2022 Introductory note: This overly long and convoluted
essay was originally published in 2016 on a different platform, which is sadly
no longer online. I think it’s worth republishing here as my opinions have not
changed much in the interim. Two things do come to mind as I’m reading this
back.
1 – The almost feverish manner in which I repeatedly try to
reassure the reader that I take consent seriously, and that the occasion of my
critique isn’t some awful prelude to a full-on exultation of manosphere values.
It’s amusing to see these little summaries at the end of each section, which I’ve
put into italics, as if I’m saying to the reader ‘No matter if you skimmed the
rest, at least concentrate on this!’, all of them couched in defensive terms, “it
is important to be very clear”, “Let
me emphasise again that in no way…”, etc. There
was a lot of pick-up-artist, manosphere attention on consent at the time and to
not be enthusiastic for Leftist consent discourse was to risk being lumped in
with some very unsavoury individuals.
2 – Quite soon after I wrote this it dawned on me that the ridiculously
convoluted route I’ve taken here to make what were at the time a series of unfashionable
arguments could be summed up quite straightforwardly with the following:
Consent does not turn violence into non-violence, it merely turns it into legal
violence. I should caveat this by drawing attention to the very timely We Can’t Consent to This campaign which has done much to push back against the defence of “consensual violence”
in cases where women have suffered serious injury or been killed at the hands
of men. Nevertheless, the fact that such a campaign group needs to exist proves
my basic point.
That I made such
effort to construct a series of arguments - some more plausible than others – reflects
my inability at the time to take what would have been the short route, straight
through values. For if violence is the actual matter at hand, then all that is
needed is to point out the empty formal quality of consent as it is used in the
contemporary legal/social context, and demand an ethic of substantial values
set against the normalisation of violence. This, of course, is the illiberal
path, but it is the one that was quite obviously signposted, which is borne out
by the fact that in turning away from that path I was driven to take these
colourful extended detours through everything from speech-act theory to Medieval
law.
I think section 5, which revolves around Jennifer Doyle’s
book Campus Sex, Campus Security, has some of the strongest material,
not least as little did I know that in thinking about risk management and the bolstering
of State paternalistic authority I was sketching what would become the central
mode of power during the pandemic. It is a short step from risk management
around sexual freedom to risk management around freedom in toto. This
passage, which quotes Doyle, is especially suggestive:
The appearance of consent classes as well as
safe spaces is "shaped by the affective economy of a security culture in
which a sense of injury and exposure revolves around sexual possibility - a
possibility with the organizing force of a black hole" (Doyle 2015 pg28).
This discourse of protection Doyle claims not only re-enforces but actually
produces the subjectivities it claims to protect. Ultimately it constitutes a
particularly insidious apparatus for normalising and inscribing both the
essential fragility of the student-subject and the policing power of the
university in its Neoliberal phase. Within these regimes of risk management sex
appears as a thing, as a dangerous property possessed by "sexual
sovereigns" that someone else might try to take away, or that we may
misuse, and which we demand the state and university protect.
Risk management is in the second rank – behind Decline – as an
interpretive key for the present. As for understanding the metastasis of
authoritarian yearning among the administrative classes, it is indispensable.
2016 Text
1.
As I write, the verdict in the retrial of footballer Ched
Evans has just recently been announced.
The verdict itself is a shock but what is even more disheartening are the facts
of the trial; that the complainant's personal sexual history was used against
her after the judge made a rare exception to allow it as evidence, and that the
family and partner of Evans was known to have offered a cash reward for
information leading to his acquittal. The repercussions of this verdict and the
precedent that the judge's exception may set will undoubtedly be felt for years
to come and is a huge blow for women who seek to bring their attackers to
justice. Once again bringing prejudice to bear against the sexual history of
women who report rape has become a legitimate line of defence. To put it
simply, this trial in the way it was allowed to be conducted has made women
less safe and men more secure in their ability to rape without fear of conviction.
