Ideal and unsullied: Purity, subjectivity and social power more

1 Ideal and Unsullied: Purity, Subjectivity and Social Power Abstract There has been a good deal of empirical social scientific research which has addressed the theme of purity and has indicated its social importance. However, few theoretical resources are available to scholars which explicitly attempt to analyse purity, besides Mary Douglas’s structural-functionalist model. This model has many insights, but is not well-adapted to considering issues of subjectivity or social power in contemporary Western societies. This article will attempt to take some steps towards filling this gap. It will be claimed that, through the way they appeal to an imputed essence and origin, purity discourses are often complicit in the consecration and occlusion of relations of power and processes of subjectivation. The argument will focus in particular on the operation of purity discourses in the discursive construction and practical negotiation of female adolescence. Keywords: Purity, Innocence, Mary Douglas, Social Power, Adolescence 2 The path of knowledge was always traced in that of a purification of the subject, of the percipiens. Well! We would now say that we base the assurance of the subject on the filth that may support him. - Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 258 1. Introduction What shall here be termed purity is a discursive judgement made regarding an object, comparing it to an ideal prior essence free from heterogeneous, foreign or inferior elements. This is in line with the use of the term in ordinary language. The Oxford English Dictionary (2009) describes purity as: ‘1. The state or quality of being morally or spiritually pure’; ‘2. The state or quality of being physically pure or unmixed’; ‘3. The state or quality of being free from extraneous or foreign elements’; or an instance of these states. Likewise, among other European languages the concept of the ‘pure’ (for example, French: ‘pur’; Spanish, Portuguese and Italian: ‘puro’; German: ‘rein’) is used to compare the appearance or state of a given object with an original, essential form. There are some slight differences between European languages, but overall the commonalities are quite striking (see Rozin et al 2010). The existence of a shared concept of purity across multiple languages is, in large part, the consequence of a series of Europe-wide events – such as the Reformation – supplemented by a degree of inter-cultural borrowing (Härle 1996); it is notable that early use of the national vernacular to write learned discourse occurred precisely to discuss the domestic implications of Europe-wide debates over the theology of purity (Doyle 2000: 38). My definition follows, too, the standard usage within social theory. Mary Douglas (2004: 162), for example, asserts that ‘purity means unadulteration; it derives from the verb ‘to purify’, to remove adulterating material... [as in] pure milk, pure intentions’. Within these various definitions we may distinguish between two elements. The first is that of being unmixed. The pure is qualitatively homogeneous and self-identical. The impure, by contrast, is qualitatively heterogeneous, incorporating materials from two or more separate origins. It can never present itself as an origin, for it is already marked by its dependent, derivative status. The impure is of necessity marked by temporality, whereas the pure speaks of its proximity to and perfect manifestation of 3 pre-temporal essence. Purity discourses map the lateral distinction between homogeneous and heterogeneous onto the vertical distinction between primary and secondary, ideal and derivative. Hence the second element in the definitions given above: the normative valuation of the pure above the impure, the ‘adulterated’ or ‘debased’. This paper sets out to engage with purity discourses on a theoretical level, so as to produce new heuristics for comprehending how these discourses operate and their social significance in contemporary Western societies. We will first offer an account of the main paradigm available to researchers addressing themes of purity: that of Mary Douglas’s (1966) Purity and Danger. The paper will go on to make two major claims. Firstly, that themes of purity should best be conceptualised as discourses tightly associated with processes of subjectivation within arrangements of social power. Rather than the consensual product of universal cognitive processes, themes of purity infiltrate our lives at a most intimate subjective level, and shape the forms of subjective agency available to social and political actors. Secondly, it will be argued that within contemporary Western societies purity serves as a form of symbolic capital, since encoded as apolitical or non-political, purity discourses are thereby able to achieve a political function largely without scrutiny. Underpinning both of these roles is the semantic structure of our notion of purity. Linked together are two partiallydifferentiable strata: purity as ideal form against which subjects and the world are measured, and purity as unsulliedness which judges difference from an imputed essence as lack. Despite making these substantive claims, above all this paper aims to re-open the topic of purity as a subject for further theoretical inquiry. Its major aims are threefold. Firstly, it will consider the role of purity discourses in the dynamics operating between the social and subjective domains in contemporary Western societies. Secondly, it will examine the role of purity discourses in the dynamics of social conflict. Thirdly, and above all, this article aims to reopen Western purity discourses as a topic for theoretical inquiry. The latter half of the article will focus in particular on purity discourses surrounding female adolescence in contemporary Western societies. This topic is of particular interest, as it will help us explore two claims that will be made below: the role of the body as a particular anchor for purity discourses and their 4 processes of subjectivation, and the feminine coding of purity as a quality attached to particular subjectivities. This focus will result in some limitations to the overall discussion since forms of purity discourse differ widely. Yet isomorphic semantic structures present across