American Imago

1. Preamble:

It has become habitual to think of the social as immaterial or unphysical, as something which does not enter into or physically affect the body. Despite the strong evidence of psychosomatic disorders, or the logical deductions that follow from the facts that words and images are physical entities as well as conveyors of meaning, social theory continues to think the relation between the physical and the social in terms where either the biological may (some claim) or may not determine the social, but where the social does not have material effects on the body. In other words, the only alternative to sociobiology, ¹ which misconceives and reduces the relation at issue to one of biological determination, appears to be a social without physical materiality.

The theory of social physicality I have developed ² is premised on the notion that the opposition between the social and the biological is itself misconceived to the extent that it conjures up an idea of the social as immaterial, as lacking matter and/or energy. ³ The opposition between the social and the biological was built into sociology’s foundations: Durkheim for instance, as Giddens has it, is concerned with “the specific characteristics of the class of phenomena which may be delimited as ‘social’ and thereby separated from other categories such the ‘biological’ and ‘psychological’” (Giddens 1971, 86). But while I agree that the social is specific to itself and independent of biology, and that it also exists independently of personal psychology, the social as I will define an aspect of it here (which we will call “social pressure”) is nonetheless physical. Moreover it is not that the biological determines the social. It is rather that the physicality of the social enters into [End Page 257] and even determines biology, and for that matter, the environment. It follows that human organisms will have physical differences consequent on their different “socializations.” ⁴

In this essay I will elaborate on the theory of social physicality in relation to aging. We are all familiar with the discrepancies between those who age “well” and those who do not, between an apparent retardation of aging and its untimely acceleration. Such discrepancies suggest that a social level impinges on the biological level. At the same time, the fact of aging seems to legitimate the distinction between the social and the biological for the very reason that while some of us age poorly and some well, we all ultimately age. The thing that varies (how we age) is not the same as the thing that is varied (the fact of aging). The fact of aging is presented to us as a biological fact. But my point will be that the social variations or accelerations and retardations in how we age, while biological in their effects, have to have a material existence that involves something more than somatic biology. The nature of that material existence, I will suggest here, is physical. Thus it may be that the “social” which affects the body can be understood in terms of physics (this is what social physicality is about); while the body of course belongs to biology. In other words, what I am suggesting is that we reflect on the appositeness of the distinction between the biological and the physical in rethinking an issue which otherwise remains intractable. If I am right in this approach, it would be more correct to say not that a critical dimension of the social is biological, but that it is physical, a force that interacts with and affects the biological body.

The distinction between the physical and the biological, while frequently collapsed in the humanities and social sciences, is long-standing. ⁵ But the distinction is needed in the social sciences. Apart from its use in explaining changes in the organism that are not consequent solely on biological developments, the distinction is necessary if one is to resolve a paradox: as Ingold points out, “biology” is meant to be about the increasing differentiation of forms, and how organisms grow in distinctiveness (1990, 214). I add that socialization by contrast is about how these organisms conform to common [End Page 258] modes of behavior and interaction. ⁶ If human organisms are subject to socialization, they should become more alike, and if socialization, through “social pressure,” has a physical aspect, the human beings it touches should become more physically alike. Now the people of different epochs do seem to conform to a physical visual type (the Medieval type, the modern type, and so on), and this would be something that would demand an explanation if its existence could be shown to extend beyond the eye of the artist. But the stronger point here is that any similarity between people, the very existence of types, is at odds to some degree with what makes them living beings. Increasing differentiation belongs to the living: biology is precisely a life science of distinct organisms, whereas physics is not (Montalenti 1974, 11). Differentiation does not belong to death. Death, in other words, is sameness. Death reduces all living organisms, no matter how distinctive, to a largely identical rubble. After the lapse of a little time, it is difficult and eventually impossible to identify a body: the process of decomposition is a process of homogenization of form.

If socialization is about similarity, it is, on the face of it, closer to death. But it would be too much to say, too quickly, that sharing a tendency to homogenization with death establishes that the social in one respect is a deathly force, in so far as the social is physical (and mutatis mutandis, that the nature of the physicality that affects the body externally is similarly deathly). Yet we may approach that conclusion more slowly through an argument that social pressure, by virtue of its physicality, constitutes a force that overlays and determines the extent to which we age “poorly,” a force, we may infer, which biology or life, or whatever makes the organism distinct, resists.

The first step in this argument will be a brief return to Freud’s psychophysics. While I have tried to show elsewhere that Freud provides us with some of the raw materials for understanding psycho-physicality, I want to develop those raw materials here in relation to social physicality. ⁷ In addition, psychophysics is an excellent prototype for social physics. And in arguing this here, I shall be able to draw a distinction between the phenomenon of aging (a biological fact) and the phenomenon of “being aged” (a social, physical fact). ⁸ These [End Page 259] are discussed respectively in Sections Two and Three below. This discussion leads to the issue of the relation between social science and physics (Section Four), a question made topical by Professor Sokal’s recent parodic paper at the expense of the journal Social Text. ⁹ This last section also briefly reconsiders Durkheim’s notions of “force” and “social pressure.” This essay is not primarily about Durkheim, but his ghost is hovering above it: no other sociologist has used the language of physics so freely, or come to conclusions which demand a theory of social energy.

2. Freud and Psychophysics

In Freud’s work, the terms inertia, entropy and rigidity are signposts to his notion of the psycho-physical level, and the singular nature of its materiality. It is no accident that Kathleen Woodward signposts each of these terms in her essay on Freud and aging (1991). Woodward notes first that “in The Ego and the Id, Freud explicitly argues that as we mature biologically, we deflect the death instincts away from ourselves by virtue of the very strength of our bodies—by the development of ‘the muscular apparatus.’ We are invited to wonder what can happen when the body slows down in old age and can no longer, as it were, deflect the death instincts away from itself” (49). There is a connection here, Woodward argues, with a letter of Freud’s to Lou Andreas-Salomé, in which he had said that he no longer wanted to keep going ardently enough. “The distinction is implicitly between movement and rest. In terms of aging, then, we could link the life instincts with movement, and the death instincts with rest” (49).

