W. is impressed by my stammer.—‘You stammer and stutter’, says W., ‘and you swallow half your words. What’s wrong with you?’ Every time I see him, he says, it gets a little worse. The simplest words are beginning to defeat me, W. says. Maybe it’s mini-strokes, W. speculates. That would account for it.—‘You had one just there, didn’t you?’

Perhaps, W. muses, my stammering and stuttering is a sign of shame. W. says he never really thought I was capable of it, shame, but perhaps it’s there nonetheless.—‘Something inside you knows you talk rubbish’, he says. ‘Something knows the unending bilge that comes out of your mouth’. (Lars Iyer, Spurious)

Equality is a central term for Rancière, but it is quite a circumscribed equality, the equality specifically and only of speaking beings. Which immediately raises the question, what about non-speaking beings? Animals would be the most obvious example, but there are also human beings prevented from speaking by age and infirmity, disability, oppression. Rancière might object that these examples of non-speaking don’t exclude people from the class of equals, which isn’t strictly speaking beings, but rather beings that have the logos, that have access to language; and, furthermore, it is the structure of the logos, of language, which ensures this equality. However, in the way Rancière makes his argument, speech is indeed theoretically central, and problematic. The argument for axiomatic equality occurs in what is, as it were, the primal scene of politics for Rancière, the moment at which a master gives an order to a slave. This contains the central contradiction of politics: the master presents themselves as of a different order from the slave and so as entitled to give the slave orders; but in the process of giving the order, the master assumes that the slave is capable of understanding the order, that is, that master and slave are equal in their possession of language. This argument doesn’t depend on speech literally understood – it would work if the order was handed over in written form or using sign language – but it does depend on features of speech broadly construed: the two participants must be in the same place at the same time for their equality, the possibility of the slave speaking back to the master, to manifest itself.

That is, Rancière’s argument for the equality of speaking beings is phonocentric in Derrida’s sense. Phonocentrism is the belief that spoken language is more authentic or primary than written language. The two features that are supposed to give spoken language this primacy are the presence and synchronicity it is supposed to require; through this presence, the speaker retains the ability to directly authenticate the meaning of their words. Writing, on this theory, is a poor copy of speech, where, in the absence of the author, the written text is parasitic on the authority which the primary speech situation provides. Derrida points out, however, that the asynchrony and absence which characterize writing are features that are inherent to all language, and are present as possibilities in spoken language as well. The absence of language is the condition of possibility of its presence.

This isn’t just a philosophical position for Derrida; rather, the prioritization of spoken language in philosophy supports the prioritization of those authorized to speak, particularly white men. Irigaray makes a somewhat similar argument, that philosophical accounts of meaning in language depend on excluding the non-meaningful in a gendered way, constructing the category of femaleness through this exclusion from language. What differentiates Derrida’s and Irigraray’s positions from Rancière’s is that, for Rancière, exclusion from language is a ruse of the powerful (slaves are persuaded of their inability to speak, and thus their inequality, but this is a false belief, the falsehood of which they can realize), whereas for Derrida and Irigaray exclusion from language is a result of the operation of language itself.

This suggests an alternative to Rancière’s idea of the equality of all speaking beings: where we are equal, rather, is in our status as non-speaking beings, in that moment of faltering hesitation that may (or may not) precede speech. This idea of a community of non-speaking beings is part of Adam’s idea of “radical awkwardness,” although this awkwardness may be a more general sociality than just the linguistic; nevertheless, I think a specifically linguistic inarticulacy is an important part of the phenomenology of awkwardness. Thinking about awkwardness primarily in terms of language also allows us to use a whole history of thinking about the relationship between women and language to think about the relationship between awkwardness and gender.

A number of  reviews of Awkwardness pointed out that all the awkward characters discussed in the book are male, and this somewhat blunts the potentially radical force of awkwardness. Judith Halberstam has a useful analysis of a related phenomenon, the difference between male and female stupidity (using as examples Dude, Where’s My Car? and 50 First Dates, respectively). Although stupidity is the opposite of the intellectual competence traditionally assigned to men, male stupidity isn’t opposed to this stereotype; “though we punish and naturalize female stupidity,” a man’s stupidity “is quickly folded back into his general appeal as a winning form of vulnerability…. Male stupidity masks the will to power that lies just behind the goofy grin, and it masquerades as some kind of internalization of feminist critiques” (The Queer Art of Failure, 55-7). So too with male awkwardness, which, as in the Apatow comedies Adam discusses (and as Adam points out) raises the possibility of a critique of articulacy only in order to resolve the problem in a new and non-awkward male homosociality. Embracing female awkwardness would be more radical, because it would involve an upending of the standards which exclude women by privileging the possession of language.

