Thus far in this book I have leaned into the resources offered by phenomenology in order to read and analyze the ways in which gender and sexuality, as embodied phenomena, were enacted in the school and brought into the courtroom. But how might we think beyond the level of individuated bodies to consider the body of the school as a whole and its role in the case? I will suggest that phenomenology can also offer us a way to read the gestalt of the world in which this murder occurred, the social context in which Brandon and Latisha were and were not held, together and apart. In what follows, I trace the concept of anonymity in phenomenology to read the climate and conditions of the relational world of the school, and suggest that it can help illuminate some of the paradoxes of Latisha’s place, and displacement, in the school environment. Anonymity in this sense names the realm that was denied Latisha through surveillance of her gender. And “common sense,” its epistemological corollary, was the means by which a consensus was reached between teachers and students about Latisha’s gender as a dangerous weapon. Anonymity becomes the cover for normative violence, as it was when Brandon suggested during the trial that he thought he was “doing everyone a favor” by shooting Latisha, because “everyone hated him,” because “no one liked him.” The key to understanding the social force that gathered momentum behind these invocations of everyone and no one can be found in this particular variant of anonymity.
Merleau-Ponty has been described by at least one commentator as a philosopher of anonymity, simply by virtue of the fact that compared to his more celebrated contemporaries, he is less well known. “In many respects,” writes Jack Reynolds, “Merleau-Ponty is the unknown man of the twentieth century’s major European philosophers.”1 Which is not to say that he has not been tremendously influential; rather, as Reynolds argues, it is “simply to observe that his life and personality have not been examined.” In a way it is perfectly fitting that Merleau-Ponty should be thought of as not just a philosopher of anonymity, but an anonymous philosopher in the routine sense of that word. Anonymity has one meaning when used in a common everyday sense, and another, or several others, when used in a phenomenological sense. And like a number of other phenomenological terms–“intention” and “flesh” are two other examples of concepts that are related but not reducible to their commonplace counterparts—the phenomenological concept of anonymity shares meaning with the way the term is normally used, but also adds to and departs from it. Anonymity, in the sense that we routinely deploy it, connotes an unknown-ness, an absence or an evacuation of a proper name.2 Anonymity in its phenomenological sense also evokes this meaning, but shifts its emphasis. Anonymous life refers not to what is missing—a proper name, a mode of being consolidated under the sign of individuated personhood—but to that mode of life that exists and persists in the absence of those principles of organization and containment. As we shall see, such a mode of life can be a way of inhabiting my connection with others that subtends or transcends individuated personhood.
A foray, then, into the relationship between anonymity and phenomenology. As a branch of philosophy, phenomenology is concerned with the transcendent structures of consciousness, the shared, invariant, and “universal” features of experience that all consciousnesses share. This is the way that Husserl characterizes phenomenology, calling it an “eidetic science,” the rigorous and systematic inquiry into essences. However, phenomenology also names that area of philosophy that focuses on the perspectivally specific nature of experience, the particularity of the world that I and I alone inhabit, even simply by virtue of the uniqueness of my location in time and space. This can be understood as a tension between phenomenology considered in its strict Husserlian sense and phenomenology as it came to be articulated in the social sciences in the mid-twentieth century. But one need not delineate a distinction between classical or transcendental phenomenology and “applied” phenomenology, or phenomenology as it came to merge through and as psychology and the social sciences, to find such a tension. This tension need not even be understood as problematic, and can be discerned at the very advent of phenomenology in the work of Husserl. It would surely be an error to try to render phenomenology, or any branch of philosophy, free of contradiction or even to require of it a coherence that it may not possess, particularly at its most nascent stage. As Dorion Cairns puts it, “By phenomenology Husserl meant whatever he was doing at the time.”3 Take, for instance, the relation between the aim and the means of what may be his most foundational contribution to phenomenological method, the phenomenological reduction. The aim of the phenomenologist is to arrive to the world, to know it as it is, to allow her faith in it. And the means by which she arrives at that faith is by rigorously abstaining from her belief in it, holding herself apart from it, subjecting it to a dispassionate scrutiny in which she withholds her judgment concerning it. While the phenomenological reduction as method was largely left behind by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Husserl’s most significant descendants, its germ contains this antipathetic structure, a coming to consciousness of the nature of the world through rigidly holding myself outside of the “natural attitude,” the mode through which I move through the world in its everydayness, unreflectively.
