Monday, July 05, 2010
Madonna's Return To Patriarchy And White Supremacy
So I did get into a few spats over at The Tomb again. And in defence of Nina "ain't I a comminist" Power's One Dimensional Woman, Leninino accused me of witchhunting and basically of being unconcerned with serious matters, touching only incidentally on such things as oppression, imperialism and exploitation in the course of "sectarian" persecution of leftist heretics.
Of course I think this is very unjust though I suppose sometimes how things happen here in this virtual scene, where I am chabert, it could seem that way. (I assume this marathon battle is the main exhibit of my Torquemadism, my victim here Linda Melvern, which put me beyond the pale. Ironically I nominated the post under which I conducted the auto-da-fé for a web journalism award!)
But really of course no specific individual or book is itself significant - it is only as examples and components of a massive cultural reaction, getting more fascistic by the day, that Zizek's, Power's, Badiou's or Hatherley's work is of the least interest. They don't sing or dance after all.
The reaction in ideology, the return of white male supremacism to nominally "left" discouse, is made up of nothing but a lot of insignificant widely consumed texts like Avatar, The Wire, and the amazingly racist and sexist War, Inc., and an immense mass of less widely consumed stuff like One Dimensional Woman and First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, articles in the New Left Review by Hatherley and Zizek, as well as the numerous "left" pieces, by Cohen, Hari, BHL, and others, picked apart with tweezers and magnifying glass by Leninino himself in his first book. The Zizz/Badiou circle are becoming really an avant-garde of racist and sexist reaction on the self-styled left, and for this reason their work is particularly interesting to me. It's not that I don't think Madonna's return to patriarchy and white supremacy is more important, or that I don't see that Avatar and 300 are...(well, perhaps they are less influential really on those who consume them than something like a Wendy Brown tract)... than Nina Power's or Toni Negri's patriarchal and white supremacist writings. It is simply that everyone is commenting on Madonna, and Lady Gaga, and it seems worthwhile to me to show how the reaction they lead is being accomplished by, and requires, many many smaller efforts, an army of culture workers, spinning topoi and themes into many products with a certain necessary diversity to be consumed by the diverse tastes of a diverse humanity. Without their work naturalising the reactionary discourses, re-creating the intelligibility of sexist and racist codes that for at least one generation became genuinely incomprehensible, re-establishing their acceptability and ubiquity, and policing the borders of culture production, the leaders, the big guns of reaction, are rendered helpless and pointless. For Madonna to lead a reaction (and not instead simply de-legitimise herself), with other major ruling class mass media entrepreneurs, to create an atmosphere where at one end of the cultural spectrum a leftist celebrity intellectual is evoking "half-ape blacks" to a wildly cheering white crowd while at the other end the tabloid press and tabloid teevee is likening the President of the US and his wife to chimps and gorillas, with much in between amounting to a general cultural shift in mythology as well as standards of civility, and a general re-establishment of patriarchy and white supremacy, Madonna and others in her stratosphere need the support not only of hundreds of middling celebrity intellectuals and culture producers like Zizz and Lars von Trier but of hundreds of thousands of little ideological soldiers like Power, to do little jobs like subject bell hooks to racist sexist ridicule and to re-popularise the monstrous image of the selfish masturbating slut who sleeps with the enemy and The Enemy and is the damnation of mankind that always emerges in times of economic depression. Power makes fashionably flexible use of an image of the sinfully sexual young woman, and ignoring (as does Nancy Fraser as well) that the important divide in feminism is (unsurprisingly) the class divide, and refusing (unlike Fraser) to recognise any feminists apart from the bourgeois feminists she can't name as such, she manages in the flimsy guise of a radical and daring unmasking of "consumer feminism" and "upbeat American feminism" (her apologetic labels for bourgeois white feminism) and its "complicity with capitalism" (her confused conception of its capitalist class politics) to scapegoat women and feminists not only for sexism and misogyny but for capitalist exploitation and imperialism. In the same vein of deflection and neutralisation of radical feminist critique of capitalist patriarchal white supremacy, her book laments that Shulamith Firestone's work is "deplorably neglected" without feeling the need to mention or acknowledge that the reason Firestone's major book, unlike her contemporary Kate Millet's work, has fallen into disfavour in American feminist circles is that anti-racist feminists like hooks and Angela Davis succeeded in making her extreme white supremacy (the final expression of a repudiated tradition of feminist "utopian" eugenics (pdf) and "futurist" technocratic colonialism associated before Firestone with Margaret Sanger and Charlotte Perkins Gilman) unacceptable even in bourgeois feminist realms. White supremacist capitalist politics even within radfem feminism were once sucessfully driven back by radical anti-racist feminist socialists. But the tide has turned and it may not be long before, flying a radical Left standard or another kind, a new generation of white feminists restore to acceptability the fretting over the "dangerously prolific reproduction" of the barbarians whose fertility needs to be controlled by an enlightened elite of benevolent "engineers" to eradicate the social pathologies explained by such "arguments" as Firestone's "Freudian family" fable of "race relations" (which resembles many a Zizekian musing about Jews or Muslims) or Brownmiller's suggestions that the Scottsboro Boys and victims of lynching were undoubtedly guilty after all.
Leninino I think knows very well that persecuting individuals for heresy is always an accusation one can make of any critic of any text's disavowed reactionary ideology, because any persuasive case about cultural and discursive matters, about ideology, is obliged to read texts, to chose and be specific. Avoiding this is always motivated by some ulterior motive, careerist colleagiality or to disguise the fallaciousness of one's charges. If you accuse a text of doing the ideological work of reaction, you are obliged to show how it does so, and what is required in such demonstrations - both close analysis and totalising synthesising interpretation - invariably can be caricatured as obsessively tenacious or whatever. Any interpretation can be accused of misreading, and any defence of an interpretation against such an accusation will appear dogged.
There is finally no line whatsoever between reading and nitpicking when it comes to exposing a text's racism, misogyny and orientalism; so rare is the overt statement of white supremacy that when it appears - (as in Zizek fairly frequently) - those disposed to apologise for subtler forms simply insist it really must mean something else. So context too is essential. No text is really a discrete object, and texts are now more open than ever, rarely read or watched/listened to in their entirety in order, and the way the white male supremacist revival is happening today involves a canny use of our mass media, its incessant and fragmented flow, to distribute the elements so that few individual texts bear in themselves all the parts necessary to identify the whole.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
In a conversation at Lenin's Tomb, this exchange
ReplyDeleteetranger
I thought so myself! (I wasn't at the meeting but I'm a reader of Power's blog and stuffs). So, I'm not really sure what the point of the quotation or Chabert's argument is.
Yesterday, 19:34:10 – Flag – J'aime – Reply
etranger
I can see why Chabert might have wanted to take issue with your affirmation that 'feminism often sees work as the opportunity for women's emancipation', which I nevertheless agree was taken out of context.
Feminism never was simply about seeing work as 'the' opportunity. Since its earlier days, one important aim of feminism (more bourgeoisie in tone for sure, but certainly not without merits), was self-emancipation through the development of one's own reason (whether this was accompanied by an attention to the problems of working class women or, let's say, the wives of working class men is another matter. Apart from a few exceptions (indeed de Beauvoir, for instance), it was not).