Currently then a critique of the use of consent as an
effective concept within the discourse of rape prevention seems inopportune.
Shouldn't we be defending the sanctity of the notion of consent, since it was
precisely the autonomy of the victim and her right to deny consent that was
being undermined in the Evans retrial? On the other hand, the trial also
demonstrates the fragility of consent as a legal principle which enables us to
identify harm in sexual matters. Given the right conditions, the right amount
of prejudice, enough money, and a legal system that still fails women time
after time, a person's right to give or deny consent can be overthrown.
It is
for this reason that a critique of consent - and in the case of this article -
of the development of so called 'sexual consent classes' in universities, is
worthwhile. It is meant to be a sketch so my lines of argumentation are
multiple but do not reach the depth that they would deserve in a fuller
exposition. Also, given the climate, it will unavoidably appear as a
provocation. What I wish to argue is that
the concept of consent is inadequate due to its being imported from the legal
discourse of property and contract and that as such it imprints a highly
abstract and alienating form onto sexual relations that erodes the aspects of
mutuality and reciprocal gift-giving which are at the heart of all worthwhile human
intimacy.
2a.
"Not everyone has the privilege to feel
enthusiastic about sexual consent but that doesn't necessarily mean that they
lack the freedom and capacity to make that choice..." (NUS Women, I Heart Consent
Workshop Guide 2015) - Link no longer available
Sexual consent classes are a phenomenon that began in
universities in the United States, but have over the last two or three years
become increasingly prevalent in the UK. Their implementation has been
spearheaded by the NUS as one approach to tackling the high rates of reported
sexual harassment on university campuses. Depending on the source those rates
range from one in five to over 50% of female students experiencing some kind of
sexual harassment or assault while at university in the UK. The NUS conceive of
consent classes as part of the standard induction package all new students
should receive along with more general health and safety material, and
information about IT and library recourses. This mirrors the reception of such
measures in the US where they have been integrated into universities as part of
their obligations under Title IX of the US Higher Education Act. Title IX is an
amendment that covers safeguarding and how universities deal with accusations
of discrimination and assault. To this end the UK NUS have produced a
standardised guide for those organising consent classes.
Their introduction has not gone unnoticed and there have
been several stories picked up by the mainstream media over the last two rounds
of admissions. Last year we had George Lawlor at Warwick (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-34615631)
who took offense at having attend the classes. He argued a common criticism of
the classes that they imply all men are potentially rapists: "It's just
that I feel if you need to be taught what consent is and what consent isn't,
then you don't have respect for other human beings." This year as more
student unions around the country introduced the classes there were even minor
protests and walk-outs such as at York where third-year accounting student Ben
Froughi encouraged a boycott arguing that the classes encouraged men and women to identify with the
respective roles of potential victim and rapist. Interestingly the irked
accountant also took issue with the implied contractual form of sexual
bargaining: "There is no correct way to negotiate getting someone into bed
with you. In suggesting that there is, consent talks encourage women to
interpret sexual experiences that have not been preceded by a lengthy, formal,
and sober contractual discussion as rape".
Despite increasing numbers of universities hosting such
classes there is scant data either here or in the US, where they have run for
many years, that the classes are effective in reducing the incidence of sexual
assault. In fact, judging by the stats put out by the NUS, the reported rates
seem to be increasing; although like such data produced by the police and
government, this is often explained away by putting any increase down to the
willingness of victims to come forward, and thus something in part to be
celebrated. However, this is also an admission that there is no reliable data
pertaining to the reality of the situation on the ground, or as yet any
empirical means to assess the impact of the classes. Like those mysterious
proclamations on the invisible war put out by security services we can well
imagine NUS officers proudly counting up the number of potential rapists
neutralised by their programs of prevention and countermeasures. It is important however to be very clear; my
argument is not that the problem of sexual assault at Britain’s universities is
trivial or overstated, nor is it that these techniques of management could
never be effective (although as yet there is no evidence that they are). My
claim is that their potential effectiveness carries with it a problematic
discourse which undermines the good intentions from within.