This is particularly relevant in the post-Fordist context that Adam discusses, because of the increasing economic importance of articulacy, an articulacy which is increasingly feminized. Just as Apatovian male awkwardness is ironic, a mask for continued male power, so too is post-Fordist female articulacy; this image of the sorted, omnicompetent woman is produced at the same time that possession of language is increasingly tightly integrated with the forms of control involved in wage labor, which means that language is increasingly experienced not as a capability but as a demand. In One Dimensional Woman, Nina discusses the way in which post-Fordism feminizes labor, and connects this in particular to “the demand to be an ‘adaptable’ worker, to be constantly ‘networking,’ ‘selling yourself,’ in effect to become a kind of walking CV” (21). Linguistic labor requires a compulsory sociality, which repurposes earlier ideas about women’s work and women’s greater social skills as a paradigm of labor.

This shows how post-operaismo discussions of linguistic labor as the basis for the construction of the multitude may be overly optimistic. Virno does recognize that the rise of linguistic labor in post-Fordism  is “ambivalent,” in that it can give rise to forms of domination as well as forms of liberation. However, there is still an underlying optimism in the idea that post-Fordist linguistic labor involves a “fundamental mode of being,” as Virno says (A Grammer of the Multitude, 84), because the suggestion is that the communication involved in post-Fordist labor involves a kind of fundamental human universality, which is liberated, or produced in a more direct form (and so in principle at least available for re-appropriation) in these new forms of capitalism.

But what if it is not speech, but non-speaking, which is the fundamental human universality? Then awkwardness would not only be, as Adam argues, the potential grounds for a radical politics, it could also be a mode of resistance. Discussing an earlier form of compulsory sociality, Shulamith Firestone describes a kind of weaponized awkwardness:

My ‘dream’ action for the women’s liberation movement: a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their ‘pleasing’ smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them (The Dialectic of Sex).

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1. Jacques Rancière’s ne­olib­eral ped­a­gogy Reading an excellent article from Nina on the possibility of a more just educational system, which makes a determined attempt to enlist Rancière in this project. As it happens I’ve been reading a chunk of Rancière for my dissertation of late, which has sharpened my skepticism towards him, and I’m...
2. Bour­geois equality It was very considerate of Nina Power to publish an article on Rancière, Feuerbach and the early Marx just when I’ve been trying to figure out this relationship, and so when I’m in a position to take advantage of her very clear discussion. One thing that’s not clear to me,...
3. German, the lan­guage of real life A footnote in Capital: In English writers of the 17th century we frequently find “worth” in the sense of value in use, and “value” in the sense of exchange value. This is quite in accordance with the spirit of a language that likes to use a Teutonic word for the...

“Yoü and I” is comfortably the worst song on Born this Way (well, on the standard edition; bonus track “Black Jesus / Amen Fashion” is basically everything bad that people who don’t like Lady Gaga say about her songs); an all too accurate re-creation of a dark period of early-90s MOR, painful for all of us who remember the 16-week reign of terror of  “(Everything I do) I Do it for You.” The video is good, though, following Gaga’s usual pattern of stitching together signifiers in the hope of creating some kind of theoretical life. My favorite thing about the video is the presence of Gaga’s drag alter-ego, Joe Calderone. Partly this is just because of a personal, erm, interest in women in masculine clothes, but it also brings up, or at least reminds me of, various questions about essentialism and gender.

With Joe Calderone, Gaga is playing the part of a guy, but not just any guy; he’s a sideburned, smoking, white-T-shirted James Dean sort of a guy. This is something that drag performances often emphasize – that there is no such thing as masculinity as such, but rather, any masculinity is always a particular masculinity (and the same goes for femininity too, of course). Interestingly, though, when I thought about this while watching the video, it wasn’t the contemporary philosopher of drag, Judith Butler, who came to mind, but Aristotle. Plato believes that the fundamental things that exist are the universals or forms: the dog, the chair, the man, and the things we encounter in the world exist only insofar as they resemble these universals. Aristotle rejects the possibility of these detached universals, arguing instead that forms are always particular; there’s no the dog, dogness only exists as it is embodied in this dog or that dog.