This tension that is central to phenomenology might better be called an ambiguity rather than a paradox. One of phenomenology’s critical insights is that all of human experience is characterized by a fundamental ambiguity. Its significance cannot be resolved into one determined and self-evident meaning. It is always something, and also always inescapably this other thing, and it can never be perceived as both of those things at one and the same moment, even though it must needs contain them both within its horizon. Simone de Beauvoir will take this insight as foundational for ethics.4 Merleau-Ponty will see in ambiguity a way of explicating the nature of bodily being—my body as always what comprises me as a subject, and also what constitutes me as an object for other people.5
Another of Husserl’s students extended his legacy in a somewhat different direction. Alfred Schütz worked at the intersection of phenomenological philosophy and social science. Maurice Natanson describes Schütz as performing a phenomenology of the social world “within the natural attitude.”6 These—the emphasis on transcendental structures and the emphasis on the lived world, the social world—do not cancel each other out. Indeed, they cannot, according to Schütz; as Natanson observes: “A constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude—even one carried out within the natural attitude—is an interpretive demarcation of the estate of phenomenology, not a repudiation of the results of transcendental reduction.”7
A phenomenology of the natural attitude would seem to be a different kind of phenomenology than what Husserl proposes, and it is not entirely clear how such reflexive analytical work could be carried out within the natural attitude. But this “demarcation of the estate of phenomenology” turns out to also be its work, and we get a clear indication of this from the major philosophical works by Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception), Schütz (The Phenomenology of the Social World), Heidegger (Introduction to Phenomenological Research), and Husserl (pretty much everything), each of which not only begins by asking the question “What is phenomenology?” but keeps at it, asking the question over and over again. In that reflexive move, phenomenology becomes again something other than, something opposed to, the natural attitude, even as the natural attitude is its unfading concern. I would like to draw on the first two of these thinkers to suggest that their concepts of anonymity might serve as a place where phenomenology can be thought simultaneously as both inquiry into transcendental essences and also a means of explicating individuation and particularity.
We might think of the concept of anonymity as one way that these two aspects of phenomenology, which we can for the sake of clarity refer to as the “transcendentalist thesis” and the “perspectival thesis,” might be reconciled or bridged. Anonymity, I will suggest, is one place in which articulated points of their overlap and connection become visible. In his monograph on Alfred Schütz, titled Anonymity, Maurice Natanson identifies anonymity as a fundamental theme for Schütz, who sets it next to two other terms, otherness and common sense. Common sense names the way in which knowledge is held and transmitted within an anonymous mode, knowledge that everyone has. It is collective and shared and seemingly untroubled by internal contradiction or division. When consulted, common sense speaks with one voice. Common sense promises to resolve rather than generate contradiction.
As it is commonly described, common sense seems also to name a way of figuring things out, an epistemological method, and not just a shared repository of information. As Leonard Lawlor puts it, “We know we are in the realm of common sense when somebody says ‘everybody knows’.”8 Common sense is distinguished from what Schütz refers to elsewhere as a “reserve stock of knowledge.”9 If someone exhorts me: “Use your common sense!” that person is generally not suggesting that I already possess the information I need to resolve the problem at hand, but that in possessing common sense I possess the means to arrive at that information that I do not yet have, but that I can derive through the use of that sense. This would seem to figure common sense as a faculty for which we have a universal capacity. However, the very invocation of common sense itself indicates the reverse. That the call to common sense takes the form of an adjuration points to its absence; one has to be urged to it or recalled toward it only if one is not utilizing it at the time. That it can be said of someone “she has no common sense” already uncouples the idea of the common from the idea of the universal.
But the context of the call for common sense also bears examining. It emerges most often at the moment in which common sense appears to have already to have failed. That is, the appeal to common sense emerges exactly and only in the moment when it is thought to have already been violated. As Natanson describes it, “It is when things go wrong that common sense stirs.”10 When that moment emerges, we are thinking in some way otherwise to common sense. As we saw earlier, an experience of shock enacts a break with common sense. But common sense is not merely a neutral ground that is disrupted by shock. Common sense can also emerge with normative force in response to a shock. It is that which disciplines the otherwise, brings it back when it has strayed from a collectively agreed upon course of deliberation or action. Common sense and shock thus work in concert, either for the purpose of establishing and enforcing norms or with the aim of challenging them.
When things go wrong, we are in the province of otherness. Otherness is, in Natanson’s words, “fugitive to common sense.”11 Which is not to say that it is unrelated to common sense, but rather that it demarcates the outer border of common sense—or in the inverted form, that common sense is simply the inside lining of otherness. Natanson prefers the inversion, defining otherness this way: “Otherness is common sense stripped not only of the possibility of being ‘otherwise,’ but negated in what it is.”12 Otherness, then, is comprised through and composed of common sense, which has assumed its form through being “stripped” of its possibility to assume any different form. It is otherness that has, in effect, sedimented. There is something of a logical knot here. Schütz says that otherness is “the primordial meaning of anonymity.”13 If common sense is comprised through and composed of anonymity, and otherness is another name for anonymity, its “primordial meaning,” then transitivity would suggest a congruence or alliance between common sense and otherness. But if otherness is at the same time fugitive to common sense, if common sense is, as Schütz has asserted, the precipitate left when knowledge refuses to engage with otherness, then the relation of these three terms is less than clear.
How, then, ought we think the relation between common sense and the philosophical enterprise? Insofar as they describe opposed approaches to knowing, and to time, we could think of common sense as the enemy of phenomenology; common sense is what we are already supposed to know. The phenomenological method wants to be a means by which we see the world as it really is by consciously holding it in abeyance and shedding ourselves of those things that we already know. This is the only means by which we are able to break out of the world as pre-interpreted, with its meanings already served and digested. To be a perpetual beginner, as Merleau-Ponty and Husserl say we must be if we are to practice phenomenology, is to teach oneself how not to rely on common sense, how not to become captured by the fixed categories of what we all already know.
