Hinge, vol. XXVII

JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY STUDIES

HINGE

HINGE Journal of Contemporary Studies

Volume XXVII, 2021

EDITORS - IN - CHIEF Isabel Teramura Isabelle Ortner Sarah Sharp ASSISTANT EDITORS Anya Deady Neyve Summerville Audrey Greene

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All the work of the Contemporary Studies Society takes place in Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki. We recognize that as a student group in a settler institution, our presence is part of an academic tradition which has historically supported and compounded colonial violence.

Published 2021 The Contemporary Studies Society University of King’s College Kjipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia

Copyright, in all cases, remains with the author.

Recto: Caroline DeFrias

Printed in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia by etc. Press LTD.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreward

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Imperative Inquietude, Litigious Language: The Discourse of Feminist Coalition Building

By Katie Clarke Contemporary Filmic Representation of Lacan’s Family Complex: The Hidden Gaze in Michael Haneke’s Caché

By Nathan Ferguson Maggie Nelson’s Series of Becomings in The Argonauts

By Hope Moon

Against Interpretation and For Sensation: A Look at Female Love and Artistry in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

By Sarah Sharp

The Dual Explicative/Critical Power of Hip Hop and White Sensibility

By Cory McConnell Does It Compute? A Discussion of Cyborg Art

By Caroline DeFrias

Mickey Mouse, Hero of Modernity: Walter Benjamin on Animation, Allegory, and Cartoon Logic

By Robbie Dryer Fragmentary Totality: Love, Thought, and Community in Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community

By Cole DeJager

Intimacy, Sex, and Survival: Emotional Empowerment and Political Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camp Brothels

By Katie Lawrence Eating the Pain of Others: Reflections On Susan Sontag and bell hooks in Light of War-Photography, the Movement for Black Lives, and the CoVid-19 Pandemic

By Nelliane Bateman When Everyone is the Flâneur: The Flâneur in a Supermodern World

By Kerri Lawrence Acknowledgements

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FOREWARD In the midst of the pandemic, participating in online school and sharing our academic ideas through our computers can sometimes feel as though we are shouting into the void. We are plugged into the interwebs at every waking moment and are constantly one click away from being contacted via email or Zoom call. There is something meditative about being able to scurry into our writing nooks. When we write, we pause the buzz of the digital world for just a moment. The scholarly work that has been lovingly compiled in this edition of Hinge is a testament to our quiet, contemplative conversations with ourselves. When we write, there can finally be a pause from the flood of information we are eternally bombarded with.

We are proud to collect so many wonderful papers together in this year’s edition of Hinge. Each work was selected for its resonance and insight upon the world we find ourselves in today. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we did.

After countless editing meetings, Zoom calls, emails, and last minute messages exchanged over the last months, we wish that we could come together in person to share in the celebration of the final product. In these times, we find ourselves coming together in strange places: we gather on the page instead. We hope that that this journal can be a small way to connect with the ideas of your peers and friends.

Yours, Isabel Teramura (President) and Isabelle Ortner (Vice President)

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS KATIE CLARKE is a fourth-year student studying Contemporary Studies and Psychology. Katie is writing her thesis on the Foucauldian carceral society and socio-economic preconditions for the criminalization and incarceration of women. She is a playwright and poet, and she enjoys cycling and roasting vegetables in her spare time.

NATHAN FERGUSON is a fourth-year King’s student, currently studying Contemporary Studies and Classics. His research interests include the aesthetics and politics of counter-memory, the history of psychiatry and the concept of traumatic stress, and the narrative structures of the Platonic dialogues. Outside of his studies, Nathan is a research assistant on an ongoing research-creation project at NSCAD University and King’s, entitled ‘Memory Activism and Collaborative Processes of Counter-Memorialization’.

HOPE MOON is in her third year, studying Environmental Science and Contemporary Studies (and a minor in Sustainability). She enjoys baking bread, watering her plants, and thinking about a just recovery for all.

SARAH SHARP is a fourth-year King’s student studying Classics and Contemporary Studies. She recently wrote her honours thesis on grief in Anne Carson’s Nox. CORY MCCONNELL is a student of Philosophy and Contemporary Studies at the University of King’s College and Dalhousie. Their work is particularly focused on incorporating subjugated knowledges alongside canonical thinkers to critically understand current and historical philosophical and political issues.

CAROLINE DEFRIAS is in their fourth and final year, completing a Bachelor of Arts with a Combined Honours in Social Anthropology and The History of Science and Technology, with a certificate in Art History and Visual Culture. Interested in the politics of translation, gallery spaces, and art, Caroline is passionate about wrestling with objects of display and notions of curation to decolonize the gallery encounter.

ROBBIE DRYER is a 5th year student majoring in contemporary studies and theatre studies. For more information regarding Robbie Dryer, please contact your service provider.

COLE DEJAGER is a fourth year student graduating this year with a combined honours degree in Contemporary Studies and History. His research interests include post-Kantian philosophy (from both continental and analytic perspectives), history of modern aesthetics, and philosophy of science.

KATIE LAWRENCE is a European Studies major in her fourth year. Her degree is concentrated on the German language and contemporary philosophy, and she is completing her Honours thesis on the significance of intimacy during the Holocaust.

NELLY BATEMAN is a 4th-year student of Contemporary Studies and French. Her research interests include the lives and works of Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, the ethics of intersubjective living, modern and postmodern literature, and the novel in the digital age KERRI LAWRENCE is a second year student in Contemporary Studies and Political Science. She enjoys (and dreads) learning about our relationship with modern media and how that affects our personal and political lives. “When Everyone is the Flaneur” was written for Modern Social and Political Thought. Kerri spends her time rereading books seven times over and calligraphying silly things.

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Imperative Inquietude, Litigious Language: The Discourse of Feminist Coalition Building

By Katie Clarke Edited by Sarah Sharp

The language of progressive social movements is often a point of contention and conflict for those both aligned with and in opposition to progressive political action. The discursive practice of feminist coalition politics has been particularly divisive over the past fifty years. In a 1981 speech at the West Coast Women’s Music Festival, Bernice Johnson Reagon defines the coalition as a place of extreme discomfort: “most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing.”1 She continues: “you don’t go into coalition because you like it. The only reason you would team up with somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that’s the only way you can figure you can stay alive.”2

The feminist coalition is a political organizing group that engages a diversity of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability. Holly Jeanine Boux examines these diverse identities in relation to power and responsibility in her 2016 paper “Towards a New Theory of Feminist Coalition.” Her work both continues from the tradition of Reagon’s, and departs from it significantly in linguistic style and situation—we can ask how the language of academia might subvert the more accessible, spoken transcription of Reagon’s 1981 speech. Nonetheless, both thinkers situate the coalition alongside the oppositional and political work of care and rest, which is essential for the longevity of the coalition itself. Audre Lorde’s conception of radical rest is essential to my understanding of feminist coalition politics, as it delineates a space of care exterior to the coalition.

Lorde explains how caring for oneself and resting from political organizing allows activism to be a generative source of social change. I understand rest and self-care as in opposition to the enforced “productivity” and will to constant work under late capitalism. Lorde’s conception of care is radical because her social justice activism and politics actively fight against a system which devalues her body, mind, identity, and existence. She explains: “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”3 Capitalism and the settler-colonial, white supremacist state tell us that there is no space for or need of rest, and that we must constantly produce economic and social value. Rest becomes radical in advocating against the values and norm of the state itself—for racial justice, community care, and the rights of marginalized peoples. From Lorde’s writings, I take rest to be the act of caring for one’s mind and body in whatever way is accessible to you and helpful for you—it can be in a space you call “home” or perhaps simply a space that feels safer and less psychologically and physically demanding than the coalition. To me, rest is possible in a space where I do not feel the need to explain myself. The exteriority of rest allows the coalition to flourish as a dissonant and discursive place of action. The coalition itself is a space where language sews both safety and danger, as differing experiences of oppression constitute overlapping and contradictory forms of certainty.

1 Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 356.

2 Reagon, “Coalition Politics,” 356-7.

3 Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light. Firebrand Books, 1988.

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I will examine this ‘certainty’ in terms of Zerilli’s Wittgensteinian articulation: we are certain of things that make up the bedrock of our existence; things we need not articulate orprove, yet we take to be true.4 For example, Zerilli focuses on sexual dimorphism as a certainty that is not factual, yet it is taken to be true because it belongs to an unshakeable “system of reference.” White supremacy—the ingrained assumption of most modern Western hegemonic culture that white people are more valuable than people of colour—has been an underlying certainty of much of my life as a white person, despite my disavowal of white supremacy and my acknowledging that it is not at all factual. Other ‘certainties,’ such as the assumed superiority of able-bodied people, the gender binary (associated with, though different from sexual dimorphism), and heteronormativity can also be very difficult to unlearn, even if one identifies oneself as outside of these ‘certainties’ or norms. Wittgenstein contrasts these mystical certainties which often operate subconsciously with knowledge and the statement ‘I know’: a conscious, factual, verifiable reality.5 In the coalition, the certainties coming from the different and sometimes opposed lived experiences of members are contested and complicated by layers of factual knowledge. For example, the ‘certainty’ of the gender binary is contested by non-binary or gender non-conforming folks articulating their knowledge and experience and making demands.

The coalition is an essential space for progressive political action because it demands a heterogeneity of gender, race, class, and sexuality, and as such, a diversity of frames of reference, or certainties. Feminist coalition politics are a central site of progressive social change.

However, they are complicated by linguistic particularities which are simultaneously essential and problematic. Not enough emphasis on these linguistic definitions can allow for movements to be exclusive or co-opted by single-issues, yet an over-emphasis on language can in itself be a kind of exclusivity, enforcing a kind of academic gate-keeping. This tension doubles back on itself: to fall into standard of academic rigour or exclusivity runs the risk of “adopt[ing] the very models of domination by which we were oppressed.”6 As Lorde says, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”7 In Lorde’s work, as well as Reagon and Boux’s, we can reflect on how this linguistic paradox may mitigated by the resistance of care and rest.

I am interested in examining some of the ‘certainties’ inherent under oppressive systems of power, and how they are interrupted and mitigated by dissonant interpersonal knowledge within the coalition and systems of care outside of it. I recognize that as I address these semantic and linguistic issues in an academic context, this paper itself potentially gatekeeps coalitional issues. Nonetheless, I will attempt the paradoxical work of undoing certainty and building alternate systems of reference from within the institution of academia.

Reagon explains that the feminist political coalition is essential given the current erosion of homogenous or so-called “closed” spaces: “even when we have our women-only festivals, there is no such thing […] to a large extent it’s because we have just finished with that kind of isolating […] There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you.”8 It is in this vein that Reagon identifies the coalition in opposition to a space of healing or care. While coalition work may be able to provide this kind of solace as a result of its long-term effects, it is essentially a place of discomfort. As such, it is also a political act to sustain a place of care for 4 Linda Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing: Feminism’s Politics of the Ordinary,” Political Theory 26, no. 4 (August 1998): 448.

5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, “On Certainty,” Brightspace Course Content, CTMP 4001, 2020.

6 Holly Jeanine Boux, “Towards a New Theory of Feminist Coalition: Accounting for the Heterogeneity of Gender, Race, and Sexuality Through and Exploration of Power and Responsibility,” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 10, no. 10 (Spring 2016): 12.

7 Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 2007), 110.

8 Reagon, “Coalition Politics,” 357.

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oneself or others outside of the coalition: “you better be sure you got your home someplace for you to go so that you will not become a martyr to the coalition.”9 The essential multiplicity of issues and proliferation of discourse in the coalition is exhausting: “any time you see a person showing up at all of those struggles, […] one, study with them, and two, protect them.”10 Protection and care are essential, as Lorde posits.

Caring for oneself outside of the coalition makes it possible to sustain the intersectional and exhaustive work of coalescing. Even with this external space of rest, however, certain boundaries and objectives must be clarified in order to avoid unnecessary harm in the coalitional space. Boux identifies certain fundamental questions of coalition building: “‘who are ‘we’’ and ‘what are we working towards?’.”11 Zerilli takes the questioning of ‘we’ in political spaces as a non-starter: “claims on behalf of a group of people are ‘inevitably partial and thus exclusive.’”12 I agree with Zerilli in the sense that one must make claims to the best of one’s ability to advance discourse, while recognizing that the ‘we’ of which one speaks will never be representative of everyone—nor should it be. However, it would be remiss to ignore the fact that the long-standing ‘we’ of feminism arises out of exclusive, primarily white, middle class, cisgender feminist identification of the early 1940s. My definition of feminism (which I employ in this essay) is necessarily predicated on gender equality for folks of all genders, recognizing that people who are feminine-presenting and/or not cisgender often bear the brunt of sexism, misogyny, and gender-based violence, among other harms. I also want to recognize that my understanding of feminism is that feminist coalition work is essentially intersectional (to use Crenshaw’s term), and that feminist work cannot progress in isolation—there can be no question of ‘single-issues’ in systems of hegemonic patriarchal power. That being said, my “we” is still partial and can only represent my own situatedness as a cisgender white woman.

Reagon also examines the ‘we’ that is included or excluded in the term ‘women’ much like Zerilli does. Reagon sees ‘women’ as an identifier that was central to feminist identification in the second wave movement, but one that now presents a litany of complexities. She explains: “the women’s movement has perpetuated a myth that there is some common experience that comes just cause you’re a woman.”13 Reagon insinuates that this concept only works for those who see themselves as comfortably enclosed within homogenous spaces; often white, middle-class, able-bodied women, bolstered by second wave feminism. She continues: “as soon as some other folk check the definition of ‘women’ that’s in the dictionary (which you didn’t write, right?) they decide that they can come because they are women, but when they do, they don’t see or hear nothing that is like them.”14 Zerilli associates the word woman with the ‘certainty’ of sexual dimorphism. Wittgenstein’s concept troubles the idea of sexual dimorphism as a ‘certainty,’ bringing the category ‘women’ into question: “Wittgenstein shows what feminists argue: our criteria always disappoint us, and therein consists the impulse to skepticism.”15 In using women as an exclusive or delineative code (not questioning its certainty with knowledge), attempting to secure a truth of womanhood that will stick, the word woman “loses” the power of its plasticity.

Reagon, by contrast, simply rejects the criteria as a whole—there can be no exclusive specificity for entrance into the coalition. Despite the ‘certainty’ of sexual dimorphism, it is not the qualifier ‘woman’ that allows one entrance into the coalition, but rather a willingness to engage 9 Reagon, “Coalition Politics,” 361.

10 Reagon, “Coalition Politics,” 361.

11 Boux, “Towards a New Theory,” 10.

12 Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 454.

13 Reagon, “Coalition Politics,” 360.

14 Reagon, “Coalition Politics,” 360.

15 Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 450.

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with those that may or may not identify that way, as well as those who reject the word outright.

Zerilli suggests that “the argument that feminism can no longer posit a subject in advance of political action is correct but meaningless.”16 Feminist politics become actualized and simultaneously meaningful in action, and flourish in the conflicting dialogues and diverse identities of the coalition. The fact that the subject is constituted in this action, and not in any essence or singularity, does not mean that coalition members’ subjectivity and individuality are any less significant.

Boux posits that ‘we’ is defined not by “what you call yourself but with whom you link your fate.”17 The act of coalescing itself can be seen as constituting the ‘we’ that she is seeking in her initial question. While individuals’ diversity of identities is essential to the constitution of the coalition, the ‘we’ of the coalition is a question of collectivity that is always evolving. It is atop the un-factual foundation of the certainty of ‘women’ that we may build multiplicities and begin to listen to others’ experiences of being (or not being) women. The ‘subject of feminism’ that Zerilli tries to deconstruct was never ‘women’ in the first place—it must be infinitely more expansive if it is to achieve anything at all. Reagon notes: “watch these groups that can only deal with one thing at a time. They ain’t gonna do you no good.”18

Nonetheless, Zerilli’s argument against identity prior to action falls short without situating the notion of power in feminist politics. ‘Power’ itself is another word that Boux problematizes in the coalition space. Boux quotes activists Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill: “power is the cornerstone of women’s differences. This means that women’s differences are connected in systematic ways. The typical hegemonic conception of power is one of “‘power-over,’ where if one person or group has power, another by definition cannot.” 19 The word power, like the word woman, is stabilized as a ‘certainty’ (e.g. power = power over) because, like sexual dimorphism, “its stability derives from its contingency and relative plasticity.”20 The word power is used in a multitude of contexts, but it remains a stable, unanimous concept, precisely because it is so widely used and understood. Power as ‘power-over’ is another certainty that derives from the patriarchal, hegemonic system of reference that feminism is actively attempting to defeat.21 As such, when Zerilli argues that there is no subject or identity in advance of political action, she glosses over an intersection of ‘certainties’ which are inescapable markers of place and identity in the hetero-patriarchal system of reference. For example, the ‘certainty’ of power as power-over exists in the same system of reference as the ‘certainty’ of white supremacy. As such, prior to political action such as speech, white people in a coalition are perceived as having power-over their counterparts who are Black people or people of colour.

Although I find fault in Zerilli’s disavowal of the subject prior to political action within her own ‘system of reference,’ I do not think that these certainties cannot be overcome. In fact, the work of coalescing demands that they must be overcome, as diverse coalition members articulate their factual realities atop the bedrock of hegemonic certainties. Boux explains that when power is understood [as power-over], the lived complexities of daily experience of self-interests such as race, gender, sexuality, and class, necessarily undermine coalitional possibilities, for if one group—for example, women—are gaining power, or reducing their oppression, other groups—such as racial minorities—are necessarily losing out.22 16 Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 454 17 Boux, “Towards a New Theory,” 13.

18 Reagon, “Coalition Politics,” 363.

19 Boux, “Towards a New Theory,” 11.

20 Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 453.

21 Boux, “Towards a New Theory,” 12.

22 Boux, “Towards a New Theory,” 12.

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Conceptualizing power as ‘power-with’ instead of ‘power-over’ resists the hegemonic certainty of the latter and provides space for solidarity and strength between diverse coalition members without homogenizing their experiences or vital differences. Boux’s re-framing of power in the coalition space questions a certainty that we take for granted. This questioning is the fabric of the coalition. Lorde explains succinctly that the certainty of a ‘power-over’ relation limits the possibilities of freedom and progress for all folks which feminism aims to uplift, narrowing the scope of action to a, supposedly singular issue: This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty going as spoils to the victor or the stronger. So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie.23 The certainty of ‘power-over’ instills in us the idea that some form of subjugation is necessary—that there cannot be freedom from oppression for all. Lorde’s articulation of the unlimited nature of freedom is a helpful starting place for feminist coalition politics, and it is a reminder that the articulation of feminist spaces need not be subject to the academic rigour of linguistic particularities to be valid: in essence, we must work at the impossibly difficult and necessarily conflict-ridden act of collaborative coalescing, not as one singular identity or cause, but towards each other’s freedom from oppression, knowing that this will only come out of mutual action and reciprocity.

Recognizing that feminist coalescing is never singular or concerned with mono-issues, the word woman is not an accurate or useful centre for feminism—one does not have to identify as a woman, or even, for that matter, as a feminist, to take part in the discursive actualization of feminist coalition politics. To take part in feminist coalition politics is to balance disclosure with dissonance, listening with litigating. The coalition is necessarily multiplicitous. Reagon says: “watch these groups that can only deal with one thing at a time. On the other hand, learn about space within coalition. You can’t have everybody sitting up there talking about everything that concerns you at the same time or you won’t get no place.”24 You don’t need to arrive with any particular words or knowledge, but you do have to arrive ready to articulate your particular knowledge, question your certainties, and listen. You must “make people contend with your baggage.”25 This is why the home space is essential to the work of the coalition. Without a space of rest or reprieve, becoming a “martyr” to the coalition will not benefit your particular interests, nor the coalition as a whole. One’s space of rest outside of the coalition allows for further resistance, and chips away at the ivory tower of academic jargon that obstructs the essence of coalescing: accessibility, honesty, and intersectionality. Resisting the false certainties of sexual dimorphism, white supremacy, and power as power-over (among a multitude of others) also means resisting the urge to create new certainties in their place. In this manner, the coalition must refuse the “craving for generality that borders on worldlessness”26—the temptation to homogenize, to make singular, in favour of ease or answers. Coalescing is uncomfortable, long-term work which “calls for some care.”27 If we are to dislodge the hegemonic certainties of misogyny, white supremacy, and patriarchal structures of power, progressive feminist politics require both the comfort of care and the unpredictable discomfort of the coalition.

23 Lorde, Sister Outsider, 51.

24 Reagon, “Coalition Politics,” 363.

25 Reagon, “Coalition Politics,” 365.

26 Zerilli “Doing Without Knowing,” 454.

27 Reagon, “Coalition Politics,” 363.

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Bibliography Boux, Holly Jeanine. “Towards a New Theory of Feminist Coalition: Accounting for the Heterogeneity of Gender, Race, and Sexuality Through and Exploration of Power and Responsibility.” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 10, no. 10 (Spring 2016): 1–22.

Lorde, Audre. A Burst of Light. Firebrand Books, 1988.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 2007.

Reagon, Bernice Johnson. “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century.” In Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith, 356–368. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. “On Certainty.” Brightspace Course Content, CTMP 4001, 2020.

Zerilli, Linda. “Doing Without Knowing: Feminism’s Politics of the Ordinary.” Political Theory 26, no. 4 (August 1998): 435–458.

