Letter From An Alien: The Scientist

Some of the righteous liberals have suggested that recent events should lead to some ‘soul-searching’ on my part. They have. But nothing in my soul regrets anything to do with my ‘critique’ of the liberal/gayist/feminist orthodoxy.

I have some regrets about how I have communicated with you. And far bigger regrets to do with my, shock horror: ‘real life’, that none of those liberalists give a monkeys about anyway. I have made some difficult phone calls and written some difficult letters.

I also have found myself thinking you and I were a bit – what? silly? romantic? – by never once speaking to each other like normal human beings. I helped you publish a book! In silence.

I’m no Coldplay fan but this song resonates with me today: Nobody said it was easy; it’s such a shame for us to part. Nobody said it was easy; No-one ever said it would be this hard. Oh take me back to the start….’

I’m sorry Mr [redacted]

QRG/Elly
Foucault’s Daughter

Confessions Of A ‘Homophobic Psycho’

This is an email I received – in reply to one from me to a few people working in the arena of gender and masculinity – a few months ago.  It is from professor Eric Anderson and as you can see it accuses me of being a ‘homophobic psycho’, a ‘wannabe academic’ with ‘mental illness’ and a ‘persecution complex’. Anderson also says I lack ‘dignity’ and ‘integrity’.

Below is screengrabs of comments by Mark Mccormack and Eric Anderson’s husband Grant Peterson, accusing me of ‘harassing gay academics’ and of ‘homophobic discourse’. These were part of a campaign by Mccormack, Anderson and Peterson to have my review of Mark Mccormack’s book on the Declining Significance Of Homophobia taken down from the website Sociological Imagination where it was published. They succeeded and it was removed.

Mccormack has also accused me on twitter of ‘harassing gay academics online’ and he tweeted his support of Paul Burston‘s  outing of me (as a ‘troll’ and a ‘bully’) back in March this year. Mccormack said:

Why am I writing about all this now? The reason is that a senior colleague of Mccormack, Professor Ian Rivers, who claims to be an ‘International authority on homophobic bullying & bystander mental health at school’ has just published an article on ‘cyber bullying’.

I left a comment underneath his post but it was not published, and the editors of the site said:

I am publishing this evidence to back up the comment I left under Rivers’ article, and to prove it is not ‘libel’ but is rather, the truth. My comment reads:
——————–

I find this article very simplistic.

I have been labelled a ‘cyber bully’ and a ‘homophobe’ including by Ian Rivers’ colleagues Mark mccormack and Eric Anderson. I was also ‘outed’ by Paul Burston a gay journalist, as a ‘troll’ and a ‘bully’.

But of course the police have not been involved at all, as in fact, I am not a bully. They just outed me because they disagree with my politics, and my criticisms of some of their work.

The police did though get involved when I received hate mail in the post I do not know who it is from.

So who is the ‘bully’ in this case? who the ‘victim’? and why was my ‘anonymity’ allowed to be taken away by Paul Burston?

Dr Elly Tams
Quiet Riot Girl
@Notorious_QRG

————————

If anyone I mention in that comment wants to argue about the truth of it, taking into account the evidence above, they are free to do so here.

The fact is, Mccormack especially is walking quite a confusing path here. His book, which I have read and reviewed, with approval from a number of academics including R Connell and K Plummer, is about declining homophobia. In his book he says homophobic ‘bullying’ is on the wane, and language is changing. People now use the term ‘gay’ to mean ‘rubbish’ often and it is rarely in a homophobic context. With that in mind, it is very odd that he and his ‘mentor’ Eric Anderson have rushed to accuse me of being homophobic and a bully of ‘gay academics’.

In his article on language, Mccormack is eager to point out that homophobia is now ‘stigmatised’ in our culture. People do not want to be seen as homophobic, it is looked down upon and challenged. So, I think he, Paul Burston, Eric Anderson and Grant Peterson are well aware that to label me as a ‘homophobe’ is to label me with a socially unacceptable trait. They know it tarnishes my name to call me such a thing. You could even argue, using Mccormack’s logic that these days, to call someone a homophobe is not dissimilar to calling someone a ‘fag’ in previous eras.

Another word that is stigmatised in our culture, that Mccormack does not mention, but that Paul Burston and others have called me is ‘troll’. When you think of a troll what do you picture? an ugly, inhuman creature? Yes, me too. Ian Rivers, in an organised  live chat on twitter recently, used the term ‘troll’ completely uncritically. For someone who is supposed to be a leading academic expert on bullying, this is worrying to me. The term ‘troll’ is used in a variety of contexts in relation to a variety of people and behaviours. One of the reasons it is a powerful insult, is the ambiguity of its meaning. On a recent programme on TV the broadcaster Richard Bacon, for example, highlighted the problem of ‘RIP trolls’ who left nasty comments on facebook tribute pages for people who had died. And yet I am also called a ‘troll’ simply for annoying some groups of people in academia and the media. This seems unfair to me.