So, does this mean Aristotle’s theory of forms is an appropriate basis for a post-structuralist theory of gender? Well maybe. The “Yoü and I” video has a kind of bride-of-Frankenstein theme, with a somewhat sinister guy attempting to stitch together an artificial woman. But he fails to produce a viable woman; the failed artificial woman cannot live, and so must be killed. In Aristotelian terms, not all possible organizations of matter are genuine forms (or essences), capable of sustained existence in real particular things. Butler identifies the problem: the constraints on which forms are genuine and which are not “not only produce the domain of intelligible bodies, but produce as well a domain of unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies” (Bodies that Matter, v). The problem isn’t, strictly, the theory of forms itself, though (indeed, unless we’re going to abandon intelligibility altogether, we are going to have to somehow distinguish between real and unreal forms); rather, the problem is the specific, and violent, imposition of particular forms in a particular social and political context; as Butler puts it, “which bodies come to matter – and why?”

 The mermaid and the robot in Gaga’s video are two opposing poles of the abject, monstrous or chimeric body. The mermaid is natural and perfectly capable of existing, it just can’t exist in our world (on dry land). The robot is artificial, but seems to have, through a more self-conscious embrace of this artifice, willed itself into an existence that eluded the Frankenstein’s bride. I’m not sure if there’s supposed to be a narrative in the video, but I like the idea of a progression from mermaid, to Frankenstein’s monster, to robot; here, the very attempt to impose on the mermaid what is supposed to be the essential, and subsistent, female form, is what destroys her; but this destruction is canceled in the manifestation of a new, artificial form, the robot. What this reveals is the contingency of essence: which forms exist and are inhabitable is not pre-determined or knowable in advance, but depends on contingent processes of manifestation, processes of appearance which retroactively produce their own essence. This isn’t Aristotle’s position, certainly, but it seems to me that Aristotle’s emphasis on the particularity of form is a more useful place to start thinking about the problems of exclusionary intelligibility than positions which simply reject an unexamined “essentialism.”

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2. I wanted to find, the logic of all sex wars As I understand it, radical feminism, particularly as developed by MacKinnon, is based on a binary account of power in which having, or not having, power, is what defines gender. It’s paradoxical, then, that one of the main criticisms radical feminists make of post-modern feminists is that the posties, in...
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Everyday objects become absurdly aggressive robots (video)

I take it that Michael Bay has some kind of unconscious awareness of the intuition behind Evan Calder Williams’s Hostile Object Theory. Williams argues that objects under capitalism “are the material organisation of all the toil, struggle, and negative affect that went into them, that thwarted, pissed-off agency, a clenched fist that keeps pulling punches and punching clocks,” and they hate us because of it. The second Transformers film, Revenge of the Fallen really doubles down on the hostility of objects, but goes beyond Williams, primarily in terms of creepiness, but also theoretically, by sexualizing the hostility of objects.

Creepy, sexualized robots (video)

A remarkable proportion of the runtime of Revenge of the Fallen is made up of this kind of body horror, showcasing Shia LaBeouf’s horror as feminized robots attempt to insert parts of their metallic anatomy into him. The robot as hostile object becomes, for Bay, a simultaneously horrifying and arousing object (and horrifying because it is arousing, and perhaps also vice versa).

There is, of course, another sexualized object in the Transformers films: Megan Fox. As LaBeouf puts it, “some people think [Michael Bay] is a very lascivious filmmaker, the way he films women,” although LaBeouf disagrees, saying that “the one thing Mike lacks is tact. There’s no time for  ‘I would like you to just arch your back 70 degrees’” (I guess specifying the precise angle at which you want an actor to arch her back doesn’t count as lascivious; to her credit, Fox responded by calling Bay “Hitler,” and getting herself fired). The films then provide an interesting mirror image: women sexualized by objectification, and objects sexualized by feminization. I think the hostility of objects is the truth underlying this mirror image. The way Bay objectifies women is, as LaBeouf’s attempted defense shows, about control, and underlying this desire for control is a fear of an assumed hostility about to break free of control. The hostile robots in Transformers, that is, are the return of the repressed of the portrayal of women in the films.