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Contemporary Filmic Representation of Lacan’s Family Complex: The Hidden Gaze in Michael Haneke’s Caché

By Nathan Ferguson Edited by Sarah Sharp

In Book XI of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Lacan defines the “unapprehensible” activity of the gaze as that which brings the subject to an encounter with their own desire.1 For Lacan, this disclosure of hidden desire is not an enriching psychological experience. Rather, it reveals to the subject the constitutive lack which structures their psyche, and which the conscious ego always attempts to elide or keep hidden. In other words, the disclosure of hidden desire which the gaze brings about is itself “the very approach of the real.”2 The subject’s confrontation with their own desire does not create a deeper sense of psychic unity; rather, it causes the breakdown of any imagined psychic cohesion, and disrupts the continuity of sensible experience altogether. Nonetheless, according to Lacan, that gaze which triggers the intrusion of the real is itself a site of desire: the subject wants to know what the gaze has to show them. Thus, the gaze is at once fascinating and frustrating, alluring and horrifying. Insofar as it both generates and thwarts desire, the gaze manifests the structural incoherence at the hidden heart of psychic life.

In Michael Haneke’s Caché, the gaze of the Other (or of Otherness itself) acts on three distinct registers. Psychologically, it discloses, and so disrupts, Georges’ repression of his childhood memories, thus exposing anxieties, tensions, and desires that otherwise remain hidden from him. On an allegorical register, the gaze of Otherness manifests itself in the embodied looking relation between Georges and Majid and reveals the fraught condition of imagination across the boundaries of racial difference. Finally, as an agent of such disruptive revelations, the gaze calls into question the extent to which ‘truth’ is ever coherent or assimilable into narrative experience. The film ultimately addresses this question of truth’s coherence through its inconclusive concluding shot, which offers no definitive answer for those who look on, desiring to make sense of it.

In this way, the defiantly ‘unapprehensible’ narrative of Caché is exactly proper to Lacan’s psychological framework, in which hidden truths and thwarted desires play central roles.

In the first part of this essay, I will orient Caché’s addressal of Lacan’s theory of the gaze with regards to a wider backdrop of Lacanian theoretical structures. In so doing, I will approach the function of the gaze in Caché by first analyzing Georges’ underlying psychic tensions and anxieties, which the gaze brings to the surface over the course of the film. Since so much of the film’s narrative revolves around this disruptive resurfacing of Georges’ childhood memories, I will begin my analysis by illustrating how Lacan’s three ‘family complexes’ operate within the film as organizational principles.3 In chronological or developmental order, these are the wean1 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), 83. I will treat Lacan’s concept of desire in proper detail in the first main section of this essay. For now, suffice it to say that desire is also thoroughly grounded in the presence of the Other.

2 Lacan, Seminar, 83. In Lacanian theory, psychic experience moves across three orders. The imaginary and symbolic orders constitute the sensical and coherent ‘reality’ of quotidian experience. In contrast, the real surfaces when trauma or anxiety ruptures the subject’s sense of reality, disclosing the fundamental void of meaning beyond.

3 Jacques Lacan, Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual, trans. Cormac Gallagher (Dublin: St. Vincent’s Hospital, 2011), 13. According to Lacan, the structure called the ‘complex’ is “an essentially uncon12

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ing complex, the intrusion complex, and the Oedipus complex. In the second part of this essay, I will draw on Neil Christian Pages’ essay, “What’s Hidden in Caché,” in order to articulate how these psychological tensions serve as allegories for tensions across boundaries of racial difference. Finally, I will address the film’s questioning of disclosed truth and the status of its own narrative coherence.

Part One: The Family Complexes and the Disruptive Effect of the Gaze

The first family complex, which Lacan calls the weaning complex, concerns the relationship of the human infant to their mother. All complexes “play the role of ‘organizers’ in psychic development,” and the weaning complex is the one which first gives shape to the infant’s basic, Other-oriented structure of desire.4 For Lacan, the lifelong drama of desire begins with the “parasitic” attachment of the child to their mother.5 Since the infant is completely dependent on their mother for physical and emotional support, they experience the withdrawal of the maternal breast as a “psychic trauma.”6 So as to avoid this trauma of withdrawal, the infant develops their primal desire: to know, fulfill, and possess the desire of their mother.

The traumatic absence of the breast (and lack of control over their mother’s desire) in the weaning complex organizes the later structure of desire in the developed psyche. For Lacan, the anxious desire to possess knowledge of and control over the mother/Other is a secret which belongs hidden in “the depths of the psyche.”7 The secret of desire must remain hidden because the integrity of the ego, which eventually develops around this hidden-yet-constitutive lack, depends on an illusion of sufficiency or independence.8 Due to this tension between the conscious and unconscious levels of the psyche, any experience in which one returns to the memory of the breast “can release ruinous” anxieties.9 In such a return to the mother as the site of primal desire, the subject comes face to face with the order of the real. The impossible, parasitic lack at the heart of their psyche emerges into consciousness, and they are forced to confront “the experience of anxiety which begins with life itself.”10 Generating this anxiety-inducing disclosure is the activity of the gaze in Caché.

The intrusion complex is the most relevant to the action of the film, for it forms during that period in childhood when the subject “realizes that he has siblings.”11 It builds on and around the anxieties of control and concealment which take form in the weaning phase. Before the face of the new sibling (as an Other), the subject redefines themself as “either the one in possession or the usurper.”12 Lacan’s description of this complex illuminates Georges’ childhood relation to Majid: this intruding or usurping sibling appears to Georges as a threat to his own control over their mother. Georges’ “jealousy,” since it manifests itself “long after the scious factor” which underlies and informs psychological experience. Analysing Georges with respect to these complexes will enable a clearer understanding of Caché’s representation of the gaze as a psychological agent.

4 Lacan, Family Complexes, 14.

5 Lacan, Family Complexes, 14.

6 Lacan, Family Complexes, 16.

7 Lacan, Family Complexes, 21. The psyche carries or sublates this structural secret of weaning forward as it develops through the following familial complexes. As Lacan writes on page fifteen on Family Complexes, the mode of desire which weaning organizes “must come to terms with all the complexes that will come later.”

8 Lacan develops this point in his writings on the ‘mirror stage’ in the Ecrits.

9 Lacan, Family Complexes, 22. Some of this anxiety becomes apparent when Georges returns to Aïx to stay with his ailing mother. Georges consistently freezes her out when she asks what troubles him: a perceptive Lacanian might be eager to suggest that he is over-asserting his separation, an independence which the maternal home threatens.

10 Lacan, Family Complexes, 20.

11 Lacan, Family Complexes, 23.

12 Lacan, Family Complexes, 23.

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subject has been weaned,” is thus a source of psychic tension on two levels.13 First, it disrupts his hidden desire to possess the m/Other; second, it discloses this repressed desire to Georges’ young ego. At the moment of development in which Georges is supposed to develop imaginary independence and separation from his mother, Majid comes to represent a threat to the anxious repression of his primal attachment. In Georges’ psyche, Majid thus becomes a figure of the intrusive real.

Beyond providing an analytical framework for understanding the anxiety that Majid represents for Georges, Lacan’s intrusion complex casts light on Georges’ protective reaction against this psychological threat. In a normal intrusion complex, the child eventually recognizes and makes space for “the imago of the other” on the basis of “a certain objective similarity” between their own body and their sibling’s.14 This is extremely significant for the narrative of Caché, for it marks Majid’s racial difference as a central factor in his rejection by Georges.

Georges cannot incorporate Majid into his psychic drama through the normal mechanisms of the intrusion complex because Majid is too different, too radically Other. Lacan’s description of thwarted intrusion aligns with the trajectory of the film: the young ego which rejects the intruding sibling develops a narcissistic world which “has no place for others.”15 In order to mask their desire for control, the jealous subject develops drives “which are essentially destructive of the other,” since it is that very Otherness which intrusively exposes that desire by threatening it.16 Ultimately, this intention to control Otherness manifests as “the system of the paranoiac ego”; this atmosphere of fraternal paranoia decisively captures the mood of Caché.

The final family complex is the Oedipus complex. In Caché, this complex bears more on Georges’ adult family than on his childhood memories. Lacan describes the paternal imago as “a representative ideal in consciousness” for the son;17 this idealization of the father is conspicuously absent between Georges and his son Pierrot. The normal Oedipus complex hinges on the child’s imagination that the father wields that so-desired control over the mother. In Georges’ family, however, Pierrot knows that it is in fact Pierre who fulfills the paternal “dominant role” of reciprocal sexual desire with respect to Anna, Pierrot’s mother.18 Georges’ adult family life thus represents one more site of frustration for his anxious desire to maintain control over Others. Inasmuch as the Oedipus complex “has to be understood in terms of its narcissistic antecedents,” Georges’ failure to carry out the role of the father can be straightforwardly linked to his failure to carry out the role of the brother in the intrusion complex.19 Carried over into the Oedipus complex and his adult life, Majid thus still exists for Georges as an unsettling representation and catalyst of his repressed anxieties.20

By casting Majid in the role of the intrusive usurper, the viewer can better understand the intensity of Georges’ reaction to his childhood adoption; by the same token, Georges’ 13 Lacan, Family Complexes, 27.

14 Lacan, Family Complexes, 26.

15 Lacan, Family Complexes, 31. Two pages later, Lacan conclusively schematizes the pathological intrusion complex: the subject “goes back to the maternal object and insists on refusing the real and destroying the other.”

16 Lacan, Family Complexes, 32.

17 Lacan, Family Complexes, 37.

18 Lacan, Family Complexes, 43. I recognize that the film never conclusively determines the facticity of Pierre and Anna’s affair. On the one hand, this inconclusiveness is a recommendation for the thesis that Caché suggests an ambivalent response to the narrative ‘truth’. On the other hand, Pierre and Anna’s affair is ultimately factual enough to Pierrot, and in the context of the Oedipal complex, that imaginary fact is all that really matters.

19 Lacan, Family Complexes, 49.

20 Indeed, Haneke emphasizes the disruptive tension over this hidden figure in the scene during which Anna and Georges realize Pierrot is missing: when the breakdown of the Oedipal triad becomes clear, sitting unacknowledged between the two parents is the muted violence of the Middle East, as a stand-in for Majid’s racialized Otherness.

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reaction to Majid’s intrusive reappearance in his adult life makes more sense in the light of these complexes. Insofar as Majid represents (that is, makes present once more) the fragility of Georges’ illusory ego, Georges predictably attempts to bring about “the imaginary destruction of this monster” or ghost of his malformed intrusion complex.21 In his essay on the postcolonial resonances of Caché, Pages gets things quite right when he suggests that the gaze of the Other, in the form of the videos which remind Georges of Majid, triggers “the return of an involuntary and unwelcome series of memory fragments.”22 Majid’s proximity to “the secret of the maternal” in Georges’ psyche explains why Georges remembers Majid in relation to blood and dismemberment: according to Lacan, such “phantasies of the fragmentation of the body” are direct manifestations of the anxiety of primal lack.23 In other words, Georges’ memories of Majid disclose to him the fundamental futility or lack of control which still structures his conscious adult identity.

Haneke represents this intrusive disclosure of the real, fragmentary nature of Georges’ psyche through the videos: those “interruptions in the sequence of the film” that come without “any single identifiable source.”24 Haneke’s method of disclosure closely fits the form of Lacan’s sourceless gaze, which also unearths psychic anxiety by intruding on the subject from without. Just as the videos lead Georges to Majid, and thus to his primal and repressed attachment to the desire of the Other, Lacan’s gaze reveals to the subject the “organization of [their] desires” around a constitutive psychic fragmentation or lack.25 Insofar as the gaze “has nothing to do with vision as such,” it too has no bodily origin.26 The videos, the memories they provoke, and the encounters with Majid himself all bring the disruptive power of the gaze to bear on Georges’ fragile and tense psychic condition, making him aware of his “original sin of repression.”27

For Georges, facing this hidden gaze results in an untenable psychological crisis. Many aspects of his personality and character in the film become clear when understood as repressive mechanisms which act to control the gaze, and to re-conceal the fragility and desire which it reveals. For just one example, the fact that Lacan includes scopophilia (“the desire to see and be seen”) among the Other-destructive drives of the intrusion complex explains Georges’ choice of career in television.28 With regards to his furious confrontations with Majid and his son, Lacan helpfully notes that the vicissitudes of the intrusion complex often result in an “aggressiveness” towards the usurper which is in fact “underpinned by an identification with the other who is the object of the violence.”29 In other words, Georges projects the threat which his own desire poses to his ego onto Majid. By expelling Majid, he thus tries to expel what Majid represents: his hidden desires which, when recognized, prove so psychically disastrous. Georges’ expulsion of Majid’s Otherness stems from a sado-masochistic desire to banish both his own fragility and the threatening gaze of the Other which makes that fragility manifest. In this way, Majid is caught between the false otherness of mere projection and the real Otherness of inaccessible, inexplicable difference — the intrusive Otherness of the gaze itself.

21 Lacan, Family Complexes, 34.

22 Neil Christian Pages, “What’s Hidden in Caché,” Modern Austrian Literature 43, no. 2 (2010): 1-24, p. 6.

23 Lacan, Family Complexes, 44.

24 Pages, “What’s Hidden,” 8.

25 Lacan, Seminar, 89.

26 Lacan, Seminar, 89.

27 Pages, “What’s Hidden,” 3.

28 Lacan, Family Complexes, 32. From the editing booth, Georges can carefully control the narratives or conversations in which he participates, as well as the aspects in which he appears on screen.

29 Lacan, Family Complexes, 27. According to this logic, when Georges castigates Majid for interfering with his family, he is actually castigating himself for his failure to uphold the paternal ideal of control and psychic unity.

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Part Two: Racial Difference and the Revelatory Power of the Gaze

In the logic of the film, however, Majid is not only radically Other in the sense that he is an individual who intrudes in on and thus disrupts the coherence of Georges’ imaginary world.

While the videos and the argumentative impasses which they generate mark one register on which mutual coherence breaks down, there is a second register on which Majid is an inaccessible Other for Georges — that of racial difference. According to Pages, Georges’ relation to Majid serves as an allegory for race relations in France. The two characters are “metaphoric figurations” of “a larger historical frame” which is “reflected in and repeated by [their individual] desires.”30 The Lacanian complexes of anxious tension that structure Georges’ desire to control Majid and repress what he represents — that is, the memory of a conflict with Otherness which threatens the integrity of his self-imagination — transpose neatly across this allegorical valence.

In this scheme, Majid remains a marked blot which stands out and disrupts the continuity of imagined reality, but now as a stand-in for the narrative and experiences of Algerians in France.

These narratives, incommensurable with and incoherent to the French psyche, represent the same kind of destabilizing intrusion for that collective reality as Majid does for that of Georges’ individual ego.

From Georges’ side of the racial divide, the Algerian body serves as a mute screen which reflects projected desires and anxieties of control. The two registers at stake in Caché collide in the sense that the same usurpation anxieties which spring from Georges’ desire to possess control over the maternal home closely mirror the French desire to maintain homeland hegemony.31 According to Lacan, this anxious domination of and separation from the feared usurper is not an internally coherent attitude. Just as “in the case of the child who enjoys the [. . .] domination he exercises,” there is “a paradox” in this mode of oppressive ‘othering.’32 Namely, the possessor “confuses the other’s role with his own and identifies with him.”33 The paranoid Frenchman who views himself as persecuted by the Algerian gaze in fact domesticates the Other through projection and misrecognition, bringing them into the framework of his own psychic drama.

By incorporating Majid into an ostensibly coherent (if imagined) narrative of vengeance, Georges silences and elides the real relation between himself and the Other — a relation which would otherwise release a crisis of repressed anxieties. The Frenchman thus mobilizes collective methods of control to dodge and domesticate the gaze. By arresting Majid and his son over Pierrot’s disappearance, they cast the Algerians in a recognizable role within familiar narratives, in which the Other is the catalyst of dispossession and loss of control. Turning the oppressed Other into such a mute screen indeed hides “the fragile nature of [their] separation,” but it also structures the French imaginary around false narratives, under which lurk hidden and thus psychologically catastrophic truths. In this way, there exists a fundamental incoherence or tension between conscious narratives of French and Algerian identity, and the real relation beneath the surface. This incoherence is what makes the intrusive disclosure of the Other’s gaze (that voiceless screen which suddenly speaks for itself) so troubling for the dominant psyche.

From the other side of the racial collision, the reality of Otherness appears in stark30 Pages, “What’s Hidden,” 4.

31 cf. Pages, “What’s Hidden,” 3. Pages writes: “In the narrative of Caché, the general indictment of viewers in the West for the sins of individual sublimation and collective repression [. . .] is lodged pars pro toto against the film’s protagonist, Georges.” Georges, in other words, represents for Haneke the ‘Western’ desire to hide from the gaze.

32 Lacan, Family Complexes, 25.

33 Lacan, Family Complexes, 25.

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ly different terms. This impasse of communicability finds figuration in the film with Majid’s unexplained suicide. According to Pages, this act is the “central ‘wound’ in the film,” the site at which the continuous transmission of diegetic narrative ruptures and breaks down.34 In other words, this is the point at which “Majid’s conspicuous silence” finally speaks: through an incoherent act which reveals how the “violence” of the colonial imagination “denies its victims any and all latitude” to articulate their own identities and experiences.35 For Pages, through this sacrificial usurpation of narrative agency, Majid “lives on as a trace, even in death,” reminding Georges and the audience of the “breakdown of the façade” of the French imaginary.36 Majid’s “unfathomable” suicide finally provides an “image of the abyss” which in fact structures the relation “of self and Other.”37 This structural wound (in the film’s narrative as in Georges’) gazes out and discloses the real void that exists around the Other, and thereby manifests the otherwise hidden impossibility of desired control and understanding.

Part Three: The Recognition of the Gaze in the Next Generation

When framed as a narrative which gathers or builds itself towards its conclusion, a central question of Caché is the role of inheritance, or the possibility for new kinds of recognition between those in the next generation. According to Lacan, since “family plays a primordial role in the transmission of culture” through the formation of complexes, there exists “between the generations a psychic continuity.”38 In other words, the psychic structure of one generation concretely gives shape to that of the following generation; through the family complexes there arises a certain kind of psychic heredity or inheritance. Pages alludes to this inheritance when he writes of trauma’s “reverberations in the generations that did not witness the event.”39 Psychic wounds, along with the inner structures those wounds reveal, remain visible through the helicoidal generation of family complexes — they persist like geological records of fault lines or tidal shifts, preserving historical patterns of collision and collapse.

The final shot of the movie asks whether Georges’ and Majid’s sons may be able to achieve some new kind of reconciliation in the light of the violent breakdowns which the gaze has brought to the surface in their families. In this sense, Pierrot receives a dual inheritance from Georges: it seems that the problems endemic to both the psychic and racial structures of the older generation appear more clearly to him. To the extent that the cuckolded Georges fails to uphold the ‘representative ideal’ and paternal “guarantee” of imaginary reality, Pierrot may be able to discern the limits of his received psychological framework.40 Similarly, Pierrot seems to inhabit a space somewhere just beyond the hereditary French imagination of race. One of his prominent bedroom posters displays Zinedine Zidane, an Algerian-French footballer who stands as a deeply complicated public symbol of both French nationalism and French colonialism. On a second poster is Eminem, the white American rapper who serves as another symbol of complicated movement across received or naturalized racial boundaries. Haneke seems to suggest, then, that the meeting of Majid’s son and Pierrot might be the site of a newly possible recognition or reconciliation across the former abyss of racialized Otherness.

While the final shot leaves this question unanswered, the general tone of the movie — in 34 Pages, “What’s Hidden,” 14.

35 Pages, “What’s Hidden,” 15.

36 Pages, “What’s Hidden,” 16.

37 Pages, “What’s Hidden,” 18.

38 Lacan, Family Complexes, 7.

39 Pages, “What’s Hidden,” 4.

40 Lacan, Family Complexes, 37.

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keeping with a Lacanian understanding of the gaze — is more pessimistic. For Lacan, discordant family complexes are themselves often at the root of further “repressed impulses” and “unconscious cruelty.”41 In other words, since the psychological crises which the intrusion of the real precipitates only generate further malaise, the children of Majid and Georges are not in a privileged position for having witnessed their fathers’ anxious and ultimately traumatic collision. Thus, for Pages, the overall chord of the film is “deeply cynical,” on both the collective political and individual psychological registers.42 While the meaning behind Pierrot’s meeting with Majid’s son is left ambiguous, less unclear is the fact that Georges — despite his repression and anxious tension — ends up being relatively successful at repressing and sequestering the uncomfortable truths of the Other. Indeed, Georges’ final appearance in the film is his comfortable (if artificial) immersion into a cavernous, forgetful, and restorative sleep.

To the extent that “trauma is that from which no one can recuperate or recover,” it is difficult to attach redemptive meaning to the traumatic disclosure of truth which Majid’s incoherent suicide represents.43 The suicide highlights the extent to which oppressive domestication of the Other, both in its anxious elision of the truth and its silencing of the oppressed, is a problematic response to the address of the gaze. However, one of the most interesting (and difficult) ways in which Caché itself addresses the gaze is its suggestion that recognizing the truth is never a coherent possibility. Haneke seems to subscribe to the Lacanian insight that avoiding or repressing the gaze, along with its attendant disclosure of the real, is an inevitable psychological reaction. The only possibility that remains is to create certain imaginary and symbolic frameworks which conceal the real, and are thus inherently antagonistic to the revelatory and intrusive power of the Other’s gaze. Within these necessary psychic structures of imagined reality, it may be that there is no possible posture which accommodates the traumatic truth of the real. In this case, any reconciliation across the boundaries of Otherness could not appear as coherently meaningful, even if it were to happen.

