I mean, here is a site which shamelessly caters to contemporary individuals’ love for the feeling of having a group of friends, without any of the pesky responsibilities commonly associated with having such a group. High-frequency, low-commitment interaction: the ideal type of postmodern sociability, if such a notion is even coherent.

It’s pretty clear though that what has animated the bizarre public phenomenon called Twitter is the fact that famous people use it (even if they’re not always really them). I mean, really, nobody cares about the masses – without idiots like these, do you really think that we would be in the weird situation of having more words said about this damn site in the mainstream media than it’s really possible to say on the medium itself?

Yet in spite of my tone I do think that this opens up some wond’rous possibilities. I have thus far resisted the temptation to join up myself – given my penchant for undue verbosity, and my loathing of the ‘LOLZ 4 U’ grammatical paradigm, it doesn’t seem like it’s for me – but there is nevertheless all kinds of fun stuff you can come across by voyaging through the site. Such as for instance the Twitter feeds of certain well-known pornographic actresses, which occupied a good hour of my morning. The particularly fun part is that you realize from these sites that these are not cyborg Amazons from Mars, but relatively ordinary girls who – if, like me, you’re a 25 year old male - are three-to-five years younger than you are, who take pictures of themselves in the mirrors of their messy rooms wearing oversized clothing, and who in fact appear to spend a silly amount of time responding to the comments of their fans.  They just happen to get plowed in various orifices for public display, and maybe sometimes they suck eighteen dicks in a row, and probably they do more drugs than you do, but in other respects they are quite normal.

The coolest part of all this though are the weird interactions that you can track through Twitter. Obviously on these feeds there is a considerable amount of social-network back-and-forth between porn actresses, and news about public appearances, and communication with obvious, obsessive ‘fans,’ but it’s the little gems like this that make Twitter-stalking celebrities conducting this kind of ethnographic study worthwhile: ‘axiomvv’ is a Christian, football-obsessed, community college student, who between posting the results of Stanford games and looking to Rick Warren for affirmation, is in regular communication via Twits with several porn stars. Who would have thought that A) someone is online telling Faye Reagan and Sasha Grey directly that ‘God has a plan’ for them, and that B) such actresses would warmly engage with such a correspondent on a regular basis?

I could go on for quite a while about this joyous serendipity, but no doubt that would start to seem creepy. In any case, I guess this just goes to show that, whatever one’s expectations or generalizations about how people use social media might be, they grossly underestimate the kinds of wacky and unpredictable shit that are made possible by every new mode of communication.

So-called ‘critical animal studies’ is the kind of disciplinary identification that just seems designed to irritate me from the get-go. I mean you have the usual collision of disciplines (according to Wiki, it includes “scholars from fields as diverse as art history, anthropology, film studies, history, sociology, biology, psychology, literary studies, geography,philosophy and feminism or queer theory“), a collection that could be applied to just about every newfangled discipline like this. Certainly everything that gets called “critical x studies.” Worst of all, you have an explicit political aim identified with the movement itself, something that almost always gets associated with something called ‘critical’ but which I think is anything but.

The first few tenets of their little manifesto aren’t hugely problematic, but eventually we get to stuff like this, saying that CAS as a field

5. Rejects apolitical, conservative, and liberal positions in order to advance an anti-capitalist, and, more generally, a radical anti-hierarchical politics. This orientation seeks to dismantle all structures of exploitation, domination, oppression, torture, killing, and power in favor of decentralizing and democratizing society at all levels and on a global basis.

6. Rejects reformist, single-issue, nation-based, legislative, strictly animal interest politics in favor of alliance politics and solidarity with other struggles against oppression and hierarchy.

7. Champions a politics of total liberation which grasps the need for, and the inseparability of, human, nonhuman animal, and Earth liberation and freedom for all in one comprehensive, though diverse, struggle; to quote Martin Luther King Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”

Anyway, this kind of stuff all really bothers me. Why can’t we just stick with the idea of ‘critical theory’ that’s served us well enough since Adorno? Why is it that every time a few good books are written by the usual suspects about a given topic (cf. Haraway’s When Species Meet, Derrida’s The Animal that, therefore, I am, Agamben’s The Open) a bunch of people feel the need to get together and imagine themselves a little disciplinary community? Why do we have to associate critique, not simply with a disciplined investigation of the status quo and its construction, but with a very specific and in many ways very problematic set of political aims? Anti-capitalistic and radical anti-hierarchical politics? Whatever one’s own vaguely-formulated political aims – and I should emphasize that I’m more than sympathetic to a critique of capitalism and of hierarchy – I think it’s pretty tendentious to include this kind of stuff in the formulation of what purports to be a field of study.