What Williams’s Hostile Object Theory emphasizes is how the hostility of objects results from the place of the commodity in capitalism; applying this to the particularly gendered objects in Transformers reminds us of the way in which the commodity is gendered. Dumb but treacherous, commodities have something in common with misogynist depictions of women reaching back to Rousseau’s Sophie (we can also see the feminization of the commodity in the connection that is often made between femininity and consumerism, so ably criticized by Ellen Willis back in 1969). This should, I think, encourage us to be careful about construing our opposition to capitalism in terms of a proletariat which is defined by its subjectivity. My worry is that, as the category of subjectivity has a long association with masculinity, emphasizing the subjectivity of the proletariat risks repeating a pattern of gendered subject/object hostility.

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2. The pathos of com­modi­ties I think Lenin underestimates the genuine pathos of the Toy Story films in his review, which reinforces (and is reinforced by) his pedagogical theory of ideology, which tends to emphasize the power of cultural products to impart ideology, thereby underemphasizing why audiences accept and inhabit this ideology. To describe the...
3. Ap­pear­ances are es­sen­tial We have all reason to rejoice that the things which environ us are appearances and not steadfast and independent existences; since in that case we should soon perish of hunger, both bodily and mental. (Hegel) If aesthetics is first philosophy, perhaps we should replace the question “why is there something...

Hellcats

What’s not so good about the show is the weirdly excessive individualism. Of course, most TV shows are implicitly individualist, assuming that every problem can be solved by an individual with sufficient gumption. What’s odd about Hellcats is that it repeatedly goes out of its way to mention collective action in order to dismiss it. The starting point of the show is that law student Marti loses the scholarship she had been receiving because her mother works for the university. Marti’s mother suggests they take this up with the union representing campus workers, of which she is a member, but Marti knows that the real solution is for her to take part in a competition to win a place on the cheerleading team, and the scholarship that goes with it. Later on, Marti’s law professor asks her to work for him on a case he intends to use to demonstrate the unconstitutionality of three-strikes laws. Marti gives an impassioned defense of the principle that, rather than caring about the thousands of people who are imprisoned under three-strikes laws, they should focus on proving the innocence of the particular individual involved in this test case; the professor’s moral sense is re-awakened, and he agrees to abandon his campaign against three-strikes laws.

I have to thank the show, though, for combining implied homosexuality and rampant individualism in a way which actually makes something clear about contemporary constraints on media representation of women’s sexuality, encapsulated by the figure of the bicurious cheerleader. What seems to allow this combination of homosexuality and American wholesomeness is that female characters are allowed to have some same-sex sex, on condition they don’t convert this into a substantive same-sex identification. One fairly harmless example of this is the (I assume intentional, aimed at the fanfic demographic) subtext of Hellcats; harmless because it is possible to read Marti and Savannah as genuinely lesbian-identified women who just by chance never explicitly mention this on screen. A more annoying example is the dramatically different level of seriousness accorded to male and female homosexuality in 90210. Last season saw Adrianna in a classic “gay-for-sweeps” subplot in which she left her boyfriend for a girl for two episodes, after which she reunited with her boyfriend and the story was never mentioned again. This season, on the other hand, Teddy’s realization that he is gay is taking up numerous episodes of angst and a coming-out scene that portrays his homosexuality as very serious and irreversible (this, incidentally, seems to now be the media-approved form of male homosexuality, in which you can be gay as long as you’re stoically heroic about it; see also the campaign to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell).

What these representations of female same-sex sexuality do, it seems to me, is erase the idea of sexuality as an identification that could lead to commonality and solidarity. There’s something in common here erasure of sexual identity that occurs in two denials of the existence of bisexuality (both of which, I regret to say, I have at one point subscribed to): there’s the biphobic claim that no-one is really bisexual, and those who claim to be are either homosexuals in denial or straights trying to grab some queer cachet; or there’s the mirror image hippyish claim that, like, everyone is naturally bisexual, yeah. What both miss is the Foucauldian point that sexuality is not a transparent or natural property of individuals, but something that is rendered possible by a particular social context.

Foucault in The History of Sexuality emphasizes the biopolitical utility of sexual identity, in which people are encouraged to identify with the categorizations that regulate them, but 40-odd years of LGBT activism show that this kind of biopolitical identification can be the basis of resistance as well as regulation. When seen in this context, and in the context of Hellcats‘ hyper-individualism, I wonder if this apparent trend towards fairly positive depictions of gay and bisexual women, on condition that these characters don’t actually identify as gay or bisexual (the state of limbo appropriately designated by the stupid term “bicurious”), is an attempt to push the Foucauldian logic of identification-as-segregation to an extreme that would preclude its political redeployment, by assigning every individual a (supposedly) unique and personalized sexuality.

