The Non-Meaning of Incest or, How Natural Culture Is

 
Historically, the key terms of poststructuralist theory are the incest taboo and kinship defined on the basis of that taboo.¹ They appeared in a groundbreaking formulation in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1935), in which Claude Lévi-Strauss, building on Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex, revolutionized the understanding of culture. As he argues, culture is not a collection of habits, rules, and rites, and a manifestation of a national being;² rather, it is more like a beehive, a natural structure with a specific internal constitution that is organized around the incest taboo, itself defined as, on the one hand, a social norm created by man and, on the other hand, a universal trait that distinguishes our animal from our human nature. In his 1966 essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Jacques Derrida objects to the restrictions of Lévi-Strauss’s theory, which stops short of decentering the Western understanding of culture insofar as structuralism replaces one organizing principle (collection, national essence) with another (taboo, kinship). For Derrida, at stake is the coherence of any cultural theory and its ability to fully explain the phenomenon it seeks to understand. Invigorated by Derrida’s intervention, scholars across the humanities have given his reproach particular applications. For instance, in an influential book titled A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984), David Schneider argues that kinship has a limited applicability and cannot be used to understand non-Western cultural models. Schneider makes a case for an anthropology that would move from the search for a general theory of culture to documenting different ways of understanding how cultures work.
 
Following this direction, poststructuralist theory of culture created more inclusive, more just ways of viewing social relations, as well as a more nuanced understanding that culture is a result of complex networks of relations, not biology, than the one offered in The Elementary Structures of Kinship. But in suggesting that there are no restrictions on social bonds other than those imposed by man, the poststructuralist theory of kinship has also come very close to doing away with itself as a theory, because it reduced culture to ideology. This lack of understanding of what determines the nature of culture—why it is heteronormative, for instance, or what that heteronormativity means exactly—can be attributed almost entirely to the rejection of Freud, which unfortunately accompanied the poststructuralist deconstruction of Lévi-Strauss’s now classical theory of kinship. Due to the purge of psychoanalysis, the unconscious has played, since Lévi-Strauss, at most a marginal role in new ways of understanding kinship, though poststructuralism—feminist poststructuralism, deconstruction, queer theory, etc.—has dealt almost exclusively with basic social relations, which is to say, with various forms of kinship.
 
On the other hand, during the same period, poststructuralist psychoanalysis in the U.S. has also sought to redefine the doctrine in order to meet new ethical and political demands. As a result, we got works on psychoanalysis and feminism, psychoanalysis and homosexuality, many on psychoanalysis and the social, but we learned nearly nothing about kinship as such.³ So it seems our work is cut out for us: to bring together the main achievements of poststructuralism, namely, its resistance to heteronormativity, with the very basic structuralist claim defining the conditions that make any kind of normativity possible. At stake in such an inquiry is not a new notion of culture, but poststructuralism as such, because it cannot pretend to a theory of culture without accounting for that which makes cultures — and that is, from Freud’s and Lévi-Strauss’s perspectives, the unconscious.
 
In this essay, I return to what may be, in the context of the theory of kinship, a minor point in Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship—the way he sorts out the relation between nature and culture—in order to borrow his rather simple and elegant way of relating culture and the unconscious.⁴ I come to Lévi-Strauss after reading an article that represents the culmination of the dominant trend in the poststructuralist critique of kinship, Rey Chow’s “A Pain in the Neck, a Scene of ‘Incest,’ and Other Enigmas of an Allegorical Cinema.” The analysis of Chow’s article should show why poststructuralism needs to be revised so as to include the unconscious in its understanding of culture.
 

 

The End of Kinship

 
Schneider’s A Critique of the Study of Kinship was a groundbreaking attack on kinship theory, in which he suggests that, if presented without bias, the ethnographic evidence concerning family relations in some non-Western cultures does not fit kinship theory and cannot be explained by it.⁵ He goes so far as to suggest that there is no such thing as “kinship”—not in the sense of the universal model of the nuclear heterosexual family in which marriage is a social expression of a biological law. In a recent article, whose thesis grows out of Schneider’s critique and addresses gay marriage, Judith Butler (“Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?”) is more moderate. She does not dismiss the term “kinship” tout court as a product of theorists’ ethnocentric bias, but instead calls for its revision, based on the understanding, not unlike Schneider’s own, that kinship structures are not necessarily limited to one (Western) model, and that they have historically taken different forms that should be recognized as viable and legitimate social ties. Accordingly, in an open reference to Freud, and alluding to Lévi-Strauss, Butler offers a middle ground between a rejection of kinship theory and the too-rigid insistence—characteristic of ethnography and anthropology before the poststructuralist turn that began in the late 1960s—that the incest taboo is a condition of culture:
 

