Ellen Willis's Don't Think, Smile!
Scialabba, George
FOR THIRTY YEARS, in a wide arc from the Village Voice and Social Text to the New Yorker and Mirabella, Ellen Willis has been the sixties' best exponent and a savvy interpreter of American...
...Hence, according to Willis, our society's precarious equilibrium...
...It requires the continual experience of love and discipline, gratification and frustration, from the same source...
...Willis's fullest account is in "Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution" in No More Nice Girls...
...But not all her targets are equally deserving...
...It's not that speech is never wounding, she argues, but that freedom is healing...
...The cost of these "inner controls" is a pervasive, largely unconscious unease: fear and submissiveness alternating with rage and resentment...
...Furthermore, "people are not 'distracted' by the moral and cultural issues that affect their daily existence as much as the size of their paychecks...
...But when Lasch criticized modernity, he had in mind mass production and the centralized state, not sexual equality...
...A little sketchy, this...
...Foucault remarked sourly: "We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power...
...that sexual freedom and pleasure are basic human rights...
...The left should contend for the maximum of individual development and expression...
...AT LEAST ONE secular leftist, however, thought quite as radically about modernity as Willis and came to different conclusions...
...Her output thus far is small—two sterling collections, Beginning to See the Light (1981) and No More Nice Girls (1992)—so one eagerly welcomes her new book (notwithstanding the false note struck by its title, which insinuates cluelessness on the other side —always a polemical dud move...
...When pleasure—or at least its material prerequisites —is more abundant, self-denial can cease to be the foundation of all collective life, and morality as a structure of internalized coercion, along with the patriarchal family that reproduces it, will wither away...
...it is also the "bitter fruit" (tart, anyway) of self-discipline...
...In recent years public discussion of abortion, divorce, welfare, and crime has been marked by near-universal deference for words like "virtue," "responsibility," "self-control," "discipline," "stability," "community," "family," and the like...
...To those who suggest that perhaps a thoroughgoing demystification of truth, beauty, objectivity, morality, authority, law, and love can wait until the minimum wage goes up a dollar or two and not quite so many American households (currently one in three) are only a major illness away from bankruptcy, Willis replies that freedom and equality are indivisible...
...and what it has to contend against are external constraints imposed by gross economic inequality and internal ones arising from the inculcation early in life of a rigid, self-denying morality...
...I'm not nearly so sure as Willis...
...for the radical democrat it prefigures the extension of freedom to other areas of social life...
...The masses rarely peruse the Nation (even less frequently, alas, Dissent...
...It won't and shouldn't lead anyone to drop one kind of political activity and take up another...
...Both essays are notable for lucidity, fairmindedness, and sureness in getting at the marrow of bitterly contested questions...
...that Mom is not going back home again and so we need to rethink domestic life, child rearing, and the structures of work...
...we cannot flourish at just any tempo, pressure, or scale...
...In the annals of human history, even this modest exercise in freedom is a revolutionary development...
...and the centralized, interventionist state, overshadowing and sometimes replacing parental authority, complicated maturation still further...
...The agency of this repression is the family: "it is the parents' job to suppress their children's evil impulses and assure that they develop the requisite inner controls...
...Would economic populists then be entitled, and inclined, to show cultural libertarians the door...
...Willis's discussion of crime, "Beyond Good and Evil," takes note of its obvious roots in material deprivation but also links the "psychopolitics of crime" to the "dynamics of domination" subtly and rigorously...
...The Ordeal of Liberal Optimism" addresses the liberal critique of affirmative action, suggesting persuasively that it takes too little account of racial psychodynamics...
...This can best— arguably can only—be done in the constant presence of the fantasied objects, i.e., the child's parents...
...During his quixotic 1968 mayoral campaign, Norman Mailer won over an emphatically skeptical Bella Abzug by roaring back at her: "I can tell you that regardless of my views on women as you think you know them, women in any administration I could run would have more voice, more respect, more real opportunity for argument than any of the other candidates would offer you...
