"Stay Negative Please."
What's So Difficult About That? Theorizing Desire in the Time
of AIDS
Michael Lucey
Professor of French and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley
I'm both flattered and uncomfortable that Nicolas asked me to speak to you to open the important conference he's set up: "Managing Desire: HIV Prevention Strategies for the 21st Century." It's true that both in my teaching and in my writing I think a fair amount about how desire has been theorized in various times and places, and that when I teach about AIDS in various contexts here at UC Berkeley, I try to get people to understand how thinking about how we think about desire is crucial to being able to think about AIDS. So it's not as if I feel like I don't have anything to say, but I feel somewhat awkward about finding a way of saying what I might have to say to you in particular, since I assume that in terms of practical experience of HIV prevention efforts most of you are a great deal more experienced than I am. Thus I feel a certain discomfort about theorizing for you about your own practice, and I'd like to be sure not to do that in what I'm about to say. I'm not that good about just theorizing in any case. I don't feel I have a clear sense of what it would be simply to theorize. I have a clearer sense of what it means to remark upon particular conjunctures of theory and practice. Theory grows out of and modifies practice at the same time that practice grows out of and modifies theory, and their mutual implication is what has always interested me.
I might just note that if I'm spending so much time being apologetic in this way, it is because I am aware of how, in certain times and certain places, a person who speaks "theoretically" has access to a certain kind of authority that provokes mostly resentment and resistance in those over whom the authority is exercised. This isn't without significance for my topic today, since many people in HIV prevention work speak from similar positions of authority when they say some version of the request in my title to someone with whom they are working: "stay negative please." And because they speak from a place which is authorized in all sorts of ways they may or may not be aware of,they are quite likely to produce a similar resentment and resistance within the person to whom they address those words, thus limiting their efficacity.
So, even though I'm working very hard at the moment to disavow many of the professorial and other privileges that authorize me to stand here and speak to you today, nonetheless,as a professional pedagogue interested in issues of authority and its uses in the classroom, I can't help thinking that if my own ability to assume my authorization has made you, is making you, or will make you a little resistant to or resentful of me and/or what I am trying to say, then perhaps that's a useful phenomenon for us to reflect on together, since it's a phenomenon anyone who becomes authorized to do HIV prevention work will likely produce in the course of her work, and will need to take account of.
I thought that I would like to take account of this phenomenon and a couple others in a personalized way. I want to speak mostly about the personal need I have felt to theorize a particular ongoing experience: that experience is my own persistent--though, I hope, slowly disappearing inability to have someone, anyone, say to me in a way I find meaningful: "Stay negative please." I don't think I am the only person who has had difficulty experiencing those words as meaningful. On the other hand, I also note that there are plenty of people who have apparently managed to hear them, and to take them to heart. But I have had the sense for a while that for many people, including myself, those words could be indeed, are said over and over without becoming efficacious. Thus my own pressing need to understand, both practically and theoretically, what makes them difficult to grasp, and to attenuate the difficulty in their apprehension.
I'm going to talk briefly about three kinds of difficulty I've been trying to think through about those words. There are a lot more than three, but these will have to do within this time frame. In my own mind, mostly for organizational purposes, I've associated each of the three difficulties I want to look at with one of three different theorists. They all happen, due to my own professional deformation, to be Frenchmen, and I'm going to name them in order for you here, though I'd also just say that I'm suspicious of this, too, as an authorizing gesture, and I know it would be possible to think through each of these difficulties in relation to different theoretical models. But here goes: Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Pierre Bourdieu. They've all been extremely influential within the Anglo-American academy, so I could cite another list of people who have thought and written specifically about HIV and AIDS, taking inspiration from one or the other of these theorists or some others, or, in fact, none of the above. And my thinking depends as much on this second list as on the first: Cindy Patton, Simon Watney, Douglas Crimp, Paula Treichler, Linda Singer, Walt Odets; the list could be longer.
Let's start with Foucault, or at least with a passage from his book "The History of Sexuality, Volume 1", where he is talking about sexology and the particular form of cultural authority it gained at the end of the nineteenth century in Europe, and how the culturally privileged way of thinking about sex that this "science" developed still grips in immediately practical ways some of our ways of experiencing our own sexualities:
this form of power demanded constant, attentive, and curious presences for its exercise; it presupposed proximities; it proceeded through examination and insistent observation; it required an exchange of discourses, through questions that extorted admissions,and confidences that went beyond the questions that were asked. . . . The medicalization of the sexually peculiar was both the effect and the instrument of this. . . . And conversely, since sexuality was a medical and medicalizable object, one had to try and detect it--as a lesion, a dysfunction, or a symptom--in the depths of the organism, or on the surface of the skin, or among all the signs of behavior. The power which thus took charge of sexuality set about contacting bodies, caressing them with its eyes,intensifying areas, electrifying surfaces, dramatizing troubled moments. (Foucault, 1978, p. 44)
I can't help thinking about this passage every time my doctor asks me about my sexual practices since my last visit, and every time I visit the San Francisco AIDS Office for the interview and antibody test that forms my regular 6 month visits as part of the HIVNET Vaccine Preparedness Study they are conducting.
