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.

Manchester Is Not Paris – The Alcohol Years By Carol Morley

It seems appropriate that I should be writing this review of The Alcohol Years with a slight hangover. Carol Morley’s (2000) documentary is about a hangover to beat them all. Not only did she forget some of the events of a drunken night out, the experimental film-maker managed to lose track of pretty well a whole period of her life.

The film, about her late teens/early 20s in Manchester in the 1980s, is how she reconstructed herself out of other people’s memories and accounts, 15-20 years later. Many of the people Morley interviewed (off-camera, with no indication of what she asked them) were ex-lovers. So the stories they tell on film, in a set of seemingly one-sided conversations, are infused with sexual tension, or lack of it, or jealousy, or indifference, or love, or in one or two cases possibly, with hate. As you might expect conversations with exes to be.

I first saw The Alcohol Years when it was shown late at night on channel four, not too long after it had been made. It formed a lasting impression on me, and seeing it in the cinema in 2012 brought it all flooding back. Carol Morley was at the screening I attended, and in the introductory talk she said she herself had not seen it for years. So she was remembering a film about her memories! Meta.

One or two of the ‘characters’ in the film are indeed very memorable. A man is one of the first to speak (I don’t know his name, this is not a typical ‘talking heads’ documentary. The viewer is allowed to get to know the people on film gradually, as they might a character in a fictional drama). He is (well he was in 2000) in his mid 30s I’d say. He has dark hair and wears glasses. He looks as if he has swallowed a lemon. This man is angry. He seems to be angry with Carol for daring to make the film at all. For coming back to her past, to people and places she left in a hurry, without any warning or explanation. He seems to be angry that she has dared to make a film about herself. 

Why don’t you look at the world around you? he asks accusingly. Why don’t you make a film about that? Why does this have to be about you?

I remember when I first watched the documentary, taking an instant dislike to this man. I thought he was very rude, to someone who was actually doing something that seemed brave to me. Facing up to her past. Facing her exes. But he thought Carol was cowardly, by refusing to sit infront of the camera, refusing to be the one who was interrogated. I just thought she was clever. Twelve years on, I actually found him quite funny. Because in the youtube/Big Brother/facebook world we now live in, making a film about yourself is a VERY normal thing to do. In fact, one might ask somebody why they DIDN’T. So this sour-faced man ( or maybe he isn’t sourfaced anymore, let’s hope not) was placing the film very much in a specific time. He made it historical.

And The Alcohol Years is full of history. Manchester, so much to answer for, has a rich recent history, especially around the music industry and scenes. Footage shot in the Hacienda and the GMex centre, and interviews with Manchester musos such as Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks (who had been in love with Morley) and Dave Haslam the DJ, brought that history to life. Even in 2000 when the film was made, the Manchester I knew, the one that caused me to apply to go to university there in 1990, was already faded and worn. Now it seems like a distant memory. The scenes of dark alleyways and grimy clubs and pubs are part of a pre-regenerated Manchester. It is much lighter now, cleaner. And arguably less interesting. ‘Manchester Is Not Paris’ , the slogan on the postcard (above) that advertised the film when it first came out, was said on screen by Alan Wise, when he described going for breakfast with Morley to a local greasy spoon, ‘the morning after’. He was older than Carol, a kind of ‘sleazy’ not hugely attractive man, who served to suggest that the young Morley was not always the most discerning of ‘experimental’ film makers. But he had some great lines. I just wonder if nowadays, Manchester, like most Western cities, IS Paris. You can get cappuccinos on Deansgate much the same as you can on the Champs Elysees.

Dave Haslam, who is a bit of a local historian* of all things Manchester and music, made some pertinent observations in the film. He said that Manchester is a city that is very good at mythologising itself. And he added that Carol Morley was mythologising her own life, as well as making a film about Manchester.  He, of all the interviewees, seemed the most self-aware, and the most aware that the film would be a permanent record of something. I got the feeling listening to him, that in his sections, Dave was talking to the future. He also seemed to be talking to a fellow artist. A lot of the people in the film treated Morley like a ‘slag’, an ‘ex’, a ‘fuck up’. But Haslam seemed to have always identified in her a fellow spirit and a quite driven, creative person. I suspect he might have been the least surprised of all the interviewees,  to find out that Morley has now made her first feature-length docu-drama, Dreams Of A Life.