Another issue that Professor Rivers seems unable to grasp, is that of power. A bully can only intimidate someone if they have power. In my interactions with him, Mccormack and Anderson and Peterson I don’t see how I have any power. They are established academics, two of them are professors, meaning they are high up in the hierarchy. And, more importantly they are a group. They know eachother and work together and socialise in real life. I am a lone individual and I have no status in academia, and no networks to use against my ‘enemies’ as they have to use against me. Ian recently ‘protected’ his tweets. Anderson has done this before too. As public academics trying to promote their work I think this is not a good move. I also think it is an attempt to take the ‘victim status’ as if Professor Rivers needs ‘protecting’ from someone like me.

Sometimes bullying can occur when a power dynamic at face value looks like it would go the other way. For example there is currently a case in the news of bullying of a teacher by students, which caused her to feel she had to leave the teaching profession altogether. But again I would say that those students formed a group against a lone individual. And they knew each other both on and offline, and probably knew how to use social media more expertly than the teacher. ‘Power is everywhere’ as Foucault said, and those young people had power in that situation.

I am aware that this Thursday is the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO).  LGBT Groups are publicising it as a day of action. But again I find their presentation of what is in fact a complex situation, overly simplistic. I know plenty of Gay people who are actually transphobic (Julie Bindel springs to mind). Creating a day against ‘homophobia and transphobia’ seems to give all LGBT people instant ‘victim’ status, when life is not quite so clear cut. As I asked in my (unpublished) comment under Professor Rivers’ article, who is the victim in my situation? Who the aggressor?

Professor Rivers’ advice for people dealing with cyber bullies,  is to ‘block’ them. I think this is very convenient as it means if he does not want to engage with someone (e.g. me) he can label them a bully and then block them online. As I have pointed out in my 101 Wankers post, blocking is a very common way of blanking out opinions and perspectives and people you don’t like. I am blocked by over 80 people now. Have I bullied them all?

If I had, surely I’d have to have been an actual psycho. Someone like  Anders Breivik had ‘power’ over innocent victims because he used violence, in his case, murder. I am not a violent person and unlike some of my detractors, I don’t even use threats. I just say things that piss people off and am sometimes rude. That does not make me a psycho!

Someone else who has in the past been called all sorts of names, such as ‘the Gay Anti Christ’ and a ‘brainy thug’ is  Mark Simpson. He has kept very quiet in this situation whereby I have been outed, not only as a ‘bully’ and a ‘troll’ and a ‘homophobe’ but also as some kind of ‘Kathy Bates Misery’ figure in relation to him and his writing. Frankly, I don’t blame him. Some of his old friends have attempted to use him in their attacks on me and I can see why he has tried to keep out of it.

But. I know that Simpson is very familiar with the kind of ‘brickbats’ thrown at me, for they are the same kinds of things which have been said about him. And, if I do have any power in this situation, as Simpson knows full well, it can only be down to my intelligence and my ability to sometimes touch a nerve.

Once, when Simpson and I were still on friendly terms, he advised me to ‘wear my brickbats like bouquets’, to stand tall and be proud of my unusual position and perspective. And now, even when that friendship is faded and lost, I am taking his advice.

The gaylords who call me a homophobe can suck my metaphorical dick.

In Defence Of… Cultural Studies

The Reader Is The Writer

On her interesting, but sometimes rambling blog, The Autobiography Of A Soul, Elise Moore has written about cultural studies. Her piece is ostensibly about the work of the late, great, film critic, Pauline Kael, but it soon becomes clear it has another purpose. To lament the ‘death’ of the old-fashioned study of literature, and the onslaught of media and cultural studies in the academy (and everywhere else).

Moore writes:

‘Once the canon had been put on trial for the harm it had done women, colonial subjects, and minorities, it was difficult to justify why the standard works of Anglo-American literary studies should still be taught. The Cultural Studies approach took care of that: high culture, like pop culture, was significant for sociological reasons. Really, though, the canon is just a relic of the old way of doing literary studies: for the purposes of semiotic analysis, one text is as good as another. Courses in genre and popular fiction have already been introduced, and the logic of Cultural Studies dovetails beautifully with the new corporate-capitalist model for universities, in which students are simply consumers. Mostly they’re going to pay to take courses in the sciences that may lead to careers, but a few might pay to study the things they love: pop culture and new media. To, basically, get an education by being entertained. Which isn’t necessarily far removed from the attitude of the first students to take literary studies. I remember reading somewhere, probably on the internet, that when the novel was first introduced as a subject of university study, the old guard was appalled, since the novel had been considered a form of entertainment.’

