(by Merlin Wendelin)
What would it mean to develope a Gay Phenomenology? What realms of Gay life are relevant for such an phenomenological approach? What are the basic questions, problems and concepts of such an Gay-oriented reflection? In the following essays some essential ideas are collected, touching different issues from questioning the patriachal, metaphysical tradition to thoughts on Gay-Self, a creative Being-in-the-Gay-world and Gay perspectivism. The relation between embodiment and gayness are discussed as well as a first draft of an phenomenology of emotions in Gay -life will be presented.
"Radiant with rapport is the phrase which George finds to describe him. For what shines out of Kenny isn't mere intelligence or any kind of switched-on charm. There the two of them sit, smiling at each other - oh, far more than that - fairly beaming with mutual insight.....Kenny and he are no longer in the symbolic dialogue-relationship; this new new phase of communication is very much person-to-person..." transforming your entire life (Christopher Isherwood A single man
in: Where Joy resides A Christopher Isherwood Reader, Bachardy, D. (1991) p 388ff
Synchronicity and serendipity as the time and gift of finding valuable givings, can become an enhancing reality. Against any metaphysical monism, Gay love is a pluralistic open process; a mystery which can be full of clarity in the midst of intimacy. Synchronicity and serendipity as the time and gift of finding valuable givings, can become an enhancing reality for those who find and touch each other with their souls and bodies....
Spirit and Life are in their multiplicity irreducible to each other. We should gain perspectives of a "holistic Gay love" against a limping dualism between life and spirit, which bifurcates man. Spirit is dependend upon and imbedded in the life processes. The unity of Gay man in his person-I, person-body-I relationsship remains open to question. A knowledge of an a living together with other persons is achieved only by participating in 'the being' of the other person, by co-achieving, pre-performing and re-executing our own spritual acts alongside those of the alien person in person-community.
We need energy, time and space to (re-)discover love on that divers, but interrelated levels: Personal Love (pleasant/unpleasant as affective response to sense); the vital or passionate love (correspondiing to the vital values of health vigor and nobility e.g. in authentic friendship); sexual love, which is not a mere response to sensible pleasure. but part of man's vital union with the totality of life-processes, mental love (including spiritual values as aesthetic, juridical or of wisdom) and spiritual love (embarking on the Holy, bliss, awe and worship) Moral love Love (in contrast to benevolence and pity) is an act that springs spontaneously between persons. Love is directed to the very person of the other as bearer of values without objectifying him A "lived" phenomenological regard of love deals immediately with the concrete acts of love-experiencing. Therefore, love is no mere disposition or tendency or habit; love is not an abstract theoretical principle associated with a universal finality. Life without love is less than it can be, as love without life is less than it can be. The dynamic involvement of both concretizes a unique creative thrusting forward towards fullness within an open context...The core of Gay Being is concrete presence of loving, which is to say, an unending, dynamic, creative, mutual disclosure of Gay person in the direction of fullest and highest possible be-ing. As executed loving, Gay-Being is actualized or participated more deeply, more intensely, more intimately in a spontaneously act, carried by embodied dimension which precede, constitutes the loving persons and transcendends them at the same time.
Where persons in love are concerned, there are no objects, no things, no this or that; there is only unique and intense penetration of an energetic flow. The effort to determine the meaning of this penetration can only be the lived creative movement of love itself. Love is not the figment of some imagination open to discussion. Inititally it is a concrete lived life that disclosed the possibility of loving by loving!
This loves resides within a direct I-You relationship which transforms both towards more than they are as singular beings. I'm because you are, which is part of my being and becoming... Love is not blind: it instills vision and knowledge where otherwise they are lacking. Love is a mutual movement of the feeling senses and the understanding heart. It represents a spiritual and embodied emotion which offers a deep understanding of the cosmic energy flux.
What would it mean to develope a Gay Phenomenology? What realms of Gay life are relevant for such an phenomenological approach? What are the basic questions, problems and concepts of such an Gay-oriented reflection? In the following essays some essential ideas are collected, touching different issues from questioning the patriachal, metaphysical tradition to thoughts on Gay-Self, Being-in-the-Gay-world and Gay perspectivism. The relation between embodiment and gayness are discussed as well as a first draft of an phenomenology of emotions in Gay -life will be presented.
