The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa
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what constituted modernity and the moral meaning of its social and cultural changes. I do not attempt a systematic transnational comparison. The transnational dimension of the book lies in tracing the diffusion of the culture of politeness from the salons of splendid town houses in aristocratic Paris to the more modest but eminently decorous drawing rooms and parlors of, to recall Hume’s phrase, the middle station. In the early modern era Great Britain and France served each other as foils in the formation of national self-images. One way in which Hume stands out—there are many—is in rejecting British stereotypes of French aristocratic society as a women-dominated world that made men “effeminate.” More commonly France was made to epitomize a modernity that would marginalize, if not erase, the manly mind. We hear sporadic echoes of this self-serving stereotyping in recent Anglophone, and particularly American, caricatures of “the French” and, by extension, the “Europeans.”
The study builds on, and would not have been possible without, the conceptual and methodological creativity of feminist scholarship over the last several decades. The critical tool has been constructionism, the basic insight that sexual and gender differences that have had the status of the “natural” are in fact constructions with which societies and cultures enforce norms that put unequal distributions of power beyond question. “Nature” is not a foundational reality, anterior to culture. Culture gives meaning to physical differences; to give the differences ontological status is to mistake the effect for the cause. By denaturalizing differences and the norms that govern them we open the putatively unquestionable to fundamental critique, and we make a society and culture self-critical right down to its roots. It would be hard to exaggerate the emancipatory potential of this conceptual shift. The historian contributes to it by thinking historically; she shows that constructions of a universal and unchanging nature were in fact historically contingent.3
Constructionism is, then, a method with a powerful potential for critiquing arbitrary power disguised in the seemingly objective language of the natural. At this point it is also something of a mixed blessing. It risks suffering the usual fate of innovative concepts that become shorthand banners and stop doing the work they should do. One thinks of hegemony, or secularization, or identity, or experience, or contingency, or indeed the concept of context itself. In principle the notion of a “construct” should be a point of departure for two historicist inquiries that, as the German sociologist and historian Max Weber argued, should be intertwined as tightly as possible.4 One is explanatory: what have the relevant contexts contributed to shaping the text? The other is hermeneutic: how does the language of the text work to produce its meaning? When used as a convenient shorthand, “construct” may obviate the need for both inquiries; it seems sufficient simply to evoke the concept, when in fact it should be taken more as posing a question or set of questions than as providing a readymade answer.
To understand construction in a richly contextualized way, I have put the idea of labor at the center of the study. The term “labor” does not simply encompass a set of practices; it is the semantic locus for a cluster of meanings that inform practice and draw normative distinctions within it and between it and other modes of social life. It would be foolhardy to assume that in early modern Europe a society in which women practiced the same occupations as men, and on equal terms, was simply unthinkable. As early as 1673, Poullain de la Barre advocated precisely that. His argument had hardly any purchase over the next century, but in the 1760s and 1770s some French women were entertaining the same change in the division of labor in private discussion, if not in print. But in this study the primary meaning of “labor” is not employment, which was unthinkable for genteel women in the upper and middle reaches of society well beyond the eighteenth century. (In Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, published in 1905, the tragic fate of Lily Bart turns on this social fact; her resort to employment puts her in a “false position” in the New York high society in which she had maneuvered so carefully to win acceptance despite her lack of fortune.) What I mean by labor here is simply the labor of the mind as a cognitive practice, the concentrated, sustained, and often physically as well as mentally exhausting intellectual effort that, it has been assumed for millennia, only men can accomplish, as opposed to what the French called the aisance, or effortlessness, which was considered natural to the female mind and became emblematic of what I am calling the social aesthetic of play in le monde.5
This angle of approach promises a deeper historical understanding of what representations of gender difference have meant and how they have worked to constitute social and cultural life. It will provide a resource for feminist theory, but I should reiterate that the book is an historical work of textual exegesis, to use the old-fashioned term; the measure of its usefulness will be whether readers are persuaded, or at least intrigued, by what it has to say about the historical meaning of texts familiar and unfamiliar to them. In the ways in which the exegesis historicizes gender differentiation, however, I hope to offer contemporary argument a more extended and richer genealogy. I have written the book with a growing awareness of the irony of normalization with which present-day feminists are contending. As feminist studies have been firmly institutionalized in academe, feminism’s critical edge has been dulled, and it is losing its purposefulness as a political movement.6 I want to contribute to moving the history of gender, as a practice of fundamental critique, to the center of historiography, where it can more effectively challenge routine disciplinary practices that have adapted to, but are far from fully absorbing, the conceptual and methodological challenges posed by feminist history.
Following Denise Riley, Joan Wallach Scott has questioned whether feminist constructionism can accomplish its purpose if it continues to use the categories “men” and “women,” which work to perpetuate gender differentiation by grounding perceived sexual difference in the putative biological ontology of the body, the assumed irreducible reality.7 I have worked in the spirit, if not the letter, of Scott’s agenda by bringing a critical skepticism to the concept of intelligence itself, which has of course been central to the categories of men and women. I try to avoid the trap of accepting as a category of the self-evident, or the undeniably “real,” what has to be explained as a discursive category open to critique. Perhaps the most obvious problem is with intelligence in the singular, which posits a unitary entity. Since the mid-nineteenth century, particularly in the United States, the use of quantified intelligence testing has encouraged this view of intelligence, though not without strenuous protests from skeptics.8 In the early modern era metrics played no role in estimations of intelligence, but it was quite common to distinguish men and women by their degrees of intelligence. We find here a classic case of the tenacious logic of illogic in the construction of difference. It rests on a false and arbitrary analogy between the physical and the mental, and a resulting causal inference, no less false or arbitrary, from the one to the other. Given the visible physical strength of men, their brains—physical organs, but unseen—were assumed to be stronger than women’s; they had more force, or energy, or power. And that in turn meant that men had greater strength of mind, particularly in what made a society and polity possible, the exercise of judgment in applying laws of nature and principles of morality and justice. Perhaps paradoxically, the unitary category, even as it might seem to level different kinds of intelligence by lumping them into a homogeneous mass, made it possible to arrange the kinds into a steep hierarchy. Men, but not women, ascended to the pinnacle of the hierarchy, where abstract thought and judgment reigned. One of the challenges we face today is to retain the critical work that abstraction does without undervaluing cognitive capacities that grasp the concrete particularity of our emotional and affective lives and the manifold talents and skills that go into human artifice.9 The question is, of course, central to making men and women experientially, and not just legally, equal. It is also integral to understanding, and changing, arbitrary inequalities of class and status.
The larger issue is how the mind, understood metaphorically as a space in consciousness, is related to the physical organ we call the brain. In recent decades new imaging technology has produced remarkable discoveries of the division of labor among regions of the brain, of the electrochemical motion of its neurons, and of how the brain receives and acts on hormonal signals. We may eventually have digital simulations of chemical and electrical synapses connecting the roughly eighty-five billion neurons that make each brain unique. But consciousness, including the mind, is something else again. To the philosopher Colin McGinn there is no doubt that consciousness