The Psychology Of Ruin Porn

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/01/psychology-ruin-porn/886/

It’s the sort of image, imbued with loss and layers, that architecture buffs drool over. A wheelchair sits center stage, its orange vinyl back echoed by a round tabletop that leans against a wall, painted in a familiar shade of institutional green. A mattress, flattened and grimy, lies tossed onto a floor that’s littered with fallen plaster. In the foreground, an overturned metal trashcan speaks volumes. A mirror reflects the whole sad scene.

It’s romantic, it’s nostalgic, it’s wistful, it’s provocative. It’s about time, nature, mortality, disinvestment.

Pursuing and photographing the old is an addictive hobby. Dozens of blogs and online galleries share strategies for entry and showcase ever-bulging collections of moss-covered factory floors and lathe-exposed school buildings.

There’s no shortage of theories as to just why these images (in this case, a long-shuttered mental asylum) fascinate us. They “offer an escape from excessive order,” says Tim Edensor, a professor of geography at Manchester Metropolitan University who studies the appeal of urban ruins. “They’re marginal spaces filled with old and obscure objects. You can see and feel things that you can’t in the ordinary world.”

 

They’re marginal spaces filled with old and obscure objects. You can see and feel things that you can’t in the ordinary world.

 

Len Albright, a 31-year-old Princeton post-doctoral student who’s tagged along with ruin explorers in Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, believes the experience is “more about the sense of ownership than anything else.”

He describes the derring-do involved in scaling urban ruins. “There’s this whole strategy for figuring out how to get in,” he says. “They start by hiding in the tree line at the edge of the property, checking for security guards. Then one of them dashes to the wall of the building. He starts looking for unlocked doors or busted out windows. There’s a lot of creeping and crawling, almost like a military operation.”

But for Matthew Christopher, the man who snapped the photograph described above, it was — at least in the beginning — more about curiosity. Only as he stood amid the eerily silent hallways and peeling ceilings of a similarly crumbling institution did he truly understand its role in the history of mental health. “When I visited the abandoned Philadelphia State Hospital, and then some of the others, I was able to connect the dots, to see the progress of treatment through the years,” Christopher says. “Architecture and the ethos of the times became linked for me.”

Reading about the field couldn’t compete with actually seeing the buildings and complexes firsthand. “I realized this was real, not abstract,” he says. Christopher became so intrigued with that first experience ten years ago that he switched from studying mental health to photography, eventually shooting some 300 abandoned asylums, schools, and factories.

“It was a case of that old cliché, ‘a picture speaks a thousand words,’” he says. “When I’d try to talk about the presences that seem to linger in these places, people would look at me like I should be in an asylum myself. When I showed them pictures — they’d suddenly get it.”

A long artistic history backs him up. Renaissance painters romanticized Greek ruins. Piranesi’s etchings memorialized Roman antiquity as it was being torn up. Photographer Eugene Atget sought out whatever bits of a rapidly-disappearing Paris he could find in a post-Haussmann era.

Now, Christopher has his own portfolio in the form of a website, abandonedamerica.us(subtitled “an autopsy of the American dream”), and he’s studying fine art photography at Rochester Institute of Technology.

As part of a disparate cadre of urbanists who have embarked on the road to ruins, he’s opened himself to some flack.

Critics accuse photographers like him of objectifying empty buildings as pretty stage sets filled with juxtapositions, fading colors and dramatic light. Those who are driven by the frisson of scampering around abandoned places, on the other hand, are often lambasted as criminal trespassers. Edensor thinks such invectives give these intrepid romance-seekers short shrift. “In the best photography, there’s a silent comment on economic disinvestment through an attempt to capture the sensations and memories that remain,” he says. “The conscientious explorer, on the other hand, seeks to create a relationship with the past, to produce a history that’s not been museumized or curated by experts.”

The two factions have, at times, gone to war. Urban explorers view photographers as passive watchers, unwilling to get their hands dirty. “Explorers move away from the porn metaphor, because it’s all theirs to experience — not to watch,” says Albright. “You poke your head into a hole, climb up a ladder, peer under a desk. You’re trying to put together a story.”

But photographers say they too put up with the slight dangers that come with the territory — Christopher has the Tyvek suit and breathing apparatus to prove it. More seriously, he contends, explorers can seem selfish, interested only in their own jollies.

“I’d like the viewer to step back just a bit and to see the horror story that’s implicit in the image,” he says.”These pictures document physical conditions that are the direct consequences of failed economies.”

With their more rebellious stance, explorers would probably issue a big meh to that idea, posits Albright.

“I’ve interviewed people who have been to the same building 20 or 30 times, they just love it so much,” he says. “But when I asked them if they’d like to organize a cleanup or a preservation effort, they’d be indifferent. They might think that’s fine for someone else to do … after awhile, though, they’d be off to hunt for the next abandoned building.”

All photos courtesy of Matthew Christopher.

Keywords: Chicago, Cleveland, Ruin Porn, Preservation

JoAnn Greco writes frequently on the built environment, and is a contributing editor at PlanPhilly.com. All posts »

http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/01/12/the-atemporality-of-ruin-porn-part-i-the-carcass/

http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/01/20/the-atemporality-of-%E2%80%9Cruin-porn%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-part-ii-the-ghost/

Michael Clarke and Media Metro – Panic

On the whole, the mainstream media avoids metrosexuality as a subject, and particularly the ‘m’ word itself, but somehow sports journalists are unable to avoid either for any length of time. As I have written recently at QRGHQ:

‘I spend a lot of time looking for references to metrosexuality. Often the subject matter is covered but the ‘m’ word is hardly used. In the Guardian for example, there were only 35 references to ‘metrosexual’ in the whole of 2011, the lowest number since 2004.

One place that metrosexual masculinity is really grasped, though, is in sports journalism. Partly because it has been in sports and sports ‘branding’ that metro men have really come into their own.  Sporno has meant that top sports men have been such tarts  in advertising and promotional work that the media have been unable to ignore the shift. And metrosexual icons such as Ronaldo , Henson and Becks have brought their fashion style and narcissism off the billboards and onto the pitch.’

My ‘metrosexual’ search in the media at the beginning of 2012 has thrown up an interesting curveball. Both The Guardian and The Independent newspapers so far this year have only mentioned the word ‘metrosexual’ in one article each. And both pieces have featured the Australian cricketer, and captain of the national team,  Michael Clarke. Apparently, Clarke is a metrosexual of such dedication that his ‘lifestyle’, like Beckham’s , has been the focus of quite a few column inches.

This section from the Guardian article that mentions Clarke could be describing    David Beckham himself:

‘Then Ponting lost the Ashes for the third time, broke a finger and in came the antithesis: a smooth-skinned, bright-eyed, baby-faced fellow from the metrosexual generation, with his tattoos and celebrity girlfriend, and image promotion from an early stage in his career. ‘

Now I am no cricket expert, so I don’t know the context. But it sounds like Clarke’s captaincy has not been without its problems. Journalists seem to be trying to work out why he has had difficulties. And this is where his metro identity seems to enter into their discourse. This article by Chris McGrath  in the Independent really homes in on the cricketer’s metrosexuality to the extent that someone might analyse an actual sexual orientation such as homosexuality:

‘If he discovered a cure for cancer in the morning, sorted out global warming in the afternoon, and paid off the national deficit before going to bed, someone would still mutter something about Michael Clarke just showing off.

As a cricketer, it is hard to imagine what more he might do to prise open a place in Australian hearts than score 329 not out (and take Sachin Tendulkar’s wicket) in an innings defeat of India on his home ground. Yet his critics are somehow contriving to depict even his decision to declare within a single blow of 334 runs – Bradman’s sacred Test best – as a self-serving calculation, the studied gesture of a man trying too hard.

…

Clarke had requested the team victory song by 11pm, so that he could join his glamorous partner for drinks. That was five hours after the match ended, but the newspaper that broke the story shared Katich’s disgust, disparaging the vice-captain’s eligibility to succeed Ponting: “Clarke is media-savvy, has the cool looks and the hot girlfriend, the tattoos, the slick image and flash car. Together, the package is near-perfect for the job. Yet what he doesn’t have is the man.”

The man. It is impossible to read any profile of Clarke without stumbling across one word. From its mystifying emergence, when apparently suggestive of some unhealthy Freudian obsession with trains and tunnels, “metrosexual” has become a standard epithet for those stretching traditional gender roles. Its most commonly cited prototypes are Clarke and David Beckham, who have made similarly conspicuous, self-conscious “lifestyle choices”.’

It appears then, that this article is referring to how Clarke has been criticised for being ‘distracted’ by fripperies such as his ‘glamorous girlfriend’ , his ‘tattoos’ and his ‘cool image’ rather than giving 100% to his sport. The same has been insinuated about Gavin Henson, the Welsh rugby player and metrotastic sex object. The Guardian accused Henson of letting down his side, due to

‘the distractions of Strictly Come Dancing and…. fist fights with teammates’.

I put that particular Guardian piece down to a clear case of metro-envy. However Chris McGrath seems more conflicted. On one hand he comes across as pretty metrophobic. In trying to understand Clarke’s critics he writes:

‘Perhaps they see proven prowess in arenas of masculine endeavour as a sufficient guarantee of virility to indulge securely in all this effete shopping and consuming and preening. From proletarian beginnings, both trace a further lineage to the urban chic of ages past. The dandy had too much ironic detachment for sport, but would share with these athletes a love of display that subverts traditional masculinity. Where the male has been aggressive and desirous, the metrosexual instead becomes a passive idol, himself to be admired and desired. Enough to make any self-respecting Bloke queasy.

The syndrome has evolved in sport as in broader society. Jim Palmer, a great baseball pitcher of the 1970s, posed in jockey shorts. Dennis Rodman proved as comfortable wearing a wedding dress as green hair, albeit he exculpated himself this week by announcing his intention to start a topless women’s basketball team. As the most aesthetically gorgeous of sports, however, cricket has a particular tradition of narcissism.

In fact, come to think of it, doesn’t the Australia game have a rather more obvious metrosexual? In his weird metamorphosis under the spell of Liz Hurley, Shane Warne is slowly morphing from surfer slob into an unnerving mutation of Cecil Beaton. Yet he can do no wrong, even as Clarke can do no right.’

The journalist then, calls metrosexuality a ‘syndrome’ and says it would make ‘any self-respecting Bloke queasy’. However, on the other hand, he seems slightly affronted that whilst Clarke is failing to really win hearts and minds, another flaming metrosexual, Shane Warne, can ‘do no wrong’ (in Australia I assume. As Warney has had plenty of stick in the British media lately).  Note how McGrath, like many journalists have done, suggests that Warne’s metrosexual ‘morphing’ occurred ‘under the spell of Liz Hurley ‘.

So McGrath goes on to attempt to ‘defend’ Clarke and place him in Australia’s hall of cricketing fame. He writes:

‘It’s all very odd. With an average of 62 in 17 Test innings as captain, you would think Australian pragmatists might pardon Clarke his perceived heterodoxies. Instead they agonise pathetically about his image. They were appalled by his admission that he sobbed on the sofa with his father after losing his Test place in 2005. Some may even have been mischievously gratified that his Herculean deeds this week were played out against swathes of pink, from the stands to the stumps (in support of the Jane McGrath cancer foundation). Yet here is a man who sacrificed the joyous freedom of his game in the cause of a team in decline; who is proving a most adept captain, not least in respectful rehabilitation of Ponting.

Doubtless those who have booed him to the crease reckon his girlfriends look just too good in lingerie; that his declaration was just too artful.

… Clarke willingly eschewed the chance to become only the 11th man in Test history to set its highest score. The third was Tip Foster, whose debut 287 in 1903 remained an SCG record until this week. When you see he died in 1914, at 36, you assume he must have been a senseless victim of the trenches. In fact, he had acute diabetes.

He could not be cured; nor could Jane McGrath, nor could Gary Ablett. And their different tragedies may make the observations above seem deplorably frivolous. But surely their loss also commands due perspective on the glories of Clarke – a man who is determined to explore his full capacity, not just as a cricketer, but as a human being. Beaton had some famous counsel that might have been written for “Pup”, though Foster and others taken prematurely would also see its merit, seeing how brief our time can be. “Be daring, be different, be impractical,” Beaton urged. “Be anything that will assert imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.”

I find these paragraphs a little confusing. But I can’t help but come to the conclusion that the journalist is saying that Clarke (whose nickname is ‘pup’) ‘suffers’ from metrosexuality, which he compares to a previous great Oz cricketer suffering, and dying, from diabetes! It reads to me like an old-fashioned pathological, if sympathetic, discussion of homosexuality.

In quoting Beaton, and saying ‘be anything that will assert imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary’, McGrath seems to be championing Clarke’s ‘unusual’ metrosexual persona. However, as Simpson has told us in his book Metrosexy (2011):

‘At the end of the first decade of the Twenty First Century, metrosexuality, the male desire to be desired – by everyone, including and sometimes especially by other men – once regarded as pathological, perverted and definitely something to keep to yourself, is so commonplace as to be almost ‘normal’. Perhaps even – eek! – ordinary.’

So again McGrath is ‘pathologising’ Clarke’s metrosexuality as unusual when in fact he is no different from most men his age.

Now I know sport has an element of machismo written into its rules. And, I think McGrath is right when he says that some sportsmen are able to ‘get away with’ being uber metrosexual, because they can compensate for it with their ‘virile’ ‘masculine’ sporting prowess.

However, Clarke doesn’t seem to be ‘getting away with it’ here. And even his defender is being pretty metrophobic in describing his ‘lifestyle’ as a ‘syndrome’ and even comparing it to a disease.

Australia is also known for being quite macho, but, as Mark Simpson has written, is actually one of the most metrosexual countries in the world. In a piece about Australian beer marketed at real men he wrote:

‘Traditional beer manufacturers have been hit hard by metrosexuality, especially in Australia which, for all its Crocodile Dundee image abroad, is one of the most metrosexualised countries on the planet.  Australian men no longer just drink ‘beer’ (‘Pint please, mate’ ‘What kind?’ ‘What kind?? Do I look like a pooftah!?’) – and instead actually have tastes and preferences.  Even if they still drink beer – and not many young men do – they havestandards.  How lah-dee-dah. Even worse, they no longer spend all their disposable income on ‘beer’, but lots of other consumer products, including of course clothes, gym membership and vanity products.’

Sadly I don’t know enough about Michael Clarke and Australian cricket or Australian media, to know if this ‘damning with faint praise’ article is a typical view of the sportsman.

But I do know that in the UK at least, where these two articles appeared, sports media can’t ignore the great big pink elephant in the room that is metrosexual sportsmen‘s ‘passive’ ‘narcissistic’ display. However once they have acknowledged it, they find it incredibly hard to accept. Because men’s changing behaviours and  feminised attributes, to some macho media types, just isn’t cricket.

Puritanism In A Permissive Age?

In the UK, the year 2012 has begun with a trial that could have come straight out of the 1960s – and even has some resonance with 19^th century sexual morals and laws. R v Peacock, which already has its own wikipedia page, has been described as the obscenity trial of the decade.

The defendant in the case, a male escort called  Michael Peacock, was cleared of all charges of ‘depraving and corrupting’ the people who watched the dvds he sold, featuring men involved in sadomasochistic  acts. Writing in the Guardian after  Peacock’s acquittal, Nichi Hodgson asked:

‘Why is [the verdict] so important? For one, Peacock … challenged the notion of obscenity in law, a law that was last updated in 1964, and has stood since. A law that is expressly designed to tell us what is “deprave and corrupt” – defined by Justice Byrne in 1960 as “to render morally unsound or rotten, to destroy the moral purity or chastity; to pervert or ruin a good quality.”‘

Chris Ashford, an academic with specific knowledge in the field of law and sexuality, also commented on the outcome of the trial, saying:

‘The case brings some much needed clarity to this area of complex criminal law.  I understand that the Metropolitan Police will be sitting down with the CPS and the BBFC and this is a welcome step.  There will obviously need to be some revision to the CPS guidelines on prosecution in light of this case.  Longer term, there are sure to be questions about the continued appropriateness of the law in this area, and whether we still need this obscenity law’.

The overwhelming verdict from those outside the courtroom seemed to agree with both the jury and the ‘liberal’ press. As Hodgson put it in the Guardian, with a cheeky reference to the four finger rule employed by many pornographers featuring ‘fisting’ in their work:

‘For gay rights campaigners and for everyone of us that believes in social and sexual liberty, it’s a day to make a five-digit victory sign.’

I too welcome the verdict but I am not quite so jubilant as many seem to be about it. Nor do I like the tone and possible ‘agendas’ appearing in some of the media discourse around the case.

My first problem is with the fact this case was brought to the courts at all, in the digital 21^st century. Shouldn’t we be up in arms about this puritanical and oppressive legislation, before celebrating that someone has avoided being criminalised by it?

As Michel Foucault put it more eloquently than I could:

“But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.” ―

It is not just the archaic and anachronistic Obscenity Laws that are directed at ‘potentially guilty’ actors in the sexual sphere. Contemporary  legislation exists that continues to execute the ‘Law of Sex’ both in the courts and out. In 2009 for example, extreme pornography  legislation was included in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act. This makes it illegal to possess and even view pornography that shows injury to the breasts, anus or genitals, or that suggests a potential threat to life. This has potentially criminalised whole sections of society, including myself, who express sadomasochistic desire.

As Jane Fae has indicated, maybe we should keep the champagne on ice.  On her blog she wrote:

‘However, opponents of censorship need to be very cautious indeed: what comes next is likely to be a thoroughgoing review of obscenity and, in the current climate, my expectation is that that will see a widening and toughening of existing restrictive laws such as the Criminal Justice Act (2008) – more colloquially known as the ‘extreme porn law’.

On the politics.co.uk website Fae also pointed out the difference in numbers between prosecutions under the OPA and the ‘Extreme Porn’ law.

‘This once proud piece of legislation [OPA], intended to be the last word in moral high ground, was down to 71 prosecutions last year – as against just shy of 1,000 for “extreme porn” and several thousand each for various forms of malicious communication and indecent images of children.

The prosecution attempted to use the ‘extreme porn’ law in R v Peacock, as the prosecution also did in the Vincent Tabak (murder) trial. Both attempts failed but it shows how this law is very much at the forefront of lawyers’ minds, and their legal artillery, when it comes to cases of sexuality and (sexual) violence.

One of these attitudes is the idea that some people are ‘normal’ sexually, and others are abnormal, or perverts.

Again as Michel Foucault has said (and as he was partially quoted in the Peacock case):

“…if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing”

Who are the ‘perverts’ and the ‘sick’ and ‘abnormal’ people in this ‘permissive’ age? Well, apart from the obvious ‘paedophiles’, judging by this and previous obscenity cases, people who commit ‘violent’ acts in a consensual sexual context are still considered perverse to some degree. Especially men who do so. It is a rarely quoted fact, that the ‘dominatrix’ trade continues to boom without too much regulation (apart from isolated incidents e.g. the Max Moseley case) or criticism, because there it is women doling out the ‘violence’, usually to men.  In our culture, women dommes ‘punishing’ willing men victims, seems to many to represent some kind of ‘justice’ or ‘payback’ for all the apparent crimes of ‘patriarchal’ men against women.

And when it comes to heterosexual men, feminism demonises them so successfully that often they do not have to be brought to trial in courtrooms at all. Men are ‘the potentially guilty’ in the Foucauldian sense. Think of the discourse of rape culture that presents all men (all heterosexual men) as potential rapists (of women) and we can begin to see how this ‘law of sex’ works.  In other words, as Mark Simpson has observed, ‘The feminist is Ms Whiplash’.

 

I also think that the emphasis in the media surrounding this trial on the ‘gay’ identity of the defendant and the people who watch his porn, is positioning other men who have sex with men who do not identify as gay, as ‘abnormal’.

Hodgson in the Guardian  emphasised the significance of the defendant here being ‘gay’ and called this a victory for ‘gay rights campaigners’. I disagree. Though Peacock himself identifies as ‘gay’, there is no evidence that the actors in the dvds he sold or the people who bought and watched them are ‘gay’.  As Mark Simpson has written, straight men enjoy watching men’s cocks in pornography.  Also, many women watch ‘gay’ pornography. Again as Simpson has told us,  Manlove for the Ladies is a big market and getting bigger. And many men who act in ‘gay’ porn are only gay for pay. So this divide between ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ porn is false and limiting.

During the trial I didn’t see any ‘gay rights campaigners’ speaking up for Peacock (with the exception of  Chris Ashford).  Maybe this was because ‘gay rights’ activists are often puritanical themselves, as they separate the ‘gay’ identity from ‘homosexual’ sex, making it respectable and almost ‘heterosexual’.  If the men hadhave been heterosexual, and fisting and urinating on women, how would the feminist Guardian have presented the case?

I wrote previously at Graunwatch about how gay activists such as Paul Burston have taken a dim view of men demonstrating their homosexuality in public. I am not surprised this case was not taken up by ‘Teh Gayz’.

Once again, Foucault nailed this issue of the ‘gay’ identity being prioritised over everything else when he wrote:

‘If identity becomes the problem of sexual existence, and if people think they have to ‘uncover’ their ‘own identity’ and that their own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their existence; if the perennial question they ask is ‘Does this thing conform to my identity?’ then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility.

http://www.michel-foucault.com/quote/2009q.html

Currently people involved in s and m activities, if they commit ‘serious’ assault on each other as part of their consensual sexual acts, for example by drawing blood, are breaking the law.

Myles Jackson , Obscenity Lawyer, wrote:

‘I urge legislators and the Law Commission to reconsider the law surrounding consent to sexual assault.’ But as yet he has not had a commitment from the Commission that they will do so.’

Whilst very few people have been convicted for ‘assaulting’ their partners during known consensual sexual activity, the fact the law exists matters.  It has ramifications for domestic violence and sexual assault cases. If someone is accused of either of these crimes, and violence has definitely occurred, it is impossible for the defence to argue that ‘consent’ is a significant factor in the case.

Again this situation is highly gendered. Men were only counted amongst potential rape victims in the UK in 1994, and in United States  in 2012! And, in UK law, women are not able to ‘rape’ men technically, as a penis is required for that specific crime. This enables feminists to continue their assault on ‘rape culture’ and to portray men as predators of women.

I welcome this ‘not guilty’ verdict. I hope  it leads to the end of the obscenity law in the UK. But I do not think it necessarily signifies the end of ‘puritanical’ or ‘oppressive’ law in the realm of sexuality in the UK.  I believe the ‘discourse’ of sexuality is where most of the power occurs. And, the discourse around this case has not been ‘liberating’ so much as business as usual for those such as feminists who invest in continuing sexual repression, and in particular the demonization of men’s sexualities.

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Originally appeared (in edited form) at Open Rights Group Org:

http://zine.openrightsgroup.org/features/2011/puritanism-in-a-permissive-age

Foucault’s Daughter Revisited

I had a bit of a scare recently, when Mark Simpson’s blog, the source of my inspiration and the archive of my research material for Death at the Mall, went down for two weeks. Thankfully it is up again and when I could access it once more I found myself checking on some of my favourite posts to make sure they were still there, unharmed.