Criticism of the patriarchal metaphysics and the becoming of Gay Embodiment.
The dominating thought system which rules the Western world is due to an implicit anti-gay orientation. Within the prevailing sex-gender system a binary logic of opposition between the masculin and the feminine has been differentiated. The dualism is codefied in the metaphysics and veild in false justifications. Since it is men who have presided over telling of metaphysics the history of Being with all its very presencing realities are a production of the patriarchal system. Being gay means suffering under the system of patriarchy too. In order to "release Being" as such the dimensionality of beings as a whole, is influenced from a history determined by the masculine will to power (and its modern forms of technology) The advent of nihilism is related to the history of male domination. That means that there can be not historically significant break with this history of male rule without a break with the history of metaphysics (and vice versa). A metaphysics which ultimately leads into nihilistic labyrinth We can only get out of the swamp of nihilism (remember!?) and its negating grip by building ways of different relations towards our-selves, each-other and our natural environment which we are a part of.
Under the patriarchal supervision the dimensionality of archetypes (as he primordial and transhistorical patterns of experiencing) manifesting in our Western civilisations has been systematically reduced and constrained. Thus restricted they do indeed function oppressively for woman and men. The archetypes which our patriarchal society has stereotyped and which it continuously reproduces as feminine must be developed now by our society as a whole and by (gay) men in particular.
How does our retrieval of a reversibility and reciprocity schematised in the depth of the "flesh" help us to break the bold of our anti-gay, male-dominated logocentric (moral) tradition? Overcoming the disembedded and disembodied being can help to create different identities and relations to each other. A claim of just treatment not as an ideal consensus of fictitiously defined selves, but the concrete process in everyday live, politics and morals of the struggle of concrete, embodied selves, striving for autonomy. A consensus not imposed by alien powers, but allowed to happen in accordance with the intercorporeality of the body's own processes, the body's own felt sense, very concrete of what the intertwining of beings calls for and what needs, in the time of each particular circumstance, to take place. Let us commit ourselves to a vision in which a nondual dimension of being Gay can take place and find its own duration and energies.
As a existentially and spiritually developing being, the Gay men is a self, not a ego. The ego is the self limited to its social identifications; its roles, practices and socially adaptive routines. Such centering ego is a supposed active pole in structure of subject and object. The Gay self however, is not identified with any fixed structure; but is being constituted continuously in a process always open to further structuring and 'becoming'. There is no Gay-self in the sense of a substance, a fixed identity and rigid closure to processes of change. We as Gays-selves are living in different styles, types and dimensions of experiencing and of integration, coherence and other basic differences. In creating a plurality of worlds we can resist totalling tendencies thus keeping open the possibility of a change in our whole understanding of 'being'. The Art of Gay existence can develop an entire reality of feeling, thinking, speaking and writing or acting in a way that the work of 'one(Gay)self' and another 'one(Gay)self' and communications with others at all are linked together. The creation of qualities of life means living an artful life. Tending our soul by living artfully in the shaped "Gestalt" of everyday activities, worked out mindful. To become what we are as Gay men, presupposes to realise and to be mindful to what we are "truly" feeling, desiring, thinking and doing. This includes to face self-deceptions of an appearing world which we take for granted as the supposedly "true", right one. But any "Truth", also of our Gay-Self is not something there, that might be found or discovered, but something that must be created. An active determination or conscious "letting-be", which dares to be and live differently. Accepting to become a Gay-Self being unique and incomparable will be the very "base" for the creation process of our identity. Becoming who we are as Gay men is to be engaged in a constantly continuing and continuously broadening process. Realising our experiences and actions and enlarging (intensifying) our capacity for assuming respons-ablity for ourselves, this is what will be actual freedom. Being Gay has not the character of a fixed identity, which is stable and permanent. The Gay-Self remains a continuos becoming and development. Being Gay is that which we feel, think and do not as Gay man want to be or shape otherwise. What we are is just what we become. Our emotion, thoughts and deeds are intimately involved with each other in a emerging flow. To become what we are as Gay men, is not to reach a specific new state and to stop becoming, it is not a "state" at all.