In saying ‘for the purposes of semiotic analysis, one text is as good as another’ Moore is accusing cultural studies, and the study of semiotics, of relativism. In reviewing a recent (sociology) book, I read a very similar accusation, this time in relation to ‘poststructuralism’, and, like Moore’s assertion here, it did not come accompanied with any references or evidence. It seems to be just a truism that is making its way into people’s minds. Well. It’s not true!

‘Semioticians’ such as Roland Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, are some of the most ‘discerning’, opinionated writers I have ever read. Sure, their opinions are not limited to literature. The word I might use to describe them is ‘interdisciplinary’. But they are not relativists.

In his brilliant essay on the Eiffel Tower, Barthes treats the famous Parisian landmark as a ‘text’. So, in that sense, Ms Moore is right. His semiotics are not showing much respect for the ‘majesty’ of the ‘book’ or the ‘novel’ or the ‘poem’ as something more worthy of study than anything else. BUT. He has not chosen any old building to study. He has not walked out into the 7th arrondissement and picked out whichever edifice he first encounters. No. He writes about the Eiffel Tower because it is an amazing, important, mythical, aesthetically imposing structure.

And that’s the problem. According to Moore, semiotics ‘ignores aesthetics’. And ‘semiotics is an inadequate substitute for aesthetics because it ignores the dimension of pleasure’. Roland Barthes, author of The Pleasure of the Text, might disagree.  In his stunning book A Lover’s Discourse, he wrote:

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”

For me, the writing of Barthes, and that of Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, is pleasure made flesh. The words themselves become solid entities, that I ‘rub against’, as a frotteur might rub against his beloved Tour Eiffel. In a world where ‘sex’ has become commodified, democratised, sanitised, the dirty, rough, beautiful, aesthetic writings of Barthes et al, are one of my few intense pleasures left!

Susan Sontag agreed. In her heartfelt love letters to Barthes, she called him a ‘radical aesthete’ and celebrated the tension in his work between his sheer joy or ‘jouissance’ (as he called it in a psychoanalytic way), of writing and reading, and his more political, critical project.

In amongst her ‘aesthetic’ assertions, Moore says something very political herself. She claims that ‘the logic of Cultural Studies dovetails beautifully with the new corporate-capitalist model for universities, in which students are simply consumers. ‘ I found this comment a tiny bit insulting. That is because my (late) step-father was one of the founding members of the original cultural studies department, Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. One of the early words I learned as a young child was ‘university’. But I pronounced it ‘wistywersity’. And not long after the ‘Centre’ joined my lexicon.

Birmingham really was the ‘centre’ of the emerging Cultural Studies discipline in the 60s and 70s. My step dad worked with one of our great living ‘intellectuals’ Stuart Hall.  But their department, despite its ground-breaking research, and its ‘star’ graduates including Dick Hebdidge, Paul Gilroy and Angela McRobbie, was forced to close in 2002. Why? Because its intellectual rigour, its inclusive policy in the recruitment of students, and its ‘semiotic’ approach to critical theory had no place in ‘new corporate-capitalist model for universities’.

I have written before that the intellectual is O.V.E.R. But I see absolutely no link between the subject of Cultural Studies and that demise. Indeed, my step-dad and many of his colleagues were literature students and teachers once. Raymond Williams, who was one of the ‘fathers’ of cultural studies, was a novelist, as well as a literary and cultural theorist. And no novelist thinks one text is of the same aesthetic value as another!

Yes, ‘Media Studies’ has become one of those ubiquitous, what some call ‘mickey mouse degrees’ at universities across the globe. And some media studies degrees are not very good. There is potentially an argument that Media Studies has ‘watered down’ semiotics, but that is not an argument against semiotics, just the way it is sometimes taught and learned.  I have taught media studies myself, and I cannot think of one thing about the subject in and of itself that would speed on the death of the intellectual. I CAN think of things like students having to take out loans to pay for their degrees, the lack of inspiring alternatives for young people, so that university becomes more like school, a necessary rite of passage that has to be endured, and the explosion of the internet and related technologies which seem to make it harder and harder for all of us to think.

It will come as no surprise to Elise Moore, or indeed to anyone else reading this, that one other living ‘intellectual’ who I admire and whose work I advocate, is Mark Simpson. I have named him ‘a Roland Barthes for the i-pod generation’, because he is one of very few writers I know who has continued the discipline of ‘semiotics’ as Barthes practised it, and as was celebrated and continued at the Birmingham Cultural Studies Centre.