This is the central paradox of Lacan’s theory of the gaze: insofar as the reality of the imaginary and symbolic orders hides (and hides from) the very structure of desire which gives it shape, it is internally incoherent; and at the same time, the disclosure of desire and the real (through the gaze of the Other) manifests within that imagined reality as the very breakdown of coherence itself. The ‘truth’ is thus either hidden from sight, or so disorienting as to appear nonsensical. If so, the central wound and final encounter of the film, as scenes which emphasize Caché’s ultimate lack of narrative coherence, situate it very close to the meaning of the Other’s gaze indeed.

41 Lacan, Family Complexes, 82.

42 Pages, “What’s Hidden,” 4. Pages frames the film as, at least partially, “a kind of ironic handbook for the successful expulsion of unwanted Others from both individual and collective memories.”

43 Pages, “What’s Hidden,” 20.

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Bibliography Caché. Directed by Michael Haneke. Paris: France 3 Cinéma, 2005.

Lacan, Jacques. Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual, trans. Cormac Gallagher Dublin: St. Vincent’s Hospital, 2011.

Neil Christian Pages, “What’s Hidden in Caché,” Modern Austrian Literature vol. 43, no. 2, 2010, pp. 1-24.

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Maggie Nelson’s Series of Becomings in The Argonauts

By Hope Moon Edited by Isabel Teramura

In her memoir, The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson considers the factors that allow for growth and stability as she documents parts of her and her family’s life. Nelson refers to the Argo, the ancient Greek ship, as a model framework—whose name and presence remains the same regardless of its “parts [that] may get replaced.”1 The Argo’s fluid structure is reflected in her prose, often dubbed ‘autotheory’, as she weaves easily between theoretical musings and intimate memories. Throughout the text, Nelson assembles cycles of renewal, processes of becoming, that her and her partner, Harry, undergo. Navigating pregnancy and top surgery, and encounters of death and birth, Nelson explores changing identities and ways to communicate the inexpressible. Nelson’s experiences and musings culminate in the paradoxical conclusion that there is no final conclusion for identity, for love of others, and for love of oneself, but rather these things are always in the ongoing process of becoming.

The Argonauts documents Nelson’s struggle with the limitations and spaces found in language. Nelson begins her memoir explaining how she “had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed,” before she met her partner, Harry.2 Nelson grapples with inexpressibility throughout the book, often with the use of the motif ‘good enough’ to denote an attempt of authentic expression within the limiting confines of words. Wittgenstein’s language problem is rooted in the unfixed nature of words, as they are so often context specific in their meaning. Expression is bound by the constraints of meanings and language, but it is within the unfixed nature of words that the inexpressible can be found. As her relationship with Harry develops, Nelson commits to the belief that “words are good enough,” as they are all she has, while entirely recognizing that words can and still do fail only a few pages later.3

The concept of ‘good enough’ derives from a prominent developmental psychologist, Donald Winnicott, whose work is popularly referred to in mothering genres. Being ‘enough’ is as simple and functional as it seems for both Winnicott and Nelson. In her quest to find words that better express herself, Nelson uses the scale of sufficiency and valorizes the simpleness of words. Nelson attempts to “create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.”4 Ordinariness, for Nelson, does not detract from a word’s meaning but instead deepens it. The ‘ordinary devotion’ that we were all met with as infants by our parent(s) to ensure survival, underscores the fuller meaning of devotion, and suggests that “ordinary words are good enough.”5 Obviously, parents can be not good enough entirely, but that does not take away from the ordinary devotion that they show in keeping their infant alive. When regarding her own parents—her mother’s bad dating history, her hesitation towards her new step-father— 1 Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2015), 54.

2 Nelson, The Argonauts, 3.

3 Nelson, The Argonauts, 3.

4 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 2.

5 Nelson, The Argonauts, 21.

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Nelson realizes that “he simply loves [her mom],” and that must be good enough.6 If the expectation of ‘enough’ is not necessarily lowered but transformed into one that recognizes something successful or good, then it expands the realm of what can be expressed. Nelson allows for the concept of good enough to be applied more freely, and fluidly, and makes room for reflection and acknowledgement where there may not have been before.

Much like Nelson’s idea of being ‘good enough’, Deleuze’s notion of becoming also evades description as both concepts are fluid and dependent upon the individual situation. The only critical element is the recognition that “there is no terminus from which you set out, none which you arrive at or which you ought to arrive at.”7 By separating notions of progress with linear time, Deleuze expands what growth can look like for an individual. What matters is simply that you meet yourself where you are at, and that you continue.

References of the collaborative work of Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, are sprinkled throughout The Argonauts. In their conversations, Deleuze and Parnet work to underline language’s roots in dichotomous systems that restrain and categorize expression rather than open up meaning: “if linguistics…[play] a repressive role today, it is because they themselves function as binary machines in these apparatuses of power.”8 As an attempt to reclaim the possibility of language from its restrictive frameworks, Deleuze and Parnet exemplify the potential that dialogue has as a turn away from “binary machines [and instead] could be what a conversation is—simply the outline of a becoming.”9 A conversation gives stagnant words a momentum, carving out space that can account for a greater breadth of meaning. Deleuze and Parnet refer to these forms of conversation as “nuptials”—a union of ideas—as opposed to “couples” which implicate a binary question-answer format.10

At the beginning of Nelson and Harry’s relationship, she recounts her initial confusion regarding their relationship and its misalignment with cis-hetero binaries, asking herself “why did I have to think about other ‘straight ladies’ who were hot for my Harry?”11 When Nelson attempts to figure out Harry’s pronouns, she reflects on how their relationship moves “beyond the Two” and refers to their partnership as “a nuptial, even,” recognizing a becoming out of heteronormative structures riddled with binaries.12 Throughout the rest of her story, she approaches questions not by simply answering them, as that would be conforming to the question-answer dichotomy, but by exploring them further and delving into the greater meaning behind them, moving in circles of questioning “to find the conditions under which something new is produced.”13 Deleuze and Parnet point out that it is in pushing these questions and binary systems that “there are becomings which are silently at work.”14 Using the philosophies of Deleuze and Parnet amongst others, Nelson is able to approach Wittgenstein’s problem of inexpressibility with an ongoing process of reworking and renewing words to suit the particular need.

The Argonauts presents key moments of the couple’s becoming. Nelson works through her understanding of Harry’s gender identity and queerness, deconstructing restrictive identity politics and her own personal fears about their bodily changes. Nelson describes watching Harry’s discomfort in their body as it was failing to represent who they were on the inside: “[Har6 Nelson, The Argonauts, 108.

7 Deleuze and Parnet. Dialogues II, 2.

8 Deleuze and Parnet. Dialogues II, 23.

9 Deleuze and Parnet. Dialogues II, 2.

10 Deleuze and Parnet. Dialogues II, 2.

11 Nelson, The Argonauts, 8.

12 Nelson, The Argonauts, 7.

13 Nelson, The Argonauts, 102.

14 Deleuze and Parnet. Dialogues II, 2.

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ry’s] inability to live in [their] skin was reaching its peak.”15 This prompts a dialogue between them, heatedly discussing the inexpressibility of their own identities due to their bodies and words that fail to truly represent them. Instead of offering a final resolution of the fight, she ends the thought with a lingering conversation between them.

You showed me an essay about butches and femmes that contained the line “to be femme is to give honor where there has been shame.” You were trying to tell me something, give me information I might need. I don’t think that line is where you meant for me to stick—you may not even have noticed it—but there I stuck. [...] I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty. You said I misunderstood what you meant by honor. We haven’t yet stopped trying to explain to each other what these words mean to us; perhaps we never will.16 This ongoing conversation provides space and chances to better understand each other’s dynamic identities, and allows Nelson to overcome her fears of how Harry might change when on T. When Harry asks for support—rather than further questioning of the risks of T and the reasons behind taking it—Nelson provides it, echoing the aim of becoming that “is not to answer questions, it’s to get out, to get out of it.”17

The space for becoming is mutually liberating, as she finds her fears unwarranted.

Nelson takes pleasure in how much relief Harry feels on T, finally able to feel like they are expressing themselves honestly. Harry’s body becomes a kind of Argo, changing yet remaining the same, shifting into truer iterations of themselves. Harry’s gender defies mainstream conceptions of transitions as static realizations, as they note “I’m not on my way anywhere.”18 Nelson questions how one explains “in a vulture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?”19 As she settles upon the concept of messiness over a clean resolution, Nelson displays a commitment to recognizing Harry’s ongoing becoming, “a becoming in which one never becomes.”20

Changing identities and ideas call for words that can be used or reinvented to accommodate for growth. The example of the reworking and reclaiming of the word queer can show how words can be morphed into a fluidity. Nelson summarizes Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s goals for the word queer to be a “continuing moment, movement, motive…willing to designate molten or shifting parts.”21 Nelson is cognizant that “words change depending on who speaks them,” and works to find the multitudes of uses within the words we have, instead of just inventing new words.22 The word queer is meant to encompasses such fluxes in meanings, as it itself flees certain definition, retaining “a sense of the fugitive.”23 Much like the concept it represents, the word queer creates space for one to turn inwards and rework themselves into something truer. The reinvention of ordinary language to encapsulate greater expressibility also prompts Nelson to rethink the word radical. Amidst encountering fetishized revolutionary language that she thought to be overgeneralizing, she suggests, “Openness? Is that good enough, strong enough?”24 Openness implies a spatial capacity for growth, for interpretation, for patience. Both queer and opennness create wider spaces for becomings, allowing existences to evolve within 15 Nelson, The Argonauts, 31.

16 Nelson, The Argonauts, 32.

17 Deleuze and Parnet. Dialogues II, 1.

18 Nelson, The Argonauts, 53.

19 Nelson, The Argonauts, 53.

20 Nelson, The Argonauts, 53.

21 Nelson, The Argonauts, 20.

22 Nelson, The Argonauts, 8.

23 Nelson, The Argonauts, 29.

24 Nelson, The Argonauts, 27.

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the bounds of the words themselves. They are sufficient precisely because of their dynamic nature. The broadening and reworking of words’ meanings allow for greater accommodation and deeper recognition of people’s true selves.

As Harry undergoes their bodily changes on T, Nelson experiences her own changing body during her pregnancy. During her pregnancy, Nelson embodies a turn inwards, as she grows a new life within the bounds of her form. She revels in the “way a baby literally makes space where there wasn’t space before…revealing [the bottom of your belly button]—finite, after all.”25 Where the two had struggled with how their bodies represented them before, different turns inwards (injecting T, pregnancy) allowed for a transformation of how their bodies worked for them, developing into new potentials while still remaining the same cores. The bounds of expression, like a body, are essential as they prompt one to delve further inwards in attempts to push against and expand the finite: to “pluralize and specify.”26 When Nelson describes her son, Iggy, growing within her, she notes how he “feels big but I feel big enough.”27 Pregnancy opens Nelson up to a mutual development with not only her partner but her future child, and serves to construct the bridge connecting them all on their evolving selves.

Nelson observes repetitions of love and care passed amongst members of her developing family. In her reflection of this cycle, “sometimes one has to know something many times over.

Sometimes one forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets again,” she presents a kind of infinite kind of knowing within a finite life.28 Rather than take this infinite cycle as a sign of failure, she suggests that it allows for the renewal of pleasures including the “pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations … because such revisitations constitute a life.”29 Nelson’s embrace of this cycle engenders a modality of forgiveness, which meets the tasks of relearning and renewing with patience and love. Becoming has become synonymous with living for Nelson, as she revels in new discoveries of underlying truths. Despite having herself given birth, Nelson reiterates the idea that “there is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production,” as she becomes aware of the love she gives him being a mere echo of the love her mother had given her.30 She is reminded of her “maternal finitude” when pumping milk, but recognizes that it is “a finitude, suffused with best intentions…often the best we’ve got to give,” and deems it good enough.31 Nelson pays homage to her mother’s ordinary devotion for her that she will now pass on to her son, in an endless line of production for those we love. It is because Nelson had “almost forgotten” this connection that she was able to bask in its pleasures of knowing once again.32 Nelson gracefully weaves together the continuous strings of love that hold together the relationships in her life, and sustain the lives of all those involved.

This trace of love is continued when Nelson juxtaposes her son’s birth with the death of Harry’s mother. The finitude of life is coupled with the lasting cycle of good enough love. Nelson admits that “you have to be willing to go to pieces” to let the baby out, accepting the pain and sacrifice needed for creation.33 Her near encounters with death through birth are placed in relation to the real death faced by Harry’s mother. As Harry tries to assure their mother that her 25 Nelson, The Argonauts, 108.

26 Nelson, The Argonauts, 62.

27 Nelson, The Argonauts, 133.

28 Nelson, The Argonauts, 18.

29 Nelson, The Argonauts, 112.

30 Nelson, The Argonauts, 143.

31 Nelson, The Argonauts, 99.

32 Nelson, The Argonauts, 142.

33 Nelson, The Argonauts, 124.

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“work here is done,” Nelson introduces another mother who has been good enough.34 While good enough is simply not good enough to save someone’s life, Nelson recognizes this finitude as “a deflation, but not a dismissal … a new possibility.”35 By pairing bereavement with the joy of a newborn baby, Nelson approaches the realities of finites by offering the possibilities that still lie within one’s life. The inexpressible contained in the expressed is the love produced from person to person, from parent to child regardless of the specific people involved: “to give to one and the same phrase inflations which will be forever new.”36

Nelson’s family of argonauts experience journeys of becomings within her memoir. The Argonauts allows readers to bear witness upon the transformations experienced by herself, Harry, and Iggy. Within the small moments of life she decides to share, Nelson invites her readers to expand their notions of what can be expressed, and what is deemed good enough for one another. Readers find themselves caught within the ongoing conversations she is having with herself, theorists, and members of her family, as Nelson captures a moment of becoming contained within the pages of her book. Though the memoir is a finite object, it holds infinite cycles of knowing, reproduced each time readers revisit and re-read its revelations as they age. One’s love others, or for themselves, never becomes, but is rather always becoming. Through her book of honesty, patience, and openness, Nelson reminds herself and her readers that we are “for another, or by virtue of another, not in a single instance, but from the start and always.”37

34 Nelson, The Argonauts, 130.

35 Nelson, The Argonauts, 141.

36 Nelson, The Argonauts, 5.

37 Nelson, The Argonauts, 95.

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Bibliography Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.

Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2015.

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Against Interpretation and For Sensation: A Look at Female Love and Artistry in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

By Sarah Sharp Edited by Audrey Green

Set in the mid eighteenth century on an island off the western coast of France, Céline Sciamma’s 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, originally titled Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, tells the love story of two young women.1 The film stars Adèle Haenel as Héloïse, the daughter of a countess left to care for her late husband’s estate, and Noémie Merlant as Marianne, the female artist commissioned to paint a portrait of Héloïse for her husband-to-be.

Héloïse, who was sent home unwillingly from her convent to marry in place of her recently deceased sister, originally refuses to be painted. Stealing glances on their walks along the shore together during the day and working in her room by firelight in the evenings, Marianne attempts to paint Héloïse in secret. Only after the two develop a strong connection with one another does Marianne reveal the real reason why she is visiting the estate. In hope that the countess will grant the two more time together, Héloïse ultimately agrees to pose for Marianne.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire extensively and unambiguously explores the dynamics of women looking at one another. As Héloïse sits in her deep green gown, her only dress aside from convent clothes, blond hair tied back and hands folded in proper portrait convention, she says to Marianne, who stares at her from behind her canvas, “Look. If you look at me who do I look at?”2 Surrounded by off-white cabinetry and lit with clear, morning light, every detail of each woman’s appearance and demeanour is on clear display for both the viewer of the film and for one another. Their strong brows and lack of jewelry make both their eyes all the more striking. Heloïse’s point is clear: despite what their respective roles have traditionally signified––the active painter and his passive subject––Marianne and Héloïse are in “exactly the same place.”3 Rather than being the mere object of the gaze of the one who paints her, a muse for an artist to play with and make his own as he likes, Héloïse sees the equality she valued in her convent sustained in the looks she and Marianne share. Though they are bound by the conventions of their time, objectified by the male gaze that though physically absent from the film, and the estate, still imposes its boundaries on their lives, the two women find pockets of freedom and moments of erotic ecstasy in their relationship with one another. Through their short romance, Héloïse and Marianne briefly live out the fleeting beauty they find in and through their experience of art and seek to re-create again and again once their love reaches its tragic end.

Céline Sciamma, the writer and director of the film, refers to her work directly as a manifesto to the female gaze. Like all of her other major films, including Water Lilies (2007), Tomboy (2011), and Girlhood (2014), Portrait of a Lady on Fire was filmed by a female cinematographer. In a cultural commentary recently published for the New Yorker, Rachel Syme writes the following about the film: But ‘manifesto’ seems too didactic a term for Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s finespun romance and delicate, transfixing tableaux, and ‘female gaze’––a scholarly term worn out from overuse––is inadequate shorthand for its thorough exploration of the entangle1 Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Dir. C. Sciamma, 2019).

2 Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Dir. C. Sciamma, 2019).

3 Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Dir. C. Sciamma, 2019).

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ments between artistic creation and burgeoning love, between memory and ambition and freedom. The film is about the erotic, electric connection between women when they find their desire for creative experience fulfilled in each other, but it is equally about the powers of art to validate, preserve and console after a romance is over.4 With this review in mind, I aim to unpack in this paper how exactly the gaze is at work and at stake, in regards to love, freedom, and creation in Sciamma’s film. And by illustrating how different kinds of art have specific relations to the gaze, to love, and to memory, I aim also to put pressure on Syme’s assertion that art is able to ‘preserve and console’ the memory and experience of a fleeting romance. Instead, I suggest that such a love resists consolation and preservation entirely even though each woman strives to catch glimpses of their love, and of one another, through their continual, active engagement with art. Importantly, this form of engagement is based not in interpretation but in sensuous experience and erotic re-creation–––the exact kind of engagement that Portrait of a Lady on Fire partakes in itself and demands of its viewers.

In seeking to create a work of art that, rather than theorizing the female gaze, is actually able to depict it, and in using the cinematic apparatus to make a film that evades the sexist, phallocentric ideology that is said to run rampant in the film industry, Sciamma breaks with central tenets of the chief text outlining the female gaze: Laura Mulvey’s 1989 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” While Mulvey asserts that both pleasure and beauty are destroyed in their examination–––and that examining the way pleasure is derived from looking at women is necessary for their social and political emancipation–––even as she breaks from the cinematic codes of traditional narrative cinema, and thus offers a re-examination, a reconstruction, of the relation between women and the gaze, Sciamma still gives her audience pleasure in looking.5 Portrait of a Lady on Fire neither depends on the “voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms” of earlier cinema nor “destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the ‘invisible guest’” who watches the film.6 Instead of deriving that pleasure from the perspective of an active male authority figure looking at a passive female as an object rather than as subject of sight, Portrait of a Lady on Fire leaves the viewer with no alternative but to identify with the women on screen.

In this way, the active-passive distinction Mulvey makes in her paper, and the way it informs the male gaze, becomes destabilized in Sciamma’s work. All points of identification in the film require the viewer to adopt an intermediary position–––to see themselves as one who is always both looking and and being looked at simultaneously.

At the same time, Sciamma’s film is not irreconcilable with the concerns Mary Ann Doane raises surrounding the equation of femininity with closeness to the image in her 1982 essay “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” Doane, in reference to theories of the female gaze, writes, “there is a certain over presence of the image––she is the image. Given the closeness of this relationship the female spectator’s desire can be described only in terms of a kind of narcissism–––the female look demands a becoming.”7 Though the viewer is meant to identify with the women in the film, Sciamma is careful for the women within her work not to over-identify with one another. The equality of the gaze that Héloïse holds so dearly emerges not when the two women see themselves as the same but when they are freely able to respect and embrace their differences from one another. In this way, love demands no becoming.

4 Rachel Syme, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire is More Than a Manifesto on the Female Gaze,” New Yorker, March 4, 2020.

5 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” CTMP 3305.03 2020 (Brightspace): 27.

6 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 27.

7 Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” CTMP 3305.03 2020 (Brightspace): 63.

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The push for assimilation, of moulding oneself in line with a particular image, a totalizing convention, is not Sciamma’s female gaze but what she posits is at work in the patriarchal one. Though the film clearly depicts the solidarity which exists between women, it also notes the distinctions in their social positions and respective freedoms. Marianne, as the inheritor of her father’s painting business, will never be forced to marry a man she has never met and whom she will never be able to love. Her ability to provide for herself grants her a freedom that Héloïse is deprived of. The scene at the bonfire, where a unified mass of women chant in the moonlight fugere non possum, Latin for ‘I am not able to flee,’ is sharply juxtaposed with a scene shortly thereafter of Marianne and Héloïse escorting Sophie, the estate’s adolescent servant girl, to an older woman’s small hut. In contrast to the countess’s vast estate, the room is dark and dusty with nowhere to lie but the sole bed in the corner. Sophie receives an abortion while lying next to the woman’s small children. A baby plays with her fingers as her face winces in pain. Though the countess’ absence allows the three women to develop a more horizontal relation–––one wherein Sophie, Marianne, and Héloïse all play with and take care of one another–––the moment the countess returns, a pale image of the matriarchal superego from the Hitchcockian universe, boundaries and inequalities between the women appear more clearly than ever.

