To Have No Face

‘I write in order to have no face’ - Michel Foucault

From a recent discussion at http://jackofkent.com about ‘outing’ bloggers:

‘But no matter how badly you feel someone has treated you in words, unless those words have broken some law or touched upon some significant issue of public interest, none of this justifies breaking our common expectation of privacy. It’s not very hard to find out the private details of pretty much anyone these days, so it doesn’t require a lot of intellect and it’s not a particularly admirable pursuit. While I don’t condone people writing deliberately nasty stuff to others online, to sinking to their level by publishing their personal or professional information as some kind of revenge is just childish. Let’s hope everyone can learn from this situation a little more mutual respect.’ – @white_mischief

Reese Rants: Quiet Riot Girl Responds

I discovered a relatively new blog recently, called Reeses Rants. One of the things I find interesting about it is that the author, Lucy Reese, set it up as part of her MA studies. But she tells us on her blog that she enjoys writing on this platform so much, that she goes way beyond the demands of the course and writes it for pleasure. Which, as a compulsive blogger myself,  I think is pretty great.

I wanted to link to her blog to show that people are reading it, and interacting with her work.

Also her latest post caught my eye. It is about blogging and identity, a subject that is very dear to my heart. She critiques a paper by an academic, who claims that the internet allows people to move ‘beyond’ identity positions such as gender, class, age, and perform online identities quite freely:

‘This paragraph – at the start of Merchant’s essay – was a bit of a worry in itself: Merchant (2006: 235-6) writes:

The rise of a new capitalism (Gee, 2004) with a global reach has given rise to a system in which it is less likely that goods are produced and consumed locally, and more likely that production is coordinated across locations and that goods are marketed to consumer types, rather than geographical locations. This sort of arrangement requires the development of particular communicative tools, but more pertinently leads to the emergence of new social identities; identities that are more accurately defined by lifestyle, media consumption, and affinity spaces than by the more traditional markers of race, class, gender and place.

The idea that there are consumer “types” outside of race, class, gender and place just doesn’t wash with me, fitting as it does into the Nu Labour/neo-liberal ideology of “choice” – I am who I am because I am wearing Adidas rather than Nike or because I shop at Waitrose rather than Asda.’

I agree with Lucy up to a point. We never really get beyond race, class, or gender, though maybe we do transcend place more easily via the internet. Language less so. An example of the power of gender identities online is how, when I openly ditched feminism, I immediately got accused of being a ‘man’.

But I think both the internet and consumerism have changed the playing field more than she acknowledges. For example I wrote after the UK riots last summer, how people have come to define themselves via brands such as Adidas, and how people’s actions in the riots affected brands:

http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/no-logo-when-branding-goes-bad/

Someone else who has written about the importance of consumerism and the modern media (including the internet) to forming our identities, is Mark Simpson. His 2011 book, Metrosexy is all about how masculinity is now mediated and commodified, and how brands maketh the man. Whilst Simpson does not claim we have gone ‘beyond gender’ as a result, he has warned that we are nearing the ‘end of sexuality as we have known it’.

So I think Lucy Reese underestimates the power of consumer culture in changing how we identify ourselves as humans.

There is something else that her post reminded me of, to do with blogging and ‘identity’. That is how much of my identity I invest in my online existence, and how much online interactions have influenced my sense of self.

I have written before about how my world-view and my life have been transformed by the work of Mark Simpson, who I got to know via the internet. And how I have had various ‘identities’ imposed upon me by people online, due to my ‘relationship’ with his work. ‘Mark Simpson’s Pitbull’ and ‘Ardent Simpsonista’ are two of my favourites.

It was through reading Simpson that I was able to finally pluck up the courage to reject feminism, and it is his work on metrosexual masculinities that has given my writing and my lust for gender theory a new lease of life.

So when I clicked on his blog to see a white screen and the hostile message: You Are Banned, recently, I was devestated. Me, the human flesh and blood person was utterly distraught by something that someone else did hundreds of miles away, in the dashboard of their blog.

It has been a stark reminder to me of the complex relationship between ‘real life’ and internet identities.