At the same time, I got to thinking about this so-called field by reading about no-kill shelters and the ethico-political implications of such (I was intrigued to find that PETA opposes such shelters, for instance), and certainly I think that there is a lot of valuable work to be done in this area. So I have to come around and say that I strongly support the aims of critical animal studies, even as I resent the kind of disciplinary fragmentation and knee-jerk radicalism that some of its practitioners’ approaches seem to imply. We have a frightening and indeed schizophrenic relationship with the many animals whose existences we have shaped and integrated into our society, and who have in turn come to structure the lives of humanity in so many ways. There are enough fragmentary disciplines already, though, involving agglomerations of fields like the one I listed off at the outset – many of which are themselves very interdisciplinary – that I think these questions can be treated in the existing frameworks of critical theory, ethics, and science and technology studies. I say the last because I just thought of a wondrous idea: in the spirit of Callon’s ‘Scallops of Brieuc Bay,’ a study of the trajectory of a GMO corn, from seed testing and production to cows and/or HFCS and/or ethanol, etc… It’s problems like these that make me think the questions surrounding animals demand a broader framework. You can’t really consider the ethics and the politics of industrial cattle production, for instance, without considering the whole corn economy in the United States and the way that plant has come to dominate the North American diet. Can critical animal studies be extended to plants?

In any case, whatever the tenor of this ramble might suggest, I don’t begrudge this group of scholars their identification; it’s just one that I personally, resist. Nevertheless I think the questions it addresses are important ones. The question of the animal is a crucial one that’s run through 19th and 20th century theory, and needs to be considered in that context: starting from Bentham and the question of utilitarian ethics as applied to animals, on through Heidegger’s famous analogy of the Holocaust and mechanized agriculture (one that makes one simultaneously question Heidegger’s ethics and the ethics of agriculture, especially if you’ve ever driven past a truck full of pigs on the highway), Singer’s Animal Liberation, Haraway, Derrida, and beyond.

]]> http://supplem.net/2009/11/being-critical-of-animal-studies/feed/ 3 http://supplem.net/2009/10/what/ http://supplem.net/2009/10/what/#comments Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:33:10 +0000 ali http://supplem.net/?p=133 The Onion A/V club’s “my year of flops” feature examines Roman Polanski’s scary-sounding 1972 comedic romp What?, and comes up with this beautiful paragraph:

Even in the Wild West world of ’70s cinema, What? is profoundly fucked-up. Polanski pops up in his free-associative bacchanal as an irritable young man known only as “Mosquito.” Why Mosquito? “They call me Mosquito because I sting with my big stinger,” Polanski helpfully says. Then he shows off the stinger in question—a harpoon. “I am not a boob man like those Americans. It’s usually ass that turns me on,” he continues. Suddenly it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to see Polanski solely as an artist, and not as a man currently in jail for having drugged and sodomized a 13-year-old. There is some creepy juju at work here.

Creepy juju indeed. I kind of want to see this movie now, and at the same time I’m kind of freaked out by that. Here’s a piratebay link, if you are interested, or if you just feel like pirating some of Mr. Polanski’s intellectual property.

if you liked the old one, you’ll dig this. if you didn’t, i may have addressed your objections to it – or you might have come up with some new ones. it’s worth taking a look anyway. pre-publication release! complete with some hilarious comments from me, trying to figure out how to fix some especially unwieldy passages. (i hope this is OK. dewaard, if you read this and it isn’t, you should prolly let me know. haha) oh, and if you notice any glaring mistakes or omissions, please do let me know. (or if you can answer any of the questions in my comments!!!)
here it is: ‘dramatizing individuation: insitutions, assemblages, and the Wire.’

Excited yet?

I hope not. This should be about the least exciting thing imaginable, and in a more rational time it would be indeed. And yet I, in absence of any attempt to do so, have somehow come upon this woman’s blog. Most disconcerting is the fact that, as Nick Denton of Gawker claims, Emily has “been barraged by interview requests from, among others, the New York Observer.”

Let’s think about this for a second. Vaguely rich girl loses weight/gets surgery/was always vaguely telegenic, and starts a blog/stars in a widely-circulated pornographic film/crashes cars/goes insane/etc/etc/etc… A flurry of well-managed media attention now seems to be the logical consequence of this situation. Thanks, Paris Hilton. I think there is a really deep reason for the profound loathing everyone really feels for Paris Hilton, which goes far beyond the simple fact of her relatively pointless existence. This stems from the fact that she really represents the watershed, from an era in which all of our ‘celebrated’ individuals had some sort of distinctive talent (however much our supply might dwindle), into a time when, as Denton says, “it is indeed enough to be a rich man’s daughter to gain public attention.”