Unlike Cheryl Dunye’s 1996 film The Watermelon Woman, a film which also depicts a lesbian romance and explores the dynamics of female artistry and creation, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is more quietly defiant than explicitly political.8 While the comedic edge of Dunye’s work suggests that widespread recognition and success for Black female artists is not only feasible but currently in the making–––that the collapse of white heteronormative patriarchal media is not just an ironic joke but an impending reality–––Sciamma’s film offers no such hope for the future. Though Portrait of a Lady on Fire destabilizes the male gaze and retains a profound sense of beauty at every level of the film–––the scenery, the women, the works of art––– this beauty, and the pleasure it evokes, is fleeting. Just as the ancient poet Sappho, writing from the Isle of Lesbos, describes “Eros the melter of limbs” as a “sweetbitter unmanageable creature,” Sciamma illustrates both the power and ephemerality of the two women’s love for one another.9 Héloïse and Marianne’s relationship is as beautiful as it is tragic. The electric and erotic connection Syme sees in the two women is bound up in both the brevity and intensity of their shared time together. Sciamma paints a tragic portrait of love. Always at once both sweet and bitter, the pleasure Portrait of a Lady on Fire offers, like the pleasure Marianne and Héloïse derive from their experiences with and memories of one another, is intermingled with pain. Even in love, Marianne cannot make a portrait of Héloïse smile. Her anger comes to the forefront of the image.

Though Portrait of a Lady on Fire pushes the gaze beyond both identification and objectification in its portrayal of a tragic relationship between two women, and though men seldom make an appearance on screen (and, when they do, their backs face the camera), Sciamma’s film is framed by the male gaze, by the patriarchal setting where the story takes place and by the phallocentric tendencies of both film theory and the cinematic apparatus. Like the vanishing point in a Renaissance linear perspectival drawing or painting, that which is unseen organizes the whole shot. But despite clearly depicting the boundaries male power places on women, and which women, like the countess, in turn place on each other, Sciamma is careful not to present the eyes of another as a mere impediment to individual freedom. While Marianne, seeing it as 8 The Watermelon Woman (Dir. C. Dunye, 1996).

9 Sappho, If Not, Winter, trans. Anne Carson (Vintage Books, 2003), 130.

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a small token of freedom, gives Héloïse the chance to go on a walk on her own, to constitute herself in the absence of another’s visual field, Héloïse returns saying she enjoyed her walk but prefers Marianne’s company. Freedom, rather than the result of an absence of eyes, emerges in positive formulations, in having a say in who looks at you, in choosing the gaze in which you constitute yourself in light of. Love, in this way, surpasses personal liberty.

Sciamma pulls the audience into the two women’s love for each other, and, in turn, into the vivid imagery of Marianne’s memory. The sensuality of Portrait of a Lady on Fire is striking. From the wide shots of the turquoise sea throwing itself against the rocky coastal shore to the close-ups of Marianne and Héloïse kissing depicting the shared saliva lingering between their two sets of lips, the film’s visual-scape feels at once vast and intimate. Like so many romance films with tragic ends, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is framed by an older Marianne recalling how she met and came to love Héloïse. The opening scene depicts a row of young women, brows knit in concentration, sketching the figure of Marianne as she poses and teaches in front of the class. Her instructions are interrupted when one of the students asks the origins of a striking painting she found in the back: a barren landscape gently bathed in moonlight with a single woman standing at its centre. She stoically faces away from the canvas’s viewer and towards the orbicular moon as the bottom of her dress erupts in flames.

In her 1964 essay,“Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag calls for a collapse of the distinction between the form of a work of art and its content. She argues that contemporary criticism and commentary surrounding works of art must move away from a “hermeneutics,” and towards “an erotics of art.”10 Clarifying, she writes the following: What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more . . . The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art––and, by analogy, our own experience––more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. 11 Sontag suggests that the potential for this new approach to commentary and critique lies in cinema. She sees something so alive and sensuous about film, that it defies the excavating interpretation that has been applied to other narrative forms like the play or novel. In referencing Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation”, I want to suggest that Sciamma, through her film, demonstrates a way of engaging with art that aligns with Sontag’s vision of ‘an erotics.’

As Leininger, a reviewer for the film suggests, what is presumably Marianne’s final portrait of Héloïse, her “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” breaks with all artistic rules and conventions of the time and depicts Héloïse’s presence with the full force of life that was absent in Marianne’s earlier works; he writes, “Is this what Susan Sontag meant when she called for an erotics of art?

It’s difficult to look at Marianne’s finished portrait and not feel its poignance.”12 Both unhappy with the first portrait of Héloïse she completed, Marianne says to Héloïse, who accuses her of painting something without life and presence, that “presence is made up of fleeting moments that may lack truth.”13 Turning back on her words, Marianne, in her “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” gives a fleeting moment the two women shared a lasting truth through the painted image. This portrait suspends a moment that lasted no longer than a few seconds. But the image is also just that, an image. A portrait is a limited stand-in for the real thing. Preserving the moment renders it altered. Unlike the bonfire scene where Héloïse’s gaze is powerfully centred, Marianne’s por10 Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” (Shifter Magazine, 2015), PDF file, 10.

11 Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 10.

12 Alex Leininger, “The Power of Looking Compels Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” PopMatters, Dec 10, 2019.

13 Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Dir. C. Sciamma, 2019).

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trait has her facing away.

Sciamma’s film presents a way of experiencing and interacting with art that moves away from interpretation and into genuine engagement. Outside works of art are drawn into the storyline where they ebb and flow in and out of the narrative with the force of the ocean that morph’s the French island’s shoreline. Sciamma seamlessly integrates the genre-bending poetry of the Roman author Ovid, best known for his work Amores and Metamorphoses, which weave myths of love and transformation respectively, into the film. Reading by firelight the three women once again find solace and solidarity in each other as Héloïse recounts Ovid’s rendition of Orpheus and Eurydice. Moved by Orpheus’ heart-wrenching song, the gods of the underworld grant his beautiful wife Eurydice a second chance at life, so long as Orpheus does not see her until the two have made it back to the world of the living. Just as they reach the threshold, Orpheus, no longer able to restrain himself, wanting to embrace and be embraced by his beloved, turns to look back. The moment he catches sight of Eurydice she slips away from him. His stretched out arms seize nothing but air.14 At first the women go around, each offering their sense of the tale. For Sophie, Orpheus’ actions are senseless; he defies reason and his wife suffers for it. For Marianne, Orpheus’ actions mark a choice. He chooses the memory of Eurydice rather than the woman herself–––“he doesn’t make the lover’s choice but the poet’s.”15 Héloïse’s dismay is plain on her face: how could a lover ever resist the sight of the one they love? Reading agency back into the woman who ultimately suffers for her lover’s actions, Héloïse suggests that “perhaps she was the one who said, ‘Turn around.’”16 While each woman’s interpretation, focusing principally on the plot and the characters, is limited, incomplete, the myth as a whole, the feelings, emotions, and sensuous images it collectively conjures, are integrated seamlessly into Sciamma’s film. In a particularly Ovidian manner, Sciamma morphs Orpheus’ tale into her own. The myth integrates itself into the women’s lives. Unlike a painting which depicts a single image forever, the ambiguity of Ovid’s words may be re-created in different shapes and forms again and again.

Most of the film, like the image-focused mind of a painter and the estate in which the bulk of it is set, is strikingly quiet. Héloïse remarks once to Marianne that she enjoys mass precisely because the only music she ever hears is the church’s organ. In this way, the soundscape of the film is almost entirely diegetic. But the scenes that do include music are all the more powerful for its earlier absence. The film ends with Marianne, many years later, recounting the last time she saw Héloïse. She sits facing her, on the opposite side of the balcony, at an opera house in Milan. Their eyes never meet. The last shot is a close up of Héloïse, eyes red, tears staining her cheeks, as the orchestra plays Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” down below. The music is as sensuous as any shot from the film and as emotionally radiant as Héloïse, heartbroken, crying in her seat. While staying at the estate years earlier, Marianne describes the piece for Héloïse.

She interprets the on-coming storm and the insects preparing for it, but memory failing her, she is unable to recreate the piece’s full force; she cannot play it on the estate’s piano. As Marianne sits in the orchestra, unable to reach out for Héloïse, separated by an abyss of other audience members, each note of the piece rings loud and clear. There is nothing to interpret, only to feel.

14 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 343.

15 Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Dir. C. Sciamma, 2019) 16 Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Dir. C. Sciamma, 2019) 30

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Bibliography 1. Primary Sources

Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Directed by Céline Sciamma, 2019.

The Watermelon Woman. Directed by Cheryl Duyne, 1996.

2. Secondary Sources

Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” CTMP 3305.03 Brightspace, 2020.

Leininger, Alex. “The Power of Looking Compels ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’.” PopMatters, Dec 10, 2019. http://ezproxy.library.dal.ca/login?url=https://search-proquest-

com.ezproxy.library.dal.ca/docview/2327563169?accountid=10406.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” CTMP 3305.03 Brightspace, 2020.

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Charles Martin. W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.

Sappho. If Not, Winter. Translated by Anne Carson. Vintage Books, 2003.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” Shifter Magazine. PDF file. 2015. https://shifter- magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Sontag-Against-Interpretation.pdf

Syme, Rachel. “Portrait of a Lady on Fire is More Than a Manifesto on the Female Gaze.” New Yorker, March 4, 2020.

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The Dual Explicative/Critical Power of Hip Hop and White Sensibility

By Cory McConnell Edited by Izzy Ortner

Hip Hop provides a space both within and without white sensibility—specifically as it is neoliberal and post-racial—from which to perceive it clearly and challenge it. Drawing on Judith Butler’s interception of the Rodney King trial, I will outline the consequences of racist seeing/ reading as well as rappers’ subversion of it through Jay Z’s “Dope Man.” From this, I will expand on the tension between the explication and critique of white sensibility and the dominant discourse in which it makes sense with an analysis of several songs from rappers Immortal Technique and Scru Face Jean. To do this I will reference Frantz Fanon’s insights regarding racism, language and culture alongside H. Samy Alim’s notion that rappers linguistically construct a street-conscious identity. Ultimately, this will culminate in the tension between white sensibility’s seeing/reading of rappers and their increasing influence over white suburban youth by drawing on 2Pac’s “They Don’t Give a Fuck About Us.”

To frame Hip Hop’s dual explicative/critical power, it is necessary to outline white sensibility as it is neoliberal and post-racial. Under this neoliberal post-racial white sensibility, it does not make sense to discuss policing as racist. Insofar as we are ‘post-racial’ we assume that racism is something in the past which we have overcome and any residual effects can be addressed through minor legal reforms. Following this, it only makes sense for post-racial sensibility to view police brutality as a tragic exception to a just justice system because to say otherwise implies that race is a real factor at work. Acknowledging this means we are not post-racial.

The neoliberal aspect of white sensibility emphasizes atomized individuals as the basic unit of society and the value of the free market. According to this, it only makes sense to see any given example of police brutality as an individual case of racial prejudice rather than a systemic problem. This is clear when considered in conjunction with post-racial sensibility. As both neoliberal and post-racial, it only makes sense to see police brutality as an individual exception to the just justice system which can be addressed on an individual basis. Any alternate view would be an affront to white sensibility because it would recognize that race is a factor (and thus we are not post-racial) and that Black communities as such are systemically targeted (which undermines the individualization of neoliberalism as well as showing how its systems are at fault). However, the racist saturation of the visible field remains at play despite white sensibility being post-racial. This is because the post-racial narrative obfuscates racism. Claiming to be post-racial while being racist maintains the racist production of Blackness and its detrimental effects while simultaneously reducing that racism to individual cases which can never be tackled systemically thus re-producing the oppressive power relations inherent in them.

Furthering this, Butler, in “Endangering/Engendering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia”, interprets the Rodney King verdict as making sense according to white sensibility which always-already overdetermines Blackness as criminal. This is captured in her notion of “the racially saturated field of visibility”1. Basically, white sensibility ‘saturates’ the visible field 1 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Engendering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” 15.

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to produce what is seen according to a racist interpretation. White sensibility upholds the conditions which make it make sense for white people to see/read Blackness as criminal and endangering whiteness. This is why the King verdict was not reached in spite of the video but because of its racist re-production in the visible field so that it makes sense under white sensibility. To remain post-racial, King cannot be seen/read as Black man but as a man (who just so happens to be Black). At the same time, the jurors always-already see/read Blackness as endangering whiteness in accord with white sensibility. Since the former claims to be post-racial while the latter is explicitly racist, white sensibility can only remain post-racial if the danger they feel from King’s Blackness is King actually endangering him. In other words, the racist reproduction of Blackness in the visible field under a post-racial sensibility obfuscates racism thus requiring the jurors to make sense of the “danger” as a real threat from King as an individual (who just so happens to be Black).

Seeing and reading through white sensibility is always-already a seeing/reading wherein the act of ‘direct perception’ is simultaneously an interpretation2. The jurors never actually ‘see’ the video, their seeing is always-already a seeing as. With the case of King, that seeing as takes the form of seeing Blackness as criminal. White sensibility prevents the jurors from seeing the video of police brutality by allowing them to see/read it as evidence of the just restraint of a dangerous Black man. This involves the “repeated and ritualistic production of blackness”3.

Each instance of seeing/reading Blackness as criminal re-produces that racist construction of it which make sense in the terms of episteme—the network of rules and assumption which produce discursive and behavioural norms which determine who can know and who can only be known—such that whiteness is always-already in the position to know Blackness which, following white sensibility, translates into knowing that Blackness is criminal. As a result of “Watching King the white paranoiac forms a sequence of narrative intelligibility that consolidates the racist figure of the black man: ‘He had threatened them, and now he is being justifiably restrained.’ ‘If they cease hitting him, he will release his violence, and now is being justifiably restrained.’”4. The King of the video is not Rodney King the man but a stand-in for the racist construction of Blackness as criminal. By virtue of his Blackness and the post-racial dimension of white sensibility assuming a just justice system, it only makes sense to the jurors that the perceived threat is real. This is because the alternative, to acknowledge extralegal violence as such, undermines the justice of the justice systems as well as reasserting that race is a real factor.

Jay Z understands the racist saturation of the visible field by white sensibility while subverting it in his song “Dope Man.” The narrative of this song is Jay Z on trial for drug trafficking with the twist that the ‘drug’ is his music5. The hook - “They call me ‘Dope Man, Dope Man’/I try to tell ‘em I’m where hope floats man/ghetto spokesman”6 - captures this dual explicative/critical power to recognize the reality of white sensibility while challenging it. When ‘they call him Dope Man’, they engage in the “repeated and ritualistic production of blackness”7. Jay Z is always-already criminal as a Black artist and, moreover, his art is taken up as evidence of his criminality. He conveys this, embodying the prosecutor, rapping: “How come you labelled your brand of dope Volume 1/and spread it through the slums/fed it 2 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Engendering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” 16.

3 Ibid.

4 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Engendering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” 16.

5 Jay Z, Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter, 0:29-0:32.

6 Ibid, 0:33-0:38.

7 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Engendering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” 15.

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to the young with total disregard/your honour, the state seeks the maximum charge”8. Here, his album “Volume 1” is considered a drug and its distribution with trafficking. This mirrors Butler’s analysis of King’s trial in that it shows how white sensibility sees and reads Blackness as criminal.

The fact that it makes sense for rapping to be criminal is a product of the racist saturation of visible (or audible) field such that Black men are always-already criminal and any of their actions serve as confirmation of them being always-already guilty. It is not that Jay Z is guilty because he is a rapper, it is that he is always-already guilty and white sensibility sees/ reads his rapping as evidence of that pre-existing guilt. This is amplified by the accusation that he “fed it to the young with total disregard.” This suggests that rappers, rather than racism, are responsible for the re-production of Blackness as criminal because, for neoliberal post-racial sensibility, systemic racism is over and individuals are supremely responsible irrespective of their circumstances. Jay Z is always-already criminal, confirmed by the racist re-production of his music in the ears of white sensibility, which is in turn blamed for re-producing Black criminality to obfuscate contemporary racism. For white sensibility, Hip Hop is seen and read as both criminal and the reason for crime such that the effect of anti-black racism is recast as the cause of Black guilt.

However, Jay Z subverts this by concluding the song with a not-guilty verdict which follows his assertion that racism is systemic and his subsequent rejection of it: “Fuck the system at Lady Justice I blaze nines”9. The seemingly violent imagery here is re-signified as an adequate response to the obfuscation of systemic racism by democratic terms. This can be explained with reference to Fanon. For Fanon in “Racism and Culture”, as racism becomes more sophisticated and moves away from its crude alleged biological state, “It was not rare, in fact, to see a ‘democratic and humane’ ideology at this stage. The commercial undertaking of enslavement, of cultural destruction, progressively gave way to a verbal mystification?”10. The image of “lady justice”, intended to embody America’s democratic and humanist values, is re-signified as evidence of the failings of a racist justice system which overdetermines Blackness as criminal and punishes Black communities as such for the guilt superimposed on them by white sensibility.

Here, Jay Z’s threat to ‘blaze nines’ at lady justice is a counter testimony which both rejects the dominant narrative of a just justice system as well as highlighting its inherent anti-black violence by turning it in on itself. This is ultimately accomplished when Jay Z is found not guilty.

This verdict runs counter to the seeing and reading of white sensibility by asserting that Blackness is not-criminal and, if there is a criminal sensibility, it is the neoliberal post-racial sensibility of White America and its unjust justice system. Most importantly, in “Dope Man” Hip Hop counter-testimony is actually heard by white sensibility and actually changes the narrative. This ultimately shows Hip Hop’s insight in both diagnosing the problems and limits of white sensibility insofar as it cannot make sense of racism while also remaining a site of resistance.

To understand Jay Z’s dual ability to explicate/critical power, it is useful to draw on Alim’s work regarding rappers’ linguistic construction of a street-conscious identity. For Alim, rappers construct a street-conscious identity through discourse which is other than, and in tension with, the dominant discourse—discourse in accordance with the norms produced by the episteme that make sense, are civil and acceptable—which both challenges that discourse and produces a new space from which to expose its limitations. Rappers, “By consciously varying 8 Jay Z, Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter, 1:18-1:28.

9 Jay Z, Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter, 2:59-3:01.

10 Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture,” 24.

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their language use, … are forging a linguistic-cultural connection with the streets (meaning both members of the Black street culture and the sets of values, morals, and cultural aesthetics that govern life in the streets”11. Here, Hip Hop discourse produces a community with a shared language in which they can testify to their own experiences of racism without being stifled by the obfuscating terms of the episteme. This is accompanied by a Hip Hop sensibility which sees and reads instances of systemic racism as such in opposition to neoliberal post-racial white sensibility. Therefore, “Hip Hop artists assert their linguistic acts of identity in order to ‘represent’ the streets. This may be viewed as a conscious, linguistic maneuver to connect with the streets as a space of culture, creativity, cognition, and consciousness”12. This is what is going on in “Dope Man” where Jay Z, always-already trapped in the dominant discourse and overdetermined as criminal by white sensibility, takes up Hip Hop Nation Language (HHNL) as a means to testify against white sensibility and ultimately change it. Thus HHNL, in a sense, gives rappers the ability to deal with the racist re-production of Blackness in the visible field by taking up the frame evident in Butler’s reading of King’s trial by reversing it. Jay Z in “Dope Man” is in an analogous position to King—seen/read as criminal thus rendering his actions (regardless of what they are) as evidence of his always-already imminent guilt—but, through HHNL, presents the opposite verdict to highlight the limits of white sensibility and the injustice of its seeing/ reading of both Blackness and the justice system.

Immortal Technique exposes the extent of white sensibility’s “racist saturation of the visible field”13 in “Internally Bleeding” and “Caught In The Hustle.” In “Internally Bleeding”, Technique asserts that “the genesis of genocide is like a pagan religion/carefully hidden, woven into the holidays of a Christian”14. This highlights the way that genocidal structures are produced at the foundation of a culture such that they are obfuscated by the presumed values of that foundation. Obviously, these lines refer explicitly to the historical destruction of pagan cultures and their appropriation by Christianity into Christian holidays.

However, this principle is analogous to the above comments on Jay Z’s line “Fuck the system at Lady Justice I blaze nines”15. While Technique puts it in religious terms, both lines point at a similar notion that the values professed by a society (Christianity and Democracy respectively) obfuscate their genocidal basis. This can be understood in terms of Fanon in that racism and ‘democratic principles’ are logically consistent16 as well as how colonialism requires the almost total destruction and total subjugation of a culture17.

Having the ‘genesis of genocide’ encoded in holidays of the dominant culture both almost totally destroy the subjugated culture while ensuring that what remains can only make sense in the terms of the episteme. Technique shows how terms in the dominant discourse will always-already make sense to white sensibility. Paganism is overshadowed by its Christian appropriation such that it is no longer possible to see/read it as genocidal because it always-already part of the dominant culture. In other words, white sensibility is so inherently genocidal that its genocidal character can only be recognized from outside of it. This, referring back to Alim, is why the street-conscious identity produced by rappers opening up an alternate Hip Hop sensibility produces the means of seeing/reading anti-black genocide as genocide.

11 H. Samy Alim, Roc the Mic Right: the Language of Hip Hop Culture, 112.

12 Ibid, 124.

13 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Engendering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” 15 14 Immortal Technique, Revolutionary, Vol. 2, 0:48-0:55.

15 Jay Z, Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter, 2:59-3:01.

16 Frantz Fanon, “The Negro and Language,” 27.

17 Ibid, 21 35

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This immanence of white sensibility is also evident in the chorus of “Caught In The Hustle” where Technique raps that “the mind of a child is where the revolution begins”18.