Lucy is a ‘real life’ friend of Mark Simpson. In some ways she knows him much better than me. But in others, I think I have got a handle on him and his work more than any other person I know of. And that could be one of the things that has led him to ‘ban’ me from the personal space that is his blog.

Even hundreds of miles away, alone in the confines of my study, I encroached too far onto his personal space.

Concepts such as ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘censorship’ normally are applied at the level of state laws, or corporations – those brands again – controlling their products and their customers. But I think those terms go deeper than that. On a  one-to-one level people can ‘censor’ each other and themselves. Stop them from speaking.

Mark Simpson has failed to stop me speaking. I use a proxy server now to access his blog. Rather, ironically it is he who has gone rather quiet lately, including on his own blog which he has not updated for over a fortnight.

Maybe Lucy can infect him with some of her enthusiasm.

Blogging is real life to me.

I hope it gets better soon!

TEDious Talks?

Nathan Jurgenson, a social media theorist, is investigating the TED talks in America.

I first came across TED when I saw a video of a talk by Hanna Rosin, on gender and women’s continuing march forwards (and over men?).  I criticised the content of her talk but didn’t address my problems with TED itself. But there was something about the set up I didn’t like.

It turns out quite a few people are not that keen on TED talks. Nathan collected some criticisms of the organisation on twitter.  I agree with most of them, particularly how ‘corporate’ it is.

So here are a few of my own criticisms of TED now I know more about it, and have seen quite a few videos of their speeches.

1. Everyone’s Steve Jobs.

Or rather, everyone wants to be Steve Jobs. When you think of the late Apple director what do you see? I have an image in my head of Jobs, stood on a stage in jeans and a black poloneck, talking to a rapt crowd. It seems to me that TED have copied the ‘look’ and feel of a Jobs talk, but without actually thinking about what makes Steve Jobs Steve Jobs! My research on creative entrepreneurship has been quite critical of the way the ‘entrepreneur’, black poloneck, ipad, lecture circuit bookings and all, is turned into a ‘type’ of person. TED seems to be replicating the entrepreneurial ‘type’ without actually considering the substance of entrepreneurship, technology and social change.

2. Evangelism Sucks

TED talks look and seem to me very similar to countless ‘evangelical’ religious conferences I have seen, especially in America. There is a ‘preacher’ element to them, which doesn’t sit well with me. I followed a  man who gave his first TED talk not so long ago, on twitter and his blog, and it seemed like once he had done it he felt somehow he’d ‘arrived’ in the special, spiritual club of TED talkers.  But if they are evangelising, what is the good word they are preaching? A kind of vague, All American, entrepreneurial, individualistic dream? Maybe.

3. It’s Nothing New – and Badly Researched

I am not a techy so I am unable to judge the more technical content of TED talks. I am an ‘expert’ in gender though. And the speeches I have seen about men, women and gender have been nothing new. They seem to re-hash very common ideas and perspectives, but just with the added ‘Steve Jobs’ effect as if appearance is everything. I come from an academic background, so when I hear people spouting their own individual ‘ideas’ about gender, I want to ask them who they have read, what research they are referencing? Genuinely original theories in gender are very rare. But you can be sure they have been informed by existing theory. So I don’t trust these talks that don’t situate themselves in research and writing and reading.

4. TED Women is tokenism

TED introduced a set of lectures called TED women and received a lot of flak a while ago. Because they seemed to be saying that TED talks are naturally ‘male’ and women need their own special section to exist. I think the video above of Hanna Rosin is a TED women talk, the audience is certainly full of women. This seems to be a tokenistic effort. If women are under-represented in certain areas and industries, surely men need to discuss this issue, if they are the ones who dominate those sectors? And if, as Rosin suggests, women are actually gaining ground and even overtaking men in many areas, shouldn’t men get the memo too? My research on ‘creative entrepreneurs’ has shown that the ‘creative entrepreneur’ is constructed as a ‘masculine’ figure – see Steve Jobs again! And TED Women only seems to emphasise this, by adding on the ‘women’ to qualify the male entrepreneurial TED.

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.

—————————————————–

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/

——————————————

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.