Think about this! What does this actually mean? Really, it’s just another step down the long and tortuous road to oligarchy. To put it maybe a bit less polemically, Paris was simply a concrete manifestation of the ephemeral quality of the barrier between wealth and celebrity. Face it, we’ve always venerated people who did more to exude the image of wealth than to actually have or earn said wealth. And so, Paris really just inherits the mantle of Donald Trump: vaguely wealthy but largely unsuccessful realtor is decidedly less photogenic than ‘heiress’ to, well, really little more than a name. Donald was, for most of his so-called ‘career,’ however, largely just a figure of fun, a go-to rich idiot for late-night talk show hosts to mock. Paris, however, showed that there was a business model underneath all this nonsense: she managed to transmute her status as unknown somewhat-rich man’s daughter into some concrete earnings. (Who actually buys her shit?!) This is not a new trend – there is of course a long history of people who are ‘famous for being famous,’ who seem to have climbed into the public consciousness for no good reason and then fought tooth and nail to stay there. (Speaking of which: Why the fuck does Carmen Electra exist!?) But in any case, Paris took this bizarre postmodern phenomenon to a very new level, both in terms of her ’success’ and susbsequent pervasiveness, and so she has inaugurated the era of the ‘celebutante,’ the internet ‘it girl,’ the moronic ’socialite’ who attempts to breathlessly chronicle her drunken whirlwind of a life for people (that is to say, idiots) who suck it up in a little perverted American Dream love-fest. Paris hilton truly inaugurated the era in which attractive rich people are inherently famous: no longer must they pretend halfheartedly to have a talent!
Why do rich people get this sort of attention for their eminently subpar everything? The media outlets which perpetuate these phenomena (including, implicitly my own, right now, and Gawker as well, no matter how much we might like to think otherwise) are just proceeding to further and further distort the American ideal of ‘meritocracy:’ once upon a time, there was a distinct belief and an institutional practice, that if one had merit, one would attain a level of compensation and renown commensurate with one’s talents. Think of it what you will, this was a fundamentally democratic ideal; we ought not, however, congratulate ourselves that democracy is the first to develop the ideal. Power has always congratulated itself that it was obtained by merit. Undemocratic political ideals all have their corresponding notions of meritocracy, they simply feel that merit is the exclusive province of a certain caste of society. This is what happens today, as the implicitly democratic structure of a culture which celebrates talent is subverted by the increasingly cultlike celebration of celebrity. And who has the means to hire a PR agent and spend their days shopping and blog about parties? Rich spoiled girls! (Because let’s face it, in the conservative world of rich folk, these girls are not going to be pressured into getting a serious education or taking the reins of the business as often as their male kin.) Thus every rich spoiled girl gets the idea that they can get richer and more spoiled and girly by making themselves famous, just like Paris! And they succeed at an alarming rate! This awful gossip machine that is taking over a large swath of ‘informational’ media simply accepts whatever it’s fed, whatever is easiest to obtain and least offensive to anyone with the will and means to complain. Therefore, we can see that the once somewhat ‘democratic’ cultural meritocracy is being progressively supplanted by an oligarchic conception of merit: rich people inherently merit attention, no matter how talentless they may be. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like this is a phenomenon which is just going to disappear, although we can hope that as enough people express their fervent loathing for this inane gossip which infiltrates their media, the bureaucrats running these corporations might get it through their thick heads that their business model is flawed. As much as these bitches might want to gussy it up by pretending to sing/write/act/etc., let’s just not lose sight of what their celebrity really ‘is:’ fodder for a profit-minded media machine without any critical standards, which thereby manufactures an enormous cult of celebrity composed of consumers too dull to construct any individual tastes extending beyond what’s within reach at the checkout counter. Yech. I can’t write about this crap anymore.

“I know I’m lookin’ for something, but I can’t even tell you what it is… I’ve had this feeling for a long time, and, it’s like I’m standing outside myself, watching me do things I don’t want to do. You know? Just seeing me like I’m somebody else, but never ever bein’ able to stop the show. I’m tired.” — Dennis “Cutty” Wise.

It should be pretty obvious to any informed viewer that the Wire is the most Foucauldian show on television. Of course, there are some cheesy reality shows which might enact some of the more paranoid visions inspired by Foucault’s work, but as a drama which undertakes an actual investigation of the problems he considered, especially in Surveiller et punir (S&p for convenience), The Wire makes a fascinating case study.

What exactly does this imply, though?

We can begin anywhere, really, but let’s start from a superficial reading: the wire represents a tremendously panoptic phenomenon. The metaphorical wire of the show’s title refers to phone taps, which are central to the show’s development, and although not particularly ‘optic’ they nevertheless mirror the ‘listening tubes’ of Bentham’s schema. On the whole, the show is a fantastic study in contemporary surveillance techniques and the functioning of the disciplinary apparatus that is the police department (For those unfamiliar, the show, on this same superficial level, is a fairly straightforward ‘police procedural’ show, but with standard HBO depth of character, production values, etc. The actual structure of the show will be examined in more depth as we proceed). The gaze of the Baltimore police department, though falling well short of the ideal implied by the ‘pan‘ of panopticism – and far more complex in its functioning – bears many other interesting similarities to that of the hidden watcher in Bentham’s prison design, and the ethic of ‘enlightenment’ from whence this ‘reformed’ penitentiary model was derived. Equally significant are its divergences from that model: the most obvious being the fact that while the surveillant gaze of the panoptic penitentiary is directed inward, at incarcerated criminals, the surveillance of the police department is directed outward. We can and should draw the standard conclusions here that modern technology has turned the entire society into a sort of panoptic assemblage, with the necessary caveat that, for the time being, the simple quantity of information which can be collected precludes any comprehensive monitoring.