2b.
The starting point for the NUS guide is the definition of
consent from current UK legislation. In England and Wales a person consents if
they agree "by choice, and has the freedom and capacity to make that
choice". And in the Scottish sexual offenses act of 2009 consent is
defined simply as "free agreement". Both these definitions are highly
abstract renderings of basic principles from contract law emphasising notions
of free agreement and the absence of force and fraud. Immediately in its legal
form sexual relations are taken in part to be an instance of the exchange of
goods or services involving the free contracting of the parties involved.
Consent
classes, the principal subjects of which are rape and rape culture, begin by
reproducing this juridical and legalistic framework of sex crime legislation,
as well as the vagueness of some clauses within those definitions. The classes
tend however to expand on the legal definition to include examples of
additional clauses while maintaining the contractual style already inherent in
the legal definition. For instance, the NUS consent workshop guide includes
“active, on-going conversation, and retractable” as attributes of consent while
including “assumed, and previous consent” as examples of what genuine consent
is not. Taken in isolation and as general pointers towards avoiding harm none
of these examples is especially vexatious, although in practice some may be
difficult to implement. Taken together
they flesh out the vagueness of the current UK definition of sexual consent
into a more concrete contractual form.
One of the
difficulties both in the UK and US legal definition is that it admits the
possibility of non-verbal consent, though the US code excludes that as a
possibility in cases resulting from the use of force, threat of force, or
placing another person in fear. Although the NUS consent class guide does not
state consent should be explicit and verbal, the additional glosses on the UK
and US legislation (especially that consent should never be assumed) and the
overall contractual framework make the implication clear. Transparency and
predictability of outcomes are key.
The clearest
indicator of the abstract contractual nature of consent being put forward in
the NUS guide is that it is explicitly separated from any notion of enthusiasm
or enjoyment; surely the prime reason all things considered for having sex
besides purely reproductive motivations. For the
authors of the guide, consent functions seemingly as a purely formalistic
concept within an exchange between two parties. The guide even goes so far as
to describe enthusiastic consent (which we might translate as anticipating the
possibility of actually enjoying the act) as a "privilege" and draws comparisons
with the exchange between sex workers and their clients. This is a particularly
striking comparison considering the continued "workerisation of sex" that I have drawn attention to elsewhere.
In that case, guided by Neoliberal
notions of entrepreneurship and human/erotic capital, advocates from the sex
industry have argued against distinguishing sex-work from work in general,
using a similar set of conceptual tools around consent and personal bargaining
that they argue would reduce the dangers to sex-workers and combat prejudice.
Paul Mason has argued in his book Post-Capitalism
that this reflects a trend of contemporary Neoliberalism to capture
"externalities"; aspects of our social lives that do not obviously
conform to market or value generating transactions. (2022 note: In the wake
of the pandemic this distinction has now almost entirely collapsed)
The direction this is heading in seems clear; human sexual
relations are just like any other form of exchange within the economy. The fact
that money may not actually change hands does not mean sexual exchange should
be excluded from regimes of management where pleasure is rarely a significant
factor. Ultimately sex is just another instance of one party wishing to obtain
goods or services from another, fitting squarely within prevailing legal
discourses of property and contract. Lovers become contracted partners in an
amorous exchange and the estrangement of immanent human relations into the
legal/juridical framework is further normalised. As so often in the most
developed societies, security and risk management are the banners under which
we are rapidly burying all possibility of a joyful form-of-life. Consent
classes are potentially then a correlate to the reimagining of sex-work through
the logic of work, contract, and entrepreneurship. And as such the sex-worker
becomes the vector through which all sexual relations are being reconfigured
along economic lines.