Don’t Forget Baudrillard

‘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

———————–

A recent review of one of Baudrillard’s most important books,

Seduction, illustrates the difficulty of commenting upon his work.

The review, written by one of the shrewdest analysts of Baudrillard’s

oeuvre, begins by conveying the right air of gravitas. Baudrillard is

described as a ‘subtle’, ‘powerful’ thinker. His work is considered to

be at the cutting edge of social and cultural theory. However, quite

quickly the reviewer is also driven to observe that many of

Baudrillard’s arguments are ‘ludicrous’; and that his manner of

presentation is often ‘maladroit’. Yet the conclusion that one would

predict from these serious criticisms is absent. We are not invited to

reject Baudrillard. On the contrary he is presented as a figure of

unique importance and his writing is recommended as required

reading for anyone interested in current thought. ‘Unsatisfactory as it

obviously is,’ writes Mike Gane (1992:184)—the reviewer in

question—‘unclassifiable as it is, it nevertheless throws up disturbing

questions which will be dismissed only with a bad conscience.’

———————————

While Baudrillard might not be at the top of the

French system, his rise to international fame has been quite

spectacular. Here again, there is the irony of Baudrillard as an Event

of Spectacle within the media scene of the Academy. Certainly

Baudrillard must be offensive to those ‘sound’ academics who have

not ventured outside the narrow confines of their specialism to

speculate, without evidence, surveys, or confidence levels, on the

meaning of Las Vegas or Reagan’s face.

———————————–

Baudrillard’s recklessness may be criticized for undermining his

credibility. However, perhaps he feels that this burden is bearable in

a world which has, in his view, become totally artificial and

parasitic. Simulation is the great theme in Baudrillard’s writing. His

definition of culture as ‘the collective sharing of simulacra’ reduces

truth and reality to a language game. Image makers have opened up

a Pandora’s box of illusions, treatments and enhancements which

have obliterated the division between reality and unreality.

Baudrillard’s argument collides with most of the assumptions and

conventions used to manage normality in everyday life. To many his

analysis is literally out of this world. It is closer to the conventions of

sci-fi than those of sociology.

——————————————-

We have claimed that Baudrillard presents himself as a symptom,

but a symptom of what? As with the last fin de siècle the 1990s are

pregnant with uncertainty and awash with change. The eastern

communist bloc collapses, but new ethnic conflicts break out from

the Balkans to the Baltic. The global virus of AIDS introduces new

doubts and fears into personal relationships. The global

communications industry erodes traditional distinctions so that the

difference between the local and the global becomes ever more

ambiguous. The nation state in Europe seems to be in peril as

pressure mounts from Brussels for European federation. Crime and

murder seem to be on the increase. Political movements based in the

principle of collective interest appear to have been bypassed by

history. At such times, nervousness and anxiety are pronounced.

Simmel (1990), of course, wrote about the neurasthenia of modern

life at the turn of the century. He noted that in extreme cases it

produced the pathologies of agoraphobia and hyperasthesia. More

and more, argued Simmel, the individual is subjected to new

stimulations and sensations, wild fluctuations in taste, style,

opinions and personal relationships. The result, he concluded, is

either the creation of the neurasthenic personality or the

development of the blasé attitude which is based in total indifference

and fatalism. Simmel was attacked by Lukács (1991) and others for

overemphasizing the haste and hurry of modern life and

exaggerating the permanence of transitional forms of personal and

social relationships. However this criticism was made before the two

devastating world wars in Europe; before the Soviet road to

communism was revealed to be a nightmare; and before the erosion

of traditional family life. From the standpoint of the 1990s it is

Simmel who looks if anything too conservative in his assessment of

fragmentation, tumult and transition and his critics who look fooled

by their own hyperbole.

————————————————

We have argued that Baudrillard is a controversial figure.