Now, I have every reason to believe that everyone I've met at the SF AIDS office is more or less my friend and wants me to stay negative. I do in fact believe that. I also believe that it would be wrong to offer some theoretical pronouncement about how the institutionalized nature of that office necessarily renders it complicit with what Foucault called "disciplinary regimes of power" that perpetuate normative forms of sexuality by being prying, prurient, and culpabilizing about deviant practices -- practices they themselves identify and help construct.
But most of us have a deep experience of this disciplinary prurient and culpabilizing form of power. From, to take a simple example, every poll we've ever read about the prevalence of, or the rise and fall of same-sex erotic experiences, STDs, teenage pregnancy, seropositivity rates, drug use, etc. Such polls can be presented in the most value-neutral language possible; they are still value-laden, and experienced as such. They are one of the most insidious avenues through which sex-phobia, homophobia, and the internalized homophobia of queers as well, are perpetuated and reinforced in our culture. Our "scientific" need to know comes with a history and a price. And I feel that history and that price every time I answer questions about whether or not I've had this or that STD since the last visit, used this or that drug, paid for sex or not, performed this actor that. Statisticians are apparently pretty sophisticated about estimating the amount of "false reporting" that goes on in interviews like these. To my mind, one of the things they are measuring is the endurance of the link between a scientific will-to-know and a subject with a certain resistance to disciplinary exposure that can never be accounted for in terms of rationality. It's experienced in an entirely different register. That register is hard to access, harder to modify. I know and believe my counselor/interviewer doesn't want me to seroconvert, and she makes that clear to me directly and indirectly every time I see her. And, in fact, after a number of years submitting myself to this experience, I feel like I'm beginning to receive her message when she delivers it. But it's taken a long time, I think, in part because of the institutional form of our contact, a form to which I of course gave informed consent, but which produces effects of resistance in me over which I have no easy control.
I don't know of any corrective to the resistance produced by the experience of an administrative interest in one's desire, any easy way to palliate for the authoritative context in which many versions of the statement, "stay negative please," would be made. Claiming some sort of commonality, a personal interest, a friendly intent, however heartfelt, misses the way this resistance produced in various official contexts where desire is examined happens--as if it were a reflex that perhaps not even friendship could quell. It seems at least worthwhile cultivating a sensitivity to the resistance that might be produced by an even slightly administrative encounter, and indeed finding ways of cultivating this awareness in both parties in the encounter, so that if some version of the statement "Stay negative please" is made and yet fails to "take hold," at least both people involved might begin to notice this fact.
Well, what about friends and family, people in general who exist in a relation of relative support to you? I think that psychoanalysis can give us (me) some help here in figuring out why a request to "stay negative please" even from the most caring of friends or families might provoke a resistance any given person may or may not be able to surmount at any given time. When Lacan theorizes desire in relation to something psycho-analysis calls the unconscious, he refers famously to a "gap" or to an "impediment, failure, split." "In a spoken or written sentence," he observes,"something stumbles" (Lacan, 1978, p. 25). Classical Freudian examples where we learn to see, hear, or otherwise experience the unconscious would be dreams, where through interpretation we can sometimes see how our conscious mind shapes our desire and hides part of it, or slips of the tongue, where we think we are saying one thing, but something else gets said for us. As Lacan says,"Freud is attracted by these phenomena, and it is there that he seeks the unconscious. There, something other demands to be realized. . . . What occurs,what is produced, in this gap, is presented as the discovery" (Lacan, 1978, p.25). This discovery is something we all have a practical experience of: that people don't always know what they are saying, don't always mean what they say; that there is something to be discovered underneath their words. When Lacan imagines a child's early awareness of this phenomenon, he says "In the intervals of the discourse of the Other, there emerges in the experience of the child something that is radically locatable, namely, He is saying this to me, but what does he want? . . . all the child's whys reveal not so much an avidity for the reason of things, as a testing of the adult, a Why are you telling me this? ever-resuscitated from its base, which is the enigma of the adult's desire. . . . Now, to reply to this hold, the subject . . . brings the answer of the previous lack,of his own disappearance, which he situates here at the point of lack perceived in the Other. The first object he proposes for this parental desire whose object is unknown is his own loss--Can he lose me?"(Lacan, 1978, p. 214). The suggestion is that a child has an early experience of people's desire being hidden inside their language, and a common, if not an original, fantasy about that hidden desire is that it is a desire for our disappearance. Now without needing to theorize at any great length about the universality of the instantiation of a fantasy of self-destruction tied to an uncertainty about someone else's desire, we might just notice that for certain stigmatized populations such as gay men, the idea that the language of others carries a hidden--or not so hidden--desire for our own death is hardly far-fetched. The palpable presence of the thought of death in the statement "Stay negative please," thus contributes to the volatility of meaning, conscious and unconscious, swirling around in any enunciation of this statement. Saying it more emphatically or having it said by close friend or family doesn't do much to lessen the potential crisis in meaning here. Some of Walt Odets' controversial work is directed at this particular crisis of the reception of conscious and unconscious meanings. As a way of referencing this work, let me cite a long passage from an article on seronegatives by David Romàn from a recent issue of Wilde. Romàn is talking about both Simon Watney and Walt Odets:
The spectacle of AIDS, Watney explains, equates all gay men--regardless of HIV status--with AIDS. Dominant AIDS ideologies historically constructed all gay men within this moralistic and homophobic model. Moreover,the force of this logic disciplined gay men to internalize it, setting up the conditions for an unconscious understanding that for gay men, AIDS is inevitable. Walt Odets . . . explains how this idea of AIDS as inevitable is one of the pressing factors contributing to seroconversion. Odets argues that the culture of AIDS--from HIV testing to AIDS education campaigns--inadvertently contributes to this unconscious belief that eventually all gay men will seroconvert. . . . The power of this pervasive logic of inevitability set forth by both reactionary political forces and by AIDS prevention programs, while different in intent and in experience, converge in the individual and cultural psyche of HIV negative gay men as a primary means of understanding and experiencing seronegativity. The cultural logic of inevitability,in other words, begins to define what it means to be negative. (Romàn, 1995, p. 54)
The statement or request "Stay negative please" -- in many if not most of its guises--does not clearly evade this logic. I don't think it can, because the logic of inevitability seems so tightly knotted together with the way we conceptualize and experience the divide between seronegativity and seropositivity.
So I wonder if there are ways of conceptualizing the practice of --in particular--gay sexuality in ways that could unknot the conceptual structure in which we experience the divide between seronegativity and seropositivity such that something productive could happen to the request, "Stay negative please." What would it involve to think about what it means to practice a sexuality, or to intervene in the practice of a sexuality -- the core problems behind the statement/request "Stay negative please." For that statement/request addresses me as if I were the agent of my own sexual practice. Now it's not out of an easy desire to be irresponsible that I want to observe that there is no simple, self-evident way that I am the conscious agent of my sexual practices. Those practices are socially and historically produced and sedimented (to use a trendy theory term), and we participate in any such set of practices actively, but hardly with a fully conscious sense of everything we might be doing. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has elaborated his concept of the "habitus" precisely in an effort to understand in a sufficiently complex and nuanced way how a given agent might operate within a set of social practices:
The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce "habitus", systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. . . . The "habitus", a product of history, produces individual and collective practices--more history--in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the "correctness" of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms. . . . The "habitus"-- embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history--is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product. As such, it is what gives practices their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate present. (Bourdieu, 1990, pp. 53-6)
If it is the case that for many of us
the statement "Stay negative please" doesn't succeed--for
intensely complicated reasons--as an appeal to our "better"
nature, what would it mean to imagine it as somehow incorporated
into our "second" nature? Now to some extent the set
of sexual practices making up gay sex in certain places is moving
in this direction -- doubtless slowly and unevenly. Lore about
which lubes work best and which don't, which condoms fit and feel
good and which don't, for instance, perhaps suggest some paths
along which certain gestures become second nature. The shifting
ways condoms have been portrayed in gay porn over the past decade
might tell us something about the importance of having history
embodied.
When I teach about AIDS and HIV, I've learned I can't get anywhere
without teaching about sex as a complicated, historically sedimented
set of social practices, and I try to talk about condom usage,
for instance, in that light, as a historical practice that we
could think about discussing less--if at all-- as a moral imperative
or as a source of guilty confessional narratives about relapse,
and more practically--more as a practice ready for all sorts of
delimitations. What difference does this make? This kind of pedagogical
shift is for me theoretically and practically motivated. I find
myself more and more interested in and compelled by the creation
of practical traditions. It has been, in my own life, the almost
incidental passing on of practices about, or in, sex that have
seemed most likely to transmit prevention methods successfully.
What's the difference between saying "Use a condom every
time" and talking about how difficult it is to open a condom
package with lube on your hands? What's the difference between
saying "Stay negative please" and talking about how
to get condoms, or which lubes work, or allergies to latex or
lube, or how physically difficult it can be to put a condom on?
What's the importance, having remarked and taught according to
this difference, of insisting also on talking "about"
the difference and its consequences? What would it mean to think
about how, during (safe) sex, we become acculturated to (safe)
sex -- so that sex itself comes to be understood as both historically
and culturally specific in its very constructedness? Pedagogically,
theoretically, and practically these are the ways I am finding
to be responsible to myself and to others.
Works Cited