If Oedipus is not the sine qua non of culture, that does not mean there is no place for Oedipus. It simply means that the complex that goes by that name may take a variety of cultural forms and that it will no longer be able to function as a normative condition of culture itself.… if Oedipus is interpreted broadly, as a name for the triangularity of desire, then the salient question becomes: what forms does that triangularity take? Must it presume heterosexuality? And what happens when we begin to understand Oedipus outside of the exchange of women and the presumption of heterosexual exchange?
 

(38)

 

With these questions Butler all but concludes that homosexual incest—and therefore the homosexual family——has finally become “thinkable” (Chow 125), which is the main claim of Rey Chow’s article, “A Pain in the Neck, a Scene of ‘Incest,’ and Other Enigmas of an Allegorical Cinema.” If the Oedipal triangle is to be broadened, Chow suggests here, Laius and Oedipus might not be antagonists. They may not have to meet in strife, fighting over Jocasta, but in bed, having sex with each other. Chow explains why it took so long for poststructuralism to take up homosexual incest:

 

In order to charge that what has taken place [between a father and son who have had sex] is incest, one must imply that one acknowledges the reality of same-sex sex (in this case, sex between two males); yet once that acknowledgment is made, the normativity accorded to patriarchal heterosexuality would by necessity have to become relativized, as would the purportedly nontransgressible boundary between man and woman, parent and child, mother and son, father and son that derives its status from such heterosexuality. The charge that this is a scene of incest would thus already contain within it the crucial recognition that both the categories of the kinship family (upon which the norm of heterosexual marriage rests with its set relations of filiation) and the categories of heterosexuality (upon which the norm of the kinship family rests with its set mechanisms of biological reproduction) are unstable cultural inventions.
 

(124)

 

In this passage Chow builds on the fundamental assumption that in patriarchy, as Gayle Rubin says in her famous 1975 critique of Lévi-Strauss titled “The Traffic in Women,” “[a] prohibition against some heterosexual unions assumes a taboo against non-heterosexual unions” (180). The logic here is that the prohibition of incest is the de facto prohibition of homosexual relationships because the taboo organizes sexuality around reproductive relations that require opposite sexes. In defining sex as a relation between a man and a woman, the taboo implicitly denies the possibility of same-sex sex and suggests that, strictly speaking, there can be no sex between members of the same sex, at least not in the same sense that sex between a man and a woman counts a sex. This is because, as Rubin points out, even when sex is just sex, “what counts as sex … is culturally determined and obtained” (32), and our culture privileges “reproductive” relations over those which are merely erotic.

 
The answer to the question of whether there is homosexual incest, in the traditional nomenclature, is hence a negative one. There is no homosexual incest, because the cultural and theoretical systems defined by the incest taboo do not even know the category of homosexual sex. And the reason that they do not recognize homosexual sex is, to repeat, that the latter is not reproductive. A relation based on homosexual sex cannot, according to this logic, serve as the foundation of a family and, beyond it, of a society. Such sex might be considered an abomination or, as in Plato’s Symposium, a kind of enjoyment and an expression of friendship, but it is not a relation that can generate offspring and serve as the foundation upon which a society can be built. Therefore, because it does not perform this basic social function, homosexual sex is not sex.
 
The incest taboo, on this account, is the keystone——the non-transgressible boundary, in the terms Chow uses——that holds together the culture of the patriarchal heterosexual family and the entire Western universe built around it. Its primary purpose is to organize sex on reproductive relations, and to present a social role (being a parent) as if it were equal to the “natural” ability to procreate. Question the heterosexual normativity and the entire patriarchal naturalist system with all its divisions and hierarchies, is, in Chow’s reasoning, undermined. The possibility of homosexual incest, then, according to Chow, entails the recognition that homosexual sex exists as a form of social relation that may serve as the foundation for a family. But also——and perhaps more importantly——recognition of homosexual incest leads to an understanding that all of our social norms, including the difference between genders, the ban on sexual relations with one’s children, respect for elders, etc., are themselves contingent, socially made, and have nothing to do with biology or nature. They are all unstable cultural inventions.
 