Baudrillard provokes, unsettles, continues to annoy. In some respects,

Baudrillard’s style and impact are not unlike the Nietzsche of The Gay

Science. Appropriately described as a ‘prophet of extremity’ (Megill

1985), Nietzsche questioned the taken-for-granted assumptions about

the relationship between language and reality, mocked the respectable

world of the German Bildungs-bürgertum, and adopted outrageous

positions towards women, philosophers and full-time salaried

academics. The Gay Science (Nietzsche 1974), which is wonderfully

rich in provocative metaphors, maxims and morals, appeared in

1887. The word ‘gay’ in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft might also be

translated as ‘joyful’ or ‘blithe’, but these terms do not catch the

feeling of exuberance in Nietzsche’s language. Perhaps Blissful

Knowledge might be a possible translation. Despite Baudrillard’s

interest in fatefulness, there is also an exuberant, playful, destructive

aspect to Baudrillard’s reflections on the simulations of the modern

world. Perhaps Baudrillard’s oeuvre in respect might be regarded as a

fröhliche Theorie as much as a fatal one.

———————————————

The Baudrillard that emerges from these pages is a combative, bombastic,

shrewd, insightful and illogical commentator. The reader

may be forgiven for concluding that the only consistent thing about

him is his careless inconsistency. However, we are in no doubt that

he is an important figure. Important not just in the mundane sense

that many people are reading his publications and discussing his

arguments, but important too in a strategic sense in that his

approach and ideas expose the limitations of certain established

ways of thinking about ‘society’, ‘culture’ and ‘meaning’.

Baudrillard may not be the shape of things to come. Even so, perhaps

more than any other contemporary writer he confronts the

exhaustion of many of the guiding assumptions and beliefs that held

critical thought together in the post-war period. So finally, he

deserves the soubriquet given to him by The New York Times: ‘a

sharp-shooting lone ranger of the post-Marxist left’.

————————————

The modern consumer society is another beast. It is, Baudrillard

claimed, a system in which analysis of the laws of production has

become obsolete. Consumption is all-important, and consumption has

to be understood in a novel manner. Thanks to the twentieth-century

revolutionization of consciousness—through mass communications, hitech

media, the advertising and publicity industries, the empire of

images throughout the global village—modern human beings now

inhabit an artificial, hermetically sealed pleasure dome. Nothing is

constant, everything reflects everything else in a theatre of dazzling

simulations dominated by the proliferation of the sign and manipulated

by ever-hidden persuaders. Desire itself is manufactured, and nothing

any longer possesses intrinsic value, in and for itself.

————————-

From Forget Baudrillard (1993) Rojek, C and Turner, B (Routledge)

I included these extracts about Baudrillard to remind myself of the similarities and overlaps between the work of the French philosopher and Mark Simpson. Simpson himself has acknowledged Baudrillard as an influence on his work, and has applied Baudrillard’s concept of the ‘hyper real’ to gender, for example in his important essay Transexy Time. Also Simpson’s work on pornography emphasises the way porn has contributed to the ‘simulcra’ of sex and sexual imagery in contemporary culture. And, finally his interest in ‘mediated’ masculinities within consumer culture is very much the kind of territory that Baudrillard occupied, even though Baudrillard didn’t seem that interested in men and masculinities as subjects of study.

Post script:

 

Certainly Baudrillard must be offensive to those ‘sound’ academics who have not ventured outside the narrow confines of their specialism 1/3—
Quiet Riot Girl (@Notorious_QRG) December 26, 2011

to speculate, without evidence, surveys, or confidence levels, on the meaning of Las Vegas or Reagan’s face. 2/3—
Quiet Riot Girl (@Notorious_QRG) December 26, 2011

BUT – what about Barthes? Surely he did social science on pop culutre? was he not offensive to academics? Or did they just ignore him? 3/3—
Quiet Riot Girl (@Notorious_QRG) December 26, 2011

I suppose Barthes was conveniently dead in the 80s and 90s when everyone was busy being offended by Baudrillard. But still…—
Quiet Riot Girl (@Notorious_QRG) December 26, 2011

Last Of The Gang To Die

In a compelling article by Mark Simpson from 2009, the discoverer of metrosexuality interviews the infamous American thinker, Gore Vidal. I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall during that encounter – the two men share a way with words not often found in contemporary culture. But Simpson’s interview is quite humble, as he plays the loyal fan to Vidal’s towering ‘star’:

‘Clad only in his wit – and an armour-plated ego – Mr Vidal has, during his long and prolific career as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, (failed) politician, commentator, movie special guest-star, (gleeful) gadfly, and America’s (highly unauthorised) biographer, taken on The Land of the Free’s finest literary warriors, who had no word for ‘why’ or ‘because’, but plenty for ‘faggot’ and ‘pinko’. Vidal broke the balls – and outlasted – tiresomely macho brawlers like Norman Mailer: he compared ‘The Prisoner of Sex’ to ‘three days of menstrual flow”; later, when he was knocked to the ground by Mailer, he retorted, still on the floor: ‘Words fail Norman Mailer yet again’.’

