Month: June 2020

Objectification and Re-presentation

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Representation is relational to social structures. These are expressed as relations of power (as per Foucault), of commerce, and of use-value (as per Marx). Within the visual space – a photograph in a fashion magazine or a painting of a Great Master –  these interactions of power and representation .

Feminist ideology has made valid, considered analyses of the effects of the widespread consumption of degraded images of women and all forms of sexism and violence.[i] The highly contested nature of such analyses begs the question of whether to cover up nudity when there are so many other readily available strategies for de-objectifying women, Foucault argued that power is not the preserve of individuals or groups, nor can it be found within a centralised site. In Foucault’s work, power is construed as a network of relations.[ii] This implies that subjectivities are constructed and perpetuated through complex forms of regulation, rather than physical limitations: ‘There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against himself.’[iii]

Bourdieu explains that interaction between individuals who are socially distant – through intersectional dynamics of power and exclusion – is often obscured or masked through ‘strategies of condescension.’[iv] That is, one’s position within the social body, the polity, or even the household is contingent upon one’s actual place in the wider world. I am the point of origin within the social from my lived experience, so what may be self-evident to me from this position may not actually reflect my value, worth or contribution within the social body. My potential for ‘world-making’ is hindered by all manner of symbolic struggles with the social body regulated by ontologies, of which the objectification of bodies is a critical element.[v]

References and Additional Reading

[i] See Christopher Berry Gray, ed., The Philosophy of Law: An Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, 1999). The link between pornography and violence continues to be contested – is pornography a cause or a symptom of violence? Pro- and anti-regulation lobbyists, independent committees and social scientists in many countries, including the US and the UK, analyse empirical research and make recommendations to governments on their own interpretation of the data. To date, there has been no successful prosecution for injury caused by pornography.

[ii] Foucault (1988), citing Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in Irene Gammel, Sexualizing Power in Naturalism: Theodore Dreiser and Frederick Philip Grove (Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 1994), p. 155. Foucault (1977) also speaks of the ‘laboratory of power.’

[iii] Judith Butler (1987: 133-134), ‘Variations on sex and gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault’ in Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, eds. Feminism as Critique: Essays on the Politics of Gender in Late Capitalist Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 128-142

[iv] Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power,’ Sociological Theory 7:1, (1989), pp. 14-25 (p. 16).

[v] Ibid.

Violence and the Absurd: The Body in Pieces

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The Body in Pieces: Mangled Language

It could just as well be a dead donkey, for example…Things have broken free from their names. They are there, grotesque, stubborn, gigantic, and it seem ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of Things, which cannot be given names.[i]

From the bimbo, to the vampy femme fatale; from bitch and ballbreaker, to spinster and hag –  the stereotypes foisted onto women support the claim that gender informs a system of social expectations, yet suggest that it is often played out at the level of representation of sexual difference.

Sarah Lucas, Five Lists 1991

A series depicting slang words about women, genitalia, bodily excretions and sexuality, Lucas’ lists are not exhaustive compilations of associated ideas, and are far from subtle – they monumentalise a certain crudeness of popular culture. These bald pronouncements may offend, or tickle, certain sensibilities, such is the power of words. Thus Five Lists compels me to address the issues raised by this compendium of puerility, before moving on to Lucas’ worldview, which presents us with a different way of conceptualising sexual difference.

Kristeva (1982), in respect of abjection towards the sign of sexual difference, argues the social processes, sorts and demarcates bodies to render them proper, conforming to, but not exceeding cultural expectations. The excessiveness of things pushes the limit set for the organisation of the body and its processes: bodies become de trop, ‘superfluous, that is to say amorphous and vague, sad.’[ii]

Ranging from the base and the animal to the supernatural, this alphabetised list is not only a colourful compendium of the names of body parts: it also refers to the woman to whom such parts belong. Far from subtle, these slurs monumentalise a certain crudeness of culture, the mangled language that informs sexism. As their centralised, columnar arrangement on the page suggests, the words are central to the way in which women are often spoken about in colloquial speech.

It is a representation of desire, and not an impetus for it. It is a work of classic pervery;[iii] one that moves beyond its own explicitness, wresting the body back from rationalism, and allowing it to wallow in its own immanence. Five Lists reminds us that for an artwork to possess aesthetic value, and to be engaging, does not imply eschewing insalubriousness.  If it offends or shocks in a visceral way, this nausea is what prompts us back into the body.

