Objectification and Sachs fifth avenue - from an old essay

If I get the sugar
would you get me

If we were to resurrect Acteon, that Greek hunter torn to bits by his own dog for gazing upon Diana bathing nude in a stream, he would find the equivalent of his divine thrill not in strip joint America, but rather in women’s clothing boutique America. While I would be the last person to deny the thrill that comes from watching a woman undressing, whether in a bedroom or to the booming of Gimme Gimme over the sound system, it is no longer the unguarded moment – it is no longer the secret of the goddess, it is no longer worth being torn apart by your dogs in the heart of the forest, the hunter hunted, the vig on the male gaze. No, the secret of the goddess has migrated to women dressing up, not taking off. Acteon would better look for his kicks in Sachs Fifth Avenue, in By George, in any number of upscale boutiques in the midsized to supersized urban playlands of America.

I was first taught this lesson by my friend M., back in New Haven. New Haven, in those days, was Yale University, a few streets of affluence, and neighborhood after neighborhood of mythical violence. In actuality, there wasn’t that much violence, just a severe class difference – on the one hand, the scions of America’s wealth, on the other hand, the victims of America’s wealth, all neatly folded into six square miles. At this time, in the nineties, there was – as M. told me over and over – a gross and heartless lack of women’s clothing stores. Nevertheless, she would sometimes, when bored, make the round of what was there – the Laura Ashley to Ann Taylor circuit – and I would tag behind her. This was my first real experience of watching a woman buy clothes – and it was exhilarating. Of course, the real thing was happening in NYC, and when M. and I went there, the first thing we would hit would be clothing stores.

A woman’s clothing store survives on the atmosphere it creates. It does this through a proliferation of huge posters of very pretty people engaged in celebrity moments – laughing sexily at each other; through a color scheme that tends to skin complementary pastels; through a staff that, if they know their business, will make the customer feel, on some level, the need to prove herself to them; and through the music, which will always be as though piped from some marvelous club. It is, in a word, a very dramatic place, although the drama here might seem, at first, no different than any other store. I think that if there were a totally nude culture – by which I mean a culture in which there was no body ornament at all – a culture such as, to my knowledge, nobody has ever encountered – that this culture would have no drama, no ritual. Drama begins with the tattoo, the mask, the feather, the earring. With the beginning of drama, we have, as well, the beginning of stage fright – that marginal anxiety that accumulates as, day by day, year by year, one is looked at. Looks accumulate inside a person as a sort of jury. In response to this, there’s a utopian dream of going beyond these things. This is expressed, in philosophy, by the perennial anxiety about the human as object. In this philosophical dream, nudity is a mark of purity. To the pure, all things are pure. Acteon, in this utopia, would have seen nothing but what there was to see. In fact, what he saw was that there was no exit – that even the goddess wears her nudity. There’s doubleness all the way down.

Given the choice, I imagine Acteon would have chosen to live in the world where he saw more than there was to see, even if it meant ending up in the mouths of dogs in the end. I’m with Acteon here. And certainly I’m with the women’s clothing boutique designers, who don’t need Greek mythology to go about their business. You are immersed in the gaze – in some kind of gaze – the minute you enter a boutique. If the male gaze is defined as an objectifying one, than one might say that here is the very workshop of objectification. Myself, I find this vocabulary to be so out of synch with what happens in a boutique that it is absolutely distorting. For objectification implies, of course, a cool mastery, an absence of effect, and this is just what the classical male gaze is not capable of. The male gaze wants a strip tease, not an x ray. At the heart of objectification is, as I said, drama – the drama of making the object. We are the objects that make the objects, including the object that we will be, with the clothes that we wear – it is the moment in which the body is ornamented that we become both body and the body that we are making, both master and slave, both object and subject, and there’s not a gaze sharp enough or thin enough to get between those two things. We’ll never be naked again. The theater of dressing up in a boutique, usually to the most affectless techno sound possible, is the recapitulation of the happy fall, the original sin, that moment of becoming our own double – with clumsy fig leaves or the first clothing, which was manufactured by the first fashion designer, the Elohim: “Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.”

Likeable monsters

I changed my hairstyle so many times now

I don’t know what Ilook like

The New Yorker asked some novelists – Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, etc. – to comment on Claire Messud’s comments to an interviewer who asked her about the likeability of her protagonist in her new novel. Messud claimed the right to create unlikeable characters, citing the royal precedents of those novelists who did it before her – or, rather, more cleverly, simply referencing the characters. It was a nice spate of indignation, and made for a nice interview. The novelists, asked their opinion, all spoke up for characters who aren’t likeable. But I was a little disappointed that they all spoke up, so to speak, within the novel and its tradition itself. From the point of view of technique, the question is whether the character works, not whether the character is likeable. Humbert Humbert was cited by Messud, and is used as a sort of totem of unlikeability by these novelists.

