...having just discussed Peter Thiel, it's disturbing how a feminist science fiction author could advocate something almost as frightening. I've just read an incisive piece that attributes the blindspots in Sheri S Tepper's work to second-wave feminism, "a movement that was largely defined by and for middle-class white women and notoriously failed to deal with the complex intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality that women outside that narrow bracket negotiate daily".
In an interview back in 2008, Tepper announced her faith in eugenics as a means of dealing with persons:
"who look human but who are uncontrollable or who habitually hurt other people will no longer be defined as human,” she said in a 2008 interview with Strange Horizons .
Walled cities will be built in the wastelands and all nonhuman persons will be sterilized and sent to live there, together, raising their own food. There will be no traffic in, no traffic out, except for studies that may be done which might lead to a ‘cure.’ There will be no chat about this sequestration being ‘inhumane,’ because the persons so confined are not human by definition.
(Whether she is unaware that forced sterilization has been used routinely against low-income women of color well into the 1970s, or whether she simply doesn’t care, isn’t clear.) Tepper’s ideal society is a terrifying dystopia in and of itself, and once you know that about her, it’s easy to see those politics reflected in everything she writes".
...we struggle to find the joy that life is haunted by/but what ends when the symbols shatter? What happens to hearts?
I'm aware how there is a very real fear in our culture of how the social death can precede the physical death. Loss of employment or retirement loom large for many men, and suicide or the development of addictive behavioural patterns can be reactions to the loss of public recognition, and hence personal identity. There are other management techniques of course: how else to explain the seeking of refuge in spaces that are deliberately furnished to appear as non-domestic (i.e. non feminine) as possible? Think of the strictly utilitarian, as opposed to decorative, stools etc in your typical pub or workshed, for example. Many rural communities in Australia have taken this onboard to the point of establishing The Men's Shed on a permanent basis, as a place where some men, who would otherwise be at a loose end, can gather free of charge to use hardware on assorted building projects, thereby circumventing any excessive need to carouse, gamble, fuck or fight...each of which may be symptomatic of boredom and depression. It goes without saying that some effort is also expended to promote suicide prevention initiatives.
It's like my mother has always told me: "many women get used to invisibility fairly early in their lives, while more than a few men struggle to accept not always getting a parade". I hope this is changing over time. I'm able to recognise this palpable sense of dread from the perspective of the female character in the opening sequence of Safe that I've posted here: the mobile privatisation of the car winding its way through the dark labyrinth of suburbia to the accompaniment of an eerie synth score. Julianne Moore's character is basically swallowed by space.But I also get what my mum was trying to tell me: Age eventually unmaketh the man too. To drive the point home further, just look at how no one has yet written the white male middleclass equivalent of Betty Friedan's pioneering feminist work, The Feminine Mystique.
Other than Douglas P, whose lyrics I've quoted, perhaps it is not surprising how more forthcoming the New Queer Cinema has been about some of these dilemmas. I've decided to put up here some of my favourite scenes from movies by Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant that capture entrapment, abjection and invisibility particularly well. John Hurt's character in Love and Death in Long Island is a case in point of someone who is reawakened by finding something beautiful where he least expected to find it. Many people can relate to this as this is surely part of the appeal of falling in love: a form of contingency that reminds you how life still has hitherto unknown possibilities, sometimes even for the most lowly, unappreciated self, who otherwise holds out few prospects for redemption. This brings my mind back to lyrics. Sadly, either possibility was ultimately too overwhelming for poor old Ian Curtis to handle, and he detailed this struggle in almost every song he ever wrote. For example, who can forget that Joy Division's debut album was called Unknown Pleasures, and what about this line too from the song "Twenty Four Hours" featured on Closer, "I never realised the lengths I'd have to go/all the darkest corners of a sense I didn't know/just for one moment I heard somebody call/look beyond the day at hand/there's nothing there at all".
You know it's strange, I started thinking about this stuff last night as I was watching the new series of Doctor Who. I'm sure many people dream of having the Doctor's lifestyle: just like a cowboy, he is a free agent who can travel but still periodically enter communities to perform good works, before departing again. Nirgal was similar in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series: he was a loner, but he wasn't a hermit. I find much to agree with too in Houellebecq's observation (in his Lovecraft book) that people who like to read and write are generally not that enthused about life in other respects.