The Gay-Self is not but a multifarious "subject" with a changing coherence, not a defined unity. This self is not an abiding substance and changes as it incorporates Others. Identifying loosely, but honestly with all our felt and acted relations, is to see that everyone we e.g. love, or everything we appreciate or refuse will be part of what we are. The love and respect for others will just be love and respect for ourselves. The challenge and task will be to give a multifarious style to us as becoming 'Beings'. This means not being haphazard but instead being connected to one another in the intimate way of a fulfilling style. Performing our daily actions and dealings with Gay styles can be related to artistic model. Fashioning our Gay life in the way artists fashion their work, means to become "poets of our Gay life" in the smallest everyday matters. To give style(s) to our Gay character requires a attention and survey of all the strengths and weaknesses of our nature. We can find our own myths, tastes and values provided that we reached a true sense of our(gay)self. A coherence which is also a living difference...
However whoever wants to "fly" in such a poetic way needs first to learn to stand and walk and run and jump and climb and dance. Evaluating ourselves according to our own Gay "value- base" and "standards". Freedom of Gay will is not the absence of causal determinations, but a harmony among all of a Gays preference schemes. It is a state and driving force in which Gay desire follows Gay thoughts and Gay actions follows Gay desire. Were feeling, thinking and acting of Gay men are one the distinction between choice and constraint disappears. Being Gay is not free not to choice to be non-Gay. Not choosing to choose consciously to be Gay is still to choose not to choose. Of course we cannot choose or will love. But we can choose to be and develop (not fall into!) a conscious Gay-love. Through our Gay intentions we can transcend our "Thrownness" (Geworfenheit, Heidegger) to be Gay. In a moment-oriented actualisation and projection of a "present future" we can accept our incorporated Gay "past" and can attribute sense and qualities to this. This qualification is a creative process. Ultimately Gay life is justified only if we would want to have again the same situation of truly being Gay again and again. (eternal recurrence within our finite Gay life) The integration of the demonic (demoniac), and tragic powers and considerations of the significance of death for a love-full Gay life offers a tremendous challenge. In theses days particularly acute because of the AIDS-menace. Writing our Gay con-Texts, is giving birth to creations of our-Selves. To take the challenging risk and effort to turn our life into a work of art, corresponds to the constantly changing interrelations we are involved in.
An according Gay morals will be an ethics beyond the heterosexual good and evil. To make a way of life out of our Gay feelings and Gay views has means to situate ourselves beyond the good and evil of any heterosexual based moral evaluation. This leads towards a life without "metaphysical comfort" and accepting that any facts are precisely what there is not, but only interpretations. "Truth" and error, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil of Gay live are not to be opposed to one another.
Can we imagine them as processes within a single continuum? Gay values and qualities are not means for the attainment of any "highest good" of best Gay life. A Gay perspectivism would refuse to grade people and views along such a single scale. On the other side such Gay perspectivism does not result in the relativism that holds that any view is as good as any other. It hold that one's own views are the best for oneself without implying that they need be good for anyone else. Integrating considerations on bodily concerned motility, gesture, rituals, morals and politics can be very enriching for a research on the felt "sense-of-being-in-the-Gay-world"(or being gay in this world) Such deeply hermeneutical and poetising approach stays in touch with our felt, pre-ontological pre-understanding of the interrelated world.
The inter-world of Gayness can be interpreted with Merleau-Ponty as intercorporeality of the flesh. Flesh serves as a formative medium of was previously called "subject" and "object". Breaking out of the powerful hold of the subject-object relationship of classical metaphysics, a carnal being of depths can be reached. The body becomes a field of Being of a embodied relation-ships.
In this interplay the reciprocity of the embodied and concretely situated Gay selves can be understood and shaped in the post-modern situation.