Sexual difference is really a fundamental difference, as any ascribed to material entities. One can identify with being female or male, as one can with religious views, or what race or ethnic group one belongs to. To a certain degree, these can vary, presenting their own difficulties or set of challenges: I may identify as a woman; I may take up a nationality that is different to the one I was born into; I may convert to a different religion; I can obscure my ethnicity, speak a different language and erase linguistic accents and quirks; I can change my identity as easily as I may change my name. But why is it that I cannot escape the elements that come to signify my sex? Five Lists, clearly a work that addresses embodied looking, raises questions about the experience of the lived body.

The Absurd

‘To understand is to experience the harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance – and our body is our anchorage in a world.’[iv]

The objective material body is intentional. That is, at the level of consciousness, it apprehends things. Human embodiment also implies an incarnated mind.[v] The mind (life, soul) is bound to our corporeality, with physiology and materiality framing the set of possibilities that present themselves to us. But as humans are also psychological and cultural beings, the body does not entirely bind existence. Mental and physical processes – mind and body – intertwine or overlap. The body is not an inert mass to be orchestrated and prodded into action, but the ‘living envelope’ of our intentionality as the incarnated subject.[vi] I will examine the nature of this dialogue through the absurd.

‘From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all.’[vii] Here, Camus refers to Sartre’s Nausea:  ‘This discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this “nausea,” as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd.’[viii]

Nausea and the absurd both derive from a mounting feeling of anguish at the discovery that the structures and frameworks of our existence are fragile, and subject to collapse. It is Camus’s claim that an appeal to transcendence is a ‘betrayal’ of the human condition, a condition in which Lucas’ project is entirely situated. Camus, like Sartre, makes the case that despite our awareness of the absurdity of life, the meaninglessness of it is offset by the voluptuous vitality of the physical world and the objects that surround us.

For Sartre, awareness of absurdity is an understanding of a lived relationship to the world and of the ambiguous unity represented by subject/object and mind/body existing across planes of signification rather than mutually-exclusive categories of being.[ix] A collapse of these planes, or a re-direction through a different signification of the thing that is known, is channelled through the absurd, triggered by the experience of nausea, best illustrated by Roquentin’s attempts to identify with objects and glean meaning from them. Nothing has intrinsically been disordered, outwardly all remains the same, yet he is assailed by a mood.

Lucas’ works do something similar. For the reader of Five Lists, nothing has changed, yet they may not be able to see themselves in her words and be either nonplussed, or profoundly troubled by this eye-opening disclosure. Unlike Roquentin, floored by the arbitrary nature of world, Lucas has taken charge, pointed ‘a finger to what is there,’ celebrating the restless sensationalism of the everyday. In this endeavour, Lucas – unlike Descartes who only let back in the world those things which could be proven; unlike a Lacanian philosophy of lack – explores being, not from the start or the end of situations, but as entirely present in the contemporary experience: the ‘ongoing banter. It can trigger something that can be handily applied later on.’[x]

‘all roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word “no”. To “no” there is only one answer and that is “yes.” Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread.’ ( Hugo, 1862)[xi]

The possibilities resulting from nihilism create a chasm, a gap – a nothingness according to Heidegger – a meaninglessness according to Camus. This is the absurd, or that with which one has difficulty coming to terms. Grosz, referencing Kristeva, calls this the abject: the ‘what of the body falls away from it while remaining irreducible to the subject/object and inside/outside oppositions,’ being both but resisting identification with either.[xii] Merleau-Ponty asserts sexuality is not a phenomenon to be subsumed into existence,[xiii] in the same way the body cannot be nothing. The body, a model for understanding corporeality,[xiv] is not incontestable, and expresses modalities of being that cannot be qualified ‘in the same manner as the stripes signify an officer’s rank or as a number designates a house. The sign here does not only indicate its signification, but is also inhabited by it; there the sign is what is signifies.’[xv] The words of Five Lists are not meaningless, nor nothing: they are the sign that designates sexual life within a particular ‘current’ of existence that is bounded by the ‘sexual organ.’

References and Additional Reading

[i] Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea 1938:180

Jean-Paul Sartre (1938) Nausea (London: Penguin Books, 2000)

[ii] Sartre, 1938, p. 188. De trop is a Sartrean term.