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2. Bumping in the back room I loved the new Girls Aloud track when I first heard a terrible quality radio rip. I was actually a little disappointed when I heard a proper quality version; it turns out my imagination had inserted a storming gay bassline (not that the real version doesn’t have a moderately storming...
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She questioned Thompson’s faith in “rational” politics and the “abstract individual, the bearer of rights.” … And I remember thinking to myself: aren’t rational arguments in favor of rights a good thing? And especially for anyone who claims to be on the Left, seeing that universal rights are the basis of…well, just about everything?

Well, yes, those are questions you might ask yourself. And you might investigate those questions by reading the work of those who have argued that its possible to have a more complex appreciation of rights than that they are just “a good idea”; someone like Joan Scott. But Kevin Mattson only read Joan Scott to impress chicks (why else would you read the work of a woman, after all?), so actually thinking about what she’d written obviously didn’t occur to him.

The article’s main thesis, meanwhile, is just as annoying. Apparently, there has been a move away from postmodernism and towards “real” political commitment, because there were no poor people or political struggles in the 1990s. I’m not sure which is the stupider thesis here: that 90s postmodernism didn’t address political questions, or that there were no political struggles in the 90s; of course, the two go together. Take Mattson’s sneering at cultural studies’ interest in pornography and Madonna. Apparently feminist debates about pornography or the fact that people were being imprisoned for consensual but non-vanilla sexual activity aren’t serious political matters, but fripperies people were only interested in because, with Clinton in the White House and the booming economy of the 90s, there was no right-wing to struggle against or economic hardship to focus peoples minds. No, things are only political, apparently, when they concern “sweaty workers.”

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3. “Sexy,” in quotes Now that I think about it, Katy Perry’s unsexy sexyness isn’t so unusual. This presentation of sexuality which is designed to fail is the stock in trade of lads mags like Loaded and Nuts. I’ve noticed this before, but never really thought about it; on reflection, though, it perhaps tells...

I read somewhere that, when Hugh Heffner first set up Playboy, he intended it solely as a lifestyle magazine, introducing men to fashion, interior design, culture, and other signifiers of the high life. The naked women, supposedly, were added when publishers were worried that a magazine about clothes and furniture would be perceived as too gay to sell. In a somewhat similar way, the pictures of women in lads mags are intended to signify heterosexuality, but to remain solely at the level of signification.

It would be odd, if lads mags were directly porn, for them to have arrived at about the same time that the infinite pornography of the internet was becoming universally available. Where the consumption of internet pornography takes place in private (I assume this is even more true than with pornography on video tapes?), the lads mag is enjoyed in public; it’s function, that is, is homosocial rather than erotic, or homosocial by virtue of being erotic, allowing for bonding via the shared objectification of women. Now, to fulfill this function, lads mags don’t actually need to be arousing, indeed, it’s probably better if they’re not; actual boners would make the homosocial too homoerotic.

So, lads mags are the heir to a long tradition of putting sexy, as it were, in quotation marks, of saying arousing without actually being arousing. It’s an interesting form of performative that is intended to fail; a little like drag, perhaps, although “failure” of the gender performance in drag is more explicit and acknowledged. What, perhaps, made this seem so odd to me in the case of Katy Perry is the move of this kind of porn-in-quotes outside of its traditional location in softcore pornography. Perhaps the increased visibility of pornography with the rise of the internet created an increased space for a discourse that signified porn without quite being it (this would be the sense in which lads mags represent pornification). Is this space now itself becoming oversaturated, leading quote-marks-”porn” to move into different domains, with Katy Perry as its vanguard (there’d be something to be said, here, about her 50s cheesecake aesthetic, and the Cronenbergian horror that is the “California Girls” video) ?

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“Surely there’s so much going on—”

“That it’s deeply boring. An excess of boringness does not make something interesting except in the driest academic sense.” (Iain M. Banks, “The State of the Art”)

It’s clear that the primary problem, both aesthetic and political, with contemporary pornography, is how boring it is. The particular boringness of porn encapsulates a specific vision of the world and of humanity, which is not at all attractive. It’s common to look on pornography with a certain knowing indulgence, laughing at the hackneyed scripts and shoddy acting. This is a mistake: pornography is a massively wealthy industry, and surely if there were any demand for it, money could easily be found for competent writers and acting lessons. No, the “bad” writing and acting in pornography are intentional, part of what makes porn “work” in the way it does.