However, I do think that the critique of certain strands of contemporary feminism is a pertinent one and certainly most welcomed. Power is not the first to wage such a critique but this is not the point and I think she never said she was. It is, nevertheless, a critique that Power's detractors would be better off acknowledging rather than caricaturing. I am in fact in complete agreement with her claim that 'the question of sexism, new or otherwise, is inseparable from the question about women's global relation to the economy, and the way in which women are positioned in the labour force' (although, this perhaps, does not mean that sexism can be completely subsumed to the logic of capital).
sorry for the mistakes. I'm in a rush.
chabert
ReplyDeleteetranger the point is that one of the major achievements, and rule one of feminism, upon which all feminisms agree, is that women should not be silenced and ignored and through that silencing mischaracterised as stupid and passive. One of the things that someone who wants to participate in women's liberation has to do is acknowledge and respect women (intellectuals and activists included) and women's struggles - this means that while "consumerism" could be deplored you cannot say things like feminists have been prevented from "genuine thinking" by consumerism because that women can't and don't produce "genuine thinking" about work and exploitation is untrue and sexist and Power can only get away with saying it because she refuses to acknowlegde the existence of women. If you acknowledge Selma James are her comrades and Global Women's Strike, dozens of other intellectuals and authors and thousands upon thousands of other women militants, then this complaint, the basis of Power's book - because she doesn't follow up to produce genune thinking about work and exploitation, as James did, but just notes the need for it and the absence of it - cannot be sustained.
chabert contd
ReplyDeleteIt is a particularly feminist demand that anyone wishing to join in women's liberation struggle has an obligation to pay attention to the women already there, to acknowledge and respect women's struggles past and present. There is an obligation to an accurate portrait and not to perpetuate the that distorted vision of a world, justifying patriarchy, in which women, unable to "genuinely think" need the guidance of an endless parade of brilliant men who have a monopoly on critique and widsom and no difficulty producing "genuine thinking".
As radical women of color feminists in the US have stressed, there is an obligation not to return to or perpetuate the bourgeois white feminist's habits of silencing and marginalising, an obligation for feminists - male and female - to not treat radical women of color as invisible and mute. In Power's book there is for example stuff like the predication that there may even come a day when women refuse the label of feminism because of the imperialism of bourgeois feminists. Now this is the kind of arrogant dismissal which has split feminists of color from white feminists again and again; anti-imperialist women of color simply have not been heard by Power, because that day came decades ago. The blogger borwnfemipower has been eloquent and tireless on this for years in Power's own corner of the blogsphere and one would have to strain not to know of her argulents and those of countrless others; you could not miss it if you had done any real research into the liberal feminism, or consuler feminism, which Power takes as her "target". The adherents of Womanism have been saying this also forever. It's quite a common position for anti-imperialist radical women in the US. But it's like Power's prediction that feminists could be again relevant if only they follow her and her male authorities to "genuine thinking of work" and don't remain in their benighted and ignorant state. The fact is feminists have produced thorough critiques of capitalism from which Power and Lenin can learn, and ought to, and need to.
chabert contd
ReplyDeleteIt is an established feminist position (shared by Womanists and also radical women who refuse the label of feminist) that anyone who is interested in women's emacipation and anti-imperialism has an obligation to listen to, respect and acknowledge the women subjected to imperialism and their fellow women champions instead of erasing them and treating them as invisible and inaudible. So to say things like feminists have never developed a critique of capitalism and women had never rejected the label of feminism because of the cooptation by imperialist (and racist) discourse is just an affront to women which belittles women and reproduces the traditional jusification for the placing of Male authorities over us/them.
...Another example of this in Power's book is, after noting that the day may come when women may be as bold and radical as she and reject the label feminist because of the imperalist uses, she brands the Toni Morrison's "insights" "feminism" though Morrison has herself for thirty years and more rejected that label for grounds Power claims to be the first to discover herself and for others she has yet to understand as well. She has not listened to Morrison at all but is just instrumentalising her as a prop. This is a gesture so common it has two names in radical women of color theory specialised vocab.
chabert contd
ReplyDeleteAnd this is just the sort of contemptuous refusal to listen and acknowledge and respect women that those involved in women's movements have been discussing and analysing and battling for decades. Power's feminist intervention is purely discursive so the discursive sexism and misogyny is not a minor feature that one could ignore. So it is a huge step back, not forward, for another crop of academic white feminists, not involved in any activism apart from pamphleteering and analysis (which no one is denying is very useful, but is isolated), to announce the reform of feminism from a posture of not only total ignorance of the history of women's liberation movement, of womanism and feminism, of scholarship and theory, of activism and issues, but from a posture insisting that there is no necessity to acknowledge any feminists or feminism, to familiarise oneself with women's past and present struggles against exploitation as well as oppression, but notice only the commodity "empowerment" of Sex and The City and selected female targets of lampoons. This rendering, again, of thousands of women, feminists, womanists, anti-imperialists, invisible and inaudible serves of course to justify the project of placing these silent and confused women, prevent from "genuine thinking" by consumerism, under the guidance of bourgeois male authorities who have no such difficulty. It is a central feminist issue to acknowledge the critiques of capitalism, and the critiques of bourgeois feminism, and the critiques of imperialism, that feminists have produced instead of declaring there is none worth noticing and imposing male authorities like Marcuse, Badiou and Virno. This is just the sort of symbolic and cultural violence that anti-imperialist anti-racist feminist theory has been struggling against for half a century and more. The caricature of feminism as feebleminded and ignorant needing to be enlightened by the perky emissary of male chauvinists like Marcuse and Badiou, is simply the restoration of patriarchy, again, in this sphere, coopting its critique in a faintly novel but basically traditional manner.
chabert contd
ReplyDeleteAnd this is just the sort of contemptuous refusal to listen and acknowledge and respect women that those involved in women's movements have been discussing and analysing and battling for decades. Power's feminist intervention is purely discursive so the discursive sexism and misogyny is not a minor feature that one could ignore. So it is a huge step back, not forward, for another crop of academic white feminists, not involved in any activism apart from pamphleteering and analysis (which no one is denying is very useful, but is isolated), to announce the reform of feminism from a posture of not only total ignorance of the history of women's liberation movement, of womanism and feminism, of scholarship and theory, of activism and issues, but from a posture insisting that there is no necessity to acknowledge any feminists or feminism, to familiarise oneself with women's past and present struggles against exploitation as well as oppression, but notice only the commodity "empowerment" of Sex and The City and selected female targets of lampoons.
chabert contd
ReplyDeleteThis rendering, again, of thousands of women, feminists, womanists, anti-imperialists, invisible and inaudible serves of course to justify the project of placing these silent and confused women, prevent from "genuine thinking" by consumerism, under the guidance of bourgeois male authorities who have no such difficulty. It is a central feminist issue to acknowledge the critiques of capitalism, and the critiques of bourgeois feminism, and the critiques of imperialism, that feminists have produced instead of declaring there is none worth noticing and imposing male authorities like Marcuse, Badiou and Virno. This is just the sort of symbolic and cultural violence that anti-imperialist anti-racist feminist theory has been struggling against for half a century and more. The caricature of feminism as feebleminded and ignorant needing to be enlightened by the perky emissary of male chauvinists like Marcuse and Badiou, is simply the restoration of patriarchy, again, in this sphere, coopting its critique in a faintly novel but basically traditional manner.
That's my point.
Today, 04:43:45 – Flag – J'aime – Reply
Apprécié par2 Visiteurs
etranger commented:
, I was thinking about this yest., before you wrote your msg. I don't have the time to develop this fully (not that I wouldn't want to, but I am extremely busy with something else at the moment) but I think in a strange kind of way it's you here that are treating women as incapable (i.e., incapable of confronting harsh criticisms).
Ok - I agree with some of your points (e.g., generalisations are wrong, especially in light of the vast amount of feminist body of work on these issues and of the various strands of feminism; acknowledging other feminists' work is important - although perhaps, not essential for a polemical book, if you then do so in public meetings etc.) - and this is certainly a discussion worth having. But I don't see any problems with saying 'feminist like are' etc.