As the show proceeds, however, one’s understanding of the main disciplinary assemblages featured in the show (the police department, the drug gangs and crooked stevedores they surveill and interpellate, the political sphere of Baltimore) grows deeper, in a manner which follows a more nuanced reading of Foucault’s work in Surveiller et punir. Two notes should be made here. Although I’m hesitant to start flipping through the book to recall his exact terminology, I’m fairly sure he would have called the police department and the city government institutions rather then assemblages, and he — as far as I know — never said much of anything about violent drug gangs. Institutions are certainly a form of assemblage, but by referring to them in general as assemblages, we can tie Foucault’s thought on institutions and discipline to Deleuze’s ideas about assemblages, and deLanda’s more recent developments of those ideas. Since I want to stick to Foucault for a moment, suffice to say that an assemblage is, roughly, any grouping of heterogeneous components. These groupings have more interesting properties which should hopefully become clear, but this definition will suffice for now. Second note: we ought to gesture at least briefly to the author’s intent: although we shall certainly depart from it to some extent, this reading is far from incompatible with the vision of the show’s creators. One of the show’s main writers, David Simon (a former police reporter), says that despite the show’s presentation as police procedural, it is “really about the American city, and about how we live together. It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how… whether you’re a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.” Whether or not Simon knows his social theory, a quote like this shows that he is certainly interested in the same questions as Foucault takes up in S&p.

Simon’s words speak to a deeper reading of Foucault than the previous focus on panopticism. Surveillance is central to The Wire and Foucault alike, but in a sense the English translation of the title as ‘Discipline’ does help to elucidate the original intent of both. The necessary emphasis in the first season on the outward gaze and ’surveillant’ qualitites of the police department gradually gives way to a deeper study of the internal dynamics of the disciplinary institution itself. Every character in the show — except for, on the most part, the drug addicts (but we’ll return to that later) — is part of at least one cohesive institution or assemblage. They are attracted to these institutions for varying reasons, but once they enter, they are taken up by a regime of training and progress which seeks to shape their subjectivity according to the imperatives of the institution. The genius of the show is that it dissects the overwhelming power of the disciplinary institutions without failing to show the equally ‘powerful’ loci of resistance: both in the form of standard human impulses and overt forms of counterpower practised by ‘individuals’ and competing assemblages. Unlike those of the standard police drama, characters in The Wire are rarely motivated by ‘good’ or ‘evil’ impulses. Rather, they are motivated by standard human drives — greed, will-to-power, horniness, laziness, and so on — which are channeled in various ways by disciplined institutions. The young hoodlums enter the drug gangs out of a basic laziness and greed bred and compounded by a general lack of opportunity. The seeming ‘hero’ of the show in its early stages, Detective McNulty, joins the police department out of what appears to be a basic fascination with pursuit and dominance, a will to exert his own ostensibly ’superior’ intellect over the criminal underworld of Baltimore. McNulty is no model police officer, however, and his drives express themselves in constant resistance to the impulses of the institution, echoed by a general self-destructiveness in his love for beer and women. Other police officers — the successful ones — exhibit far greater self-restraint, and indeed ‘compromise’ their own desires far more readily in order to ’succeed’ according to the standards set out by their institution. McNulty is driven by a fantasy of the ideal case, which will somehow ‘prove’ his dominance over the criminal mind; in the process he constantly runs into conflict with those whom he calls ‘the bosses,’ career-focused professionals who are themselves driven by a general desire to uphold the status quo, and thereby rise in the ranks of the department. Foucault discusses at length the essential role of this sort of ranked progress in a military and educational context as a means of ‘administering’ and constructing subjects. The Wire, however, constantly enacts his maxim that ‘Where there is power, there is resistance,’ not only in the dialectical battle of the police and criminal institutions, but in the resistances of individual subjects to the exigencies of their chosen (and less chosen) institutions.