The consent classes, which would presumably be appropriate
for anyone, are in fact part of a package from the US which includes the
notions of “safe-spaces” and “trigger warnings” (both present in the NUS
literature) which opponents argue have together contributed to infantilising an
entire generation of students across the pond and is threatening to make
relations between young people just as miserable and estranged over here. There
has also been criticism of the use of safe spaces by some universities and
interest groups to shut down legitimate criticism of Israel on the grounds that
Jewish students felt threatened. This is however another issue entirely.
Let me emphasise again that in no way am
I suggesting that consent is an irrelevance for sexual relations (quite the
opposite) or that one should casually reject the discourse around consent
purely on the basis that it brings with it unforeseen consequences or types of
language. Nevertheless, it is all too often forgotten that life and Law are
fundamentally distinct realms and the assumption that the former might be
contained and safeguarded by the later is a mistake that Western society in the
modern period never ceases to repeat.
3.
"Our suggestion
is that the presuppositions introduced by the pornographic conversations
persist in the conversations with real women" (Langton 2009 pg187)
Consent, when referring to a verbal or other sign form of
agreement is an example of a type of speech act called performative. Performatives are not like regular descriptive speech
that report something about the world; the cat is on the mat, etc.
Performatives do not merely describe a state of affairs but actually bring that
state of affairs into being through their saying. When someone says "I
promise" those words are not representing a promise but constitute the
promise itself. Performatives do what they say. Similarly, J.L. Austin who first
developed speech act theory in the 1960s uses the example of an umpire in
tennis who when shouting "out" constitutes the ball 'as' out within
the context of the game regardless of whether it actually was or not. Saying so
'makes it so'. This reality constituting aspect of performatives is central to
American philosopher Judith Butler's queer theory and the possibility she sees of
undermining prevalent norms of gender and sexuality; notably through the use of
Drag.
Consent classes are not the first example of performatives
being brought into issues around rape and sexual violence. Second wave
feminists in the 1970s and 80s found Austin's work on performatives invaluable
in building their case against pornography on the grounds that it depicted
women in ways that caused "illocutionary disablement" of women
in general. In short, the argument goes that the depiction of women in
pornography as enjoying domination, as always available, as always saying yes -
and critically when they do say no not really meaning it - meant that a women's
capacity outside of pornography to refuse sex (refusal is also a performative)
was negatively affected. Just as was the case during the Ched Evans retrial, consent
is for all intents and purposes assumed.
As Catherine MacKinnon put it in an
influential essay: “pornography brings its conditions of production to the
consumer, … establishing what woman are said to exist as, are seen as, are
treated as, constructing the social reality of what a women is and can be in
terms of what can be done to her, and what a man is in terms of doing
it”(MacKinnon 1993 pg25). Pornography is said to make comparable pronouncements
on the status of women as an umpire in tennis calling the ball out or a jury
ruling a defendant guilty. As such it does not simply describe a state of
affairs but continually constitutes and re-enforces that state of affairs.
Saying no is a refusal and like utterances of consent are
speech acts that aim at a particular effect and are as such dependent on
factors Austin called felicity conditions.
These are particular conventions and references that allow a performative to
actually have the effect it is intended to have, such as promising, accepting,
etc. If, however, the one whom the refusal is directed to believes that women
enjoy being coerced into sex, that for a woman to drink and enjoy herself is
itself an invitation for sex, and that even when they say no they sometimes
mean yes, the act of refusal can fail to count as an effective speech act. The
felicity condition whereby the speaker’s refusal is taken to reflect genuine
intention is absent or disputed, as such it fails to count as an effective
illocution. Between the speakers, as Jennifer Hornsby has argued, there is a
lack of reciprocity (Hornsby in Dwyer 1995 pg224).
Although much of what MacKinnon and others argued about
pornography at this time has been challenged, not least on the claim that it
has a so-called power of 'divine performatives' that can socially construct
women unchallenged, there was a sophistication to their critique that brought
in ideas of how the wider discourse on sex within a society impacted an
individual's sexual relations at a fundamental level. Consent classes however
appear something of a step back from this insofar as they take the concept of
consent in a more or less uncritical way, as if it were not also dependent on
particular conventions and subject to the vagaries and dominant interests
within the wider discursive environment in which it is used.