Gay sexuality Gay sexuality can be interpreted as a specific intentionality. Affection, this gentle lasting love and fondness between Gay men implies an original Quality.(consciousness). Erotic perception, sexual understanding and sexual-erotic intentions follow the movement of Gay existence itself. Gay sexuality constitutes itself not within a behavioristic mechanism of stimulus and response, but is linked immanently with the entire Being of the feeling, recognising and acting as Gay men. In contrast to the epithymia of the wanting and indulging lust, the Eros 'creates' as a realising energetic process. While the sexual satisfaction relaxes the exciting needs, the "erotic birth" intensifies the experience. Both strivings long for a unification. As psychological research have found out the sexual longing is driven by the libido force. This libidinous, sexual urge expresses strong and actual sexual desires. The motivating forces of the Eros are combining these natural powers with more "spiritual" but not totally disembodied orientation and formation. Without sublimation, which would only repress and replace the natural sexual urge with other activities, the aim of Eros is sublime, deep feeling of wonder and (en)joy(ment). Not new 'generations', but a deep, sensitive and sensual 'regeneration' will be born. Being and Becoming are united in multifarious ways and offering glimpses of a lasting happiness within the Æeternal momentØ. As Foucault and Merleau-Ponty wrote, the history of the sexual orientation of a man offers the key to an understanding of his life at all. This is true because the sexuality of men actually projects the entire kind and modus of his being-in-the-world. This includes his behaviour towards 'space`, 'time' and particularly to other men. All our relations wherever, whenever and to whomever are influenced by our sexual and existential intentions.
This does not mean that the total sense of existence is a sexual one, nor that the sense of all sexual phenomena would be an existential one. But that sexuality and the effectual processes of Eros are an language and expression of the existence in the sense of its realisation. Realising our existence is essentially a realisation of our sexual being. And it is our responsive body through which we receive, give an sensual and meaningful expression.
The Gay body is a sign pervaded by a unique Gay significance. The Gay body symbolises accordingly a particular Gay existence. Each of us realises on his own and through his specific will, hence creating an actual reality. This incarnated sense embodies Gay life is at present in the sexual drama of our lives. Body and existence are presupposing each other. Body is a generalised existence, while existence is a continuos embodiment. Existence comes to its expression as an ambiguous meaning and corporeal field of interpretation. Sexual experiences with other men are a general but private and intensive "manifestations" of the condition of being a Gay with all its embodied ambivalence between autonomy and dependency. Sexuality and Eros are always at present as atmospheric reality. In its own mysterious and beautiful but also strange qualities the ambiguous atmosphere of Eros is essential for a human and fulfilling Gay existence. This Gay existence takes over and interpretates a factual or imagined sexual-erotic situation. Not getting an one-sided control over the other, but developing a mutual responsibility of an interlinked, existential sensual event and shared sense. In this sense erotic sexuality is already more than itself: erotic and relational sexuality concerns the entire Being. The erotic Gay sexuality has its dramatics, because we are engaged in the same with our entire personal Being. According to Merleau-Ponty this is because our body is our natural "I", which is more than a selfish, egological "Me-only" but part of a trans-subjective net of intercorporeality.
As as a society, as a culture, we need to appreciate that the historical forms in which the archetypes have been manifested are not necessary and eternal, but contingent and changeable; we need to understand that the forms within which women and men, too - have been confined are not pre-ordained fates, to be suffered and endured generation after generation. The historical forms ought rather to be seen as challenges to our imagination, our capacity to envision new possibilities for social existence. This also challenges our willingness to share in the difficulties of the task, and demand from us a real commitment to improve communication between the two systems of sex and gender, moving towards greater reciprocity, respect and equality. Aiming to overcome the perpetuation of an oppressive essentialism, which fixates historically contingent identities. Archetypes which for too long have been constitutive only of femininity (body, earth, matter, emotionality, darkness, holistic awareness, the unconscious) must be seen and valued as essential for the fulfilment of masculinity.
We will not truly love and respect ourselves, nor love and respect of other gay man until we affirm the feminine values. To draw the lives of gay men into the dimensions of their embodiment can contribute to this sensitivity.
Feeling our embodied Otherness, we will realise an important sense in which we do not know who we are. This "not knowing" gives to our lives a new "ontological question" challenging of course, and not without pain; but also enriching beyond known measure....