These theoretical questions lead nicely into the question of how Foucault’s concepts might generalize to other forms of assemblage; conveniently, the fourth season of the show, which I am starting into at the moment (much to the woe of my course reading), directly sheds some light on these issues. In this season, the conflict of police and criminal recedes to some extent, although the disciplinary power of the Department continues to unify disparate elements of the plot. The show’s gaze seems to zoom out, focusing less specifically on these two ‘institutions’ and examining more generally the various interconnected assemblages which constitute the city of Baltimore. The seeming difficulty of characterizing drug gangs — assemblages which are, at least towards the bottom levels of their loose hierarchy, quite informal and deterritorialized — as ‘institutions’ makes clear the usefulness of a Deleuzian concept of the ‘assemblage’ (recall: a grouping of heterogeneous components) as a more general way of thinking about institutions. The addicts themselves are the most interesting examples of assemblages, since they are the essential consumers for the capitalist assemblage of the drug trade, but have themselves generally turned away or been driven away from all of the other assemblages in their lives: family, community, the law, etc. (by contrast, Bubs — the show’s main addict character — is always trying to form a kind of substitute assemblage for himself: taking younger addicts under his ‘apprenticeship,’ teaching them the ways of petty theft and con games, and thereby constituting a little two-member ‘community’ of his own). By thinking of the groupings into which individual – or, following one of Deleuze’s more poetic turns of phrase, ‘dividual’ – subjects are gathered as ‘assemblages,’ we can begin to make sense of the various new assemblages which come into view in the fourth season, as well as their many reciprocal and promiscuous interactions. The introduction of a plotline following an even younger generation of children growing up in the extreme poverty of Baltimore’s ‘Western District’ makes an already fascinating drama even more remarkable. As a counterpoint to the relatively well-formed assemblages of organized crime and the police department, we see a loose group of eighth-graders, and we begin to understand some of the dynamic processes at work by which we choose assemblages and make sense of the ones which are in a way ‘pre-chosen.’ These children — even more ‘larval’ than the ‘larval subjects’ which Deleuze argues we all remain — are caught between the conflicting impulses of every assemblage previously featured on the show, and a few new ones. They have to negotiate their identities in the spaces between (generally single, always poor, and often drug-addicted) parents, the underfunded school system, their friends, and the gangs and police at war in their neighbourhoods. Each of these assemblages form ‘attractors’ of sort in a space of interconnected assemblages, with sympathetic and oppositional effects: the children of drug addicts, for instance, are likely to become addicts themselves, while the child of one incarcerated gang member in this season is put out on the street by his mother with a ‘package’ and forced to take up where his father left off. This concept of assemblage makes the process by which poverty and circumstance creates dropouts and criminals painfully clear, without resorting to the standard ‘moral’ arguments of conservatives. For a wealthy child, the sympathetic effects of educated and well-off parents guide children relatively smoothly into the educational assemblage and then on to some sort of productive capitalist assemblage; for the children of impoverished parents who place little to no value on education, and for whom the most prominent productive assemblage in their neighbourhood is the drug trade, the force of that trade as ‘attractor’ can be overwhelming. Conversely, some children are driven by their own internal drives to fight against these sympathetic effects and break off into other ‘basins of attraction:’ either way, they choose certain assemblages for themselves, for whatever reasons, and are then guided down a certain path largely predetermined by the structure of that assemblage.

This analysis is beginning to sprawl to an almost absurd extent. To punctuate this discussion, I shall lay out, as best as I can recall, the general line of reasoning taken, and then in best Deleuzian fashion gesture towards a more productive statement of the underlying Problem at hand. The Wire is such a great show for reasons which extend far beyond the standard critic’s glosses on production values, conventional ’social commentary,’ ‘realism’ and the like: it sets out to undertake a serious critical analysis of the dominant processes by which our modern social life is structured. It plays with many of the same issues laid out in Foucault’s work on institutions, but has developed even further into something which can best be described in Deleuzian terms: as a meditation on the city as social assemblage. The show is incredibly entertaining for a critically-minded viewer, dramatically compelling in itself and for all of the ‘theoretical’ reasons cited. It also gestures beyond itself, however, to a fundamental problematic of the assemblage: The Wire investigates assemblages from the lowest (hierarchically-speaking) and least formal ‘larval’ assemblage of a group of teenage boys, to the high-flown rhetoric and gamesmanship of the city’s political sphere in which city councillor Tommy Carcetti maneuvers his way into the mayoral seat. How are all of these assemblages connected, however; how do they interact with each other and create new emergent assemblages; and indeed, how do these assemblages emerge at a base level from physical and biological assemblages? These problems imply numerous questions for further investigation, and numerous tentative hypotheses. It seems obvious in The Wire that each stratum of assemblage interacts with the assemblages immediately above and below, or those to which they stand in direct opposition; assemblages can also interact, however, in even more complex and nonlinear ways, facilitated by the technological assemblages of communication and transport. Reversing McLuhan’s rudimentary usage of the terms, we might think of human subjects as the extensions of these assemblages, or as assemblages formed in reciprocal interaction with all of these other extensive assemblages. The questions of a theory of assemblages are the essential questions of our time, and perhaps of any time; put differently, the essential questions of our time all fall under the purview of a generalized theory of assemblages. In closing, this Deleuzian hypothesis or problematic as a gesture to the breadth of this fundamental problem: the mind and body are heterogeneous assemblages of human cells, microbes, and microcosmic assemblages of communication and transport; the mind is a virtual assemblage which emerges from the actual assemblage of the body, and which incrementally reconstructs, constructs and is constructed by actual social assemblages in the external world.

