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A major problem with the solidification of pleasure is that it becomes ‘visible’ as an object for and of knowledge. Pleasure is recognized in its solid form, and any pleasure that remains in the realm of fluidic or unspeakable (unable to be encompassed by language rather than profane), with irrationality (non-language) could be deemed deviant pleasure, or at the least, incomplete or infantile pleasure. Subjectivity, which embraces solid pleasure, recognizes pleasure among other subjectivities as ‘same’. Pleasure here conforms to an organism or object divisible from all others and hence reducible to a function, just as an organ is a function, in biological discourse. So human pleasure is created as a unified affect, brought about by unified, normal sensation/perception. Even solid pleasure considered ‘perverse’ in a normalizing culture is nameable as such. This deviant pleasure deviates only through act or object, not through an inability to articulate or even ‘see’ its aim, normal or perverse. It is seen as finished, ‘I have pleasure’, rather than a process of becoming, achieving or exceeding which need not end in a solid product. [51] Through this equation of same-result pleasure versus perversion, subjectivity risks the same fate of being ‘deviated’. Felix Guattari weighs up the dilemma; “We are faced with an important ethical choice: either we objectify, reify, ‘scientif-ize’ subjectivity, or, on the contrary, we try to grasp it in the dimension of its processual creativity.” [52] This could be equivalent to a measuring of an intensity rather than locating the result of the term pleasure within a subject. Pleasure can be the catalyst of the ‘becoming-intense’ of subjectivity. The less language is given to the articulation of a communal pleasure, the less equivalent narrative is built into its experiencing, and the more the processual and the creative aspects Guattari mentioned will flourish. However, even then, our desire to ‘grasp it in the dimension’ may be fruitless and pleasurably so; why does pleasure need to be grasped for analysis? [53] To grasp pleasure still allows it to be ‘visible’. If it is conceptualized in its fluid state, allowing it to wash over us and to try, not to grasp, but to become wet from it, is ambitious.

What result is hoped for by attempting to make something visual, especially an experience or intensity rather than an object? Any desire to make visual and solid the idea of pleasure seems deeply embedded in the equation in psychiatry of sensation + perception = affect. Affect, in medical discourse on pleasure, is a result, a capital object, which can be rewarded or punished, beneficent or detrimental, sanctioned or prohibited. The problem, especially in biological discourse, is how to re-cognize it. Recognition indicates repetition, repetition in science representing the extrication of the subject from a theory and placing it in the realm of independent objectivity. Biological sciences phantasize re-presentation of the same indicates an absolute or a truth outside subjectivity. Such an objective phantasy seems a little bizarre when it is continuously turning in on the subject (or the body of the subject as object) in which it seeks to find truth. Because there are available so many scientific texts on pleasure, both in the empirical (biological) and the human (psychiatric) sciences I can only presume there is a phantasy of ‘capturing’ pleasure as a unified, repetitious, solid truth which is constant in all subjects. This conforms to the aim of both science and phallologocentric culture to access and study objects rather than non-re-presentable processes, to theorize in molar rather than molecular terms. [54] The problem for science is how to recognize pleasure. How to see it. And inevitably how to grasp and manipulate it. [55]

The visual metaphor has, in the past few decades, come under severe attack in cultural theory. It is still, however, seen as one of the most reliable means of identification and excavation of the human body in biological science. The subject is left for the analysts while the sciences dismember its interior to invest each organ, each cell, and each molecule with a name and an image (whether the image is literal or symbolic, such as that of molecules or synaptic trails). As Rosi Braidotti puts forth: “The central point of concern for me remains that modern science is the triumph of the scopic drive as a gesture of epistemological domination and control: to make visible the invisible, to visualize the secrets of nature.” [56] Science does not always make nature’s secrets visual, but it certainly makes them visualizable in terms of allowing them to be most easily comprehended, within dominant systems of visuality and solidity. Braidotti’s concern mirrors the certain paranoia encouraged by the visualization of everything and this activity suggests overtones of conspiratorial domination evident from the largest area to the smallest point. The idea there are secrets to be discovered returns us to a scientific belief in a natural and pre-discursive essence, unthinkable in a focus on the temporality of all things where continual transformation refutes the suggestion an object’s secrets are constant and hence available for analysis. Foucault speaks of the power of the threat of being potentially visual in his work on the panopticon, where the subject is transformed into something to be studied and known only by those who may or may not watch, “he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.” [57] Donna Haraway too, in her anxiety about the all-seeing satellite eye expresses a similar concern. [58]   Luce Irigaray’s conjoining of the scientific desire for visualization as a means towards knowledge, and the desperate attempt by many discursive practices to grasp or identify ‘women’s pleasure’ is an ideal area for discussion at this point. Irigaray uses the metaphor of the medical implement designed to reveal the visuality of women’s sex, the speculum, in order to elucidate the failure of science to ‘see’ women’s bodies without the preordained desire to visualize them as comparative to, (and hence terminally other to) the isomorphic model of the male body, specifically in reference to the penis; the solid, the easily visible sex. The desire to see, solidify and know by the visual is a desire embedded in a system of language designed for the enunciation of the primary sex of the male. Language, solidity, visibility already and always pre-supposes an ease with which all objects may be ontologically grasped (named, analyzed, given a function in reference to the scientific aim) in this manner and with these codes. Language does not make or compare women’s bodies and pleasure with the masculine per se. It simply cannot speak outside of masculinity. The concept of two sexes is a phantasy of our culture where only one sex and everything else exists in terms of language and the means by which biology is spoken (solids, visibility, singularity).  Irigaray writes in Speculum Of The Other Woman,