However, I think this misses the response outside of the novel – the response that fully accounts for the novel’s strangeness, or function within novel cultures. For it is a good question: why would anybody want to read about the actions, thoughts and words of a person one dislikes? Why would you do this for fun?

The line in lit crit, which was cemented in mid twentieth century, was that the modernists invented the novel in which the anti-hero is the dark eminence, and true prince of our sensibilities. This, however, really isn’t the case. Greek myths, the Grimm’s fairytales, Daoist anecdotes are all ceded with mildly or strikingly dislikeable personages. Aristotle, in a sense, is asking a similar question in the Poetics about tragedy. We can admire Antigone, we can even admire Achilles, but we don’t – we are intended to – befriend them. For Aristotle, plausibility is a sort of meta-rule of narrative production. Plausibility is not reality, but rather, reality as seen by a certain credentialed set. It inscribes class into the very heart of aesthetics. Plausibility is not just continuity and logistics, but it gives us our sense of what typifies a character – what they would do in character. This is not a neutral judgment about norms – it is an imposition of a certain class’s norms upon narrative. And, always, the artist has squirmed under that imposition. The slave’s impulse – irony –counters the demands of plausibility even in fairy tales. When La Fontaine portrays the ant and the grasshopper, for instance, we know, from the point of view of plausibility, that the ant is right Mention, say, welfare at a dinner party in the suburbs and you will hear a chorus of ants. But La Fontaine surely makes the reader uncomfortable with this judgment. We see the cruelty of ants, and the beauty of the grasshoppers.

Plausibility and likeability get us to reflect on what these narratives do in the culture. And I think that this is what really happened with the novel in the 19^th century in a Europe that was still largely peasant and ancient regime: the novel was a tool for encountering the Other. The Other outside the bourgeois norms, as orphan or ax murderer, as adulteress or unhappy wife.  This is where the anti-hero collects within his unlikeability the collective unconsciousness, and opens up the dreamlike possibility that the plausibility-ruled reader is, perhaps, Other. The novel hymns what Foucault calls the experience-limit – the limit in which you test to see whether you are a human or a monster. How much of a monster can you be? And so far, in the sweep of the imperialist eras, the genocide, the famines, the wars, we find that often, dizzyingly, the likeable is the monstrous, liquidating the dislikeable in a systematic monstrosity that runs because we don’t want to look at it or claim our responsibility for it.  

heart vs. character

Lawrence Lipking is one of those few academic literary critics who one can read for enjoyment. I’ve been thinking lately about an essay he wrote a decade ago on literary criticism and chess. I commented upon it in LI at the time, and I just returned to it. It is still a well wrought thing.  Lipking writes a lot about chess, since he is a grand master as well as a surviving  member of what used to be the upper echelon of the lit crit establishment. The essay, Chess Minds and Critical Moves, mixes the field of literary criticism and chess, using Lipking’s own experience in playing William Wimsatt as an example.

“Nevertheless, a great gulf separated the two of us: he was a problemist, I was a player. The distinction between these habits of mind is so fundamental that, like yin and yang, it can be used to divide the whole intellectual world into contrary pairs -- for example, Plato the problemist and Aristotle the player, or Being and Becoming. The problemist seeks perfection of form and idea (or "theme"), and arranges the pieces artistically to realize that theme in the purest and most elegant way. The player seeks the excitement of a constantly shifting struggle against a recalcitrant foe, and subordinates considerations of beauty and style to the most efficient method of winning. A move is best, for the problemist, when most ingenious; for the player, when most advantageous. A problemist needs to be original; a player needs to be tough.  In practice, to be sure, the two habits of mind often mingle. Most problemists also play games, and most players sometimes solve problems. Yet Wimsatt was not at all a strong player, and difficult problems usually baffle me. “

For myself, this passage put a silver ball in motion. Bing bing bing, it touched all the lights. My early intellectual life, really up until around 35, was spent under the problemist spell. I actually considered myself a maker of formal structures, of interesting problems with multiple solutions. This attracted me to philosophy, even to the rather disastrous decision to spend years  in a graduate school in philosophy. Philosophy in the anglosphere is usually divided under the old Cold War categories of analytic and Continental, but Lipking’s division seems more pertinent. There were analytics and Continentals who looked for the ingenius move, and viewed the solution to a problem as an irritant, a sort of bell signaling the end of recess. And there were members of the same two groups that viewed the problems as pests, and were all about solutions. For the analytics, this ultimately meant computer science, and for the Continentals, it meant religion or politics.   

