Introduction
It is important to distinguish performance from performativity: the former presumes a subject, but the latter contests the very notion of the subject.
Judith Butler
The subject is a variable complex formation of discourse and power. One might argue that subject is impediment. For to be subject is to be someone else by dependence and tied to his own identity by a conjunction of ‘self’ and knowledge.
Stuart Hall.
The next question was - what makes planets go around the sun? At the time of Kepler some people answered this problem by saying that there were angels behind them beating their wings and pushing the planets around an orbit. As you will see, the answer is not very far from the truth. The only difference is that the angels sit in a different direction and their wings push inward. For me, it is a pity that Einstein's idea doesn't work. The reasonable thing just doesn't work.
Richard Feynman
The starting point on the subject is that almost all philosophical orientations today, even if they strongly oppose each other, agree on some kind of basic anti-subjectivist stance. ‘The subject is ossifying’, although not yet a clamour has become a consensus view. The feeling is that the dynamism of the subject has exhausted itself and is now in terminal decline. Some suggest the subject, or self, if not dead, is in an ‘oxygen tent’ and we are beginning to become haunted by its gradual disappearance.1 Bearing in mind the tide of subjection we face round the clock; politics, education, consumerism, media, it could be confidently claimed ours is an age in which the individual subject is in increasing search of itself.
Yet it is a requisite of liberal, democratic politics to presuppose the existence of individual subjects. These citizen/subjects are deemed capable of reflective and critical distance from a possible course of action. They are also assumed to be equal to the task of taking and being charged with unique responsibility for those actions. Such democratic societies encourage unfettered, public debate in the belief that their subjects would be ultimately responsive to the force of better reasons and would act accordingly, i.e. at the polling booth. Yet throughout many contemporary social science and humanities disciplines, a widespread and deep scepticism about the possibility of such individual agency and such responsiveness reigns. It follows that such contemporary scepticism in regard to the subject must impact on notions of that currently highly esteemed concept of ‘performance’.
Certainly, ‘performance’ plays a major part in the election of our political leaders, Tony Blair has been described as ‘...a great performer’, (The Scotsman, 12th July, 2003).2 Indeed the choice for the ‘leader of the ‘free world’ has hinged on the performance of presidential candidates in television debates and this has been a constant since Nixon v Kennedy in the 1960s, now embedded in performance lore.3
(For acess to the complete work - email drpcheevers@yahoo.co.uk)
Monday 27 September 2010
Why the Grass isn’t Green and the Sky isn’t Blue and your Blood is not Red.
You go through your school life with your English teachers (Bless) telling you what a Metaphor is - and for the rest of your days, it is more than likely; you will view metaphor as one, or all of the following:
a) Metaphor expresses similarities, used mainly in poetic flourish or by politician in rhetorical persuasion.
b) Metaphors occur when a word is allotted to not what it normally designates but to something else.
c) You are given to understand by the teachers that there are pre-existing similarities between what words normally designate.
So you leave school with a sense that metaphors are, well, kind of linguistically deviant - should have an ASBO wrapped round them for they are saying one thing while meaning another. Anyway shouldn’t language if used in its proper sense be literal. Eh well, no.
Follow me into my garden and I will endeavour to make my point...
(For access to full article email magazine)
a) Metaphor expresses similarities, used mainly in poetic flourish or by politician in rhetorical persuasion.
b) Metaphors occur when a word is allotted to not what it normally designates but to something else.
c) You are given to understand by the teachers that there are pre-existing similarities between what words normally designate.
So you leave school with a sense that metaphors are, well, kind of linguistically deviant - should have an ASBO wrapped round them for they are saying one thing while meaning another. Anyway shouldn’t language if used in its proper sense be literal. Eh well, no.
Follow me into my garden and I will endeavour to make my point...
(For access to full article email magazine)
Saturday 25 September 2010
I suppose we were just meant for each other - destined to meet.
All of us, find it hard to escape the attraction of lyricism, the fairytale, minstrels that enchanted universe of goblins and fairies so redolent in our Harry Pottterish world. For we live in a world of wall to wall media with its techno-tele-discursivity, telling us how to think and x factor techno-tele-iconicity telling us who to adore. Most of us just grin and bear these pathological aspects of modernity.
Why not be stoic anyway? because overhead there is lowering sky called seductive capitalism with its massive investment in the escapism of ‘luv’, from pop songs to women’s magazines downwards. Yes charismatic capitalism with its proselytising zeal that induces desire, the kind of purchasing desire that once induced must be sated. Does this apply to love. Does the discourse on love go unrecognised. Is love domination accepted?