these different discourses may permit a wider applicability for some of the reflections offered here. 2. Beyond Mary Douglas The academic literature which takes purity as an object is exceptionally wideranging. There are major fields of scholarship which explore the theme of purity in the Ancient Greek polis (for example: Parker 1996), in Old Testament and rabbinic thought (Douglas 2001; Schwartz & Wright ed. 2008), and in New Testament and early Christian theology (Chilton & Evans 1997). Certainly any concept of the pure differs substantially between these periods, but there is a consensus in the literature that it does make sense to speak of a common object in the evolution of European culture, and cross-historical comparisons are common. There are also a number of historical and anthropological studies of non-Western cultures of purity (Maghen 2004). Social historians and historical sociologists have examined the history of our current notion of purity (Barrington Moore 2000), with particular scholarly focus being trained in recent years on early modern Europe (Leshem 2003), the Puritans (Lim 2004), the Progressive-era campaigners in the USA (Morgan 1999), and Victorian race and gender discourse (Brody 1998). Much of this literature has been in dialogue with the work of sociologists examining purity discourses in the contemporary Western world. Such studies of purity in contemporary Western societies are by far the most prevalent of all research on the topic. There has been a work, in particular, on racial discourses of purity (Warren 2003), ideas of purity in the art world (Raverty 2005), environmental discourses of nature and purity (Stephens 2000), and sexual purity themes associated with the rise of the New Right in the USA since the 1980s (Lienesch 2007). There has also been extensive research on the theme of childhood purity, due in part to the rapid growth of the sociology of childhood since the early 1990s (Prout & James 1997). My involvement in this work on purity in the sociology of childhood was what first brought me to consider the issue more generally. 5 Despite the wealth of empirical research, however, there is little theory that explicitly addresses purity. Steiner (1956) and Riley (2005) have convincingly argued that a major reason for this is that, since the foundational work on the sacred by the Reverend William Robertson Smith (1894), social scientific thinking on religion and society has been organised by a fundamental ambiguity between two sets of terms: sacred and profane, and pure and impure. Robertson Smith understood the sacred to be a realm of holy purity, separated from the profane actions of ordinary life. This framework was made into a key assumption of the emerging discipline of social anthropology by the Année Sociologique group (see Mauss and Hubert 1889). In practice, to circumvent this issue, the notion of ‘the ambivalence of the sacred’ allowed theorists to make allowance for the axis pure-impure within the framework of the sacred-profane. Thus Durkheim (1912: 306) asserted that ‘the pure and the impure are not two separate genera but two varieties of the same genus that includes all sacred things’, illustrating this principle with reference to the changing relationship of society with the corpse as sometimes an object of revulsion and sometimes as an object of holy veneration. However, though sometimes attentive to the different modes of the sacred, Durkheim focused his attention primarily on the (pure) sacred as a representation of the community as a moral whole. The result has been that, though themes of purity and impurity have appeared again and again in research across the social sciences, there has been surprisingly little theoretical attention paid to the topic, save within the terms already established by a post-Christian Western religious discourse. This discourse identifies purity with the sacred proper, and devalues impurity as, at best, a deviant and corrupted form of the sacred. The predominant paradigm available to researchers is Mary Douglas’s (1966) structural-functionalist theory of purity. Douglas (1966: 164) poses that, in the absence of other concrete sanctions, ritual taboos are produced. These are symbolic restrictions on relations between pure and polluted things, and protect the cultural consensus on how the world is organised by pushing anything mentally or socially ambiguous – ‘matter out of place’ – into the categories of deeply sacred or deeply impure (48-9, 66, 124). The universal reach of Douglas’s approach, attributing any theme of purity to ‘man’s common urge to make a unity of all their experience’ (209), has undoubtedly contributed to the usefulness of her theory in diverse fields over the last forty years. 6 However, its ahistoricism means that the mechanisms that lead to actors reflexively taking up and using purity discourses, in particular political and social situations, are outside her purview. Social scientists analysing Western cultural forms have raised two problems with Douglas’s work on purity classifications: subjectivity and social conflict. Firstly, Isenberg and Owen (1977: 8) criticise Douglas for not offering ‘a sense of how the world feels from various social spaces’. Likewise, Wuthnow et al. (1984: 245) notes that ‘her work focuses on culture with virtual disregard for individual subjectivity’. Secondly, both Wuthnow et al. and Isenberg and Owen agree that Douglas generally provides an inadequate conceptualisation of difference within a society as a source of social conflict and social change. This flaw impacts too her theorisation of purity, conceived as a symbolic expression of society as a ‘political and cultural unity’ (Douglas 1966: 125-6). Douglas (1980; 1990; 2002) has herself accepted both of these criticisms of Purity and Danger. These two issues with Douglas’s theory have also had an impact on subsequent research, theoretical and empirical, drawing on her account of classifications of purity and impurity. For example, one can trace their effects on Julia Kristeva’s (1980) The Powers of Horror, one of the few theoretical works to have engaged with classifications of purity and impurity. Attempting to analyse the ‘specific economy of the speaking subject, no matter what its historical manifestations may be’, Kristeva (1980: 