Again, yes women of colour have criticised the type of claims Power criticises before (even though the majority has not, or does not now, and in my view rightly so, refuse the label of feminism). But I think this is a criticism worth repeating. And, after all, is not Power aligning herself with them? Or are you suggesting that only women of colour have the right to wage these type of criticisms? Because this to me this is yet again a way of dividing or compartmentalising feminist struggle(s) which I never was comfortable with and which you explicitly criticise at the beginning of your msg.
It is not a matter of being 'better', more intellectually capable than 'them'. Power too is a woman who works for a living and 'self-exploit' herself in the process. I'm sure she is aware of this and does not pretend she is not. But, on a more general level, given that feminism for all its many and important successes has not succeeded in eliminating all forms of sexism and that the pr. of exploitation remains, I think to condemn certain strands of feminism that do not acknowledge the differential position of women in the global economy and/or that are a bit too quick to embrace consumption of goods as a form of liberation is perfectly logic.
Ok - I really have to go now. More for another time, perhaps. (and again sorry for mistakes...)
I put this here as a placeholder because I'm going to reply shortly.
NEW COMMENT
ReplyDeleteOkay first - it is a bit absurd to suggest that the failure to overthrow capitalism is feminism's failure. It is clearly communism's failure, or more broadly anti-capitalism. Feminism was basically specialised fcus on patriarchy. More successes there than for socialism. So one thing Power's - not hers alone, she's part of a large routine - complaint here is doing is scapegoating women and feminism for the failures of men and communism. It is a gesture not uncommonly involved in what Losurdo has diagnosed as the Left's "self-hatred" in recent decades.
That's just a little prologue because I want to be clear that the major problem with power is not details or things that could changer - her whole project is reactionary and it's the project of scapegoating women and feminism: for misogyny (she only objects to misogyny that can be blamed on women, and she is pretty vocal in celebrating misogynist elite and mass culture that has no "feminist accomplice", from Kant to Lacan, Badiou and Anti-Christ), for imperialism, for capitalism, and for the failures of the movements to which her Male mentors and sponsors claim allegiance. So it's not like I think there's something to salvage here. Rather those unobjectionable points there are in her book and lectures are in fact just appropriated to make the overall reactionary misogynist project of apologetics for capitalist white male supremacy saleable to its critics. But I'm going to have to read her text both for detail and interpret it synthetically, as a whole, to make a strong case for this.
Unless you're already persuaded, in which case don't hesitate to save me the trouble of the demonstration by saying so.
Of course there are clear limitations to the victories feminism can have over patriarchy, over sexist oppression, within the status quo of capitalist property relations. And it would be an exagggeration to say that feminism has even approached those limits in the never-communist world.
ReplyDeleteOkay so, a little more prologue, the view of the whole performance, and basically how it works by deploying the old reliable basics of misogyny, for example the old Pauline tactic of - Silence The Woman In Public:
ReplyDeletePower's shtick is to stand up and say "there's no genuine thinking" and "we need structural analysis" and "we have to think about capitalism". And that's it. It seems like an intro to some genuine thinking or a structural analysis but it's only the first of repeated complaints that there is no feminist structural analysis or genuine thinking between easy and commonplace sarcastic remarks about Sarah Palin's moose hunting and facebook fans, and tits and ass tv.
Now she claims "there's no genuine thinking" but it isn't true. She asserts this bullishly, repeatedly, without grounds, rather than addressing or acknowledging all the thinking there is and to avoid having to engage the actual _content_ of thinking and practise - of feminist praxis. Thius she offers immaterial labour and not only ignores the feminist critique of it (Federici and others) but guards against the discovery of it or the need to address it with this repeated insistence that no feminist genuine thinking exists. So the Male Genuine Thinking Monopoly is asserted, and painted as the saviour of the feebleminded feminists, generous and forgiving enough to guide and teach women even though so many just titter and masturbate as the noble projects of these Universal Heros "crumble to bits around her".
Okay so by silencing women, feminists, especially rwoc, Power then set up this reactionary theatre where she insists that women, who have achieved really quite a lot, a considerable portion of the feminist agenda against immense reaction, need to be lectured and guided by men who not only achieved nothing but presided over the loss of tremendous ground of the projects they influenced. Badiou, Virno, Negri, Marcuse - these guys are more than merely failures politically, they have been key influential figures of movements which suffered catastrophic defeat after defeat. So only by caricaturing feminism and portraying women as utterly brainless and lost and depraved can the Authority of White Bourgeois Men again be placed over us in an apparently seemly way. This is a theatre of the reassertion of White Male Bourgeois Supremacy on the Left. The discredited Universalism is revived as excuse for an attempt by a clique of self-appointed bourgeois white men, Platonists, Paulines, to retake control of anticapitalism, ideologically at least. This means denigrating and degrading women and people of colour, creating a mass of wayward and vicious suitable to be reform and control and restoring the old white bourgeois male supremacist history, where the white bourgeois males have always done all the "genuine thinking" and women and people of colour have always been subject to the barriers of their own vicious natures. So this project depends on restoring age old misogyny, and racism, in very faintly newish clothes. Power is performing within this greater project a role specific to her gender.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the reasons people are finding it difficult to understand feminist objections to ODW, Female Chauvinist Pigs, etc., is because there is a certain tendency in the zealous toward a knee-jerk (or as kenoma said, infantile) 'ultraleftism' that would grant any statement about the badness of capitalism, no matter how problematic or entangled in other discourses, carte blanche. Because books like ODW and FCP are ostensibly "anti-capitalist" in rhetoric, many people are unable to think through or uninterested in investigating their claims further.
ReplyDeleteDisappointed in some of the setbacks feminism has suffered in the past couple of decades? Well, these are, of course, capitalism's fault. And there's truth that very general statement- quite a bit of truth. What people are missing is that the problematic points in Power's argument are not based on her taking-aim at capitalism; they come when she begins to equate feminism (excuse me, American feminism) itself with consumerism, rendering unintelligible (to borrow Butler's phrase) the feminism of literally hundreds of thousands of American feminists.
Some people are having trouble recognizing that a critique of (for example) Sex and the City and its consumerist ethos is perfectly welcome and in order. American feminists have been doing it since the show first aired. What's not welcome or helpful is to proceed rhetorically as if Sex and the City is an avatar of American feminism. It isn't, and nobody involved in American feminism ever claimed that it was. The characters themselves don't claim to be feminists. The way in which Power performs this sleight of hand is uncomfortably familiar to feminists over here- especially feminists with minority identifications. Speaking for in order to speak against is a favorite tactic of those interested in enforcing patriachy. Silencing. Erasing subjectivity. Othering. Etc.
Any feminist familiar with the struggles/plight of U.S. feminists in particular should know better.
thanks anodyne...
ReplyDeleteyes the carte blanche for anything that basically says "capitalism", it's interesting because its a friend/enemy thing, a declaration of allegiance. Now Power aside for a moment, there is this visible kind of attentuation of discourse, I think as a result of the dominance of audiovisual texts. But it really is an erosion of reasoning capacity, and accounts for the forgiveness of so much vacuousness and inaccuracy. The applause is simply for someone standing up and declaring "a side" as a personal identity, like in an AA meeting.
