Pronouns for…what?
Once, a few years ago, I was at a conference about pronouns. The overall theme was literature and aesthetics, but as you can imagine most people chose to talk about new pronouns, not just he and she, but ze or they. My talk was on a phrase by Kant found in the Critique of Pure Reason: “this I, or He, or It (the thing), which thinks” (Critique of Pure Reason, A346/B404). It did not land very well. Perhaps, because I chose to speak of a dead, white man, and even the most bourgeois philosopher at this progressive conference. Since I was organizing the conference, I was able to talk, had I applied somewhere else, they would probably have rejected my paper for even suggesting something with Kant. Or maybe they would have accepted it, thinking that I aimed to critique Kant for his limited use of pronouns — why not “ze” or “she”? Or was the very oscillation between “he” and “it” an indication that he was unsecure about his status as a man, as the many gender-theorists minded people at the conference seemed to expect.
Kant is not a linguistic philosopher, but a philosopher (among other things) of epistemology. The socalled “linguistic turn” around Saussure and others (Jakobson, Wittgenstein) in the 20th century was ahead of him. Yet, he managed to articulate many things, that have some similarities with insights of structural linguistics, and that are as radical now as ever. One of them can be found in this phrase, which is used as critique of the cogito (“I think, therefore I am”).
I will simplify the argument here. Kant’s basic question is: who is really that thinks, when I think — it is a substance, and how do I know that this “thing” which thinks is also me? Do I coincide with this thing? The point is: I don’t coindice with it. There is a radical cut between our world of phenomena, the world constituted by, in Kant’s language, the transcendental I of apperception and then the noumenal I. We cannot get access to the thing, which thinks in us. But Kant’s even more radical move is to say: and this is actually a good thing. If we could really coincide with the thing that thinks, we would not have pure thinking, a perfect “intellectual intuition”, a thinking that would bypass the troubling, deceiving world of phenomena and illusion, but no thinking at all. The condition for thinking is “alienation”, that is being reduced to the world of phenomena. Why?
In order to think something, thinking must be minimally different from the thing. If they were to fully coincide we could not think it, since there would be no distance, no mediation between them. Perhaps the easiest way to articulate this is through the nature of language. Language, what Lacan calls the symbolic order, the Other, alienates us from things “out there”. The word “scissor” is part of network of meanings. It can only get significance by being different from “paper”, for example. So, there is no single referent, a word and a thing out there in the world, but rather a network of significations, none of which are permanently fixed. Furthermore, the word “scisssor” is not itself a scissor. In the end we don’t have scissors and paper, but “scissor”, “paper” and so on. In Kantian language, we only know the thing in its “objective validity”, through its phenomenal appearance, not as it is “in itself”. This “in itself” is problematic: we must both accept it as essential, and yet, we have no access to it. As Kant says, at one point, if we just had appearances, the world of appearance would itself collapse, because it would not be the appearance of anything, but just a solipstisic self-enclosed space (hence, we would be stuck with the same problem as if all things were not appearances at all, if we were immersed directly in things, we would be mere puppets, there would be no inside/outside). Only through language, Kant’s phenomenology, can there be truth, because in order to be truth, there must also be the possibility of falsehood. Only through the signifier can a signifier deceive, can we think that the word “apple” does not simply refer to actual apples.
But things get more complicated when we look at pronouns. This is because the object designated is not simply out there in the world, but is the subject itself that does the designation. As linguist Emile Benveniste would point out, there is the difference between lexical words, words referring to things, and words of deixis (here, there, me, you, they) that refer to the moment of utterance, the situation of the speaker.
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This is because a pronoun, which stands in for the name (the pro-noun), a stand in for the self, is no longer referring to a thing “out there”, but to the transcendental subject itself. Hypothetically, we might perhaps get to know things in themselves, but if we could know ourselves in this way, we would lose the very activity of thinking. The alienation (from myself as thinking thing) is constitutive. The problem with much of the contemporary discussion of pronouns, is that they assume that the split that we suffer through language can be healed by finding the right pronoun. The problem is therefore not structural, but just empirical: a question of finding the right pronoun. I do not mean that you are not allowed to prefer the pronoun “ze”. Only that the same alienation will incur here, that you will not live happily ever after, but suffer the same alienation as when Kant says: “I, he, it, the thing which thinks”. At the conference, people were predictably (or maybe it was not predictable, I don’t know), that Kant did not say, “ze” or simply “she”. Was he not a male chauvinist? The problem with these kind of arguments is not that they are wrong, but that they are not really arguments, and they fail to address the philosophical problem, avoiding it through moral indignation. Did he not thereby exclude minorities from the activity of thinking? Kant was no doubt, as the trivial saying goes, a “child of his time”, and ze-pronouns was not on his mind (not even “she” as the pronoun a philosopher could have…). But that doesn’t matter, except as some personal short-coming that does not detract from his philosophical point. What matters is what he is trying to say: namely that the activity of thinking is based on being alienated from things. Could we truly think the thing “in itself”, we would lose thinking (and the thing itself, since it would not be opposed to anything). The conference went horribly, and many people got upset, and I was not asked again, for a very long time, many people even refused to talk to me. But my point was simply that the actual activity of thinking is based on alienation. To exclude pronouns of minorities (like “ze” is of course equally bad, since it presumes that the “I, or he or it…” actually has some access to the thing which thinks (only “hes”, not “shes” or “zes”. But no one does. The subject is not a sovereign master, behind which hides simply so many (white) men. The subject is a split, something that falls out of reality as a given, with “things” in themselves. Kant’s entire point is that the subject is not simply a master “colonizing” things in themselves, by reducing them to a subjective point of view, but on the contrary, a radical discord, an oddball, something that enables a rupture with reality, such as it is. This is also why the “thing in itself”, is not simply some part of reality, that the subject does not (yet) know. It is correlative with the constitution of the subject itself as different from reality around it, if we remove the subject, we would not get the thing itself, but just a completely flat reality, with no way to make a difference.