Although these
classes do address the influence of rape culture (a term retained from
MacKinnon's era) it could well be argued that the claims made about refusal by
second wave feminists apply equally to consent and that wider societal and
ideological factors have a part to play in how such speech acts function and the
sort of social relations they entail. The question we need to then ask is what
are the felicity conditions that make consent intelligible in its contemporary
form? I have already drawn attention to the legal economic influence which
brings sexual consent into the realm of contract and exchange, but what about
other historical sources?
4.
"When the ethical
- and not simply cognitive - connection that unites words, things, and human
actions is broken, this in fact promotes a spectacular and unprecedented
proliferation of vain words on the one hand and, on the other, of legislative
apparatuses that seek obstinately to legislate on every aspect of that life on
which they seem no longer to have any hold" (Agamben 2011 pg70-71)
The etymology of consent leads back to the Latin consentio/consentire; literally to ‘feel-together’
or to be of the same mind. For the ancient Romans however the word never had
the status of a technicus terminus in
legal or economic writing and is instead found across the literature in
numerous contexts evoking the sense of being of common mind or shared sentiment.
The development of consent as a concept in modern legal discourse and the
caveat in the NUS literature excluding enthusiastic consent makes clear however
that sentiment or mutual feeling are not significant factors in its contemporary
use. The sex worker does not feel the same about the act as the client. It
should not surprise us that the etymological shift towards an increasingly abstract
form of agreement took place during the 13th century when so much of
the basic framework of modern systems of Law were being worked out across
Europe.
In English law it makes a prominent appearance near the end
of that century in the Statutes of Westminster where for the first time the
notion of sexual consent is developed independently of whether a girl (such
laws dealt solely with girls) were married. In Roman and Cannon law a girl's perceived
capacity to consent was tied entirely to the age of womanhood and marriage. Consenting
to marriage necessarily implied consent to sex and the two were more or less
indexed to the onset of puberty and as such the physical capacity to bear
children. As Victoria Bates writes recently "Consent in itself was not the
focus of these laws, in which a man’s right to take a girl’s chastity –
ideally, but not necessarily, with her consent – came with marriage".
The marriage agreement was taken to give the husband a right in the use of the
wife's body, ostensibly for child rearing; a perspective on the institution of
marriage that lived on well into the 20th century.
Bates also draws attention to the 1885 Criminal Law
Amendment Act which gave us our modern two tier system of consent laws which
set the felony age at 13 and misdemeanour age at 16. What is essential for our
discussion is how the setting of the two ages reflected concerns about unruly
sexual desire in young girls. "Before full maturity – physical and mental
– girls were thought to need protection not only from men, but also from their
own new and disorderly sexual feelings. This question of ‘capacity’ was a
double-edged one: it complemented a child protection agenda, but also supported
those who feared that girls (especially working-class girls) would ‘fall’ early
and should not be given the opportunity to do so.
This balance between
protection and control ran throughout much Victorian legislation" (Ibid).
In effect the raising of the age of consent to 16 reflected as much a desire to
control young women as to protect children. I don't believe it is too much to
suggest that today's discourse of consent as it plays out in the courts and
social media and in particular how a woman's clothing, her choice to drink, her
choice of company and lifestyle retain the signature of this desire to control
and condemn female sexuality.
Leading into modernity there have then been two distinct but
interrelated discourses on consent which now find themselves united in the
contemporary concept. On the one hand a notion tied to the institutions of
marriage, childbirth and ethico/religious obligations; on the other an increasingly
general and abstract notion tied to the development of the law of property and
contract, and of the human being as an economic subject. It is clear that many
aspects of the first discourse continue to influence the moral landscape around
consent, with women bearing most of the negative consequences.