Power's practise of the denial of subjectivity is swaggering; in ODW Power sighs in annoyance that when gays "marry and adopt, you know the restoration is truly upon us". You can really see how her rhetoric functions, here she finds a way to openly deplore the success of the struggle for gay rights simply by latching it to a complaint about "the restoration" and "the nuclear family". (I don't know how this stuff passes as Marxist, such familiar petty bourgeois rebellion but 100 years out of date, like the stereotype of woman she is so valiantly challenging.) It's the same as her lamenting the gains of the women's movement on employment, except it doesn't have the flimsy excuse made for it that what is really being deplored is women being forced to work. Because gays aren't being forced to marry and adopt. They are just such a disapointment! It confirms one's suspicions about how she uses declared "left" positions as a shield for reactionary rhetoric, images and assumptions. By declaring herself, simply identifying herself as on the Good Side, she gives herself a brevet to spout all the reactionary routines - women take men's jobs, gays destroy the sanctity of marriage - with all the contempt and mastery that is normally not permissible because she is presumed to be rooting for our team. The repeated declarations of "but I'm one of the Good Guys!" are presumed to protect all utterances however loathesome or wrong and especially their constant reconstruction of monopoly on subjectivity for the identity group as which and to which alone she speaks - the white male imperial core hererosexual we.
It's always clear "about whom" "we" are speaking. "We" speak about veiled teens (Badiou speaks for them to us.) Gays used to be so fun and adventuresome when they were persecuted! And so subversive too! Now they're just like 'us', what good are they? It's breathtaking. and of course it has a second condom on it, that it's "just a joke". Missy Power is so annoyed that when gays "marry and adopt, you know the restoration is upon us. Alternative living these days is more likely to refer to the fact that you've bolted a solar panel to your roof rather than undertaken any practical critique of the nuclear family." Badum cha.
excuse me, American feminism
ReplyDeleteyes this really bothered me also. I have to confess I am guilty of sometimes doing something similar in speech or emails, generalizing American to mean really the most "legit" part of the mass media; I would more accurately say "Mr. Newhouse" or the New Yorker or MSNBC. But it shouldn't get past a rewrite. Power's "upbeat American feminism", since she really never specifies (Valenti is isolated for ritual killing, but she makes no other effort to identify the objects of attack. She's not the only one doing that of course.) it seems like a deliberate vagueness to implicate all those who are "upbeat" and "American" a description that could as easily include Alice Walker as Gloria Steinem. She is after her rivals mainly though, I think; her description of the enemy is tailored to fit a few people who write in the Guardian and fictional characters most of whom as you say don't even identify as feminists.
But the vibrators, the importance of feminism's, or that bad strain, that evil feminism's complicity in consumerism - it seems to me that if you are going to real advance this case then find out if women who identify as feminists really do buy more vibrators and make-up and handbags than other women, and really do spend more money on their own pleasure than non feminist women and men. If the case is that a certain evil feminism is encouraging women to be consumers and selfish vapid bitches, and that's bad, try to demonstrate that this evil feminism is really successful at this. because certainly not every woman Power denounces for owning a vibrator, drinking and flashing teta on reality tv actually calls herself a feminist or would admit to the influence of thsi bad feminism on her. Maybe most of these "pure egoists" who so disgust Power won't even acknowledge any feminist input into their masturbation habits or anything else. I probably have more sympathy for Levy's concerns over "raunch" than you do but she doesn't attribute any of this to feminism iirr, and neither does Natasha Walter who is a bit dippy and fit for television. ODW differs from these other authors bemoaning the "hypersexualisation" by chalking it up to success, not failure, of feminism and women's improved self-sovereignty and self-determination. She's saying look what these women do with their freedom! Like Henry James of Isabel Archer - my god look what she does when independent! She's better off chattel of Goodwood. Just as Power is saying of gays who marry and adopt - look what they do with their civil liberties! they were better off when persecution forced them to live "alternative lifestyles".
I mean Levy's case is that commercial interests, the entertainment industry and fashion etc, use promises of empowerment, which are kind of new, with an older sales pitch of rebellion and danger, geared to the sensibilities of young women who feel entitled to self determination. It's simlilar but the differences are really crucial, because she is identifying the agent of this reaction as capitalists, the entertainment industry, where as Power is really identifying the agent of this "consumerism" as an evil feminism, as the expression of a bad uppity trait in feminism itself. Levy is basically coherent (I'm not totally on board with her, you can guess the reasons) but Power is really incoherent. The nuclear family is the enemy (especially when the couple is gay), but evil feminism has encouraged women to shun their proper roles as mother and wife and buy apartments before they have men and that makes them the enemy too.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I remember when Levy's book first came out, even the most uncritically sex positive of sex positive feminists didn't dismiss it out of hand. It makes good points- and I agree- it places blame squarely where it belongs. My quibbles with it are minor. Like just about every feminist I've ever met, I really do think the pornification of mainstream media is something to be resisted. But my reasoning regarding why is obviously different in key respects from Power's or Levy's.
ReplyDeleteI mention Levy's work, and FCP specifically, however, because it seems to have launched a thousand reactionary ships. After that book came out to wide acclaim, it was almost as if it had opened a floodgate. One that was holding back what had been theretofore barely suppressed glee over the notion that feminism had indeed changed the world, but only to transform young women into brainless man-pleasing sluts. Levy is invoked now by countless idiot pundits and journalists (Caitlin Flanagan, Roiphe, if I'm not mistaken- that ilk)... NYTimes columnists who are happy to report that women, 100 years after feminism, are actually "less happy" than they were before. (Yeah, sure- having to work outside AND still do the majority of the domestic/affective labor is a drag. We're working on it.) Now many a man thinks he's a "feminist" when he spouts protectionist bs: "does feminism really mean that women are now free to act as bad as men?" I've literally heard that question asked w/r/t female binge drinking, in the context of date rape. It's just so awful how women are now doing shots, all unladylike, partying like men, getting raped left and right. (Yup, that too is feminists' fault- give a girl freedom like a man, and she'll just bring violence on herself.) Women need to be controlled: for their own good.
If anything's proof that feminism still has its work cut out for it, it's this reversion to male ego-flattering myths about feminine vulnerability, and how easily women are manipulated (by men, by mass media, by capitalism- all for their sex, which they 'give' to others instead of experiencing it with them). It really seems as if what's been called phallogocentric discourse is willing to embrace and subsume feminist varieties, but only insofar as women are still relegated as Other, separate, the weaker vessel.
Don't even get me started on the gay marriage issue... I couldn't believe my eyes when I read some of the things certain bloggers have said about that.
ReplyDeleteTo think: some people claim gay people are humans with everyday lives, and hopes, and aspirations, some of which intersect with existing social norms. But that makes them sound an awful lot like straight people. (Difference, sameness, oh it's all so confusing!)
I just figured gay people exist in a neverland where all they had to do was be the opposite of everything I am, so as to subvert me culturally without receiving any of the social entitlements that should come with this. Who needs medical benefits and tax breaks and equal status under the law when you could function as a bohemian freedom-proxy for the privileged?
"it seems to me that if you are going to real advance this case then find out if women who identify as feminists really do buy more vibrators and make-up and handbags than other women, and really do spend more money on their own pleasure than non feminist women and men."
ReplyDeleteI agree. But even if you collected the data, and it indicated that wo/men who identify as feminists buy more stuff and generally consume more conspicuously, it'd still be hard to really prove that the consumption was caused by the feminist views. (It would be the proper place to start, though, definitely.)
One of the biggest demographics now is the tween market, and increasingly the pre-tween market. I would guess that you'd see a breakdown in consumption patterns like this: single women would, on average, spend considerably more on goods just for them than those who were cohabitating, married, or married w/ children. There'd be a smaller difference between what a man spends on himself, with or without a spouse/kids (there's already data on this that I've seen). However- and this is a key point- you'd have to look at exactly where the money was going for any of the data to make sense.