68) superimposes a universal account of structural linguistics onto the frame of Douglas’s anthropology. She proposes that subjects strive to achieve a state of purity, wholeness and autonomy by symbolically closing up the body through the categorical divisions of language. In the maintenance of our ‘clean and proper’ categorical divisions, we engage in a continual attempt to sequester or destroy the hated bodily matter that necessarily underlies but also disturbs our experience of the world. Kristeva (1980: 69-73) terms this ‘jettisoned’ matter out of place ‘the abject’, and shows how it possesses a certain relationship in phantasy with both the feminine and a return to continuity with nature and the world. Scholars have treated Kristeva’s ideas as a supersession of Douglas (e.g. Nead 1992: 32; Grosz 1994: 192-202), especially in the arts as an area where The Powers of Horror offers an advance beyond Purity and Danger through a more detailed analysis 7 of embodiment. Among social scientists, however, The Powers of Horror has generally been treated as a supplement to rather than a replacement for Purity and Danger, since it has been understood to retain the guiding philosopheme of ‘matter out of place’, without addressing the major concerns social scientists had with this account (Hawkins 2006: 3-4; Butler 1990: 107-27, 179-82). In her universal alignment of impurity with the feminine and the material, and the pure with the masculine and the cultural, Kristeva produces a hypostatised account of subjectivity and power-relations. As a result, though Kristeva’s notion of the abject as the feminine bodily substrate of culture has been widely taken up by social scientists, this has occurred in a way generally shorn of the static theory of the subject and of power-relations within which it is embedded. As de Nooy (1998: 289) has suggested, the abject has all too often tended to ‘become a catchall term for ‘yucky’ stuff’. The same issues have arisen in empirical cultural analyses which utilise Douglas’s ideas, for example John Warren’s (2003) Performing Purity, an ethnographic study of racial purity discourses in educational practice. Warren (2003: 11-4) expresses enthusiasm for Purity and Danger as a framework for analysing purity. The notion that the socially denigrated are ‘matter out of place’ is indeed successful as a model for considering his findings regarding the exclusion of non-white subjects within an education system that presents itself as racially neutral. However, as Beidelman (1993: 1066), Bauman (1997: 8) and Asad (2007: 77) have each noted, Douglas’s otherwise valuable theory of classificatory systems causes problems for contemporary researchers since it presents few tools for critical thought. Purity and Danger offers Warren little help grappling with his fascinating observations on how these racial categories become lived subjectivities, or on the way racial discrimination links up with other types of appeal to purity in the occlusion of social power. Attempting to address these issues without explicitly criticising Douglas, Warren directs his findings into a form that permits interpretation with Foucault’s (1975) Discipline and Punish, but in doing so reduces his account of purity in the process. Given the inadequacies of Purity and Danger as an account of the role of purity discourses in the domains of identity and politics, there is a need for a new theorisation of purity discourses in order to understand the social significance of discourses that ascribe purity to particular subjects. Rather than a universalising model, an analysis 8 concentrating on the role played by purity discourses in the shaping of subjectivities and power-relations in Western societies might well be of use to researchers. 3. Purity as a Discourse regarding Essence and Subjectivity ‘Purity discourse’ does not name a general structure (‘langue’) out of which may be created particular social acts or subjectivities (‘parole’); we may more appropriately speak of a multiplicity of relatively-contingent discourses. Despite their extensive differences, however, within modern Western societies certain general patterns can be discerned. Purity discourses tend towards an isomorphic discursive structure, once articulation had occurred between reference to that which originally is and the selfidentical and complete. Appeals to purity align these two referents to present a particular subject or phenomenon as corresponding to a perfect essence, prior to and more true than the cultural and the fragmentary. Distance from the pure ideal is thereby constructed as a state of lack, necessitating action – most notably consumption in the contemporary world – to realign the subject or the world with its true form. Purity as a discourse is irreducibly tied to processes of subjectivation, the material and discursive factors that organise the assemblage of social and psychological relations that constitute an individual actor. When mobilised, purity discourses arrange and shape the experience, knowledge and desires of actors, managing or resisting existing forms of meaning, emotion and power-relations within and between forms of subjectivity (Foucault 1982; Henriques et al. 1984; Blackman et al. 2008). On the one hand, successful appeals to purity, as a discourse appealing to and covertly constructing a natural essence and origin, places the speaker in the position of being able to legitimately judge between the essential and the inessential. This allows them to make further classifications regarding the relatively originary or prosthetic, valuable or valueless, relevant or irrelevant, real or apparent, unitary or fragmented, ordered or inchoate, necessary or contingent. On the other hand, the qualities of neutrality and transcendence make purity and impurity powerful discourses for enacting processes of subjectivation. Through the ability of purity to make claims regarding the essence of the true human being, subjects are encouraged to engage in two forms of reflexive agency, each highly loaded with affect. On the one hand, the subject must take responsibility for 9 regulating and normalising their living body and signifying practices, to avoid slipping out of the acceptable definition of the human. To do otherwise threatens to risk their social exclusion, or even their