We need to get out of the logocentric epistemology of the patriarchal tradition which rejects Eros. Patriarchal "knowledge" is detached, abstract, universal, and totally committed to the ideal of objectivity. Based on a sturdy foundation of unquestionable, absolutely authoritative propositions, this knowing is organised hierarchically. This approach is characterised by the exclusion of all feelings, or at least their subordination and control by a rationality which is purely theoretical, laying claim to the power of an impartial universality. Feelings can be a deep source of wisdom, of a knowledge much clearer than the ideas we can produce by the exercise of pure intellection. An emancipatory reconnection with our body's internal nature can help us become a more holistic being.
Releasement (Gelassenheit) as a practice of a self without dualism involving us in the ongoing development of our capacity for circumspective concern. In a hermeneutical return to the primordial moment of perceptional separation the intertwining and connective tissue is been respected, without falling into a regressive fusion and undifferentiated matrix. A bodily relation with ourselves, with each other and with the concrete world of everyday life can be relaxed, playful, gentle, caring; an approach which moves freely, and with good feelings; an attention which is alive with awareness; at peace with ourselves, resisting to fall into patterns that are rigid, dogmatic, prejudiced and stereotyping; a relational behaviour which moves into the world bringing with it peace and respect, because it is rooted in, and issues from, a place of integrity and deep self-respect. A bodily relationship which has a continuos openness to experience, being full of delight in being surprised and drawn into the invisible. Becoming more at ease with idiosyncrasies and the unexpected. The described responsible letting-be constitutes indeed a radically different relationship with all encountered beings.
But what are the conditions of the possibility of such a circumspective, non-dualistic and concerned relationship? Will such "Gelassenheit" be only an ideal of living, a practical postulate for our imagined being; It can allow some measure of actualisation provided that there are correspondingly radical changes in the body politics of our social environment. But how can the "transformation of sociality" be realised which is pre-supposed for such embodied relation of letting-go?
Can the body and the perception be organs of political thought and action? Can the questioning and changing of our prevailing norms and standards find its concrete and situational starting-point in embodied feelings? An emancipatory interplay between sameness and difference can certainly help to overcome the narcissism in modernity.
Transforming ourselves as Gays means coming up against interiorized cultural edges. If we want this transformation to occur, we will have to disturb the status quo of the world around us as well.
The conflict with the history of the world which we are an integral part of and which arises in our everyday life. Becoming a Gay means stepping over cultural edges. This can help freeing the encountered "public" to communicate more freely too.
But in reality this can turn out to be dangerous and requires not only brave, but wise sensitivity to do and say the right thing at the right time.
Overcoming the metaphysical split between inner and outer, oneself and the other, can start by being honest to ourselves and people we encounter. This means in our embodied meetings to express feelings of sympathy or non-contentment in a frankness which can be received and accepted by the other. To open up for a new political order by new body politics seems to be challenging indeed. Based on a consensus not imposed by alien powers or normative morals but allowed to happen in accordance with the "intercorporeality" of the body's own processes, the body's own felt sense, very concrete, of what the intertwining of beings calls for and what needs to take place in the time of each particular circumstance. This means to be ready to approach from a multiplicity of standpoints and perspectives; with an awareness of contextuality, of field and horizon, of situational complexity; and with a corresponding openness to the possibility of different positions. This does not necessarily lead toward relativism but to a variational framework with a concerned pluralistic response-ability urgently needed. Agreeing with Ihde writing about what he calls "Post-phenomeology" what all the post-modern captures is the sense of transition, of a proliferating pluralism. Following the research agenda of a non-foundational and non-transcendental phenomenology we can hope to integrate a perceptual-bodily referentiality and refractive perspectivism within the mentioned variational framework, without falling into the traps of relativism or essentialism.
Integrating the relation between embodiment and gayness. What would it mean to understand the body as an causal- intentional agent and "incorporeal materiality" (Merleau-Ponty), as an "inscribed surface of events" in the depth of being Gay? The hermeneutical phenomenology of the flesh by Merleau-Ponty could provide a radical grounding for a critical gay theory and practice. At the deepest level of our "immediately" felt experience we have the experientially accessible dimension of our bodily being. But also the embodied relational dynamics have to be considered and require an corresponding response. (response-ability) For Merleau-Ponty "flesh" disignates a dimension of our embodied being in which all individual lives are inseparably intertwined. What he calls "flesh" (what is called in French "chair") is been constituted in processes of interaction manifesting various degrees of symbiotic interpenetration and interdependency: an essential sociality or gathering already present at the inception of all individuated existence.