There would very likely be a huge increase in spending on consumer goods for kids in the married couples, making up for any discrepancy in spending with single folks. The single women would be more likely to buy items like clothing, luxury brands, expensive dinners- but they'd be much less likely than the married couples or men to buy big ticket items like cars, homes, and electronics. (Men spend just as much money on themselves as women; they just buy fewer, more expensive things.)
Essentially, people today spend what they make, and then some. So everyone is "consuming"- it's just a matter of whether they're buying themselves pedicures or camping trips or video games for the kids.
How can anyone not see how fishy this asymmetrical focus on how SINGLE, unmarried, presumably nymphomaniac women embroil themselves in consumerism, while ignoring the consumption patterns that come with being part of patriarchal institutions like marriage. I know that one can't talk about everything at once, but really, how can anybody spend so much time and energy lamenting that young single women pay to learn pole dancing while ignoring all of those environmentally unfriendly things married wo/men buy.
When people start talking about single men buying big screen TVs and iPhones with the same visceral disgust that they do women buying vibrators, I'll be convinced this is about consumerism and not sexuality.
thanks - yes i agree, about the actual consumption, and that it wouldn't prove much if it were to show that women who call themselves feminists had more virabtors, i was really just snarking about the utter lack of seriousness here, the assertions of just so stories as incontestable fact.
ReplyDeleteLaunching a thousand rectionary ships - yes. And Roiphe before her, the whole discourse of date rape (and I know you won't think I am denying there is rape on dates even nice middle classdates) restoring the notion that women are not only physically weaker than men (a significant factor in violence) but mentally (he "got her drunk"; erasing the distinction between drugging someone forcibly by ruse or otherwise and cajoling). This narrative, this mold and genre, of course gave rise to the really problematic backlash mythology that claimed all over college campuses were girls who regretted a night of bad sex and cried rape. Roiphe really was a key figure inn reviving a neoVictorianism; she did this not precisely through her assertions but through the pictures she painted, the whole genre she created, the setting and stock characters that would supply all future discussion of rape and young women's sexuality. At the same time the culture industry commodification the created the first really big pseudo-feminisms (first Dworkin, then Paglia), and the public discourse lost all contact with any praxis.
"When people start talking about single men buying big screen TVs and iPhones with the same visceral disgust that they do women buying vibrators, I'll be convinced this is about consumerism and not sexuality."
it's amazing that poledancing fits into this discourse deploring "female consumerism" with so few of the pulpit thumpers thinking to use that as a transition to a discussion of "male consumerism" (don't men buy that spectacle, along with videogames and motorcycles?) and maybe to get back to the obvious "consumerism" which is in any case a moralising petty bourgeois problem (the superrich want their consumers to consume but also to loathe themselves, like the Wall-E humanity, and then to sell them consolations for that self-loathing too) and not a Marxist one. Of course people want to consume - and the focus on the problem of this small slice of humanity who consume a lot and create a lot of garbage is a way of minimising the main problem for humanity which is that most people can't consume even adequately to basic comforts.
Levy doesn't claim any Marxism of course, so her moralising approach is unsurprising. But the thing about the achievements of feminism, gay rights and the civil rights movement regarding anti-discrimination in hiring that anyone who really has read any Marx and paid attention to Marxism has to recognise is the issue of not only the wrongs but THE POWER of labour. The working class has a certain power to disable the system of accumulation and from this power comes the power to overthrow the ruling class and establish capitalism. Exclusions from sectors of the working class experienced by women and black people meant exclusions from this power - that is, meant being subjected to all the wrongs of labour (exploitation, dispossession) and additional oppressions (including terrorism and routine violence) and additionally being deprived of the full participation in the situation form which the power of labour arises. The divide and conquer this involved weakened the whole ruling class but is also a specific wrong to the objects of discrimination and oppression.
ReplyDeleteThe civil rights movement, the women's movement, the gay rights movement, the anti-colonial struggles, hugely strengthened the working class, and brought it to the brink of real revolutionary potential in much of the capitalist world including the US and provoked the reaction that is now called "neo-liberalism" or "globalisation" which has been largely successful. One of the aspects of this is renewed racist and sexist and xenophobic divisions and unfortunately some of the left is not immune to the blandishments of the right. But Marxists especially should not be duped by this "oh but we should recall at the end of the day working is just being exploited" because it is not just that, but possessing the real power to carry out a revolution and establish communism. This is another thing, perhaps the most important aspect of the worldview that distinguishes Marxism from bourgeois of dissident thought, that the bogus neoPauline neo-modernist neo-Univeralists with the bourgeois abstract "equality" and their promises (untried) of voluntarist jacquerie are out to disguise.
weakened the whole working class that should say
ReplyDeleteHere's a good feminism 101 level take on the universalist/post-colonialist debate within feminism, from the post-colonialist perspective. For unfamiliar dudes or people who don't understand that this debate has a history:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.womanist-musings.com/2009/11/idealize-this-feminism.html
yes the carte blanche for anything that basically says "capitalism", it's interesting because its a friend/enemy thing, a declaration of allegiance. Now Power aside for a moment, there is this visible kind of attentuation of discourse, I think as a result of the dominance of audiovisual texts. But it really is an erosion of reasoning capacity, and accounts for the forgiveness of so much vacuousness and inaccuracy. The applause is simply for someone standing up and declaring "a side" as a personal identity, like in an AA meeting.
ReplyDeleteYes, a world of 'left'-Schmittians and a "straightforwardly on the left" pre 9-11 Hitchens - one regrets their errors of course (their deliberate lies and mystifications), but one cannot simply dismiss them, or the marginal spectacular profits gained from associating with these types. Potentisl gsins incalculable.
Yes, a world of 'left'-Schmittians and a "straightforwardly on the left" pre 9-11 Hitchens - one regrets their errors of course (their deliberate lies and mystifications),
ReplyDeleteYes, and there is an implicit really deeply rooted supremacism in this insistance always on honoring these figures, the white celebrities and the women and poc who know their place and honour and perform reverence for them.
It should be ludicrous - the idea of having Badiou and Virno preach to feminists precisely because feminism has "failed" to achieve the end of sexist oppression. If feminists were to accept this leadership, that would be the way for feminism to end like french maoism and autonomism - utter catastrophic failure and obliteration. Only by painting this degrading and distorted and dishonest portrait of feminism and by extension of women is it possible to sustain this suggestion that we women be subordinated to Political Beavis and Butthead without causing laughter. But it relies on a) this bourgeois intellectual credo that "genuine thinking" cannot be judged except "in theory" or implicatedeven in the political failures of the thinkers even when it is being offered as remedy for the political, not theoretical, setbacks of women's struggles and b) how "natural" is the idea of men in leadership and women as their helpmeets and wards that even men, who, if judged by the same yardstick being applied to women and feminism, are utter failures, who not only have no political accomplishments, who not only failed to achieve progress for their causes but who lost all the inherited ground they started with, seem suitably qualified for the instruction and guidance of women.
And it's women who reject this, who think women can teach men and who recognise and explicitly refuse all this tradition, that become the targets of the most vicious attack, to the point even where Jacques Alain Miller re-intevents Palin, whom we all know is the fully motorised remote control puppet and spokesmodel of a powerful block of the US ruling class allied with a big swathe of reactionary "middle class", as insubordinate just to use and abuse her image as the figure of Insubordinate Women. Which is additionally, as a little extra, propagandistic distortion for the ruling class that operates her.