“Our antennas were trembling at that first meeting. We both just knew it. It wasn;t tht long afterwadsthat we were married. Has the woman just unknowingly just triggered her dispositions and entered marriage as calculated submission?
I was talking to friends and associates about how they first met and I though this could be turned into a game show by say, Simon Bowel, he could stage it in a Roman amphitheatre
”We had such similar tastes in everything.” I stayed schtum, but the view that marriage between people with the same social characteristics, is a form of inbreeding floated across my mental screen.
“I don’t know what it was about him, I think it was his bearing. You know, the way he carried himself.” So he had performed his manly role well. “I don’t know... with her...it was the way she walked, her gait, the tilt of her head - she had played her, coquettish, demure female part well. Hearing this just strengthened my view that identity is performance.
“Something told me to go to the cafe that night with my friend, and that’s where we met. The moment I looked at him. I knew, I can’t put it into words...” Don’t worry others will, with their incomparably lucid evocation from Mills and Boon to chic lit, stretching into an infinity where all the trees have been used up.
“It wasn’t long before I was thinking of...well marriage really...the white dress, the ceremony, the full works. Never thought that would happen to me. Perhaps it was just fate that I met him that night.” “Perhaps it was” I acquiescd. Yes, amor fati, that love of fate, with its baggage of acceptance of the determined or predetermined course. Haven’t we all fallen for that one.
If you feel all this has a comic pedantry, part of some medieval fabliaux, you are on the right track. As these friends continued to recount the tale of their romance and subsequent marriage, a ghostly bearded figure like Hamlet’s father fleeted across my mind and in sonorous Darwinian tones boomed, “All these meeting are driven by biology.” Jesus, I thought, I will have to get a move on myself if I want to have children.
But I kept on interviewing the couples. So these couples told how they were in love, as they understood it. As their relationships intensified, they began to view the other as quasi divine creatures. Now they were on the magical island of love where there is full reciprocity. Where you entrust yourself to the other, and authorise the atonement of yourself to the other, A work of mutual recognition takes place, which Jean Paul Satre said makes you feel, ‘justified in existing’.
And this island is on a wondrous archipelago where you are just accepted with all your negative particularities and at your most contingent. Here in this love bliss, a state of disinteredness, based on the happiness of giving happiness. It is and inexhaustible reason for wonder. On this island of pure love, couples give themselves to each other, thereby excluding themselves from common circulation. Yet pure love, like art for art’s sake, is a relatively recent historical invention.
Some of the men talked to me of their ‘stag nights’ with misty reminiscence. As the tales of this strange male phenomeonon unfolded each sounded more and more like a bunch of Norse men with horns getting pissed in Ramsgate after a rocky landing in their long boats. So I went to one, as another of my. “I ‘m nearing 30 now,” of my friends ‘bit the dust’.
“She brought him to his knees.” “He was putty in her hands.”
Over the beer in the pub, they shook their heads. Yes, he had succumbed, hadn’t he, to that fatal attraction. Their words, in that male way, rang out like verdicts. “You’ll be next.” They said to me accusingly. “What me, never.”
“It was the pillow talk, wasn’t it?” The lads taunted him, the hooked one, the soon to be married. Yes, the forces that are suspected of working in the darkness, of binding men, of entrapping. The vagina dentata had struck again for men enfold and women ensnare, they didn’t say. But as they went on, tacitly branded the woman as a decadent voluptuary for stealing one of their mates. For this was a ‘stag nigh’ and these were men, and they were acting out the permanent dispositions that being masculine triggers and awakens.
As they reflected further how he had fallen madly in love with her, their laddish reflections, with their fixations to immaturity just serving to reinforce the androcentric mythology. Yes that fatal attraction affecting the social order of male dominance, embedded in our psyches from Aphrodite to Eve had worked it’s magic again, making them forget the obligation linked to their social dignity as men.
As they continued to muse not allowing for an instant, that they as men are invariably in a state of subterranean tension, like an enclave of negation. You know the weight of it just being men, and their anxiety about being men like some exotic peculiarities never spoken of and the resulting uncertainty leading to frantic circular investment in just achieving the target of being, well you know, a ‘man’.