...But the displacement of household production by mass production drastically altered the child's relation to its father...
...Symbolic expression, however forceful, leaves a space between communicator and recipient, a space for contesting, fighting back with one's own words and images, organizing to oppose whatever action the abhorred speech may incite...
...Living down these otherwise disabling fantasies is the essence of psychological maturation...
...and of course she does not deny that legally actionable harassment can sometimes be purely verbal...
...In addition, social, sexual, familial, economic, and other hierarchies are less oppressive for some (males, whites, parents, employers) than for others—an incentive for the more fortunate to make the best of a bad but apparently natural and inevitable situation...
...Naturally this vision should be accompanied by tough-minded analysis, in the first instance "a thoroughgoing critique of the new economic order and its accelerating class war...
...When those emotions find expression in destructive behavior, it is seized on as proof of intractable human evil and the need to maintain or increase repression...
...These intense primary identifications can and should be gradually left behind, but they cannot be skipped, on pain of shallowness, instability, and—paradoxically—an inability in later life to stand firm against authority...
...We are organisms...
...A good deal of the book is devoted to rebuking the "economic" or "populist" or "majoritarian" left for insufficient attention to the psychocultural roots of inequality and domination...
...Just so...
...that genuine virtue is the overflow of happiness, not the bitter fruit of self-denial...
...It is, on the contrary, a highly plausible deduction from the prevailing conception of modernity, which defines the good life in terms of leisure and abundance and envisions history as continuous moral and material progress, made possible by the spread of scientific and social rationality...
...These are limits imposed not by material scarcity or political inequality but by the process of individuation itself...
...He believed that the family needed to be defended, not against feminism but against the effects of the separation of home and work...
...the essence of premodernity was immobility and ascription...
...WILLIS ' S QUARREL with the "culturally conservative" or "pro-family" left is more substantial...
...Needless to say, Wolfe's book is not the last word, but he offers plenty of evidence...
...Isn't there a non sequitur here...
...GEORGE SCIALABBA is a writer who lives in Cambridge, Mass...
...Attention to the internal as well as the external yields much astute commentary...
...These institutions and practices evolved to serve essential purposes...
...A popular majority might, after all, agree broadly with the left about freedom and equality in economic relations but disagree broadly about freedom and equality in personal relations...
...Speech undeniably has consequences, sometimes entirely predictable ones...
...Though speech may, and often does, support the structure of domination, whether by lending aid and comfort to the powerful or frightening and discouraging their targets, in leaving room for opposition it falls short of enforcing submission...
...Willis is right about that...
...He was skeptical of "progress," not from a dislike of equality or pleasure but from a preference for the genuine rather than the ersatz articles...
...For this reason the unrestrained clash of ideas, emotions, visions provides a relatively safe model—one workable even in a society marked by serious imbalances of power—of how to handle social conflict, with its attendant fear, anger, and urges to repress, through argument, persuasion, and negotiation (or at worst grim forbearance) rather than coercion...
...So by all means let's fire away at one another, but with popguns rather than heavy artillery...
...They are not purely, or even primarily, strategies of exploitation...
...DISSENT /Fall 1999 105...
...communal child rearing, shared by both sexes, would remove the element of martyrdom from parenthood...
...Culture and psychology are central to politics...
...An essay on censorship and free speech starts out, like most feminist approaches to the antipornography debate, considering the "politics of sexual representation...
...The child's thwarted impulses persist in adulthood, this argument continues, where they are countered by an array of external controls —religious, legal, medical, economic, etc.—that teach and enforce one or another version of hierarchy...
...Groups of people who agreed to take responsibility for each other, pool their economic resources, and share housework and child care would have a basis for stability independent of any one couple's sexual bond...
...But cultural 104 DISSENT / Fall 1999 politics must reckon with our psychic ecology, which is the sum of our adaptations, over the course of two million years, to infantile dependence, territoriality, scarcity, mortality, and the other hitherto inescapable limits of human existence...