There is, however, nothing resembling a consensus on the scope or value of common sense, nor on its relationship to the phenomenological enterprise. In The Way of Phenomenology, Richard Zaner suggests that common sense is not precisely a social consensus about the world, but rather the comparatively thinner fact that there is a world at all. We can each say of this world that it is always inhabited by more people than just myself, and that it is perceptible to my senses. Common sense gives me the world as sensed in common with other perceiving subjects. “Common sense life,” as he uses the phrase, means the natural attitude. Zaner takes issue with Natanson, and also Schütz, on the matter of common sense life. Whereas Natanson and Schütz, following Husserl, insist that a break with the natural world occurs when we submit it to a process of reflection, of reflexive awareness, Zaner insists that life itself offers us ample opportunity for such moments of break, through tiny mundane encounters or interactions that surprise or shock us out of our habitual engagement with the world. We have seen in chapter 2 the ways in which a shock in the flow of everyday life can resonate, ripple outward, cause a break in unreflective everyday life, a break whose results can be unpredictable. What Zaner is after, however, is something relatively more minor and less consequential. He describes strolling down a crowded urban sidewalk during the holiday season, immersed in thoughts about shopping, gifts, and plans for the season, and suddenly coming face to face with another similarly immersed shopper, right in his path, nearly running into that person. One walker steps aside, out of the way of the other with whom he is suddenly confronted, and the other steps in the same direction at the same moment. He steps aside again, is again unintentionally mirrored by his mirroring other, and the two of them perform a dance impeding one another’s way even as they are trying to remove themselves from each other’s path. It is in that moment, of confronting the other in a way that breaks me out of my automatic movement toward my goal, that I experience a minor break with the everydayness of my life.
In the sidewalk do-si-do that Zaner describes, a process of “disengagement occurs, however minimally or momentarily” from the seamless flow of everyday life within the process of daily life itself. He explains that this enacts “a kind of release from the deep moorings of the general thesis of the natural attitude” and that this occurs without any consciously mobilized reflection, without my effort to transcend the natural attitude.14 Such a break occurs always in the passive voice. The point, for Zaner, is for us to model our metaphysical musings on those small moments in the daily world, those moments of interruption, rather than needing to retreat to a separate realm suspended above daily life.
Anonymity is neither a state to be aimed toward nor something to be rectified. It is “neither authentic nor inauthentic,” writes Schütz, steering our interpretation away from either a Heideggerian or a moralistic slant. It is instead “a necessary condition for there being a social world.”15 It is the fabric from which daily life is woven, the atmosphere of our relations with others and with the world. Aside from his disagreement about the emergence and location of a shock that leads to a disengagement with the “common sense life,” Zaner does agree with Natanson and Schütz in his assessment of the task of the phenomenological philosopher. Like anonymity, the natural attitude is not something to be affirmed or denied. Daily life is rather something to be more precisely described and thus disclosed more fully, even as the work of phenomenology neither begins nor ends with that description. He writes:
As Husserl emphasizes, while the constant affirming of “reality” is the texture of our daily lives, the denial of it is itself but another thesis or supposition, one which affirms the non-being of that reality. That is, unlike Descartes’ attempt at universal doubt, the phenomenological philosopher is interested neither in affirming nor in denying anything, but in exploring, or, as I shall want to say later, in making explicit what has hitherto been implicit.16
I will return to this matter below, in looking at a specific appeal to common sense, in order to consider not only how the implicit can be made explicit, but also the social utility of both, and what concealment is able to achieve.
In a murder trial, the charges against the defendant are read out loud in court. In this murder trial, Brandon McInerney is accused of killing Larry King. He is charged with acting with “malice aforethought” to accomplish willful, premeditated murder. When read aloud, the charge sounds like this:
Brandon McInerney is charged with killing Lawrence King, a human being.
The law concerns itself with Brandon McInerney and also with Lawrence King. The first thing that the court wants us to know about the victim is that he is a human being. The life that was killed has to be a human life in order that the killing be considered a homicide; thus the establishment of Lawrence’s humanness is one of the first statements uttered in the courtroom. This serves to identify him in some minimal way and will lay the groundwork for the prosecution’s claim that the homicide that occurred was a murder, through the syllogistic precision of the criminal code. Murder is the premeditated killing of a human being. Lawrence King was a human being. Brandon McInerney killed Lawrence King with malice aforethought. Therefore, the premeditated killing of Larry King was a murder.
To have one’s grievance taken up by the law in this way is at some level to have one’s proper name effaced, where “Lawrence King” is the position that becomes occupied by “The People” in The People vs. Brandon McInerney. The People, in turn, are a way of naming the prosecution. But it is also to have one’s personhood elaborated, simultaneously. The clerk who reads the charges aloud also tells us that the victim is “Larry King, a person.” That slight modification, that slight elaboration of the category of “human,” offers him as something more specific than a member of the general class of human. He was a person, individuated, living the specificity of a singular life. His humanness is understood to be inflected with, rather than comprised by, attributes of his personhood. Larry’s other name, his improper name, Latisha, had only the briefest flicker of life in the school, just those few minutes between the second it was typed on the screen and the second it joined the proper name, Larry, in naming someone who no longer existed.