Simpson is a good example of how semiotics and aesthetics are never far apart. His important essay Sporno takes the male sporting body and shows how it is a ‘sign’ that becomes a ‘signifier’ when it is photographed, filmed, placed on the sides of buses and billboards. Having read his 1994 book Male Impersonators, whilst Simpson doesn’t refer all that often to Barthes himself, the ‘cultural studies’ theory is all there in that seminal work that led to Sporno. And in a recent talk Simpson gave in London, where he explained how Tom Of Finland was a ‘blueprint’ for the metrosexual buff boys we know and love today, I was enthralled by his ‘semiotic’ understanding of his subject. I could not help but picture Barthes himself, stood in that lecture hall with his powerpoint slides, demonstrating convincingly, the importance of the ‘image’ to the ‘text’. And the importance of both to what we internet-agers now dismissively term, ‘RL’.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fyBcXKbFXt8

I don’t see a conflict between ‘literature’ and ‘cultural studies’, partly because of my own background and how those two lived side by side in my own household growing up. Partly because I see how they have been combined by academics such as David Halperin, a theorist and teacher of literature, who applies a ‘cultural studies’ and ‘semiotic’ analysis to much of his work. And does so in a most ‘aesthetically pleasing’ way. Another cultural studies academic who values (and indeed writes) literature is Jonathan Kemp. He spoke at the same event (above) as Mark Simpson, where he related the ‘aesthetics’ of the male body to cultural theory.

I have said too, that we are now witnessing, not just Barthes’ prediction of ‘The Death of The Author’ but also the death of the reader. Nobody reads. But that is not Cultural Studies’ fault. My discovery of the work of Mark Simpson has reminded me of the importance of the Cultural Studies I have been immersed in since I was a small child. I think there are only two Simpsonists in the world at the moment, but they are as intellectually sound as any literature boffin. I also think, inspired by Simpson, and Barthes, and Foucault, that my novella Scribbling On Foucault’s Walls is a testament to the literary, aesthetic value of cultural studies.

Elise Moore said her last piece may be her farewell post on her blog. I hope it isn’t. But I also hope she takes a bit more account of those theorists who do not fit into her existing literary mindset. She might realise just how beautiful some of them are.

The Softer They Come – Review of The Declining Significance Of Homophobia

The Declining Significance of Homophobia – How Teenage Boys Are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality  By Mark McCormack  New York: Oxford University Press 2012.

This book, The Declining Significance of Homophobia[i], is, according to its author, a ‘Good News story’(p xxv). I capitalise ‘Good News’ for reasons that shall become clear. But focusing first on the main thrust of the thesis (and there is no reference to it but I am certain this is a book written out of a PhD thesis), the ‘good news’ is how teenage boys in the UK are less homophobic than in previous eras. Good news indeed.

McCormack’s research, with the fieldwork carried out between 2008 and 2009, consists of ethnography in three school sixth forms in the South of England. He used participant observation and semi-structured interviews with teenage boys/young men between the ages of 16 and 18. The argument he makes is clear:  in line with Eric Anderson (2009)’s theories of ‘softening’ or ‘inclusive’ masculinities, McCormack tells us that the young people he studied do not marginalise and discriminate against each other on the basis of sexual orientation, or even perceived orientation. And this is because homophobia has declined in our culture, since the ‘homohysteria’ that characterised the 1980s and 1990s (Anderson 2009) (p32-36).

There are some positive aspects to this book. One is simply that I always value qualitative research, and especially ethnography. In this age, that McCormack himself describes as being ‘a world in which the social sciences must demonstrate their impact and pay their way’ (p 9), in-depth studies that focus on people rather than numbers are refreshing. I am also pleased that he overtly challenges what he calls a ‘victimisation framework’ (p130) often adopted by people from LGBT communities. McCormack acknowledges the ‘agency’ (p32) people have to contest their and others’ oppression. This goes against recent research, for example by the UK LGBT organisation, Stonewall, (p61) that I have found to be scare-mongering about bullying and the hopeless ‘plight’ of LGBT youth.

Another plus to The Declining Significance of Homophobia, is that even in 2012, feminist-dominated gender studies does not adequately cover the experiences and accounts of boys and men. As Tom Martin’s[ii] recent (failed) attempt to sue the Gender Institute at the LSE for discrimination against men[iii] suggests, whilst the name ‘women’s studies’ has been lost from most university gender departments, the bias against men and masculinity remains. McCormack rightly puts his book in the context of a small amount of existing research on men, boys and masculinities in the field of education, citing work (p xx –xxv) by academics such as Mac an Ghaill (1994, 2007), Epstein and Johnson (1994) and Rivers (1995). In doing so he critiques the concept of Hegemonic Masculinity, developed by R Connell (2005). I have criticisms of Connell’s theories, not least because they reinforce the misguided, in my view, notion that ‘patriarchy’ continues to allow ‘orthodox’ ‘masculine’ men as a group to dominate and discriminate against women (and ‘effeminate’ men) as a group (p39). McCormack does not let go of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, or of a feminist perspective (p xxix). But at least he is critiquing Connell’s ideas, not accepting them unquestioningly.