One of the pieces I alighted upon was Simpson’s ‘review’ of my novella, Scribbling on Foucault’s Walls. I put ‘review’ in inverted commas, because it felt to me as if he didn’t really focus on the content of the book, so much as the context in which he read it, including the breakdown in the friendship between us that was occurring at the time, that is still occurring.

But I want to keep it here as I don’t want to lose it again. And he does say some nice things about that girl, the one that scribbled all over a serious homosexual intellectual’s walls. Who got in the way. Who won’t be forgotten.

Sometimes I wonder what Freud would make of all this.  He was no stranger to intense intellectual interactions. It may or may not be a coincidence that after getting back in touch for a while, Simpson and I have not been in mutual contact since I wrote that piece Looking for Sigmund, Finding Simpson about my Freudian  ’relationship’ with Simpson’s writing.

Anyway, here is his ‘review’ of Foucault’s Daughter:

————————–

Regular visitors to this blog will be familiar with the spirited, sharp, thoughtful, charming, insistently-infuriatingly reasonable — and occasionally downright cantankerous — commenter Elly, aliasQuiet Riot Girl.

Elly gave me enormous encouragement and support in putting togetherMetrosexy, which in all honesty probably would never have seen the light of day without her. She also proved tireless in spreading the word about it.

Elly is not only extremely enthusiastic about the concept of metrosexuality, she’s one of the few people to really engage with it and grasp its import. Perhaps more so than even Metrodaddy himself, who remains something of a deadbeat dad.

This is why Metrosexy is dedicated to her.

Now Elly has given birth to her own offspring. A bouncing novella calledFoucault’s Daughter, about what might have happened if the famous bald homo French philosopher had been a single dad, juggling cruising Parisian S/M sex clubs with school runs. There is of course more than a little bit of QRG in Dr Foucault’s sprog, who scribbles all over his nice clean walls and then spends most of her adult life trying to live down and up to her father. Insisting that ‘macho fags’ (in QRG’s favourite phrase) acknowledge the (little) lady in their life.

It’s a fantastically, possibly madly ambitious work that self-consciously negotiates her own highly informed, passionate-but-critical and ultimately highly ambivalent investment in that very nearly extinct species: The Homosexual Intellectual. It won’t be giving too much away to tell you thatFoucault’s Daughter, after prolonging the agony of The Homosexual Intellectual with its interest in him (who else shows any these days?), comes very close to euthanizing him.

Many passages in it are beautifully written and breathtakingly vivid. The scene, for instance, which rehearses the death of the famous cultural critic and QRG hero Roland Barthes in a traffic accident stays with you. Even if you feel he is being ever-so-slightly, ever-so-lovingly pushed into the path of the oncoming laundry van.

So I strongly recommend you read Foucault’s Daughter (which is free to download  here). But if you do, you’ll also understand why, in the end, QRG and me, alas, had to go our separate ways.

 http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2011/07/27/to-foucault-a-daughter/

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I don’t think the book does explain why he and I had to go our separate ways. Not least because, in a way, we haven’t gone separate ways at all. We are both still concerned with the same project and the same subject, of metrosexual masculinities. I am not Jungian in the sense that I have not made a mockery of Simpson’s original theories and turned them into pseudo-religious quackery as Jung did to Freud.  If I have, I hope someone will tell me!

But I know what he meant.

Once I sent Simpson a poem by Edna St Vincent Millay, about dealing with loss. It ends with the lines:

‘Pity me that the heart is slow to learn, what the swift mind perceives at every turn’.

And that is what I ask of you.

Death of the Author, death of the writer, death of the reader

‘The book must break up so as to resemble the ever increasing

number of extreme situations. It must break up to resemble the

flashes of holograms. It must roll around itself like the snake on

the mountains of the heavens. It must fade away as it is being

read. It must laugh in its sleep. It must turn in its grave.’

~ Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

I’ve had a couple of interactions recently, with Remittance Girl, the talented erotica author, relating to Barthes and The Death Of The Author. I smiled to myself as RG suggested I hadn’t understood Barthes and really need to go back and re-read him. Well I never stop reading Roland. And one thing I am certain about from my readings, is that he’d welcome debate over the intentions and meanings of his words. ‘Death of The Author’ signifies at the very least, an openining up of dialogue about writing and what it achieves (or doesn’t).

http://networkedblogs.com/saym9?a=share&ref=nf

http://networkedblogs.com/saym9?a=share&ref=nf

Below is my chapter from my novella, Scribbling on Foucault’s walls, that takes Barthes’ Death of the Author and uses it for my own purposes:

Death of the author, by Roland Barthes[i]

Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.

Michel Foucault is slipping away…

No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.

A disconnection occurs; his voice loses its origin; the author enters into his own death

French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author. The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.

Baudelaire is dead. Van Gogh is dead. Tchaikovsky is dead. Barthes is dead. Foucault is dead.

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely.

Foucault’s daughter’s only power is to mix writings…

Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. Which is why it is derisory to condemn the new writing in the name of a humanism hypocritically turned champion of the reader’s rights. Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Foucault’s Daughter will let herself be fooled no longer. Her life must be at the cost of the death of her father. The death of the author. The reader is the writer. The Reader is The Critic. The reader  is the Subject. The reader is the Lover. The reader is the Killer.The reader is the reader. The reader. The reader. The reader.

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In the introduction to one of her recent posts, Remittance Girl wrote:

‘Academia puts a high value on the ability to read critically; to deny the text our heart and view it with an analytical, objective mind. From the early of the 20th Century onwards, we have made a practice of withholding our commitment to the narrative lure novel and called it an intellectual virtue. The subtext here is that really ‘bright’ people don’t suspend disbelief when they read. So it’s hardly surprising that literary theorists have, for the most part, looked down on the readers of genre fiction – especially romance – and it’s hardly surprising that they find little value in reading them. If they could ever drop their ultimately jaded eye and fully indulge in a well-written piece of erotic romance, what they’d find was that Barthes was not entirely correct in his assessment on the death of the author.’

And in the comments during our discussion she said:

‘The death of the author concerned meaning making. Not an inability to recognize whether something is science fiction or romance.’

I disagree with what I understand her to be suggesting. It seems to me as if RG is separating ‘erotica’ or romance writers from ‘academics’ and placing the former as somehow superior when it comes to getting meaning out of writing. Apart from the fact that RG is both an erotica writer and an academic, working in Higher education and studying for a Phd, she misses some important points. One is that ‘literary theory’ itself is not really in fine form, and the study of literature has changed and dissolved, so many students do modules in English alongside other subjects – media, history, journalism, cultural studies. The ‘purist’ literary theorists are few and far between.

Another point she seems to be making, that literary theory that ‘deconstructs’ texts, does not allow for beauty and romance. I think the opposite is true. In reading Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse for example, I was blown away by the sensuality and ‘romance’ of his writing. I fell in love with Barthes, and in a way ( a melancholic one) with love, all over again on reading that book.

I am also currently reading Baudrillard and I find that for all his bluster about ‘the end of meaning’ he too writes with a sincerity and a beauty that I find mesmerising.

I think these two French thinkers were bang on the money when they declared the death of the author and the dissolution of meaning. But I don’t think they were celebrating this situation so much as lamenting it, or trying to accept something they themselves found hard to grasp and to understand. I think if Baudrillard and Barthes were to come back now, and to see us arguing over the meanings of their words, on blogs, on facebook, on twitter, they’d nod their heads and say, ‘I told you so’. But they’d also be stunned at just how far their predictions had come true.

Maybe erotica romance is one place where people retreat from this incoherent, fragmented world and try and restore some order in the chaos. But I prefer to embrace the inevitable uncertainty, and to find some kind of ‘romance’ there.

How have representations of sex become so banal, so unthreatening, so uncritical? Because the body and sexuality are liberated as signs and only as signs. Through the sign-system, Baudrillard contends, ‘sexuality itself is diverted from its explosive finality’ and transformed into ‘promotional eroticism’ or ‘operational sexuality’.

“Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality” by William Paulett

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[i] http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes06.htm