Adultery

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 24, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 289-326

  Kipnis, Laura ^a  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0039833685     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/448876     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. The term repressive desublimation, meaning sexual liberation in the service of social control, is Herbert Marcuse's. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, 1964), pp. 72-78
2. See also Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, 1955), pp. 197-221. This essay leans heavily on Marcuse's general critique of social domination and the reduction of life to work
3. The point that adultery is a structural transgression of marriage is made by Tony Tanner in Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore, 1979), pp. 3-11
4. Marcuse distinguishes "surplus-repression" from "basic repression," that being "the 'modifications' of the instincts necessary for the perpetuation of the human race in civilization" (Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 35)
5. Sexual self-reporting is notoriously unreliable; the statistics on adultery are simply all over the place. Kinsey's reports famously pegged male adultery at 50 percent in 1948 and female adultery at 26 percent in 1953. The numbers currently in common usage, based on a 1994 survey by the National Opinion Research Center, are quite low by comparison (21 percent for men, 11 percent for women), but suspicion has been cast on the method for arriving at these figures and the data collection method itself (the interviewers were predominantly white, middle-aged women, for example). One problem is that men seem to overreport and women to underreport sexual activity. In the raw numbers gathered for this survey, apparently 64 percent of male sexual contacts can't be accounted for-or, rather, they could if in a pool of thirty-five hundred responses, ten different women each had two thousand partners they didn't report. Researchers thus routinely "adjust" their data by eliminating the high-end male responses, even though it seems unclear why the assumption would be that men misreport upward more than women downward. See David L. Wheeler, "Explaining the Discrepancies in Sex Surveys," Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 Oct. 1993, p. A9. The relation of any of this data to actual practices seems problematic, to say the least
6. Jerry Adler, "Adultery: A New Furor over an Old Sin," Newsweek, 30 Sept. 1996, p. 51
7. Communists, according to Marx and Engels, have "no interest separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole," no "separate principles of their own" (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore, ed. David McLellan [New York, 1992], p. 17)
8. On the theme of love as mistaken identity, see Judith Livingston, "Love and Illusion," Psychoanalytic Quarterly 65 (1996): 548-50
9. On the links between criminal or deviant subcultures and social stasis, see Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (New York, 1981)
10. Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the Slate, and Law and Order (London, 1978)
11. and Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London, 1979)
12. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 256
13. quot;In our erotic life.... it is no more possible to work at a relationship than it is to will an erection, or arrange to have a dream. In fact when you are working at it you know it has gone wrong, that something is already missing" (Adam Phillips, Monogamy [New York, 1996], p. 62)
14. One of the most common labor law violations is failure to pay for overtime work, to the tune of some §19 billion a year. See "Overtime Blues," The Nation, 10 Mar. 1997, p. 7
15. See Robert Goldman, "'We Make Weekends': Leisure and the Commodity Form," Social Text, no. 8 (Winter 1983-84): 84-103
16. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, 3 vols. (New York, 1976), 1:342
17. hereafter abbreviated C. Much of this language occurs in volume 1, chapter 10, "The Working Day," but it is scattered throughout. On Marx's use of metaphor, see Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford, 1987), pp. 121-40
18. For another turn through the affective boneyard, see Lauren Berlant on "dead citizenship," in her "Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material)," The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N. C., 1997), pp. 55-81, an analysis that influences mine significantly
19. See Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modem Societies (Stanford, Calif., 1992), p. 155
20. See Arlie Russell Hochschild, "Time in the Balance," The Nation, 26 May 1997, p. 11
21. excerpted from Hochschild's book The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York, 1997)
22. Quoted in Linda Kintz, "The Appeal and Danger of Sacred Familiarity: The Promise Keepers" (unpublished paper), p. 6
23. See also Ron Stodghill II, "God of Our Fathers," Time, 6 Oct. 1997, pp. 34-40
24. See Mark Poster, Critical Theory of the Family (New York, 1978)
25. Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (New York, 1976). For materialist feminist critiques
26. see, for example, Michèle Barrett, Women's Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis (London, 1980)
27. Barrett and Mary Mclntosh, The Anti-Social Family (London, 1982)
28. Christine Delphy, Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women's Oppression, trans, and ed. Diana Leonard (Amherst, Mass., 1984). The inception of much of this general line of thinking is in Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (Harmondsworth, 1986); the critique of the family continues as a general theme in Frankfurt School critical theory, particularly in the work of Wilhelm Reich