In fact of course, these terms cannot fittingly be designated by the number ‘two’ and the adjective ‘different’, if only because they are not susceptible to com-parison. To use such terms serves only to re-iterate a movement begun long since, that is, the movement to speak of the ‘other’ in a language already systematized by/for the same. [59]

Irigaray is not claiming that visuality in science is a particularly masculine and hence, negative hermeneutic. She is claiming however, that within the language of culture, visuality can only see that which is masculine as positive presence,

Now the little girl, the woman, supposedly has nothing you can see. She exposes, exhibits the possibility of a nothing to see. Or at any rate she shows nothing that is penis shaped or could substitute for a penis. This is the odd, uncanny thing, as far as the eye can see, this nothing around which lingers in horror, now and forever, an overcathexis of the eye, of appropriation by the gaze, and of the phallomorphic sexual metaphors, its reassuring accomplices. [60]

Irigaray points out that women supposedly have nothing to see. It would be ridiculous to claim of course that women really do have nothing to see. But within the phallomorphic model, that is, the singular model of a body-with-a-phallus, there is always the possibility of a nothing to see. It is the limits of the morphological element which is inextricable from language that creates the ‘blind spot’ in the phantasy of a symmetry between the existence of one sex and more than one sex. From this analysis of the blinded eye in considering women’s body comes the eventual blindness of linguistic and psychological discourse when articulating women’s pleasure as differentiated from and somehow enigmatically foreign to, the single sex model. This does not disappear even amongst positive readers of Irigaray. Martin Jay, in his extensive study of the denigration of sight in French philosophy discusses Irigaray on the impossibility of woman ever being a reflection, or mirrored other of the male in parallel unity. Irigaray uses the speculum as an image of the un-reflective mirror, the warped reflection that women are in phallologocentric culture. She points out that women cannot be read as different in a specifically phallogic specular economy which is why the visual reading of woman is not satisfactory. Jay takes this idea as meaning all secularization of women is always and essentially detrimental. He states, of the mirror in which the male speculates his other,

One solution would be to shatter the mirror…for on the other side of the mirror, behind the screen of male representation, is an underground world hidden from the surveyor’s categorizing gaze, a world where women might whirl and dance out of the glare of the sun. [61]

For Irigaray to desire a world without any specularization of anyone (but here specifically women) would mean her writings were a prescription for the end of visuality as a feminist strategy. Jay suggests her aim is not to analyze the structure of phallologocentric knowledge but to create a utopian world of women, non-visuality (invisibility?)  and (a somewhat condescending) whirling and dancing. I do not believe this is her aim. I definitely do not think Irigaray wants women to ‘go underground’. Rather, Irigaray is stating that phallogocularity, to use Jay’s terminology, has an arbitrary compulsory-ness which, like scientific discourse, masquerades as objective - objective language, objective vision (you have to see it to believe it, but then is it really true?). What we see is created as much as what we make up as phantasy. There is no essential truth in visuality, just as there is no essential truth in scientific discourse that uses repetition as a guarantee of objective reality, while the aim all along precedes the method and result. Pleasure made visible indicates, in scientific discourse, knowledge of pleasure. It is the narrative of ‘vision equals solidity equals knowledge’ and eventually equals power, which both Irigaray and Foucault wish to deconstruct.