Simpson doesn’t name Vidal as an ‘intellectual’ as such, but the portrait he paints of the writer is definitely one of an old-school intellect, from a previous era where ideas mattered more than facebook profiles. His description of Gore Vidal, particularly his appreciation of how provocative Vidal has been, reminds me of a book I am currently reading about the Jamaican ‘intellectual’, Stuart Hall. Hall was instrumental in establishing the discipline of cultural studies, in the 1960s and 70s, the discipline that Simpson, inspite of himself, practises. This passage includes a definition of the intellectual taken from Edward Said’s lectures and subsequent book on the subject (1993, 1994).

‘Stuart Hall is the pre-eminent figure in Cultural Studies today. Nobody else enjoys the same prestige. This derives as much from his charisma as from his writings. Hall’s leadership of the influential Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham in the 1970s, and his oratorical role as a public intellectual, contributed immensely to the ascent of Cultural Studies. I do not mean this to be taken as a slight on the published work. On the contrary, I hold that there are contributions in Hall’s writings that are seminal for the study of popular culture. Yet as Hall would surely be the first to acknowledge, he can hardly be classed as an original theorist. His forte is to synthesize, clarify, popularise and sometimes to provoke.

These are qualities of elucidation. In his refreshing book on intellctuals, Edward Said defends the Socratic ideal of the intellectual as the unparalleled agent of independent social criticism in civil society (1994:17). On this reading, the job of the intellectual is to aggravate cliche, combat dogma and delineate a space that does not answer to power.  In as much as this is so, Said identifies the intellectual as an agent who intervenes in the public sphere, expressing issues of public conscience, injustice and the misuse of power. Said, in fact, rejects the traditional conservative ideal of the intellectual as the avatar of taste, hygenienically insulated from the public by virtue of superior knowledge and greater cultural capital. For Said, the independent intellectual is the highest form of public man, ready to enunciate truths and perspectives which, when circumstances demand, disturb convention and intimdate power.’

I like this definition of an intellectual, maybe, in part, because I see aspects of myself in it. Particularly how I am (I think) ‘ready to enunciate truths and perspectives which, when circumstances demand, disturb convention and intimdate power’. Mark Simpson of course, is, or was, in his ‘heyday’, this kind of intellectual too. His first book (1994), now re-released on Kindle, Male Impersonators is an example of the ‘elucidation’ and ‘synthesis’ that characterises Stuart Hall’s work. Simpson’s treatment and excavation of Freud in the book, to uncover the homosexual subtexts in contemporary masculinities is nothing if not ‘disturbing’ of convention and ‘intimidating’ to the repressed power of straight men.

One of Mark Simpson’s  most provocative works, Anti Gay (1996), was a defiant up yours to the gay establishment, one that caused him to be ostracised from mainstream gay culture and mainstream media. The book led to indignation, and anger, and some delightfully quotable reviews:

MARK SIMPSON… IMBUES THE BOOK WITH THE VAPID APPEAL OF A COMPASSIONLESS MARGARET THATCHER’ – City Life

‘SIMPSON IS FAR TOO MUCH A MAVERICK AND TOO ACERBIC’ – Diva

‘MARK SIMPSON… COMES ACROSS AS UNACCOUNTABLY SMUG’ – The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review

