On the impossibility of being feminine (2006-7) Artist's note My childhood self, located in a family of women, was a multiple of differing types of negotiations, but many based on my being a biological male. Growing up with a sister who is a confirmed feminist, this was always forefronted, even as I struggled to relate with aspects of myself which are considered ‘feminine.’ My maleness, its ‘gaze’ and the inherent power relationship which societally exists between the sexes was presupposed and imprinted into my psyche, even as I resisted being stereotyped into my being a ‘male.’ Where lies my experience of myself, and how much did it belong to my being a male, in spite of ‘femininities’ within, can I even ever know? ================================================================== Some thoughts on The Impossibility of Being Feminine , by Smriti Vohra -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. William Blake – ref. earlier mail (texts of The Sick Rose and Eternity) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Foucault and Freud + Leonardo on repression/censorship – ref earlier mail. See quotes pasted below -- Question: what does it mean to be unthinkable, unutterable, unenacted? Or rather – how does it feel to be unthinkable, unutterable, unenacted? This interdiction [the logic of censorship]… is thought to take three forms: a) affirming that a thing is not permitted b) preventing it from being said c) denying that it exists These forms are difficult to reconcile. But it is here that one imagines a sort of logical sequence that characterises censorship mechanisms – it links the inexistent, the illicit and the inexpressible in such a way that each is at the same time the principle and effect of the others. One must not talk about what is forbidden until it is forbidden in reality; what is inexistent has no right to show itself, even in the order of speech where its inexistence is declared; and that which one must keep silent about is banished from reality as the thing that is tabooed above all else. This logic of power exerted upon free expression is the paradoxical logic of a law that might be expressed as an injunction of non-existence, non-manifestation and silence. This power is poor in its resources, sparing in its methods, monotonous in the tactics it utilises, incapable of invention, and seemingly doomed always to repeat itself. Further, it is a power that only has the force of the negative on its side, a power to say no; in no condition to produce, capable only of posting limits, it is basically anti-energy. This is the paradox of its effectiveness: it is incapable of doing anything except to render what it dominates incapable of doing anything either, except for what this power allows it to do. And finally, it is a power whose model is essentially juridical, centred on nothing more than the statement of the law and the operation of taboos. All the modes of domination, submission and subjugation are ultimately reduced to an effect of obedience. – Michel Foucault Moreover, it is a mistake to emphasise only the repulsion that operates from the direction of the conscious upon what is to be repressed. Quite as important is the attraction exercised by what was primarily repressed upon everything with which it can establish a connection. – Sigmund Freud Nothing is hidden under the sun. Truth at last cannot be hidden. Dissimulation is of no avail, is of no purpose, before so great a judge. Falsehood puts on a mask… When the sun appears which dispels darkness in general, you put out the light which dispelled it for you in particular for your need and convenience. – Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Figures that manifest in fantasy + personal constructions/concepts that are being engaged with through fantasy – brought to mind the following theorisation from Western philosophy (had to do a bit of research on this for a note that is part of the documentation I just finished of the Sarai colloquium on information society): For Deleuze and Guattari, a “concept” is a multiplicity, not in itself a single thing but an assemblage of components which must retain coherence with the others for the concept to remain itself. These components are singularities: “‘a’ possible world, ‘a’ face, ‘some’ words”, and yet become indiscernible when a part of a concept. Each concept also has a relationship to other concepts by way of the similar problems that they address, and by having similar component elements; but there is no given way of relating, nor any necessary relation. The concept is not to be confused with the proposition, as in logic; i.e., it is ungrammatical. It does not have a reference, as a proposition does. Rather, it is intensive, and expresses the virtual existence of an event in thought. A concept has no relationship to truth, which is an external determination, or to presupposition, that places thought at the service of the dogmatic image of thought. “The concept is a form or a force,” according to Deleuze and Guattari. Concepts act – i.e., they are affective rather than significatory/expressive of the contents of ideas. Conceptual personae are figures of thought that give concepts their specific force, their raison d'être. They are not to be confused with psychosocial types, nor with the thinkers themselves. They are created, like all concepts. While they are often only implicit in philosophy, they are crucial for understanding the significance of concepts; they are internal, non-philosophical preconditions for the practice of creating concepts. [Famous instance of conceptual persona: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra] Are the personae manifested in fantasy ‘conceptual’ in the manner suggested above? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. Question that I raised in our conversation: Is there a realm that is beyond fantasy; autonomous, impervious to fantasy? What is the nature of such a realm? Can this be accessed through language, image, concepts, categories? Or is it only accessible via a different mode? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 5. Deleuze and Guattari also ask -- (this is fascinating, to me) “The thought which is born in thought, the act of thinking which is neither given by innateness nor presupposed by reminiscence but engendered in its genitality, is a thought without image. But what is such a thought, and how does it operate in the world?” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 6. Is rationality/reason/’reality’ etc. the inexorable opponent of fantasy; do fantasy and its opposite always contain one another, always stay embedded in one another – though when one manifests, the other cannot? Ref Descartes’ Discourse on Method: “Good sense is the most evenly shared thing in the world . . the capacity to judge correctly and to distinguish the true from the false, which is properly what one calls common sense or reason, is naturally equal in all men.” ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 7. National fantasies – cultural fantasies – their embodiments and the violence behind these embodiments, in many instances – sadism of collective/political/military fantasies and the subsuming of collective conscience in the ‘negative sublime’ of fantasies that are efficiently and completely manifested, i.e., modes of genocide… ------------------------------------------------------------------- 8. “The deepest desire is perhaps to give the responsibility for one's desire to someone else,” says Jean Baudrillard. His concept of simulation and the simulacrum includes a beautiful sentence that might well apply to such a relationship (of reciprocity/resemblance, not of rejection/opposition) between the fluctuating signifiers of sexuality: “All the referentials intermingle their discourses in a circular, Moebian compulsion.” Or, “…the real’s hallucinatory resemblance to itself…The copy only resembles the original by being different from it.” He adds, “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken resurrection of the real and the referential.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 9. Final Curve When you turn the corner And you run into yourself, Then you know that you have turned All the corners that are left. -- Langston Hughes ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10. Fantasy in relation to the metaphysics of lack / producing an epistemological break via art / analysis: (Text of a comment in panel discussion, during the information society colloquium I documented – the theme of the panel was censorship and the ‘cut’) “What constitutes the unconscious, in the clinical topology of psychoanalysis? “We don’t know what it is, but we know it speaks… What’s being addressed in the clinical situation is always the suffering of the body that has gone through so much, and it’s not what is said – the subject in this topology is always the divided, unconscious, decentred subject… “The part of the subject that is privileged is always the one on the side of the fiction that is reality and the misrecognition that is identity, the construction of history and memory that is on the side of the pleasure principle; and that switches off all the gaps and breaks where the trauma might reside… “It actually blocks the path to trauma that it is a defence and protection against.” “In the analytic situation it is not what the patient says that is crucial; instead, the analyst “literally has to listen for what can’t be said” – this unfolds on the unconscious level and from a kind of embodied level, into embodied speech. “And the analyst has to have an ear to hear this, ‘the ear of the other’, as Derrida calls it… “If one takes this topology into the work of art, or any act of creative sublimation, the analyst/work of art are in the place of the unconscious. The analyst comes to incarnate this material trace that is literally beyond mediation – it is a painful lesion as the limits of mediation. And this material trace is literally a blind spot in identity and history and memory; a fantasy which is literally a defence against the trauma which has to be foreclosed for the ego to function. “Analysis is about trying to bring into the topology what is foreclosed because it is too traumatic, or to produce an epistemological break… And the way that this is done is through the incarnating, or through the work of art that literally hears what can’t be said through the analyst.” This produced a kind of “destituting effect” that she then linked to notion of the cut. “Within traditions that are on the side of the metaphysics of lack – for instance, the theories of Jacques Lacan – one of the most important analytic techniques is to produce a ‘cut’ – it is literally about finding the right moment to ‘cut’ the identifications, misrecognitions, fantasies and memories which place the subject in a safe and secure way. And within that topology, with art and ethics, in order to go to that foreclosed coordinate you have to cross the limits of embarrassment and shame – which is one of the most important things in Lacan’s topology of ethics – on the path to bringing in the foreclosed signifier, the material trace, in order that it can be destituted so that something new can take place, where it has colonised the subject…” ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 11. Part I – unclothed figure in ‘campy’ pose (from Manet’s Olympia?) Susan Sontag has famously defined camp as "the furthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre", "the consistently aesthetic experience of the world"; "a mode of seduction"; "a doubling, but not the split-level construction of a literal meaning on the one hand and a symbolic meaning on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something and the thing as pure artifice." Camp sees everything "in quotation marks. It's not a lamp but a 'lamp'; not a woman but a 'woman.'" Sontag adds, "The question isn't, 'Why travesty, impersonation, theatricality?' The question is rather, 'When does travesty, impersonation, theatricality, acquire the special flavour of camp?'" Camp finds success in a certain committed seriousness "that fails"; two of its tonalities are "pathos" and "the excruciating"; pure camp has to have the proper mix of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate and the naive. Sontag concludes, most interestingly: "Time liberates the work of art from moral benevolence, delivering it over to the camp sensibility." ------------------------------------------------------------------ 12. Relationship of first frame to last frame – the latter does not return the viewer to the space of the former, in any way… is a teleological drive inherent in fantasy, or does fantasy intrinsically a denial of telos? -------------------------------------------------------------------- 13. Relationship of Part I to Part II – suggests the relation of “studium” to “punctum”, in the Barthesian sense, but infused with deliberate ironies? ------------------------------------------------------------------ 14. Dynamics of viewing space influencing the viewing experience – can one view the sequence from end to beginning, i.e, II to I, rather than the other way ------------------------------------------------------------- 15. Relationship of the two figures/ personae – what if the clothed figure had been lying down/centrally positioned, and the unclothed figure seated/peripheral? Which figure is fantasising the other? We construct our fantasies, and simultaneously they construct us… ----------------------------------------------------------- 16. Frames as sequence of foreplay – erotic charge building up to discharge – climax in frame with petals in a blur – orgasm – ejaculate of rose petals (male/female ambivalence is concretely, brilliantly imaged there) – scattering leads to quiescence – last frame has same content as orgasm frame, but the components have reclaimed their definition – dense bed of petals – The logic of fantasy: if one enters this sensual mass of petals, will one encounter nothing, or more of this material, or a solid body? -------------------------------------------------------------- 17. Relationship of ‘nakedness’ to ‘nudity’, the ‘naked’ to the ‘nude’ Is nudity an aesthetic representation of nakedness; the nude body is therefore not unclothed, but draped in particular modes of signification ---------------------------------------------------------------- 18. Relationship of literal male body to the symbolic female body (rose petals) Ratio of attention viewer is compelled to pay to each… What if other kinds of bodies were posed/framed in the bathtub of petals – sculpted/classic male nude; androgynous man or woman; woman with masculine face but obviously feminine body; man with feminine face and obviously masculine body – what would be the effect of such equivocation ---------------------------------------------------------- 19. Rose petals present an erotic/sensual/aesthetic absolute, a hyperbolic index of material seduction. Yet they are not the flower itself, either living or plucked – they cannot constitute that flower, are limited to being a representation, a sign… Fantasy is not reality, can never be… yet while it prevails, reality is non-existent -------------------------------------------------------------------- 20. Fantasy’s relationship to fetishism – the fetish is a substitute for an actual object… the act of fantasising itself may be fetishistic… --------------------------------------------------------------------- 21. Fantasy as an irruption of reality, a severing in a continuum… Is the root of fantasy necessarily linked to the stem and flower? Fantasy is real in that it takes place as a human activity; and that it may lead to greater self-understanding through self-expression. But if it is an exploration of ambiguity – as it is in this case – where does one locate “truth” and the “real”? ------------------------------------------------------------------- 22. Can a sustained or a sporadic fantasy actually alter one’s reality? -------------------------------------------------------------------- 23. What constitutes the threshold between fantasy and reality – at what point is that crossed? Does this threshold change with each fantasy? --------------------------------------------------------------------- 24. Does a fantasy consist only of its particular signifiers? Subtract the signifiers, and what is left? -------------------------------------------------------------------- 25. Relationship between fantasy and delusion ------------------------------------------------------------------- 26. Somatic terrain of fantasies involving sexual identity – the ‘reality’ is that one may be something in terms of anatomy, but have other preferences and affiliations in the mind; another in one’s sexual practices, another in the structure of one’s desires – these may be violently conflicted to the point that they induce splitting, or relatively harmonious and reconciled – Who or what is a “man”/ Who or what is a “woman”? Does the power of fantasy lie in the fact that it enables manifestation as well as erasure, simultaneously? Or enables control as well as surrender, simultaneously? --------------------------------------------------------------------- 27. Question: “Is this photography or performance?” Leads to the question of whether the self in the imaging – the “I” in these self-portraits, the “I” that is performed – is the same as the performer/self fantasising the image… -------------------------------------------------------------- 28. Frames – no horizon – completely immersive – this is also true of the logic of fantasy, which denies the horizon of reality – they cannot coexist together. ------------------------------------------------------------ 29. Is fantasy what is, what will come to be, or what might have been? ---------------------------------------------------------- 30. Fantasy and processes of displacement – the complete transfer/ transposing of erotic energy onto the symbolic body of the rose petals – implies the emptying of the person/personae, which implies a filling up – where? What is the nature of the space emptied, the space filled? Is the re-emptying and refilling that inevitably follows, a re-emptying and refilling of the same interior space? Or does a retelling of the fantasy create and shape new such spaces? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 31. Is the seed of fantasy also the site of fantasy? Can fantasy exist without finding its exterior? Is fantasy a compulsion, or a homeostatic imperative? ------------------------------------------------------------------ 32. Richard Dienst – “The image is that which remains to be seen.” -------------------------------------------------------------------