In what Merleau-Ponty describes as the "intercorporeality" of the "flesh", individual beings continuously mirror and reflect one another, setting in motion a process of reversibility in which sameness and difference turn into one another: the seer is seen, the seer sees himself being seen, the seer sees himself as seeing, as s seeing being. And at the same this is true for the other, the one whom he sees. it is in the medium of this reversibility, this interplay, that mutual forms of reciprocity emerge. The gay intercorporeality again has its specific dynamics of its own related to the "inter-male process involved. The interactional synchrony or dissychrony which are exhibit in a gay to gay relation-ship have their own corporeal schema.
Understanding love as a mutual bestowal of qualities, needs a specific interpretation of "gay qualities". Not only in terms of appraisive categories, neither in a pure platonic, disembodied understanding. Loving someone gay, we bestow qualified values upon the other. Let us imaging pictures and speak a language of gayness that corresponds to the multidimensional constellations of traits and complex process of emotion and thoughts involved. There is an unconscious, involuntary "postural impregnation" which takes place in our bodily presence and effect to one another. Starting with the initial sympathy of the orgasmic bonding among infants and children, this natural attunement accompanies us in all our social and personal interactions. What does this primordial, inauguarative layout of reversibility mean for being consciously gay? The question we need to think about is this: How does our retrieval of a reversibility and reciprocity schematised in the depth of the flesh help us to break the bold of our anti-gay, male-dominated logocentric (moral) tradition?
The creation of qualities of life refers to a mindful feeling ans treatment of our emotions. Therfore a phenomenology of emotions in Gay-life will be developped in the following:
Phenomenology of emotion in Gay -life
Feelings lubricate all our social transactions. They shape and reflect the structure of our everyday life. The possibility to express or the pressure to suppress anger, pain embarrassment, disaffection or passion influences Gay life in an essential way. The simmer and flow of everyday feelings can be revealed Emotions are a constituent of Gay meanings. This is particularly relevant in personal relations but as well at our working places. Emotional energy mobilise power or determines a sense of belonging or solidarity for a Gay community as well as for the working within organisation. Fear, awe or love, the genuiness of feeling are opposed by emotional-control and a bureaucratisation of feeling which rules at working places and within any organisational context.
Emotions both determine and are determined by organisational order. To work out how they play a key role in our organisational activities requires a phenomenology of working life which reflects the (Gay) emotional dimensions involved. What are the essential (Gay) emotionalities of working? How does the sharing of feelings change those feelings, and so re-form one's organisational reality? What are the organization's feeling rules? How does power in organizations affects emotional disclosure, feeling rules and climates of trust and mistrust? Bureaucracies are a particular kind of patriarchal form that reproduces power relations along heterosexual gender lines. This forces Gay man to follow patterns which are not there own, causing personal and interpersonal conflicts. The gap between felt and expressed emotions marginalized individual Gay experiences and the intimacy that typically accompanies personal feelings. Organizational control of Gay emotions can lead to suppress disagreements, eliminating a critical and creative employee voices. Gay employees are less likely to protest against perceived unjust actions for fear of experiencing negative consequences. The suppression of feeling during interactions with colleagues may result in altered relational perceptions and changed communication patterns. On the other hand the outbursting expression of highly intense negative emotions may result in perceptions of distrust and disrespect between employees. For overcoming this dilemmas we need to understand the underlying assumptions: The dualism of rationality and emotionality is socially constructed and, consquently open to change. Understanding the significance of "work-feelings" can contribute to get out of this dualistic trap. "Work-feelings" are those emotions that emerge from human interaction rather being imposed by instrumental goals and bureucratic rationality. The emergent work-feelings aid in negotiating meanings about roles and relationships rather than in conforming to predetermined display (non- or anti Gay) rules or to prescribed (non- or anit Gay) norms. Gay people often mask their feelings to manage social impressions, to avoid embarrassment, and to save face. The effort to control and to bear the inconsistency of felt and expressed feelings in every-day life may be stressful. But ascribed feeling rules aiming at serving an organization's commerical or strategic ends, causes that the then structural tension between felt and feigned emotions intensifies. The potential for Gay employees to lose touch with their own feelings increases. When and how becomes the expression or non-expression of emotions pathologized? What can be done to prevent this to happen? How can organisations strive to make work feelings central to participation in the work environment?