When the landlord called time, afterwards, in that British way, there wasn’t a public toilet to be found, so it was down the alley to urinate against the wall. And this with much hearty laugher ended in a contest as to who could piss highest. It could have been a potency contest for 12 year olds. Alex won, but then he’s a fire man/fighter.
Then it was my turn, theres isn’t the space to tell you the whys and wherefores. But I do remember standing by her at the ceremony. How I had worked on my body in the gym, and she had worked too, to make herself trim and neat. Men do such gym things to make themselves bigger, women to make themselves smaller. .
Then the ceremony, we all need ceremony. I think of it now. The priest in his cassock, she in her silk dress that piece of clothing that like the priest’s cassock that neither prescribes or proscribes. And her minimal maquilage that denoted what? Allure. The cosmesis of it all, me in my first suit for yonks, which made me feel as if just I just had plastic surgery. What did the suit denote anyway, honour?
We took our vows in language effectively vowing to resolve our differences in non-coercive and non manipulative ways. And how would we manage to do that? Well we would use those twin transcending towers; we would be both rational and yes, reasonable. I mean if you want to achieve a consensual action you use the bargaining tools available to rational and thinking people
We vowed this both publicly and privately in the belief that these stubborn notions of rationality and reason would impose order on our chaotic manifold of impulses. Of course it is a given that in employing these two stale and obstinate notions they must be recognised de facto and unquestioning, for they are like objectivity, trans discursive and trans subjective. Now I think, how impotent and arbitrary is utopian thinking.
I remember those communicative signs, the ‘gifts and then there were the speeches.
Heavily male. Where innuendo snuck in, eh, tastefully of course.
Men with their speeches as if by their words they were magically been handed the skeptron, that Greek staff of bygone ages. And that by their just standing to speak there was some Godly call to order. There should be a sacralising separation, or so they thought. For men were about to speak, and they did so, by believing that they were drawing on external sources, words. But it was words that were drawing them in the linguistic sphere and just releasing the springs and pulleys that constitute male dispositions. Meanwhile, as I recall, the women watched, feminine, demure,coquettish.
I recall the mute suffering on the face of my Mediterranean mum giving her son away. There she was employing the means of the weak, the tearful outburst, as she squeezed the life out of a tiny laced white handkerchief. As people comforted her with mollifying words, or overly personal addresses of “Darling; or “Dear” or chucked her cheek, she was accepting of this sympa behaviour exemplify her marked propensity for self denigration.
Then there was the father-in-law, an Edwardian gentleman straight out of the pages of Virginia Woolf. I recalled how on the lawn afterwards he narrowed his eyes and looked to the horizon as if to say
‘You will understand one day.” The gloating of prophylactic prediction all over him. Yes, for this man who had deserted just about everybody, including three wives, all this was a kind of ludic illusion. He was at pains that you would remember his ‘ I told you so’ shots off the bow, while the retrospective triumph would be his. This man was always full of the pleasure of disillusioning. As if fitting to his male statutory loftiness he was an anthropologist but a pessimistic one. This man, for sure, would die standing, preferably by a crag of rock where in the future people would come to reflect by the cairn of rocks that was his monument to steadfast maleness. Or so he believed. He was a man alright, but prehistoric. His demeanour full of that totalising critique, like those experts hauled onto television couches, the intellectual theocracy giving out their critiques that reduce most to utter despair and defeatism. These latte literati, are an exploitative class of mediation and meaning who are unregulated, unmediated,
Then there was the Honeymoon in Venice, where we wandered past ‘Harry's Bar' and laughed uproariously. So here we were on our Honemoon in Venice, being in love was like a truce; love as the suspension of power relations, a deadly break in the natural order. A miraculous truce has taken place, where the dominant (male) seems dominated. And as if by magic male violence and coarseness has been stilled; civilized by stripping social relations of their brutality. We were in love, the state where couples lose themselves in each other in suspension of object and subject. It is a state where there is no temptation to dominate for one is blissfully beyond the alternatives of egoism and altruism and in this complicitious stage there is little need for the distortion of compromise.
But can the enchanted island of love endlessly threatened by the return of egoistic calculation be snatched from the icy waters of calculation, violence and self-interest. Years later I would recall those marriage vows - as if rationality and reason were free from illusion and self-deception, not as a pile of debris growing skywards.
Is love then, domination accepted, unrecognised. Has the woman entered marriage as calculated submission. Is her behaviour the complicity of the dominated? Was being in love the suspension of the dominant symbolic violence, or did it then become the extreme, the most subtle, the most invisible form of violence?