...Until the last two centuries, it usually was...
...that contempt for the black poor is the middle class's effort to deny that we are next...
...Lasch's account of psychic development, like Willis's, focuses on the infant's response to frustration, but more convincingly...
...But Willis moves quickly to "the politics of speech as such," where "the case against the censors is not so obvious after all...
...Which door, anyway...
...In demonizing children's desire, the family provokes the very destructive impulses it must then imperfectly repress...
...There is no left-wing party or other organization awaiting its outcome, ready to carry the approved word far and wide...
...There are, of course, plenty of other good reasons for saying yes to sex and to pleasures of (nearly) every other kind, as well as for demanding a fairer distribution of pleasure's prerequisites—money and leisure...
...children would have the added security of close ties to adults other than their biological parents (and if the commune were large and flexible enough, parents who had stopped being lovers might choose to remain in it...
...Distinguishing talk about inferiority from verbal imposition of inferiorDISSENT / Fa11 1999 101 ity may be complicated at the edges," MacKinnon writes, "but it is clear enough at the center with sexual and racial harassment, pornography, and hate propaganda...
...There turns out to be more substance to the critique of First Amendment absolutism than one might have supposed...
...The result was frequently a weak self, which is the clinical meaning of "narcissism...
...The bearer of this bad news was understandably greeted with something less than grateful enthusiasm by many of his political comrades...
...She acknowledges, as one must, that speech is a particular kind of action...
...CULTURAL POLITICS should aim to reform rather than abolish marriage, the family, hierarchy, authority, morality, and law...
...they care passionately about those issues...
...I think this takes the debate a step beyond Stanley Fish's There's No Such Thing as Free Speech—no small achievement...
...Catherine MacKinnon and others argue with some plausibility that the boundaries of speech protected by the First Amendment can only be specified by taking no less seriously the constitutional mandate of equality set out in the Fourteenth Amendment...
...Premodern cruelties and superstitions still bulk large...
...The premise of traditional morality is some version of original sin...
...Cultural radicals will sometimes, in fact, need to defend these institutions...
...Imagination itself is, as I have suggested, an evolutionary adaptation, whereby we master a threatening environment when young by binding or investing fantasy within nearby entities —parents, neighborhood, church, ethnic group...
...Nearly all secular thinkers of both left and right subscribe to this conception, and in their case Willis's exasperated exhortations to "think radically" are very much to the point...
...but beyond that, I don't see what's at stake in this strategic debate...
...The essence of modernity is mobility and choice...
...To consider them prisons rather than temporary outposts is not radical but superficial, like considering religion and myth mere lies rather than inadequate attempts at explanation...
...Economic radicals and cultural radicals can pretty much count on each other's handful of votes, and neither has any resources or patrons to be 102 DISSENT / Fall 1999 raided by the other...
...Actually, these are not merely logical possibilities...
...it "assumes the need to combat the human inclination toward evil by imposing coercive social controls as well as the internal controls of conscience and guilt...
...Willis's "demonizing of desire" implies parental intent, a contingent matter...
...The only place Willis hints at an answer is a passage in DISSENT /Fall 1999 103 her well-known 1979 essay "The Family: Love It or Leave It": The logical postpatriarchal unit is some version of the commune...
...It looks, vexingly, as though successful individuation requires an irreducible minimum of the latter...
...What do the sixties have to say to the nineties...
...I have outlined Lasch's ideas at considerable length in "A Whole World of Heroes," Dissent, Summer 1995...
...that is, insist that some way be found to achieve their formative or protective purposes...
...THROUGHOUT these essays it's a pleasure to watch the deployment of Willis's extraordinary dialectical skills...
...According to Alan Wolfe in One Nation After All, they're the way things are...
...A little comradely recrimination may be good for the ideological blood pressure...
...But while MacKinnon's argument stops there, content merely to demote speech from categorical uniqueness, Willis goes on to root a defense of controversial speech in a theory of freedom, which is in turn derived from a theory of moral psychology...