Unfortunately I have some major problems with McCormack’s book. My biggest issue is with his statement that this is a ‘Good News story’. Whilst McCormack  is very critical of the historical role in religion in reinforcing homophobic attitudes (p59), and in particular ‘evangelical Christianity’ (p59),  I think his book reads like an ‘evangelical’ tract itself, spreading the ‘Good News’ that homophobia is on the decline. There are two main reasons for my feeling. One is that his book relies incredibly heavily on the ideas of one man: his former- PhD supervisor, and ‘mentor’ Eric Anderson ( pvii). McCormack refers to Anderson’s ‘vision’, his ‘academic critiques’ and his ‘exciting theoretical developments’ in awe (pvii). The other reason I think the book is ‘evangelical’ is that McCormack also dismisses out of hand some very important work by other theorists in the field. It reads to me like this is Anderson’s Good News, and ‘academic critique’ of Anderson’s work is not encouraged by McCormack at all.

Anderson’s theories are used by McCormack to explain everything! Whilst I can see that McCormack is using Anderson’s theories of ‘inclusive’ and ‘softening’ masculinity to explain the demise in homophobic language and behaviours amongst contemporary teenage boys, I am less clear as to why he also relies on Anderson almost alone, to explain the homophobic cultures of the 1980s and 1990s, including the devastating impact of AIDS on people’s lives and attitudes. Other writers who are missing from McCormack’s book who have carefully examined the recent history of homophobia (including AIDS), include Mark Simpson (in Male Impersonators 1994 and in Anti- Gay 1996), David Halperin (In How To Do The History of Homosexuality, 2002), Steven Seidman et al (in Queer Theory/Sociology 1996), Steven Zeeland (in Barrack Buddies 1993) and Keith Boykin (in Beyond The Down Low 2005)[v].

The implied ‘defence’ made by McCormack for ignoring and/or dismissing other theorists and writers is in itself worrying. In part, his logic consists of his assertion that poststructuralism is invalid as an epistemological and theoretical basis for research on gender and sexuality. With a grudging concession to what he calls ‘soft’ poststructuralism (p8), that he says maintains that social identity categories have some use, McCormack is damning about poststructuralist theory. He writes:

‘…poststructural scholarship, being wedded to transgression and subversion, cannot theoretically legitmate particular forms of anti-assimilation; it must valorise all or none. That is, postructuralism does not have the conceptual tools to distinguish (‘bad’) sexist and homophobic norms from (‘good’) normative ideals such as antidiscrimination and law-abidance (Nussbaum, 199a) (p7).

This is an inaccurate and unfair interpretation of poststructuralism. What McCormack is doing, is equating all poststructural theory, with ‘relativism’. But many poststructuralist writers have grappled with the potential for their work to become ‘relativist’, and have shown clearly why it is not. Writers and theorists such as Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Bordo and Butler have all explained why their interest in the ‘deconstruction’ of meaning, does not and should not necessarily lead to a belief in the dissolution of meaning. And we only have to read accounts of Foucault being influenced by the Mai 1968 ‘manifestations’[vi], or watch youtube footage of Butler addressing the crowds at the 2011 Occupy demonstrations in New York[vii] to be convinced of their commitment to social justice and political activism. Even Baudrillard[viii], who was less resistant to the idea that deconstruction might lead to a complete obliteration of meaning, seems to me, to have actually very potently and politically predicted the ‘internet age’ with its cacophony of voices, its rows and rows of flat screens, and its ‘hyperreal’ imagery. If it has not disappeared altogether, then in the 21^st century, surely ‘reality’ is much harder to grasp , to analyse and to categorise than it was in previous eras?

But it is Judith Butler who McCormack saves most of his anti-poststructuralist ‘zeal’ for. He uses her as a reference to state how ‘obscure’ a lot of poststructuralist writing is:

‘…the writing style of many poststructuralist theorists is so dense and obscure that it is understandable to only a subgroup of academics (Butler,1990). And they only imagine that they read clarity in the writing’ (p9).

He goes onto cite those (including, of course, Eric Anderson), who have criticised Butler’s writing:

‘… In a searing and accurate critique, Martha Nussbaum (1999a) argues that this writing is a wilful attempt to ‘bully’ readers into docility, and Anderson (2009) calls it a ‘violent, shameful act of academic exclusion’ (p33).’