Latisha’s gender, sexuality, and race are obscurely present in the courtroom, invoked either in order to be made explicit, in the case of gender, or to be dismissed, in the case of race. Chapter 1 showed some of the bizarre effects that result from understanding these aspects as separable from personhood, as in the pretrial hearing that determined that race played no part in the case and thereby insured almost no mention of race during the trial even though Latisha King was biracial and Brandon McInerney was charged with belonging to a racist neo-Nazi gang. The district attorney contended that this killing was a hate crime, which means that it was motivated by bias against a particular group of people who share a marker of identity and that bias served as a “substantial motivating factor” in the killing. It was alleged that a gender bias motivated Brandon to kill Latisha. Gender takes many forms in this case. It is a catalyst, it is a provocation. It is a performance, it is an essence. It is protected expression, it is criminal. But for the district attorney’s purposes, it meant one thing. In her opening statement, she explained how we ought to understand gender in this case: “Gender here means sex.” Given the premise that gender is the same as sex, the jury was from the outset poorly equipped to understand “Larry King” or “his” gender, since “his” sex was never in doubt, even as her gender presentation was emphatically feminine. As Larry King was described in court, his sex was male, as were his pronouns and proper name. Yet through dress, self-naming, naming requests to others, and behavior, it was clear—although never admitted by the court—that Latisha’s gender was girl. The assertion that gender is sex collapses these categories and gives sex dominion over gender. While we might long for a more sophisticated account of gender here that might be awake to the nuances of gender as it is lived, there are also ways in which this account is telegraphing something more complex than it might at first appear. For even though gender is asserted to be sex, and thus sex is offered as the reason for the bias, we are given no account of bodily morphology, no recitation of anatomy as evidence of “Larry’s” sex. His sex is a matter of the clothing that he wears: it is either altered or determined by that clothing. It is thus also a matter of his choosing and donning clothing—an inadvertently performative account of gender in which gender is the effect of the clothing that one puts on.
Or the accessories one wears. Latisha’s ostensible “cross dressing,” as it was repeatedly termed in the local newspaper, would be more accurately characterized as cross-accessorizing, a phrase that Ken Corbett has used to describe Latisha’s appearance. What District Attorney Fox claimed regarding Larry’s wearing of feminine boots, jewelry, and hair product, the behaviors for which he was targeted and killed, was that the wearing of the accessories was a pushback against gender-based harassment. Because of the fact that the donning of the accessories was done with pride, the District Attorney was in fact asserting that Latisha was expressing emotional health, rather than emotional distress, in her wearing of women’s accessories. The authoring of gender through the donning of accessories was a claim, a declaration, a prideful response to the taunting she received at school. With this claim, both the District Attorney and Latisha captured something real about the assertion of gender expression as a mode of defense. The risk in such a claim, however, is that it relocates Latisha’s performance of gender, figuring it as something pushing toward the other, a something that is not defensive, but is in fact aggressive.
And yet, there is some temporal ripple in this account. The teasing is said to have occurred as a result of the gender transgression visible in the dress, but the dressing as a visible expression of gender transgression was ostensibly undertaken to push back against that very harassment. When gender is understood as something that I do to someone else, as well as an element of my personhood that expresses itself, the time and the aim of its expression multiply in this way. This testifies, too, to the unlocatability of gender; a violation of gender norms was apparent in Latisha’s person, even before there was any cross-accessorizing, even in the absence of any singular object to which one might have pointed as its location. As we shall see below, anonymity, in both its common and phenomenological usage, depends on compliance with gender norms. This question of Latisha’s gender, how and when it asserted itself, and whether it did so in a mode of compliance or defiance, is inextricable from the ways in which she was unable to retreat into anonymity and thus unable to inhabit the shared and reciprocal life of those around her.
Susan Crowley was one of Latisha’s teachers who testified to their relationship, to Latisha’s behavior, and to her own interventions. She described that relationship while she was being questioned by defense attorney Robyn Bramson:
Bramson: Did you have a student named Larry King?
Crowley: Yes
Bramson: Did you get to know him well?
Crowley: Yes.
Bramson: You had a good rapport with him.
Crowley: Yes. He was very endearing.
Bramson: Do you think he liked you?
Crowley: Yes. Not initially because I had high expectations but eventually he was fond of me also.
Bramson: Over the course of the year did you get a good sense of his personality?
Crowley: Yes. [I saw him] twice a day. And he stopped in to see me most days to say hi.
Bramson: In seventh grade how would you describe him?
Crowley: He got along much better with adults than he did with kids. He had a small circle of friends [who were] girls. He liked adult company, liked the attention. He was effeminate and had a high-pitched voice. He made a present for my cat at Christmas because he knew I had a cat.
Bramson: Did Larry have any behavioral problems?
Crowley: He was constantly seeking attention. He was very endearing but very needy. Much more emotionally immature than other kids his age. He constantly sought attention.
Bramson: And I think you said he was immature?
Crowley: He wanted attention but did not have the social skills to get it. He talked about subjects that did not. . . . Apropos of nothing he said he had been crocheting scarves for soldiers in the Middle East. All the kids caught my eye but then they looked down and did not say anything because they knew they could not say anything about him in my classroom. So afterwards I asked him: Honey what was that about? Who taught you to crochet? And he said: My grandma. I said: Do you know anyone else that crochets? You tell me every day that the other kids tease you and harass you. But you talk about things to get attention. That behavior needs to stop. There is nothing wrong with crochet, but other kids don’t do it. I said that Rosie Greer did cross-stitch but he was a pro football player and he could get away with it. This is junior high not junior college and this is not the time. This is not.