Defenders of pornography sometimes argue that we should not be concerned by it because it is mere harmless fantasy, while critics respond that pornography and its effects are all too real. Both of these positions get it slightly wrong, because they miss the point that the fantasy that sustains pornography is the fantasy that it is real. This is why pornography rejects basic cinematic competence: a little bit of play-acting is OK at first, but when the sex starts, the costumes come off and the props and performances, anything that might suggest that this is pretend, are dropped. Pornography puts forward two interlinked claims: this is really sex, and sex is really Real. Any suggestion that sex might be linked to human concerns of imagination, language, or politics, is rigorously supressed.

There is a growing “alternative” porn scene, which one might hope would provide an alternative to this grimly realist logic, but unfortunately the alternative appears to be merely one of decoration rather than underlying aesthetic practice. The Doll Underground seems like it would be a good candidate for a more interesting view of sex, with its references to the Weather Underground and advertising through a series of ambiguously rebellious communiques (note that that page includes automatically starting—but non-pornographic—video). Despite the claim in Violet Blue’s enthusiastic review that the film “feels like anti-porn,” the film seems to mostly be conventionally attractive people having conventionally athletic porn sex, although the costumes are goth-loli and the props are sticks of dynamite.

There’s one exception: the first scene in the film, in which two women have rather disaffected and not obviously terribly satisfactory sex on a train, does something almost unimaginable from the point of view of pornography: it repeatedly interrupts the sex to show the landscape through which the train is traveling.

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The problem with MIA’s new video is not, as Anna Pickard claims, that it is “too shocking,” it is that it is not shocking enough. The video’s big “reveal,” that the state’s violence is directed at the redheaded, turns any possible shock into pure silliness. Now, I imagine someone will say that I’m missing the point here, that prejudice directed against redheads is really no more silly than prejudice directed against black people or Muslims, and that by showing us this, the film makes a serious point about the arbitrariness of racism. This is wrong: racism is indeed unfounded and constructed and arbitrary, but it is not silly. The mistake here lies in thinking that, because racism is based on a social construction rather than a biological reality, it is therefore unreal, a mere error or fiction with only a mental existence in the psyche of racists. But in fact there is little more real than social constructions, because they create, and exist through, a material reality of practices and distributions of people and things. By eliding this materiality, and suggesting that an alternative racial reality could be produced simply by an arbitrary switch of what signifiers are racialized, the MIA video flatters its liberal audience, reinforcing the belief that racism a matter of ignorance or error that can be avoided by the sufficiently enlightened.

Worse, perhaps, the video ends up letting the actual racism and violence of the US state off the hook. The first half of the video presents us with a mystery: who are these police, and why are they raiding this building? The moment when we see the bus full of red-haired young men functions as an explanation, an explanation which immediately places us in an alternative reality in which the US features a number of signs of oppression that suggest places out side the US: Northern Ireland (murals) or Palestine (kids in keffiyehs throwing rocks). The problem is, that this, it seems to me, strongly suggests that we should see the first half of the video as also part of this alternative reality; but police raids of this sort are of course no “alternative” at all to actually existing US reality.

I don’t think I’ve written much about MIA before, not just because I don’t like her records very much, but because I’m rather uncomfortable with the fact that I don’t like her records. Oh, I can come up with any number of plausible reasons why, but they all seem to have a borrowed kettle quality to them: I have too many reasons for not liking her, none of which are finally quite persuasive. I don’t like the superficiality of her gestures towards politics, but why is this a problem when I’m so happy to take as interesting the surface features of other artists, from Lady GaGa to tATu? Is it that I’m happy to let the girls talk about fripperies like gender and aesthetics, but politics is SRS BSNS that should be left to the men? Perhaps I judge MIA differently because she presents herself as serious about politics; but, again, why do I let my interpretation of her work be determined by  MIA’s interest in politics when I’m more than happy to ignore Britney’s lack of interest? This suggests, I think, a potential problem with popism’s otherwise admirable commitment to the death of the author, which is that it tends to work better when the interpretation of the record is wholly disconnected from the artist’s self-understanding. The problem is that this requires the artist to be ignorant: the female (usually; feminized, in pop, almost always) pop star is forced into the position of the subject not supposed to know.