designation as sub-human. On the other hand, the subject is framed as requiring a continual project of striving for the good life, represented as a source of purity and perfection, in which existence is reconciled utterly with an ideal essence. The inevitable inability of any subject or group of subjects to entirely complete these two forms of reflexive agency provides the mandate for social institutions in their activities to regulate and optimise subjects and the population as a whole. Different genres of purity discourse are facilitated by particular social institutions and cultural forms, and are tied to the production of various forms of subjectivity. They do not express a single social structure in any kind of compelling way, as Douglas has argued; rather, the everyday use of purity discourses by actors is sustained and socially grounded by significant institutionalised discourses, such as on the purity of the body, purity in the natural world, or purity in discourses relating to beauty (see Bourdieu 1984, 1992). The ascription of purity or impurity is a contingent discourse mobilised by subjects or institutions in order to enact a covert form of metaphysics. This metaphysics assigns particular subjects or phenomena a relatively perfect or imperfect correspondence with an imputed essence. To the extent that the subject or phenomenon approximates this idealised autonomy, they are treated as whole and proper, natural and neutral. Yet subjects, and a number of other phenomena, may only be able to be treated as pure, if the complex, interested and temporalised processes that practically bring them into discursive representation are sidelined as merely supplementary (Derrida 1972). The complex interrelation and struggle of social or physical forces that may be necessary in order to maintain in existence something classified as pure are therefore constructed as foreign to the phenomenon and its essence. Forms of subjectivity, and other processes, that speak of heterogeneity and temporality within phenomena that ostensibly correspond to a pure and originary essence are thus treated as impure, whether this be a diversity of elements, sites of openness to the non-pure, a inchoate lack of shape, or temporal change and synthesis. Gender, race and dis/ability, for example, are particular sites where purity and impurity are invoked to regulate physical and social elements through reference to a pure ideal. Representations of impurity in these three instances are utilised to plug the 10 gap between ostensibly essential categories and the messy and contingent continuums of existence (Butler 1993; hooks 1994; Shakespeare 1994). Purity and impurity, in these contexts, devalue as of little moral or epistemological significance all the practical and institutional factors that permit a contingent ideal to seem natural and eternal. Those who differ from this ideal are then characterised as themselves impure. This association operates both symbolically – in terms of, for example, ascriptions of corruption or unnaturalness – and practically, through being physically located proximally to or tasked with responsibility for the physical or moral dirt that would otherwise disturb the elevated ideal. The category of impurity is thereby mobilised to structure the boundaries that separate the acceptable human from the sub-human. Impurity, as ascribed to different forms of embodiment, does not therefore primarily express the presence of an anomaly in the social structure as Douglas has argued. It is first of all a social strategy for occluding the contingency of an essential ideal, and for regulating those physical and social elements thereby classified as essential or inessential. Various genres of purity/impurity discourse may be available depending on the situation. Purity/impurity discourses engage in reciprocal relations with one another, and with other discourses, over time. The respective power of the agents within their field and the field within society more generally will shape the likely outcome of such a conflict should it become relevant to the practical projects of those agents mobilising or perceiving the purity/impurity discourse. A degree of conflict is continually occurring in the various classifications that attend a phenomenon. Yet the shared assumptions of different genres of purity/impurity discourse within the framework of Western societies, mean that they can be brought into articulation in a manner that is mutually re-enforcing and supportive. This isomorphic semantic structure allows purity ascriptions made in one cultural realm to support those in other realms. The body may be a particular site associated with discourses of purity and impurity because, within different sites in the cultural and political fields of contemporary Western societies, it is a key social object that can be regulated through appeal to an ideal of what the human being is in essence (Grosz 1994; Burkitt 1999; Papadopoulos 2008). Such an ideal permits the regulation of the body as a site of organic matter, physical force, signifying practices, and subjective agency. It therefore gives actors grapple – whether to regulate or to resist – on the 11 power-relations that socially and materially position other members of the field or the population more generally, in their biological, economic, semiotic, and social potentialities. The body is therefore a field for purity discourse in its own right. However, it also serves as a discursive anchor, helping to support the operation of other purity discourses. It does this both through its availability for metaphorical applications, and through the social ontology of human beings that it establishes. The political thought of Rousseau, for example, illustrates well this process of discursive anchoring. The developing child in Emile and the savage in the Second Discourse, seen as moving from nature to culture, serve as ‘the concrete figure upon whom can be rested a metaphysical critique of the social’, judging the world by the yardstick of purity (Duschinsky 2010). 