It is apparent that Crowley understands Latisha to have been fond of her. Latisha came to say hello to her most days, made a Christmas present for her cat, and sought Crowley’s counsel. Crowley also describes Latisha as less mature than her peers, and engaging in behaviors that other kids did not. Here, though, the description turns somewhat strangely on the question of Latisha’s maturity. The characterization of her as immature sits alongside the assertions that she got along better with adults than with kids her own age, that the time for her “behavior”—still unspecified—is junior college and not junior high school. She is thus immature, delayed, too early, at the same time that she is too mature, too far ahead, too enmeshed in something—a way of speaking? a way of being? a way of presenting?—that should more properly emerge in “junior college.” Latisha’s strangeness, her wrongness, becomes a temporal problem as well as a gender problem. Or a temporal problem because the unfolding of gender is a temporal matter.17
The suggestion that Latisha is seeking attention comes in this instance from her remark about crocheting. The remark comes “apropos of nothing,” Crowley suggests. It marks her as out of sync with her peers, because “the other kids don’t do it.” The behavior about which she is concerned is not merely the crocheting, but that Latisha is marking herself with the remark, exposing herself in a way that she would not have had she announced that she had been at Jiu Jitsu, as Brandon often was after school, or playing football. Indeed, something like football-playing might have inoculated Latisha, Crowley suggests, allowed her to “get away with” the crochet, just as Rosie Greer got away with the cross-stitch. She recalls what Latisha has confided in her: daily teasing, constant harassment. And her response, given it seems with all attempt at care, is: stop. Stop saying strange things. Quit being weird. Stop drawing attention to yourself. She was concerned, as so many of the teachers were, with Latisha’s “negative attention-seeking,” a pseudoclinical turn of phrase that might be translated here as you are asking for it.
Crowley understands herself to be Latisha’s ally, someone who will take her aside “afterwards,” after there has been some incident, after something has gone awry, and intervene. She is looking out for Latisha with these interventions. And also creating a place of protection and maintaining her classroom as a sphere of correct behavior, one in which her other students “knew they could not say anything about him.” When Latisha says something odd, a precisely choreographed and wordless dialogue takes place. “All the kids caught my eye,” says Crowley: the classroom apparently united as one in their reaction to Latisha’s utterance. But there is also an exchange in which the unspoken rule of Mrs. Crowley’s classroom is reasserted, the unspoken rule that dictates that you do not speak about Latisha, particularly when she speaks. Latisha speaks, and all of the students “looked down and did not say anything.”
In this moment it is all of the other students in the classroom save Latisha who catch Mrs. Crowley’s eye. But there are moments when it is Latisha who catches her eye, not with her own look but with how she looks. And when either Latisha or the students who do not know how to respond to her catch Mrs. Crowley’s eye, she waits, she lets the moment pass, and she takes Latisha aside after class. She lets Latisha know afterwards, giving her the information she understands her not to have, that she is not participating in the life of the classroom in the proper way, that she is not fitting in, not blending in. Mrs. Crowley begins to give Latisha lessons on how to be anonymous.
In Schütz’s view, the process through which otherness transforms into common sense is the process of sedimentation. Other transformations are also characterized by the process of sedimentation, namely the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and habits. What Schütz means by “sedimentation” is the way that daily life comes to us pre-interpreted, predigested. With that assessment of daily life as already interpreted, he is describing something like the natural attitude. Sedimentation describes that substratum of knowledge that we have and rely on but cannot quite remember when or how we learned it. We seem always to have known it. He gives the example of a stop sign, or a red light. We know that red means stop, but we can almost never recall when we first learned this, or how. Anonymity is both the means by which we learn much of what we know and also the state that emerges as a result of that learning. Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, means something quite different with his use of the term sedimentation. For Schütz, sedimentation describes our encounters with the already meaningful shape of the world; sedimentation describes the world. Whereas for Merleau-Ponty, sedimentation describes the means by which I come to be an embodied subject; sedimentation describes me as my habits and body are shaped by and dissolved into the world. For Schütz the antonym of anonymity is concreteness. This may strike us as surprising, that anonymity should be contrasted to what is concrete and thus figured as abstract, rather than being contrasted with knowability, or specificity. In Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, its antonym is something more like “individuated.” Anonymous life is the bodily self I have before there is a “me” to have one.
Merleau-Ponty explains the concept of anonymity in several different ways in Phenomenology of Perception. In the chapter titled “The Body in Its Sexual Being,” he describes anonymous life as a blank field to which I can retreat when “normal” life, my life lived in connection with others and in co-implication with the world, threatens to capsize me. The later section in the book in which he discusses anonymity at length, “Other Selves and the Human World,” is a direct continuation of the discussion of the body in the earlier chapter on sexual being, which concerns anonymity and its relation to natural time, as well as proximity to and withdrawal from the social world. As we shall see, the difference between anonymity as it is articulated in the section on sexual being and the later section is that the former gives us anonymity as a way to retreat from others and the overwhelming press of the social world.18 The latter gives us anonymity as a way of giving us the other, anonymity as the tissue that forms a continuity out of my body and self and the body and self of the other. Interestingly enough, anonymity here will operate similarly to “flesh” in the later work, as an elemental structure of dual and reversible action.
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“Other Selves and the Human World” offers prenatal life as exemplary of anonymous life. It is “merely the extreme form,” he says, “of that temporal dispersal which constantly threatens the historical present.”19 Of neonatal life, he writes that “nothing was perceived, and therefore there is nothing to recall.” This is life that persists, but does not know itself, is not awake to itself. Anonymous life in this articulation is a description of the barest conditions of existence. Things become more complicated, though, as Merleau-Ponty explains that it is not just people who have anonymous life but objects as well. What that ends up meaning is that unlike the thing in the natural world, the subject of the prior chapter, humanly wrought objects retain in their being and shape the human purpose for which they were made, and thus retain a kind of human-ness. The rug on the floor, as a humanly-wrought fundament, retains the impress of the hands that have woven it and the footsteps of those who have walked on it, even when I am the only person left in the room.
The object and subject appear to be distinct things. But they are bound to one another in that the cultural object delivers to me, the perceiving subject, another subject, though he is general, diffuse, indistinct. The object thus starts to resemble a subject in two ways. First, the shape of the object recalls the shape of the human who made it for the human who will use it. Second, the object does not just retain the ghostly trace of this human-ness but projects it out toward the world. Each manmade object, Merleau-Ponty says, “spreads round it an atmosphere of humanity.” The difference between object and subject is hard to place, since the object keeps recalling subjects, anonymous others. In fact, it is not clear if the anonymity belongs to the objects themselves or is in fact only borrowed from the human realm. Sometimes it seems as if the anonymity belongs to the ambiguously present subjects who may once have inhabited or will someday also move through the space in which the object now rests. The object is then the carrier but not the source of the anonymity. Such an object would have anonymous life in the same way that the roots of a plant have the soil. When pulled from the ground, the roots of a plant are surrounded by a ball of earth, because the roots are grabbing hold and giving form to an otherwise formless something not the same as they themselves. Sometimes anonymity is the name Merleau-Ponty gives to the means and mode through which perceptions give us the world, as in: “Every perception takes place in an atmosphere of generality and is presented to us anonymously.”20 At other times, anonymity seems to be a property of the object, indissociable from its function, a function that presents us with other human beings.
But only nearly, only almost. The object is cloaking those other beings that it conjures up with anonymity even as it offers them to my perception. When I perceive objects—a bell, a spoon, a pipe—I perceive the other, but only in a general sense. Merleau-Ponty writes: “In the cultural object I feel the close presence of others beneath a veil of anonymity.”21 Perception, for Merleau-Ponty, is not the same as thinking: “In perception we do not think the object and we do not think ourselves thinking it, we are given over to the object and we merge into this body which is better informed than we are about the world, and about the motives we have and the means at our disposal for synthesizing it.”22 The object I perceive becomes a body into which I merge.
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We will see in the next chapter how cultural objects can not only come to stand in for gender or sexuality but actually become them. The ambiguous relation between the cultural object and the human subject becomes still more ambiguous with Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion that the object can also be . . . another subject. And not simply another object, but the cultural object par excellence. “The very first of all cultural objects, and the one by which all the rest exist, is the body of the other person as the vehicle of a form of behavior.”23 We are suddenly in a world that has been denuded of all of its objects save one: the body of the other. That other body exists for me in order to transmit its behavior to me through my perception.
Anonymity is being worked through in such fine grain in this section of the Phenomenology in order that Merleau-Ponty might consider what is sometimes referred to in philosophy, with a rather terrifying opacity, “the problem of others.” That merely the ontological being of others—not others behaving badly or others who are evil or others who cause me trouble, but just the bare fact of others—says something about the discipline no doubt, and certainly the extent to which thinking about intersubjectivity and intercorporeality is a comparatively staggering challenge. Merleau-Ponty’s intervention in this debate, and arguably the most significant intervention of the Phenomenology of Perception as a whole, is to replace the conception of consciousness as constituting its world with a philosophy of consciousness as that which perceives its world.24 Merleau-Ponty reorganizes Descartes in insisting that it is not that I project the world, it is that I take it in. And what this reordering, this move from a constituting to a perceptual consciousness, does is give me the other as well as giving me the world. In order to explain the radical shift that this entails, Merleau-Ponty uses the example of a baby: if I playfully pretend to bite a baby’s finger, it will open its mouth and attempt to bite, too.25 In this case, anonymity describes the hinge between Merleau-Ponty and the baby, the fact that they both share the lifeworld, and the anonymity of being allows for a kind of transitivity whereby the baby understands the congruence of its face and his, even before it has a distinctly felt sense of its own.
Two questions might be asked here. First, what does this have to do with gender, for our purposes, since Merleau-Ponty does not bring the two together? Echoes of this moment between adult and infant abound in contemporary thinking about infantile relations and gender. Take, for example, Jessica Benjamin in The Bonds of Love, in which infant and mother undergo mutual mirroring, which is about recognition, care, and gender. The Phenomenology of Perception offers a different scene, with male Merleau-Ponty and the resolutely nongendered baby, where what the baby is feeling inside its own body is the feeling of itself as another, or another as itself. “Biting has immediately, for it an intersubjective significance. It perceives its intentions in its body and my body with its own, and thereby my intentions in its own body.”26 An obvious feminist rejoinder might be: yes, mutuality is well and good, but the fact that Merleau-Ponty is writing gender out of this scene does not mean it is not there. A second, and perhaps still more significant question: anonymity thus described sounds like a happy condition in which I and the other and the world all exist in a mutually beneficial enmeshment. How can anonymity help us think about what happens when that enmeshment is not so happy, when I am locked into the tissue of the world with another who abrades me, injures me, or worse?
Merleau-Ponty’s comments on anonymity have been put to various uses by philosophers thinking about gender. Drawing on them to posit a form of sexuality that exists prior to gender differentiation, Sylvia Stoller argues that the experience of anonymous sexuality and anonymous temporality demonstrate that sexual difference is “an ongoing process of differentiation.”27 Sara Heinamaa uses Merleau-Ponty’s theory of anonymity and the matter of drives to argue the opposite,that the central feature of anonymity is that it is not differentiated, or at least not by gender. She is interested to show that Merleau-Ponty’s conception of anonymity, drawn from Husserl, is not used in opposition to or as a lever against personal subjectivity, as we have already seen. For Merleau-Ponty anonymity is rather “an extension of Husserl’s genetic theory of sedimentation,” a broadening of the purview of those things that, though repetition and habituation, become us.28 For Husserl, the sedimentation of actions into subjects is the accretion and transformation of judgments and acts—products of the will—into persons. Merleau-Ponty’s extension is his insistence that anonymity becomes sedimented as not merely this layer of willed acts but, more fundamentally, the stratum that underlies those acts. As Heinamaa puts it:
Merleau-Ponty calls “personal” the layer of subjectivity that is based on decisions, volitions, and judgments, and “anonymous” the layer that is formed in perceptions, motions, and feelings. My main argument is that both levels are included in the Gestaltung that Husserl calls the “transcendental person.” Accordingly, both levels—the level of explicitly egological decisions and volitional acts, and the level of anonymous operations—contribute to the establishment of sexual difference.29
Heinamaa thus recruits Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in order to offer a theory of sexual difference in which the volitional and the nonvolitional are intertwined. To Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the anonymous and the personal, she attaches Husserl’s theory of genetic phenomenology, the temporal establishment of meaning through the sedimentation or repeated acts of will and judgment. This genetic phenomenology, she suggests, offers a way of thinking about sexual difference as a style rather than an empirical fact of biology, hormones, or the like. “My crucial idea,” she ways, “is that Husserl’s personalistic concepts of style and type offer the possibility of formulating the question of sexual identity and sexual difference in a radically philosophical way.”30
Heinamaa’s radical philosophizing of sexual difference, then, appeals to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of anonymity and also to Husserl’s genetic phenomenology. This introduces something of a puzzle, however, one that attends attempts to think the transcendental and the contingent together. Husserl’s conception of style relies on the sedimented acts of an individual, acts that accrue to form an individual person, but that might have been arranged or performed differently, resulting in an entirely different style and thus an entirely different person. The location of all of this labor is decidedly at the personal level. It is what makes me different from anyone else, even in close temporal and physical proximity, or indeed different from who I would have been had I been born at another moment in time. Merleau-Ponty’s anonymity, however, exists in another realm entirely. It is prepersonal; it is not dependent on the me-ness of me, even if the use I make of that anonymous bodily experience accrues to and forms that me-ness. Merleau-Ponty also has a philosophy of bodily style, and a precisely formulated one, which he articulates most explicitly in his aesthetic writings, as discussed in chapter 2.31 But as we have also seen, in his treatment of anonymity in Phenomenology of Perception, he emphasizes those aspects of being that are prepersonal, that lie below the level of the individuated subject, below selfhood. Anonymity describes the being that I share with the rest of the world, upon which any further articulated notion of individuation from it must rest. How then ought we understand the interplay of style and anonymity? Where and how do these different spheres of action intersect, if they do? If we return to the realm of everyday usage, style and anonymity would seem to be united only in their opposition to one another, though that opposition might also be a uniting force that binds them inseparably to one another. The realm of aesthetics can offer examples here, as, for instance, in the way that the style of a piece of artwork tends to be most intensely scrutinized when the author of a work or works is anonymous or suspect.
Heinamaa offers us resources for thinking the join between anonymity, phenomenology, and gender. What might be said of the style of Latisha’s gender? And does understanding gender as a style offer any benefit that might offset the obvious risk that it runs of collapsing gender into mere theatricality or willed performance? The case testimony provides many different assessments of Latisha’s gender, offered by scores of classmates, teachers, neighbors, strangers. It became clear throughout the trial that Latisha was taunted and teased for the way she lived her gender, for its style. The disciplining aspirations of her schoolmate’s taunting and her teacher’s warnings sometimes seemed to have the effect of provoking Latisha to proudly assert her gender. And it sometimes succeeded by triturating her gender back in line with normative expectations, as it did on the last day of her life. As we saw in the last chapter, on February 12, 2008, Latisha came to school looking like a boy. In the words of the Maeve Fox, “He has no makeup, no hair, no boots, no earrings, nothing.” With this statement Fox does not mean that Larry has no hair, though that is how it is described when it is unmodified toward the feminine. The district attorney says, “He is wearing nothing,” which does not mean that “he” came to school naked, but that “he” was wearing the unremarkable attire and accessories of masculinity, where masculinity is the unmarked term that “passes” as invisible. Wearing nothing no makeup no hair no identifying features. Perfectly anonymous.
Let us conclude by returning to Susan Crowley’s testimony.
Bramson: After [Larry’s remark about crochet] you counseled him.