It is also clear
however that with the detraditionalisation of established sources of ethical
norms, such as the church, the family and the local community, that it is the
economic discourse of consent which now holds sway over the field. More broadly,
as the aspect of reciprocal feeling inherent in the ancient usage has receded,
the concept of consent has increasingly come to be associated with individuals
embroiled in some form of negotiation. Its fate is like many other concepts in
the Western metaphysical tradition; its character as an emblem of singular being-together, of common life, is
hollowed out, abstracted and finally marooned as a mere statement representing
the ascent of an individual to a matter present-at-hand.
5.
"Making oneself
vulnerable: Is that not what we do in friendship, and in desire?" (Doyle pg49)
The continued failure of the judiciary to properly protect
women, instead perpetuating prejudice; and the proliferation of discourses
collapsing the distinction between sex and other forms of economic activity are
not phenomena opposed to each other. Both rely on the efficacy of the
performative ‘consent’ as a means to constitute harmless relations or identify
harmful ones. As such consent relies on certain conditions of intelligibility, which
Austin called felicity conditions, in order to function. These include the
distribution of roles, responsibilities and rights, and obligations drawn from
prevailing social relations. Or as Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato put
it in a recent critique of the emancipatory potential of speech act theory:
"Just as the performative codifies enunciations, utterances, and their
effects, it also institutionalises speakers and listeners, their respective
roles and ranks, and the public space of their acts. The "subjects"
that emerge here take no risks and do not engage themselves "personally""(Lazzarato
pg174).
As we have seen, the discourse of sexual consent is
inseparable from its history as a means of managing female sexuality either in
association with marriage and child rearing or the supposed dangers of
precocious and disorderly female desire. Consent more generally is also
inseparable from its development as a key concept in the history of property
and contract law, and in the present era the generalisation of those discourses
as models for all human activity as life continues to be marketized. It is for these reasons that I argue that
making consent the foundational concept of any discourse dealing with sex will
not help produce healthy, flourishing relations between people, nor ultimately
prevent harm.
The situation in the courts and the continued prevalence of
prejudice against women remain a salient example of how this historical baggage
combined with legal exactitude are ensuring the failure to prevent or even identify
that harm. Victoria Bates' reflections on the 19th century consent laws and
their ambivalent motivation similarly allow us to understand this strange dual
view of women as simultaneously 'at risk' and 'a risk'.
Returning to the situation in the universities Jennifer
Doyle's recent book Campus Sex Campus
Security (Doyle 2016) describes how concerns around sexual harassment have
articulated with the university security apparatus in the US. Doyle claims that
outmoded paternalistic myths about female vulnerability have been generalised
in the contemporary era and are now captured within the ubiquitous discourse of
risk management. The appearance of consent classes as
well as safe spaces is "shaped by the affective economy of a security
culture in which a sense of injury and exposure revolves around sexual
possibility - a possibility with the organizing force of a black hole"
(Doyle 2015 pg28). This discourse of protection Doyle claims not only
re-enforces but actually produces the subjectivities it claims to protect.
Ultimately it constitutes a particularly insidious apparatus for normalising
and inscribing both the essential fragility of the student-subject and the
policing power of the university in its Neoliberal phase.
Within these regimes
of risk management sex appears as a thing, as a dangerous property possessed by
"sexual sovereigns" that someone else might try to take away, or that
we may misuse, and which we demand the state and university protect. Just
as pre-nuptial agreements were meant to protect the property of the rich in
acrimonious divorce settlements, and modern sugar daddy agencies seek to
formalise that type of relationship outside of marriage, here the juridical
framework of contract is again called upon to smooth over precarious
interpersonal relations, which in an atmosphere of cultural anomie and litigious
anxiety, increasingly lack any other grounding. The historical unfolding of contract
and consent, while always carrying with it the mark of freedom and
individualism, has also - and always been - a way for life to be captured in
Law.
6.