4. Purity as Symbolic Capital The pure ideal is never a secure quality attached to the subjectivity of individuals in any class, age, gender, or race. What is erected though appeal to purity is, rather, a spectrum of subjectivities embedded in a matrix of power-relations: the consecrating resources of purity (coded feminine, though not necessarily female) are possessed, in different degrees, by citizens (coded masculine, though not necessarily male). Though no citizen is ever fully consecrated, ownership of sufficient purity permits actors to make claims to dominant and legitimate subject-positions. Purity might therefore be understood as a species of what Bourdieu (1984: 170) has termed ‘symbolic capital’: purity serves as a varying level of culturally constructed difference between subjects, competed for by actors, which naturalises the relations of power that structure a particular social environment. The capacity of purity to serve discursively as a form of symbolic capital for the production of subjectivities makes it available as a contested resource for actors pursuing various projects that involve the shaping of themselves and others. To take but one example, from the 1880s female-led philanthropic movements sprung up across Europe and America, using the traditional association of femininity with socially-redeeming purity to mandate legitimate subject-positions in the sphere of public discourse for women; in Britain and America these were known as the Social 12 Purity movements. Whereas the middle-class had until this point been intent on preserving their monopoly over cultural purity, in the context of widespread fears of economic and social turmoil, the campaigners strove for the purification of society through legislation and activism against prostitution and for the improvement of the working-class home. These activities achieved widespread support through being conducted under the banner of a crusade against child prostitution and the attempt to ensure a good home for working-class children (see e.g. Cooter ed. 1992; Egan & Hawkes 2007). Historians have documented how the ideology of these campaigners was coopted as a ‘cover justification’ used by national elites throughout the Western world and Latin America to legitimate the escalation of state intervention in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Cunningham 1996: 137; see also Koven & Michel 1990; Mead 2000). For instance, the introduction of the welfare state and universal education were mandated by the needs of children, though they also served to help regulate and optimise the labour-force, and reduce the possibility of civil unrest. The historians describe how, in the course of these reforms, purity was imposed as a normative (but largely unreachable) subject-position on the national working-class. By contrast, the absence of whiteness-purity has meant that some non-whites are only gradually gaining potential access to legitimate subjectivities with the quality of purity (Roberts 1999). Black men, for example, are categorically assumed to have sexual knowledge, experience or desire to the point that black masculine subjectivity and purity serve as social antonyms, and for a black woman to be successfully recognised as pure requires a ferocious internal expurgation of desire and very careful social self-management (hooks 1998; Tolman 2002; Hook 2005). 5. Purity and Subjectivity The cultural work to make purity available as symbolic capital is a laborious and precarious psychological process enacted through the interplay processes of subjectivation. For subject-positions socially and materially situated by discourses of purity, feelings of lack are interpreted as caused by distance from the pure ideal, though in fact they come from the most diverse sources in the course of everyday social 13 practice – including, significantly, the very organisation of the process of subjectivation itself as always underway and never complete (Butler 2003; Hook & Neill 2010). Yet the affects of tension, pain, and aspiration associated with the reflexive perception of lack are usually held in place by an economy of moorings. This economy is comprised of strategies of self-management and self-transformation, often themselves utilising discourses of purity. Such strategies include little redemptive fantasies, intensely private, that allow one to get through the day; routines that keep one safe from encounters felt to be emotionally or socially toxic; social encounters with those with the capacity to make one’s present, or future, life feel acceptable; and long-term work to gain access to sites that offer a feeling of something universal (e.g. education, art, the nation). However, continually aggravated by the social and institutional demands – which provoke but also undermine these moorings – social tensions can activate the sense of lack, and make themselves felt in the form of a demand for some external source of absolution. The economy of self and its activities comprise strategies to access enough graspable resources to be able to produce one’s desired response (for example, put on a smile, and offer welcome without reservation or need), and maintain a drowning-out or sublimation of negative feelings. Each person, likely subjectivated by various competing institutional forms and their ideals, searches then for means of managing the distance between these ideals and their own state of lack. For those subjects in a dominated or socially deviant position, regulation is provided by control and punishments, and chances for something felt to be pure and redeeming are more scarce, covert, and costly. Among these means of negotiating one’s relationship with the pure ideal is possession of perceived sources of purity, an ownership that is frequently organised through relations of aspiration and commodification in contemporary society (see e.g. Faulkner 2010). To offer a brief illustration, this interaction can be seen in the case of discourses regarding ‘the natural’, within and beyond the human subject. Western societies have produced representations of nature both as a pure essence underpinning and legitimating a certain form of human existence, and as the impure soup of organic life that requires control in order that human society can be built. This pivoting construction of ‘the natural’ in Western cultures frames natural purity as both the real, as opposed to the 14 false, and the originary, as opposed to the corrupted. This serves to align that which differs from the imputed essence with the movement of temporality. Phenomena