In my heart, I want to remain on the playground, but since the age of 35, I have slowly come to understand my character better – and my character is not an extension of my heart. My character is a limited thing, and it wants a limited number of moves to a certain end. My character is a player.

Still, I am not an unmixed player. Oh heart, oh problem seeking  heart, tied to me as cans to a dog’s tail  – to get all Yeatsian about it. The limits of the player’s world are not only defined by a strategic end but, at least in my case, by boredom. Boredom is the revenge of my repressed problem heart. It undermines my projects, to an extent.

Back to Lipking: “To speak for myself, the deep pleasure of chess can rival the spell of great music. In the best games there comes a moment - the one that Satan and his Watch Fiends cannot find - when the balance of tensions in a position reaches its climax and the mind is challenged to see through all the ramifications. This is a dangerous moment for a player like me, because time seems suspended while the analysis lasts, and the clock keeps ticking away. When I indulge this luxury too much, time pressure will finally ruin me. But the pleasure is usually worth it. Just as some critics gradually go to the heart of a poem, surrendering to the process for its own sake rather than any rewards that may follow, a chessplayer can savor a game whether winning or losing. Both as a player and critic, I prize these moments of incredibly focused attention. They do not last long in chess, unfortunately. Once the game is over, its aftereffects do not linger and spread as they sometimes do with poems and music. Chess draws on cognitive powers like those of the critic, but not on the other capacities that a critic requires, where all the senses and feelings come into play. Even a very good game does not tell us, like Rilke's Apollo, to change our lives. But subject to that limitation, the pleasure of chess is intense. Unlike Rilke's Apollo, it affirms unashamedly that the head is important. “

The whole society deal

An old post - but one I am putting up as a squint eyed comment concerning the controversy concerning Vivek Chibber's recent book on Marxism and post-colonial studies.

In Ma Nuit chez Maud, Jean-Louis, the Catholic engineer, bumps into an old college friend of his, Vidal, who is now a philosophy professor. Jean-Louis confesses that he is still an observing Catholic; but, he says, he has his own ideas about Catholicism. For instance, he recently read Pascal and felt that if Pascal’s rigorism was Christianity, he would rather be an atheist. Vidal, on the other hand, claims that, as a Marxist,  Pascal has a peculiar meaning to him.  His choice of Marxism, he claims, was decided by something like Pascal’s wager about the existence of God. As Vidal sees it, there are two ways of looking at history. Either it doesn’t make sense or it does. If the first view, A, has an 80 percent sense of being true, and the second a 20 percent chance, it is still rational to bet on the second view – as it fills one’s life with meaning.

I doubt that there are many Marxists today who would say, with Vidal, that Marxism is a decision to see the meaning in history. They are far more likely to explain that Marxism points to the way in which the meaning of history changes with the historical circumstances of the interpreters – which tends to undermine any objective claim to discern the meaning of history. And, to an extent, I would agree with the disabused Marxist. It is true that Vidal is reflecting a position that was most pronounced in the years after WWII, when the defeat of Nazi Germany and decolonization could easily make a person think that history was ‘on our side’ – although of course the sense of history could be an infinite crucifixion, a la de Maistre. By the sixties, however, the notion that there was some inevitable development in history – inevitability being one way to construe the ‘meaning’ of history – was on the wane. This version of history had always competed with a positivist variant – that the progress of science was, in general, the progress of liberal capitalist society. In the late 80s and 90s, the notion that history made sense was disguised in the end of history thesis.

Marx had a strong sense of history. This, it is usually said, is his inheritance from Hegel; however, even a glance at the Enlightenment and Romantic culture of Germany would show us that history as a “force” of some kind precedes Hegel. Herder, the translators of the Scots like Gentz, romantic critics like Schlegel were very invested in seeing history as a force. In one way, this expressed a clear material anguish: the peasant society of the limited good was particularly strong in the German states, and the distrust of growth was shared by peasants and Juunkers. Faith in history as a force was the face of the modernity longed for by a section of the intelligentsia.

Marx’s original views about history were, I think, entangled with his sense of Germany’s underdevelopment. The double aspect of Marx’s description of the capitalist system – on the one hand, as the expression of the revolutionary force of the bourgeoisie, and, on the other hand, as a system that had to be overthrown – lead to a certain confusion in reading Marx chronologically. That double aspect allows Marx a lot of irony elbow room – and Marx always viewed irony as a high intellectual gift.