TO TRADITIONAL GAY FUNDAMENTALISTS MARK SIMPSON IS THE ANTI-CHRIST’ – Vogue

‘ There is no unified body of non-heterosexuals to represent. There are only factions or fashions that are either followed or ignored – which is why the media’s portrayal of a community split into gay and anti-gay supporters in the wake of Mark Simpson’s collection of essays is a joke. I almost hate to agree with anything Simpson has to say, but there is some truth in this reduction of the press to a listings service. All a person or thing need be is gay or considered gay, regardless of merit or interest, and it will get published. As John Weir protests, ‘if Melissa Etheridge burps, she gets covered.’- On and Off The Scene BY Jessamy Harvey (London Review of Books 1996)

‘The overwhelming (and I have to say repulsive) cynicism of the editor of this volume, Mark Simpson, is quite frightening coming from one so young. If he’s this dyspeptic now, I hate to think what he’ll be like when he’s fifty.’ -Terry Anderson, Pink Triangle 1997 http://www.pinktriangle.org.uk/glh/164/simpson.html

In my own experience of being an advocate for Simpson’s work, I often get a lot of the flak that is really aimed at him – from academics, journalists and gay activists. For these days the ‘elucidation’ of Simpson’s theories is something I am more actively involved in than he is himself. But they are still just as ‘incendiary’ as ever. And it is that provocation that I admire so much in him and his ideas.

The problem, from my perspective, is that this form of agent provocateur intellectual is falling from grace, and being swamped by the ‘discourse’ of the internet, including facebook, twitter, tumblr and youtube. The very idea of ‘ideas’ itself seems outmoded in this fight for attention and ‘likes’ or ‘reblogs’. I maintain my version of the ‘intellectual’ as a kind of memorial to it. Death at the Mall is partly so called because it identifies the ‘death’ of all things I hold dear in the age of looking and shopping. An age that Simpson, ironically, being such an old-fashioned intellectual, has analysed with insight and accuracy  like nobody else. Maybe whilst Gore Vidal is still on this earth we can maintain some vestiges of an ‘intellectual’ identity remaining, but once he’s gone I think it will be well and truly O.V.E.R.

Elise Moore, blogger, ex-playwright and self-identified ‘intellectual’, is less pessimistic than me.

I wrote previously about how I like her blog because it is such a clear example of someby ‘clinging on for dear life, as Leonardo de Caprio clung onto that iceberg in Titanic, to the idea that blogging, and intellectual discourse are not completely and utterly dead in the frozen water’.

She describes the shifting context in which ‘intellectuals’ operate, but rather than saying the postmodern world is killing them, she seems to think they are adapting to the new conditions:

‘ To write and to be an intellectual was once, recently, to craft a persona that had nothing in common with one’s mundane private self; that was, perhaps, precisely an escape from it; to craft a self that was smarter, sharper, more elegant and eloquent. I dearly love all of these critics as much for their personas – or their variations on the critic-persona they bequeathed to us – as for their prose and ideas, but it seems to me that as a medium, the blog is far too informal to support such persona-building, which requires an absolute separation between public and private self. ..

Can you picture Sontag with a blog? In a blogging world we could never have had a Sontag or a Trilling; they would have had to democratically puncture their elitist personas. And that would have been a shame. But we did have them, issuing from the world of 20^th century literary journalism; and now we have a different model, which, while no doubt throwing up its own celebrities (and more of them), may never allow for the level of intellectual celebrity of the great 20^th century American critics, simply because there are too many of us. But there’s nothing wrong with changing the face of intellectual inquiry en masse.’

Ms Moore’s blog profile consists of a quote from Oscar Wilde, which shows she is identifying herself, not as a public, combative intellectual, but as a more introspective ‘artistic’ critic and intellectual:

“That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.” Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”. But I read this with the necessary ‘scepticism’ that accompanies any reading of Wilde. As the image above shows, his belief that ‘life is too important to be taken seriously!’ means he was always satirising life, ideas, and most of all himself.

The fact The Autobiography Of  A Soul has few readers, and up until recently (when I abandoned it due to ‘intellectual’ differences with Ms Moore) only one regular commenter, I think it is fair to say that her romantic view of the intellectual critic as artist, is passe. That’s not a specific criticism of her, for, as I said above, the whole concept of the ‘intellectual’ is old hat now, in tumblr generation. So to be arguing over the finer points of which model of the intellectual is superior really is missing the point.