Claiming that revolution must start with the ‘mind of child’ implies that being raised in white sensibility ensures that Blackness will always-already be seen/ read as criminal. Thus, the locus of resistance must be producing subjects with an alternate sensibility such that they will be sufficiently outside of white sensibility to implicitly see/read its racism and limitations in the same way the episteme produces racist subjects with white sensibility. He expands on this need later in the song explaining that “even though we [Black Americans] survived through the struggle that made us/we still look at ourselves through the eyes of people that hate us”19. This can be explained by Butler’s claim that “Whiteness as an episteme operates despite the existence of two non-white jurors”20. Since white sensibility produces images in the visible field by seeing/ reading them in the racist terms of the episteme. Until you cultivate an alternate sensibility (like Hip Hop), you will default to seeing/reading according to white sensibility because the episteme produces you to follow it. Technique recognizes this by saying “we still look at ourselves through the eyes of people that hate us.” He acknowledges that white sensibility informs even the seeing/reading of non-white people because everyone is always-already trapped by the episteme.

Likewise, Fanon shows that “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization”21. Adopting the dominant discourse brings the entire episteme with it. Since rappers are always-already trapped in the episteme, they necessarily exist in relation to every racist conception of it. This is why “Nothing is more astonishing than to hear a black man express himself properly, for then in truth he is putting on the white world”22. Insofar as rappers are pressured to occasionally take up the dominant discourse in order to be recognized with it, they adopt the terms of their oppression.

Alternatively, if they refuse these terms outright, they will still be seen/read according to them. Either way, the “repeated and ritualistic production of blackness”23 by white sensibility superimposes its racist construction of Blackness onto all real Black people. Consequently, the racist conception of Blackness will necessarily influence the self-perception of Black people which is why “The mind of a child is where the revolution begins”24. In order to challenge the genocidal nature of white sensibility, an alternate sensibility must be produced from which the former’s limitations and problems can be exposed, explicated and critiqued. Technique suggests that the most effective way to do this is raise children with that sensibility such that they always-already recognize the limits and obfuscations inherent in white sensibility rather than the reverse if they were raised in white sensibility exclusively.

Expanding on this racist saturation of the visible field, we turn to Scru Face Jean’s (henceforth SFJ) counter-testimony in “Homicide Scru’d Up” and “Collapse.” In “Homicide”, SFJ raps: “They say you a racist/cause you want representation/the people the colour you face is”25. This perfectly encapsulates the paradox of racism and white sensibility. Since white sensi18 Immortal Technique, Stronghold – Mixtape Vol. 2, 1:38-1:40.

19 Ibid, 2:24-2:28 20 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Engendering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” 19 21 Frantz Fanon, “The Negro and Language,” 3.

22 Ibid, 16.

23 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Engendering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” 16 24 Immortal Technique, Stronghold – Mixtape Vol. 2, 1:38-1:40.

25 Scru Face Jean, Homicide Scru’d Up - Single, 0:34-0:37.

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bility holds that we are post-racial, it does not make sense to speak in terms of racial representation. As a result, any call for Black representation will be seen/read as reintroducing race into a post-racial society. Moreover, the only way that reintroducing race make sense to white sensibility is as racist. Thus anti-racist calls for Black representation which could subvert the white hegemony of the episteme must be a racist call for Black supremacy because we are all raceless neoliberal individuals who can represent everyone equally. This allows white sensibility to see/ read rappers’ counter-testimony about racism as “the real racism” while obfuscating the racism implicit in their sensibility. Returning again to Butler, while “Watching King the white paranoiac forms a sequence of narrative intelligibility that consolidates the racist figure of the black man: ‘He had threatened them, and now he is being justifiably restrained.’ ‘If they cease hitting him, he will release his violence, and now is being justifiably restrained.’”26. This follows the same logic SFJ employs in “Homicide” insofar as it exposes how the unspoken assumption (that Blackness is criminal) produces what is seen according to white sensibility. While in the King video what is seen is evidence of a violent Black man justly restrained because his Blackness is the violence, SFJ shows how something as simple as acknowledging race at all is an affront to white sensibility which can only make sense as racist.

Countering this, SFJ draws up parallel experiences of Black and White America to expose the discrepancy between them. The clearest example of this is his assertion that “you had a pot to piss in/we had cops and prison”.27 Here, having a ‘pot to piss in’ epitomizes the satisfied needs of White America in opposition to the hyper-policing of Black communities as such. This also relates the two suggesting that the satisfaction of White American needs is always-already accompanied by the racist policing of Black bodies. Subsequently, he explains that “My n***** are awful listen, only cause our decisions/are moulded by awful systems we given before we livin”28. This testifies to the systemic nature of anti-Black racism in the USA. Following the aforementioned Jay Z song, SFJ subverts the criminalization of Blackness by re-situating systems as the cause of crime in Black communities rather than allowing the effect of crime to be mistaken for its own cause. Furthermore, the claim that Black communities are always-already present in these systems—‘given before we livin’— shows how anti-Black racism is an intergenerational genocidal project into which all Black people are thrown and produced by from birth. This expands Butler’s notion of the “repeated and ritualistic production of blackness”29 by showing that not only is the perception of Blackness constructed by white sensibility but that all the contingent factors which produce the conditions of Black life are analogously produced.

The lived-experience of Blackness is, in part, produced by white sensibility within the racist episteme to ensure that policing always-already makes sense as necessary. However, SFJ subverts this dual racist production of Blackness and the circumstances of Black life rapping: “We so used to the sewers/that we made fertilizer when you guys/gave us manure”30. Here, he asserts that Black communities can take up the racist systems which oppress them to undermine them and produce alternate ways of being-in-the-world (like Alim’s street-conscious identity) out of their suffering. This is a kind of subversive resilience which characterizes Hip Hop resistance as it both recognizes its relation to white sensibility while remaining sufficiently outside of it to challenge it in HHNL. This line can also be read as an allegory of Hip Hop itself. The suffering of Black Americans coincides with the production of an entirely new language and sensibility 26 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Engendering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” 16 27 Scru Face Jean, Slime Shady, 0:44-0:47.

28 Ibid, 0:47-0:51.

29 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Engendering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” 16 30 Scru Face Jean, Slime Shady, 0:44-0:47.

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which in turn resists that racism oppression giving rise to that suffering.

Similarly, 2Pac in “They Don’t Give a Fuck About Us” explicates the paradox of white sensibility seeing/reading Hip Hop as criminal while an increasing number of white youth listen to it. In the chorus, he summarizes this rapping: “If I choose to ride, thuggin’ till the day I die/ nobody give a fuck about us/but when I start to rise, a hero in they children’s eyes/now they give a fuck about us”31. The first two lines detail how white sensibility, perceiving Blackness as always-already criminal, disregards the suffering of Black communities. They— those seeing/ reading in terms of white sensibility—‘don’t give a fuck about’ Black communities insofar as they continue to re-produce the racist production of Blackness as criminal in the visible field in the image of ‘thuggin’.” This follows the logic of Butler’s reading of King because it suggests that crime (riding, thuggin’) is a choice—“if I choose to ride”—which thus justifies the extralegal policing of Black communities as such. When 2Pac talks about ‘choosing to ride’, he recognizes that he, as a Black man, will always-already be held responsible for the ‘crime’ of Blackness. Choice necessitates moral responsibility insofar as ‘choosing’ implies you could have chosen otherwise. 2Pac, here, can be read in accordance with Butler’s analysis of the police and jurors seeing/reading King as having “‘had threatened them, and now he is being justifiably restrained.’ ‘If they cease hitting him, he will release his violence, and now is being justifiably restrained.’”32. If 2Pac ‘chooses to ride’ irrespective of his circumstantial reasons for doing so, he has been criminal and any punishment will be just retribution for the crime of being Black.

However, 2Pac also reverses this in line with the dual explicative/critical power of underground Hip Hop. In the latter two lines, he raps: “but when I start to rise, a hero in they children’s eyes/now they give a fuck about us”33. Now, as Hip Hop becomes increasingly influential over the children of those seeing/reading through white sensibility, that sensibility is necessarily challenged by Hip Hop sensibility. To understand this, it will be helpful to return to Fanon’s comment of language and culture in order to invert it. Recall that “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization”34. Fanon, of course, is principally considering Black men taking on French culture through the language35. However, I argue that 2Pac is following this same logic but turning it in on white sensibility. Rather than discussing Black Americans acclimating to white sensibility, 2Pac highlights the power of HHNL and Hip Hop sensibility to acclimate White America to Hip Hop. By having children grow up idolizing Black rappers and, as a consequence, picking up HHNL and thus seeing/reading through a Hip Hop rather than exclusively white sensibility, the seeing/reading of Blackness must shift. This is why, when 2Pac becomes “a hero in they children’s eyes” ‘they’ must start to ‘give a fuck’ about him. In a sense then, 2Pac takes up Fanon’s recognition of the link between speaking a language and taking up a culture but suggests it ought also to hold for White America actually hearing Hip Hop.

At the same time, this line maintains the fact that the increasing visibility of Hip Hop (at least in White America) serves as justification for policing it following the racist saturation of the visible field. Since white sensibility remains operative while Hip Hop’s influence increases, the increasing visibility of Black rappers in White America will likely be seen/read as criminal31 2Pac, Better Dayz, 1:18-1:29.

32 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Engendering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” 16 33 2Pac, Better Dayz, 1:18-1:29.

34 Frantz Fanon, “The Negro and Language,” 3.

35 Ibid, 16.

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ity becoming increasingly visible and influential. Furthermore, white sensibility seeing/reading “a hero in they children’s eyes” as criminal influence infiltrating and violating the sanctity of whiteness implies a greater need to police that criminality to protect white sensibility in the minds of white children. In other words, white sensibility mirrors the jurors seeing/reading Rodney King as endangering the police by seeing/reading rappers as endangering their white children. On the whole, 2Pac teases out the paradox between white sensibility seeing/reading Hip Hop as criminal both as self-contained in Black communities and as influencing their children.

With the former, Hip Hop is seen as self-contained in Black communities and thus ignorable.

With the latter, Hip Hop is seen as an influence on, which is seen/read as endangering white children who need protection like the police needed protection from King. However, at the same time as white sensibility sees/reads the increasing influence of Hip Hop as increasing endangering it is also being undermined. The fact that ‘when 2Pac starts to rise’ they begin to ‘give a fuck about’ him, as opposed to how ‘they don’t give a fuck about us’ prior to gaining popularity in White America, shows that the question of Black representation SFJ refers to becomes a question for white sensibility. Regardless of how they see/read 2Pac, he and what he stands for is necessarily a matter of concern for white sensibility. This is how the Fanon inversion can be reconciled with the hyper-vigilant policing of rappers. The fact that white sensibility sees/reads an increasing threat implies that the hegemony of that sensibility is being undermined. Once white children are acclimated to Hip Hop sensibility, their parents white sensibility is perpetually challenged. This calls back to Technique’s claim that “The mind of a child is where the revolution begins”36 because 2Pac shows how raising children in Hip Hop sensibility subverts the hegemony of white sensibility at its base which encapsulates the dual explicative/critical power of Hip Hop in relation to white sensibility.

Taken together, these songs reflect Hip Hop’s ability to expose the limits and problems of white sensibility in a way that recognizes and challenges it simultaneously. Jay Z, explained in terms of Butler, encapsulates this dual explicative/critical power by framing the “repeated and ritualistic production of blackness”37 as trial for drug trafficking where the “drug” is his music. This framing reflects how white sensibility always-already sees/reads Blackness as criminal.

However, he challenges this racist saturation of the visible field by reaching a not guilty verdict inverting the outcome of King’s trial. Deepening this, Technique outlines the centrality of white sensibility and its genocidal character in the structures of society in which children are raised.

From this, he suggests that real anti-racist work must begin with the reproduction of white sensibility in terms of the episteme. To explain this further, I turn to SFJ to highlight how even acknowledging race as a factor challenges white sensibility by undermining its neoliberal and post-racial assumptions. Moreover, he carries out this dual explicative/critical power by comparing the lived experience of White America and Black communities to highlight the disparity between them. Ultimately, this culminates in 2Pac’s understanding of the paradoxical seeing/ reading Hip Hop by white sensibility in terms of the racist production of rappers as ‘thuggin’ who ought to be ignored and left in a self-contained loop of criminality. At the same time, he shows how white youth engaging with Hip Hop culture increases rappers’ visibility which simultaneously undermines white sensibility (by raising children with Hip Hop sensibility) and is seen/read as justifying greater policing (because it is endangering whiteness is a way analogous to King). Drawing on Fanon and Alim, rappers construct street-conscious identities in tension 36 Immortal Technique, Stronghold – Mixtape Vol. 2, 1:38-1:40.

37 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Engendering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” 16 39

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with the dominant culture implicit in speaking the language of the dominant discourse. This creates a space under the episteme which both recognizes white sensibility without seeing through it exclusively such that its limits and racism can be exposed and critiqued.

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Bibliography 2Pac. They Don’t Give a Fuck About Us. Better Dayz. Amaru Entertainment. Accessed 2021. https://music.apple.com/us/album/better-dayz/1443394968.

Alim, H. Samy. Roc the Mic Right: the Language of Hip Hop Culture. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009.

Butler, Judith. “Endangered/Engendering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia.” Essay. In Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising. New York, NY: Routledge, 1993.

Fanon, Frantz, and Azzedine Haddour. “Racism and Culture.” Essay. In The Fanon Reader, 19–29. London: Pluto Press, 2006.

Fanon, Frantz. “The Negro and Language.” Essay. In The Fanon Reader, edited by Azzedine Haddour. London: Pluto Press, 2006.

Immortal Technique. Caught in the Hustle. Stronghold - Mixtape Vol. 2. Viper Records. Accessed 2021. https://music.apple.com/us/album/stronghold-mixtape-vol-2/140783554.

Immortal Technique. Internally Bleeding. Revolutionary, Vol. 2. Viper Records, 2003. https:// music.apple.com/us/album/revolutionary-vol-2/554912764.

Jay Z. Dope Man. Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter. Roc-a-fella Records, 1999. https://music. apple.com/us/album/vol-3-life-and-times-of-s-carter/1440912389.

Scru Face Jean. Homicide Scru’d Up. Homicide Scru’d Up - Single. Scru Society. Accessed 2021. https://music.apple.com/us/album/homicide-scrud-up-single/1462585548.

Scru Face Jean. Collapse. Slime Shady. Scru Society, 2019. https://music.apple.com/us/album/ slime-shady/1497175544.

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Does It Compute? A Discussion of Cyborg Art

By Caroline DeFrias Edited by Isabel Teramura

Donna Haraway, feminist scholar and historian of science and technology, puts forth a cyborgean philosophy as a new mythology to (re)code our collective consciousness. Her philosophy predicates itself on the fundamental assumption that communication is an act of translation. Haraway understands knowledge as the product of this transmission of information imparted by the lense given by one’s particular situatedness. The creation is, after all, the instantiation of the creator. Indeed, for Haraway mythologies mediate our ways of seeing, populating the phenomena one encounters. The inexplicable nature of the universe is a negotiation—one which is often subsumed when agreement is found. The rhetorical construction of knowledge is such that its constituents—signifier and signified—are often made invisible, enveloped into the constructed object or symbol. What was once a dialogue—namely the creation of a subject through the active (re)construction of irreducible and fluid actants—became a monologue—the exchange of a petrified object. To put it simply: the subject, upon entering the social realm, is entrapped in an economy of linguistic practices for which it is not a decisive subjectivity—or, in other words, it is an object. Haraway’s task is the restoration of the subject through the elucidation of the deliberative process of knowledge production in her cyborgean philosophy. As a means of communication, the cyborgean artwork must follow this tête-à-tête construction. If the cyborg can be said to metamorphosize the symbol, illuminating it as participatory in the making of meaning with its constituent actants, then the cyborgean artwork must be an illumination of the process of artistic exchange.

The cyborg is an intersectional being; it is an affirmation of the particular and partial modalities, and so renounces assimilative practices. Haraway seeks to reconstitute what it means to be objective, not to merely abandon objectivity itself; cyborg philosophy seeks to recondition our proximity to “the object.” Haraway maintains that one’s perceptions are projections onto nature and seeks to reconstitute the nature of this relationship. Her cyborg embodies the mutual construction of this encounter, understanding this dialogue as a co-relational symbiosis instead of a static setting-upon. Haraway’s principle concern is the static, concrete and otherwise unyielding polarities, such as private/public and nature/culture. Such dualisms, she argues, leaves one vulnerable for appropriation, chiefly reduction to either polarity. Instead, the cyborg seeks a delicate assertion that it is neither one nor the other, but both and neither. Somewhere between distance and intimacy, Haraway refuses universal, totalizing constitutions.

Translation is the operative word to describe the process of the cyborg—specifically as a kind of tête-à-tête, or malleable exchange. Haraway predicates the cyborg in actants: acting and reacting components expressive and meaningful in their relation to one another. The cyborgean translation is one that aligns towards resonance instead of transmitting an essentialized exchange. There is no determined configuration of or for the subject—Haraway writes: “the relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world.”1 The cyborg does not hold a claim to anything but partialities; it is “not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”2 Cyborg art, then, does 1 Donna Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto”, pp. 2.

2 Donna Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto”, pp. 3.

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not breach the boundaries of the subject and sacrifice it into a kind of palatable, transcendent objecthood, but rather champions the fluid, particular situatedness which constitutes the subject.

Haraway, through her cyborg, champions immanence over transcendence. The precarity of the cyborg is precisely the point.

Following Haraway’s linguistic practices, this paper will put terms such as art, artist, and viewer in italics to indicate that these words, as certain kinds of determined or universal beings, do not exist. Within the consideration of cyborg art it is necessary to engage the terms at play, to call attention to the ways of seeing that permeate our systems of reference and language of investigation. By italicizing these terms, this paper seeks to illuminate the distance between the subject in question and the ways in which one intuits its meaning.

If art can be said to be an attempt at an ephemeral exchange, then cyborg art seeks to illuminate the construction of said exchange. Following Haraway, cyborg art predicates itself on the translation of meaning as an assemblage, not an essentialized equivalency. Accordingly, it is neither determinant nor fixed, but is rather a coalescence of irreducible and ever-changing integral actants which make and remake the work in a unending spiral dance; as Haraway writes the cyborg, and thus its artwork attempts “the confusing task of making partial, real connections.”3 The cyborg is a way of being inherently resistant to abstraction, and instead firmly sits within fragmentary particularities. The cyborg and its art is in this way paradoxical: the nature of cyborg art must be concrete in its resistance to concretization. Haraway describes the cyborg as an ironic being, and as such its art must be also. Cyborg art is unyieldingly situated within changeability—a work of art which seeks to challenge one’s way of interacting with it as an object. As such, the pieces seek to honour the reality of the situation—namely the tacit objecthood of being an artwork, while simultaneously contributing sympoiesis perspective—asserting itself as a subject, which begets notions of compromise or agreement among multiple parties. Cyborg art is conversational and contingent, embodying Haraway’s call for situatedness: to operate through partialities which are in themselves co-constituents of the pieces, or the phenomena one encounters. Cyborg art allows for the cognizance of the dialogue which is its own creation, or as Haraway writes: the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living a vision of the means of living within limits and contradictions—of views from somewhere.

Cyborg art possesses a post-ontological formation that elucidatesthe postmodern fragmentation beyond static partiality and into fluid recognification; it spotlights what is living and where, foregrounding the particularities of identity as they exist in the world. The cyborg does not focus on fragmentation, or isolating its components, but is rather interested in how these particularities and partialities are constituents of the exchange—within the realm of art it is not the varying media or symbolic depictions of interest on their own, but rather how they are in dialogue to make the artwork. The aesthetics of the cyborg dissents from traditional ways of seeing art, seeking to collapse absolute exchange through staticized art objects. If it can be said that one creates art as an object to be seen, then the cyborg partakes in art as a subject of encounter.

Following this wonderfully blasphemous and disruptive means of expressive heresy, one encounters the works of Mickalene Thomas and Félix González-Torres—both of whom are contemporary artists who make kaleidoscopic pieces about their intersectional identities4 3 Donna Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto”, pp. 10 (emphasis added).

4 Artists Mickalene Thomas and Félix González-Torres are both queer and racialized artists, centering their works on their situated experiences.

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which implicate the audience directly by and through the making of their works. Thomas and González-Torres seek to foster a deeper engagement in the experience of meaning making through the construction of works which seek to dismantle the binaries implicit within art institutions, such as object/subject, self/other, artist/viewer, signifier/signified, “art”/”non-art”, etc. The explicitly fragmentary nature of Thomas and González-Torres’ oeuvres break down what Haraway describes as “seductions to organic wholeness,”5 or appropriation into convenient, essentializing categorizations. Indeed, partiality can be understood as a kind of necessary withholding that protects the sublime from external consumption. Visible, or explicit, fragmentation marks a piece as particular and subjective—making explicit its assemblage through one’s encounters with it; cyborg aesthetics are far too slippery for binary-oppositional cages. Instead, Thomas and González-Torres are iconoclastic by way of bedazzlement—re-presenting symbols of identity by adorning them into the process of meaning-making. Thomas and González-Torres’ respective oeuvres set upon the viewer, implicating them into the creation of their pieces.

Their works exist within an irrevocably fluid and communicative dialogue of meaning making (and remaking), and therefore reject notions of a translatory exchange of communication. Within cyborgean philosophy the artist is beyond present; they are operative—and importantly so is the viewer.

Central to Mickalene Thomas’ works is the process of assemblage and reconstruction.