Phew. That’s more than enough for now.
Acknowledgements:
Though lacking in direct citations, this piece evidently works from the texts cited in the body, as well as Deleuze’s early philosophical work and expositions of his ideas in deLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy as well as A New Philosophy of Society.

this number is largely random. or pseudorandom, to be more specific, and utterly insignificant,

 and yet my posting it here is in fact illegal according to the law of the United States of America. so, much like those very devout Jews who not only obey the Law, but go out of their way to find opportunities to fulfil its commandments, i am in this case going out of my way to disobey this particular law, even when i have no real reason to do so.

 hurray!

for more information on this issue, check this post out.

Allan Sekula proposes that ‘every proper portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police” (5), and thereby equates the idealistic representational mode of photography with the more repressive. Sekula’s “Body and the Archive” is a particularly provocative piece, insofar as it refuses to consider photographic practices in isolation: police photography and artistic photography are not two discrete modes of expression which coincidentally make use of the same apparatus, but rather, along the lines described by Flusser, the apparatus in effect produces both modalities of its use. “The freedom of the photographer is a programmed freedom;” thus, the program of the camera implies the contemporary artistic and penal programs alike. Following Flusser’s philosophy of photography even further into Sekula’s piece, we might state that the production of the categories of the ‘criminal’ and ‘ethnic’ other were only the beginning. Existence is defined by difference, and thus it would make sense that society should devote itself first to cataloguing its ‘others,’ by way of the photography of the criminal, the ethnic, and those other subaltern groups in opposition to which ‘respectable’ society forms its identity. And yet, with the world of ‘otherness’ thoroughly catalogued, it seems that Western society is now led inexorably on to the cataloguing of itself.

This is perhaps part of Flusser’s objection to amateur photography; the cataloguing of the other is certainly problematic, as Sekula’s piece outlines. This is not a new development, however. As Sekula states, “‘the potential for a new juridical photographic realism was widely recognized in the 1840s, in the general context of systematic efforts to regulate the growing urban presence of the ‘dangerous classes’” (3). The desire to regulate the other has been a human impulse for all of recorded history. It is only with the rise of modernity, however, that the instigators of social regulation realized that regulation could be far more efficiently implemented not through spectacular manifestations of power, but through surveying, cataloguing, and disciplinary institutions, as described by Foucault. The medieval was a time of myths, of symbols, and of men; modernity is a time of maps, of signs, and of subject-positions. This is why Sekula argues that ‘photography is modernity run riot’ (3). Photography is neither cause nor symptom of modernity, but rather the cultural practice which is most symbolic of the character of the modern age.

I am not referring to ’symbolic’ here in the conventional sense, so derided by Walter Benjamin is his ‘Origin of German Tragic Drama,’ by which one calls anything which represents another thing a ’symbol.’ For Benjamin, the ’symbolic’ mode of expression is one in which the ’symbolized’ object is immanent within the symbolic object; this sense of the ’symbolic’ is derived from a theological sense, and thus demands representation immanence along the lines of the immanence of the divine within the profane. Of course, with our growing uncertainty towards the divine, and the notion of divinity in general, this particular form of symbolism is in decline, supplanted by allegory. Allegory, by contrast to the symbolic, is a form of representation signification in which the ’symbolic’ objects only symbolize by way of their position within an ordered construction. As such, this would cover nearly any instance of ’symbolism’ as we moderns tend to use the term, since, lacking a belief in divine immanence, one only has the structure of language to appeal to for representational purposes.

I will return to the concept of the allegorical in a second. First, however, I should like to unpack why I propose, rather anachronistically, that photography is symbolic of modernity, and perhaps in the process make the distinction between these two modes more clear. The camera is a ’symbol’ of modernity in the conventional sense, that is, we can interpret the rise of photography as an allegorical representation for the character of modernity: as a modern technological apparatus, and one whose usage determined much of the character of modernity, photography is an allegory for modernity. However, modernity is also in some sense immanent within the camera. The rise of modernity would not have been what it was without photography, while photography would not have developed as it did in any context but the modern. Photography neither ‘represents’ modernity, nor ‘constitutes’ it, but rather, modernity is immanent to the program of photography, and vice versa.

This symbolic anachronism is paradoxically responsible for turning the world into allegory. When Sekula states that “‘for Bertillon, the criminal body expressed nothing” (28), he is in fact describing the allegorization of the human body. In the classical mode of thought, as evinced by discredited pseudosciences like phrenology, the human body was taken to be symbolic of the human character: one’s character was not determined by the slope of one’s forehead or the bumps on the skull, nor vice versa, but rather the criminal character was taken to be immanent within the cranial geography. With Bertillon’s allegorization of the criminal body, however, the body was no longer a symbol of the character: the character was in no way necessarily ‘present’ in the structure of the body. Rather, the body was merely a sign which, by way of its position within the structure of society and history, could point to any particular character type. No longer was there a general theory of the criminal physiognomy: on the contrary, the key to the criminal psyche took up residence in the particular. The only way to gain control of the criminal element within society was therefore to catalogue its position within the larger structure. Just as a dictionary catalogues the linguistic sign, so did Bertillon’s photography of deviance catalogue the ‘criminal sign,’ that is, the criminal body.

It is impossible, however, to catalogue one pole of an opposition. The attempts of penal reformers like Bertillon or Bentham were ‘flawed’ in that they restricted themselves to the criminal. The problem with this approach is that one can only catalogue deviance by simultaneously cataloguing that which is deviated from. In Sekula’s terms, “”for Bertillon, the mastery of the criminal body necessitated a massive campaign of inscription, a transformation of the body’s signs into a text” (31): note that the mastery of the criminal body necessitates a transformation of the body’s signs. In order to catalogue criminality, one must catalogue corporeality in general.

And thus, in perhaps the most telling proof of Foucault’s theories with regard to the ‘internalized gaze,’ we see in modernity a simultaneous explosion of photography for artistic and disciplinary purposes. As Sekula argues, photography constitutes “a system of representation capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively” (4); few other cultural phenomena fit this description. One does not go to a prison for recreation, or create art with an MRI machine: why, then, do we catalogue ourselves for fun? It seems this must necessarily be a consequence of the allegorization of the body. The categories which we create for the Other have a tendency of reproducing themselves in unwanted contexts: if the criminal body could no longer be symbolic of ‘evil,’ no longer could the law-abiding body be symbolic of ‘good.’ Allegory gives us a way to make sense of the world without recourse to divine organizing principles: we can interpret the allegory according to the laws of its own structure, rather than any externally-imposed order, and thus the objects within the allegorical constellation are elevated. The signification of the allegorical object lends it a certain secular sanctity, as in the “look up at one’s betters” Sekula describes (8); it also implicitly devalues the individual object, since it only signifies with reference to a larger whole. And thus we have the obsessive impulse towards systematization, cataloguing, categorizing. The only means by which the allegorical body can interpret itself is for it to perceive the structure of which it forms a part, and thus it travels around ripping fragments from reality to perceive the construction of the whole. The ‘public looks’ (Sekula of the photographic serve to situate our own subjectivity with regard to the subjectivity of others: we interpret our positions within the public sphere by determining who we stand above, and who stands above us. By cataloguing our reality with photographs, we can create for ourselves a hierarchy from these panoptic fragments, and thereby seize some provisional meaning from the absurd system that is the modern world.

  Manifesto of the Futurist Woman

“We intend to glorify war, the hygeine of the world, militarism, patriotism, the anarchists’ destructive actions, great ideas worth dying for, and contempt for women”
(First Manifesto of Futurism)

Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are equal. Both deserve the same contempt. Humanity as a whole has never been other than the fertile groundfrom which geniuses and heroes of both sexes arose. But in humanity as in nature there are particularly favourable moments for flowering. In the summer of humanity, when the ground is baked by sun, geniuses and heroes abound. We are at the beginning of a spring; we still need a great measure of sun, that is to say a great deal of blood must be shed.

Women, like men, are not responsible for the fact that those who are truly young, filled with lymph and blood, are stuck fast. It is absurd to divide humanity into women and men: it is composed entirely of femininity and masculinity. Every superman, every hero, however epic he may be, every genius however powerful, is the amazing expression of his time only because he is composed simultaneously of feminine and masculine elements of femininity and masculinity – he is a complete being.

An exclusively male individual is nothing but a brute; an exlusive female individual is nothing but weakness.

The history of collectivities and historical moments is the same as the history of individuals. The fertile periods, in which a great number of geniuses and heroes spring from the ground of a fermenting culture, are periods which are rich in masculinity and femininity.

The periods which saw wars with only a few representative heroes, because the epic wind flattened them, were exclusively male periods; those which denied the heroic instinct, turned towards the past and lost themselves in dreams of peace, were periods in which femininity predominated. We are living at the end of such a period. What is most lacking in women and men alike is masculinity.

That is why Futurism, with all its exaggerations, is right.

To give back a certain masculinity to our peoples benumbed by femininity, they must be dragged to masculinity, even to brutality.

But to all, men and women alike in their weakness, a new doctrine of energy must be taught, so that we may reach an epoch of superior humanity.

Every woman must possess, besides the female virtues, male qualities: otherwise she is weak, womanish. And the man who has only male strength without intuition is nothing but a brute.

But in the period of femininity we are living in, only exaggeration in the opposite direction can help. It is the brute who must become the model.

No more women who cause soldiers to fear “the lovely arms entwined around their knees on the morning of departure”; nurse-women who encourage weakness and old age, taming men to suit their personal pleasure of for their material needs! No more women who have children only for their own sakes, sheltering them from danger, from every adventure, which means from every joy; who keep their daughters away from love and their sons away from war! No more women who are octopuses of the hearth, whose tentacles bleed men dry and make their children anaemic; women who love like animals, and destroy the force of renewal that lives in Desire!

Women are Erinyes, Amazons, Semiramis, Joan of Arc, Jeanne Hachette, Judith and Charlotte Corday, Cleopatra and Messalina, warriors who fight more ferociously than men, lovers who incite, destroyers who contribute towards natural selection by breaking those who are fragile, arousing pride and despair, “the despair that gives the heart all its richness”.

May the next wars create heroines like the wonderful Caterina Sforza who when her city was besieged, seeing from the top of the walls the enemy threatening her son to force him to surrender, heroically displaying her sex shouted “Kill him then! I still have the mould to make others!”

Yes, the world is “soaked in reasonableness”, but by instinct woman is not reasonable, nor pacifist, nor good. Since she is totally lacking in a sense of measure, in a sleepy period of humanity she becomes too reasonable, too pacifist, too good. Her intuition, her imagination are both her strength and her weakness. She is the individuality of the crowd: she applauds the heroes, or if these are lacking, she supports the fools. According to her apostolate, woman incites to spirituality or to carnality, immolates or heals, makes blood flow or wipes it away, is a warrior or a nurse. The same woman, in the same historic period, according to the ideas produced around her by the latest event, will lie down on the tracks to stop the soldiers leaving for war or will throw her arms around the neck of the winning sports champion. This is why every revolution must include her; this is why rather than professing contempt for woman, you must address her. It is the most fruitful conquest you can make; and the most exciting, which in its turn will make more recruits.

But Feminism should be left aside, Feminism is a political mistake. Feminism is a mistake made by women’s intellect, a mistake which her instinct will recognize. Women should not be given any of the rights claimed by Feminism. To give women these rights would not produce any of the disorder the Futurists hope for, but on the contrary would create an excess of order.

To give duties to woman would mean depriving her of of all her fruitful power. The logic and deductions of Feminism will not destroy her primordial destiny; they can only falsify it and force it to express itself through deviations that will lead to the worst possible errors.

For centuries now humanity has clashed with woman’s instinct. All that is values in her is grace and tenderness. Anaemic man, miserly with his own blood, wants her to be only a nurse. She has allowed herself to be tamed. But call out a new word to her, give a war cry and with joy she will ride again on her instinct and lead you towards undreamed-of conquests. When your weapons are needed, woman will sharpen them. She will once more contribute towards selection. In fact, although she cannot easily distinguish genius, because she judges according to passing fame, woman has always rewarded the strongest, the victor, the one who triumphs through his muscles and his courage. She makes no mistakes about this superiority which imposes itself brutally.

Let woman rediscover her own cruelty and violence that make her turn on the beaten, just because they are vanquished, and mutilate them. Stop preaching to her the spiritual justice that she has tried to acquire in vain. Women, become once more as sublimely unjust as every force of nature!

Freed from control, once more in possession of your instinct, you will take your place among the Elements which oppose fate to the deliberate will of man. Be the egoistical and ferocious mother who jealously guards her young having every right and duty over them as long as they physically need her protection. Let man, freed from the family, live his own life of courage and conquest as soon as he has the physical strength to do so, although he is a son, and although he is a father. The man who is sowing does not stop at the first furrow he makes fruitful.

In my Poems of Pride and in Thirst and Mirages, I rejected sentimentalism as a contemptible weakness because it ties down energies and immobilizes them.

Lust is a force because it destroys the weak, stimulates the strong to spend their strength and hence renew it. Every heroic people is sensual: women for them is the most glorious trophy.

Woman must either be a mother or a lover. True mothers will always be mediocre lovers and lovers will be inadequate mothers through excess. These two types of women are equal before life, and complementary. The mother who receives the child makes future out of the past. The lover dispenses the desire that is a bridge to the future.

We conclude:

The woman who keeps a man at her feet with tears and sentimentality is inferior to the prostitute who out of vainglory pushes her man to maintain his dominion, revolver in hand, over the city slums. Such a creature at least is cultivating an energy which could serve a better cause.

Women, for too long you have been lost amid morals and prejudices; come back to your sublime instinct: to violence and cruelty.

Because of the fatal tithe of blood, while men are warring and fighting create sons and act the role of Destiny among them in the name of Heroism. Bring them up not for yourselves, which diminishes them; let them find a wide freedom, a complete development. Instead of reducing man to the servitude of detestable sentimental needs, encourage your sons and your men to excel themselves.

It is you who make them. You have complete power over them. You owe heroes to humanity. Give them to us!

Valentine de Saint-Point