If something cannot be expressed as an internet meme, it probably can’t be expressed at all. As I have written before,  ’ ‘ONLY JOKING!’ could be the subtitle of any ‘serious’ article or statement made by anyone. If nothing means anything, nobody has to mean what they say. Right?’

In fact,  ’seriousness’ itself has been parodied by the meme army much more succinctly than Wilde or Simpson could ever do:

Simpson, despite his own ‘seriousness’ as a theorist and a writer, has also critiqued the ‘seriousness’ of some intellectual figures. In a lovely piece about Susan Sontag and her final book before she died, Where The Stress Falls, Simpson wrote:

‘But, just like the ‘vulgar’ Paglia, Sontag made her reputation in part by lending cultural capital to things which were not at the time considered worth it, such as camp, cinema and Roland Barthes in her now classic 1966 collection Against Interpretation. In fact, it was Sontag’s interest in that silly Frenchy which arguably set her up, giving her the edge on her (long forgotten) rivals. She was one of the main conduits by which Barthes’s obsession with taking superficiality seriously reached Anglo academe and became intensely fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s, and in many ways prepared the way for the post-modernism and irony which is such anathema to  Sontag today.

As Oscar Wilde once put it: “A moralist is someone who lectures on the vices of which he has grown bored.” In a preface to a new edition of Against Interpretation, included here, she makes a moving public confession: “What I didn’t understand… was that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete.”’

The mention of Barthes is relevant to Death at the Mall, not least because I have named Simpson himself ‘a Roland Barthes for the iphone generation’. And my advocacy of his work could be compared to Sontag’s of Barthes. But my quest seems much more hopeless than Sontag’s, partly of course, because I am no Susan Sontag. But also because the 21st century, despite it showing both Barthes and Simpson’s ‘predictions’ to have come true, has no time for cultural theorists. My Barthes is bound to remain unappreciated.

Sadly, Simpson’s awareness of the end of the intellectual, and the impossibility of ‘serious’ intellect being taken seriously in the 21st century, seems also to contribute to a certain lassitude of late on his part. And, though it pains me to say it, my investigation into his work is possibly going to be a retrospective.

I’m reminded here of Morrissey for some reason, and Simpson’s only book-length investigation into a single artist or writer. I think Morrissey and Simpson have something in common, in that their work is often quite light of touch, and, like Wilde’s who they both admire, full of ‘satire’ and playfulness. But really, they take life, ideas, and themselves, incredibly seriously indeed. The chapter in Saint Morrissey (my favourite as it happens), that gives away Simpson’s (and Morrissey’s) sincerity and seriousness for me, is the one where he considers Morrissey’s relationship to northern literature and film, in particular the work of the late great Shelagh Delaney.

When Delaney died in November 2011 Simpson re-released his chapter from Saint Morrissey, Dump her on the doorstep, girl. He also wrote a sincere goodbye to the playwright and inspiration to his ‘hero’.

Delaney has left us, Vidal is clinging on, as if to spite us all, Morrissey is beginning to resemble a kind of belligerent lounge singer, living in LA and doing comeback tours and box set compilations. But one thing is for certain, the ‘intellectual’ is if not completely deceased, well on the way to breathing his last serious breath.

———

Refs: Rojek, C (2003) Key Contemporary Thinkers: Stuart Hall Polity

Said, E (1994) Representations of The Intellectual Vintage

Simpson, M (1994) Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity Cassell

Simpson, M (1996) Anti Gay Continuum International

Simpson, M (2004) Saint Morrissey

Sontag, S Where The Stress Falls

The Origins of Simpsonism -By The Metrosexy Messenger

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2011/12/15/male-impersonators-now-available-as-a-kindle-ebook/

Mark Simpson has just released his 1994 classic, Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity, on Amazon Kindle.

Apart from it being a great book, and a major contribution to the literature of gender and masculinities, Male Impersonators is important because it includes the beginnings of Simpson’s theorising of metrosexuality. It represents his ‘original contribution to knowledge’ as academics like to call it. And in a post accompanying the book’s digital release, Simpson explains how the ‘m’ word came about:

‘For all its datedness, there is something timeless about M.I. The ‘male objectification’ it analysed has become so dominant and everyday that evenNew York Magazine (and then Details) notices it.