Irigaray states in her discussion of the visual in terms of women’s pleasure

Within this logic [of phallologocentric western discourse], the predominance of the visual, of the discrimination of form and individualization of form is particularly foreign to female eroticism. Woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking, and her entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity. [62]

This seems to be a commonly misread quote, whereby the first sentence, ‘Within this logic’ is ignored and the paragraph is read as Irigaray’s vindication of touch as a ‘feminine’ experience of pleasure while sight is consigned only to the male. Jay once again reduces Irigaray to essentialism by stating that Irigaray claims “Not only are the female genitalia plural and female sexuality based more on touch than on sight, but the woman’s body is also less firmly divided into inner and outer than man’s.” [63] Many feminists have similarly read Irigaray as advocating another - ‘female’ - sense as a new mode of experience. Sonya Andermahr, Terry Lovell and Caroll Wolkowitz, in A Glossary of Feminist Theory, in their discussion of Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic analysis of gaze theory state: “[Mulvey’s gaze theory] has been criticized for presenting an overly monolithic conception of the gaze which denies that women have pleasure of their own, and for prioritizing the visual over the tactile (Grosz, 1989, Irigaray, 1985)”. [64] Irigaray, and Grosz, do not necessarily advocate tactility as a preferable new mode of sensuousness, but simply mention it as an alternative, as easily replaceable with olfaction as tactility. Neither do they condemn a prioritization of the visual, rather of visuality’s insidiously intimate relationship with solidity, reliable truth, knowledge, the phallus and the visual’s particular incarnation within phallo-logic. Andermahr, Lovell and Wolkowitz do not make sufficiently clear that they themselves are not advocating a prioritization of the tactile over the visual, neither do they make explicit the descriptive rather than prescriptive nature of both Grosz’s and Irigaray’s work on the visual. I do not believe Irigaray advocates new rules for all women and the ways in which they experience pleasure, although this aim has been the main focus of those feminists who consider her essentialist. [65] I think Irigaray is critiquing the placement of women in zones either as the objects of study (like the resident of the panopticon or the pathologized body under the microscope or speculum) or as representative of points of less-than-truthful or unclear knowledge, such as touch, which is infrequently used in science as a diagnostic tool to obtain empirical discourse. Perhaps Jay is using the breakdown of divisions in women to suggest their closeness (or closer-than-men-ness) to a breakdown of binarism and ‘solid’ subjectivity in a similar way that Deleuze suggests all stages of becoming must first pass through ‘becoming-woman’? Access to knowledge found in the image mirrors the access to knowledge that is the aim of empirical science. This sounds like a depressing stagnation into the world of logos. But if I shift the emphasis away from knowledge and back into pleasure - not pleasure as analyzed, as excavated, from women, from the brain, but the pleasure of empiricism and of the visual - the absent-subject of all-objective science becomes present. The language Irigaray explicates as concealing its aim, its construct and its patterns of vision and blindness, has a speaking subject finding knowledge because of pleasure. This contrasts with the scientific aim of finding knowledge because of ‘science’. Between these two extremes could be placed the possibility of finding pleasure from knowledge, an epistemophilic drive. However thinking any of these possibilities independent of each other immobilizes the fluidity of pleasure before and beyond a need to speak its cause or genesis. 

I find myself now back at Braidotti’s comment on the scientific triumph of the ‘scopic drive’ (my italics). Before empirical ‘truth’ is found, before the object is located and its function pinpointed, before every organ is wrenched from the body and reduced to thousands of layers of analysis there must exist a drive to want to find out. This seems a phallologocentric drive implicitly, and I do not wish to go into what constitutes a male drive for knowledge as opposed to a female drive for anything else. I simply wish here to refigure the notion of a privileged access to knowledge in science and knowledge in visuality by pointing out, as Irigaray does, that before any masquerade of truth or knowledge of the world, there is a subject or many subjects with a drive. The term ‘drive’ has, as its most important element, a relationship with desire, and consequently, pleasure. Before the science then, exists the scientist, and in/around/through the scientist there is a drive for the pleasure of…? I cannot say truth and I cannot say knowledge. [66] The drive to see further is easy to phantasize as something which medicine itself could pathologize in those who work within it. Braidotti goes on to suggest that the desire to see further in modern science is itself constitutive of a form of medico-porn. She states, “Apart from the fantasy of absolute domination that is expressed in this process, I want to stress also that this visualization produces an attitude that I would describe as medical pornography.” [67] The implications of power in this matrix are most threatening and urgent, however for my purposes the way in which Braidotti takes the medical profession’s desire to see further out of its strictly regimented context seems a hopeful means by which the domination effect of empirical science could be re-figured. Because of the power implicit in medical knowledge, few are able to ‘see’ the medical profession as pathological perverts or witnesses to a form of pornography. Evincing scientists’ pleasure would render all science subjective and re-negotiate the power implicit in discourses of ‘truth’ and knowledge.

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