*(If you like this kind of thinking - then read
Pierre Bourdieu, I could not have written this without him).
Why not be stoic anyway? because overhead there is lowering sky called seductive capitalism with its massive investment in the escapism of ‘luv’, from pop songs to women’s magazines downwards. Yes charismatic capitalism with its proselytising zeal that induces desire, the kind of purchasing desire that once induced must be sated. Does this apply to love. Does the discourse on love go unrecognised. Is love domination accepted?
“Our antennas were trembling at that first meeting. We both just knew it. It wasn;t tht long afterwadsthat we were married. Has the woman just unknowingly just triggered her dispositions and entered marriage as calculated submission?
I was talking to friends and associates about how they first met and I though this could be turned into a game show by say, Simon Bowel, he could stage it in a Roman amphitheatre
”We had such similar tastes in everything.” I stayed schtum, but the view that marriage between people with the same social characteristics, is a form of inbreeding floated across my mental screen.
“I don’t know what it was about him, I think it was his bearing. You know, the way he carried himself.” So he had performed his manly role well. “I don’t know... with her...it was the way she walked, her gait, the tilt of her head - she had played her, coquettish, demure female part well. Hearing this just strengthened my view that identity is performance.
“Something told me to go to the cafe that night with my friend, and that’s where we met. The moment I looked at him. I knew, I can’t put it into words...” Don’t worry others will, with their incomparably lucid evocation from Mills and Boon to chic lit, stretching into an infinity where all the trees have been used up.
“It wasn’t long before I was thinking of...well marriage really...the white dress, the ceremony, the full works. Never thought that would happen to me. Perhaps it was just fate that I met him that night.” “Perhaps it was” I acquiescd. Yes, amor fati, that love of fate, with its baggage of acceptance of the determined or predetermined course. Haven’t we all fallen for that one.
If you feel all this has a comic pedantry, part of some medieval fabliaux, you are on the right track. As these friends continued to recount the tale of their romance and subsequent marriage, a ghostly bearded figure like Hamlet’s father fleeted across my mind and in sonorous Darwinian tones boomed, “All these meeting are driven by biology.” Jesus, I thought, I will have to get a move on myself if I want to have children.
But I kept on interviewing the couples. So these couples told how they were in love, as they understood it. As their relationships intensified, they began to view the other as quasi divine creatures. Now they were on the magical island of love where there is full reciprocity. Where you entrust yourself to the other, and authorise the atonement of yourself to the other, A work of mutual recognition takes place, which Jean Paul Satre said makes you feel, ‘justified in existing’.
And this island is on a wondrous archipelago where you are just accepted with all your negative particularities and at your most contingent. Here in this love bliss, a state of disinteredness, based on the happiness of giving happiness. It is and inexhaustible reason for wonder. On this island of pure love, couples give themselves to each other, thereby excluding themselves from common circulation. Yet pure love, like art for art’s sake, is a relatively recent historical invention.
Some of the men talked to me of their ‘stag nights’ with misty reminiscence. As the tales of this strange male phenomeonon unfolded each sounded more and more like a bunch of Norse men with horns getting pissed in Ramsgate after a rocky landing in their long boats. So I went to one, as another of my. “I ‘m nearing 30 now,” of my friends ‘bit the dust’.
“She brought him to his knees.” “He was putty in her hands.”
Over the beer in the pub, they shook their heads. Yes, he had succumbed, hadn’t he, to that fatal attraction. Their words, in that male way, rang out like verdicts. “You’ll be next.” They said to me accusingly. “What me, never.”
“It was the pillow talk, wasn’t it?” The lads taunted him, the hooked one, the soon to be married. Yes, the forces that are suspected of working in the darkness, of binding men, of entrapping. The vagina dentata had struck again for men enfold and women ensnare, they didn’t say. But as they went on, tacitly branded the woman as a decadent voluptuary for stealing one of their mates. For this was a ‘stag nigh’ and these were men, and they were acting out the permanent dispositions that being masculine triggers and awakens.
As they reflected further how he had fallen madly in love with her, their laddish reflections, with their fixations to immaturity just serving to reinforce the androcentric mythology. Yes that fatal attraction affecting the social order of male dominance, embedded in our psyches from Aphrodite to Eve had worked it’s magic again, making them forget the obligation linked to their social dignity as men.
