AT THE HEART OF ANY POLITICAL BATTLE

Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it. It is so in tune with our expectations that it becomes hard to challenge it.

Now, more than ever, it is crucial that we work to dissolve the apparently obvious and explore the symbolic structures of the androcentric unconscious that still exists in men and women alike.

What are the mechanisms and institutions which make possible the continued reproduction of this age-old domination by men ?

And is it possible to neutralise them in order to liberate the forces for change which they are instrumental in blocking ?

It is unlikely that I would have embarked on such a thorny topic for a book had I not been led to it by the whole logic of my research.

Throughout my life I have been amazed at what one might call the paradox of the doxa : the fact that the order of the world as we know it, with its one-way streets and its no entry signs (both literally and figuratively), its obligations and its penalties, is generally speaking respected. I find it surprising that there are not more transgressions and subversions, crimes and "madnesses" (here you need only think of the extraordinary concordance of thousands of human dispositions —or wills— involved in five minutes of car-driving around the Place de la Bastille in Paris).

It is even more surprising that, leaving aside the odd historical accident, the established order, with its relations of domination, its rights and prerogatives, its privileges and its injustices, manages to perpetuate itself so very easily and that it is often possible for the most intolerable conditions of existence to appear as acceptable and even natural.

I have always seen male domination, and the ways in which it is imposed and suffered, as the prime example of this paradoxical submission. I see it as an effect of what I would call symbolic violence, a violence that is hardly noticed, almost invisible for the victims on whom it is perpetrated ; a violence which is exercised principally via the purely symbolic channels of communication and knowledge (or, to be accurate, mis-knowledge) of recognition and, in the final analysis, of feelings.

This social relationship which is so extraordinarily ordinary thus offers an opportunity for understanding the logic of a domination which is exercised in the name of a symbolic principle that is known and recognised by dominator and dominated alike. This may involve a language (or a pronunciation), a style of life (or a manner of thinking, doing or acting) or, more generally, a distinctive property, emblem or stigma, of which the most efficient in symbolic terms is that perfectly arbitrary and non-predictive property which is the colour of a person’s skin.

It is clear that in all this we need to restore to the doxa its character of paradox, while at the same time dismantling the mechanisms which are responsible for the transformation of history into nature, of that which is culturally arbitrary into something that appears as natural.

And in so doing, we should strive to view our own universe and our own vision of the world from the perspective of the anthropologist : we need to be capable of seeing both the arbitrary and contingent character of the principle of vision and division (nomos) which lays the basis for the difference between the masculine and the feminine as we (mis-)know it, and its sociological necessity.

It is no accident that when Virginia Woolf attempts to analyse what she refers to, magnificently, as "the hypnotic power of domination", she uses an ethnological analogy and relates women’s segregation back to the rituals of ancient societies : "Inevitably, we look upon societies as conspiracies that sink the private brother, whom many of us have reason to respect, and inflate in his stead a monstrous male, loud of voice, hard of fist, childishly intent upon scoring the floor of the earth with chalk marks, within whose mystic boundaries human beings are penned rigidly, separately, artificially ; where, daubed red and gold, decorated like a savage with feathers he goes through mystic rites and enjoys his dubious pleasures of power and dominion while we, ’his’ women, are locked in the private house without share in the many societies of which his society is composed."

"Mystical boundaries", "mystic rites" —this language, which is the language of the magical transfiguration and symbolic conversion that produces the moment of ritual consecration, the basis of new birth— invites us to direct our research activities towards discovering an approach that will be capable of grasping the actual symbolic dimension of male domination.

A transformation strategy

What we should require from a materialist analysis of the economy of symbolic goods is that it provides us with the means to escape from the damaging dichotomy between the "material" and the "spiritual" or "ideal" (a dichotomy perpetuated today via the opposition between so-called "materialist" research, which explains the asymmetry between the sexes by reference to the means of production, and so-called "symbolic" research, which produces results that are often remarkable, albeit partial).

But first, I would argue that only a very particular usage of ethnology would make it possible for us to achieve the project suggested by Virginia Woolf, of scientifically objectivising that highly mystical operation which goes to produce the division between the sexes as we know it. In other words, what we need is to treat the objective analysis of a society that is thoroughly organised on androcentric principles (in our case the Kabyle tradition) as an objective archaeology of our own unconscious - in other words, as an instrument for a thoroughgoing project of social analysis.

Such a detour via an exotic tradition is indispensable if we are to break the relation of misleading familiarity which we have with our own tradition.

The biological appearances and the very real effects which have been produced, in people’s bodies and in their brains, by a long collective labour of socialisation of the biological and of biologisation of the social combine to overturn the relationship between causes and effects, and end by making them appear to be a naturalised social construction ("genders", as sexed habituses), as the grounding in nature of the arbitrary division which is the basis both of reality and of the representation of reality, and which is sometimes to be found expressed within research itself.

Thus it is not rare to find psychologists taking on board the commonly-held view of the sexes as being radically separate and lacking in intersection, and ignoring the degree of overlap in the distribution of the things that men and women do, and the differences (of scale) between the differences identified in the various domains (from anatomy to intelligence).

Or, more seriously still, they often allow themselves to be guided, in the construction and description of their object, by the principles of vision and division that are inscribed within everyday language - whether in attempting to measure the differences that are embedded in that language (the notion that men, for instance, are more "aggressive" or that women are more "timid") or, in using ordinary terminology (which is heavily weighted with value judgements), in order to describe these differences.

However there is a danger in this quasi-analytical use of ethnography, which, by historicising it, de-naturalises that which appears as most "natural" in the social order (i.e. the division between the sexes) - namely that it runs the risk of bringing to light constants and invariables - which are the very foundation of its socio-analytical efficacity - and, in so doing, it risks eternalising (by ratifying it) a conservative representation of the relationship between the sexes, that same representation which is condensed in the myth of what is "eternally feminine".

At this point, we need to confront a new paradox, precisely in order to force a revolution in our manner of approaching what we have sought to study in terms of the "history of women". Is it not the case that the non-variables which, beyond all the visible changes in the feminine condition, are still to be seen in the relations of domination between the sexes, oblige us to take as a priority object of study those historic mechanisms and institutions which, in the course of history, have repeatedly and continuously detached these non-variables from history ?

This revolution in ways of seeing things would inevitably have consequences at the level of practice, and, in particular, in ways of conceiving strategies aimed at transforming the present state of the material and symbolic power balance between the sexes.

The basis for the perpetuation of this relationship of domination does not really reside (or at least not principally) in one of the more visible places in which it is exercised - in other words, within the domestic sphere, on which some feminist debate has concentrated its attention - but in locations such as the school, or the state, which function as places for the elaboration and imposition of principles of domination which go on to be exercised even within the most private of worlds. Recognition of this fact opens up a huge field of action for feminist struggles, which are thus called upon to take an original and decisive place within political struggles against all forms of domination.