Or another thing; I dislike the appropriations involved in MIA’s presentation of herself as speaking from a generic third-world position (this is most annoying in the uncredited “baile funk” tracks on Piracy Funds Terrorism, which may be Diplo’s fault rather than MIA’s, and the cringeworthy line about how she “puts people on the map who’ve never seen a map,” which is MIA’s fault); but, for all that I could make arguments about self-made native informants, she surely does have an experience as someone growing up in Sri Lanka and working in the western music industry that qualifies her to say something about the third world; why is it that I somehow want to deny this?

I find myself in the odd position of not being able to trust my judgment about MIA; but I’m pretty sure “Born Free” isn’t as good a record as “Jimmy.”

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1. Racism: not his­tor­ical Towards the end of this interview with Doug Henwood, Adolph Reed criticizes the tendency to describe the effect of race on contemporary politics using analogies drawn from the racism of the past—as a “new slavery” or “new Jim Crow.” I was reminded of Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”: One...
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This reminds me, in a roundabout sort of way, of the dual descriptions that circulate on the internet of Fox News’s female anchors as looking like either porn stars or transsexuals. What I think maybe  people are groping at with these misogynistic and transphobic comparisons is a sense that Jamie Colby or Megyn Kelly perform gender in a way that’s somehow too obvious. The mistake here is to think that it’s only when you’re sexy that you’re performing sex; but Tamron Hall’s no-nonsense short hair, or Brit Hume’s rumbling monotone delivery are also gendered performances.

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A little while ago I wrote this as the introduction to a paper, the argument of which it ended up not, really, introducing; so I cut it, with hopes of returning to it at some point. I was reminded of it when Dominic followed up a debate on subjective intentions, structure, and agency (which got trapped in a familar and depressing spiral) with a discussion of Dworkin (a much more hermenutically thoughtful reading of Dworkin than my own).

The uninterrogated reference to a masculinist construction of subjectivity in Dworkin’s Intercourse can be seen particularly clearly in her discussion of “militant virginity.” For Dworkin, Joan’s virginity is above all a physical integrity that comes to stand metonymically for a more general idea of subjective autonomy.³ Dworkin contrasts this sort of virginity with the virginity traditionally prized by Christianity, in which female purity is valued because it implies passivity.⁴ However, Dworkin does not mention another tradition of Christian virginity that appears much closer to Joan’s, the tradition of heroic masculine virginity that one finds in medieval romance and, in particular, the various forms of the Arthurian legend. Here, as with Joan, virginity is the virginity of warriors; and, again as with Joan, virginity is associated with activity and with self-posession (this is most strikingly apparent in the contrast between Lancelot, who is sent mad by physical intimacy with Elaine, and Galahad, who remains a virgin and is thus able to succeed on the quest for the Holy Grail). Read in a medieval context, then, Joan of Arc is, more even than Dworkin realizes, appropriating a masculine rôle; her virtue indeed has the masculine quality suggested by the etymology of that word.⁶ However, virtue is not masculine merely etymologically; the virility associated with virtue has a long tradtion as a form of masculine subjectivity predicated on the subordination of women. For this reason, the appropriation of masculine subjectivity, achieved by Joan and celebrated by Dworkin, is strictly limited as a mode of feminist resistance.

Rather than either of these Christian conceptions of virtue, Dworking construes Joan’s virtue according to an older, classical conception of virtue which is connected with strength, ability and (a connection Dworkin makes but, surprisingly, does not comment on), manliness. Here too, however, virtue is implicated in a masculinist conception of agency. The connection here lies in etymology (the “vir” in “virtue” being the Latin for “man”) but, perhaps more importantly, has a long tradition in political theory. One of the most prominent political theorists to emphasize this concept of virtue is Machiavelli; furthermore Machiavelli makes a great deal of the gendering that the term “virtue” carries with it, so studying Machiavelli’s political theory can make clear some of the problematic features of the understanding of agency that underlies Dworkin’s analysis of Joan.