As they continued to muse not allowing for an instant, that they as men are invariably in a state of subterranean tension, like an enclave of negation. You know the weight of it just being men, and their anxiety about being men like some exotic peculiarities never spoken of and the resulting uncertainty leading to frantic circular investment in just achieving the target of being, well you know, a ‘man’.
When the landlord called time, afterwards, in that British way, there wasn’t a public toilet to be found, so it was down the alley to urinate against the wall. And this with much hearty laugher ended in a contest as to who could piss highest. It could have been a potency contest for 12 year olds. Alex won, but then he’s a fire man/fighter.
Then it was my turn, theres isn’t the space to tell you the whys and wherefores. But I do remember standing by her at the ceremony. How I had worked on my body in the gym, and she had worked too, to make herself trim and neat. Men do such gym things to make themselves bigger, women to make themselves smaller. .
Then the ceremony, we all need ceremony. I think of it now. The priest in his cassock, she in her silk dress that piece of clothing that like the priest’s cassock that neither prescribes or proscribes. And her minimal maquilage that denoted what? Allure. The cosmesis of it all, me in my first suit for yonks, which made me feel as if just I just had plastic surgery. What did the suit denote anyway, honour?
We took our vows in language effectively vowing to resolve our differences in non-coercive and non manipulative ways. And how would we manage to do that? Well we would use those twin transcending towers; we would be both rational and yes, reasonable. I mean if you want to achieve a consensual action you use the bargaining tools available to rational and thinking people
We vowed this both publicly and privately in the belief that these stubborn notions of rationality and reason would impose order on our chaotic manifold of impulses. Of course it is a given that in employing these two stale and obstinate notions they must be recognised de facto and unquestioning, for they are like objectivity, trans discursive and trans subjective. Now I think, how impotent and arbitrary is utopian thinking.
I remember those communicative signs, the ‘gifts and then there were the speeches.
Heavily male. Where innuendo snuck in, eh, tastefully of course.
Men with their speeches as if by their words they were magically been handed the skeptron, that Greek staff of bygone ages. And that by their just standing to speak there was some Godly call to order. There should be a sacralising separation, or so they thought. For men were about to speak, and they did so, by believing that they were drawing on external sources, words. But it was words that were drawing them in the linguistic sphere and just releasing the springs and pulleys that constitute male dispositions. Meanwhile, as I recall, the women watched, feminine, demure,coquettish.
I recall the mute suffering on the face of my Mediterranean mum giving her son away. There she was employing the means of the weak, the tearful outburst, as she squeezed the life out of a tiny laced white handkerchief. As people comforted her with mollifying words, or overly personal addresses of “Darling; or “Dear” or chucked her cheek, she was accepting of this sympa behaviour exemplify her marked propensity for self denigration.
Then there was the father-in-law, an Edwardian gentleman straight out of the pages of Virginia Woolf. I recalled how on the lawn afterwards he narrowed his eyes and looked to the horizon as if to say
‘You will understand one day.” The gloating of prophylactic prediction all over him. Yes, for this man who had deserted just about everybody, including three wives, all this was a kind of ludic illusion. He was at pains that you would remember his ‘ I told you so’ shots off the bow, while the retrospective triumph would be his. This man was always full of the pleasure of disillusioning. As if fitting to his male statutory loftiness he was an anthropologist but a pessimistic one. This man, for sure, would die standing, preferably by a crag of rock where in the future people would come to reflect by the cairn of rocks that was his monument to steadfast maleness. Or so he believed. He was a man alright, but prehistoric. His demeanour full of that totalising critique, like those experts hauled onto television couches, the intellectual theocracy giving out their critiques that reduce most to utter despair and defeatism. These latte literati, are an exploitative class of mediation and meaning who are unregulated, unmediated,
Then there was the Honeymoon in Venice, where we wandered past ‘Harry's Bar' and laughed uproariously. So here we were on our Honemoon in Venice, being in love was like a truce; love as the suspension of power relations, a deadly break in the natural order. A miraculous truce has taken place, where the dominant (male) seems dominated. And as if by magic male violence and coarseness has been stilled; civilized by stripping social relations of their brutality. We were in love, the state where couples lose themselves in each other in suspension of object and subject. It is a state where there is no temptation to dominate for one is blissfully beyond the alternatives of egoism and altruism and in this complicitious stage there is little need for the distortion of compromise.
