the individual." (pp. 77–78) Yet this is precisely that "inflated" individual which is unable to "bear" (i.e., conceive and nurture) both itself and the conditions for itself: The conversation that the bourgeois world had made possible dissolves in the face of a world that is progressively destroying Page ix the conditions for conversation: a world presumed in common prior to individual existence, in which the individual could see himself or herself reflected, and a world that possibly, just possibly, he or she could come to love and to very much regret leaving. (p. 92) In other words: "the conditions under which subjectivity can emerge are being done away with at the same time as people are being encouraged to assert their 'subjectivity.'" (p. 106). Thus the human species finds itself bereft of a common social world in the midst of which the individual can be identified. For the legacy, from the Enlightenment through Modernity, is that "society itself is defined a posteriori" (p. 75), by its agents, rather than serving to define those agents. Distrust of transcendence precludes appreciation of society's insistence upon defining us, even while being defined by us. Individuality was to be constituted instead only on the basis summarized by C. B. Macpherson as "possessive individualism" — a sense of selfhood, Schecter notes, that has the "paradoxical effect of draping, if not burying, love in the gravity of self emancipation and latterly, of selfrealization." (p. 58) In popular contemporary terms, this individuation through accumulation is consumerism. Schecter finds (drawing on the work of Norman O. Brown) that its failure intensifies the claims of constitution on the basis of difference: ''Wealth is sublimation, an attempt to get in the world what has been denied in the body." (p. 104) But "precapitalist hoarding ('primitive accumulation') differs from that of capitalist enterprise . . . precisely in the fact that the accumulation . . . yielded bodily satisfaction to the owner." (p. 107) And so we arrive at defining individuality as well as society through practices that do yield that satisfaction; through sexuality, and especially through a sexuality in which our general awareness of the individual as "other," as individual by virtue of difference, is magnified. But even in the exuberance of earlier moments in gay consciousness, the already overburdened "subject" found "difficulty of forging a community on the shifting sands of the right to be different." (p. 63) And now "the fear surrounding AIDS gets expressed in the fear of the other, of contamination by the other, of which the homosexual is one, but not the only one." (p. 48) This fear puts an end to hopes for community founded in an era when technology pried sexuality loose from bourgeois rationality. But that negation of old adhesions between society and self implied no next stage. It's now quite obvious that it could not, in itself, provide any basis for fusing sexuality and sociality. Thus our immediate and present fear — of AIDS — can now be understood as a more general and generally unthematized fear of all that technology cannot do. Page x Earlier, I noted that Schecter finds both evil and beauty in this story that he tells, and for which AIDS is the emblem. The sketch I've given of the story, thus far, focuses on the evil — or at least, on absences that overburden the self into fear and silence. For I have been reporting some strands of what Schecter reports, and that description of sociality's appearance within and at the end of modernity is not a description of the good life. But also — and at the risk of seeming "almost silly, perhaps pathetic, certainly oldfashioned" — Schecter reaches beyond those descriptions; he interprets the appearances in order to "argue that we must reflect on sex and apply such reasoning to practice if sex is one day to be both good and different; and mean by reflection the working through of standards in the light of experience, rather than the hasty retreat to traditional morality that was also compulsion." (p. 113) The beauty in the story only comes forward if we also perform this reflection, which is a phenomenological one that examines the phenomenon — in this case, the history and present condition of social sexuality — so that we may understand it, rather than prescribing for it or proscribing any of its multiple ways of being. It is also a hermeneutical one, for it seeks to capture not just the appearances but also their significance "in the light of experience": Yes, AIDS kills, but therein does not lie its significance. The latter lies rather in the understanding we come to acquire about the world and our place within it, frail human hope, quixotic and eternal beauty, desire necessary and unfulfilled and still longing until extinguished with our breath. (p. 142) Central to that understanding, perhaps, is Schecter's coming to the thought "that there are times when civilization can be summed up as learning to say no." (p. 115) He arrives at that summation through listening to a lot of stories: "Stories make the world talk," (p. 117) but they do not make us listen, unless and until we have something for which we are listening. It's when we hear that for which Schecter is listening that we come to appreciate the significance and recognize the beauty of the story he tells us in The AIDS Notebooks. If we would hear what he hears, this seems to me the procedure to follow: we must begin from Schecter's understanding of sociology as having always been about "the socially organized structure of meaning and its absence." Equally important, we need to grasp the extent to which he shares critical theory's emphasis on absence; on negative dialectic — even while adhering to phenomenology's thematizing of patterns that organize what
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