Machiavelli employed the early-modern Italian term virtù, rather than the English virtue, a term which means virtue in the non-Christian sense discussed by Dworkin. In particular, as Machiavelli uses it, virtù has a definite sense of agency, or ability to act decisively, the sense foregrounded by Dworkin. Machiavelli, however, emphasizes the masculinity of virtù by defining this kind of agency by reference to its other, chance, which he personifies as the goddess Fortuna. The way these two terms map on to a gender binary is particularly clear in Machiavelli’s play The Mandrake Root, which is a kind of comedy of the sexes. The play concerns the attempt by the braggart Callimaco, with the assistance of the “rascally go-between” Ligurio,⁷ to seduce the young wife of the old and foolish Nicia. These three characters provide different images of masculine virtù. Callimaco is the heroic, active man of virtù, whose masculinity is defined by an overt agency. Callimaco says that he must “try something, grandiose or dangerous, ruinous or infamous,”⁸ a type of agency he later describes in explicity gendered terms: “Flee danger, but if you cannot, then confront it like a man. Don’t cringe like a woman!”⁹ Nicia is the mirror image of Callimaco, a man who is not properly manly because he does not act. He is literally impotent (the play opens with him unable to get his wife pregnant) and metaphorically so, too; his unmanliness is shown by his lack of control over his wife (as Callimaco puts it, “I wouldn’t call myself a husband if I couldn’t dominate my wife”¹⁰). Ligurio, finally, represents a third, more ambivalent presentation of masculinity, as he maintains his agency not through a direct and heroic action, but through manipulation and a careful negotiation of contingency.

What is important about all these constructions of masculinity is that they show how virtù, the masculine virtue of independent agency, is itself, paradoxically dependent on the feminine. This is most apparant in the case of Nicia, who is explicitly considered unmanly because of his inability to dominate his wife. However, it is also true in the case of the ambivalent heroes of the piece, Callimaco, whose heroic virtù is set into motion by the women he is trying to seduce and is, in the final analysis, dependent on her approval, and Ligurio, whose crafty virtù depends on taking into account how the women he is trying to dupe will respond to his actions. The point I want to make is to emphasize the way in which this idea of independent agency is gendered, and also the conceptual difficulties this masculine gendering of agency engenders. This latter is particularly apparent in The Prince, which is especially important as this is one of the foundational texts for the modern concept of the political subject. The discussion of the relationship between virtù and Fortuna occours throughout The Prince, but the conceptual difficulties and the gendered polarity of the terms are most visible in Machiavelli’s image of Fortuna as a flood, against which virtù is defined as a series of dikes and embankmments which perform two separate and not necessarily compatible functions, both channeling and resisting Fortuna.¹¹ Machiavelli oscillates between these two responses to Fortuna, sometimes emphasizing the importance of adapting ones “course of action to the nature of the times”¹² to such an extent that self-direction seems to disappear almost entirely. Indeed, I think it is in this response to this vanishing of autonomy that Machiavelli abruptly switches course, replacing the theme of adapting to Fortuna with direct opposition, at the same time as Fortuna’s gender is emphasized, with Machiavelli arguing for the need to “keep her down” and “command her,” using force “to beat her and struggle with her.”¹³

It is on this note that Machiavelli ends the chapter on the rôle of fortune in politics, perhaps hoping to exorcize with rhetorical violence the ambiguity that runs throughout the chapter. However, the conceptual difficulty remains; virtù, the masculine virtue of autonomy and self-direction, remains fraught. If to exercize virtù is to exert ones will in opposition to a woman, or the female godess Fortuna, then the concept of virtù requires the resistance of its female counterpart, which necessarily imples the possibility that this female resistance might be successful. This definition of masculine mastery is thus self-defeating, containing within the definition its own negation.

This makes clear some of the difficulties in the account of subjectivity that underlies Dworkin’s Intercourse. The identification of femaleness with subjection, which Dworkin counterposes to the freedom enjoyed by the male subject, is an inherent part of that male agency; thus the latter cannot be a genuine alternative to the former. Instead, the terms of Dworkin’s critique of women’s subjection reinstates that subjection. Dworkin’s position here exhibits the logic of what Brown calls “wounded attachments,” in which an identity is constructed around the “wound” produced by exclusion from the sovereign subjectivity of liberal modernity, in a way which re-installs that sovereign subject as the desired object.¹⁴ This, suggests Brown, leads to the doomed attempt by some feminists to achieve feminist ends solely by appealing to the very liberal legal structure they themselves recognize as iredeemably patriarchal.¹⁵ Dworkin’s account, that is, amounts to a critique of the effects of the modern understanding of agency in the terms of that account itself, where what is needed is a critique of this account of agency.

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