Stewart 6

 

So what does Hacking see as "autonomous" about gays and garçons de café but not about splits? First, it is of course understood that the point about the appearance of the gay person is actually a point about the appearance of the "heterosexual" and "homosexual" kinds of person. The idea that we have "sexualities," and further that those have "orientations," and even further that these divide people into natural kinds, is a (dubious) notion that has only recently been put into practice. Naturalization aside, being straight or gay or anything in between is considered a way to be a kind of person, and definitely not only with respect to sexual activity.

With regards to the garçon de café, we are speaking about the showing up of a phenomenon inextricably embedded in a particular social climate and context. What did this special waiter have out of the ordinary? Here we should, as Hacking does, ask for Sartre's description: "His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly, his eyes express an interest too solicitous for the order of the customer."12 Now, it's not as if Parisian garçons de café awaited such a description as Sartre provided before they could come into being. This is not Hacking's point. Rather, the precondition for the existence of these special coffee-house servers is to be found in the particular social history of Paris. The Parisian café was, after all, a crucial site of movements in art, philosophy, literary criticism, etc. Those cafés were sites of a particular social climate; they had particular social significance. Sartre's description of the garçons de café is also a description of their place within a particular, localized unfolding of social events and relations. Hacking's point is that it was possible to perform such a social role, that of the garçon de café, only relative to concrete social interactions going on in those cafés, against the background of particular social climates in Paris at a particular moment in history: "As with almost every way in which it is possible to be a person, it is possible to be a garcon de café only at a certain time, in a certain place, in a certain social setting. The feudal serf putting food on my lady's table can no more choose to be a garcon de café than he can choose to be lord of the manor."13

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12 Ibid., 231. Hacking is quoting Sartre from Being and Nothingness.

13 Hacking, 232.


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