These proclivities can be distinguished from the extremes I've posted here. I'm someone who likes pathos, and there is plenty to be found in the clips which follow. But I'll also never forget the guy at university who could only [read: exclusively] listen to Closer, who worked as a toolmaker. His other obsession was the tragic life of Jean Seberg. What I look back on most of all though is the stories he used to tell about growing up and the people he had encountered at work. So I'll recount my personal favourite about his working life: he had a workmate who used to get up early every morning to read Proust ("struggling to find the joy" perhaps). Anyway, one morning the workmate was talking continuously about the dilemmas faced by Raskolnikov (i.e. the anti-hero of Dostoyevsky's novel, Crime and Punishment). He disappeared into the bathroom at lunchtime, eventually re-emerging with a shaved head. His scalp was bleeding profusely as he'd used a very crude razor. Everyone just stood there in silence, uncertain how to react. What would be his next move? The man placed one of the workstools on the bench and sat himself down: "Now that I've got your attention, let me ask again: does anyone remember Raskolnikov?" Why be so demonstrative to try to get across a point? I won't pretend to understand, and suspect I'm not alone in that respect. So you might reasonably expect that psychiatric treatment would follow and this man would be certified as unfit for work, but according to my friend, that is not what happened. Perhaps these struggles are more common afterall than many of us realise, and people are sometimes able to find ways to manage their suffering more effectively than they're usually given credit for by so-called "experts" in mental health?
That's a pretty important point, so permit me to say something more about it. I don't claim any sort of superiority here because I've always preferred to think in terms of an anecdote Lacan related. A specialist in "ego psychology" informed him that she felt she was a good therapist thanks to her "strong personality". Lacan confessed that he felt the exact opposite: it was because he could empathise so closely with his patients' distress that he was able to treat them. In a manner of speaking, "there but for the grace of God go I".
Seeing I've posted the opening of Last Days here, it is fitting to close this post with lyrics by a band from the days of Seattle's grunge scene: the song is called "The Birds", and the band is Skin Yard. It's such a great summation that there is little I can add. It's worth watching the rest of the film too as there is another great scene of a door to door salesman meeting Blake at his isolated mansion. Blake is preoccupied by his own problems to the point he can barely communicate. To his credit, the salesman is not fazed by Blake's demeanor, or his disheveled appearance (Blake is also wearing women's clothing at the time).
I'm sitting in a rather small room My walls have nothing to say I memorize every hole Squinting eyes all day
Fold me up and bring me home With the night I cannot stay!
Violence surrounds my house I'm a loco loser Springing the noose, stay rather far
I rest from the fact The birds cover trees on my side Violence surrounds my house So I sit on the side These birds are mine, together The friends of your blood I smile, then divide The birds all take mine
Fold me up and bring me home No I will not stay These birds surround my house I cannot stay
I'm sitting in a rather small room My walls have nothing to say I memorize every hole Squinting eyes all day
Resting from the fact the birds The birds cover the trees, my side Violence surrounds my house So I sit on the side
These birds My mind Together They fly
On the side I hide my eyes Stole my mind I feel my flight
The milkman passes through today, on his way He's bringing home the noose of mine The birds are his tree I'm sitting in a rather small room My eyes of nothing left to say I can remember a time I was As pretty as the day!
I was reviewing the list of influences on Coffin Joe and it got me thinking more generally about transgression and the need to complicate the gender blindness that can follow on from uncritical use of this concept. I thought one promising starting point would be to get hold of Martine Beugnet's book on the so-called "new French extremity", entitled Cinema and sensation: French film and the art of transgression. Derridata, have you encountered this book in your travels, and if so, do you feel it departs in any significant ways from Shaviro's The Cinematic Body? Methodologically, does it follow the default setting of the continental philosophy blogosphere of performing deep readings of canonical texts and applying them in an analytically suspect way to this cultural phenomenon, or does it really contextualise them social theoretically so that they are saying something about life in France at the beginning of the 21st century?
Given the biological themes of this blog, it is hard to ignore her starting point that film is a "medium of the senses". I like the description of the book though how it claims to move from the cinematic apparatus itself to broader social issues:
"Martine Beugnet focuses on the crucial and fertile overlaps that occur between experimental and mainstream cinema. Her book draws on the writings of Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and Bataille, among others, but first and foremost, she develops her arguments from the films themselves, from the comprehensive description of specific sequences, techniques, and motifs that allows us to engage with the works as material events and as thinking processes. In turn, she demonstrates how the films, envisaged as forms of embodied thought, offer alternative ways of approaching today’s most burning sociocultural debates—from the growing supremacy of technology, to globalization, exile, and exclusion".
