Map and Territory

In her seminal book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), philosopher Judith Butler claimed that gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original. Her position mirrored that of the Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski’s about the endless mapping of maps which all seem to point to some unknowable territory, and also to Gregory Bateson’s, in his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), regarding the confusion between the map and the territory, and the essential impossibility of ever really knowing what the territory is:

We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out . . . and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum (pp. 454-455).

In the case of Butler’s theory on “performativity” the question was of gender, the fact that there is no original to the representation of it today. If we push the question of “homosexuality” back, what we find is a similar “infinite regress” for the mental world of the social construction of homosexuality as identity is but a series of maps without territory. We can never really know the “Ding-an-Sich” (the “thing itself”) cautioned Immanuel Kante two centuries ago, yet this is precisely what we have said in self-identifying as homosexual: not only that we have found in the word, which is but a map, the thing itself, but that we are that thing, we are the word. “[T]o describe something as seamless as lived experience, one needs categories,” David Valentine once wrote. “Yet a danger arises when those categories come to be seen as valid descriptions of experience rather than as tools used to apprehend that experience” (2004, p. 217).

The problem, Korzybski explained, was in our patterns of thought, or orientation, which was based on an Aristotelian dualism, what Monique Wittig called the “categories of opposition” (1990, p. 5): light/dark, even/odd, new/old, straight/curved, good/bad, woman/man, white/black. As pointed out by Bateson, when presented with the question of the map/territory confusion in the question, “‘Do you ask what it’s made of—earth, fire, water, etc?’” or the question, “‘What is its pattern?’” (1972, p. 449), Aristotle chose a system of patterns (maps) over essentiality (territory). The word “homosexuality” answers a question about a person’s patterns (map), not about what they are made of (territory).

Korzybski, through his theory of general semantics and “the denial of the ‘is’ of identity” (1933/1958, p. 11), sought to re-orient the individual to a non-Aristotelian way of thinking in order to avoid such map/territory confusions. According to Korzybski, in the Aristotelian orientation words are understood primarily through their “intensional” definitions, whereas in a non-Aristotelian orientation they are understood through their “extensional” definitions. Logicians use the terms “intension” to describe the assumed intrinsic meaning of words, and “extension” to describe the objects that those words refer to in the material world. Different philosophers or mathematicians have distinguished intension and extension from one another in different ways, for example, through the words “sense” (for intension) and “meaning” (for extension), or semantic and pragmatic, respectively, or even a priori and a posteriori types of knowledge. 

While an intensional definition of homosexual might be a person who has sex with or is sexually attracted to members of the same sex, an extensionally defined homosexual, conversely, would need to point to every single person in the material world (past, present, future) who has or might ever have sex with, or erotically desire, members of the same sex—an impossibility, considering that some, perhaps many, of these people might never admit to such a thing, or even recognize, within themselves, said desire since it would likely fall outside the map of what they believe to be “a homosexual.” In fact, the material world contains no such “thing” as a homosexual because by its very definition the word, having been imbued with meaning, is solely intensional.

We live in a map-oriented, intensionally-defined culture. People conflate words with the objects that those words point to. The surrealist painter Rene Magritte understood this when he painted a picture of a pipe with the captioned phrase, “This is not a pipe.” George W. Bush, former President of the United States, would never have been able to induce much fear by projecting images of an Iraqi mother coddling her infant child, but he could and often did talk about “The Axis of Evil.” Likewise, right-wing fundamentalists, while debating the “issue” of homosexuality, do not speak about one’s next door neighbours named John or Frank or Sally and Heather, but they can and often do talk about an intensional definition of homosexuality, “The Homosexual,” to great effect.

When 2012 United States Presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann, an Evangelical Christian, referenced homosexuality as “personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement” (Stolberg, NY Times, 2011a), her intensional use of the word “homosexuality” was not a dialectical rendering of meaning based in history, reason, fact, or “proper evaluation,” or else she might have more accurately said that oppression causes personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement. To paraphrase Wittig from “The Category of Sex” (1982), it is oppression that created homosexuality, not the contrary. Bachmann reversed cause and effect so that instead of oppression it was now homosexuality itself that had caused victimhood. Bachmann’s words capitalized on a “similarity of structure in the map-territory relationship” through a “deliberate, professionally planned distortion” of the intensionally-defined word, homosexuality, which “results only in breeding fears, anxieties, hates, etc., which disorganize individuals and even nations” (Korzybski, 1933/1958, p. ix).

As maps, Bachmann’s words carried no meaning outside of their insular ideology: they did not point to any territory in the material world but became their own referent, “the thing in itself.” It should come as no surprise that her husband, Marcus Bachmann, PhD., has long operated Christian counselling centres that advocate conversion (“pray away the gay”) therapy, since conversion therapy, simply stated, operates in maps, not territories. That millions worldwide believe what the Bachmanns and others just like them still to this day have to say about homosexuality speaks to the power of the intensionally-defined word. As Wittig noted: “Meaning is not visible, and as such appears to be outside of language” (1983, p. 68). Always one must look beyond words, or trans-linguistically, to find meaning. For advocates of conversion therapy, however, the intensional word is now “the thing.”