Now this in fact is exactly the link Freud makes. Indeed, he sees the death instinct as an urge to restore an earlier state of things and as such “the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life” (1920, 68). Thus he links life with movement, and death with lack of motion, in a mistaken application of Newton’s theory of inertia. It is mistaken because Newton’s first and second laws do not mean that in an inert state a body is necessarily still or without motion. Newton meant that a body will seek to return to the state of motion that is natural to [End Page 260] it, and that this seeking constitutes its inertia. The natural state of motion itself could vary from rapid to infinitesimal movement.

While Freud is mistaken about Newton, the mistake is productive because it bequeaths us a theory of how physical inertia is psychically constructed (even though Freud was unaware of this). ¹⁰ As I have indicated, its legacy also includes a prototype for understanding socially constructed inertia. Before elaborating on why and how this is so, let us turn to rigidity and entropy: both as we shall see are consequences of “inertia.”

Rigidity is evoked by Woodward (1991) when she notes that Freud, again in a letter to Lou Andreas, describes aging as the experience of “a crust of indifference creeping up . . . a way of beginning to grow inorganic” (48). Elsewhere, Freud is explicit, telling us that rigidity is also associated with age (1937, 242). Later analysts will take him seriously, and advise against analysis for those over forty, on the grounds that the psyche is too set in its paths. And yet, the very process by which rigidity is produced means that its strength will vary in intensity, regardless of biological age. Some may be too rigid at forty. Others may not. It remains to see why.

Psychical rigidity (Freud’s texts imply) comes about through an increase in “bound” as compared with “freely mobile” energy. If we inquire as to what freely mobile energy is, the only reply is that it is the state of energy before it is bound, and that energy has to be bound in order to learn from experience. Each experience creates a neuronal pathway, based on the memory of doing it right or wrong the first time. These pathways give us guidelines on how to respond the next time. It is the binding of energy, it seems, that gives the pathway its stability. In other words, the binding of energy and the corresponding creation of pathways are testaments to lessons. But they are also, once established, hard to give up, even when they stand in the way of new lessons, as we shall see. In infancy, the lessons which lead to pathways begin with the first hallucination.

An hallucination is the manifestation of a wish. ¹¹ It presents whatever we want as if it were here now, but the [End Page 261] hallucination’s agreeability in these respects is countermanded if we believe it to be real. We do not act, because we believe our need has been met, and yet by our inaction the very need is frustrated. To pre-empt this unpromising outcome, hallucinations are superceded by another psychical process. Freud later refers to it as the secondary process, or sometimes, simply, as the work of the ego. The ego’s work is not to dream, but to act on reality. It diverts “the excitation arising from the need” (for instance, for food) and fixes it on screaming or crying loudly for attention from another, who is able to feed one in fact (Freud 1900, 599).

But in infancy, and often in later life (depending on the wish) no action in the real world is an alternative. In which case, the only thing to do with hallucinations, whether they occur in infancy or in dreams, is to repress them. There is also a negative inducement to this repression, which Freud describes as a “quantitative build up of excitation accompanying the expectation of satisfaction.” This is true for any organism, including human organisms. An organism expecting to be fed or loved (or, one might add, flattered or given money) gears itself up, it puts all systems on go, and then when it is not satisfied, it is left with the amassed excitement and no release for it. It is profoundly frustrated, for what else is frustration other than a build up of expectant energy without an outlet. It is worse off than it was when the hallucination was first called forth.

Thus human organisms learnt that the hallucination was ultimately productive of more unpleasure than pleasure, and learning this, they repressed it. But repression always involves a “persistent expenditure of force” (Freud 1915). One does not just put the matter to one side. Keeping it to one side and outside of consciousness requires a continuous exercise of force, which disables us because the energy used is not available for other pursuits. Repression is also a restriction on future mobility. It makes us less of actors in the world than we would otherwise be, because it leaves us out of synch with the movement of the freely mobile energy into which we are born.

Overall the repression of hallucination and the related binding of energy form the first step in creating an alternative [End Page 262] psychophysical world. This has to be so: if energy bound in repression leaves people less mobile, it leaves them in a world with different energetic coordinates. The second step is the binding of energy in pathways. ¹² Not every bound pathway, every lesson of experience, requires a repression, but it does require a binding of energy. On the one hand, this binding is supremely useful in that it saves one from endlessly repeating the same mistake. And yet, it should also mean that the greater one’s experience, the more energy is bound in pathways, and the less one’s access to freely mobile energy, and hence presumably the ability to adapt. This situation would create an alternate psycho-physical world because it would lead to rigidity, a rigidity which is a response to psychical rather than genetic dictates. It would also lead to entropy, insofar as this too Freud associates with aging. He explicitly equates rigidity with “a kind of psychical entropy,” and both traits with loss of plasticity. ¹³

Why then, would anyone seek to make and inhabit this slower, repressed, entropic world? Freud’s own answer to the question, a question he phrased himself in terms of the organism’s tendency to “inertia” (misunderstood by him as the final rest of Nirvana) is that while this inert trend is the physical disposition of the organism, “biology” comes to the rescue. The organism keeps going because it is not bound only by the laws of physics. This is an unsatisfactory recourse, and is discussed below. Freud might also mention the notion of the unpleasure caused by hallucinations in this connection, and reiterate, as in fact he did, that pathways based on experience are also a considerable psychical gain. But the question about the use of the alternative psycho-physical construction invites another answer.