But the ‘slag’ reputation is also fascinating, emerging as it does from these individuals’ accounts of their memories of Carol. I distinctly remember when I first watched The Alcohol Years, wondering what it would have been like, to hear the words that these people were saying about you, to your face. Hurtful words. Years later, now I fancy myself as something of a ‘sexuality expert’, I notice a few things about their words.

One is that it wasn’t just Morley’s promiscuity that caused people some discomfort. Though one of her exes, a woman, said Carol was ‘a role model for promiscuity’ in such a damning tone that I flinched in the cinema. Her bisexuality also caused some of them problems, and especially a few of the women she spoke to.

The ‘role model’ woman asked Carol at one point how many people she’d slept with (we never got to hear the answer of course. Like I said, she’s clever). Then she corrected herself and said ‘how many men? I don’t care about the women.’  It is as if for a woman to have sex with women is ‘not really sex’. It doesn’t count. This reminded me of Mark Simpson’s work, and his comments on trysexuality. He says women are more free than men to experiment with same-sex sex. If a man does it he is labelled as ‘gay’. Simpson and I have argued about this a few times. I agree up to a point. But I think Carol Morley shows that for a woman to step out of whatever box she has been put in (whether it is ‘lesbian’ or ‘heterosexual’), it is still not accepted wholeheartedly by many. In fact, Carol Morley shows that the ‘slag’ stereotype and the ‘greedy bisexual’ stereotype are alive and well – or they were in 2000. I personally don’t think that has changed.

Has Carol Morley changed? I guess we’d have to ask her that. Though again, in the introductory talk at the screening I went to recently, she said The Alcohol Years is about how we only really exist via other people’s versions of us. So maybe I am as well placed as anyone to answer that question. My view is yes and no. On one hand of course she has changed. It is clear that she could not sustain herself in the lifestyle depicted in the film. She has grown up and moved on. But The Alcohol Years provides us with an early glimpse of what is most definitely an impressive talent. I haven’t seen Dreams of A Life yet, but all reports tell me it is excellent, and is only a continuation of and a development of the ideas and skills shown in The Alcohol Years.

So if Morley was a role model in the 80s (for promiscuity, drinking, being young) she still is one now. But a role model for honest and challenging documentary film making. Long may she continue to be so.

*thanks to Dave Haslam for the top image, which he had filed in his archives. I told you he is a historian!

A Nice Line In Neckerchiefs – John Wayne As Metro-Icon

When did metrosexuality begin? It is an impossible question to answer. The phenomenon, that seems as natural to us now, as Gucci manbags and orange man-tans, has crept up on us.

This following exchange between masculinity ‘experts’ Mark McCormack and MetroDad Mark Simpson, shows some of the confusion about the origins of metrosexuality, and what being a ‘real man‘ might mean:

@_MarkMcCormack US much more attached to trad ideas of masculinity than the UK. They had a national nervous breakdown over metrosexuality.—
Mark Simpson (@marksimpsonist) April 01, 2012

@_MarkMcCormack He didn't have very flexible hips. But he did have a nice line in neckerchiefs.—
Mark Simpson (@marksimpsonist) April 01, 2012

I of course agree with Simpson. John Wayne did indeed have a ‘nice line in neckerchiefs’. And, however rugged and American he may have been, he, like all men film stars, ‘desired to be desired’ as much as their women counterparts. His ‘star’ quality, like Tony Curtis’ and Elvis’, meant he was a precursor to the tartymetrosexuals we know and love today. Oh, and, he also did some dancing on screen!

*

ACT UP! And ‘Radical’ Gay Elitism

I have already posted about a recent photography exhibition of AIDS activism. 2012 is the 25th anniversary of the start of Act Up! the ‘radical’ queer organisation that campaigned on AIDS/HIV issues in the 80s and 90s.  Larry Kramer, who worked for Act UP! writes a quite empassioned piece in Huffpo this week. He says:

‘I’m an ungrateful sonofabitch. ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which helped save my life, is 25 years old, and I am going to be 77 years old come June, and I should be grateful, right?

It’s difficult to be grateful when the AIDS plague is worse than ever all over the world and the two organizations I helped found to stop it are, if not no more, then in such pathetic shape as to almost be no more.

It’s hard to blame these remnants of former greatness when the gay population of this country continues to be so passive, so apathetic, so shut-the-fuck-up-with-all-your-message-queen-shit…

At the height of the AIDS plague, from 1990 to 1995, when we were dying so fast we couldn’t keep up with the count, of all the gays in the United States — be it 10 million or 20 million (will we ever find out?) — no more than 5,000 of us at the most fought in ACT UP’s 100 or so chapters to save the lives of our brothers and sisters. All the rest of the 10? 20? million gays would not fight to save their own lives. I never could figure that one out. Still can’t.’

Well I might be able to help Larry figure out why the majority of non-straight people do not support ‘radical’ organisations like Act UP!(his aside that ‘will we ever find out?’ how many gays there are in America alludes to the fact many people have same-sex sex without being ‘out and proud’ gays) . I am using a chapter from Anti Gay (ed Mark Simpson), written in 1996, when Act UP! was at its height. It is by John Weir and it is quite illuminating. He writes:

‘The entire gay male community seems at times to be colluding against the possibility of independent thinking. The gay rights movement, too often, is focused on theatrics rather than on discourse: we want to be entertained and flattered, not criticised. As a group, self-identified gay men are especially resistant to thinking about issues of class and race, and they steadfastly deny their sexism. The irony of gay liberation is that it has made room in the mainstream only for those white men who are already privileged, and disinclined to share their wealth. This is the charge that many Christian fundamentalists make against us: that we are a bunch of affluent men who think our homosexuality shouldn’t interfere with our God-given right to rule the world. Fundamentalists aren’t exactly strangers to feeling both martyred and entitled, of course. Maybe that’s why, in vilifying us, they’re  partly right…

I spent the week with my best friend, the writer David B. Feinberg, who was dying of AIDS. He was having a hard time eating. Parasites were wearing away the undulant walls of his intestines, and he couldn’t keep anything down. Wherever we went, our main concern was finding the john. As it happened, when I wasn’t with David, I was reporting a magazine article about aspiring gay male porn stars. I went from club to club with members of my community, bare-chested men in cut-off blue jeans and black combat boots. Gay liberation had made it possible for every male homosexual in America to look the same and act too beautiful to talk to. If David had come along, he would have looked around the dance floor and said, ‘cute boy, cute boy, cute boy’. But David was home shitting his beauty into the toilet, and the cute boys he might have wanted were busy trying to look like storm troopers…

Both Bawer and Queer Nation belong to the privileged upper tenth of the gay community, the class of urban artists and professionals who dictate gay politics to the rest of the country. There are no statistics to prove it of course, but if mainstream means ‘majority’, I bet the mainstream of homosexuality in America today is in the Marines…

And in the Navy. And living on public assistance in Idaho. And leaving Latin American enclaves in Los Angeles to cruise for gringos wearing beautiful sweaters in gay bars lining Santa Monica Boulevard. The mainstream of homosexuality in America today is living with Mom and Dad in a two-family house in Whitestone, Queens, acting ‘straight’ all day with friends held over from high school, but getting on homosexual phone-sex lines at night and saying things like, ‘Anybody out there like a lot of body contact?’ Mainstream homosexuals are straight guys who go to gay bars once a week on Fridays and warn their girlfriends not to ask them what they’re doing on their one night out. They are lesbians whose order of preference for sexual partners is 1) straight women, 2) bisexual men, 3) other lesbians….

Yet the gay community represented in Ikea ads, the comfy image of a couple of middle-class white guys out shopping for furniture, is the one that has been identified as the mainstream. It’s a lie. It is a lie for which radical dykes and fags are just as culpable as assimilationist lesbians and gays. The true division in the gay community is between entrenched, privileged, politically active urban and suburban trend-setters and policy makers, and the mass of people with homosexual urges who feel represented more by Reader’s Digest and Soldier of Fortune magazine than by The Advocate or Genre or 10 Percent or Frontiers or Deneuve or On Our Backs or Out. If indeed they have even heard of them…

I’m not gay anymore. I’m not even queer. I’d almost rather be mistaken for a registered Republican. After all, there’s no distinction anymore between conservative Republicans and self-identified homosexuals. A conservative is someone who wants to keep what he has. So is a gay man. The gay rights movement is largely helmed by white men who crave what they were promised as children, but denied as adults because of their sexuality; they want their guaranteed access to power. And they’re not necessarily interested in extending that power to you, just because you happen to like having sex, sometimes, with guys.’

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.

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

---

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

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 Metro-morphosis Of Narcissus

‘In classical mythology, Narcissus was a hunter who fell in love with his own image that he saw reflecting off water from a river.  He eventually fell into the river and drowned in the image of himself.  The myth became a metaphor for intense self-love and pride to the point of destruction.

In his influential and controversial essay On Narcissism, Sigmund Freud defines narcissism as “the attitude of a person who treats his own body in the same way as otherwise the body of a sexual object is treated.”   Now, before you get all “Freud is a perv” on me, it should be noted that the terms ‘sexual’ and ‘object’ have slightly different connotations in Freudian theory than they do in everyday conversation.  ‘Sexual’ is Freud’s way of describing anything that contributes to an investment in an organism’s life.  Social behavior, love, eating, communication–it’s all sexual.  An object is anything that is not the self.  Sexual objects, then, are the focal points of sexual energy apart from the self–i.e., the opposite of narcissistic objects.  We love ourselves but not in the same way that we love others.

One aspect of narcissism that the previously mentioned study completely ignores is its ubiquity.  It only speaks to narcissism as a pathological tendency.  As far as I know (and I could be completely wrong) Freud was one of the first thinkers to suggest that narcissism is, on a certain level, universal.  And if it is universal, it must be necessary.  If we accept Freud’s definition of narcissism, then it follows that narcissism can be adaptive.  Notice that his definition focuses on attitude and not behavior.  I would argue that this attitude of taking one’s self as a love object is necessary to exist in any meaningful way.  It is only when this investment in the self becomes completely dominant over all other investments that problems arise.’

By Thomas Wendt (@Thomas_Wendt)

This painting by Salvador Dali is called ‘The Metamorphosis Of Narcissus’. If you look carefully you can make out the figure (golden coloured) on the left, staring  into the pool, an echo of the more classical painting by Caravaggio at the top. I am not going to analyse the surrealist’s work; my academic art appreciation days are over. For now we live in a culture where self-taken photographs are the main portraits we see around us, hung in the virtual galleries of facebook and tumblr.

Here is a photograph taken in the mirror by a contestant on American Idol, apparently, making reality TV and individuals’ self-loving photography  merge in a postmodern mash up. I like the way the edge of the mirror serves as a frame within the frame of the image. I note the golden (tan) glow that resemble’s the colours in Dali’s painting, and I like the way he puts his hand behind his head in a famous pin up pose.

As  Mark Simpson and I have recently written, narcissism, briefly removed from the psychiatrists’ bible, the DSM last year, is now back on the books as a personality ‘disorder’.

Simpson echoes Thomas Wendt’s feelings about how ‘normal’ narcissism is, when he says:

‘Perhaps, being somewhat cynical, the objection to de-listing NPD was driven precisely by the ubiquity of narcissism. It’s certainly a growth market.’

Of course,  Simpson has identified the importance of narcissistic urges in postmodern culture before.  A couple of years ago he observed:

‘We live in an age of Dorians, admiring themselves in webcams, phone cams and online profiles. If there’s a picture in the attic you can be sure it’s been photoshopped.’

In 2008, Professor Metrosexuality examined an advert by Dolce and Gabbana, where a man and a woman seem to be about to meet for a date, but instead of each other, they greet clones of themselves:

‘What, then, is D&G Time? What is the era, the epoch it heralds and meters and so accurately, so tastefully accessorizes? Well, a cloned, digital world in which the driving force, the coiled spring at the heart of the jewelled mechanism, is not heterosexual reproduction, or even homosexual coupling, but rather, narcissistic perfection. Narcissistic perfection achieved through fashion, consumption, cosmetics, technology, surgery and really good lighting. A utopian-dystopian, twinsome future in which men and women date themselves instead of each other that has already arrived.

It’s a measure of how far and how quickly we’ve come that only a few years ago this ad would have been regarded as ‘sick’ by almost everyone, not just a few homophobe holdouts.  But the brazen auto-strumpetry of D&G Time broadcasts that narcissism is no longer a pathological condition – it’s thecontemporary condition. That’s to say, it’s no more pathological today than desire itself – since narcissism and desire are much the same thing, particularly since we’re now surrounded by such shiny, pretty accessories as D&G jewellery.’

Since Simpson wrote his excellent piece inspired by D and G – ‘twinsome devils and the narcissus complex’ visual culture has become full of ‘ twins ’:

I agree with Simpson that the ‘driving force’ of this clone culture is narcissism. But, also from reading Simpson, I am interested in how the result of our self-love being reflected back at us in advertising and pop culture imagery, is that we are being presented as ‘androgynous’, as ‘gender neutral’, as  gender bending,  transexy composites. Stars such as Andre Pejic are models for the present and the future, where everyone:  men, women, and people who identify as neither can be everything, to themselves.

It reminds me of that famous line (which has also appeared somewhere in Simpson’s oeuvre):

‘ I’m more man than you’ll ever be, and more woman than you’ll ever get! ‘

- Car Wash (and Rent, and other sources)

It was in his 1994 ‘lost classic’ Male Impersonators, though, that Simpson really nailed the metro-morphosis of narcissism in contemporary consumerist culture. He wrote:

‘This is the secret behind the growth of male narcissism in Western society. Nineties man’s love affair with his own image, which is itself a misrecognition (to love one’s image is not to love oneself), is but a faint echo of what he takes to be his idealised form reflected from the billboards and cinema screens.

The products and accessories offer a link that appears to marry the three kinds of ‘self’ together that modern media separates: the idealised form (the model using the product in adverts), the reflected images (looking in the mirror while using the product), and the actual body (wearing the product or applying it to skin, hair, teeth etc).  Ideal, body and image thus come together in a consummation of a love that only money can buy. Of course, this is not a consummation at all: all three types of self are kept distinct, and the imperfection of image and body next to ideal ensures that desire is never satisfied and the consumer never loses his appetite.’

But these days, people are able to create more and more ‘perfect’ images of themselves, with the help of photoshop, instagram, facebook, etc. The user/consumer has more control these days, and companies have to work much harder to ensure ‘the consumer never loses his appetite’. Thomas Wendt, who is remarkable in that he is both a ‘semiotician’ using the old school Barthesian definition, as is Simpson, but he also works in marketing/advertising and so understands consumer narcissism as an ‘insider’ in the business that exploits it has something to say about this. He writes:

‘Primary narcissism is essentially an unconscious process.  The infant is not aware of his or her relationship to the world and others.  Secondary narcissism is preconscious–although the formation of the ego-ideal is not entirely conscious, it has the capacity to become conscious.Perhaps the influence of social media creates a third narcissism, or tertiary narcissism, which is a completely conscious and active process.  The individual asserts active power over his or her ego ideal when creating, for example, a Facebook profile.  Everything in the digital media space can be thought of as a tertiary narcissistic process: profiles, status updates, blog posts, comments, etc.  All these activities work to build an individual’s ego-ideal within a space that is relatively controlled by that individual.  I say relatively because the individual certainly does not control every aspect of his or her online presence; at least, it would be very difficult to do so.I think that the relationship between narcissism and social media is reciprocal: social media’s relationship to the individual is greatly influenced by the concept of narcissism and vice versa.

It might be time to rethink the negative connotations of narcissism and examine how this idea of tertiary narcissism can be adaptive.  If one can take an active stance in regard to ego-ideal formation and maintenance, then perhaps identity formation is becoming more controlled in the digital-social age.I suppose the question is whether this amount of control over identity and sense of self is really adaptive or not.  Do we really want that constant burden to manipulate our identity rather than just letting it happen?  Is digital identity adaptive, or does the fact that it is controlled make it a sort of false form of identity and selfhood?’

I don’t know the answers to Thomas’s questions. I wonder if Mark Simpson does. He has definitely reffered to an ‘adaptive’ element of metrosexual narcissism, especially at the level of  consumer culture, if not in terms of each person adapting and using narcissism themselves:

‘Narcissism is outside of tradition. It’s literally self-referential. So narcissism is both a product of and a helpmeet to rapid change – producing ‘individuals’ in identical loft apartments.’

I do think that some people are taking ‘control’ over their ‘narcissism’ for themselves and turning it into capital. Mikey Sorrentino, love him or hate him, is exceptionally talented at ‘winning’ the game of Metrosexy narcissism. He began as a contestant/actor on a reality TV show, Jersey Shore. Rather than be chewed up and spat out by the media company that hired him, as most reality tv participants are, he turned himself into a ‘brand’. ‘The Situation’ reduces him to his six pack, but also gives him a USP in a world full of six packs. Mikey stands out from the crowd. And now his  GTL catchphrase – gym, tanning laundry, the metrosexual mantra of young men across the globe, has become a profitable business. He sells fake tan, and runs tanning salons, he produces work out videos, and he markets ‘laundry’ bags and gym bags.  He also operates on twitter, facebook and youtube, showing that his ‘narcissism’ is, if not adaptive in Wendt’s terms, then at least very much controlled by him for his own purposes.

Ours is definitely and possibly permanently the Dorian Grey age, as Simpson put it. And now these Dorians are also becoming entrepreneurs of the self. Some of them are making money out of their enterprise, others not. The ‘idealised images’ we see in advertising and film, are now much easier to reproduce on our own at home.

But when we look in the mirror will we ever like what we see?

Back in the 20th century, Mark Simpson said no:

‘We’ve totally buffed sex and desire until there’s nothing left but our own reflection. And it ain’t pretty’

(Attitude 1997, Published in  Sex Terror 2002).

Objects Of Desire

http://www.ohlalagallery.com/so-chic/bang-bang-by-vijat-mohindra-for-factice-magazine-8/bangbang3/

I have been troubled by these photos in Oh La La Mag, of a fashion spread featuring a woman as a dead body, surrounded by her metrosexual male assassins. Not due to the murderous subject matter, which has become banal in contemporary (visual) culture. No. It is the issue of the ‘gaze’ that’s got me thinking.

The problem these photographs pose is an old one, that has been addressed in philosophy, social research, literature, film and art studies. It relates to the fraught and complex relationship between ‘subject’ and ‘object’.

According to Laura Mulvey

‘the subject is active, is attached to the active verb, is the center or point of the utterance (the film), and directs the object. The object is passive, is “done to,” and receives the action of the subject. Thus, “Jim (the subject) pushes (the verb) the car (object). Within Mulvey’s conception of classical Hollywood narrative, the male lead is positioned as the active subject who gazes at/controls the female as passive object, which fits nicely into the Oedipal trajectory paradigm. The positioning of the gendered subject and object within the narrative is often technically enforced by subjective shots from the male character’s point of view so that the female character is positioned as the object of the camera’s/man’s/spectator’s gaze. ‘

I expect contemporary feminists looking at these photos would apply Mulvey’s theory to them, and conclude that indeed the men are the ‘active’ subjects of the photos and the woman the ‘passive’ – and sometimes dead – object of their actions (killing her) and of our gaze.

But look again. In the top picture, though the woman looks pretty done for, and is lying corpse-like on the pavement, with blood coming out of her, there is some confusion about who killed her, who is ‘active’ in this scenario. For the gun is in her hand not that of the man by her side. Could he have put it there to cover his tracks? We shall never know. Also though they are very blank, it is the woman’s eyes that are open, and looking in the direction of the camera. The man is wearing sunglasses, and facing away from, beyond the woman. He is not ’the active subject who gazes at/controls the female as passive object’. Far from it, the man is the one who is naked from the waist up, and whose body (without a face, due to the sunglasses) we see most clearly. He is the ‘mannequin’ in the picture, the ‘object’ of the gaze.

In the second image the woman is quite clearly the subject, looking directly into the camera, the only colourful ‘lively’ character in the frame. Again the men are lifeless mannequins, their faces hidden by dark glasses. Surely they are the ‘objects’ of this photoshoot?

Mark Simpson has written before about how men are becoming ‘objectified’ in our visual culture, as much as, if not more than women these days. The ‘objectification’ of men in metrosexual society throws into question our previous assumptions about the ‘gaze’ and the relationship between ‘subject’ and ‘object’. Simpson has also observed that women’s ‘metrosexuality’ which has been in existence longer than, and has been one of the causes of men’s  (though men do it SO much better now) is active, in contrast to men’s newfound  passivity (especially in front of the camera). And this series of photographs definitely illustrates Simpson’s points.

But is anybody paying attention? Sometimes it seems as if everyone is going round in dark glasses.

An Overdose of Meaning

The Byzantine Iconoclasts wanted to destroy images in order to abolish meaning and the representation of God. Today we are still iconoclasts, but in an opposite way : we kill the images by an overdose of meaning. – Baudrillard

Like most people, I found out about the policeman pepper-spraying the student protesters at UC Davis, California, via the images of the event.

As the website Sociological Images told us: ‘images and videos of the pepper spraying incident have flooded the internet. One video has received over 1.7 million views on Youtube; another shorter clip has almost 1 million’.

The event became over-powered and replaced by the mediation of it. Without the initial photograph, and then its reproduction online, we might not think of the pepper spray incident as important at all.

The Scientific American was impressed by this process:

‘When U.C. Davis police officer Lt. John Pike pepper-sprayed a line of student protesters last Friday, his actions were recorded in replicate. Dozens of cameras captured video and still images, and soon swarms of photographs seeped across the internet. If there was ever a more-recorded single event in history, I am not aware of it. Yet, from the cloud of pepper-spray photographs, one has come to dominate. It is this image, taken by Davis psychology student Louise Macabitas, from the west side of the blocked path:

This is the photo that birthed the Pepperspray Cop meme. After spending time looking at this and dozens of similar captures, I think I know why.

• A low perspective elevates Pike’s head above the crowd, leaving an indelible impression of dominance & authority.
• Pike is in mid-stride, adding motion to a still image, and the outward-pointed foot puts the Casual in the “casually pepper-spray everything” meme.
• Pike’s face is visible, more so than in images taken from a higher angle.
• The spray itself is unmistakable in silhouette.
• Every person is identifiable as either Police, Onlooker, or Protester. The story tells itself.
• See that police officer back-right? His stance, and his high head, reinforce a detached arrogance on the part of the police.
• The expressions of the onlookers- at least not those in the standing paparazzi- convey a mix of surprise and disbelief.

Leaving politics and sociology aside, the image compels on its own merits. It is at once both complex and simple. There is a lot to look at, but each element adds into the same narrative. As Megan Garber notes:

…the photo’s narrative is built into its imagery. It depicts not just a scene, but a story. It requires of viewers very little background knowledge; even more significantly, it requires of them very few political convictions.

A remarkable image. I hope that eventually Ms. Macabitas receives due recognition for it’.

I find it fascinating how the imagery of this moment of police violence has been taken and separated from the event and analysed as a photograph, as a work of art. It’s not the first time this has happened of course. This incredible photo from the Vietnam war in 1972 featuring the naked girl Kim Phuc, won a Pullitzer prize for the photographer, Nick Ut. It has featured in many books, galleries and museums since. But the Kim Phuc photo was also used to publicise the horrors of the Vietnam war. It became an emblem of the anti-war movement. Does the pepper spray photo have a similar, political value? The writers at Sociological Images think it does: ‘I think this meme is itself a form of visual protest. The variations on the original image reinforce the perception that the police officer’s actions were inappropriate and an abuse of power. The use of famous scenes and works of art creates a cartoonish depiction of inequality and injustice, of someone using their power unjustly against those who obviously have less power — children, kittens, the unemployed, etc. (via the Pepper Spraying Cop tumblr)’.

I am not so sure. The sophisticated social media internet, which is dominated by what I call the ‘tumblr generation’, means the relationship between ‘reality’ and ‘representation’ has transformed in recent years. Baudrillard’s early 90s take on this, well before the internet got underway, was incredibly controversial at the time, partly because he used the Gulf War (1991) to illustrate his point. But I think his ideas hold true today:

‘For  Baudrillard thinks that language has broken free from its moorings and now proliferates out of control. The best one can do is show how every proposition can be shown to be no more true than its opposite. The ‘evidence’ of the Gulf War taking place can also ‘prove’ the opposite. That what took place was not a war at all, but something else — the spectacle of a massacre. Or that the ‘place’ that the war ‘took’ for those of us who watched it on TV was an imaginary place, an orientalist fantasy of mad Arabs and imperial splendour. The war took the space of our televisual imaginations.’

Now our ‘televisual imaginations’ have been replaced by internet imaginations, and through the endless production and reproduction of ‘memes’, the possibilities for art/photography/film to have political meaning I think has lessened. As I said here at Death At The Mall before:

‘It is in this age of ‘meaninglessness’,  and ‘kitchified…tragedies’ that the internet ‘meme’ has flourished, particularly, unsurprisingly, on tumblr. The UK riots were captured and butchered on ‘photoshoplooter’ tumblr, a spoof, in itself of the other ‘serious’ tumblr, ‘Catch A Looter’ aimed at indentifying participants in the riots by posting photos on tumblr.

And feminists, those well known believers in ‘debate’ and ‘rational discussion’, produced ‘Privilege Denying Dude’, who was supposed to represent the arrogance and misogyny of white middle class men. But their ‘irony’ was lost on me, because I actually found myself agreeing with much of what PDD said!  And, if you are reduced to using internet memes to make your political points, haven’t you lost the argument? Or am I just behind the times? ‘

There are a number of results of this ‘meaninglessness’ of imagery in relation to politics and political action. It is complex. I am not saying there is no relationship between the two at all – there are too many examples of youtube videos ( most recently the one of the racist British woman on a tram that led to her arrest) which have resulted in protests, criminal convictions etc for me to argue otherwise.

The first effect of this ‘overdose of meaning’ I think is that most representation of violence, war and trauma becomes concern porn. Middle class people watching that video of the woman on the tram may have phoned the police, but the main reason they watched it was to establish themselves as good, ‘concerned’ citizens in comparison to the bad woman who uttered the tirade.

Another result I think, of this mediated imagery overload, is that the value of people’s individual responses and ‘real life’ discussions about events and politics becomes very limited. If you can Retweet a link to an atrocity, why bother going to a meeting or even writing a blogpost about it? I know #ows is a real life, real time movement, but there are many many more people who claim to support it simply sending hashtags round the twittersphere than there are camping out in city squares. Also, I have found the level of debate amongst occupy activists to be dire.

There has been a kind of triumphalism from Occupy protestors when they have successfully ‘shut down’ meetings or talks by their ‘opponents’. For example the British Conservative minister David Willets was forced to abandon a talk at Cambridge university recently, and occupy activists in America have shut down a number of meetings and events. Their own meetings and events have been severely lacking in any kind of political analysis. 1968 this is not.

http://heresycorner.blogspot.com/2011/11/two-brains-v-no-brains.html

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/11/28/whose-capitol-our-capitol

A kind of enthralling but also depressing example of this lack of ideological backbone to the occupy movement is a youtube clip of Judith Butler addressing OWS. They do that ‘human mic’ thing and her usually complex and subtle discourse gets reduced to a kind of show and tell event. I ended up spending the duration of the video admiring her leather jacket, her ‘look’, rather than listening to what she had to say. To underline my point, Butler has been described  by (internet) activist fans as being the dreamiest in the video:

I am forced to abandon the 21st century and its tumblr memes, and to return to Baudrillard, who saw all this coming back in the 1990s. He wrote:

‘Today everything takes the look of the image – then all pretend that the real has disappeared under the pression and the profusion of images.. What is totally neglected is that the image also disappears under the blow and the impact of reality. The image is usually spoiled of its own existence as image, deyoted to a shameful complicity with the real. The violence exercised by the image is largely balanced by the violence done to the image – its exploitation as a pure vector of documen-tation, of testimony, of message (including the message of misery and violence), its allegeance to morale, to pedagogy, to politics, to publicity. Then the magic of the image, both as fatal and as vital illusion, is fading away. The Byzantine Iconoclasts wanted to destroy images in order to abolish meaning and the representation of God. Today we are still iconoclasts, but in an opposite way : we kill the images by an overdose of meaning.’