that are close to nature as pure are understood to speak of integrity, essence and eternity. By contrast, within this discursive structure, the construction of impure nature as a deviation from a true essence frames both complexity and time as intrusions into a prior perfection. Treating nature as an untouched purity, and in need of cultivation and regulation as an impure object, means that a ‘natural purity’ can be performatively constructed, and then consumed. Opel (1999) has researched representations of bottled water, and their use as a commodity to position the consuming subject as relatively more civilised. The water is represented as natural and pure, as in the cases of Volvic or Evian advertising their product through images of pristine and inaccessible mountains topped with snow. However this representation of purity occludes the material processes in play in its production as a commodity: the extraction of the water from the ground by industrial machines and the global organisation of labour, material and representations that goes into bottling and selling the item. Likewise, the subject can be measured against their own nature in such a way as to naturalise social inequalities and to permit social regulation: assessed against the standard of sexuality or literary genre (see Foucault 1976; Derrida 1980), to take two quite different examples, deviation from the norm for one’s subject-position, unless carefully qualified, tends to be coded as a fall from the natural to the unnatural and threatening, whereas the processes that sustain the norm itself are treated as incidental to its claims to be a pre-given essence. 6. Striving for Unsulliedness One of Nietzsche’s most important insights was that because our desire for the alignment of essence with existence is always attached to a fantasy of pure perfection and eternity, this contingent and transient personal and social project is one tied to the creation of suffering (see Nietzsche 1881:§242, §321, §559; 1887 II: §18-2). He speaks of the way we have been brought to ‘set up an ideal’ and in doing so have become ‘palpably convinced of [our] own absolute worthlessness in the face of this ideal’ (1887 II: §22). The distance between the pure ideal and our unruly and disordered world will 15 serve as a source of pain, provoking a desire for self-regulation and self-transformation to ‘purify and sharpen ourselves’ and achieve a felt state of unsulliedness (1886 §189; 1878 §637). However, if another person, or a social process, is assigned the role of managing this distance rather than ourselves, this pain can be ‘outsourced’. To gain access to a felt sense of justification or absolution in the face of the judging ideal, purity can mandate an agonised, incremental work on the self – or on others. In a case where purity is attained via the body of the other, this social structure tends to be held together by narratives of threat (cf. Butler 1993: 101; Semelin 2005). The social negotiation of female puberty offers an interesting case of this potentially ambiguous social role played by the pristine ideal of purity. One example among others, the role of the body as a particular anchor for purity discourses and the feminine coding of purity as a discursive object – both proposed above – makes this a striking example to investigate. Purity discourses are far from the only socio-linguistic resources available in contemporary Western culture for addressing this life-stage; however, when they are drawn upon certain effects can be observed. To the extent that an individual has been constructed as natural, happy, innocent and devoid of sexuality as a pre-pubescent child, puberty can be discursively constructed and experienced as deeply troubling. The awkward fit between sexual adulthood and ideals of purity makes this region an important battleground for negotiations over wider personal autonomy and identity vis-à-vis social norms and parental authority. This is for both intrinsic and strategic reasons: the sexuality of girls is seen to have high physical, social and moral stakes in itself, and can serve as a site, for the girl themselves or for others, for organising their lived practice more generally. For the female adolescent, the maintenance of a state of purity even into sexual adulthood requires a redoubled effort in self-regulation. To maintain a position on the ‘Madonna’ side of the Madonna/whore dichotomy, unacceptable desires (frequently coded as dark) must be kept away from public expression and even from the light of conscious awareness (cf. Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2003; Hook 2005). This felt dislocation has been insightfully explored in the work of contemporary artist Sarah Lederman, whose work draws attention to the easy movement between signs of emergent female adulthood, dirty sexual availability, and woundedness. In Red 16 ‘Red Legs’, 2008, Sarah Lederman Legs (2008), for example, the uneven muddy inks and oils mix together as they leak down the canvas, conveying a sense of physical filth glowing and dripping from every pore of the squatting figure. These translucent smears over the surface of the canvas make the figure’s brown shadow ambiguous, sliding it visually towards faeces or menstrual blood. As in a several other pieces of female figures by Lederman, the eyes are darkened and blurred by what may be heavy make-up, or bruising, or an emptiness. This picture captures the distance between, on the one hand, the purity that consecrates those with social power, and on the other, the feelings of lack and guilt experienced by those who are constructed as differing from this ideal, or who require extensive and painful emotional and practical work to avoid doing so. Striving for unsulliedness becomes an imperative, due to the economy of subjective needs produced by the pure ideal, and ultimately because of the symbolic needs of social power. Building from these reflections, we can suggest that across the West, the modern concept of purity is structured by the interplay between two partially-differentiable strata: purity as ideal form, and purity as unsulliedness. These are analytical abstractions, but nonetheless seem to account well for the patterns in usage across the span of Romance and Western Germanic languages. Purity as ideal form indicates