The answer is that this newly created psychophysical world, and this world alone, guarantees a self which sees things from its own standpoint. Or rather, it can be used to explain how a self-centered standpoint comes into existence. Moreover, it is because a new self-centered being sees things from its own standpoint that it ages, and ages poorly rather than well. The rudiments for analyzing how this self comes into being have already been outlined. It is time to elucidate them, and in [End Page 263] doing so, to develop the idea that the new psychophysical world is a slower one, which lags behind the freely mobile energy of the world we have lost.

Given how thoroughly modern physics attests to the indissoluble connections between energy distribution and space-time, then the alternative energy distribution contingent on repression and bound pathways should result in different spatio-temporal coordinates. And, indeed, time and space feature directly in hallucinatory activity and its repression. Hallucination is about instant gratification: the denial, or other means of overcoming, time and space. It is a response to the delay between the perception of a need or a wish and its fulfillment. But hallucination as we have seen only leads to more unpleasure because satisfaction is not forthcoming. It leads in this sense to pain.

Wollheim has suggested that it is the projection of pain that establishes the ego’s first concept of inside and outside. The Kleinian explanation—for it is this that Wollheim develops—of what Freud regarded as an especially primitive form of defence is that projection is an attempt at locating pain outside the self. ¹⁴ In projecting its pain outside itself, in establishing an “outside,” the infant is also establishing a spatial sense. However, it can only do this if it has a fixed point to project from. How this fixed point originates has not really been addressed in the psychoanalytic literature. But by my argument, a fixed point has to be born of the repression of the first hallucination, precisely because this repression binds energy by turning it back against other psychical activity. Indeed I would submit that primal repression and the formation of a fixed point, and with it the nascent ego, are the same thing. There are other reasons for thinking this is so.

When the organism decides to repress an hallucination, to follow in future one pathway rather than another, it is per force deciding to remember. Its memory, the condition of its having a sense of its own history, begins with that first fixed point. The fixed point henceforward functions both as a condition of the sense of history, and because of its fixity, a sense of causality, or time in the sense of how one thing comes before and leads to another. Paradoxically, while repression keeps something in place and out of the time of freely mobile [End Page 264] energy, it simultaneously creates a sense of time geared to the subject’s own standpoint. ¹⁵ It is thus the factor that sets the organism’s sense of direction (from its own standpoint) through time (or to say the same thing, its projection of itself in space). Without a fixed point, there can be no direction. A little reflection makes this plain. To go somewhere, anywhere, there must be a point of departure, as well as a destination. Durkheim (1995) himself said exactly this, when arguing that the social was the origin for the apparently pre-given Kantian categories of space and time (10). The account I am giving here may explain how those same categories are matched or internalized psychologically.

After establishing that first fixed point, a person will continue to repress and to erect bound pathways to deal with experience. But these subsequent repressions and pathways, as should now be plain, emanate from a fixed point which makes a person central to himself, or herself. It remains to see why it is that seeing the world from one’s own standpoint, from the standpoint of the ego, intensifies the aging process (and ultimately the loss of form, which means that whatever form is, it is not the same as the ego). ¹⁶ I will introduce the discussion here by noting first that Freud associated anxiety with the death drive. And the death drive, as we have seen, is meant to be at work in the aging process. Yet Freud also, well before he posited the death drive, associated anxiety with a threat to the bound pathways which, by this analysis, constitute the self. It is the threat to the self involved in overturning these pathways, even when overturning them is beneficial, which causes stress.

The stress factor is plain enough in an example Freud provides of how the reluctance to enter upon a new pathway is strengthened by anxiety. He tells a story of how he installed a telephone to cope with emergencies. Then, “under the impact of a great anxiety,” he forgot about the telephone and consequently did a great deal of needless scurrying. He forgot because the anxiety caused him to fall back on the familiar pathways he used to cope with emergencies, even though he had deliberately outmoded them (1950, 357).

Anxiety is possibly the most complicated affect in psychological and physiological theory (Cannon 1922, passim). It is meant to be the signal for when one’s actual bodily survival is [End Page 265] at stake. In the psychoanalytic canon anxiety also signals jeopardized vanity (it is a response to humiliation or the fear of humiliation), and as we have just seen, it also results from jeopardized familiarity. Anxiety, it would follow, is the ego’s response to anything that threatens its established existence. This means its biological life; but it also means its established social life, the world it knows, and the world in which it would like to be central, and where it is at least more centrally located than it may become in the world it knows not. In other words, from the foregoing analysis, we should feel anxiety not only when we doubt that we will go on living, but when we doubt or know that we will cease to live in the same way. It is felt when the self that has been lovingly crafted, the known self, is threatened with change. Of course reasoning this way one must conclude that the ego and the death drive are intrinsically related. This idea is resisted in the psychoanalytic literature, where the ego is meant to be on the side of the life drive, if not equivalent to it. ¹⁷ But provided we allow there is more to us than the collection of fixed points and pathways that constitute the ego, then the evident alliance between the ego and the drive towards death comes into focus. The argument brooks no other conclusion: the more we see things from our own fixed point, the stronger the ego. But the more we do this, the more sedimented our pathways become. The more sedimented they become, the less freely mobile energy we have, thus the more we age, and the closer we come to death. ¹⁸ Hence the “inorganic crust” Freud felt growing about him as he aged. Hence too “psychical entropy” and inertia.