But can the enchanted island of love endlessly threatened by the return of egoistic calculation be snatched from the icy waters of calculation, violence and self-interest. Years later I would recall those marriage vows - as if rationality and reason were free from illusion and self-deception, not as a pile of debris growing skywards.
Is love then, domination accepted, unrecognised. Has the woman entered marriage as calculated submission. Is her behaviour the complicity of the dominated? Was being in love the suspension of the dominant symbolic violence, or did it then become the extreme, the most subtle, the most invisible form of violence?
*(If you like this kind of thinking - then read
Pierre Bourdieu, I could not have written this without him).
Hell in fractured French
Hell, in Fractured French.
Like Alice he had fallen down a hole into a weird world. So this was it, finally had made it, to hell. But it was nothing like he had envisaged, none of that burning in eternal flames; no boiling tar when he asked for a cup of water; none of the Catholic indoctrination of his youth. In fact, strangely what he got was an offer of biscuits and tea and eh...sympathy. No, this was a different kind of hell.
This hell was a group who were talking about their experiences and all in fractured French which he strained to understand. I know it sounds like a gentle kind of hell, like some intermediate language group meeting up as a break from the tedium of knitting and bowls, but the hell was of it was, its subtlety.
For these people, you see, weren’t devils, no, no, they were good solid burghers, some educated, some not, and their horns only appeared when they talked delightedly of this incident or that which had struck them since they last met.
As the self congratulatory reportage of this item they had seen in the newspapers or they had seen on the television rolled out, the hell of it only became apparent when you asked, “How do you know that to be true?” And a more devilish side would show when they indignantly responded, “It was in the papers and on television”.
But being a new boy in hell, unwisely you would persist “...this thing you read about, this latest phenomenon, how do you know it is beautiful?” and you would get baleful looks. “It’s say so here, in this magazine.” “But beauty is a transitory thing, you know Rubinesque women in one century and stick thin models in another...” But the hellish futility of it, as they all smiled sympathetically at this new boy, would make the words die on your lips. ‘And why was all this being conveyed in lousy French?’ you wanted to scream but you knew you couldn’t for this nightmare was ruled over by civilised restraint. You were slow, but you were learning
You see this was a genteel hell, for you were allowed in a very courteous way to bring up what you wanted to say, “You know on the way down here I saw...” but when you would express sympathy for the demonstrators you had seen naively voicing their discontent at Lucifer’s gates, you were immediately pounced on for being a sympathiser with violence, and you knew for all eternity there would not be a recognition that the violence was coming from the other side. It was an awful feeling, just awful, that the violence of silence ruled here.
But come on, enough is enough, you wanted to scream at them all, ‘...all your reportage...on the television...in the newspapers, it is all virtual. Even the bloody language you use is virtual, even you, the subjects you so confidently think you are, it is all virtual.’ But you suppressed your scream because it would have been ridiculous in this genteel place where all they knew and would forever know was the virtual.
So with a mind wrenching clarity it dawned, here you had to play the polite game, the courteous exchange, for it was the only way, you were permitted to ask anything. So you would enquire in that hellishly civil way, “Well...eh what happens here, eh... in hell. You know what do you do with yourselves in the eh... evenings?” You had asked the right question, clever boy, for your polite enquiry brought about a communal glow of self satisfaction.
“Oh, you know, we watch the news on television, just to keep informed, you see, so as we know what is going on. Then most of us have a sherry or two on the balcony and read the newspapers. It’s lovely you see because all of our balconies face the sun.”
“Do they, really?”
And you would think of the occupants of those balconies; billions, trillions of them all facings the sun, all contentedly committing the blasphemy of thinking they could convert the unknown into the comfort of the known. And why is it all in fractured French?
Oh, what a future hell is this to be here for all eternity with human mermaids basking on their verandas in the sun, contentedly thinking they had straddled both worlds.
Like Alice he had fallen down a hole into a weird world. So this was it, finally had made it, to hell. But it was nothing like he had envisaged, none of that burning in eternal flames; no boiling tar when he asked for a cup of water; none of the Catholic indoctrination of his youth. In fact, strangely what he got was an offer of biscuits and tea and eh...sympathy. No, this was a different kind of hell.
This hell was a group who were talking about their experiences and all in fractured French which he strained to understand. I know it sounds like a gentle kind of hell, like some intermediate language group meeting up as a break from the tedium of knitting and bowls, but the hell was of it was, its subtlety.
For these people, you see, weren’t devils, no, no, they were good solid burghers, some educated, some not, and their horns only appeared when they talked delightedly of this incident or that which had struck them since they last met.