Her art hinges on her intersecting identity as a queer black femme, pouring forth in a diverse media including video, installation, reflective mirror, silkscreen, oil and acrylic paint, enamel, rhinestones, fabric and furniture. Thomas’ works are hybriditic—a constant and inseparable amalgamation of references, materials, and encounter with the viewer. She seeks not to essentialize her works within a particular boundary; instead Thomas’ works oscillate among various particularities, determined to be without resolution. Her use of transitory and reflective materials is characteristic of cyborgean philosophy: the viewer is co-constituent in the creation of the artwork—the encounter makes the piece. Rather than bringing forth a formal stringency, Thomas’s fluid visual language speaks to a resonance through distinctive partiality, answering Haraway’s cyborgean call for an “embodied nature of all vision.”6 Cyborg art exists in the nexus of artwork, artist, and viewer; Thomas’ works are existentially dislocated, created when populated with relationality.

Thomas’ Je T’aime Deux is exemplary of this cyborgean disposition; the piece exists playfully in the intersection of viewer, artist and artwork. Je T’aime Deux comprises black and white four-screen projection, mixing intimate and erotic scenes which show the artist and her lover. The piece never depicts the same sequence of shots, varying with each encounter. Je T’aime Deux is not determined, but rather constantly made and remade in every occurrence of convergence of viewer, artwork and artist. This embodies Haraways definition of translation, which she describes as “always interpretive, critical, and partial. Here is a ground for conversation, rationality, and objectivity—which is a power-sensitive, not pluralist, “conversation.”7 Haraway seeks a translation predicated on resonance, instead of essentialization—a negotiated communication. Je T’aime Deux demandes its recognition in this tête-à-tête of meaning-making. The artwork is operative in its own construction alongside the viewer.

Je T’aime Deux relies on “conventional clichés—extended shots of crossed legs, stilettos and an arched back and lingerie-laced behind”8 as a means of provoking questions about the 5 Donna Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto”, pp. 2.

6 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”, pp. 581.

7 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”, pp. 589.

8 Glessing, Jill. “Mickalene Thomas.” Border Crossings (May 2019).

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notion of the gaze and situated perspectives. Thomas highlights the ways in which the viewer translates the meanings of these images by constantly shifting their placement and context among other images. It is not simply that one witnesses a recorded event, but rather that one’s encounter makes the piece; there is no possession, only simultaneous creation and destruction.

Je T’aime Deux is dynamic, constantly re-representing itself in a dialogue with the viewer. The piece co-constitutes varying resonances with the viewer; cyborg art is in the process of creation rather than a created object.

The works of Félix González-Torres question the presumptive legibility of the artwork; his works subert the categorization of the artwork as something apart from the viewer.

González-Torres’ oeuvre centre his personal experiences as a gay hispanic man during the 1980’s AIDS crisis, manifesting in installations of “the mundane material of everyday life,”9 such as stationary clocks, candies, and lightbulbs. This usage of commonplace media brings forth the artistic process directly to the viewer, carefully dismantling the boundaries between the realms of art and life. Indeed, despite the intense emotional specificity of his work, as well as the references and in jokes typical of art,10 González-Torres takes care to implicate his viewer in the creation of these encounters. It is not simply that his works are to be read as a determined meaning or aesthetic, neatly fitting within an art historical canon of fixed pieces, but rather González-Torres’ works are an incitement towards resonance with the emotions and events referenced. His oeuvre exists within the translation, not the essentialized exchange with a determined message or outcome—echoing Haraway’s call that “one must not think in terms of essential properties.”11 Instead, the creation consists precisely of the dialogue between viewer, artist and artwork—the constant and inseparable amalgamation of fragmentations to form the encounter.

González-Torres’ Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is visually unsettled; it exists as both beautifully simple and uncomfortably complex. The sculpture is an active metaphor for the death of the artist’s partner, Ross Laycock. Initially, the piece’s narrative appears to be quite simple: González-Torres instructs that brightly coloured candy be piled on the floor of galleries, in the ideal weight of 175 lbs, and encourages viewers to take a piece. Beyond this playful gesture towards the consumptive practices of encountering art, González-Torres does something quite radical: he stipulates that this pile should be continuously replenished, thus granting it perpetuity. Through this specification González-Torres removes nostalgia, attempting to destroy the linear mythology that threatens to subsume the piece. Portrait of Ross in L.A. is constantly changing, simultaneously in a state of being and becoming, of “both building and destroying.”12 It is a unity of multiplicity—and as such destabilizes that ostensible binary. There is no nostalgia, no organic wholeness of higher unity piece or its meaning can be appropriated to. González-Torres proposes an active deterioration, but one to which the work itself does not yield—instead, locating within it the work’s very constitution. The unsettled piece refuses the imposition of a palatable paralysis—rejecting its supplantation into a mythical wholeness.

Portrait of Ross in L.A. possesses a sharp emotional poignancy; the viewer tangibly participates in the deterioration of Laycock, González-Torres’ partner, as an ostensibly organ9 “Gonzalez-Torres Paintings, Bio, Ideas,” The Art Story (April 24, 2017): https://www.theartstory.org/artist/ gonzalez-torres-felix/ 10 Gonzalez-Torres’ works clearly demonstrate a lineage with art historical canons, especially other common objects or “readymade” artworks and artists like Marcel DuChamp and other Dadaists. Indeed, the cyborg can be seen as closely related to Dadaism.

11 Donna Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto”, pp. 12.

12 Donna Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto”, pp. 28.

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ic whole preserved absolutely in the work of art. The piece challenges viewers to understand their role in the creative process, illuminating their constructive role within the (re)making of the work. The cyborg seeks to distill the eternal from the transitory—utilizing the specific, the partial, the fragmented to speak to the process of encounter as the site of meaning making, and importantly meaning re-making. Portrait of Ross in L.A. sets upon the viewer, removing “the suspicion that an “object” of knowledge is a passive and inert thing.”13 Rather, the piece declares itself and its viewer as operative in an elliptical tête-à-tête, which (re)constitutes Portrait of Ross in L.A; cyborg art in general is this process of construction.

Lacking from this discussion of cyborg art thus far is the problematic reality of tacit knowledge, the unexamined assumptions undergirding one’s way of seeing. The cyborg is a contingent being—it is irrevocably relational. As such, the cyborg depends upon a delicate coalescence of irreducible and changing constitutive actants, facilitating the spiral dance of its construction and reconstruction. Accordingly, cyborg art hinges on related situatedness—contingent upon a fragile kind of internal integrity of an intersectional active dialogue between artist, viewer, and artwork. Tacit knowledge directly challenges this fundamental principle; mythologies have the potential to dismantle the cyborg. The existential interdependency the cyborg necessitates of its artwork is its greatest weakness, precisely because it requires the full cooperation of all of its constituents which dominant mythologies14 ostensibly challenge. Ironically, the very systems and structures of art the cyborg seeks to challenge are precisely located in the cyborg art’s foible. The work is completely undone when one of its constituents, namely the viewer, refuses the agency or participation of the other actants.

To understand this complication further, one should turn to Linda Zerilli’s text “Doing without Knowing: Feminism’s Politics of the Ordinary.” She argues that “certain epistemic commitments have come to define discussions,”15 which is to say that our ways of seeing overrides that which exists. It matters not that Mickalene Thomas and Félix González-Torres intend to make cyborg art, or even that they succeed in creating it, if their viewer does not see and accept this reality. The cyborg piece is contingent upon the fluidity of the encounter, or willingness partake in a communicative translation, which Zerilli identifies as antithetical to the premise of sight, which makes the subject a foregone conclusion through the mythology under which one operates, or sees. Following Ludwid Wittgenstein, Zerilli argues that “grammar constitutes our form of representation, lay[ing] down what counts as an intelligible description of reality, and is hence not subject to empirical refutation.”16 One’s mythology is not something cognized, or choosen. The certainty one possesses about the world predicates itself on what Zerilli calls, again following Wittgenstein, ‘hinge propositions’—propositions about which one can be certain, but do not correspond to knowledge. It is without thinking that one encounters the world, taking certain fields of ‘truths’ for granted—seeing the subject of cyborg art as an object. Zerilli argues that one does not experience one’s hinge propositions reflexivity, as an object of cognition, but rather acts them out; she writes: What is at issue in grammar is not a metaphysical given but our form of representation that sets limits to what it makes sense to say and that is held in place—I do not say justified—not through grand theories but small acts: daily, habitual practices of speaking, 13 Donna Harraway, “Situated Knowledges”, pp. 591 14 I am speaking here of essentialized, “objective” views from nowhere which canonically dominate Western ways of seeing. Reference to Francis Bacon, and other old fuddy-duddies of this sort of scientific method.

15 Linda M. G. Zerilli, “Doing without Knowing: Feminism’s Politics of the Ordinary.” Political Theory 26, no. 4 (1998): pp. 437.

16 Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford, OX, UK: Blackwell Reference, 1996), pp. 153.

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acting, and judging.17

Indeed, mythologies possess their own desires which exceed one’s control or even conscious thought; one has neither charge nor illusion of choice over the world they encounter. By virtue of the encounter, one assimilates the subject. This consumption is the crucial jeopardy for the cyborg: if one does not engage with reality unmediated, or even passionately commit to their mediations, what hope is there for the cyborg, let alone their art?

The incommensurability, or impossibility, of cyborg art orbits within grammar, or mythology. This is a problem of how one encounters the cyborg—specifically its treatment as the product of knowledge instead of action. Haraway describes the cyborg as “not just [linguistic] deconstruction, but liminal transformation.”18 It means not to find a new word or language, to critique the existing structures, but rather to change the ways in which one communicates, or simply to transform the act of translation—Haraway writes: “this [the cyborg] is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia.”19 Cyborg art, then, seeks not to find a place within the existing grammer, or encounter of art, but rather is a radically different mode of encounter. It refuses what Zerilli describes as “the metaphysical lure of the verb “to be,” or simply the cyborg seeks to put “the conditions of predication themselves into question.”20 Cyborg art is the action of questioning the translation practices of artwork. It is communicative resistance—the refusal to appropriate the sublime into palatable objecthood. Cyborg art is not simply an argument against essentialization, but the practice of intersectional, expressive dialogue. The cyborg is “not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility,”21 but rather “turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment.”22 Cyborg art is an action, not an object.

Ideological immersion saturates the encounter, such that one is unable to countenance its effects even when cyborgs and their artworks may be communicating such efforts. There is no site of unmediated knowledge, all is negotiated and translated. The cyborg is a prompt for a new mythology, one which seeks to metamorphosize the object into a constitutive subject within the exchange. It is not a question of access, but rather a challenge of the very notion of ingression upon the subject. Haraway challenges the notion of an absolute, essential sign and encourages one to partake in a communicative exchange. As Zerilli writes, “we can break the spell of this picture [of essentialized, static objects] but only if we acknowledge that to make a claim is to speak for someone and to someone.”23 Cyborg art is cognizance of the translation implicit to art.

To put it simply, it is less a motif and more a way of being.

17 Linda Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing”, pp. 442.

18 Donna Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto”, pp.24.

19 Donna Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto”, pp. 28 (emphasis added).

20 Linda Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing”, pp. 442.

21 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”, pp. 583.

22 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”, pp. 581.

23 Linda Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing”, pp. 455.

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Bibliography Glessing, Jill. “Mickalene Thomas.” Border Crossings, May 2019. https://bordercrossingsmag. com/article/mickalene-thomas Glock, Hans-Johann. A Wittgenstein Dictionary. Oxford, OX, UK: Blackwell Reference, 1996.

González-Torres, Félix. Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), candies individually wrapped inmulti colored cellophane, endless supply, 1991, dimensions vary with installation; ideal weight 175 lbs.

“Gonzalez-Torres Paintings, Bio, Ideas.” The Art Story, April 24, 2017. https://www.theartstory. org/artist/gonzalez-torres-felix/.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in theLate Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, pp. 149-181.* New York, NY: Routledge, 1991.

Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): pp. 575-99.

Thomas, Mickalene. Je T’aime Deux, four-screen projection, 2014.

Zerilli, Linda M. G. “Doing without Knowing: Feminism’s Politics of the Ordinary.” PoliticalTheory 26, no. 4 (1998): pp. 435-58.

* Document was an isolation of “Cyborg Manifesto” and had its pages numbered in addition to providing the original page numbers from the original text. My paper used the document’s pagination and not the original text.

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Mickey Mouse, Hero of Modernity: Walter Benjamin on Animation, Allegory, and Cartoon Logic

By Robbie Dryer Edited by Isabel Teramura Introduction: Walter Benjamin and Disney

In a 1931 piece of fragmentary writing, Walter Benjamin declares of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse shorts: “In these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilization”1.

This cryptic statement is part of the sparse extant writing from Benjamin on Mickey Mouse, consisting of the aforementioned fragment and passing mentions in key works. However, these collected statements make clear Benjamin’s fascination with the popular character. By applying the theoretical framework of his other writings, we can begin to see why Mickey Mouse may have intrigued and delighted Benjamin so thoroughly. Viewed through the lense of his aesthetic theory of film, animation has a powerful potential to take up the true form of these new technologies. Moreover, by looking for recourse to the figure of Mickey Mouse specifically throughout Benjamin’s work, we can see how the conception of modern heroism, the blurring of nature and technology, and the role that new technologies can play in resisting forces of myth and fascism, all play into the philosopher’s admiration for the cartoon mouse. Viewed in sum, we can begin to piece together a Benjaminian understanding wherein Mickey Mouse emerges as a proper hero for modernity.

Shock Experience and Technological Reproducibility

One of the key distinctions Benjamin draws between modernity and the pre-industrial age is two contrasting forms of experience. Benjamin identifies everything before modernity with Erfahrung, or long experience, wherein “lessons in experience were passed on… either as threats or as kindly pieces of advice… Moreover, everyone knew precisely what experience was: older people had always passed it on to young ones”2. Long experience is made possible through the historical continuity of conditions, so that received wisdom and a connected tradition define one’s experience of the world. In modernity, this is no longer possible, and we thus live in shock experience, or Chockerlebnis, wherein we are disconnected from tradition and experience life as “the process of continually starting all over again”3. Shock experience is life experienced as disjointed, unrelated events. In the constantly new, discontinuous world of modernity there is no value for, or connection to, received wisdom and past experience. This, for Benjamin, characterizes life in modern capitalism. Benjamin’s fascination with film stems from its status as an art form and technology belonging wholly to the era of shock experience. Film is a truly mass entertainment with the capacity to acclimate its viewers to the radically new. He writes, “nowhere more than in cinema are the reactions of individuals, which together make 1 Walter Benjamin, “Mickey Mouse,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 338.

2 Walter Benjamin, “Poverty and Experience,” in Selected Writings Vol. 2 1927-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 731.

3 Walter Benjamin, “Some Motifs on Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 195.

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up the massive reaction of the audience, determined by the imminent concentration of reactions into a mass”4. Not only is film widely accessible, but modern audiences also easily understand the new visual language of film, an entire new mode of perception. Film perfectly encapsulates the modern relationship towards art, where technological reproducibility allows the work to “meet the recipient halfway, whether in the form of the photograph or in that of the gramophone record. The cathedral leaves its site to be received in the… private room”5. In long experience, art was distant and retained its auratic quality; whether in a church or a gallery, to see art, one had to seek it out. In the modern age of technological reproducibility, this distance is destroyed.

Rather, art presses against us, encouraging identification. As Benjamin writes: “a person who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it… By contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves”6. It is this closeness of film that allows it to be an art form that reflects the experience of its audience.

The very technological form of film perfectly suits the fleeting nature of shock experience: “reception by distraction… finds in film its true training ground. Film, by virtue of its shock effects, is predisposed to this form of reception”7. Every frame of a film is a distinct entity. Despite the appearance of continuity, it is a sequence of independent, separately recorded images. Animation captures this ‘shock’ quality of film at its fullest potential. Every cell of an animated film is an individually crafted artwork, drawn entirely separately from the rest. It is the wholly new nature of every animated frame that allows animation to achieve anything in film. Animation reveals the shock nature of film, seizing it to break all rules and conventions of normalcy. This reflects the full potential of shock experience and the release from tradition.

Technological reproduction, as realized in film, is no less than the “liquidation of the value of tradition in cultural heritage”8. For Benjamin, the future belongs to those willing to take up this new barbarism9, the freedom of those unburdened by the long weight of civilization.

Modern Heroism and New Barbarism

Turning from animation to the figure of Mickey Mouse specifically, we can see how Mickey emerges for Benjamin as an identifiable hero of this new, immediate art form. Benjamin’s writing on heroism delineates a new understanding of the figure of the hero in modernity.

In his work on the French poet Charles Baudelaire, he writes, “the hero is the true subject of la modernité. In other words, it takes a historic constitution to live modernity”10. It takes a hero to endure modernity’s imposition on the individual, and this endurance defines Mickey Mouse’s heroism. Mickey, in the classic Disney shorts, is a mischievous figure, never an aggressor.

Rather, he responds to external forces, often in the form of an authority figure, that impede upon him. The very notion of the hero has to be radically recast in the modern age. The classical notion of the hero is bound up in the tradition of heroism, and is thus impossible in a world without long experience. Shock experience destroys stable identities, thus the hero in the modern era cannot be a fixed person: “the modern hero is no hero; he is a portrayer of heroes. Heroic 4 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 36.

5 Ibid., p. 22.

6 Ibid., p. 40.

7 Ibid., p. 41.

8 Ibid., p. 22.

9 Benjamin, “Poverty and Experience”, p. 735.

10 Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 103 50

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modernity turns out to be a Trauerspiel [tragic drama] in which the hero’s part is available”11.

We see this in Chaplin, whose tramp persona finds himself in a different situation in every film.

Likewise, Mickey Mouse is a more extreme portrayer of heroes. In different shorts, Mickey takes on different roles, jobs, and even names: a sailor in one film, and then a pilot in the next.

This is reflected in the fact that every short is discontinuous, as no new challenge can be helped by the lessons of an old one. Without received wisdom, there can be no ‘hero’s journey’. This is what Benjamin means when he writes that “The route taken by a file in an office is more like that of Mickey Mouse than that taken by a marathon runner”.12 Without the connections of long experience, Mickey’s journey cannot be one from a set beginning to a set end. Mickey emerges as a hero precisely because his self is unfixed; freed from continuity, he can meet every disjointed challenge as the right kind of hero.

As a modern hero, Mickey’s heroism manifests as the overthrow of old orders. Much of this is embodied in the fact that Mickey Mouse is, in fact, a mouse. Yet, he is still the everyman hero of modernity, thus “the explanation for the popularity of these [Mickey Mouse] films is… the fact that the public recognizes its own life in them”13. As film encourages us to identify our lives with what we see on the screen, one of the most powerful things film can do is defamiliarize our own lives, as “the representation of human beings by means of an apparatus [i.e. film] has made possible a highly productive use of the human being’s self-alienation”14. Through this, film can spur people to question their own conditions and view them critically, rather than accept them as given. Mickey is a powerful figure of defamiliarization, as audiences see the experience of the modern human reflected in a non-human entity. Through this identification, Mickey “disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind”.15 Moreover, Mickey is not only not a human, but not real. The films never encourage the viewers to accept that Mickey is not just a drawing, rather our own lives are reflected in the figure which we know to be just a drawing.

A key factor in the death of traditional heroism is the rise of advanced mechanized warfare, as “the new warfare of technology and material… dispenses with all the wretched emblems of heroism”16. Play becomes important for Benjamin as it arises as the new site of heroic exploits. The form of film becomes ideal for this as “the space for play is widest in film, in film, the element of semblance has been entirely displaced by the element of play”17. Mickey, the mischievous hero of modernity, is fundamentally a figure of play. The animated hero is emblematic of play-fighting, as Mickey Mouse can suffer any blow without being harmed in any lasting way. A crucial aspect of play is the improvisatory nature of play, and Mickey’s actions are never calculated, rather he takes up what is around him. Through this taking up of what is around him as it appears to him, Mickey disregards any stable meaning and blends meaningful distinctions.

One of the significant separations being destroyed here for Benjamin here is a distinction between technology and nature: [The wonders of technology] appear… to have been improvised out of the body of Mickey Mouse, out of his supporters and persecutors, and out of the most ordinary pieces of furniture, as well as from trees, clouds, and the sea. Nature and technology, primi11 Ibid., p. 125 12 Benjamin, “Mickey Mouse”, p. 338 13 Ibid., p. 338.

14 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, p. 32.

15 Benjamin, “Mickey Mouse”, p. 338.

16 Benjamin, Walter “Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior, Edited by Ernst Jünger.” New German Critique, no. 17 (1979). p. 121.

17 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, p. 49.

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tiveness and comfort, have completely merged18 For example, Mickey takes up other animals to use them as instruments19. In other cases, he inserts animals as parts into the machinery. Thus, in the cartoon world of Mickey Mouse, nature and technology are completely interchangeable, and the body becomes a technology. This serves as a deeply defamiliarized representation of the worker’s alienation and mechanization within the scope of industrial mass production. Moreover, it reflects the total mechanization of warfare, as represented in “Plane Crazy”20. All this reaches its peak as in Mickey’s world, the body is not a stable unit. Rather, “it is possible to have one’s own arm, even one’s own body, stolen”21. The mechanization of the worker meets its logical conclusion as Mickey, or any other creature, can be reduced to spare parts.