From this it should follow that an organism need not be subject to inertia and rigidity, to the crust of age, if it managed to retain its access to the freely mobile energy that was so abundant in its youth. One can resist psychically by keeping access to freely mobile energy, and this can be done (depending on class position) by any process from physical exercise to meditation, to viewing an opera or play, all processes which cathect to that refreshing consciousness which is free of the self. Again, Freud of course does not put the matter this way. What he does is to doubt the inevitability of aging as a biological process, as Woodward notes, noting too that this makes no sense (Woodward 1991, 46). Freud’s arguments are [End Page 266] indeed not very sensible on the face of it. He records how senescence can be postponed or dispensed with altogether in certain animalculae. “If two of the animalculae, at the same moment before they show signs of senescence, are able to coalesce with each other, that is to ‘conjugate’ (soon after which they once more separate), they are saved from growing old and become ‘rejuvenated’” (Freud 1920, 48). What is of interest in these animalculae is that their moment of coalescence involves merging with another. An organism that merges with another necessarily breaks down its own boundaries, or crust perhaps, as it does so. How could this come about at the human level, and what would be at stake if it did? In general, Freud’s appeals to biology are a problem. I indicated above that while Freud’s model can be adapted to explain inertia intrapsychically, it leaves the problem of how we move at all, of how we overcome inertia as “a problem for biology.” That is to say, after Freud explained the tendency to psychical inertia in the terms discussed here, he explained it too well. When it came to accounting for tendencies that ran contrary to this inertia, he postulated that biology would one day fill the lacunae. But rather than invoking a nebulous biology, especially when it is meant to counter a physical trend, we might be better placed to answer questions about how organisms move and live despite their trend to inertia, and how they break down their “crusts” through interaction with others, by stepping outside the one-body psychology in which Freud framed his psychophysical explanations, and into territory where energy is understood in social terms. This will account for how it is that another can break down the “crust.” It will also account for the phenomenon of “being aged.”

3) Social Inertia or the Phenomenon of “Being Aged”

So far we have a theory of aging “from the inside.” The problem with it is that it is unable as it stands to explain the all too evident exceptions. There are the self-centered people who gleam and flourish in middle-age. By the same token, there is that most generous of creatures, Murdoch’s “mother of a very large family” whose goodness lies in her utter lack of [End Page 267] selfishness, and who is often worn before her time (Murdoch 1967). To account for the overwhelming number of exceptions, the social ramifications of this theory need to be developed. This development is also necessary to provide an alternative to Freud’s biological fallback in overcoming inertia.

In fact the inadequacy of that biological fallback might be the best place to begin. It is a fallback that presupposes that biology is in actuality a domain entirely apart from physics, when it is not. The soma too is subject to laws of physics, to entropy and dissolution, to the gradual wear and tear of aging which can be explained so well by an extension of Freud’s psychophysics. Nonetheless, there must be, as Freud inferred, some counter-force which combats the effects of inertia, even for only three score years and ten. This counter-force, I surmise, can either be intrinsic to the organism, a given supply of energy which runs out over time, or it can be energy from without, from beyond the fixed lines and confines the organism erects in order to experience itself as separate, a confinement which robs it of its real distinctness. I do not know if the organism is born with its “own” supply of energy, although it is evidently born with access to such a supply: “freely mobile energy” after all is the material used in the construction of bound pathways and fixed points. Leaving that to one side: there is no doubt that growth is enhanced from without by the care and nurturance of others.

The living attention of another is an excellent candidate for the supply of energy which is drawn on in combating inertia. Living attention, as I have argued, is energy (Brennan 1992, 83ff). This attentive energy facilitates; it enables one both to divert energy along the pathways that construct a self-concept, and to have energy available with which to grow, and later, not to age. At any level of life attention is an expansive energy. But if energy from another can enhance, it can also diminish. To see why, let us begin again with rigidity. This time however we will begin with feminine rigidity. Rigidity, wrote Freud, marks femininity as well as age, and the understanding of feminine rigidity provides a bridge between the one-body psychology of aging and the social physicality of being aged. It does this in so far as feminine rigidity can only be explained [End Page 268] (by my account) via some consideration of how the negative affects of the other, not the self, intensify rigidity. ¹⁹

Freud explains feminine rigidity as a convoluted psychical response to the rigors of the transition to femininity from masculinity. But the rigidity of femininity can also be explained by the notion that the sedimentation of fixed points and pathways is somehow intensified. This intensification can be seen as an overlay, a projection by the masculine other of all the rigidity he wants to dispose of in himself (or herself) (Brennan 1992, 83ff). He or she wants to dispose of it, but does not in doing so wish to lose the fixed point that is the core of his or her separate identity. A person can have his cake and eat it too if another becomes that point of fixity for him, and in doing so carries the rigidity to which fixity leads. This is what the feminine party does for the masculine, and in doing it, directs her attentive energy towards that masculine other. The masculine party benefits then in two ways: he is able to dispose of fixity by projecting it outwards, a process that is otherwise known as projecting the death drive externally; at the same time he receives a facilitating, attentive energy from the party he restricts while guaranteeing his own identity (ibid.). This facilitating energy can be given by any one subject, of either sex, to any other. It is the means whereby a refreshing consciousness comes into being.

All this happens at an interpersonal level. ²⁰ It is an interaction that works well enough for explaining how an older man might “break down his crust” through the agency of a younger woman, an interaction which involves femininity as well as age. ²¹ This view of a particular interaction might also help explain the discrepancy in accounts of whether social interaction does or does not benefit health and forestall aging (Schulz-Aellen 1997). ²² But there are other levels, more overtly social levels, which come into this explanation. The first is the level of the image. The second is the level of social inertia. Both will bear directly on an aspect of the social that can be called “social pressure.” Taking these in turn:

The image of age in this culture is a powerful force in itself, one which exists and which is conveyed independently of particular interpersonal encounters. The image mainly involves [End Page 269] dictates about what the not-young are no longer capable of doing or being. Notions of this capacity are of course skewed in favor of men, perhaps because women of a certain age no longer put out the same supply of attentive energy; women too, as they age, increase the fixed points and pathways that extend the ego’s compass. But while masculine beings of either sex might stave off aging by an unconscious parasitical process, men and women alike are subject to the greater cruelty, to the pervading negative images of incapacity, enforced economically by imperatives ranging from compulsory retirement to a not-so-tactful exemption from service. Whether the not-young are or are not capable, they are certainly going to be less capable after receiving an image telling them that this is the case. It is an image which increases anxiety at the most basic level of bodily survival, and because of this, it actually contributes to incapacity. For anxiety as we have seen abets forgetfulness. The greater the anxiety, the less the capacity to form and follow new pathways. The greater the forgetfulness, the more likely one is to appear fundamentally old, even senile. ²³

The power of the image is not independent of energy; it is not immaterial. When the masculine party projects that in himself which is rigid and entropic, by definition he projects that which is anxiety-ridden and confusing, the excess of emotions that interfere with his capability. He projects them into another, who then carries these affects for him, and as he does so he conveys a negative image of the feminine party’s capacity. Indeed the image he gives cannot be separated from the affects in its train. But the process of “being aged” is not something that happens in all dyadic relations: it is not—at least in the main—something the child projects onto the parent. The source of the negative image of aging is rather a plural event, a compound of images scattered throughout the culture. But just as the negative image intensifies rigidity in femininity, so it does in aging; it is why we can speak of “being aged,” in that the recipient of the image is passive. Those who receive the image are not only dealing with the sedimentation and fixity engendered by their own points and pathways; they are also, like the feminine beings, dealing with the refuse [End Page 270] engendered by the striving of others, with an overlay formed out of projected rigidity and entropy.

But where, in the case of those who are aged, does this refuse come from? I may have been overly hasty in concluding that “being aged” is not produced by a projection in a dyadic relation, as with the projection of his anxiety and aggression by the masculine party into the feminine. Adolescence is precisely a time of denigrating the capabilities of parents, and of fierce insistence that the preceding generation is passé and limited accordingly. And yet, for all its fierceness, there is something about the adolescent declamatory mode that lacks real force, in the physical sense in which I use that term. That declamatory mode has more sound than bite, and more the sense of a resistance to something that was or is projected onto it. There is also the plain empirical fact that the aging of the preceding generation is out of synch, as a rule, with the onslaught of adolescence. ²⁴ While I am qualifying claims about dyadic aging, it may be time to add that in earlier work, I failed to stress the way in which plural social events also contribute to feminine rigidity. There is of course no doubt that the compound of negative images of the feminine diminishes the capacity of any being who is styled feminine, insofar as the image is not fully resisted (and resistance expends its own energy). Having said that, I see no reason to retract the broader claim that feminization is primarily a projection from a masculine other, a masculine other who of course may be of either sex.

But the origin of the refuse projected in “being aged” remains to be explained. This brings us to social inertia. It cannot be fully distinguished from the social level of the image, because the image is an energetic event. The work of David Bohm demonstrates that this is so not only on the basis of a deduction from psychoanalytic material. Bohm’s research on holographic phenomena shows how the image and the energy are inseparable. In a hologram, the whole is implicated or enfolded in each part. Even the smallest particle will contain the space-time image of a given whole (Pribram 1987, 367). Moreover, the very prevalence of images in modernity, the fact that late Western culture is image-ridden, may owe [End Page 271] something to the trend to objectification that is part of social inertia. We will return to the connection between the image and social inertia after exploring objectification. This exploration should lead to the origin of the refuse projected in being aged and to a source of the false individuality objectification produces (c.f. Bauman 1993, 197–199).

Objectification, in the most literal sense, involves making something or someone into an object. Objectification, by this account, is tied to social inertia because inertia is tied to the proliferation of objects. Objects in the form of commodities have proliferated over the past three centuries, following the shift to a mode of production which fosters objectification in the form of commodification (although the objectification of this epoch extends beyond commodification: to give people a fixed image of who and what they are is of course to objectify them). We may speak of social inertia because the construction of “fixed points” and pathways that produce psychical inertia are paralleled in the social by the construction of objects, as commodities or artefacts which bind the energy of nature in the same way that freely mobile energy is bound psychically. I have tried to show this at length elsewhere (Brennan 1993), and here am including only the briefest of summaries of that argument, in order to be able to extend it. But to make the point a little clearer, it is this: when energy is bound in the form of an object, meaning a commodity that cannot reproduce itself, it is unable to re-enter the generative cycles of nature. It is out of time with those cycles, just as bound energy constitutes a different time, a time at odds with the freely mobile energy into which the subject is born. The new social realm, through its proliferation of commodities, creates entropy, rigidity and an inertia which slows the world down. It is critical to remember here that in discussing the psyche, we were speaking of a constructed inertia rather than the tendency to the natural state of rest that constitutes the inertia of Newtonian physics. Just as the constructed inertia of the psyche leads to a slowing down of the organism, in that more energy is bound in fixed points and pathways, so can the same process be observed in the social. When commodities are constructed as objects or artefacts which cannot reproduce [End Page 272] themselves, they constitute an accumulation of fixed points which are inert, in the sense of unmoved, and thus slower relative to the generative cycles of nature. They can not re-enter natural reproduction, unless they are biodegradable, and even then they take much longer to “catch up.” These commodities are also constructed in relations of production which demand new and extensive pathways of acquisition: means of transport and communication to bring the raw materials of production and the labor that transforms them to increasingly centralized points of construction (cities). These pathways parallel those of the psyche to an extent. They are rigid because the more they are used, the more they are depended upon: take away the roadways and the cars and you incapacitate the average citizen. But there is a difference between the rigid pathways and inert points of the social, and those of the psyche: the former are spatial pathways; those of the psyche are historical, in that they are based on memory. In the social, the spatial pathways embody the history of the region, but only to the extent that they are not consumed in the construction of new spatial pathways of extended acquisition. There are few Italies, where the Via Appia has been the main pathway from Rome to Naples for nearly three thousand years.