It is here, in this breakthrough critique of kinship, which insists that not some but all cultural norms are socially constructed, that we find the critique’s chief shortcoming, and the reason I want to revisit the current account of the taboo. If all cultural norms are socially constructed, they are not constructed in the same way, nor do they serve the edifice of culture in the same way or on the same level. It seems that for Chow, the taboo creates patriarchal social organization, and it also seems that the taboo could disappear, like other restrictive and discriminating rules that dictate heterosexuality. What this view obscures is that there is a significant difference between, on the one hand, the norms—foundational and unconscious norms—that make culture and, on the other hand, the cultural rules—patrilineality, heterosexuality, even the Oedipus complex, etc.—that are built on such norms. There is, in other words, a functional difference between that incest taboo that makes laws possible and the same taboo that is used, since Plato’s Laws, to shape sexual desire around “natural,” heterosexual predilections.⁶ Both are norms, but one’s function is unconscious, the other’s conscious, and therein lies the difference that cultural constructivism (of the kind presented in Chow’s, Butler’s, and Schneider’s work) has yet to grapple with.
 
Butler, who relies on psychoanalysis more than Chow does, acknowledges the unconscious, that is to say, phantasmatic, importance of the taboo but then mentions that the Oedipus complex can take other than heterosexual forms, implying that the “triangularity of desire” may not need to be heterosexual, or that it may not be a precondition of culture, but might be an optional formation that a culture may, or may not, follow, because she would like to allow for a multiplicity of foundational norms. Butler’s chief example when she attempts to show an alternative to Western patrilineal norms is the now famous case of the Chinese Na, who do not have the institution of marriage. Instead, as Butler’s source, anthropologist Cai Hua, interprets it, the Na rely on “night escapes,” when young women who normally live with their brothers visit young men from other “families” for purposes of sexual reproduction. In the morning the women go back to their families, which will raise the child as theirs. The Na do not recognize either the nuclear family or a figure like the pater familias.
 
What we begin to see here—in Chow’s equation of the incest taboo with an oppressive heterosexual norm, in Butler’s rather naïve reference to the Chinese Na culture as an exception to a rule posited by psychoanalysis—is that the critique of incest norms reduces the concept of the “triangularity of desire” to the “nuclear” family, indeed, to an Oedipus complex, which then leaves this critique with an overly narrow concept of the taboo (and, therefore, of culture as well). The nuclear heterosexual family is a recent, bourgeois invention of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hardly a universal cultural formation. The “triangularity of desire,” however, has no necessary connection with the father-mother-child triangle with which it is regularly confused. According to Jacques Lacan, who developed this concept, it is the result of a prohibition. The third angle in the triangle is there to allow for the constitution of the subject, not simply to limit the access of the child to the mother and of the mother to the child. The father is only the most likely candidate in a traditional Western family for this function that is, in fact, unconscious and can be performed by any number of agents and agencies. Moreover, in Lacan’s theory of the triangularity of desire, sexuality, in terms of homosexual and heterosexual orientations, as well as gender are results of the triangulation, not its condition, as Butler and Chow after her assume when offering their views on how culture is made.
 

The River

 
Chow ends her essay by describing a new situation that emerges after a sexual relation between a father and a son is recognized as incest in Ming-liang Tsai’s movie The River (He liu, 1997). This recognition of father-son sex as incest, according to Chow, results in “the dissolution of the kinship system based on seniority and hierarchy” (135), and so patriarchy ends with a “dephallicized” father who loses his privileged position and becomes merely one among other family members:
 

Rather than being a patriarch in control of his woman, his offspring, and his household, the old man is a forlorn figure who at one point became consigned to a small room in the apartment, a room that obviously is not the master bedroom. He eats his meals alone (no one cooks for him), sweeps the apartment floors, and irons his own clothes.… More appropriately speaking, the old man is now an anonymous member of a clandestine sexual economy, in which his body, like others’, is a token of exchange—his penis is just a penis—and in which his age, rather than giving him special status, only means that he will become increasingly undesirable. Insofar as the old man enters the culture of the san wennuan [bath house] as an agent of consensual sex transactions, he is, strictly speaking, no longer a “father” with his traditional privileges and entitlements, but a (mere) peer to his “son.”
 

(135)

 

If Chow’s reasoning is right, patriarchy is a structure of entitlements. It is like the web of protectionism in ex-socialist countries, with the exception that patriarchy is an oligarchy of men and the system in a country like the former-Yugoslavia was an oligarchy of those who were “connected.” But if, conversely, this is not the case, if patriarchy is not only a structure of preferences and entitlements, but also the structure of the subject—if, in other words, patriarchy is also an unconscious formation—then this account on what homosexual incest signifies is incorrect and Tsai’s The River leads to another interpretation of the norm that it relies on when representing father and son as sexual partners.