[iii] The lists are not pornographic or gratuitous – conditions Lucas defines as ‘Ordinary Pervery.’ Ordinary Pervery is not Classic Pervery, which is a ‘rare’ condition that the individual must conceal until coming of age. Who are ordinary ‘pervs’? According to Lucas, most people. Classic pervs take pleasure in the undesirably unusual (Lucas, I Scream Daddio, 2015, pp. 132-133).

[iv] Merleau-Ponty, (1945: 144). Being, in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, refers to the lived experience of the body through the senses.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945),  Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge: London and New York,  2012)

[v] From the Latin incarnare, made flesh. The flesh made manifest.

[vi] Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 145

[vii] Camus 1942:20

Albert Camus (1942), ‘Absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus,’ in God, ed. T.A. Robinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002), pp. 317-327. A non-fiction essay on the ethics of suicide – here the absurd is the expression of a fundamental disharmony in our existence.

[viii]  Camus (1942)

[ix] Sartre, (1943:97-119) implies that the gap between a being/person (for-itself) and the world and its objects (in-itself) is another way of experiencing the absurd. The for-itself lacks the ability to come to terms with its own existential ‘nothingness,’ which is why it seeks an affinity with objects: or rather it has the potential for nihilism, or for ‘othering’ the in-itself, and this implies possibility to the facticity of the in-itself. This affinity signals an emotional apprehension of things which Sartre describes as overflowing with a knowledge of the world the for-itself does not possess, for being just ‘is.’

Jean Paul Sartre (1943) Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956)

[x] Lucas (2011) speaking to Pauline Daly on how she names her characters – from phrases ‘Out of my past. Overheard in the present.’ (After 2005 Before 2012, p. 50)

[xi] Victor Hugo (1862) Les Misérables (London: Penguin Classics, 1982), p. 1210

[xii] Grosz,( 1994, p. 192). moves away from the sphere of subjective representation, to insist, much like Young (1990), on the female experience of the lived body.

Elizabeth Grosz Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (London: Routledge, 1994)

[xiii] Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 161-164

[xiv] Corporeality as defined in Grosz, 1994.

[xv] Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 161-164

[xvi] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press,1982)

Lucas, Sarah Five Lists (1991)

Image courtesy of Museum of Modern Art , New York (MoMA),  licensed through Scala Archives

Fetishism and the use-value of women’s bodies

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Fetishism and the use-value of women’s bodies

It has been suggested that the fetishisation of the female body in industrialised nations coincided with the growth in the production of commodities around mid-nineteenth century.[i] A review of fetishisation from a Surrealist perspective supports this assertion.[ii] One could make the case that the commodification of the female body did not begin with the advent of commodity fetishism – a point addressed not only from a Marxist perspective of production, but from Appadurai’s construal of the fetish as arising from people’s motivations for using things[iii] that can be traced back to ancient times and have endured throughout the Enlightenment project of rationalisation.[iv] Pels and Bohme make the clear distinction between commodity fetishism and cultural fetishism.[v]

However, a practical example of how both commodity and cultural fetishism lies in womenswear.  Stockings – or pantyhose –  gained popularity during at a time of shifting attitudes towards women’s dress. During the 1920s, as hemlines for women’s dresses began to creep upwards, hose, though largely inessential, satisfied social ideas of decorum and conveniently concealed the imperfections of the flesh now on show. As the fashion world of the 1920s changed, encouraged by the emergence of the New Woman and a backlash against constrictions upon the female body, the intimate wear business also was transformed. Women cast off corsets, bustles, girdles and petticoats, but wearing stockings meant they still had to contend with garter straps to keep them up, one of the many problems of the irrational nature of women’s wear.

Concealment of the body is motivated by beauty, social respectability and conformity. Panti-Legs, a pair of panties bonded with stockings, were invented in 1959,[vi]  and with the advent of spandex during the 1960s they became a widespread symbol of feminine sex appeal and glamour, and a sign of respectability for ladies concerned about the baring of legs in public, and with reining in the body.  The flimsiness of the material, however, is as thin as the gesture of wearing them.

This  process of ‘world-making’[vii], then, is designed to limit bodies and  proscribe to the performance of repetitive behaviour, their sense of self compromised and given over to normalising mechanisms, grounded in cultural topography. The cultural production of women’s bodies acts as the frame of reference for their representation in mythology, literature, which function as the channels through which ideas circulate.

The body as currency is negated as an actual human body,[viii] marking its differentiation and materiality as a negation of exploitation, in the same way commodity fetishism, under Marx, is negated as an exploitation of labour. At the same time, the exchange-value (the commodity), is affirmed, not only through the perpetuation of forms of discrimination, but also through the qualified aspects of the medium of representation, be it an artistic portrayal of a nude in a museum, or nude of glamour girls in magazines. It is further affirmed by sexual difference and economic asymmetry. A negation of the exploitative nature of the sexual differentiation of bodies, in Marxist terminology, constitutes a negation of the abstract human labour and social power relations inherent in the use-value of the commodity – in this case, the female body.

For Marx, this meant the obliteration of a ‘genesis’ between the sexes, being in fact, the source of unequal relations, an instance of alienation, with ‘man’ becoming like the goods and services he produces. Here, women’s bodies are the goods and services. In certain contexts, the body itself could be described as a commodity fetish, with a concomitant use-value: the body is of use and of interest to others.

The disjuncture between being and utility makes the act of ‘uncovering’[ix]  an important form of analysis, one converging with feminist criticism. In some feminist critiques against androcentrism, this disjuncture is identified as the patriarchy – the monolith of power, unyielding, against all appearances, to legislative and civic reform.

But could it be that this fetish character is in fact produced by the gesture that simultaneously reveals it? Does the emancipated consciousness display traits of the fetishism that it reveals? Is there an uncomfortable link to the object, one which is in fact supposed to be eliminated and surpassed in the analysis? The fetishistic mechanisms that dwell within the very systems that leave themselves open to criticism, cannot be easily stamped out. A fetish, after all, cannot be destroyed. Fetishism, idolatry and the cult of appearance continue unabated. Think back to Bitch, featured in the article Language and Embodiment.  This is the power things have over us.

Why does this matter to feminism? It is not only because Marx, and later Foucault (1975) speak of the use-value of bodies, the universal medium of circulation and the form of appearance through which everything communicates with everything else; it is because they speak to the social relations that drive production and exchange, a necessary feature of the socio-cultural sphere in capitalist societies. Marxist fetishism is the metaphorical formula not for a relationship to things, but to their appearances (as commodities), whereby the fetish is the mechanism that not only manipulates the desires of individuals or groups of people, but that acts as the gauge between:  natural and machinery; godliness and matter; the incontrovertible and the questionable. What the fetish reveals is our deepest ‘anthropological humiliation’ in that the certainty of a ‘precarious’ existence comes through the medium of things, part of a traffic in commodities (bodies), arguably of the greatest insecurities in the histories of civilisations.[x]

References and Additional Reading

[i] Jon Stratton (1996) The Desirable Body: Cultural Fetishism and the Erotics of Consumption (Champaign IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 87

[ii] Johanna Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 113-143

[iii] Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)

[iv] See Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944. Whilst they do not mention fetishism per se, other than in the Marxian sense, they discuss the idea of delusion vis-à-vis lived experience.

Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944) Dialectic of Enlightenment (London and New York: Verso Books)

[v] Peter Pels ‘The Spirit of Matter: On Fetish, Rarity, Fact, and Fancy’, Border Fetishism: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 91-121

Hartmut Böhme (2004)  Fetishism and Culture: A Different Theory of Modernity (Berlin and Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter, 2014)

[vi] In 1959, at the request of his wife, who pregnant at the time, and was inconvenienced by having to accommodate her garter and stockings to her expanding belly, informed her husband, (Allen Gant Sr.) that as she could not be seen in public without hosiery, they would be making no further outings until she was delivered of her child.

‘How would it be if we made a pair of panties and fastened the stockings to it?’ he is said to have asked his wife, thus hailing the birth of the ‘Panti-Legs.’

Joseph Caputo, ‘50 Years of the Pantyhose’, Smithsonian Magazine, 7 July 2009. <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/50-years-of-pantyhose-33062523/#xo8ZvgUYjWWtEpPp.99> [  29 May 2018]

[vii] Bourdieu’s term (1989), as before. Bourdieu is primarily concerned with the question of class, not the question of women and automata.

Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power,’ Sociological Theory 7:1, (1989), pp. 14-25 (p. 16).

[viii] The body as currency appears here as a link to fetishism, both from a commodity use-value perspective, and in the idea of the uncanny, which relates to parts of the body being displaced, and not the body as a whole.

[ix] Heidegger The Concept of Time (1924)

Heidegger, Martin (1924), The Concept of Time: The First Draft of Being and Time, transl. Ingo Farin, Alex Skinner (London and New York: Continuum, 2011)

[x] Bohme, 2004