ReplyDeleteNaturally this is common, right wing or ruling class and odious individual women - Imelda Marcos, Leona Helmsley, Hilary Clinton - are available for misogynists to choose as the receipients of abuse with the strong alibi that individually they are indefensible. But women have no difficult distinguishing between real political attacks on Clinton or Palin (or Thatcher, Condoleeza Rice, Royale, Aquino or Merkel) and the use of their images for other ideological purposes. And then of course women can be fit into this pattern - as every Haitian leader from Dessalines through Estimé and Aristide can be fit into "Presidentialitis" modeled on Duvaliers and Emperor Jones by Diebert - whether or not they are really ruling class, corrupt, etc.
Dutiful daughter Zadie Smith even includes a nauseating assault on Mildred Aristide in her novel On Beauty.
But there is always a mix of cooptation and reaction. I mentioend Weeds, it had been so long since I watched a show like this, I really loved it. I was just consuming them like potato chips. It is this mix of some really progressive stuff - it can be progressive around/within the family headed by the main character, who isolated can be seen as a character produced by "feminist" writing and thinking: - but embedded in some extreme reactionary stuff, the world the family is inserted into. But even this is ambivalent - on the one hand, this show displays the experience of latino immigrants without papers in a rare fashion; on the other it contains this in comedy, is a gentle adoreable self conscious white supremacy, and in a general frame of reactionary re-affirmation of difference; ultimately the wrongs in the white California society are transferred, and discovered to have their origin and exaggeration and embodiment, south of the border. On the one hand it is comically allegorising a critique of the global division of labour - an upscale Maternity clothing shop in southern california run by upper middle class subsurban white women (one a drug addict) has beneath it a tunnel to Mexico through which coerced young girls are trafficked, guns and drugs flow.But while showing the disparities as illusory or constructed, the programme does not escape finally naturalising the divisions and reifnocing the paradigm of ideology. Because its mining it for entertainment and its from the pov of upper middle class california. Like the wire it seems to pride itself on a pseudo- "even handedness" it shows in saying "We're as bad as Mexican Mafiosi!" Even the feminist achievement that is the the main character played by Mary Louise Parker is "compensated" for with "comical" but descending to truly sadistic pummelling and torture of the character, her foil, the judgemental suburban witch played by Elizabeth Perkins. I mention this among other reasons because this show has this image, Anodyne, of the liberated-empowered/selfish vapid consulerist slut split into this pair of leads, the pretty, sexy, open-minded weed dealing widow and her mirror/other the monstrous vain consumer, and its solution to preserve the first is to really torture the second.
ReplyDeleteto preserve the first, that should say and add but not "deny" the vices and sins her existence requires....
ReplyDeleteThat just ate my long and erudite comment, Arpege. I guess that's better than crashing--looks like you cleared it up here, and if anything else happens, I hope someone gets their fucking ass arrested. I've been spooked by this crap, and have even been lying about things on emails.
ReplyDeleteOkay, I'll fill in an abbreviated version about my just-departed roommate. This was a complicated case, so doesn't work in your theory businessing. But her ideas of revolution are more that Oprah and Michelle Obama ought to wear 'natural hair', that it would be so important to black women. I told her I'd never really notice the hair of the black men I've fucked, although now I realize I have, it's always been very short, I don't go for the Rastafarian look. But none of them had ever straightened it, like james Brown and 50s black singers used to sometimes do, slicking it down. Is adopted by white parents, and has some white siblings. I liked her for most of the time she was here, but that kind of job where you're idolized will probably make anybody expect instant gratification at all times. As you're talking about women's consumerism, yes, all clothes, ornaments, flavours, aphrodisiacs, and herb things, no big ticket items, tons of money for marijuana, but I think no vibrators (I guess there are now vibrating dildoes, I was thinking about the old days when the two were separate, I never saw what anybody would see in those hard-plastic things, you might as well use just any sort of piston or whatever, and those all ought to be used as foreplay to real fucking, because dildoes and vibrators are virtual and material at the same time, but that's neither here nor there--lots of people do time on internet porn, and if you're at a shitty job, that's understandable, male or female.) Plus, when it came to paying off her college loans, she was the type who just let it go into default (I had a male gay friend back in 1990 who was like this, these people don't have any concern about their credit rating, which reminds me of the NYT things I read last night of rich Silicon Valley mortgages now being left unpaid.
As an art model, she's got this perfect body and all the artists worship her and spoil her. She drops her male and female lovers just like the proverbial male irresponsible, and does conquests of that sort, that's okay with me.
It gets further complicated that she is attracted primarily to white guys sexually and white girls about equally, although there was one black boy she liked. Oh well, this is just the one example of having been in a position to observe this first-hand in a particular person over a 5-month long period. Other characteristics included throwing out very quickly any new love interest in the fashion usually associated with men, but that again is what is often thought of as the privilege of being obviously physically attractive, and it's always taken advantage of, no matter what the orientation or ethnicity.
ReplyDeleteMainly, she was stoned 24/7 and even did some of her buying in the apt., I got tired of that, but I think Californians think that's perfectly normal (the getting stoned is all right, trading in the house while it's illegal and bringing in the dealers was not).
I took her to ABT for her birthday, we were stepping out, but after that things went downhill, and I've explained to other people that I really can't pick up most of the time when a younger person is putting the make on me, because I don't expect them to be doing it. I guess it's because of those 20 lbs. I lost during the bedbug/Martin period.
Anyway, Off-topic, I've decided to see 'In the Heights', having listened to the score about 15 times now, it's the first great score in 25 years, and may close by the end of this year. This 'fresh blood' of meringue and salsa proves something: There really is no more B'way of the great Jewish composer-lyricists of the musical comedy's golden age; every time they try to do that sound again, it DEcomposes, and is just sickening. So you get all this vital Dominican music from Washington Hts., where I spend as much time as possible...and it is just divine. But people who got used to the stupid derivatives like 'Wicked' and more Disney and 'Phantom' and 'Les Mizz' aren't that interested in Mr. Miranda's beautiful score, I think it's because it's the exception that proves the rule. B'way music is essentially dead, and somehow reggae and meringue have made their way onto the stage of the Richard Rodgers Theater--but there's no tradition of such a thing supporting a theater scene, any more than black musicals were ever able to do it (I remember 'Your Arms Too Short to Box with God', that was great, but off the beaten path, Gospel). 'Heights' even has a song about the death of a matriarch of a single BLOCK in Wash. Hts., how unexpected is that? Oh man, I have become quite the Dominophile! There's even a song called 'It Won't Be Long Now' that sounds like a B'way song, but freshened with the Dominican sounds so it doesn't sound putrescent like the other shit, as Elton John's dreadful score to 'Billy Elliott'--not even terrible, just mediocre from start to finish, not ONE decent song.
I have seen Weeds, the first season and at least part of the second... but it was so long ago I've forgotten most of it. I do remember being somewhat impressed with the easy way they integrated black characters into the show, and the way the black dealers that the lead female associates with were depicted as normal, down-to-earth family people and not extremely violent sociopaths. Not without flaws, but it has this spot on California feel to, it really speaks to the widening income gap in that state and the social fallout of its being veered right politically by local politicians.
ReplyDeleteFor the record, since Patrick brought it up but not because I think anyone cares, I am myself no devoted fan of vibrators (especially vibrating dildoes). I find myself on this point as so many others defending the behaviors and habits of groups I don't fully identify with. I've never heard any woman I know who owns one say she uses it to feel or become "empowered", though...many vibrator consumers are compelled by the fact that straight men are not always dynamos in bed.
'But it relies on a) this bourgeois intellectual credo that "genuine thinking" cannot be judged except "in theory" or implicatedeven in the political failures of the thinkers even when it is being offered as remedy for the political'
ReplyDeleteEvery time I've ever objected to the implicit assumption that the only type of thinking that's "genuine" is the academic/philosophical kind, I've been immediately accused of being a rabid neo-liberal anti-intellectual. When I've said as much in the presence of the Zizekian leftists, anyway. So I just gave up. It's really, honestly, a relief to find that I'm not the only person who has been thinking some of these things. Quite a few people have tried to make me feel like I must be insane to object to anything they say, like it's completely out of line and obnoxious to question them.