Allegory, Fairy Tales, and Cartoon Logic

This rejection of stable meaning is given further significance in relation to the Benjaminian categories of allegory and symbol. For Benjamin, symbols are suspect. In symbolism, the signifier and what is signified flow into each other without distinction, and this unity creates meaning as semblance22, a persistent, singular totalizing meaning. Allegory differs from this importantly as “that which the allegorical intention has fixed upon is sundered from the customary contexts of life: it as at once shattered and preserved”23. In taking up images out of their contexts as they flash up, allegory never collapses the sign into the meaning. Thus, allegory is a disruptive process which disfigures fragmentary images without attempting to impose stable meaning on to them. For Benjamin, symbolism is linguistic, whereas allegory is imagistic; hence the great allegorical potential of film, which is entirely without semblance24. We see this reflected in the films of Mickey Mouse as discussed above: Mickey’s improvisatory play consists in the taking up of images, then discarding them. When Mickey is done cranking an animal’s tail to hear “Turkey in the Straw”, he moves on to the next thing and the correlation is done.25 A goat may be used as a phonograph, but it never is a phonograph. When meanings are not stable or lasting, it gestures to the true nature of shock experience. And in the imagistic, cartoon world of Mickey Mouse everything appears as allegory, a flashing up of a sign that is over as fast as it has begun, with no reason to give pause before he moves on to seize up the next image. Allegory is profane26 and it is this allegorical debasement which allows for Mickey’s transgression of norms and hierarchies. Through this Mickey is able to avoid symbolism and shatter semblance.

In this rejection of symbolism, we can identify Mickey with a resistance to mythic totality. Benjamin identifies myth with fascism. Myth thrives through the symbol, using the appearance of stable meaning to enforce the past beyond the time of long experience. The power of myth is in its unified semblance. Mickey’s improvisatory play in allegory shatters semblance, and Mickey’s disjointed adventures often take the shape of familiar stories, archetypes, and fables, which he moves through with abandon. Benjamin compares Mickey Mouse to the 18 Benjamin, “Poverty and Experience”, p. 735.

19 Steamboat Willie (Walt Disney Studios, 1928).

20 Plane Crazy (Walt Disney Studios, 1929).

21 Benjamin, “Mickey Mouse”, p. 338.

22 Walter Benjamin, “The Antinomies of Allegorical Exegesis” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 176.

23 Walter Benjamin, “Central Park” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 143.

24 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, p. 49.

25 Steamboat Willie (Walt Disney Studios, 1928).

26 Walter Benjamin, “The Antinomies of Allegorical Exegesis”, p. 176.

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archetypal Brothers Grimm story, writing “all Mickey Mouse films are founded on the motif of leaving home in order to learn what fear is”27. Additionally, in their resistance to myth, Benjamin identifies the shorts with fairy tales, as “not since fairy tales have the most important and most vital events been evoked more unsymbolically and more unatmospherically”28. The structure of the Mickey Mouse films resemble fairy tales in their lack of symbolism and resistance to semblance.

For more of Benjamin’s thinking on fairy tales and myth, we can turn to his essay “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death”. In this work, Benjamin draws out how fairy tales shatter mythic power, writing “reason and cunning have inserted tricks into myths; their forces cease to be invincible. Fairy tales are the traditional stories about victory over these forces”29. He turns to Kafka’s retelling of the story of Ulysses and the Sirens, wherein Ulysses’ methods should not work, and Ulysses himself knows this30. Benjamin uses this to draw out how, in Kafkas’s words, “inadequate, even childish measures may serve to rescue one from peril”31. The totalizing semblance of myth is broken when fairy tales break the inescapable logic of the mythic. To break this cycle requires solutions that should not work and do not make sense; it is knowing this, and pursuing the actions regardless that breaks through semblance.

The logic of symbolism is therefore resisted by a different fairy-tale logic, an unstable logic of inconsistent usefulness. This is similar to what we might call ‘cartoon logic’, and we can see how these animated shorts function as fairy tales in the Benjaminian model. In seizing up allegory as it presents itself, Mickey’s solutions do not need to make sense in a larger whole. In the classic example of cartoon logic, gravity only comes into effect when one looks down and sees that they have walked off the cliff. Refuse to notice it, and the cartoon figure can make it to the other side. Mickey’s use of allegory breaks through the mythic structures by simply refusing to accept its terms.

Conclusion: Mouse, Barbarian, Hero

Benjamin’s fascination with the figure of Mickey Mouse draws together numerous strains in his thought on the new world of modern capitalism. Through the new medium of film, we are met with a figure who embodies Benjamin’s understanding of the modern hero. Mickey Mouse, the demented reflection of the self, in his wild abandon and cartoon logic, model for audiences’ resistance to the totalizing forces of myth, semblance, and symbol. In his total abandonment of long experience, we see Mickey as the emblem of our new barbarism. For Benjamin, Mickey thus emerges as the perfect representation of how resistance to fascism can only be achieved by facing up to and embracing the impermanent new world of shock experience. These films can spur the masses to collective laughter, for “Disney films trigger a therapeutic release of unconscious energies”32. As we face the alienated representation of our society’s own cruelties with our laughter, it may sound cruel and sadistic, but Benjamin assures us not to worry: “In its buildings, pictures, and stories, mankind is preparing to outlive culture, if need be. And the main thing is that it does so with a laugh. This laughter may occasionally sound barbaric. Well and good.”33 27 Benjamin, “Mickey Mouse”, p. 338.

28 Ibid., p. 338.

29 Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969). p. 117.

30 Ibid., p. 118.

31 Franz Kafka, “”The Silence of the Sirens”,” trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir. p. 430.

32 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, p. 38.

33 Benjamin, “Poverty and Experience”, p. 735.

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Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. “The Antinomies of Allegorical Exegesis” In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, 175-179. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

---. “Central Park” In The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, edited by Michael W. Jennings, 134-169. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

---. “Franz Kafka On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death.” Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. In Illuminations, 111-140. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

---. “Mickey Mouse.” In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, 338. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

---. “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” In The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, edited by Michael W. Jennings, 46-133. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

---. “Poverty and Experience.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2 1927-1934, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, translated by Rodney Livingstone, 731–36. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

---. “Some Motifs on Baudelaire.” In The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, edited by Michael W. Jennings, 170–212. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

---. “Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior, Edited by Ernst Jünger.” New German Critique, no. 17 (1979): 120-28. Accessed April 28, 2020. doi:10.2307/488013.

---. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, 19-55. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Disney, Walt and Ub Iwerks. Steamboat Willie. Walt Disney Studios, 1928.

---. Plane Crazy. Walt Disney Studios, 1929.

Kafka, Franz. “The Silence of the Sirens.” Translated by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir.

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Fragmentary Totality: Love, Thought, and Community in JeanLuc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community

By Cole DeJager Edited by Neyve Summerville

Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “Shattered Love” in The Inoperative Community, opens up the question of thinking of love as philosophy—which is also a thinking of philosophy as love—in order to rethink community as the laying bare of our ontological1 situation. To put this differently, Nancy wants to get outside of an immanentist thinking of community that necessarily excludes; and instead, think of community as our ontological state of always already being exposed to one another. It is the proximity or a touching of singular beings without confusion or blending—the being-singular-plural of the social. Nancy rethinks the political as the social. The social is simply our Being or existence, as mitsein—being-with. Nancy states this: “Our being-with, as a being-many, is not at all accidental, and it is in no way the secondary and random dispersion of a primordial essence. It forms the proper and necessary status and consistency of originary alterity as such. The plurality of beings is at the foundations [fondment] of Being”.2 The meaning of community is not its foundation that gives relation, rather it is between each singular being—it is relationality as such. In contrast to Nancy’s conception of community as the social, the occidental tradition understands community as the political essence of an original immanence that has been lost and is in need of recovery; or as the irrational and dark force of disorder that is subverted within the rational operativity of modern society. The community as the political is understood as being invested with immanence or inherent meaning; this is why the tradition “displays a longing for a lost ‘original community’”.3 This longing (nostalgia) for an original community inevitably leads to a thinking of community that is closed or unified by a common-shared essence—nationalism, totalitarianism, or immanentism. This is because a Western philosophical-political thinking of community always sees it as a political entity, rather than a property of Nancy’s ontological conception of the social—relationality or “communication”.4 Western philosophical-political thinking thus always seeks a foundation, a ‘ground’, or logos in order to gather individuals; in the modern world, this foundation is revealed as a creative act of myth-making or as Nancy says, “the will to (the) power of myth”.5 Nancy instead suggests a thinking of the experience of a lost community as the shattering of singular beings that always already gives each ‘singular’ being their relation to the other, rather than as the gathering of ‘individuals’ under the guise of a prelapsarian essence. He engages in a thinking of ‘loss’ and ‘lack’ as such; the ‘loss’ which characterizes our very being-in-the-world-together. He does this by thinking of love as the promise of fulfillment and completion, that is interrupted or broken by the experience of loss, shattering, and dispersal. To put this differently, love promises the Abso1 Following Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy is concerned with our being or existence in the world. They both seek to redo ‘first philosophy,’ which since Aristotle has been conceived of as metaphysics. In turn, they want to delve into the question concerning how we—as human beings—are in the world.

2 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. R.D. Richardson and A.E. O’Byrne, ed. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), 12.

3 Catherine Kellogg, “Love and Communism: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Shattered Community”, Law and Critique 16 (2005): 340.

4 Marie-Eve Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 76.

5 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 46.

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lute—immanence, (re)union, and return—but in actuality, love, as totality, has always already withdrawn from itself.

Nancy’s reading of Plato’s Symposium reveals the intimate interconnectivity between love and thought; philosophy’s birth and simultaneous ‘effacement’ occurs in its thinking of love—philosophy’s thinking of itself. For Nancy, “Philosophy never arrives at this thinking— that ‘thinking is love,’ even though it is inscribed at the head of its program, or as the general epigraph to all its treatises”.6 Nancy understands love as meaning qua meaning because it is what brings us up against the limit of ourselves and of our thought. Catherine Kellogg summarizes Nancy’s point about these limits and their relation to love: “Nancy says, we are broken by love; in love we find ourselves beyond ourselves, in excess to ourselves”.7 Meaning, as love, is the promise of immanence or wholeness that is broken at the moment of its inception.8 This shattering at the very moment of unification is what is meant by Nancy’s suggestion of a different thinking of community that takes the form of what he calls ‘being singular plural’. It is this notion that announces the laying bare of the social: meaning and community are right at; that is, they are between ‘us’, rather than thinking of these notions as the product of work, they must be understood as the ‘site’ or ‘place’ in which we are open to being-in-common. Love appears as the experience—for both the singular and the plural—that reveals our ontological condition.

In Nancy’s writing, the concepts love, meaning—philosophy or thought—and community dance around each other as fragments of the lost totality that each of them promises in their occidental definition. They all promise an immanence or wholeness and yet, in Nancy’s writing, they never reach the satisfactory definition that we expect. Nancy does not write philosophical treatises, because they require the kind of systematicity that is promised in a ‘concrete’ philosophy—one that provides a foundation or logos; and this requirement of systematicity and foundation is no longer possible for philosophy.9 Instead, Nancy writes and thinks—and necessarily continues to write and think—in fragments. Marie-Eve Morin notes that “What holds the fragments of Nancy’s thinking together is the thought of the ‘singular plural’ or of ‘being-with’ … In a sense, the ‘singular plural’ furnishes the ‘axiom’ of Nancy’s thought, from which everything else follows. Yet it is also this ‘axiom’ that undermines all attempts at finding ‘wholeness’ or ‘systematicity’ in his thought”.10 The singular plural is an ontological thinking that prompts us to think of the relation that each singularity has with other singularities; it is the bare-sociality of existence. To put this differently, it is the plurality of singularities that allows each singularity to identify itself at all. Nancy’s thinking is concerned with an anti-foundationalist understanding of the subject;11 it does not seek to ground identity or meaning in the subject itself. His anti-foundationalist thinking of the subject (the singular) is a mirror for his thinking of community (the plural). The immanence promised in the occidental tradition’s understanding of community is indefinitely deferred, it is not found in the community’s origin. It is his thinking of the singular plural that necessitates his anti-foundationalism. Nancy’s singular plural can be understood in terms of Jacques Derrida’s differance. Morin explains the connection between Nancy’s singular plural and Derrida’s differance: “Difference is the openness or spacing that first allows something like a self to identify itself. Since this ‘identification’ happens thanks to a ‘detour’ through an exteriority (a not-Self), pure self-identity or self-presence is indefinitely 6 Ibid., 86.

7 Catherine Kellogg, “Love and Communism: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Shattered Community”, 344.

8 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 1-2.

9 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, xv-xvi.

10 Marie-Eve Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy, 2.

11 Ibid., 7.

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deferred”.12 In other words, immanence is always late, it can never catch-up with what would have been a pure origin or re-union.

Nancy challenges the tradition’s demand for an immanentist thinking of community because the need for a ground always includes individuals who share in a common essence; which also means, by necessity of the inclusivity’s ‘closure’ within immanence, that other individuals who do not share in the common essence of foundation are excluded. He uses the word “‘immanentism’” to describe the exclusionary nature of the foundationalist thinking of community; he uses this word, rather than ‘“totalitarianism’”, in order to make it obvious that this logic of exclusion is not limited to “fragile juridical parapets”, but also encompasses “democracies”.13 Nancy states this in order to demonstrate the magnitude and pervasive scope of immanentist thinking, it pervades the whole of Western philosophical-political thinking. He attempts to think of a community without foundation—presuppositionless—and points in the direction of an ontological thinking of community with the singular plural as its eccentric-center point.

Nancy begins his critique of our contemporary situation by showing “us how communism and liberalism are two sides of the same logic.”14 Nancy begins his critique by “questioning the breakdown of community that supposedly engendered the modern era”.15 He questions the nostalgic character of modern political thinking that Rousseau apparently gave rise to.

Nancy shows how in Rousseau, modernity begins to think of “society” (Gesellschaft) as that which has experienced “the loss or degradation of a communitarian (and communicative) intimacy” (Gemeinschaft).16 This feeling of loss pervades our thoughts about community from the Romantics, through Hegel, all the way up to today. Although Nancy uses Rousseau as an example of this communitarian nostalgia, he states that “this consciousness … has accompanied the Western world from its very beginnings: at every moment in its history, the Occident has given itself over to the nostalgia of a more archaic community that has disappeared”.17 In other words, our cultural muthos becomes our political logos. For Nancy, this longing for a lost wholeness is a peculiarly Christian thought. He states that “the community desired or pined for by Rousseau, Schlegel, Hegel, then Bak-ouine, Marx, Wagner, or Mallarmé is understood as communion, and communion takes place, in its principle as in its ends, at the heart of the mystical body of Christ”.18 The desire for community as communion appears as a response to the secularized experience of modernity; namely, the withdrawal of the divine—absolute immanence. But in modernity there are also “those who do not mourn the loss of community, but welcome its disappearance in the birth of ‘society’”.19 These people privilege modern rational society because of its ability to separate individuals “on the basis of rational calculation and self-interest, and thus allows these separated individuals to live peacefully beside one another”.20 But this individualistic stance of rational or contractual understanding only subverts the need for immanence on a surface level. It separates us from one another in a sort of ‘operativity’ that accompanies advanced capitalism and its “dissociating association of forces, needs, and signs”.21 This standpoint is premised on the subversion of the dark and irrational forces of community; it is thus de12 Ibid., 29.

13 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 3.

14 Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy, 74.

15 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 9.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., 10.

18 Ibid.

19 Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy, 74.

20 Ibid.

21 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 11.

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pendent on the same immanentism that characterizes the romantic view. Morin states that “both sides conceive of community as an ideal of self-presence, intimacy, immediacy, and identity that has been lost in modern society”.22 Instead of siding with the romantic-nostalgic desire for a lost community or the privileging of modern rational society, Nancy thinks of the opposition between them in our contemporary situation as the symptom that reveals our ontological state of always already being-with-one-another in our singular plurality. Nancy states that “Society was not built on the ruins of a community. It emerged from the disappearance or the conservation of something—tribes or empires—perhaps just as unrelated to what we call ‘community’ as to what we call ‘society’. So that community, far from being what society has crushed or lost, is what happens to us—question, waiting, event, imperative—in the wake of society”.23 For Nancy, nothing is lost, ‘we’ have lost nothing. But just as Nancy will later say about the emergence of the subject or the singular being’s heart (which is nothing but the I): “the heart is not broken, in the sense that it does not exist before the break. But … It is: that I is broken and traversed by the other where its presence is most intimate and its life most open”.24 This mirrors Nancy’s thinking of community: it is the experience of loss itself that is the community; the loss or the break is what makes ‘us’. The loss of immanence disperses each of us as singular beings in our plurality and thus gives our relation—communication. The experience of loss unveils the inoperativity of society, as community; the experience itself interrupts the operativity of the modern rational society that conceals our singularity as individuality in a fragile contractual exchange.

Nancy exposes the experience that we feel in common: the loss or break of immanence and love that community promises.

The beginnings of the political as an immanentist project begins at the very inception of Western philosophy. It begins in Plato’s banishment of the Poets in The Republic. For in so doing, Plato relegates the muthos of the Homeric Poets to ‘fiction,’ or to our modern understanding of myth as a ‘narrative’; as Nancy states, “Homer’s muthos, that is, speech, spoken expression—becomes ‘myth’ when it takes on a whole series of values that amplify, fill, and ennoble this speech, giving it the dimensions of a narrative of origins and an explanation of destinies”.25 Thus Plato identifies muthos (original speech) with his political logos of the city—a ‘foundation’ in rationality or reason over mere ‘stories’ that appeal to human irrationality and emotion.26 In this move, at philosophy’s inauguration or birth, muthos and logos are no longer opposed, but “imply each other”.27 This is Plato’s noble lie: he sees the powerful capacity of myth (muthoi) as stories to move people and hence usurps for philosophy it in a double-move. This creates the veil of logos that creates a foundation which extends from Plato to the Romantics who expose the created origin of myth.28 But in the romantics there is a “reinvention of mythology”29 which also—like philosophy itself—arises out of the “consciousness of a lack of foundation”.30 At this point in his essay, Nancy makes a decisive move to attribute the “nostalgia for an original mything humanity” to modernity as a whole.31 It is here that the subject of humanity is broken; it is broken by the “extremeties” of myth making and the subsequent use of its power: the “Nazi 22 Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy, 75.

23 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 11.

24 Ibid., 99.

25 Ibid., 48.

26 Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (New York: Penguin Classics, 2007), 76; 345.

27 Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy, 89.

28 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 45-6.

29 Ibid.

30 Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy, 89.

31 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 46.

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myth”.32 The shattering effect of Nazism and its Aryan myth reveals to us the fact that “we no longer have anything to do with myth”.33 Nancy then asks if the knowledge of myth as mythic is enough to keep the threat of something like Nazism from emerging. He questions the standpoint of knowledge because it does not give us enough to interrupt mythic discourse—the need for a foundation. Nancy states that “whether one laments that mythic power is exhausted or that the will to this power ends in crimes against humanity, everything leads us to a world in which mythic resources are profoundly lacking”.34 The task becomes a serious thinking of a groundless ground, without turning the abyss into a foundation itself. Nancy states this: “To think our world in terms of this ‘lack’ might well be an indispensable task”.35 Interestingly, the beginning of philosophy inaugurates the problem of immanentism, but it also contains within it the experience of loss or lack as such. To think ‘loss’ itself is to experience the indefinite deferral of immanence. In turn, this opens us to the bare-sociality of our ontological state as being-singular-plural.

The wholeness and immanence that is promised in philosophy’s identification of muthos and logos is also promised in the occidental tradition’s definition of love; but it is in the thinking of the experience of love that philosophy is revealed to itself as primordially divorced from itself. Plato’s Symposium inaugurates thinking as such, it reveals the way in which the birth of philosophy in The Republic is possible at all. Nancy states that “the first philosopher expressly authenticated the identity of love and of philosophy. Plato’s Symposium does not represent a particular treatise that this author set aside for love at the heart of his work … But the Symposium signifies first that for Plato the exposition of philosophy, as such, is not possible without the presentation of philosophic love”.36 Nancy presents the Symposium as the inception of philosophy which appears to itself at its own limit—it announces the closure of philosophy in the same breath that opened it. This is what Nancy means when he says that “Thinking is love”, but concludes that philosophy “has never explicitly attested this”.37 Love, as pure immanence, cannot be in-itself; rather, it is always unto itself, in excess to itself, and thus slips away from itself. The thought of love withdraws love-itself from the place or space that it promises to fill.

The withdrawal of love is an interruption that always shifts its own foundation. Thinking is the heart of love and thus it cannot be present to itself in order to achieve rest or immanence. This structural impossibility is what propels thinking itself, it is restless. This is why love and thinking are always in-the-balance.38

Love is the promise without guarantee that exposes the singular being to the other.

Nancy explains this in relation to the singular being’s act of love; he says that, in love, “I can no longer, whatever presence to myself I may maintain or that sustains me, pro-pose myself to myself (nor im-pose myself on another) without remains, without something of me remaining, outside of me”.39 The subject is broken in the act of love. Love exposes one singularity to the other but also the singularity to itself; the love break presents to us “the fact of her [the other’s] existence, which is to say, a being whose mortality and finiteness, calls us to our own”.40 Love is absolutely singular but needs the other, it is weak. The experience of love reveals it as a promise 32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid., 47.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid., 85.

37 Ibid.

38 Kellogg, “Love and Communism”, 345.

39 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 97.

40 Kellogg, “Love and Communism”, 344.

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without guarantee that is at the limit of speech, which is also to say—in philosophy’s identification of muthos and logos—at the limit of what can be signified. Philosophy’s thinking about love—as meaning qua meaning: the limit of what can be signified in language—exposes itself to the experience of love as the shattering of absolute meaning. All that is left is the spacing of singularities who identify themselves by way of this dispersal; love and thought are left bare in their singularity and only become meaningful in a plurality. All that is left, is relationality— communication between ‘us.’