 
Contrary to what Chow suggests, rather than marking the transgression of a traditional Western patriarchal model, the effect of the homosexual incest that makes the father become just another member of an economy, a mere peer to the son, represents simply patriarchy’s transformation from a feudal model, in which a man is “a patriarch in control of his woman, his offspring, and his household” to a bourgeois, twentieth-century model in which the patriarch gradually begins to play a supporting role. The River does not offer, as Chow thinks, a new economy beyond the Western Oedipal model, but rather registers the modern evolution of the head of the family towards a role more akin to that of an elder brother—think of compassionate conservatives in the U.S., for instance—which, in turn, supports new forms of the incest taboo. The function’s renewal and modernization is suggested already in the fact that in The River the character of the father is the only one of the family members not identified by name. He is, as for Lacan, merely the function, “Father,” not a fixed identity.
 
Because this is simply a transformation of the Oedipal model, and not as Chow assumes an alternative to it, when father and son recognize each other as father and son in The River, they immediately turn away in silence. For good measure, the father then smacks the son upside the head, emphasizing thus how different their relation has become. The implication is that they can enjoy each other’s bodies for as long as their identities are secret to both. When the truth of the couple’s social roles is revealed, just as in Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus, the knowledge reorganizes their entire universe and the sexual arena is immediately desexualized, which is to say, all feelings are immediately repressed. Just like The River‘s father, Oedipus too loses all of his privileges and entitlements, even his eyesight, after his crime is known.⁷
 
About the taboo itself, we need to recall here that it has been separable from the heterosexual norm (as were the social roles of “mother” and “father,” “son” and “daughter,” “brother” and “sister”) since Classical Greece, when the Oedipus myth was tied to homosexuality. “Pederasty” is as close to Oedipus as his father Laius, who, as Lowell Edmunds writes in Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues, was commonly assumed to be the first human homosexual (7). This mythic invention of male homosexuality takes place around a sexual crime. The rape committed by Laius will be the reason for Oedipus’s curse and, therefore, the cause for his murder of his father.⁸ As Jean-Pierre Vernant retells the story in The Universe, the Gods, and Men, Labdacus, Laius’s father, rules Thebes only for a short period and dies when his son is only a year old. Nicteus and Lycus take the Theban throne, to be replaced eventually by the non-Thebans Amphion and Zethus. Laius, then a young man, is forced to live in exile and finds “refuge at Corinth with King Pelops, who generously extends him hospitality and keeps him close” (155). The future king of Thebes abuses the King’s hospitality when he falls in love with Pelops’s son Chrysippus, whom he forces to suicide. As Vernant writes, Laius “courts the boy assiduously, takes him around on his chariot, behaves as an older man toward a younger one—he teaches him to be a man; at the same time, though, he seeks an erotic relationship with him, and the king’s son refuses” (155).⁹ After Chrysippus’s suicide, which commentators have considered to be caused by Laius’s attempt to gain the boy’s affection by force, the boy’s father curses Laius: “[M]ay you never have a son; if you do, may you be destroyed by him” (Edmunds 7).
 
This physical destruction of the father is repeated in a mutated version in The River in what Chow describes as a loss of entitlements. The demise is foreshadowed in the omnipresent symbol of destructive water that parallels the Theban plague: from Hsio Kang “playing” a corpse floating down a polluted river and getting a mysterious ailment from it, to the flood caused by a broken toilet. The destruction here, like the destruction of Oedipus, does not signify an end of a norm but the beginning of its renewal, resulting in the slightly different patriarchal universe defined, after Oedipus’s murder of his father, by among other things the repressed homosexual desire between the father and the son. The River is special in that it openly presents the latent Oedipal scenario, albeit for a short while, until recognition takes place.¹⁰ Then its father and son go back to the disregard that defined their relation before the transgression.
 