While the new pathways appear to speed things up (as production, consumption and geographical mobility geared to both gets faster and faster) they actually slow things down because they retard the pace at which nature overall reproduces itself. However the idea that the world is getting slower (and perhaps like the rigid psyche less intelligent) is profoundly counter-intuitive when everything appears to be daily speedier. This is so much the case that we need to address what the new speed is composed of. By this account, the new speed is written out of the accumulation of fixed points or objects: these constitute a sequence that registers as a temporal sense. They do so in this way. As with the psyche, each fixed point that needs to be formed involves an event and causality. Fixity is both a response to a cause and gives rise to a causal sense, and a sense of direction. We are able to think in terms of A leading to B if and only if the position of A is secure. But the more secure it is, and the more fixed points we have established, the [End Page 273] stronger the sense of causality. Moreover without the fixed points there would be nothing that constituted the direction necessary to the passing of time, that is to say, linear time as we know it. Accordingly the sense of the passing of linear time increases as fixed points and pathways increase. ²⁵

4) Social Inertia: Physics and Sociology

The next question obviously should concern the energetic effects on space-time of this new extrusion, this constructed inertia, onto the earth, if not the cosmos. But at this point it becomes difficult to pursue this enquiry further, because the questions it gives rise to have as yet no analogue in the armory of physics. Bohm pointed out that “conceptualizations in physics had for centuries been based on the use of lenses which objectify (indeed the lenses of telescopes and microscopes are called objectives). Lenses make objects, particles.” ²⁶ But what if the objects themselves change the physical continuum, so that the physicist who perceives in terms of objects is perceiving the present social reality correctly, while remaining oblivious to its historical contingency? If the physical reality becomes more objective, by virtue of becoming detached from the “implicate order” (Bohm’s term for the intricate unity of thought and matter) it would appear that sight is the sense most involved in the shift to social objectivism: sight more than any other sense perceives in terms of objects, and a proliferation of objects accordingly feeds the culture of images.

This returns us to the question of the refuse to which social inertia gives rise. Simply put, there should be refuse from the proliferation of objects precisely because these are excerpted from the natural world and the transformations they undergo as they become commodities do not use all that is excerpted; there is a necessary debris. Just as its bound energy weighs heavily on the psyche, so too must socially constructed fixities be felt as a pressure, and not just in the sense that they are pollutants. Their very existence means there is less that is living in the atmosphere. This new dead [End Page 274] weight must be felt as a pressure for the reason that any presence which cannot escape, which is confined by its inability to re-enter the flow, is felt as a pressure. Pressure is where a force builds up because it is has no discharge. If the organism is sensitive to the presence of living things, so too must it have a response to non-living fixities. And if the death drive directed from one subject to another ages them, either because its burden is accepted or because the resistance to it also extracts a toll, then it is as well to remember here that the death drive by this argument is nothing more than the accumulation of fixed points and sedimented pathways: it is the pressure of bound energy. The energy bound in socially constructed fixities should also generate a death drive. Obviously it is not directed against specific subjects (unless there is some law whereby the more vibrant exercise a fatal attraction for the relatively mortified). But the refuse of social inertia should, by this logic, nonetheless accelerate the process of being aged. Not that the refuse which ages is distributed fairly, no more than are the purchased forms of resistance to it (everything from a massage to a sunny retirement, which loosen and lighten up the old, fixed points). The point rather is that pressure seeks release from its containment. While objects lose the forms that connected them with the flow of life as their energy is bound, that bound energy itself will nonetheless be drawn to the living, and seek entry there by whatever door is open.

All this, of course, is completely hypothetical, and as I mentioned above, any concretization is handicapped by the utter lack of relevant enquiries in the physical and social sciences alike. But I would like to pursue this hypothetical direction a little further before reining it in. The reason is that this direction is yielding a concept of social pressure (in the most literal sense of pressure) which is at least consistent with the connection made by various social theorists, most notably Max Weber, Arendt and Donzelot, between the rise of the social and industrialization. The concept of social pressure I am drawing out means something more than “social pressure” in the traditional sense, but is compatible with it. By my reasoning so far, the extent to which a literal social pressure is [End Page 275] produced, and with it the relative force of social inertia, will vary according to the balance between technology and nature in any given territory. Not for nothing, then, is the social described as a phenomenon born of the last three centuries (Arendt 1958, 6, 27), for this is the period over which the pressure increases, the pressure in the most literal sense of that word.

As the last paragraph implies, we can now give a precise content to the “social” referred to by Arendt and Donzelot, seeing it as a force and a pressure with definite determinants. The most social of environments, the one in which the social matters most, is the one with the most intense concentration of history and technology, and with the least geographical relief in the form of living things and free space, in which maximum pressure is generated in consequence. The rise and spread of this social is the most significant object for study by sociology, and it can never be studied independently of the territories it extrudes upon, like an unavoidable gaseous emission.

But the study is handicapped because fixities are not confined in their effects to living things. They spill over too into the very prose and conceptual array of the social science that is meant to analyze them. Fixity, in the form of the desire for disciplinary security, makes one less likely to question the divorce of physical matter and social ideas. Sociology is handicapped by that divorce, as it is handicapped by fixity in other, related, ways. The desire for fixity is also evident in an insistence that sociology should be about the “industrial,” “historical,” and “Western,” especially when the categories are taken for granted, and their origin not borne in mind. That is to say, categories fix the discipline’s identity. At the same time as this identification of the discipline’s appropriate territory has the appeal of a partial truth, it can partake of the imperial process it should be analysing, ²⁷ a process which is about fixing territories in a way that pre-empts much creativity, in nature and thought. The uncritical acceptance of a tendency to taxonomy without a dynamic analysis of the processes which produce those taxonomies unwittingly partakes of the dynamics that give rise to the social as social pressure: the social insofar as it is a physical force in itself. The point here about the neglect of the dynamics underlying the rise of the social is [End Page 276] usually made, or at least a comparable point is made, in relation to the economic dynamics underpinning the shifts in social organization over the past three centuries. But the observation can be extended. To refuse to investigate the condition of a social shift, whether it is the economic changes wrought by capitalization, or the social pressure that accompanies them, is to be caught within the terms of the very phenomena that should be questioned. By this point I do not mean that the only good sociology is Marxist sociology. Rather, it becomes possible to grasp why the other great sociologists apart from Marx (one thinks of Weber and Durkheim) grasped something specifically “social” even as they diverged from Marx.