29. The state of Louisiana has even introduced something called covenant marriage, which couples can elect over civil marriage and which will make divorces more difficult to obtain-incompatibility isn't sufficient grounds, although adultery is. State officials predict more states will follow suit. Divorce laws vary from state to state, but as of 1988 only five states had no adultery laws on the books. See Annette Lawson, Adultery: An Analysis of Love and Betrayal (New York, 1988), p. 42
30. Tanner also discusses adultery in relation to contract law and the state in Adultery in the Novel, pp. 3-11
31. See Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, p. 2
32. A term that defines the subject's relation to the outside world and modes of access to reality. Given that the two expressions are invariably opposed to one another, the reality principle usually gets to settle the debate-although less so in the case of sexual instincts, which are "more difficult to 'educate' than the ego-instincts" (J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, "Pleasure-Ego/Reality-Ego," The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith [New York, 1973], p. 320; see also pp. 320-22)
33. The question actually paraphrases one posed in Michael Warner's slightly melancholy introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory: "What do queers want? This volume takes for granted that the answer is not just sex. Sexual desires themselves can imply other wants, ideals, and conditions" (Michael Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Warner [Minneapolis, 1993], p. vii
34. A random example of the ubiquity of the language of banality when it comes to adultery: "In telling the story of Nona, a narcissistic, 40-year-old New Yorker who leaves a 'patient, loving' husband for a short, pitiful affair, Sigrid Nunez's second novel could verge on the banal. But with her well-pitched prose ..." (Christine Schwartz Hartley, review of Naked Sleeper, by Sigrid Nunez, New York Times Book Review, 1 Dec. 1996, p. 23). Questions about happiness seem to automatically invoke fears of banality: even Freud fretted about this in Civilization and Its Discontents, wondering if his observation that life isn't made for our happiness was a waste of paper and ink
35. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York, 1961), p. 71
36. The critique of a society without opposition is Marcuse's general theme in One-Dimensional Man
37. This line of argument is developed more fully in Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (New York, 1996)
38. For Charles Taylor, asking oneself "what makes life worth living?" is the fundamental question of modern subjecthood (Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modem Identity [Cambridge, Mass., 1989], p. 4)
39. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 16
40. Livingston, "Love and Illusion," p. 549
41. For Michel de Certeau tactics like "poaching," "ruses," and "deception" are deployed against the power of established orders, thus, reading de Certeau backward, may be taken as a clue to its presence as well (Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall [Berkeley, 1984], pp. 31, 37)
42. Or see Phillips, who poses it as an individual question about self-knowledge: "What does commitment leave out of the picture that we might want?" (Phillips, On Flirtation [Cambridge, Mass. 1994], p. xviii; see also pp. xviii-xx). The question is about flirtation, but translates well enough to adultery
43. Douglas Crimp, "How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic," October, no. 43 (Winter 1987): 253
44. So responded a Marxist reader of an earlier version of this essay (with apologies for poetic license). An extensive left literature critiques the attention devoted by cultural studies to "minor forms" like fandom, subcultures, pornography, and other marginalia, routinely accusing this work of neglecting the centrality of class. See, for example, Judith Williamson, "The Perils of Being Popular," New Socialist (Sept. 1986): 14-15
45. Corey Dolgon, "Challenging Cultural Studies: Not by 'Culture' Alone," Minnesota Review 43-44 (Fall 1994-Spring 1995): 99-112
46. Teresa Ebert, "Ludic Feminism, the Body, Performance, and Labor: Bringing Materialism Back into Feminist Cultural Studies," Cultural Critique 23 (Winter 1992-93): 20-26
47. Mike Budd, Robert M. Entman, and Clay Steinman, "The Affirmative Character of U.S. Cultural Studies," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 7 (1990): 169-84
48. So responded an early feminist reader (again, apologies for poetic license). Recent reports suggest there are generational shifts in these arrangements and that women in their twenties are now more likely to stray then men. Therapists also report anecdotally that adultery among women is increasing. See Adler, "Adultery," p. 58
49. The literature-popular, psychological, sociological-on gender roles in adultery is, of course, enormous, and while certain roles may be commonly associated with certain genders (cheating husbands, jealous wives), sociologists also indicate that the more education women have, the more likely they are to have affairs. In couples in which the wife has more education than the husband, she's the one more likely to stray. See Lawson, Adultery, p. 79.I presume I'm addressing a readership with a high degree of postgraduate education and one in which gender roles may perhaps be less predictable. Hence my avoidance of gendered pronouns throughout the essay. 34