Whilst McCormack calls Gender Trouble (1990) ‘impenetrable’, he provides no evidence in the form of quotes from Butler’s seminal work to back up his statement. We the readers are expected to trust McCormack implicitly in his analysis. And, if we may have been so foolhardy as to have read Butler ourselves, McCormack tells us confidently that those who read and understood her work, ‘only imagine that they read clarity in the writing’ (p9).

McCormack  is using his book in part to challenge the queer (and poststructuralist) ‘turn’ (p6) that took place in gender and sexuality theory, and is attempting to replace it with something different, something better, something more ‘Good News’. He writes, towards the end of the book:

‘The consolidation of heterosexual identities in these settings means that decreased homophobia does not necessarily result in a dissipation of sexual identities. This would suggest that, and that deconstruction has its emancipatory limits (Anderson, 2009; Kirsch 2000; Weeks 2007) (p133).

Having earlier dismissed postructuralist queer theory as ‘obscure’ and ‘elitist’, McCormack is able to assert his belief that ‘identity-movement politics’ is the way forward for LGBT young people. I strongly disagree with this perspective, partly as a result of my PhD studies and post-doctoral research into ‘identity politics’[ix], and partly as a result of my own personal, very negative experience of ‘identity politics’ in action.[x] [xi]

The way in which McCormack’s attachment to Gay identity politics is shown in the book, is via his endless use of the word ‘gay’ to describe young people who do not identify as ‘straight’. He talks about ‘gay discourse’ (p114), ‘gay-friendly schools’ (p121), ‘gay students’ (p130), the ‘gay rights movement’ (p57) and ‘gay men’. McCormack mentions at the beginning that some of the young men at the sixth forms (UK equivalent of American High Schools) he studied, identify as bisexual, and one identifies as trans. But throughout the text he prioritises the term ‘gay’ to cover all LGBT young people, and in doing so, I believe, does most of them a great disservice.  The theoretical justification he uses for this is worrying to me. Not satisfied with rejecting poststructuralism’s insights into problematic identity categories, he uses biological determinist theory to ‘close down’ the debate about how we come to be who we are. In particular he uses uncritically the widely-contested[xii] (see also: Simpson 1994) work of sex ‘scientist’ Simon Le Vay. McCormack writes:

‘Post-structuralism and social constructionism both recognise that current conceptions of gender and sexuality are socially constructed and historically situated (Foucault 1984, Weeks 1985). This means that although one’s own sexual orientation is biologically determined (Le Vay 2010, [emphasis mine]), the way society understands forms of sexuality is determined by the politics and people of the time, and this will vary across cultures.’(p6).

This ‘born this way’[xiii] version of sexual identity is gaining traction in the 21^st century. Of course the subject is still debated, but the dominant view seems to be one which I find highly conservative, and indeed oppressive: that our sexual orientations are determined before birth, and the rest of our lives are somehow enslaved to them. I personally don’t identify my sexual orientation, not out of some political ‘stunt’, but because, aged 41, I still don’t know what it is! And that is not through lack of having tried to find out, in both ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ ways[xiv].

By privileging ‘gay’ terminology in his book, I think McCormack, even on his own ‘identity politics’ terms, is not helping bisexual, trans, asexual and non-identified young people find their way in the world, or indeed find their voices and experiences in the literature.  Another of my criticisms of McCormack’s exposition of his research findings, is that he does not give enough space to the accounts of the young people in the study. Apparently he conducted over twenty semi-structured interviews in the three research sites (p15), but hardly includes any quotes from those interviews. When he does quote the students he is very quick to impose his interpretation of their words, rather than giving them a chance to speak for themselves. [xv]

I have one final criticism of McCormack’s book, which extends to a general criticism of masculinities theory and research overall – it relates to what could be seen as an unmentioned, under-researched, unacceptable great big pink ‘elephant in the room’.[xvi] The elephant’s name? Metrosexuality. McCormack makes one single, cursory reference to metrosexuality in his book, in relation to work by David Coad (2008) on metrosexuality and sports (p64). But I think his whole thesis and his research would be improved immensely by giving serious consideration to this ‘21^st century’ phenomenon, of men expressing their ‘desire to be desired’ via consumer and media culture (Simpson 2011)[xvii]. According to Mark Simpson, originator and key theorist of the concept of metrosexuality,

‘Con­trary to what you have been told, met­ro­sex­u­al­ity is not about flip-flops and facials, man-bags or man­scara. Or about men becom­ing ‘girlie’ or ‘gay’.  It’s about men becom­ing every­thing. To themselves. In much the way that women have been for some time. It’s the end of the sex­ual divi­sion of bath­room and bed­room labour.  It’s the end of sex­u­al­ity as we’ve known it.’ (Simpson 2011)[xviii]

And there lies a clue as to why McCormack ignores Simpson’s ground-breaking theories. Because, according to Simpson, metrosexuality, including ALL men’s display of ‘feminine’ traits such as narcissism and passivity, marks the beginning of the end of sexual identity categories[xix]. And it is sexual identity categories that McCormack is so keen to hold onto. Also, McCormack’s mention of young men using facebook and the internet for example, would make much more sense if put in the context of Simpson’s theories of ‘mediated’ and ‘commodified’ masculinities (Simpson, 2011).