a thing as being morally, ideationally, or theoretically perfect – with existence corresponding utterly with existence. Moral purity is a state of ethical elevation or 17 sanctity. Ideational purity indicates absolute correspondence between a form and its content, for example ‘to shout for pure joy’, and for this reason can be used as an intensifier on stronger judgements. Theoretical purity, opposed to mixed empirical knowledge, refers to an understanding based solely on logical axioms and not on a posteriori observation. Whereas the ideal form ties purity to a metaphysical pole, Purity as Unsulliedness ties it to this world by making available purity as an empirical description. Unsulliedness asserts that something has not been contaminated by anything heterogeneous, foreign or inferior to its essence. It is in both senses that purity can connote whiteness, or be used to signify sexual innocence relating to any of three modes: the absence of knowledge, the absence of experience or the absence of desire. Within Western purity discourses, then, there is a constitutive distance between ideal form and unsulliedness, utilised by in processes of subjectivation to gain grapple on the experience, knowledge and desires of individual and collective actors. 7. The Politics of Purity The relation between ideal form and unsulliedness also indicates the operation of a politics of purity, when the theme is understood as a contested social discourse and as symbolic capital. Social strategies of contest and control are made available as possibilities to actors by the interaction between the notion’s two semantic strata – though these strategies will be taken up, or not, in a particular case and manner depending deeply on political, cultural and economic national and individual context. Purity as ideal form provides an ostensibly neutral source of value and legitimacy to institutions and identities, and can serve as something for which individuals will strive or mourn when it is lost. Any difference from the ideal form is dismissed as distance from the norm, as inferiority and lack, purity thus expressing an imperative to become acceptable to oneself and to others by making present existence adequate to an imputed essence. Purity as unsulliedness identifies phenomena as relatively distant from this ideal essence due to the presence or potential presence of heterogeneous, foreign, or inferior elements. Purity appears to be merely an empirical judgement about the presence of such elements. In fact, however, the imputed essence that mandates this classification into the 18 essential and the inessential is in fact performatively produced through such classifications. These semantic boundaries designate as impure those phenomena that would undermine the fidelity of a particular form of subjectivity or phenomenon to an imputed essence through the intrusion of elements heterogeneous, foreign or inferior to this essence. The essence which the pure subject or phenomenon ostensibly expresses is therefore in fact articulated through the classification of phenomena into those that impinge upon it and those that do not. Purity can therefore serve as a powerful discourse for naturalising and occluding the social structures of meaning, emotion and the power-relations involved in the production of certain forms of subjectivity. The constitutive distance between purity as ideal and as unsulliedness, smuggles an imputed essence, as judgement and injunction, into our mixed-up social and personal worlds, to organise or resist existing relations of power in their wild-flower plurality and process of living motion. The interlacing of the two strata of purity surreptitiously gives metaphysical properties – for example, the ability to naturalise, the ability to promise existential meaning – to designated subjectpositions, processes or phenomena. This effect is associated particularly with purity’s connotative significations, such as whiteness, the absence of sexual knowledge, experience or desire, and forms of culture ostensibly devoid of sectional interests. The applicability of this model can be demonstrated with reference to two studies on discourses of childhood innocence in America. Though clearly limited in their specifics to the context of contemporary American politics regarding childhood and sexuality, the cases are intended as an illustrative – and perhaps also suggestive, mutatis mutandis – application of some ideas generated in this article regarding purity discourses and the role they can play as symbolic capital. Drawing ideas from Mary Douglas, Lynch (2002) suggests that it may be the anomalous sexuality of the child sex offender which causes contemporary American society to attribute them such power and to react strongly to re-enforce the symbolic boundaries separating sex offenders from the territories frequented by sources of purity – namely children (539). In her analysis of four debates in the US Congress over sex offender community notification legislation, the ‘dichotomy rather than a continuum’ (543) between purity and impurity led Congress, according to Lynch, to four nonrational assumptions. Firstly, that all sexual deviants were potential child molesters, 19 necessitating the notification of local schools and day-care centres (537). Secondly, that danger to children comes from an ‘outsider predator who relentlessly lusts after the innocent and pure’ despite police records which show that all but 3% of sexual crime against children comes from family and acquaintances (545). Thirdly, the belief that the overwhelming majority of victims of sex-crime are white pre-pubescents, like the children the bills were each named after (547). Finally, that there is little besides sequestration and monitoring that can help anything impure, thus cutting the funding for treatment – even for victims (554). Legislators conveyed a sense that ‘the only way to save the sanctity of the traditional family is through passage of these bills’ (549), demonstrating in Lynch’s eyes that the concerns are somehow linked to fears about the changes in the social structure of the home in the post-feminist and gay-rights era– however, she is not able to go further than this to analyse the nature of such a link (560). Whilst offering Lynch a powerful account of symbolic