This often triggers flashbacks to Julys spent at religious summer camp. Me surrounded by people citing chapter and verse and insisting that I was only being rebellious and stubborn... that I had no right to question God's authority... that if I turned my back on tradition, I'd be sorry, etc.
I've never heard any woman I know who owns one say she uses it to feel or become "empowered", though..
ReplyDeleteI don't know about 'empowered', I don't see how it could empower anybody, but vibrators have always just seemed so nowhere to me. Dildoes, on the other hand, can be quite pleasurable and useful, they can even be yogic, although I can't imagine wanting a vibrating one. I never like any accessory that becomes more important than the basic natural apparatus, and a vibrator just seems so artificial. A perfectly fitting dildo has, I imagine, pleasured many a woman as well as man, and I know of some who knew and loved their dildoes well! They could have written 'DILDOES AND THE WOMEN WHO LOVE THEM' for the old mags on the old pre-Disneyfied 42nd Street, whose porno stores I used to enjoy on my lunch hours as recently as '96. It's all hideous now.
But there are lots of people who get off on all sorts of weird sex-themed objects, like cakes in the shape of cocks or pussies, I don't get it. I wasn't excited about Judy Chicago's Dinner Party of Vagina Table Settings either, and the Lesbian who tried to 'sell me on it' also then tried to fuck me, and that was just a fucking bust. I split from all contact back in 2002, when she tried one last time in Pittsburgh. We've sometimes referred to her in the now-dead dialogues as the 'Cambridge Whorebag', because she was guilty of 'old Scottish habits' and sold her plastic bags back to the supermarket for 2 cents apiece. When she served a meal, it would always be delicious, until she started telling you how she managed to get each ingredient on sale. Lawd Jesus.
Btw, I certainly did not kick that girl out of here, she left because she found a cheaper place and tried to bargain me down, and that just doesn't work on rent matters unless you're in love. She did do a kind of 'performance art' in my kitchen for about 2 weeks after she moved in, sitting there reading a book called 'BLACK RAGE' so I would see her very conspicuously. She finally stopped, but I think her emphasis was far more on her ethnic culture than on feminism (she was almost stereotypically overly feminine, terrified of a single roach, redid my whole kitchen with her vast cookery equipment, and yet cooked a total of two times in 5 months, it was pretty off-balance. But mainly, the point was that yes, there are, of course, women who go into the 'sex object conquest' syndromes and, if they're not imitating the male versions, then they do come upon it naturally. She was doing that with me, and after I didn't 'go for it', she immediately turned sour and sullen, and announced she was leaving 4 days later, and gave me an inedible Napoleon pastry for my own birthday. There is a bleuger who can vouch for the gluey inedibility of this pastry (lol), although I forced more of it down than he did...
thanks patrick, i wouldn't deny there are people in the world who fit every stereotyp; it's a mutually creating thing, perosonas, stereotypes, back to personas. When I lived in rural england and was meaningfully "jewish" for my acquaintainces for the first time in life, I found i hammed something up a bit around them. don't know why - partly for fun, to please perhaps, partly it was the comfortable way for me to cope with my awareness of their constant awareness.
ReplyDeleteanodyne re weeds; the black characters, not sociopaths but as the show went on at first at least you saw they never left the kitchen table where they sit fixed cleaning, weighing and bagging; the young woman is interested in nancy's shoes and you think "this is how we know she has legs"? because she literally never gets up from the chair. They're magic negroes, an endlessly available resource for the character and the show's creatives, a fantasy of a place to go to get real and be supplied that makes very minor demands, none of the story-tellers (they have no life independent of their function in Nancy's life, which is not true of Nancy's nemesis or other minor white characters). But then I think it gets somewhat more complicated in shows I missed. there's white supreamcy in the show - this becomes even clearer with Mexican characters - but its uncomfrotable with itself, not malicious, and you see as hooks says it's driver is that this is how the creatives learn to entertain an audience. The Mexican ruling class is the mob and his latin machismo turns her on! he rapes her and this makes her fall in love. This was not the no-go area it may have seemed (Luke and Laura on General Hospital, Lee's She's Gotta Have It) but even so; yet it managed to have this plot due to an overall lavish sense of flowing goodwill and inclusiveness, of non-judgementality, of California liberalism, and it's not failing to acknowledge itself and confess constantly - thus the show gives us its own self-portrait as justifying by confession (like sayng "I'm an alcoholic" is no longer difficult, it's pleasureable) - we're weed dealers, that's good, says the show, we bring something to help you cope, but we're also coyotes, the show says, good ones, but yes we want to exploit, but kindly, and with bottled war, and not "rapey" and cruel, just as exploitative as we need to be for our own needs, and no more. The show is about not knowing how to make amends or change anything, wanting to be rich for purely creature comfort "hedonist" not sadistic/power reasons, btu wanting to limit the harm done to others if that's not too much trouble. Later n the show Nancy draws the line about the trafficked girls, but then she backs off and instead does her penance by kind of making herself the "puta whore" (in luxury, but danger) as if to say "well at least i don't think i'm better", but the result is, that much like in many elizabeth gaskell books, the exterior, the social world presented through comic critique just becomes the illstration of the main chatacters' lifes, and is subordinated in importance to it. But of course the show"s postmodernity is in an endless loop of self consciousness, so this too is confessed and exposed, this everything's a learning experience for nancy and it's all about nancy, migrants suffer to perform in the drama of illustrating nancy, girls are trafficked to illustrate nancy, is also acknowledged...and given some stakes by effecting her son...
In general there is a certain "ring of truth" about California, yes, and not based wholly in stereotypes.
but it shows the structural antagonisms better than something like the Wire which moralises and says there could be a harmony if everyone had the nature of the good white people. It _says_ "structural causation" but it shows only characteristation as cause, of both the narrative/plot and the events depicted in the narrative. Weeds is an endless exhibition of structural antagonism which exists where there is no personal antagonism and no character-driver of plot. The drug dealer and the narc marry not as an allegory showing the collusion of drug dealing and law enforcement, or not only that, but to show elective individual affinities do not override or solve material interests.