As the self congratulatory reportage of this item they had seen in the newspapers or they had seen on the television rolled out, the hell of it only became apparent when you asked, “How do you know that to be true?” And a more devilish side would show when they indignantly responded, “It was in the papers and on television”.
But being a new boy in hell, unwisely you would persist “...this thing you read about, this latest phenomenon, how do you know it is beautiful?” and you would get baleful looks. “It’s say so here, in this magazine.” “But beauty is a transitory thing, you know Rubinesque women in one century and stick thin models in another...” But the hellish futility of it, as they all smiled sympathetically at this new boy, would make the words die on your lips. ‘And why was all this being conveyed in lousy French?’ you wanted to scream but you knew you couldn’t for this nightmare was ruled over by civilised restraint. You were slow, but you were learning
You see this was a genteel hell, for you were allowed in a very courteous way to bring up what you wanted to say, “You know on the way down here I saw...” but when you would express sympathy for the demonstrators you had seen naively voicing their discontent at Lucifer’s gates, you were immediately pounced on for being a sympathiser with violence, and you knew for all eternity there would not be a recognition that the violence was coming from the other side. It was an awful feeling, just awful, that the violence of silence ruled here.
But come on, enough is enough, you wanted to scream at them all, ‘...all your reportage...on the television...in the newspapers, it is all virtual. Even the bloody language you use is virtual, even you, the subjects you so confidently think you are, it is all virtual.’ But you suppressed your scream because it would have been ridiculous in this genteel place where all they knew and would forever know was the virtual.
So with a mind wrenching clarity it dawned, here you had to play the polite game, the courteous exchange, for it was the only way, you were permitted to ask anything. So you would enquire in that hellishly civil way, “Well...eh what happens here, eh... in hell. You know what do you do with yourselves in the eh... evenings?” You had asked the right question, clever boy, for your polite enquiry brought about a communal glow of self satisfaction.
“Oh, you know, we watch the news on television, just to keep informed, you see, so as we know what is going on. Then most of us have a sherry or two on the balcony and read the newspapers. It’s lovely you see because all of our balconies face the sun.”
“Do they, really?”
And you would think of the occupants of those balconies; billions, trillions of them all facings the sun, all contentedly committing the blasphemy of thinking they could convert the unknown into the comfort of the known. And why is it all in fractured French?
Oh, what a future hell is this to be here for all eternity with human mermaids basking on their verandas in the sun, contentedly thinking they had straddled both worlds.
If you wish to find a message in a Godard film then Cherchez Le Pimp!
If You Want to Find the Message in a Godard Film,
then Cherchez le Pimp!
John Kriedl, Jean-Luc Godard Twayne Publishers (Boston 1980), reminds us
that in a study made of prostitution in France in the last days of the IV
Republic (1954-58), it was revealed that one out of every eighty Parisians
women were prostitutes. The prostitute can thus be seen as a protagonist of
French society. Accordingly, Jean-Luc Godard moved the prostitute to the
centre of his first five films.
Now if one goes to Godard¹s earlier film work Breathless, A Woman Is a
Woman, and The Little Soldier, we see the beginnings of a subjection of
women to a rigorous semiotics scrutiny. Godard¹s women appeared almost
extra-filmic, leaning out of his films, and as they did so, were subjected
to a rigorous, almost Gestapo-like questioning. Kriedl goes on to argue that
continuing this train in his film work, Godard introduced a technique for
analysing women that was a total break from all Hollywood convention; a
technique, Kriedl asserts, that borrows from sources as wide apart as
Umberto Eco, the TV Interview, and Russian Formalism.
This technique is called experimental semioticization, which means reducing
the character to a bunch of signifiers, stripped of any psychologism, and
making these signifiers belong to a class, concept or ism, such as
prostitution. This external semiotisation of a female character was a
technique totally new up to 1962 in France and 1968 in USA, which violated
all the character conventions pertaining to female images.
So if we search for a semantic meaning in a Godard film we rapidly find
information systems that tell us we are observing pimps and prostitutes.
Therefore we follow what narrative there is, until we see the prostitute
signifiers. These will also signify pimps and the signs we receive are
those giving the sense of prostitutes controlled by hidden pimps - in other
words, behind every prostitute is a hidden pimp.