50. See the recent book by Gabriel Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (New York, 1997).
51. For the argument against Rotello and gay neoconservatism generally, see Warner, "Media Gays: A New Stone Wall," The Nation, 14 July 1997, pp. 15-19
52. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1964), p. 832
53. See Berlant, "Introduction: The Intimate Public Sphere," The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, pp. 1-24
54. See Kipnis, Marx: The Video (1990) or its script, "Marx: The Video, a Politics of Revolting Bodies," in Kipnis, Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics (Minneapolis, 1993), pp. 243-93
55. For a discussion of the modern tendency to privilege expressivity as a form of knowledge production, see Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 368-90, 456-93
56. I'm drawing on theorists of the various avant-gardes, for whom the materiality of literary and artistic practices effect the category of the subject. See, for example, Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis, 1988)
57. Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, N. Y., 1985)
58. Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London, 1979)
59. See Helena Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism (New York, 1988) on the historical association between political and aesthetic avant-gardes, including the close ties between surrealism and the Communist Party
60. See also Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, 1984), on aesthetic movements that challenge art's autonomy from daily life
61. The "utopian impulse" is "able to do its work only in disguise," after all, as Fredric Jameson has pointed out (Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature [Princeton, NJ., 1971], p. 156). Jameson's reading of Ernst Bloch's work colors this essay (as does Jameson's commitment to Utopian thinking generally), particularly his point that philosophizing Utopia "begins at home ... in lived experience itself and in its smallest details, in the body and its sensations," or in experiences like astonishment, and other epiphanies of daily life (p. 122). For a discussion of the vicissitudes of the Utopian impulse for which Jameson's work is also crucial, see Berlant, "'68, or Something," Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 124-55
62. See Phillips, Monogamy, pp. 4-18
63. See " Harper's Index," Harper's (Aug. 1997): 13
64. Clines F.X., Character Question Fails to Catch Public Interest, 1996, A14, New York Times, 28 Oct
65. See Ken Auletta, "Inside Story: Why Did Both Candidates Despise the Press?" The New Yorker, 18 Nov. 1996, p. 48
66. As one commentator puts it, perhaps somewhat ironically, the "vigorous pursuit of the good fight against adultery springs from basic common sense and the bedrock military principle on which our entire defense posture has been built: When the enemy attacks, we simply can't have our soldiers, sailors, marines and pilots lying down on the job" (Alan Abelson, "Bum Raps," Barron's, 9 June 1997, p. 3)
67. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington, Ind., 1992), p. 39
68. see also pp. 36-39. Jameson's analysis echoes Deleuze and Guattari on the invariably collective nature of minor forms. The "cramped space" of minor literature "forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics" (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "What Is a Minor Literature?" trans. Dana Polan, in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson et al. [New York, 1990], p. 59)
69. See Victor Turner, "Social Dramas and Stories about Them," Critical Inquiry 7 (Autumn 1980): 141-68
70. Jonathan Raban, quoted in Howard Kurtz, "The Press in Campaignland," Washington Post Magazine, 16 July 1995, p. 13
71. I'm drawing on Berlant's work on national intimacy and traumatized citizenship here and throughout this section. See Berlant, "The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics," in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat (forthcoming) and "Introduction: The Intimate Public Sphere."
72. The Star broke the story that Morris attempted to impress his prostitute girlfriend by, among other grand gestures, letting her listen in on phone conversations with the president. See Star, 10 Sept. 1996. Prostitutes often report that in general, the more socially powerful men are, the more they want to be humiliated and made submissive in sex. So reports "Barbara," in her "It's a Pleasure Doing Business with You," Social Text, no. 37 (Winter 1993): 18
73. On the politics of renunciation and the difficulties of finding a properly political idiom for the languages of desire, see Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, NJ., 1986), pp. 110-24
74. On the differences between public and private forms of renunciation-and enjoyment-see Slavoj Zizek, "Superego by Default," The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London, 1994), pp. 54-85, who argues a different case: that the Law secretly condones transgression, including adultery, making the only true transgression publicly overidentifying with its dictates
75. Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), p. 218.1 borrow the phrase from Whitebook who borrows it from Cornelius Castoriadis. Whitebook gives an elegant psychoanalytic account of the Utopian impulse, and although his zeal for sublimation as a solution to the antinomies of psyche and sociality is a little complacent for my taste, he provides an in-depth account of the tradition my own essay attempts to invoke through perhaps somewhat more unreconciled tactics and languages
76. As in the realm of abjection, the space beyond identity, system and order whose occupant Julia Kristeva nicknames (coincidentally?) a "stray" (Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez [New York, 1982], p. 8)
77. On self-transformation in romantic love, see Christopher Bollas, "Transformational Objects," The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York, 1987), pp. 13-29
78. I'm drawing on Richard Dyer's argument in his "Entertainment and Utopia," in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1985), 2:220-32
79. Quoted in Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, p. 110
80. See Bollas, "Transformational Objects."