To think it therefore always to do something catastrophic, since it alienates us from the things in themselves, but this is also the moment of freedom (like Kant later shows in his moral philosophy). Because only through transcendence, through a cut, can we enact a change in the simply given. Were we victims of the given, either socially or naturally, we would not be free beings, we would be in a coma. Far from a boring bourgeois philosopher, Kant is a catastrophic thinking, a thinker of catastrophe, that shows thinking AS catastrophe, perhaps the most radical philosopher of his time (except for Hegel).
As Slavoj Zizek once remarked, perhaps it is no accident that many of the most radical marxist wrote there phds on Kant, because once you really get into Kant, there is no turning back, your mind is already bent on emancipation, although this emanication cannot be through an overcoming of alienation, but rather through an acceptance of it, and this is not resigned acceptance, but jubilous, since only by not getting access to that which thinks can I think, and be different, to begin with.
We live in an epoch where the “self”, or “selves” (if you believe in several “identities” are more and more inflated. We live in an epoch of imaginary and intensified intensities (Anna Kornbluh), where any kind of limit (like the limit to myself as thinking entity) is seen as an affront to my self-image. Even when we emphasize vibrant matter or Deleuze like intensities of affective flow underneath the subject, the point is precisely to avoid any limit, because a limit is, and this is more structural cause, something that capitalism in its current “too-late” style cannot abide. This is why Kant is so abhorred today, not because of his “bourgeois prejudice”, but because he introduces a limit to what I can know and even sees this limit as the condition of any difference (and freedom) at all.
Something else happened at my university as well. People started sending e-mails, which they of course, had always done, but now, at the end, like standard procedure, like “professor so and so”, they also added “pronouns”, such as “he, him”. Why did this happen? It was clearly part of the moralistic trend to be on the “progressive side”, but also something like a trophy to show, it perfectly captured the logic of the superego which commands us to enjoy our own submission. This logic is not so much an outright command: it is more, as Freud notes, a surveillance, something like being eternally on once guard, “nothing can be hidden from the superego, not even thoughts”. It was like everyone wanted to show that they were part of the “in-crowd”, it felt compulsive to add once preferred pronouns. And if one didn’t it was not simply a neutral gesture, it was already interpreted (as my talk on Kant) as reactionary. But to add once pronouns at the end of the e-mail, it felt like something one actually did “impersonally”, as simply signing off a paper, something that should not be thought about, especially not critically. What we lose is precisely the ability to think, the discord between thoughts and the “thing that thinks”.
We see this trend also in the recent rise in socalled “autofiction”, that is fiction that takes the author’s own life as an almost 1:1 inspiration. As Anna Kornbluh has shown, whereas the 19th century and most of the 20th century had the third person narrator as the most common narrator, the 21st century is overflowing with 1. person narration. It is like fiction and the fictional universe itself is suspicious. Instead, we are supposed to only care about “real things” and “real people”, as though reality simply lies out there ready to get and be picked up and put on paper. What we lose thereby is not so much reality itself (which is already full of fiction), but we also lose, what we might call the “effectiveness” of fictions themselves, the way common and shared fiction enable us to escape the oppressiveness of the “self” (which is just another term for ego). Recall, that the ego or self is never immediately there, as Freud says, it must be constructed, it is something “put on”, and it doesn’t matter if this is a “vulnerable” fluid self (in fact the ideology of the “fluid self” is as egoistic as anything, perhaps even more, since it stretches to include so much). We need thinking and the shared fictions of the symbolic again to counter this ideological trend, and to see that the turn to narcissism since the 1970 is not a psychological phenomenon, but a structural one, rooted in neoliberalism.