Godard¹s semiotics on the sexual element of the prostitute/pimp
relationship, were of course just the codes and signs which pointed towards the real Mafia in our society. An illustration of this would be Godard¹s response to women undressing in his films. He stoutly defended this, and would point out that the real pimps in this area of our society are the ones who dress women. Taking this
Semiotic decoding a step further we find in Breathless that the Inspector is
the pimp of the law; yet, we also find that, even worse, by law is meant
(the real Mafiosa) the economic law. Therefore a successful decoding
process for the Godard film would necessarily take us through the following
steps:
1. Assume that each film will contain a prostitute and a pimp; evidence of
one is evidence of the other.
2. See that in an extension of the prostitute/pimp story, the pimp can be
the state or an agency of the state, and sexual prostitution will not be the
only signifier for the prostitute shown in the film. The signs showing the
pimp's control will stand for societal forced prostitution and will search
out what the character is really unwilling to do but does anyway.
3. Recognise that part of the prostitute/pimp story will have a
self-referential element that is Godard¹s self-criticism of his own, i.e.
deploring the artist (Godard) selling out to a capitalism.
4. Assume that the resolution to the story line of the film must happen
later, in real life, and that the film we saw is episodic, not final. Its
beginning happened before the film and its end will be found later, or, in
the next Godard film.
The pimp/prostitute relationship was one of Godard's bêtes noires and it
was through this device that he hoped to concentrate minds on larger social
issues.
then Cherchez le Pimp!
John Kriedl, Jean-Luc Godard Twayne Publishers (Boston 1980), reminds us
that in a study made of prostitution in France in the last days of the IV
Republic (1954-58), it was revealed that one out of every eighty Parisians
women were prostitutes. The prostitute can thus be seen as a protagonist of
French society. Accordingly, Jean-Luc Godard moved the prostitute to the
centre of his first five films.
Now if one goes to Godard¹s earlier film work Breathless, A Woman Is a
Woman, and The Little Soldier, we see the beginnings of a subjection of
women to a rigorous semiotics scrutiny. Godard¹s women appeared almost
extra-filmic, leaning out of his films, and as they did so, were subjected
to a rigorous, almost Gestapo-like questioning. Kriedl goes on to argue that
continuing this train in his film work, Godard introduced a technique for
analysing women that was a total break from all Hollywood convention; a
technique, Kriedl asserts, that borrows from sources as wide apart as
Umberto Eco, the TV Interview, and Russian Formalism.
This technique is called experimental semioticization, which means reducing
the character to a bunch of signifiers, stripped of any psychologism, and
making these signifiers belong to a class, concept or ism, such as
prostitution. This external semiotisation of a female character was a
technique totally new up to 1962 in France and 1968 in USA, which violated
all the character conventions pertaining to female images.
So if we search for a semantic meaning in a Godard film we rapidly find
information systems that tell us we are observing pimps and prostitutes.
Therefore we follow what narrative there is, until we see the prostitute
signifiers. These will also signify pimps and the signs we receive are
those giving the sense of prostitutes controlled by hidden pimps - in other
words, behind every prostitute is a hidden pimp.
Godard¹s semiotics on the sexual element of the prostitute/pimp
relationship, were of course just the codes and signs which pointed towards the real Mafia in our society. An illustration of this would be Godard¹s response to women undressing in his films. He stoutly defended this, and would point out that the real pimps in this area of our society are the ones who dress women. Taking this
Semiotic decoding a step further we find in Breathless that the Inspector is
the pimp of the law; yet, we also find that, even worse, by law is meant
(the real Mafiosa) the economic law. Therefore a successful decoding
process for the Godard film would necessarily take us through the following
steps:
1. Assume that each film will contain a prostitute and a pimp; evidence of
one is evidence of the other.
2. See that in an extension of the prostitute/pimp story, the pimp can be
the state or an agency of the state, and sexual prostitution will not be the
only signifier for the prostitute shown in the film. The signs showing the
pimp's control will stand for societal forced prostitution and will search
out what the character is really unwilling to do but does anyway.
3. Recognise that part of the prostitute/pimp story will have a
self-referential element that is Godard¹s self-criticism of his own, i.e.
deploring the artist (Godard) selling out to a capitalism.
4. Assume that the resolution to the story line of the film must happen
later, in real life, and that the film we saw is episodic, not final. Its
beginning happened before the film and its end will be found later, or, in
the next Godard film.
The pimp/prostitute relationship was one of Godard's bêtes noires and it
was through this device that he hoped to concentrate minds on larger social
issues.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)