"We must think
that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces. To make a truly
unavoidable challenge of the question: What can be played?" (Foucault
1997 pg140)
This is meant to be a sketch for a critique, and I make no
claim to any magic bullet for the problems of sexual violence and how Western
societies are addressing them. However, to bring this to some sort of
conclusion it may be worth reflecting on one kind of utterance that Lazzarato
opposes to the performative. Michel Foucault's late work included extended
reflections on the ancient Greek practice of parrhesia, a word with no direct translation but which is to do
with truth telling or true speech. This is however not the kind of speech that
merely describes a state of affairs.
As Foucault put it in almost tautological
fashion: "parrhesia involves the
way in which by asserting the truth, and in the very act of this assertion, one
constitutes oneself as the person who tells the truth, who has told the truth,
and who recognises oneself in and as the person who has told the truth"
(Foucault 2011 pg68). In such speech it is the speakers themselves who appear
rather than in the case of performatives like consent, where what appears is
merely the matter present at hand. The latter case brings in nothing that is
not already decided upon or pre-assigned to accepted roles and
responsibilities, of what can and cannot be said. Whereas in parrhesia it is the speaker’s freedom
that appears and their courage.
In his writing on this "courage of truth" Foucault
describes different situations where parrhesia
is in play, several of which are political in nature such as Pericles
speech to the Athenians during the Peloponnesian war. Indeed, at times it is as
if for the French philosopher the function of parrhesia takes on a significance for the wellbeing of a political community
that surpasses even that argued by Cicero for classical rhetoric. For our
purposes, on the interpersonal level it is also crucial to emphasise that this
openness in truth is a deeply ethical one that always demands a reciprocal
openness on the part of the other which Foucault describes as the "parrhesiastic pact". This is especially the case as the
question of the free and moral subject “comes back to the question of the true
discourse in which this moral subject constitutes itself, and the question of
the relation of power in which this subject is formed“ (Foucault 2011 pg68). What is crucial to
this argument is that for Foucault this kind of truth telling is the highest
exercise of freedom, albeit a dangerous one.
Dangerous perhaps because unlike with performatives parrhesia does not produce a codified
effect, rather it opens up an unspecified risk (Foucault 2011 pg62). As such it
is entirely opposed to the contractual logic animating the contemporary
discourse of consent with its emphasis on predetermined, predictable outcomes
and risk management. Parrhesia as an
eruption of truth means that the situation between the partners is open, no
longer predictable and that consequences cannot be known in advance. A
declaration of love or desire always carries with it great risk for both
parties.
However, clarity is essential here; parrhesia is not opposed to consent. On the contrary, at the very
fundamental level (the level of not forcing people to do things they do not
wish to) consent is presupposed by parrhesia.
Within a parrhesiastic situation the
will to dominate the other must be entirely absent for the play of risk and openness
to function, and it is only through such an interplay that a break with the
predictable, with the closed and cold logic of sexual exchange can be made,
that love and sex might reach the level of an event.
This is admittedly a somewhat vague and certainly more
difficult form of relationship to think compared to the familiarity of legal
terms that increasing guide our public and personal lives. I hold however that
it and other similar notions constitute a far better starting point for ethical
sexual relationships than the limited and tainted discourse of consent. If
there is any desire left in this world to resist the transformation of all
social life into market transactions; any desire to resist human intimacy being
subsumed under economic categories; or any imagination left to conceive of a
break with the conditions of the past, then it will involve re-thinking sexual
relations and sex education along these kind of lines.
References
Agamben,Giorgio 2011 - The Sacrament of Language (Cambridge,
Polity Press)
Doyle,Jennifer 2015 -
Campus Sex, Campus Security (Semiotext, California)
Dwyer, Susan (Ed.) 1995 - The Problem of Pornography
(Belmont, Calif.:Wadsworth Publishing Company)
Foucault,
Michel 1997 –
Ethics:Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 Vol 1 (London Penguin Books)
Foucault,Michel 2011 - The Government of Self and Others
(New York, Palgrave Macmillan)
Langton, Rae - Sexual Solipsism (2009) (Oxford University
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