More generally, Chow’s narrow notion of the incest taboo results not only in a failure to address systematically the norm beyond and besides the bourgeois version of patriarchy and a narrowly understood Oedipus complex, but also in an equally narrow critique of kinship theory. It is on these bases, and for this reason—because the theory underlying the critique of kinship, as we see, does not account for the fundamental function of the taboo—that a selective return to Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship, which marks the very beginning of the structuralist understanding of the nature-culture relation, becomes a way forward toward an understanding into how cultural construction works.¹¹
 

Symbolic Structure

 
In an age when most American households consist of one member or have no children, it may seem out of date to talk about kinship and family.¹² The family and kinship relations, however, are first and foremost symbolic, not natural or even concrete structures. Viewed as such, during modern times, that is to say within last two hundred years, family has become more important, not less. This is because the society of which the ever-shrinking modern family is a basic unit, the nation-state, has itself become more like the family than the feudal kingdom could ever have been. Since the eighteenth century, the so-called father- or motherlands (and their institutions, like schools, hospitals, prisons) have assumed the family’s traditional attributes as well as some of the roles that a weakened and decentered familial structure could no longer support. If in contemporary society something we might call the content of the taboo has changed as well, this is because with the disintegration of the patriarchal family, the regulation of sexuality is more and more a matter of written laws and less and less of unwritten taboos and social mores. Thus, on the one hand, today there is a loosening of restrictions on private relations among consenting adults, going so far as to include the possibility of legalizing sexual relations between blood-relatives. As a result, various “new” rules have become thinkable, homosexual incest being only one among many.¹³ On the other hand, there is an ever more vigilant policing of families and of the relations resembling parent-child model including but not limited to caretaker/dependent, teacher/student, overseer/employee, et cetera. The new rules are accompanied with an extension of the period of special protection, namely, adolescence, to almost a decade beyond the age of physical sexual maturity.
 
This does not mean that I entirely disagree with Chow’s critique of Lévi-Strauss’s kinship theory. Chow is right to insist on the contingency of cultural norms. She is right to claim that some Western patriarchal heterosexual norms are not applicable universally, across time and space. For instance, Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the exchange of women, which itself supposes that fatherhood defines a family (and therefore makes it possible for women to be “exchangeable” between families), is neither universal nor the only way to explain social ties. This familiar configuration is, indeed, an unstable cultural invention. Besides relations of “blood,” there are also many other kinds of bonds that connect people and form cultures, without necessarily revolving around or including the nuclear family, fathers, or the heterosexual norm. However, from these discoveries of other ways to understand what culture is it does not follow that the fundamental prohibition is on its way to “extinction” (Chow 133), or that “incest” is thinkable only as a vestige of “ethnocentrism,” in Chow’s repetition of David Schnieder’s most serious complaint (134). This is because the incest prohibition is not only a cultural norm. As a prohibition, it is also a function that makes culture possible. The taboo is the invention upon which the notion of culture (and therefore the notion of change, ethnocentrism, deconstruction, etc.) rests. By this I mean, as I try to demonstrate below, that the taboo is not only, or primarily, a particular rule banning sex within the nuclear family, it is a “taboo,” a fundamental rule that makes sexuality. The taboo can, of course, be filled with whatever incidental content is politically possible at a given time and place. Na women can be banned from having sex with their brothers just as Western men can be banned from having sex with their fathers and sons.
 
In the U.S., as public morality becomes more accepting of different sexualities and the heterosexual norm gives way to different normativities, the incest taboo does not simply disappear. It shifts, as I suggested already. As a result, not only police, but doctors and teachers, our colleagues at work, and other professionals who have insight into our private lives are recruited in defense of the new taboo. The reason for this transformation, to repeat, is not that the incest taboo is weakening, but that culture is changing. As a part of this process, the taboo is recontextualized, and its content is adapted to fit the new constructions of reality without any alterations in its fundamental, unconscious function.
 
In the following selective reading of Lévi-Strauss, I offer the basic theory of the prohibition as I try to explain in which sense the taboo is the condition of culture.
 

Lévi-Strauss

 
Lévi-Strauss begins his argument about the elementary structures of kinship by distinguishing between universal traits in human cultures, which are natural, and norms, which are culturally specific. He then identifies the prohibition of incest, calling it the one universal norm that “could not be ascribed accurately to either one or the other” category (25). This norm is natural in the sense that all cultures seem to adhere to it, and it is cultural because, obviously, it is a social norm defined by man. The meaning of this proposition hinges entirely on how we understand the latter part, that incest is a social norm made by man. There are, in short, two possibilities. One, used by Schneider and his poststructuralist followers, is to take Lévi-Strauss’s words to refer to customs created as a part of a more or less conscious process of defining rules and creating traditions. Lévi-Strauss himself sees the norm this way, but not only this way. For him, this semi-conscious process of definition and redefinition is only a secondary role the taboo—as a taboo—plays. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Lévi-Strauss first argues that the norm creates man as distinct from other animals. This is the fundamental function of the taboo whose mere existence signals that humans are creatures unlike other animals because they regulate their sexuality using norms. The taboo thus turns human sexual instinct into what Lacan calls drive—drive is different from instinct precisely because it is regulated by changeable rules.¹⁴
 