McCormack and Anderson are not only holding onto gender and sexuality categories. They seem very attached, additionally, to ‘binary’ notions of gender. They talk about masculinity in terms of (having once been) ‘hard’ and now becoming ‘soft’. McCormack  seems to be uncritical of the categories used by both theorists and young people themselves, of ‘masculine’ men being ‘hard’ and ‘effeminate’ or ‘camp’ men being ‘soft’. This view is critiqued comprehensively by Mark Simpson, who highlights how machismo is actually often ‘camp’[xx], and how men who attempt to appear ‘uber-masculine’ often display very ‘feminine’ traits.[xxi]

The final paragraph of McCormack’s book is a defence against imagined ‘critics’ of his work. He says that if readers accept his position that homophobia is declining amongst young people, they will accept his research as a valid addition to the literature, documenting this ‘changing social zeitgeist’. Well, this reader does and doesn’t accept the validity of McCormack’s Good News. On one hand, as I stated above, I see it as a valuable (if flawed) addition to the qualitative and ethnographic literature in masculinity in education studies. On the other hand, I see it as an ‘evangelical’ sermon on the importance of Eric Anderson’s theory of ‘softening’ and ‘inclusive’ masculinity, that, ironically, is not inclusive at all. For it dismisses the proven value of most poststructuralism to the study of sex and gender, it clings on to sexual identity categories that are becoming less and less relevant as the 21^st century progresses, and it ignores the ‘social zeitgeist ‘ of metrosexual masculinity that has been clearly documented by Mark Simpson since 1994. In short, I found this Good News story somewhat depressing, and am much relieved, having finished reading it, to return to the ‘exciting theoretical developments’, not of Eric Anderson, but of wonderful writers such as Simpson, Butler, Foucault and The Daddy of sex and gender theory himself, Freud.

——————————

Dr Elly Tams is an author and freelance researcher. She also publishes and blogs under the pen-name, Quiet Riot Girl. Her debut novella, Scribbling On Foucault’s Walls, is about a world in which Foucault, the famous French homosexual philosopher, in fact (in fiction) had a daughter.

An edited version of this piece originally appeared at The Sociological Imagination: http://sociologicalimagination.org/

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NOTES

[i] McCormack, M (2012) The Declining Significance of Homophobia – How Teenage Boys Are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality, New York: Oxford University Press

[ii] https://twitter.com/#!/Sexismbusters/status/179639793880281088

[iii] http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2012/03/rights-feminism-gender-british

[iv] http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/dear-feminism-the-end-of-the-road/

[v] Simpson, M (1994) Male Impersonators (Cassell), Simpson, M (1996) Anti-Gay, Freedom Editions

[vi] Foucault. M (2000) [1980]. ‘Interview with Michel Foucault’. In J. Faubion (ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. Power The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume Three. New York: New Press

[vii] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVpoOdz1AKQ

[viii] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/

[ix] http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_gendering_of_work_in_Sheffield_s_cul.html?id=PPNeHQAACAAJ&redir_es

[x] http://graunwatch.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/bona-drag-paul-burston-and-his-naff-polari-prize/

[xi] http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/against-feminisms/

[xii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_LeVay

[xiii] http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/born-this-gay/

[xiv] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Unethical-Sluts-ebook/dp/B005ZU10HW

[xv] Also, as his research is not ‘action research’[xv] it is not clear how young people could use his findings to improve their lives. That task seems to be left to academics, educators and adult ‘activists’.

[xvi] http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/the-metrosexual-elephant-in-the-room/ Mark Simpson first described metrosexuality to me as ‘the elephant in the room’ but this is anecdotal. I have used his phrase since.

[xvii] Simpson, M (2011) Metrosexy, Amazon Kindle

[xviii] http://www.marksimpson.com/metrosexy/

[xix] Simpson, M ‘The End of Heterosexuality As We’ve Known It’ (2010):

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/06/11/the-end-of-heterosexuality-as-weve-known-it/

[xx] http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/11/15/america-to-machismo-how-do-i-quit-you/

[xxi] http://deathatthemall.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/big-tits-masochism-and-transformation-in-bodybuilding/

Wilhelm It Was Really Quite Something

 

This is Mark Simpson on Morrissey, his long-term lover and anti-life partner, at the Spectator Arts Blog

——————————

Because the 80s is the decade that actually ended the 19th Century – the 90s was just an after-party clean-up operation – it’s also the decade that never came to an end itself. In fact, the 80s just won’t go away.