ReplyDeleteas for the unquestioned respect for these illegitimate Authorities, it's a sign of the infantilisation of that niche of culture, like celebrity worship everywhere else. But I really think the Zizz circle is functioning as a psy-op of a sort; his shtick is to say I'm a Marxist! and to be promoted now by the BBC as the best of the radical left. and then he's just repulsive, stupid, incoherent, spouting alternatively inanites and clichés, costumed now as an insane asylum inmate in sweat soaked diarrhea colored tshirts. and he's constantly speaking for the left and against the left, saying this is all there is, there is that "typical left" with their beautiful souls who just want to outlaw racism and persecute you white males, and there's me, this spitting, flailing, incoherent obsessive ranter who you know spends all his time watching tv and thinks he's gettng messages from the Absolute through it. Now Power is saying, there's no feminism, there's no women's opposition to exploitation and oppression, there's only Vibrator Valenti, Moosehunting Exorcist Palin, and there's me, giggling, moralising and emptyheaded mascot of clever boys I can't understand who collects stuffed animals. This is public pedgagogy to a new generation, freshmen today in the rich countries who are going to come of age in a much more brutal situation than even those who graduated in the years after the 87 crash, who are going to be hard to convince that TINA, that indeed it's not worth trying anything at all because the situation is so bad AND because the current ruling class is so corrupt and shameless and cruel they have to be dethroned. So this whole Zizzy thing is geared toward shaming people out of that last observation and using that shame for every possible reactionary purporse (BP's insurer shouldn't be pursued at law because it implies - to some unspecified audience, but he means to himself as reader/pundit - too "personalising" as an analysis? WTF? This is like Schwartzengger after the succesful - insane, surreal - recall of Davis to save Enron saying he told them to keep the $9 billion stolen by a cut and dried criminal conspiracy because he didn't want the State to "inherit litigation".) All the disciples of the Zizz work tirelessly producing confusion and irrational affects around these few points - Harry Potter and The Wire are realism, the enemy is a magical disembodied thing, like Voldemort or "institutions", women alone produce sexism and misogyny, black people alone produce racism, gays are to blame for heteronormativity, the working class exploits itself, "the left" are guilty white legalistic liberals who have loathesome selfish unwholesomely sexual motives for their touristic and condescending fascination with the downtrodden; "yes yes of course there is child labour and torture and mass killing and so on and so forth" this is to be mentioned in passing and dismissed on the way to the important thing which is that, today, BP shouldn't be "screwed" as yesterday TARP shouldn't be "opposed" etc etc.. What's important this supposedly "genuine thinking" that Zizz and posse read on the back of the cereal box mainly. the "child labour and so on" is insignificant contemptible concern, what matters is the Idea of Communism meaning how the infantile "lacanian" reading of headline stories in zizz op-eds will turn out. Who will be a symptom, who will be the real, who will imagine taking power ruthlessly with revolutionary terror in this episode of Secret Decoder Ring Adventures? Will we find the answer in X-Files or Islam or Michelle Obama's shoes?
ReplyDeletep"the left" are guilty white legalistic liberals who have loathesome selfish unwholesomely sexual motives for their touristic and condescending fascination with the downtrodden;
ReplyDeletelol, love it. I'm not above it...
Well, yes, now I see what the real problem with Zizek is: If you can remember the pre-Zizek world, you can easily see how putrescent he is, how perfectly grotesque even without his superficial obviously unclassiness and tackiness. The PROBLEM is that he's got maybe a bigger following than I thought, and has become very popular (but I don't know for sure HOW popular). If it really is still expanding, tell me, because it could only be expanding because people don't even have a reference that they can hold onto that is superior to this diarrhea-coloured T-Shirt wearer. It's the fast cancellations of all previous positions that is found to be so clever, that he has no consistency in anything at all of importance doesn't seem to bother his followers. He really is just a kind of klutzy performance artist himself, and by now is spitting and sputtering, almost in a Little Jack Horner posthumous period:
Little Jack Horner
Sat in a corner
Eating his Christmas pie
He put in a thumb
and pulled out a plum and said
'Oh what a good boy am I!'
For further research on the real Jack Horner, we have wonderful resources RIGHT HERE ON THE WEB!
http://www.rhymes.org.uk/little_jack_horner.htm
Do you, uh, think that, uh, Zizek, is like, uh, a careerist? or is that almost like accusing BP? FUCKING GODDAM BP! Of course, I can't figure out your Schwarzenegger/Davis $9 billion theft thing. I bet 'careerist' is an old-fashioned term that jealous people use for THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE (remember that term, Arpege, for Cafe Society back in the Bouvier Days, almost unbelievable it ever existed now, although Lee still around) like Slavoj Zizek. Well yes, I wish I was Slavoj Zizek, he's just so exciting with the way he doesn't have no foolish consistency, and agrees to have a mind of total mush to entertain tenured profs of manifold persuasions!
I like the idea of a 'Sex and the City 3' with a vignette of Zizek in the middle of it--or maybe a movie-within-a-movie that will be the FIRST SLOVENIAN ROCKSTAR PHILOSOPHER TO BE EMPOWERED BY A VIBRATOR. I'm sure he'd do it too. What's worse, he'd believe he really had been empowered. And so would upstate disciple-ettes, 'oh it really proved the Stalinism in a new way, but I'll delete you if you say he's a whore...' I want it to be one of those pale pink ones with the little ridges where the glans would be if those old vibrators looked like cocks (and they sure don't). There is a good standup porn mannequin at The Blue Store in Chelsea, I smile at her when I go in there, because she was accidentally given character.
ReplyDeleteThe PROBLEM is that he's got maybe a bigger following than I thought, and has become very popular (but I don't know for sure HOW popular).
ReplyDeleteWell it's not an authentic "following", it's celebrity and the imprimatur of the mass media. He has fanatics, hooting and giggling, not critical readers. The phenomenon is pomo fasho. On its own, all this neoPlatonist backlash "philosophical" pretend voluntarism would be just nonsense and trivial, transparently about keeping academic production going in a shrinking market and industry, but because it obviously has backing of the corporate media and function in the mainstream, it's something more serious.
I can't figure out your Schwarzenegger/Davis $9 billion theft thing.
ReplyDeletegray Davis naturally sued Enron for defrauding the state of California; California basically was on the point of recovering $9 billion from enron, the thing was sewed up; this is why Enron and Cheney had to recall the governor in the middle of a term and get Ahnode in there to drop the complaint. He let Enron keep the $9 billion it owed the state of California. and when questioned AS said he "didn't want to inherit litigation" from the previous admin.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0310/S00087.htm
Of course California could really have used that money.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/42520229@N04/4732413048/
ReplyDeleteI wrote Anodyne last night that we'd all try to meet and enjoy each other's sassiety if you really show up in the next few months. This is me from a few weeks ago, when my favourite bleuger had lunch with me--the CHICKEN SALAD was great anyway, and I put it all on this huge Mexican Wooden Salad Bowl in Bibb Lettuce with Tomatoes and it was delicieux. Okay, fag-gits, he's STRAIGHT! I haven't got time for any more of these idiot and their gossip. He also did a good full face one of me, but I wouldn't let him post it because the lighting misread my characterful crooked top teeth (they used to be perfectly str8, but now one incisor is wickedly pushed slightly in front of the other), and made it look like all my right teeth were missing! Given these evil trolls, they'd have gone around and called me 'toothless old P.', and I am just in NO MOOD. I'm going to make him take some more if he comes back through in August. I liked this picture, though, in my kitchen, although you just get the bricks from that angle, and they're many trees and gardens the other direction. I had some really good Chevre too, and he brought a deeLISH-yoos Montrachet. Anyway, rather liked the photo because it's rather Parisian, after all, I've got Parisian creds--and my new Neopolitan here is going to work out fine. She's not spoiled at all, and that makes me want to be especially sweet to her.
Okay, Arpege, even if you don't lust after my svelte body, at least make sure you don't lust after that FAG-GIT in my mouth--because although I smoke four or five when I do lunches and dinners with the wine (oh ho ho, we had a Tahitian CocoVanille ligueur too before that awful Napoleon), I only smoke one cigarette per day, and YOU are not going to want to try that if you went years unable to. You don't sound all that dizzy, by the way, but it probably does have some biological withdrawal time if you smoked a good bit for some years. Keep at it, mademoiselle.
i would like a ciggie.
ReplyDeletei have to go to the other page to get the full link....
I'm going to open a cold white wine now and get back to my more official grumbling.
good pic - you look dashing and i do want that cig
ReplyDeleteThe PROBLEM is that he's got maybe a bigger following than I thought, and has become very popular (but I don't know for sure HOW popular).
ReplyDeleteAll I can say about this is that I have been in the most godforsaken sub- and exurbs of Los Angeles this summer, and in all the pokey little stripmall bookshops I went to, I have always seen a Zizek book. He's at the level of Edward de Bono in ubiquity, if not in sales.