The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa

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      In 1691, in an effort to improve Genevan French (and perhaps to win sponsorship for a school he hoped to establish), Poullain published a little book on proper French usage. He dedicated it to Mme Perdriau, the wife of a Genevan councillor of state. It was in her home that he had been introduced into the city’s patrician circles and had met his future wife. He fondly recalled that, in a typical conversation there following a dinner, Mme Perdriau distinguished herself “as much by the importance of the subjects (she) brought up as by (her) reasonings and by the turn and beauty of her expressions.” There was nothing more important or beautiful or worthy of our “study” and “conversation,” he recalled her saying, than “the truths of salvation”; and so we should “neglect nothing to acquire the purity of the language,” since “it can serve to render the truth at the same time more agreeable and more useful.”³⁶

      We glimpse in the dedication a world of bourgeois wealth and domesticity quite different from the Parisian salons. If there is any room in it for the free play of esprit, it is subordinate to a sober concern with the purity of religious truth. All the more striking, then, that Poullain made Mme Perdriau a kind of bourgeois—and Calvinist—salonnière. We do not know whether his radically unconventional commitment to gender equality survived the transition from Parisian polite sociability to the Genevan variety. But we can be sure that Poullain carried with him to Geneva, along with his Protestant convictions, the social aesthetic with which he had identified when he turned his back on the clerical scholasticism of the Sorbonne. In this bourgeois world of Calvinist religiosity, he retained his Parisian attachment to polite conversation and, with it, his appreciation of the indispensable contribution of women.

      The social aesthetic of honnêteté played a constitutive role in Poullain’s youthful feminist thought, crucial to understanding both the experiential grounding of its radicalism and its implicit tensions and inhibitions. The tensions lurk beneath the surface, in the interstices between formal argument and the uncontested norms and assumptions that shape an intellectual field. There is a sense in which Poullain’s concept of equality, “abstract[ed]” from so many intellectual and cultural contexts, is “socially undetermined” and hence “applicable to all social and political practices.”³⁷ But that misses an irony central to his radicalism: that his argument for granting women equal access to educated work roles drew so much of its rhetorical power from a discursive world that made freedom from labor essential to its self-imagining and its claim to incommensurable status. To do justice to the irony, we need to pay due attention to the differences between Equality and Education. And, however useful it may be to separate out gender and status conceptually, we must reentwine, and indeed reentangle, them if we are to understand the historical contribution of both honnêteté and Poullain to early modern feminism.

      This is not, it should be stressed, a simple story of the imperatives of status constricting the emancipatory thrust of new thinking about gender. Arguably one of the instructive twists in the story is that a logic of elite status, pervasive in the discourse of honnêteté, played a vital role in making possible a new logic of gender—one that quite explicitly reversed the construed normative relationship between male and female intelligence. It is hard to see how Poullain could have formulated his concept of gender equality without the salons’ efforts to justify themselves as a status community. The denigration of the kinds of intellectual authority represented by male corporate cultures; the revaluation of the relationship between female physical “delicacy” and intellectual strength; the new significance given to “natural” speech as an instrument and emblem of intelligence; the insistence that the value of intelligence and knowledge hinged on their efficacy in forms of social communication emphasizing reciprocity: these new cultural construals of gender were as indispensable to Poullain’s breakthrough as was Cartesian method. Poullain did not simply reorient the discourse; he upended it, using gender norms designed to make women the guardians of a culture of leisure to advocate equal access for women to positions in the social division of labor. In his hands the reconstrual of gender norms leapt across the boundary that distinguished an imagined community of leisure, mixing men and women on new terms of communication, from the rest of society. It justified a vision of a society bringing together men and women on new terms of labor conceived as social communication. It is above all this reimagining that makes Poullain a remarkable figure for his time and place.

      In this sense Poullain distilled a socially determined discourse into a “socially underdetermined” concept of equality. In Education, however, he can be said to have reacknowledged the constraints of the historically determinate. Its “conversations” reflect the fact that, in the social world he was addressing, women’s ascent to intellectual equality with men was inseparable from, and indeed contingent on, their fulfilling their assigned role as the exemplars and guardians of an exclusive culture of leisure or, more precisely, of aesthetic play. Because that role was not compatible with the avowed practice of intellectual labor, it also forbade women from using their newfound intellectual equality to engage in critical thinking as a social practice. That is the irony that Poullain’s blending of Cartesian rationalism and the discourse of honnêteté in a polite dialogue could not efface.

      We risk limiting ourselves to two equally unacceptable alternatives. One is to discount the ideal of “the feminine” produced by the discourse of honnêteté, and by the women who had a central role in its formulation. Since the discourse banned even the appearance of intellectual labor, we might conclude, it has nothing to say to modern feminism. That would be unfortunate; we would deprive ourselves of an instructive historical precedent for reconstruing intelligence in terms СКАЧАТЬ