Strikingly, Durkheim was writing at the tail-end of the time where energy was still a palpable social fact, and when the social pressure to ignore it was not as strong as it was to become. Durkheim, in proposing that religious force was the progenitor of the notion of force in general, takes specific issue with Comte (Durkheim 1995, 292). Comte thought that “because of its mystical origins, the idea of force was fated to disappear from science, and he denied it any objective meaning [valeur]” (Durkheim 1995, 206; 1968, 292). ²⁸ Comte of course was wrong, and for Durkheim, he was not only wrong about the future direction of science. Comte also misunderstood, as do most sociologists, that “religious forces are real.” While Durkheim insisted on this reality, a reality which for him lay in the ultimately social origin of religious forces and the conscience collective, I submit that there is a definite ambiguity in Durkheim’s use of the term energy in particular (as well as force and pressure), an ambiguity that suggests that these terms capture a physical reality, even though this reality can not be localized in physical sensation.

When a force or a property seems to us to be an integral part, a constituent element, of whatever it inhabits, we do not easily imagine it as capable of detaching itself and going elsewhere. A body is defined by its mass and atomic composition; we do not imagine either that it can pass on any of these distinguishing properties by mere contact. On the other hand, if the [End Page 277] force is one that has entered the body from outside, the idea that it should be able to escape from that body is in no way unimaginable, for nothing attaches it there. Thus, the heat or electricity that any object has received from outside can be transmitted to the surrounding milieu, and the mind readily accepts the possibility of that transmission. If religious forces are generally conceived of as external to the beings in which they reside, then there is no surprise in the extreme ease with which religious forces radiate and diffuse. This is precisely what the theory I have put forward implies.

(Durkheim 1995, 326–327) ²⁹

Now I do not wish to exaggerate Durkheim’s physicalism, or imply that he was saying much the same as I am claiming here. Even when speaking in terms such as “the radiation of mental energy” (1995, 210) and the power it gives to “social pressure,” (211) Durkheim is at pains to specify that its workings are interior: we respond because an idea generates a psychic energy within us, not because psychic energy generates an idea. ³⁰ It is a form of explanation in which something on the outside resonates with something on the inside. And yet, as Durkheim in the same work is subsequently sceptical of explanations along associationist lines (1995, 326), the nature of the resonance between outside and interior remains open. In addition, one should consider that as early as Suicide he writes of the individual as a carrier of social energies. “There is . . . for each people a collecive force of a definite amount of energy, impelling men to self-destruction. The victim’s acts which at first seem to express only his personal temperament are really the supplement and prolongation of a social condition which they express externally” (Durkheim 1951, 299). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is replete with similar references, to how individuals are the bearers of energies which are in fact social forces (whether malign or beneficient). Durkheim writes, for instance, of how when “individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness” (1995, 217). He is insistent that energy is the real object of the earliest totemic cults (1995, 191) as well as more evolved and [End Page 278] more social religious forces, although he hedges his bets when it comes to conceptualizing the unity of physical and moral forces: “Modern science also tends more and more to allow that the duality of man and nature does not preclude their unity, and that, while distinct, physical forces and moral ones are closely akin. We certainly have a different idea of this unity than the primitive’s, but beneath the different symbols, the fact affirmed is the same for both” (1995, 224 n34). The fact affirmed is, incidentally, the idea of “the life-principles of things” (224).

It is well-known that Durkheim insists on how the social cement is stronger with the rise of the new industrial division of labour and “organic solidarity,” although the hypostasization of the social in the form of religious force is not as palpably strong as it was in previous centuries. It has declined as a force in most European countries, and although it appears to be increasing in strength in the United States in terms of a belief in an “afterlife,” the force of organized religion gauged in terms of church and synagogue attendance is less than it was (Greeley 1997). If Durkheim is right that religion is a purely social force, generated by the social body whose moral authority it hypostasizes, then religion should be an even stronger force in a more developed social environment. However, if I am right, and social pressure is a physically tangible force escalating with industrialization, then we are in a position to buttress another of Durkheim’s remarkable arguments, related by him to the force of religion, that “it is far from true that the more individualized we are, the more personal we are” (1995, 274). He is making the point that our social being is inseparable from our individual being, and for this reason it may not have anything individual about it.

Our social being, by my account, involves some loss of personal distinctness or form. In more detail, I said at the outset that there seems to be an alliance between the social and death, insofar as both work against the differentiation of organisms and towards an homogenization of their forms. The issues here will be plainer if we pause to consider a question that has received insufficient attention, but which necessarily comes to the fore when any similarity between social pressure [End Page 279] and the force of death is pointed out. The question is, Does the similar homogenizing action of social pressure and death mean that both forces are in essence the same? If they are the same force, it follows that there is only a difference of degree between the way social pressure homogenizes and the way death has the same effect. In support of this idea, we may consider that “being aged” is in part the result of the wearing away of social pressure, and the end result of being aged is death. Against the idea, we have to note that of course aging also occurs in isolation, away from even the most gentle of social pressures or minimal of social interactions, that it is scarcely historically specific, and moreover, evidently, that aging is not confined to human organisms. Hence the distinction I drew earlier between being aged and aging. Rather than say that social pressure and death are variations in degree of the same thing, it would be simpler to say the same force underlies both of them. This force is constructed inertia, consequent on the binding of energy in fixed points. Alternatively, it is possible to argue that this constructed inertia is tantamount to the death drive, in which case social pressure is more or less an offshoot, a byplay of the force of death. ³¹