...FOR THIRTY YEARS, in a wide arc from the Village Voice and Social Text to the New Yorker and Mirabella, Ellen Willis has been the sixties' best exponent and a savvy interpreter of American politics and culture...
...These fantasies—of omnipotence or terrified helplessness, of annihilating rage or undifferentiated union, of perfectly benevolent or implacably threatening parents— must gradually be mastered, reduced in scale, if the child is to assume the contours of a self...
...A moral system based on repression and coercion, on the stifling of desire, generates enormous stores of anger and frustration that can never be totally controlled...
...He maintained that freedom meant overcoming emotionally charged dependence on individual or local authorities, not taking for granted an abstract, universal dependence on distant, bureaucratic authorities...
...that endless work and subordination to bosses are offenses to the human spirit...
...People no doubt care passionately about both economic issues and moral/cultural ones, but their views about the former may be much closer to those of economic leftists than their views about the latter are to those of cultural leftists...
...It serves, she argues, to shore up a familiar system of domination and hierarchy based on self-denial and the subordination of women...
...Christopher Lasch was not a believer in original sin but in what might be called original limits...
...As long as societal survival was not assured, hierarchical subordination and the disciplining of individual desire were self-evidently necessary...
...The way out of this circle is the conquest of scarcity...
...left-wing libertarianism is still the best answer to them...
...In essays on crime, race, censorship, globalization, Bosnia, the Republican ascendancy, the culture of austerity, Zippergate, and right-wing libertarianism, Willis advocates left-wing libertarianism...
...Over the last two centuries, however, it has become possible to see traditional morality as a strategy of social self-preservation, a strategy bound to be superseded and indeed already in retreat...
...A little (or better, a whopping) redistribution of wealth would put cultural radicals— most of whom, I suspect, inhabit the lower four-fifths of the income scale—in a much stronger position to ignore the rest of society, press their claims on it, or construct alternatives to it...
...The result is a closed circle, a self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing system of tragic dimensions...
...In any case, economic democracy is surely the best thing that could happen to cultural radicalism...
...And what might come after...
...It has nothing to do with an excess of self-love, the popular meaning of the word...
...And if this is the way things are, what follows...
...But even those who are dubious about Willis's postpatriarchal alternative must acknowledge that her libertarian-socialist utopianism is based on something more than a sentimental attachment to sixties slogans...
...To recognize the subtler entrapments of modernity requires, however, another variety of radical imagination...
...But as Lasch points out, some—in fact a great deal— of infantile frustration is inevitable, as are the outsized fantasies with which the infant typically responds...
...Willis avoids the untenable absolutist rejoinders: that the First Amendment is unambiguous and that speech can infallibly be distinguished from action...
...These "evil impulses" are erotic: desires for bodily satisfaction and pleasure, which are imagined as potentially limitless and progressively consuming in later life if not firmly curbed in infancy and then, in childhood, channeled into forms of expression (that is., maleness and femaleness) that allow for social order and continuity...
...they're busy or tired or glued to the screen, and we're not on the local newsstand anyway...
...that democracy is not about voting for nearly indistinguishable politicians but about having a voice in collective decision-making, not only in government but at home, school, and work...
...Among the tenets of left libertarianism: that the point of life is to live and enjoy it fully...
...But the strength to persevere in such demands and also to pursue the more sublime, more strenuous pleasures—of craft, of thought, of devotion, of emulation—is not only, as Willis contends, "the overflow of happiness...
...If Americans "do not feel entitled to demand freedom and equality in their personal and social relations," she insists, "they will not fight for freedom and equality in their economic relations...
...They are also countered by the need to repress the acutely painful memories of rage and humiliation that an open acknowledgment of long-unsatisfied desires would provoke...
...As the global economy and mass culture lay siege to inwardness, plow up our psychic root system, and alter the very grain and contour of our being, conservation increasingly becomes a radical imperative...
...Willis is deeply suspicious of this rhetorical tendency...
Vol. 46 • September 1999 • No. 4