And M.I. did after all give birth to that attention-seeking, damnably pretty creature that was to own the 21st Century: the metrosexual. Though I never uses that word in M.I. Instead I talk about male narcissism (and masochism). A lot. It wasn’t until I wrote an article for UK newspaper The Independent in late 1994 to publicise M.I. that I used the ‘m’ word – which turned out to be its first appearance in print.

I deployed ‘metrosexual’ as journalistic shorthand for the freighted theory of M.I. Reading M.I. you may decide that the shorthand said rather more than the longhand.  If Male Impersonators was the theory of metrosexuality,Metrosexy, my recent collection of metro journalism, documents the way metrosexuality went on to conquer the culture over the next seventeen years – and also the half-hearted backlash against it.

Sometimes I have to pinch myself today. Watching the pretty boys hugging and crying on X-Factor and American Idol, or the straight muscle Marys flaunting their depilated pecs and abs on Jersey/Geordie Shore, or the orange rugby players spinning around topless in glittery tight pants on Strictly Come Dancing — or Tom Hardy doing the same thing in Warrior – it’s as if I’ve died and gone to a hellish kind of heaven.’

But Simpson’s ‘original contribution to knowledge’ has not been acknowledged by the academy, or the wider world.  Metrosexuality, though in common parlance, and a major phenomenon, is not considered an aspect of masculinity worth studying, examining or identifying as a ‘discovery’ by a theorist. Possibly because Simpson is not himself an academic, and also because his concept of metrosexuality pretty well blows existing (feminist)  academic gender theory apart.

So over the years, academics have basically ignored Mark Simpson and his big bulging theory of masculinity, with one or two also stealing and appropriating his ideas.

And they have been able to, because nobody has taken up his cause. Nobody, apart from maybe Science of The Time, a European trendwatchers organisation, and one or two individuals and friends, has treated Simpson as a ‘theorist’ .

Until I came along. My advocacy of Simpson’s work has caused me, and him, some grief so far. And I am sure will cause some more. I am not going to examine this ‘conflict’ between me and the ‘establishment’ – be it in journalism, academia, feminism or elsewhere – here. But I am acknowledging that it exists, and that the key cause of the tension, is the radical, provocative and incendiary nature of Simpson’s work.

Marx, also radical, provocative and incendiary, famously once said: ‘I am not a Marxist’. He resisted and anticipated the dogmatism which fell under the banner of ‘Marxism’. I have never asked him, but I wonder if Simpson is nodding to that irony – of Marx rejecting ‘Marxism’ – when he calls himself in places (eg twitter), ‘Mark Simpsonist’.  I expect he is also staking his claim to being a theorist, to having an ‘ism’ that could have followers, Simpsonists.

https://twitter.com/#!/marksimpsonist

 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_08_05.htm

I myself have been called all sorts of names in relation to my support of Simpson’s theories. Ardent Simpsonista is probably the kindest of these monikers. ‘Fanatic’, ‘disciple’, ‘obsessive’, ‘sock puppet’, some less pleasant terms.

The fact is I am a little bit ‘obsessed’ with the concept of metrosexuality, and how important it is, and how unacknowledged and ignored it is. I think Mark Simpson is, or at least was, too. And, as a friend of mine who shall remain anonymous for now pointed out, all I am doing is what people, especially academics have been doing since well before Marx even:

‘[there are many] other people singularly focussed on the work of a particular theorist… It’s basically the stock in trade of most humanities scholars to filter the world through a particular theoretical lens… How else would we have Freudian, Derrideans, Deleuzeans, Marxists, etc.?’

I don’t want to erect a dogma of ‘Simpsonism’ or create an army of little loyal ‘Simpsonists’. But I do want to ‘spread the word’, regardless of any ‘evangelical’ accusations that may bring with it, about metrosexuality and Simpson’s contribution to theory. Perhaps I could be considered a ‘metrosexy messenger’. Look, someone already made me a bag to put my leaflets in: