Feminism's at a Standstill

This week, in my "Speech/Acts/Contexts" class, i elected to "present" on the second half of Judith Butler's newest book, Undoing Gender. Given Butler's popularity, i expected this class period to provoke an energetic dialogue about Butler's most recent contribution to the how's and why's of feminism, gender, and social change. Instead, everyone seemed bored.

Sure, i didn't have any trouble instigating a good old fashioned gross-out by reminding the class that Butler admits in the seventh chapter, "Quandaries of the Incest Taboo", "Well, I do think that there are probably forms of incest that are not necessarily traumatic or which gain their traumatic character by virtue of the consciousness of social shame that they produce" (157). But this was a cheap shot on my part because i knew that, since people didn't seem to have read, this would get them talking. i probably couldn't have made a worse move, because in the interest of inciting discussion i allowed the more nuanced component of Butler's argument, that,

It might, then, be necessary to rethink the prohibition on incest as that which sometimes protects against a violation, and sometimes becomes the very instrument of a violation. What counters the incest taboo offends not only because it involves the exploitation of those whose capacity for consent is questionable, but because it exposes the aberration in normative kinship, an aberration that might also, importantly, be worked against the structures of kinship to force a revision and expansion of those very terms. (160)

to be eclipsed by how freaky justifying incest seems. But maybe Butler's onto something: Wal-Mart refuses to carry Jon Stewart's psuedo-textbook America, but they've got every blonde brother-sister love book V.C. Andrews ever wrote on their shelves. In other words, by sanctioning the process whereby we allow for the pornification of incest whilst insisting upon its ungainliness, we miss the fact that both the prohibition and the practice of incest keep normative exchange value heterokinship rules in place. And for Butler, the larger concern is that the incest prohibition symbolically calls into practice the "normal" family because, without an understanding of normal filial behavior, departure from that behavior would be unknowable.

Zombie Babies!

Tonight in my "Notebooks" class we realized that Benjamin's project does actually ask us to think about the mall as having once been the possibility of a utopian project. Our first instinct is to laugh, but Benjamin would perhaps have us hold onto that laughter. In other words, Benjamin gives us a way of rethinking nature as well as conventional versions of "History" and of progress through his insistence that we rethink the idea of what constitutes an historical failure.

i immediately thought of two things. First, of an interview with Christopher Walken last summer in the New York Times Magazine in which he and the interviewer go see Dawn of the Dead and afterwards Walken says something like, "Not a zombie baby! That's too much." He's referring to a scene in which the surviving humans of a zombie invasion collect at the mall for safety, but one of the characters, a white woman pregnant with a black man's baby, gets bit by a zombie and consequently gives birth to a zombie baby.

i also thought of how many times my students have laughed at the "crazy hippies" in both films we've watched in class to give them some background for last week's reading of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Berkeley in the 60's and Gimme Shelter. As the naked woman attempted to mount the stage during "Under My Thumb," one of my students leaned over with a gnarly grimace and asked, "Why doesn't someone arrest her?"

The failed interracial harmony at the department store room-to-go delivery mirrors the failed interracial harmony at Altamont. The sixties mantra of free love, symbolized by a black man in a green suit dancing with a blonde white girl in a crocheted dress who is stabbed by an "angel," is extinguished by potent government-issued LSD and security guards paid in beer. A millennial mall, invested in "harmless" circulation of convention, cannot bear the new.

But for Benjamin the question might now become, why couldn't hundreds of thousands of people come together to hear the Rolling Stones? What has become so vapid about contemporary malls, with their policed wares ranging from adolescent/thirty-something adult contemporary punk accessories to cell phones to engagement rings, that children, especially interracial newborns, are better off zombies?

Grab that Gun

Hunter S. Thompson, from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
"No, these were not the hoofprints of your normal, godfearing junkie. It was far too savage, too aggressive. There was evidence, in this room, of excessive consumption of almost every type of drug known to civilized man since 1544 A.D. It could only be explained as a montage, a sort of exaggerated medical exhibit, put together very carefully to show what might happen if twenty-two serious drug felons--each with a different addiction--were penned up together in the same room for five days and nights, without relief.

Indeed. But of course that would never happen in Real Life, gentlemen. We just put this together for demonstration purposes" (188).

i've been trying, this week in my AML 2070 class, to persuade my students to consider Thompson's book as something other than, or maybe something more than, a story of a drugged-out weekend. i suggested that we might read the figure of the drug trip as an extended metaphor for a failed utopian project: as an allegorical correspondence to 'the Movement' Thompson obsessively returns to.

This extension applies not only to 'the Movement', but also to the ontological rupture the movement presaged and provoked, but did not sustain. As a way of marking this unravelling, the above quote is doused, in the novel, with a heavily glopped paint splatter. A further denotation of the "demonstration purposes" to which Thompson's montage might be put. In other words, his juxtaposition of varieties of "consciousness expansion" perform an historical documentation of the impossibility of the 60s' brand of idealism Thompson is exorcising through a 1970's-welcoming Vegas drug binge, as well as the possiblity of a new historical moment, that of postmodernism. The story, as well as the telling, purges nostalgic pinings for truth, authenticity, or nature, and Nixon isn't the only one to blame.

Thompson argues these breakdowns through a variety of registers: insistence upon the impossibility of making a truth/fiction distinction, foregrounding of the necessity of this impossibility for seekers of the "American Dream," and a problematization of the conventional boundaries of his discipline. Nonetheless, these are not arbitrary stylistic choices. He tells his reader, "But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create . . . a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody--or at least some force--is tending that light at the end of the tunnel" (178-79).

In other words, Thompson's departure from conventional grammar and organization in favor of a kind of fact/fiction montage holds onto the hope that a partial but consistent dismissal of cultural/ideological scaffolding begins the difficult utopic journey. The book, despite its disgusting heroes and destitute environs, has a mutated anticpation that Didion's similarly famous lament doesn't dare to suggest. Thompson begs readers to hold fast to a rejection of the "old-mystic" fallacies, not out of some kind of nihilistic cynicism, but out of a desperate longing for change.

Anti-Climax

maruxushugishya

Allegory: sustained metaphor; the antidote to myth; insists on the sheer artificiality of constructs in ways that myths do not.

So it is with the present portion of the work, which aims to characterize and to preserve the intervals of reflection, the distances lying between the most essential parts of this work, which are turned most intensively to the outside. [N1,3]

Is Benjamin trying to create some sort of unity?

Derrida from Limited Inc., "Rather, I deconcentrate, and it is the secondary, eccentric, lateral, marginal, parasitic, borderline cases which are ‘important’ to me and are a source of many things, such as pleasure, but also into the general functioning of a textual system. And were there to be a center to this debate, we would have reached it already, in the form of this difference in styles of reading. But what is involved is more than a difference in style" (45).

While in Aragon there remains an impressionistic element, namely the ‘mythology’ . . . here it is a question of the dissolution of ‘mythology’ into the space of history. That, of course, can happen only through the awakening of a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been. [N1, 9]

Commodity: fetish and fossil. Wish image and ruin.

Empathy with the commodity is fundamentally empathy with exchange value itself. [M17a, 3]

Barthes from Mythologies: "The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history. In short, in the account given of our contemporary circumstances, I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there" (11).

Concept of nature in Marx: "If in Hegel . . . ‘physical nature likewise encroaches on world history,’ then Marx conceives nature from the beginning in social categories. Physical nature does not enter directly into world history; rather, it enters indirectly, as a process of material production that goes on, from the earliest moment, not only between man and nature but also between man and man. Or, to use language that will be clear to philosophers as well: in Marx’s rigorously social science, that pure nature presupposed by all huan activity (the economic natura naturans) is replaced everywhere by nature as material production—that is, by a social ‘matter’ mediated and transformed through human social activity, and thus at the same time capable of further change and modification in the present and future," Korsch, Karl Marx, vol. 3, p.3.
[N16, 4]

Butler from Bodies That Matter: "The process of that sedimentation or what we might call materialization will be a kind of citationality, the acquisition being through the citing of power, a citing that establishes an originary complicity with power in the formation of the ‘I’." (15)

Back to Negri: "We can see in it the passion for totality, but only in the form of a series of multiplicities and leaps, never in a monolithic sense; we can find in it, above all, a dynamic which has the plurality and the same diversity of subjectivity, and is nowhere closed" (13).

The lack of narrative structure does not produce capriciousness of meaning.

honky-tonk lagoon

"debutante"
Today's NYT: "By that time she had become a kind of legend and the debate had polarized: Arbus as a compassionate champion of the neglected versus Arbus as exploitative, a narcissist of morbid eloquence. Or as Susan Sontag infamously put it, the photographer of "a single village": "only, as it happens the idiot village is America."

On Reading A Notebook

Derrida, Limited Inc: "The first consequence of this will be the following: given that structure of iteration, the intention animating the utterance will never be through and through present to itself and to its content. The iteration structuring it a priori introduces into it a dehiscence and a cleft which are essential. . . . Above all, this essential absence of intending the actuality of utterance, this structural unconsciousness, if you like, prohibits any saturation of the context" (18,59).

i was biking to school on Monday morning and i crossed Main at University to talk to the black man wearing a KKK shroud and bobbing a sign that read, on one side: "Lesbian work at court house." On the other side was a list of judges. i have no idea what it "meant."
So i just said, "Your sign sucks."
And he told me, "You suck. You need a man."
"Your sign still sucks," i said. "Besides, it should either say, 'A lesbian' or 'lesbians' work at the courthouse. "
"Free speech," he replied.
"But it doesn't make any sense."
He started yelling at me through his bullhorn so i headed on to class to show my students a dvd about "Berkeley in the 60's." Maybe we should have just gone for a walk downtown.

Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook": "We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind's string too short to use, an indescriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker" (136).

Someone in class suggested that we have non-reified utopia: Starbucks. It's a place where people can come in from the rain. A place where your students can find you. People go there to study. In my grad class. The class where we read Marx and Benjamin.

Yesterday i read that Taco Bell finally agreed to grant the Coalition of Immokalee Workers that extra penny per pound of tomatoes picked they've been asking for. For five years. A penny per pound. For a living wage.

Starbucks. Lesbian work at courthouse.

Godard, "We have to discover everything about everything. We must turn to life again. We must move into modern life with a virgin eye."

One of my cats will only sleep on my laptop, on top of the gas stove, or behind the microwave.

Engels, Selected Correspondence, "According to the materialist conception of history, the determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction in real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If therefore somebody twists this into the statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phase."

i visited my family in San Francisco last week and we went skiing in Tahoe. Every time i see that lake my experience is mediated by the beer commercials that were popular when i was a kid. i see the lake and the snow-capped mountains all around it, and i immediately think, "Head for the mountains. Head for Busch Beer." Then i think about the styrofoam cooler full of cans of Pabst my grandfather always kept in the van. Or on the boat. Or next to the TV chair.

Then i think, "Wow. What a huge lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains."

The Dirty Mac

Performance 1970

Watching my 15 month-old niece, my sister-in-law, and my brother sit transfixed before a peaking Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus Mick Jagger as he chicken-strut, floor-slithered, flirted with John Lennon, and strategically effected an awkward striptease by pulling off his tight red top in order to reveal a fake devil/oni tattoo and an assortment of other demonic scribblings on his little trunk, i remembered my own complete attentiveness during my first surprised "afterparty" viewing of Nicholas Roeg's 1970 exploitation of Jagger's shapeshifting allure, the profligate sex/gender crimeworld fantasia, Performance, ten years ago.

As most of my fellow cultural studies-leaning grad student peers tend to mine the ripe genres of hip-hop, punk, riot grrl, and contemporary Le Tigre-esque bands to illustrate their queer theoretical problematizing, i have yet to snuggle up for an end-of-the-semester paper presentation on Mick and Keith or, even more appropriately for students of that ever-expanding "discipline," performance studies, on this difficult to recount film, Performance.

Bowie, Lou Reed, Freddy Mercury, Sweet and Slade are the obvious seventies go-to's for glam and androgny rock performance critiques, the Stones had a cockier legacy filled with oodles of lazily-sired offspring and supermodel affairs. But Jagger, the tiny "little faggot" confusing the Angels in Gimme Shelter, prefigured such later omni-sexual heartthrob's as Brett Anderson, about whom a male rock critic once observed, "I didn't know if I wanted to be him, or to fuck him."

But the now-knighted sir-Mick is the classic case of "subversion" gone "consumption," right? That riskiness and discomfort, Jagger in fedora and scarf begging all of Altamonte to just cool it and love each other became the face of Hilfiger and tabloid paternity tests, so can his pockets of transgression even matter anymore?

Here's one answer: My brother Jesse and i, a few hours before our couch ogling, had sat on the floor in his daughter's nursery while she took every book off her shelf and licked each one to test its content. We talked about our parents and our weird but lucky childhood. Before Dad traded the union for the golf course and mom swapped grass and macrame for nursing school and lesbian communes, our country home was full of people. Our playmates were the children of blue-collar hippies who climbed poles and ran leather stores during the day and just hung out at night. Dad 's hair was just as long as Mom's, inspiring me to call him 'George Washington' until he chopped off his ponytail. And by the time we came around they were listening to the Band and John and Yoko, but they were mellow.

They, along with the rest of their friends, were from Miami, and they were cool. When we first moved to the north Floridian backwater town we grew up in, the kids at the new Publix would stare, open-mouthed, at our mysterious parents and our bellbottoms. i guarded my middle name (Sunshine) from classmates as if it were an ugly planter's wart. But our parents knew more than we did, and when my mom painted the mail box with roses and my dad tended the honeysuckle that grew over the chicken coop, they thought their details helped them move away from the religion and the paranoia they'd been raised on. For some reason, Jesse and i see some of this in our obsessions with the Stones and Roxy Music and Bowie, figures we didn't exactly grow up on, but ones we imagine altered our parents and their friends.

For a while, masculinity was different. And even though it makes no difference anymore who wears the pants or the long hair, when i watch both of my brothers with their little girls i see that some of that softness has rubbed off on the men they grew up to be. They're calm. They change diapers. They make dinner. They love their wives. They don't make "queer" jokes. And one of them enjoys watching the young Rolling Stones just as much as his wife, sister, and baby girl do.