For Schneider, in contrast to Lévi-Strauss, the incest taboo has merely conscious effects. Its content is known by all members of a community; otherwise, as Schneider reasons, it would not be a taboo. As he writes in an essay titled “The Meaning of Incest,” the taboo defines where our primary socialization unit ends and the secondary units begin. Its sole purpose is to separate the nuclear family from the domain of permitted sexual partners. As such, the taboo regulates the relations within the family, differentiates its generations, and limits the sexual rights of the father while, at the same time, shoring up his power. If, on this way of thinking, the taboo restricts his rights, on the other hand, it grounds the father’s privileged position in the collective interest of the family members by giving the children (and the mother) a stake in maintaining the hierarchy that protects them against the first (namely, sexual) violation. Because of the taboo, the father is seen as the protector of a certain order and the one who adequately represents it.
 
For Chow, as for Schneider, such a nuclear family is a Western invention applicable only to certain civilizational and historical models. When these models are outlived, the taboo and the nuclear family no longer have the primary role and are giving way to other social norms and bonds. As a result, the father is becoming more like other members of the family. He is reduced from being the pater familias to being just a male member.
 
For Lévi-Strauss, as we see in the introduction to The Elementary Structures of Kinship, the primary role of the taboo is not to organize social ties, but to define culture as such. He explains that sexuality gives the varying content to the taboo because the sexual instinct is our only social instinct—hunger, in contrast, does not require another human being to be felt or satisfied. He says, for instance, “if the regulation of relations between the sexes represents an overflow of culture into nature, in another way sexual life is one beginning of social life in nature, for the sexual is man’s only instinct requiring the stimulation of another person” (12). Understood this way, the incest prohibition is the fundamental social rule because human sexuality exists in a social mode, and whatever rule regulates the way people organize the social bonds that make them into subjects must also regulate the condition for the possibility of their becoming subjects. Thus, as Lévi-Strauss offers in his formula, the taboo is the norm that allows for the transformation of “nature” into culture. It separates the human from the animal state of our evolution, and sets our sexuality on a separate track from the biological instinct.
 
The incest prohibition in the form of a ban on the father having sex with his daughter is only one possible content that can be attached to the fundamental taboo. The taboo as such neither has nor needs any content. It is differentiated as a function—its function being to separate the orders of nature and culture and make each possible. As Lévi-Strauss says, the taboo is that cultural norm “where nature transcends itself,” evolves into the self-legislating system we call culture, and allows the new order to superimpose itself over the old one (25). By “superimpose” Lévi-Strauss means that the new code is rewriting and reshaping the old one. Such culture is the realization of this animal’s nature, and this animal’s nature is manifested as a superimposition of its own constructs over, and as, its “nature.” The relationship between culture and the taboo, hence, does not go in one direction, as Schneider assumes. It is, rather, reciprocal. Culture constitutes the origin of the prohibition, and the prohibition provides the condition of possibility for culture’s differentiation from nature. Because these are reciprocal relations, there is no such thing as nature as such, there is only “nature,” which is created by culture’s separation from it. At the same time, there can be no such thing as “pure” cultural construction, because culture needs a source for itself, which it finds in the human nature.
 
This distinction of nature from culture is a universal trait and because it is a universal trait all human cultures are organized around restrictions on sexual relations. Whether the ban includes the mother, as the first myth of psychoanalysis indicates, is less important than the fact that the norm is applied to sexuality. Legislating sexuality and building culture around sexual rules is, in Lévi-Strauss’s way of thinking, the most natural tendency of the human animal. And this is the simplest way to understand what the incest taboo and other taboos are: norms that bring together our social and our sexual beings. The understanding Lévi-Strauss thus reaches is that culture is “naturally” a sexual system, just as it is “naturally” a constructed social system.¹⁵
 
Based on this understanding of the nature-culture relation, we can correct the basic assumption of cultural construction theories to say that culture is not a cultural but, rather, a natural construction humans make instinctively. Our most natural behavior is to organize sexual relations with others around us and to do so by imposing certain rules. Through this process of rewriting or substitution of nature with culture, “natural” roles become defined by custom. A female human becomes “mother,” a male “father,” where “father” and “mother” are both, and equally so, what Lévi-Strauss calls social relationships (30). Or, as the case may be, the female becomes a “father” as she assumes a specific function (itself defined by the history of its relations) within the social web.¹⁶ In such a constellation, because as a norm it is first defined through its function, the incest taboo can be assigned just about any content, even content that has no apparent relation to sex. The grounding function of the taboo, however, is always the same—it makes the regulation of sexuality and the organization of social structures into one and the same process.
 
The fact that the function, not the content, is the primary definition of the taboo, implies also that the taboo can be broken without permanent damage to the group it defines. A transgression of the ban still confirms the basic function of the taboo, that sexuality is regulated and that society is organized based on sexual rules.
 
This understanding of kinship has to part ways with Lévi-Strauss by the third chapter of The Elementary Structures of Kinship, where he turns his attention away from the fundamental principles and toward the different historical contents the taboo has had in organizing the nature/culture opposition—when he says, for instance, that “the incest prohibition expresses the transition from the natural fact of consanguinity to the cultural fact of alliance” (30). As Schneider notes, from this point on Lévi-Strauss operates with a reified notion of nature. Specifically, Lévi-Strauss assumes that (a) there is such a thing as a natural fact that was (b) at some point in time overcome in favor of a new, cultural organization. And so we can conclude that, in fact, in The Elementary Structures of Kinship there are two distinct theories involving the incest taboo. The philosophical one we followed above explains the origin of culture in the nature/culture opposition, thus demonstrating that cultural constructs have their bases in nature. The second is a naturalist theory. It concerns “marriage prohibitions” and is a variant of the theory of scarcity (32). This latter, ethnocentric theory (ethnocentric because it still thinks culture in terms of one, coherent system, not because it is Western) explains how human groups form kinships through the “exchange of women” and why exogamous marriage enhances the family’s survival chances. It is this “marriage prohibition” theory that, as Butler says (29), has been surpassed as a universal theory and is no longer seen as a norm-defining rule. The theory, however, is not wrong (when separated from Lévi-Strauss’s tendency to naturalize gender roles and sex), but remains one among others that can help explain how social bonds are formed.
 

The Theory of the Subject

 
What we thus take from Lévi-Strauss is a theory of the subject, which—paradoxically perhaps—the extant poststructuralist critique of kinship lacks. To be sure, neither Schneider nor Butler nor Chow would think of their work this way. They believe they have a theory of the subject contained in the assumption that the subject is a product of power relations and an ideological construct. Moreover, they believe that poststructuralism in general is a theory of the subject because for them its most basic goal is to show how subjects are produced. In Butler’s account in The Psychic Life of Power for instance, the unconscious is said to be a product of power relations. But for all the critique of ideology, neither Schneider nor Butler nor Chow can explain where this formative power, which is constitutive of the subject, of the unconscious, etc., comes from or what it is.
 
The lack of a theory of the subject is the reason why the critique of kinship treats all cultural norms as constructed the same way—eating habits, choice of sexual partner, what have you. We can easily demonstrate that this is the case by turning again to the same Gayle Rubin quotation that Chow refers to, and which sums up the poststructuralist critique of Lévi-Strauss thus: “Hunger is hunger, but what counts as food is culturally determined and obtained.… Sex is sex, but what counts as sex is equally culturally determined and obtained” (qtd. in Chow 134). Rubin is correct that what counts as food is culturally determined, but neither hunger nor food form the subject the way sex does. Hunger and food play a role in subject formation in the sense that their cultural determination—what we consider to be food—becomes a part of the subjectivity of the subject. Sex is unlike food because it also has a fundamental role no other instinct has. This does not mean that rules of sexual behavior are not culturally constructed. They are, just as Rubin suggests. But cultural construction is itself defined by, and grounded in, our sexual nature. So it is more likely that what counts as culture is determined by sex than the other way round—that what counts as sex is, simply and only, decided by custom.
 
We can illustrate the same kind of lack of the theory of the subject with another example, Diana Fuss’s influential version of deconstructive feminism, which builds on the same set of assumptions about culture present in Rubin’s, Butler’s, and Chow’s work. I choose Fuss (Essentially Speaking) here because she relies on Lacan’s theory of the subject and presents his account as compatible with Foucault’s, which is behind the extant critique of kinship. Briefly then, according to Fuss, Lacan shows that the subject is best understood as a subject-position:
 

It is especially significant that throughout his work Lacan always speaks in terms of the place of the subject. His subversive rewriting of Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum) as “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think” provides a good case in point (“The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud” 1977, 166). The emphasis in Lacan’s anti-cogito falls on the “where”; the question “who is speaking” can only be answered by shifting the grounds of the question to “where am I speaking from?”

 

Fuss then pushes the metaphor of place to its limit:

 

But it is important to remember that the place of the subject is nonetheless, ultimately, unlocalizable; were we able to fix the whereabouts of the subject in a static field of determinism, then we would be back in the realm of ego psychology.

(29-30)

 

The subject, as Fuss tells us, is displaced from the proper place it had as the Cartesian autonomous self capable of observing itself fully. That it is displaced means that it does not get its identity from within itself but from relations with other subjects. The position of such a subject is not fixed, at least in the sense that we can never be certain which elements determine it and how, and which ones do not.

 
The field of subject formation, however, is itself a function of another instance, not as unlocalizable and free-floating as Fuss implies. The subject-place is fixed in the sense that it is determined, in at least three ways. First, it is determined with respect to what this field is—a manifestation of human sexuality. Second, it is determined with respect to the instances that relate to one another in every subject-relation—namely the unconscious. And, third, it is determined with respect to phantasy—the ego continues to think of itself in terms of the same, continuous self of the Cartesian cogito.
 
Fuss is right that, for Lacan, the subject is a function of the place and the place does not occupy a specific spatial location—the subject is an effect of the interactions between shifting networks. But these networks do not take just any form. They are, rather, structured following precise scenarios of human sexuality, and so are our cultural constructions. The relations within these networks are fixed to, and orientated by, the unconscious that relates every individual to the Other and to every other. Fuss’s theory—like Schneider’s, Butler’s, and Chow’s critiques of kinship—neglects these restrictions. The exclusion of these determinations gives her the illusion that subject positions are interchangeable, which in turn becomes the basis for her further argument about cultural construction, that the essence of feminism is politics and politics itself is a matter of ever-shifting coalitions.
 

Conclusion

 
Rey Chow’s article, “A Pain in the Neck, a Scene of ‘Incest,’ and Other Enigmas of an Allegorical Cinema” expresses a generally accepted poststructuralist view that the new forms of the incest prohibition are now, toward the end of the patriarchal epoch, becoming “thinkable” as we recognize the naturalist bias built into certain Western concepts, and as we consider other norms besides those that sustain the heterosexual nuclear family (125). Strictly speaking, this is the case only with conscious norms or, rather, with those norms we have made conscious. The unconscious structure of the subject, however, is as little, or as much, thinkable today as it was when Sophocles wrote Oedipus Tyrannus. This is not because we have not yet, to use an old phrase, penetrated the darkness, but more simply because we have not stopped being sexual-social beings.
 
Derrida might be addressing this unconscious function that escapes us when he proposes in “Structure, Sign, and Play,” his essay on Lévi-Strauss and structuralism, that the origin of thought evades though even as philosophy is more capable of locating its origin:

It could perhaps be said that the whole of philosophical conceptualization, systematically relating itself to the nature/culture opposition, is designed to leave in the domain of the unthinkable the very thing that makes conceptualization possible: the origin of the prohibition of incest.
 

(254)

 

Poststructuralism has made the taboo more thinkable by revealing its origin in patriarchal or heterosexual or ethnocentric notions of family, as Chow argues. But as poststructuralism reveals this origin of thought, as it deconstructs Western metaphysics, it must also acknowledge its own limitation. It has to recognize that it too leaves something in the domain of the unthinkable.

 
David Schneider’s analysis of Yap culture in A Critique of the Study of Kinship is a case in point. Searching for a Yap self-representation different from the one his ethnocentric, Western methodology directed him to discover, Schneider forgets that the very notion of culture is what gives him the basis to distinguish between the Yap and the West in the first place, and sees relative differences between the systems as destabilizing the entire edifice of his scientific assumptions. He thus gets caught up in what Paul de Man identifies as revolving-door reading (“Autobiography as De-facement”)¹⁷ because he believes that he has applied too little deconstruction. As a result he tries ever harder.
 
Subsequent critiques of kinship theory, like Butler’s and Chow’s, follow Schneider into this revolving-door of cultural constructivism where all norms appear the same, forgetting that their own work is predicated on the absolute difference between nature and culture. As a result, they do not know what to do with, or how to explain, the function that makes culture, the function that Lévi-Strauss saw in the incest taboo and before it in the unconscious.
 
If we do not allow that there is a limit to what cultural construction can construct (and to what deconstruction can deconstruct), it is hard to see how our theories—psychoanalysis, deconstruction, anthropology, feminism, queer and postcolonial studies, or another of their hybrids—can approach culture and what appears to be a true heteronormativity, the one that has to do with the unconscious.