boundaries, Douglas (1966: 150) confesses to yielding no concrete help in analysing the specific mechanisms that relate socio-structural forces to what her theory treats as their symbolic ‘expression’ in the realm of culture. Working without an explicit social theory of purity discourses, Fields (2005) conducted a study of a North Carolina school board discussing abstinence versus abstinence-plus sex education. Both Left and Right, in her study, claimed to be fighting ‘threats to childhood innocence’ (560). The Left worried that innocent children, ‘little girls’ (567), are left vulnerable and ‘at risk’ by the absence of sexual education, their poor social conditions and absence of positive role models (563). The Right voiced fears about sexually ‘initiating’ innocent children for the sake of the sexual health and safety of a small number of ‘deviants’ (551, 562). Both discourses, Fields argues, share a number of features. They allow the speaker to talk about African American teenagers without mentioning race, gender or class. Besides stereotypes of absent sexuallyuncontrollable black fathers, they avoid discussing male responsibility. Furthermore, they both foreclose, by speaking of pre-pubescents, the possibility that a teenager can be sexually adult and still warrant care (555). As interesting as her study is, however, Fields’ work remains descriptive rather than explanatory, as she is not able to offer any account for this consensus between Left and Right. 20 The heuristics for analysing purity in Western societies suggested above allow us to interpret the strange consensus on the issue of purity in contemporary American society described separately by Lynch and Fields. Seen as a mode of purity discourse, the innocence of minors is foundational to both Left and Right as political positions within American society, and at the same time underpins their differences. The American Right largely present a model of threats to society which sees danger as caused by irredeemable individuals (coded poor, coded ethnic, associated with sickness) unless the vulnerable are protected through immediate action against social deviancy – to avoid it escalating further. The paradigm of vulnerability is childhood, which represents the essence of innocence and purity, traditional values and the past; it is for the sake of this ideal that state intervention and social surveillance can be legitimated. At the same time, state intervention to alter the status quo can be blocked or restricted by the image of, for instance, pure homes or communities as unmixed and unsullied. On the whole the American Left, too, though using a quasi-epidemiological model of social risk factors to explain misdemeanours, take children as the paradigm of the vulnerable population. In order to protect those who have a diminished capacity for responsibility, the Left advocate a widening and intensification of the defence of purity through state legal, institutional and medical intervention and an increase in social surveillance. The recourse of both sides to a discourse of purity is understandable, since it is one of the few strong sources of symbolic capital remaining in American society for operating the relationship between institutions and subjectivities, whether mandating or preventing social action. It is not my intention to suggest that all discourses that in contemporary Western societies are currently associated with purity, such as discourses of vulnerability, incapacity or protection, are simply illegitimate. Rather my concern is primarily to analyse some of the less apparent consequences of appeal to purity (cf. Atmore 1999). A number of concomitant assumptions and themes are cemented by the common use of purity in the course of social conflict in the contemporary ‘culture wars’. As an ideal form, purity appears to be neutral in American political discourse even while protecting (for the Right) or extending (for the Left) the claims of a particular group to both be the norm and to stand neutrally above it (see Iyer 1993 for example, or Field’s critique of the Left’s tendency towards race-blindness). The connotations of whiteness and wholeness which are attached to purity are not merely a 21 grammatical accident but serve a definite social purpose in American society in tacitly establishing these as social ideals, and marking as inferior or broken those who cannot make successful social claims about either. At the same time, the feminine coding of purity and its association with vulnerability naturalises its status as the consecrating property of a legitimate authority, rather than an entitlement to social power itself. Furthermore an economy is set up in the private and interpersonal spaces of the desires and dreams of each individual, in which the tensions that underpin their psyche are managed and the strains of daily living are practically reconciled. This management takes place through a relationship – manifest both in strategies in social life and in the most personal spaces of fantasy and emotion – with the need for even the most transient access to some felt source of purity. This self-surveillance and self-discipline can sometimes erupt as either unintentional (as symptom) or resolute (as conviction) social difference. However, for most people subjectivated by an institutionally-sponsored pure ideal, the result is a series of everyday projects characterised by striving, and docility, and pain. In addition, purity as unsulliedness means that a person’s problems are individualised by their distance or experience of distance from the ideal, making issues seem unconnected to their socio-structural context. Similarly on the larger social level the emotive narratives of the ownership or the vulnerability of purity successfully remove power from either history or interest, thus naturalising and rendering invisible forms of social oppression. 8. Conclusion Purity is a multifaceted discourse of social meaning and social contestation, relating individual subjectivities to political dynamics and forms of institutional power. The interlacing of purity’s two semantic strata, as ideal form and as a posteriori unsulliedness, covertly garner powerful properties for subjectivities and other phenomena to which purity is ascribed. 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