I'mintrigued by the prospect of encompassing "today's most burning sociocultural debates", particularly how the foregrounding of globalization would seem to intimate the applicability ofher critical approach to comparable studies of other films as epiphenomena of cultural transgression. I don't know the extent to which she undertakes a feminist analysis that is reflexive enough to epistemologically qualify Bataille's contribution in light of the formative influence of his companion Laure (as per, for example, Michel Surya's Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography).
But I do know that when I start to think about this topic I admit to feeling a lot like I imagine Herbert Marcuse did in Eros & Civilization, shyly tiptoeing past the cavalcade of perversions he attempted to introduce on account of their [alleged] radical emancipatory potential. For me, reading or thinking about such possibilities demands something like Martine Beugenet's approach: I treat the reading as a material event. If I am repulsed by it I admit I will have a hard time moving forward by articulating why I feel that way, letalone changing my reaction, irrespective of whether a prima facie political reason can be advanced to try to convince me otherwise. So my test in the first instance is gauging how you respond to these kinds of positions. Be sure to drill down to the comments in that post about bell hooks before you try to reach any decisions about your receptiveness to transgression. Another affirmative perspective can be found here, along with the aforementioned Shaviro's extreme take on its biological ramifications, thanks to a reading of Michel Foucault. Transgressors would no doubt sneer at the idea of opposition (claiming it presupposes transgression), but a representative example is Ashley Tauchert's Against Transgression. Closer to my own social theoretical views are Anthony Elliott's objections to queer theory more generally (of which transgression forms a subset), which can be found in his Concepts of the Self.
But I'll finish up here by leaving it to some examples of transgressive filmmaking to serve as a litmus test. That is my only justification for posting them here. I fear they are treading some dangerous misogynistic territory, so I advise extreme caution in case anyone else chooses to watch them (especially the second half of the final clip). But the test for me is whether the advocates of transgression would be willing to redeem even these activities, letalone their filmic representation, or do they agree that limits and distinctions occasionally have to be drawn because some things are simply beyond the pale? By the same token, how much latitude must be given in light of the fact that there is a diverse range of cultural logics, or are they merely accentuated for the reasons Beugnet adduces i.e. an explosion of difference in response to globalization?
Graphic Sexual Horror is an interesting case though because it documents political censure of a bondage website by an administration under the Patriot Act that was itself willing to use torture as an interrogation technique, in addition to the greed of the website's creator (and its effect on his "models"), so I certainly don't wish to imply that the issues are always cut and dried. It would be interesting to compare the motivations of that webmaster with those of the Japanese maker of genki porn. In the latter case the documentary makes little effort to establish how representative such an extreme genre is, letalone attempt to challenge any justification behind it.
My only point then in regard to each is that Beugnet's book might help me to get a better critical perspective on what is at stake in these kinds of debates, thus also hopefully making it unnecessary to automatically appeal to Videodrome as sole evidence of a transgressive "postmodern" media culture.
This story is quite old by now, so evidently it had somehow passed me by. But given the footage of the accompanying gender studies class, I'm starting to wonder if any Japanese academics have published on this very disturbing phenomena. I can see possible connections to media studies "effects" type approaches as well, especially in light of the footage from the "Rapeman" anime featured in the report (which, incidentally, if memory serves me correctly, was the inspiration for the name Steve Albini chose for one of his groups once Big Black had dissolved).
By sheer coincidence I had just touched on this topic after reading the critique of Yoko Ono and John Lennon's short film Rape (1969) in Joan Hawkins' Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde , which is more concerned with the scopophilia of the cinematic apparatus. It is unclear to me though how a feminist film critic, even one generally receptive to Continental philosophy, would respond to a reading method such as this, which spends more time talking about Badiou's framework of the Truth-Event than the generative structure of patriarchy per se. However, given the brevity of this posting, I make no pretence to having unpacked the relevant stakes according to each theoretical position. In any case, here is the film in question:
Angela Davis ; moderator, Rachel Herzing ; speakers, Mabel Williams, Kathleen Cleaver. Mabel Williams and Kathleen Cleaver, two women of the 60s Black liberation struggle share their personal experiences -- resisting the KKK and police repression, forced exile and their international experiences in Third World nations -- and how their their story relates to the struggle today. Recorded in Oakland, California on March 14, 2004. Program presented by Freedom Archives, East Side Arts Alliance, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. 72 min. Dist.: Freedom Archives 72 min. Courtesy of the Freedom Archives, San Francisco
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"Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do; such as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe" (David Stove The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies 1991: 188)