Economy in (‘Big Bang’) recession. Tories in power. Cuts on the table. Riots on the streets. Royal weddings on the telly. The Falklands becoming a fighting issue. And my mother complaining about Morrissey. (‘I see that chap you like so much has been in the papers again. Ridiculous man! And he still can’t sing!’)

As Madonna might put it, it’s all a bit reductive.

Everyone has been enjoying moaning about Morrissey lately – just like the good old days. In case you somehow missed it, at a performance in Argentina last week, his band appeared in t-shirts printed with the charming message ‘WE HATE WILLIAM AND KATE’ (remember 80s protest t-shirts?).

Perhaps worried this might be overlooked back home, the former Smiths front-man also offered this bouquet to his Argentine fans about those bitterly contested, sparsely-populated rocks in the South Atlantic: ‘Everybody knows they belong to you’.

The Times, Mirror, Telegraph, Sun and Mail all dutifully denounced Morrissey’s big mouth.The Guardian for its part ran an earnest discussion between two music critics titled: ‘Is Morrissey a national treasure? (The answer seemed to be ‘yes – but a very naughty one.’)

Not bad for a 52-year-old crooner currently without a record contract. But then, just like that other 80s diva keen on hairspray and frilly-collared blouses, we’ll never entirely be rid of him.

The British experience of the 80s is forever dominated by two very difficult personalities. Both from the north, both unafraid to speak their mind, and both possessing a gender all of their own.

And while one was a working class militant vegetarian anarchist Sandie Shaw fan with a flair for homoerotic imagery, and the other a bossy petit bourgeois social Darwinist and devotee of General Pinochet who famously outlawed the ‘promotion of homosexuality’, both of them were radicals on a revenge trip.

But, while Margaret Thatcher owned the 80s, Steven Patrick Morrissey stole its youth. Or at least, the youth that didn’t want to be a part of Thatcher’s 80s. The Smiths were not just an ‘alternative’ band: they were the alternative that Maggie said didn’t exist.

In fact, The Smiths were reviled by almost everyone at the time – Fleet Street, the BBC (they were effectively banned from daytime Radio 1), the record business (they were signed to a teeny-weeny Indie label), and indeed most of the record buying public (their singles struggled to even get into the top 20).

But they have become the heart of a decade that didn’t have one. They are now the band that everyone liked – two or three decades after the event.

Including, most famously, David Cameron, who used The Smiths and Morrissey as a Tory rebranding and detoxifying tool at least as important as those melting glaciers he went to gawp at. Declaring The Smiths his favourite group not long after gaining the leadership of the ‘Nasty Party’, he was even pictured, if memory serves me right, with a copy of Morrissey’s 2005 album Ringleader of the Tormentors on his desk.

Cameron, the former Carlton PR, was telling us that the Tories were now cool and sensitive, that they had assimilated the social and cultural anti-Thatcher reaction.

But Morrissey, whatever you may think of him, isn’t a man to be assimilated lightly. Especially by a Chipping Norton Tory.

When, in 2010, his estranged former Smiths collaborator Johnny Marr tweeted that he ‘forbade’ David Cameron from liking the Smiths, animal rights activist Morrissey endorsed him, adding:

‘David Cameron hunts and shoots and kills stags – apparently for pleasure. It was not for such people that either Meat Is Murder or The Queen Is Dead were recorded; in fact, they were made as a reaction against such violence.’

No-one can be genuinely surprised that someone who called an album The Queen is Deadis fiercely anti-Royalist. No-one can be shocked that the man who sang ‘Irish Blood English Heart’ is no fan of the remnants of the British Empire.

And let’s not forget his famous 1984 quip: ‘The sorrow of the Brighton bombing is that Margaret Thatcher escaped unscathed’, or the track ‘Margaret on the Guillotine’ for his 1988 album Viva Hate.

Unless, that is, they hoped that Morrissey had mellowed with age and become some sort of singing Stephen Fry with a quiff. Morrissey’s views haven’t changed. Morrissey hasn’t changed. He hasn’t grown up.

Still an adolescent curmudgeon, an otherworldly prophet from Stretford, he’s just older and thicker around the middle. He did after all promise us again and again that he wouldn’t change, couldn’t change.

It’s we, his fans, who have changed. If we’re embarrassed by his antics it may be because we’ve finally become the people we used to hate.

Mark Simpson is the author of Saint Morrissey

http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts-and-culture/night-and-day/7714548/morrissey-hasnt-changed.thtml

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!

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.

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.

___________________________

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

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