What kind of training programmes might help employees to analyse task and social interactions? interpretate verbal and non-verbal cues.How can an emotionalizing and personalizing of an organisation been realised practically?
How can emotions serve expressive "functions" that build interrelatedness, without being used as commodity for instrumental utility only? The sharing of emotional experiences develope mutual affect, connectedness and cohesion that break down anonymity. Such interrelateness and sense of community produce mutual understanding and develope self-identity. In dialogic relationships each person sees the other as sharing meanings and cumulative experiences. To value feelings as an enhancing force for community they provide options for alternative forms of organzing. Changes in the (implicit and explicit) feeling rules can breathe new life into an organisation's culture and subculture, permitting shifts from, secrecy to openess, confrontation to collaboration. Emotions can hence surface as central to a participatory work context and its organizational change.
A recontextualization of emotions can be then more that venting the frustrations or moan session; it can substantially redefine the emotional "material" and contribute to the processual "emotional texture" of the organisation. It would be possible to feel different about our feelings because we find different explanantions for the emotional "event". A mindful and conscious as well as spontaneous awareness and treatment of Gay feelings and sensitivities can contribute to an authentic Gay living within any relations and at the working place. For a deeper understanding of the "distorted" relation-ship to Gay emotions the genealogy of the suppressed Gay feelings must be reconstructed:
The background of suppressed Gay feelings
Gay men have experienced the effects of a conditioning which forced them not be what they are. The missing of appropriate role models to guide a fulfilling Gay bevaiour, to be at odds with mostly heterosexual emotional reponses of life causes pschic conflicts and a continuious crises of identity. Gay men faced (embodied) an upbringing within an environment that was frequently uncomprehending, unsupportive and grossly insensitive to Gay men needs. In contrast to a heterosexual child Gay men suffered from an (unintended) denial of a guidance and social validation for Gay attributed behaviour among parents, adults and peers. The inability to conform emotionaly to the widely accepted norms of "normal" life, led to clashes with powerful feelings about the inner self. Such "incarnated dissonance" could lead to a psychological state of lonleyness, destructive tension , energy-absorbing anxiety and unreflected self-doubt. It will be very important for Gay men to understand that the loving or loathing depends on interplay of constructs which are the product of cultural values , social expectations and above all early childhood druing which many of the core constructs are formed. As Karl Ulrich has worked out the Uranian Gay love is a "pure" and elevating love. The social world is essentially processual and emerges from intentional acts of human beings acting individually or in concert with one another. The realities created in the course of this process consist of powerful interactive images. These socially created worlds are all too real and provides a framwork, which enable or constrain the actions and orientations of Gay men if it had an existence on its own account. A critical consideration of the power-gender dimension inherent in the ability of the individual (Gay) to create his reality is necessary.
In the Freudian perspective civilisation rest upon the repression of man's internal drives. The 'pleasure principle' by which these drives are allowed to follow an unconstrained search for satisfaction is seen as being subjugated in a civilised society by the 'reality principle', according to which men are prepared to postpone self-gratification in the interests os social order. But the reality principle is a historically specific element. It is found of necessity only in eras of scarcity, which presuppose the need to master nature in order to survive. The continous impact it exerts on modern life leads to a repression and suffering particulary for Gay men.
Without sharing the hope of Marcuses optimism for overcomimg that allienation through technological change and social development (Eros and Civilisation,(1966) The one-dimensional man (1964), there is still a liberalising potential of Eros within post-capitalist societies. The structure of verbal and embodied language, its nature and use in everyday discourses, provide a key with which it is possible to unlock many insights into the fundamental mode of operation of different Gay and social formations. Communicativ distortions in which a supposed consensus is arrived at through a context of an unequal power distribution have to be overcome. The power of purposive rationality and the rationalisation of the systems of action reflect an asysmmetrical dominatiion at the expenses of "reason of the heart" and possiblity of interaction within a life-worldy context. How could Gay men get equal access to speech acts and ways of expression and an equality of opportunity within discourses (affordered by all)? I belief that the liberating potential of self-reflexive language and expression can and should be further "exploited" by the Gay community. We need to demonstrate the way in which language, ideology, politics, science and other aspects of the superstructure of modern capitalist social formations are to be understood in relation to the role which they play in sustaining an developing the systems of power and domination which pervades the totality of this social form. The eventual emancipation and the pursuit of alternative forms of live are a continous task for Gay men.
The encounter with the other
A reflective consciousness of something or someone involves a consciousness reflected on. (non-thetic and non-positional consciousness). Consciousness orginarily is a upsurge from and towards unknown coasts. A pure flux locked in a continual struggle with what is not it-self (For Satre as a pure interiority of nothingness). Conciousness ist a relation of being. But does it constitutes its own being an internal consciousness? What happens if two such "internal consciousness" meet? For Satre the relation with the Other (being one wich is of necessity "internal") and the body being essentially something "external" (in space), the body of the Other and my own body can emerge only after connection with the Other himself has aready been established. But the consciousness could never expierence anything other than itself, much less an Other's look, were it not already embodied, which means experiencing itself as embodied. Is the only possible point of departure for the examination or discovery of the Other the cogito, the objectifying reciprocal negative relation within a twofold interiority of I and Other emerges. The Other being he who is not-me, and I being for him a "not-me", each of the two terms constitutes itself as such by actively denying itself as being the Other. Losing its interiority from within by the Other's look, consciousness experiences itself for Satre as robbed of its own intrinsic integrity. (e.g. in shame as the feeling of original fall from nothingness ot being-something-for-the-Other, from interiority to exteriority, to being-oneself-as-body). The Other can become an object-for-me only subsequent to my being-an-object-for-the-Other. For Satre the body (as an illusory fulfillment of the I-concpet) is subsequent to the encounter with the Other. It is by means of the Other's look, that I acquire spatiality an outside, or a nature. One cannot say furthermore, that "to-be-looked-at" is to apprehend the body of the Other (e.g his eyes)
But what is called consciousness lives its body as for-itself. Being-for-itself and being-for Others are genuinely ontological strata for the body. Consciousness is an embodied consciousness from outset.
Without apprehending the Other according to my conciousness and feelings, nor dissolving "myself" in the relation with the Other, to relate to the Other in a both-sidely fulfilling way requires to let him and "me" be an other-one.
The existence or life of a Gay man the facts that constitute who or what he is is not determined by an essence to which his particular existence conforms, but rather he can choose himself and together with other Gay men to be different consciously. He and they choose what he or they is (are) by choosing what he (they) will do or will not. This choice is not completely undetermined, uncompelled and absoulty free. We need the other (Gay) men for a fulfilling choice within such existential decision-constellation.
It is in terms of being Gay that things and others have, for us, the value of meaning that they have. This consciousness of being perpetually engaged in a choice of being Gay must be constantly renewed. The conscious intention of being freely Gay is manifested in every act or mindful "letting-go", and has no existence elsewhere. The nature of Gay consciousness expressed in a Gay language and the nature of Gay freedom mirror each other. -------------------------------------------------------------
The waters of my soul... are the life-worlds of what I'm and - will be
setting out from where I have been - what I was
with all my past I'm sailing
on the boat of present~~~
towards the current future's destination
on the boat of present ~~~
wandering down, wondering up - swimming - diving
in the labyrinths of waterly soul without clinging
finding my course while on the way
ignoring the tempting shore - crying stay
learning to breath underwater within
on the surface without denying
the personal ocean as all can see
part of the great sea
being a living difference
in the realm of mundane transcendence
Merlin
Literature: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, (1962) Phenomenology of Perception, London
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