It is in the Manifesto that Marx makes certain statements about history that, themselves, have a history leading up to the conversation of Jean-Louis and Vidal in Ma Nuit chez Maud. As with Baudelaire’s notion of the modern, history is obviously a bit of an intoxicant to Marx. And why not? Who has not known the sublime feeling of standing with the devil above it all, at say 6,000 feet above all human kind  – although it is best not to bow down to the devil at that moment, no matter what he promises you.

“One speaks of ideas, which revolutionize a whole society; one thus only expresses the fact, that within the old society have been moulded the elements of a new one, for the dissoluton of the old ideas keeps pace with the dissolution of the old relations of life.”

The uncompromising phrase, a “whole society,” seems to infer a unilateral motion, pressing on all levels of society.  Everything goes at once, for all pieces of the old relations of life are connected to each other. And we do see this. Who can’t see, for instance, that the old ways of human locomotion – mainly by walking, sometimes by horse – were so completely swept away, first by the railroad, then by the automobile, that walking in many places in the developed world – for instance, Texas – has become a minority option.  The old times – the week it would take to go from London to Edinburgh – have disappeared – or exist only in the minds and careers of bums and tramps. But bums and tramps can’t simply walk across the countryside like they could in 1900 or 1800 – they are bounded by the roads they can travel, as they cannot walk besides a highway, and would certainly draw police attention if they walk along other roads. At the present time, China, in one of the greatest engineering feats ever attempted, is automobilizing its human locomotion. All over the world, the car is uprooting and changing  the old relations of life.

And yet, is it true that the surface of life is so homogeneous that it can simply change like this?

That question gets to another aspect of Marx’s ironic praise of the bourgeoisie: that homogeneity is the result of capitalism. The homogeneous society, in which the archaic has no place to hide, is the effect of the penetrative tendency of capitalist culture, which roots out its opponents from the intimate sphere. Of course, its opponents might produce the elbow room that makes capitalism tolerable – and capitalist overreach might well be keyed to the sound of a gravedigger digging his own grave, which is what Marx heard. We at this point give capitalism much more time than Marx could give it in the nineteenth century, and we can watch the process of total change. Ethan Watters, a journalist,  has pointed out that the variegated understanding of emotions in different cultures are in the process of being changed, or at least confronted, by an American model that is convenient to Big Pharma. This is from a NYT magazine article he wrote on the subject:

“We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing.”

No matter – all madnesses must get in line! Or so it would seem as the Blue Pill bears down. The marketing of mood management is by now a well known ongoing scandal – one that has produced almost no opposition. Whenever marketers change the laws to allow for the mass advertising, over tv, of various anti-depressives, the amount of anti-depressives goes up far, far over anybody’s estimate of the real number of pathological depressives, which then enters into the ordinary life of the emotions and our expectations of people’s moods. And so it goes – what, in an earlier age, would be considered an illness in itself, can now be dismissed as a side affect and become the locus of a new marketing campaign and a new drug. Here, the homogenization promised by the term  ‘whole society” seems armed and should be considered dangerous.

And so, I’d contend, Marx began to think in the years after the Commune.

Bite the hand that feeds you

Plato, when doing philosophy, often used a method familiar to any 17 year old with a passion for music: he would pull out a line from one of his favorite singers – Heraclitus, Democritus, Parmenides, et al. and finger it until it gave up its meaning. Unfortunately, the history of philosophy, from Heraclitus to Elvis Costello, shows that philosophers are less and less inclined to linger over these gnomic spasms that come in – as though fully formed in a whole other universe - from the outside, while they are more and more concerned about creating logically coherent structures in this world that they can argue for and against.

However, I, like Plato, think it is worthwhile pondering the weighty obscurities summoned like spirits in a great phrase. For instance – to return to Elvis Costello for a moment – it seems to me that the proper measure of that phrase in his song, Radio Radio, which goes: I want to bite the hand that feeds me – has not yet been attempted.

Of course, the naïve listener might think that this is pure resentment. The naïve listener instinctively takes the side of the hand, and is thus lost. However, the listener who has a larger sense of the dialectical peculiarity of the human situation would not so quickly go over to the hand’s side. Instead, this listener might consider that biting the hand that feeds you is, at least in some urgent cases, the  necessary prelude to understanding just what it is that the hand is feeding you. This is not only the truth of punk – it is the truth of satire, of film noir, of all kinds of insomnias, ideological and personal.

Biting the hand that feeds you is a lot more difficult than it might seem, especially when the hand is so much larger than you, and you are so dependent on the hand that you can barely stand without it.