Turning now to the issue of personal form or distinctness: this can be lost through the wearing away effected by fixity, in that the binding of energy that produces fixity tends to death, the great homogenizer. Distinctness can also be lost by the power of the image, particularly the mimetic image. I noted in passing that, at a superficial level, people do seem to conform to types. Here, we can add that the mimetic tendency of human beings makes them less differentiated. It also makes them more mediocre, precisely because it rules out the exceptionality that comes with distinctness (hence the term distinctiveness): for my purposes in this paper, it is worth highlighting this finding that mimesis is not always an evolutionary plus, not something that necessarily aids the living to live at their best, or something that enhances the preservation of species. ³² This is true of all species, not only homo sapiens. The thing here is that while social pressure evidently does not cause mimesis, mimesis is certainly at work in social pressure, ³³ insofar as social pressure (in the more traditional sense, which we are [End Page 280] about to see is compatible with the definition I am proffering) involves conformity to images. As we saw at the outset, the organism is most evolved, and most a part of the living, the more distinctive it is.

But what then is the connection between the mimetic wearing down of distinctness, and the wearing down accomplished by death? Or, to say the same thing, what is the connection between social pressure as I have defined it: namely, as the refuse of constructed fixities, and the traditional understanding of social pressure? The tentative answer to this, an answer hinted at in my brief reference to Bohm earlier, begins with the notion that the image itself is a key carrier or vehicle of the force of fixity. The power of images in a given culture, the force of objectification in that culture, is, I suggested, a consequence of the refuse generated by the binding of energy in fixities (and commodification necessarily increases this refuse). Mimesis by definition is image-dependent: it means miming the other’s image. We would have the link between the way the force of death, and social pressure in both senses, alike wear down distinctness, and the way in which mimesis does the same thing, if mimetic tendencies are exacerbated by the prevalence of images, as the carriers of fixity, in a given culture. None of this is to say that mimesis is born with commodification, which evidently it long predates. ³⁴ But it is to say that, as with the drive towards death, mimesis is increased by social pressure. And if this is right, then it is clear why, in the era of individualism, the mimetic behavior of individuals striving to “be individual” is ever less personal or distinct. It is also true that persons will be less distinct the greater the social pressure in any environment (naturally including environments in which the prevailing ideology is not at all individualist), simply because the greater the social pressure in my sense, the greater the fixities which the social encapsulates.

It is these fixities, as I have tried to show, that lead to death. But in reiterating that point here I should also reiterate that fixity has always to be understood in physical terms. Otherwise the idea that the “postmodern” social is “fixed” is evidently absurd: it is, as we are told often, endlessly dislocating [End Page 281] and displacing, with an enormous capacity for unfixing that which is familiar (Jameson 1991, Baumant 1993). But even the most rapid of displacements can still generate a physical influx of fixity, an increase in technological as well as psychical instances where energy is bound, and incapable of re-entering the flow of life. It is at this energetic level that the social is deadening, and it is the grinding down by bound energy, whether it is within or without, that leads to homogenization and a loss of form.

But as we have seen, Durkheim himself remained on the border of proffering an energetic explanation, and taking his distance from it, as social science has done since. ³⁵ If social science has backed off from physicality, physics has fared no better when it comes to social explanation. Recently, a physicist scored rather well in his duel with “the poststructuralists” when he published a kind of “sociology of relativity.” The interest of Professor Sokal’s article was that it demonstrated how far one can go with a string of problematizing, complicating, and critiquing adjectives, with no content whatsoever. Its downside was that it took for granted that any sociology of physics was by definition absurd, and this despite other findings of hard science, to the effect that all social facts have their material dimension (Searle 1992). The apparent acceptance of an immaterial social by some physicists leads to a climate in which the physics needed to extend the discussion in this article are not available. Admittedly, it is not an easy discussion to extend. The failure to discover the effects of CFCs for so long is an excellent illustration of how hard it is to couch physical experimentation in ways in which low-grade effects can be isolated. Something far more complex, such as the cumulative effects on persons of manifold energetic additions to their environment, would be very difficult to gauge. Of even greater difficulty is the notion of a sum total of affects operating as “social pressure” in a given environment. But the difficulties should not be confused with the notion that the effects are nonexistent. Were more physicists to address the systematic questions concerning the nature of the changes wrought in the environment by social pressure, we might be better placed to know if these thoughts about social pressure, [End Page 282] the social as a physical force in itself, are more than mere speculations, and whether the social is in fact something that weighs one down more in some environments than others. But this presupposes we can think clearly about these issues, when the force of social pressure might stop us from thinking much at all outside of the knowledge pathways that have been rigidly laid down.

As with the overlay in the case of the ego, the overlay that sediments and rigidifies, that prevents one seeing clearly and hearing distinctly, social pressure will also impair the capacity to take on board fresh ideas and the new energy that accompanies them. This may be why new ideas are more likely to visit the traveller, whose movemment perturbs the established pathways which otherwise guide and limit understanding. This may be why on the coast of the unspoilt sea, or in the Highlands, a philosopher and an anthropologist found eyesight improving, and the reception of fresh ideas more free, for no other reason than that the social weighs less heavily there: ³⁶ there is less of the pressure whose intensity will vary according to the proliferation of fixed points in a given locale, and thus more room to think. Those of us who remain in cities, and the universities within them, look elsewhere for that release, to the interactions which facilitate ideas, as well as fix things in place.