Crowley: Yes. And anytime something like that would come up I would hold him back afterwards and say, Larry, you are doing it again. I think Larry wanted to not do it he was just looking for attention and guidance all the time. He could not distinguish between good and bad attention.
Bramson: Were those frequent?
Crowley: They were. He would say things off topic that other kids would not talk about.
Bramson then asks Mrs. Crowley if Latisha was “cross dressing” at this time. Crowley answers:
Crowley: He didn’t cross dress but did accessorize. I would have to say: Larry. He would have a scarf tied at a jaunty angle and I would have to say: Larry. A feminine looking scarf and I would say; take that off sweetheart that is not part of the uniform. And he would without comment. And I would ask him later where did you get that and he would say a girlfriend. And chunky jewelry and I would say take it off but he would comply.
Bramson: The scarves, was that part of the dress code or just your class?
Crowley: It was always being tweaked a little bit and nothing was ever being enforced. . . . But I didn’t know any other kids that wore scarves. Ever. But I didn’t know if it was prohibited or not.
Bramson: Why?
Crowley: He was drawing negative attention to himself. And I wanted him to be happy and successful and I wanted him to be himself but junior high is not the place for that. I tell the girls that too, button two more of those buttons.
Bramson: Did he comply?
Crowley: Yes always: ok Mrs. Crowley. He did not wear it again in front of me. I think he did value my opinion and wanted to please me and he knew that I had good common sense and had his interests at heart. Kids at that age try out all sorts of stuff and they need someone to tell them what is appropriate and not appropriate.
Bramson: At the end of seventh grade, did you continue to have concerns for him regarding his attention seeking behavior?
Crowley: Yes. He had not made very much progress regarding being able to monitor those behavior issues. It was a self-destructive kind of behavior. He was a lonely kid and he complained on a daily basis that other kids teased and harassed them.
To return to Maurice Natanson: things have gone wrong. In Mrs. Crowley’s telling of events, Larry could see her heart, understood that she was looking after him, and complied with her requests because he admired her common sense. Common sense has stirred. Mrs. Crowley had good common sense and was trying to impart that good sense to Larry; it was her good common sense that caused her to tell Larry to remove his jewelry, untie his scarf. And it was her good common sense, if not Larry’s, to Mrs. Crowley’s mind, that led him to comply.
What common sense seems not to address, seems not to be able to see at all, are the actions of those children—good, compliant, appropriate children—who were teasing and harassing Latisha. The common nature of common sense, paradoxically, insures that the actions of those who participate in that shared consensus are able to escape scrutiny. Latisha could not distinguish between good and bad attention, Mrs. Crowley asserted repeatedly, although Latisha had just told her about the bad attention from other students, unwanted and unrelenting. And she described Latisha as wanting to please her, as complying rather than acting out in order that she be looked on favorably, thus demonstrating an ability to discern good from bad attention and wanting Mrs. Crowley’s good attention. She says: “I would have to say: Larry.” And she says this name, says it again, says it over and over, recalling Latisha to proper gender with the proper masculinity of this name. She appends the masculine proper name to the scarf, the crochet, the jewelry, hailing him repeatedly—Larry—spurred by her discomfort and unease. The scarf is not specified as a woman’s scarf but is still marked as transgressively gendered, with Crowley pointing not to its materiality but to the way it was tied that marks it as such.
There is a dual movement to anonymity and loss in this case. In everyday terms, if we are speaking about the loss of anonymity, we are characterizing the conspicuousness of Latisha’s gender presentation. That conspicuousness was the target of Mrs. Crowley’s observations and interventions. It was also mentioned in a casual way by other participants in the trial, who remarked that “everyone knew who Larry was,” or that when Latisha walked down the hall, even before she could be seen, “you could hear him coming.” Latisha stood out from the other students. She did not blend in. She did not have the cover of anonymity as she moved through her day, moved through the school. She was not enmeshed in the seamless, unthought, uninterrogated context of the world. Yet if we draw on Natanson’s language, the loss of anonymity also describes something about the teachers. It describes what happened to them once they were themselves no longer enmeshed in seamless everydayness, once they were broken out of it by some event, some object, some person. “It is characteristic of the natural attitude,” Schütz says, “that it takes the world and its objects for granted until counterproof imposes itself.”32 Latisha became, in effect, a gendered counterproof, disrupting the teachers’ shared thesis about the nature of gendered personhood. Latisha appeared as an affront to their certainties about gender and about the world, an affront that they were unable to incorporate into their understanding. In order to resist that affront, even as they were seeing her, they refused to see her.
This matter of attention is where anonymity in its colloquial sense and anonymity in its Merleau-Pontian sense converge. Latisha is understood to be drawing attention to herself, a formulation that transforms the behavior of others into Latisha’s willed action. The targeting of Latisha, by the teachers with discipline and by the classmates with taunting and violence, is justified on the basis of her lack of anonymity, and also results in the loss of that anonymity. Brandon asserts that “everyone knew” who Latisha was. And that no one liked her. Latisha’s lack of anonymity rendered a retreat into pre-personal anonymity impossible. There was no moment during the school day in which she could sink into the simplicity of bodily rhythm and existence. There was no retreat inward toward solaces of undifferentiated being-with-others that characterizes anonymous life. The role of common sense is to insist that this loss of anonymity was function of Latisha’s own behavior. To assert, once again, that she was, once again, asking for it.