Nancy’s reflections in The Inoperative Community demonstrate the possibility of a community that does not exclude through any mode of radical or essential inclusivity. He exposes the dangers of modern thinking and its rational operativity. His thinking seeks to interrupt this discourse by demonstrating our ontological state of always already being-with. As is characteristic of Nancy’s work, this interruption arrives as an arrival; his writing itself exposes us to the impossibility of absolute signification in language. The eccentric-center point of Nancy’s discussion is the singular plural—our being-with-one-another. We are exposed to one another in our very Being. He thinks of community as not that which has been lost and needs to be recovered, but instead thinks of the ‘loss’ of immanence as the essential experience that exposes us to one another and makes thought and love—meaning—possible. It is the spacing of singularities in our lack of immanence that throws us into the world of relationality. Nancy announces an alternative thinking that guides us out of the dangerous exclusionary tendencies of Western philosophical-political thinking and its insatiable drive for immanence. It strips the dominant political discourse of its totalizing power and reveals the fragmentary structure of its own foundation. Love appears as the social experience that opens up our thinking of community beyond all essential categories; it brings us up against ourselves and allows us to touch one another in an embrace that remains ‘open’.

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Bibliography Kellogg, Catherine. “Love and Communism: Jean Luc-Nancy’s Shattered Community.” Law and Critique 16 (2005): 339-355.

Morin, Marie-Eve. Jean-Luc Nancy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Edited by Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery, translated by R.D. Richardson and A.E. O’Byrne. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Edited by Peter Connor, translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

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Intimacy, Sex, and Survival: Emotional Empowerment and Political Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camp Brothels

By Katie Lawrence Edited by Isabel Teramura

During the Holocaust, sex was often employed by the Nazis as a weapon against persecuted groups. People who did not conform to Nazi sexual ideology, such as queer individuals, “asocial”1 women, or prostitutes were incarcerated. Hitler’s National Socialism was grounded in Rassenschande: an understanding that Aryan blood was superior and could be polluted through sexual intercourse with “inferior” races.2 In the concentration camps, men and women were often sexually assaulted or raped by Kapos3 or Nazi guards. However, sex was also an important form of resistance, source of emotional empowerment, or survival tool for men and women who were engaged with the concentration camp brothels. In this essay, I will examine the concentration camp brothels as potential sites of emotional, psychological, and even political resistance to the Nazi regime. However, in undertaking such an investigation it is critical to recognize that any instances where intimacy or sex provided a source of empowerment or comfort are greatly overshadowed by the numerous instances of sexualized violence and rape. In addition, discomfort with the topic of sex work has discouraged meaningful scholarship on the camp brothels.

Further, the positive impact of sex and intimacy on an individual’s psychological state and their survival during the Holocaust can only be observed in exceptional circumstances and in extraordinarily brave testimonies. Robert Sommer was the first Holocaust scholar to consider them seriously and his research has determined the mainstream narrative regarding this peculiar camp phenomenon. Throughout his treatment of the camp brothels, Sommer insists that the women forced to work there were exploited miserably and suffered horrifically: at no point does he consider any alternative reading of the brothels or any degree of resistance they may have afforded.

In her exploration of the camp brothels, Jessica Hughes adopts a very different perspective and her reading offers a way of understanding sex and intimacy as potential aids to psychological survival. Drawing on Hughes’ analysis, I will argue that the concentration camp brothels gave certain individuals the opportunity to connect emotionally with others, assert their individuality and agency, and resist Nazi oppression.

As Sommer explains in his essay “Sexual Exploitation of Women in Nazi Concentra1 Individuals charged and imprisoned under the category of “asozial” or asocial were typically charged with “vagrancy” or “prostitution,” however, as stated on the Auschwitz-Birkenau website, they were often arrested for “a wide range of other deeds or behaviors, loosely and arbitrarily interpreted by the police.” These prisoners were identified with a black triangle. This information can be located in the Works Cited under “System of Triangles.” For further reading, please see “The Unsettled, ‘Asocials,’” The unsettled, “asocials” : Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies : University of Minnesota, accessed March 12, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20080604015908/http:// www.chgs.umn.edu/histories/documentary/hadamar/asocials.html.

2 In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed in Nazi Germany which provided the legal framework for the systemic persecution of Jews and other “racial” groups in Europe. The “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor” prohibited marriages between Jews and non-Jewish Germans and criminalized sexual relations between them. Any such relationships were labeled as “race defilement” or Rassenschande, and thousands of individuals were publicly humiliated, murdered, or sent to concentration camps for committing this “crime.” More information can be found here: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Nuremberg Race Laws,” Holocaust Encyclopedia (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, September 11, 2019), https://encyclopedia. ushmm.org/content/en/article/nuremberg-laws.

3 Nazi concentration camp prisoners arrested for common crimes and given privileges in exchange for supervising prison work details. In the camp hierarchy, these individuals were in closest proximity to SS officers.

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tion Camp Brothels,” the history of these brothels has been dismissed by historians as a taboo subject, but also because “the notion of brothel barracks created for prisoners has seemed completely absurd.”4 Indeed, the concentration camp brothels were an extremely peculiar phenomenon that resisted the oppressive structure and aims of the camp systems in which they were enclosed. As Sommer articulates, the brothels were established by Heinrich Himmler with the intention of improving the “efficiency” of camp prisoners. Himmler argued that camp commanders should grant “in der freiesten Form (most free manner) certain privileges to hardworking camp prisoners,” and, as Sommer notes, only non-Jewish “top-notch workers,” which would include “access to Weiber in Bordellen (women in brothels).”5 Male prisoners could earn the right to visit the brothels, however some men arrested for homosexuality were also forced to in a horrifically homophobic effort to “re-educate” them.6 Further, Sommer explains that Himmler believed that “denying the necessity to ‘provide’ women to satisfy sexual needs of male camp prisoners would be welt- und lebensfremd (out of touch with the world and life).”7

Sommer describes the camp brothels as “organized with high-level bureaucratic effort.”8 The women were frequently tested for sexually transmitted diseases, as were the prisoners, and their time spent intimately with the men was diligently monitored and recorded by Puffmütter or “brothel madams.”9 The women selected to work in the brothels exchanged many horrors of camp life for some reminders of “ordinary” life. As Sommer details, the women wore civilian clothes instead of camp uniforms, including “panties” and a “bra,” and they had access to “a bathroom with a certain number of water closets” that “didn’t lack cleanliness,” like the rest of the camp.10 However, these women were also subjected to frequent sexual exploitation and humiliation, as SS guards would often watch the women being used by prisoners through peep holes installed in the bedroom doors. The extent to which these women suffered psychologically, emotionally, or physically is unclear as so little testimonial evidence exists.

In his conclusion, Sommer observes that women significantly improved their chances of survival by working in the brothels, because they were not engaged in deadly physical labor, and therefore “sexual forced labor in a concentration camp brothel can certainly be described as a survival strategy.”11 However, Sommer states that this employment was unequivocally associated with psychological trauma from sexual exploitation and a “lifelong stigma.”12 Further, as Sommer asserts, it is critical to acknowledge that many of these women were categorized as asozial prisoners, and thus did not receive any “recognition or restitution” for their suffering from the German government until the 1990s.13 From his research, Sommer concludes that despite the small number of brothel victims, about two hundred women, the type of exploitation they experienced “reveals a new cynical dimension of the Nazi terror” wherein certain male 4 Robert Sommer, “Sexual Exploitation of Women in Nazi Concentration Camp Brothels,” in Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, ed. Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), pp. 45-60, 45.

5 Sommer, 46.

6 For more information about the fate of prisoners categorized as “homosexuals,” please see: Robert Biedroń, “Robert Biedroń, Nazism’s Pink Hell,” Memorial and Museum: Auschwitz-Birkenau Former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp, accessed March 13, 2021, http://auschwitz.org/en/history/categories-of-prisoners/homosexuals-a-separate-category-of-prisoners/robert-biedron-nazisms-pink-hell/.

7 Ibid, 46.

8 Ibid, 51.

9 Ibid, 52.

10 Ibid, 50.

11 Ibid, 54.

12 Ibid, 54-55.

13 Ibid, 55.

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prisoners or “victims themselves” were given the opportunity to become “perpetrators.”14 While Sommer correctly notes the exploitative elements of the camp brothels, Hughes’ analysis of the camp brothels “reveals that prisoners, male and female, used sex, and moreover, the available moments of intimacy, to reaffirm their humanity and survive their incarceration.”15

Hughes asserts that the conditions themselves of the camp brothels were radically life-affirming in comparison to the rest of the camps. In contrast to the concentration camps, “working” in the camp brothels reinstated a sense of individuality in the women. The women “working” in the brothels were individually selected by camp guards, unlike the typical camp conditions which discouraged any distinct identities and sought to level all inmates into one meaningless mass. As Sommer discloses, women were “picked out” and deemed “suitable,”16 which although appalling in its own way, did necessarily acknowledge them as distinct from the collective and as possessing sexuality. Further, the women sent to work in the brothels were promised an early release which, although never granted, would presumably have altered their perception of their circumstances. Thus unlike the other prisoners who had no future to look forward to, the brothel workers had an arbitrary but promised exit to survive for.

The brothels allowed women to reclaim various tenets of “normal” civilized society, such as time, movement, and privacy. In the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where many of the camp sex workers were sourced, Hughes explains that “normative notions of space and time were fundamentally altered.”17 Due to overcrowding in the camp, Hughes describes how “the freedom to move ceased to exist during the hours prisoners were relegated to their barracks.”18 Further, Hughes states that: “[t]he concentration camps were built in a manner ordering both space and time; the camps themselves were structures of domination and oppression exerting control over the prisoners they contained.”19 Perhaps the most devastating quality of the camps that Hughes outlines is the complete lack of privacy, especially with regard to bodily functions.

Hughes illustrates how women were made to feel uncivilized and barbaric “immediately upon entering camp” because “they could no longer carry out their daily bathroom rituals on their own schedule, nor in privacy.”20 However, in the camp brothels the conditions were radically different. As Hughes articulates, in the camp brothels “women showered in privacy with hot water in the modern bathrooms,”21 which even included “bathtubs and bidets.”22 These components of the brothels allowed the selected women to feel as if they were individuals and civilians.

The women were selected for the brothels, Hughes explains, based on their “womanly” physical traits and their adherence to “a certain female aesthetic.”23 The SS wanted prisoners to be motivated by the promise of “real” women and not the female prisoners, for as Hughes relates, male prisoners were allegedly “repelled by bony bodies and hollow cheeks.”24 Hughes describes how the women selected were all “still possessing a womanly figure and considered ‘attractive,’” they were “young,” “of good weight,” “still possessing their hair,” and of course 14 Ibid.

15 Jessica R. Anderson Hughes, “Forced Prostitution: the Competing and Contested Uses of the Concentration Camp Brothel” (dissertation, ProQuest, 2011), 17.

16 Sommer, 49.

17 Ibid, 95.

18 Ibid, 96.

19 Ibid, 95.

20 Ibid, 97.

21 Ibid, 138-139.

22 Ibid, 140.

23 Ibid, 124.

24 Ibid, 130.

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preferably “Aryan,” or “Aryan-looking,” and definitely not Jewish.25 After being selected, Hughes discloses that the women received medical screenings, and then began their “physical rehabilitation” which included better food, exemption from “all work details,” and importantly “civilian clothing that included bras and cotton underpants.”26 In the camp brothels, Hughes details how women received improved rations that often “came directly from the SS Kantine and included real coffee and margarine.”27

Having hair and regular clothes, instead of camp uniforms, offered these women the opportunity to feel feminine through their dress. The improved living conditions and nutrition allowed these women to maintain a healthier body weight and get their period, an experience which most female prisoners lost. Menstruating would have allowed these women the opportunity to feel feminine or womanly, which for many women during this period would have been closely associated with feeling human or “civilized” at all. In addition, the brothels allowed women to consider their emotional and mental well-being. Hughes explains that when “the general worries plaguing life in the camps, hunger, cold, filth, and heavy labor, were removed” the women working the brothels “turned to reawakening their minds and personalities.”28 The removal of physical concerns allowed these individuals to focus on their mental survival, an equally important component of negotiating camp life. As Hughes identifies “these women were denied control over their final reserve of autonomy: their own body. These women did not ‘own’ their ability to give or receive sexual pleasure through the act of sexual intercourse.”29 However in intentionally “ressexuallizing” these women, Hughes states, the Nazis “stripped the women of the physical markers of their ‘unworthiness’ to the Reich.”30 No other prisoners in the camps were capable of achieving this kind of physical, mental, or emotional liberation while still enslaved under the Nazi regime. Thus the brothels were unparalleled sites of prisoner empowerment in the camps, despite their necessary exploitation and humiliation of the forced sex workers’ bodies.

Most significantly, the brothels provided opportunities for men and women to show compassion and to form friendships and romantic relationships. In one instance that Hughes describes, the prisoner Dacko “went to the brothel because he wanted to see and be with a woman.”31 Dacko states: “I wanted to cuddle up to her as much as I could, because it was three and a half years since I’d been arrested, three and a half years without a woman.”32 In this example, the brothel provided a place for compassion and human contact, in radical contrast to the surrounding camp atmosphere of violent life destruction. Similarly, the prisoner Heimberg visited the brothel and is described as just conversing with the sex workers. Hughes observes that “Heimberg was curious and desired something more than the physical act of intercourse, he wanted to connect with the women and perhaps find a companion.”33 Unlike in the camps where prisoners were encouraged to turn against each other in order to survive, in the brothels individuals could communicate as they had in the civilized outside world. Finally, Hughes details Mikols’ visit to a brothel where he was allegedly mothered by the women working there.

Upon entering the brothel and meeting a woman, Mikols states that “after she found out what 25 Ibid, 124.

26 Ibid, 129.

27 Ibid, 138.

28 Ibid, 139.

29 Ibid, 112.

30 Ibid, 138.

31 Ibid, 218.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid, 221.

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my name was, how old I was, she gave me a couple of cookies and a little glass of wine and she sent me home!”34 Hughes speculates that Mikols’ young age may have caused the women to treat him differently than the other customers; regardless, his experience demonstrates that the brothel could be a place for acts of extraordinary kindness and human connection.

The camp brothels, Hughes argues, “created opportunities where men could prove they were ‘up’ for the task of sexual intercourse” which also perhaps was “proof the men were ‘up’ to the task of survival.”35 Hughes explains that “the brothel not only put male prisoners in contact with females,” made to conform to Nazi-approved gender norms “thus allowing [the male prisoners’] ‘masculinity’ to bloom in relation to the women’s ‘femininity,’ but their sexual prowess also served as a symbol of their unwillingness to be emasculated by the SS.”36 Thus sex with female inmates was a form of resistance against the Nazis men could engage in by affirming and reasserting their masculinity. Virgin men also used the camp brothels to experience sex for the first time, and Hughes mentions that “men believing death was imminent” may have used the brothels to have sex, and declare their masculinity, for the last time.37

Importantly, the brothels also allowed privileged prisoners the opportunity to embody conventional gender roles. Hughes explores how “it was a common practice for the ‘prominent’ brothel patrons with ‘wealth’ to bring gifts to the women.”38 Over the course of multiple brothel visits, patrons may bring the forced sex workers clothes or other goods. In one significant instance, Hughes describes how one regular brothel patron, called “Der Buckel,” began courting a woman named Brunhilde. Hughes states: “[t]heir relationship flourished over the course of his numerous brothel visits and during one of their encounters, ‘Der Buckel’ presented Brunhilde with a present, a watch.”39 The patron’s gesture proved he was a powerful, generous, and caring provider to his “sweetheart”; further, as Hughes explains, the man was “simultaneously resisting dehumanization by engaging in a familiar courting ritual.”40 Der Buckel’s gift was also a form of political protest, considering gift giving in the brothels was not permitted, but also, as Hughes recognizes, a watch would have sold easily “on the black market” and the man “could have easily benefited from its ‘sale.’”41 Therefore “despite camp rules, and the highly abnormal atmosphere of the camp brothels,” Hughes asserts that Der Buckel needed to “present his ‘sweetheart’ with a gift” to show his affection, as he would have under normal circumstances, and thus this act proved that he had not “lost his former sense of self.”42

Further, brothel protocol required patrons to bathe with hot water in a modern bathroom before visiting the women, which was an extraordinary privilege inside the camps. The impact of a bath on an individual’s outlook should not be understated: as Fanya Gottesfeld Heller explains in her memoir about life in hiding from the Nazis, being given the rare chance to bathe after a long stretch in hiding could switch her “mood from low to high, from a state of terror of imminent, violent death to a feeling of calm bordering on joy, even hope that this nightmare would end.”43 Plus the actual conditions of the brothel, in comparison to the rest of the camp, were beautiful and familiar from ordinary life: as Hughes explains, “comfortable couches, ta34 Ibid, 220.

35 Ibid, 223.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid, 218.

38 Ibid, 224.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid, 224-225.

43 Fanya Gottesfeld Heller, Strange and Unexpected Love: a Teenage Girl’s Holocaust Memoirs (Gefen Publishing House, 2015), 91.

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bles, and chairs furnished the brothels,” “curtains hung on the windows,” and “vases of flowers adorned the tabletops.”44 Therefore, the brothel and its rules of conduct provided men and women with moments of calm, cleanliness, and the semblance of normalcy.

Aside from the interactions between male patrons and brothel workers, Hughes also outlines how the sex workers showed other prisoners generosity and kindness. In Sam Goodchild’s testimony, he describes how while fixing the brothel roof at Monowitz, the women working there used to throw him and the other workers “some bread.”45 Jack Unikowski, a Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz, remembers the women giving him bread and even chocolate when he cleaned the brothel.46 Finally, Meyer Schwartz explains that one brothel worker supplied him with food for an extended period of time because they came from the same hometown. The brothel workers also cared for Jewish women who were stranded there. In her video testimony, Jewish survivor Sylvia Hack describes how at the end of the war when camps were being liquidated with “death marches,”47 seven or eight Jewish women marching from Auschwitz-Birkenau found themselves in the Mauthausen camp brothel by mistake. Allegedly, these women were shown kindness and generosity by the brothel sex workers, who offered them “tea and food” and were “reassured that while there they were safe.”48 These testimonies illustrate how the brothels facilitated compassion between the women imprisoned there and the other prisoners they came in contact with. Due to their improved living situations in the brothels, the forced sex workers could afford to be generous to the other less fortunate prisoners, which was miraculous in itself.

As these examples reveal, although sex may have been one motivation for visiting the brothels, many male prisoners were eager for an opportunity to simply experience human connection and contact. The lack of information detailing the complex and fascinating brothel community and its patrons is devastating; however, the testimonies Hughes provides indicates that, in stark contrast to the rest of the concentration camps, the brothels offered potential spaces where men and women could escape the terror, madness, and inhumanity of life under Nazi law.

Hughes states: The SS leadership failed to foresee the prisoners’ potential use of the brothel as an escape from the realities of camp life. For both the women and the men the brothel was a refuge from the excremental assault of the camps. The purpose of the concentration camp system was to dehumanize and weaken its victims by reducing them to their animal instincts. However, the brothel and its protocol gave the men and women a small window of opportunity where they themselves were physically clean, had access to clean beds, and could engage in sexual intercourse, in itself an act that could be life affirming.49

Finally, we can speculate that the women working in the brothels also became quite close with one another and may have even shared quite intimate relationships, however no such testimonies exist. As Hughes articulates, information about the camp brothels is tremendously rare and often when it is discussed in video testimonies it is shrouded with misunderstanding, mystery, and judgment. Although Hughes’ claims about the brothels as spaces that facilitated 44 Hughes, 140-141.

45 Ibid, 186.

46 Ibid.

47 The death marches were forced evacuations of concentration camps near the end of the war. SS guards marched prisoners inwards toward the Reich (central Germany) while brutally beating prisoners. Many individuals died on these marches from exposure, mistreatment, and starvation.

48 Hughes, 178.

49 Ibid, 226.

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exceptional instances of human connection and compassion are compelling, they are ultimately not as well-substantiated as other camp phenomena. Further, although the brothels greatly improved the living conditions of the women enslaved there, and therefore potentially their mental states as well, it is ultimately impossible to determine whether their intimate contact with prisoners contributed positively to their psychological survival due to the lack of testimonies. The exploitation of these women cannot be overemphasized in any conversation of the potential emotional and mental benefits male brothel patrons may have experienced. Finally, we must recognize that there were men charged with “homosexuality” who were forced to visit the brothels, and thus even when the brothels did provide benefits to willing participants, they also absolutely contributed to other forms of suffering.

In conclusion, the camp brothels could give men and women the opportunity to feel human again, and to connect as human beings through acts of kindness, generosity, and even love. Sexual relationships in the brothels could give men the ability to feel like providers, which reignited their masculinity. Additionally by imitating conventional gender roles, sexual relationships developed in the brothels could reinstate an illusion of normalcy for men and women.

Ultimately, sex and intimacy in the brothels could give prisoners rare opportunities for political resistance, autonomy, and human connection within a framework that had rendered these actions seemingly impossible.

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Works Cited Heller, Fanya Gottesfeld. Strange and Unexpected Love: a Teenage Girl’s Holocaust Memoirs.

Gefen Publishing House, 2015.

Hughes, Jessica R. Anderson. “Forced Prostitution: the Competing and Contested Uses of theConcentration Camp Brothel.” Dissertation, ProQuest, 2011.

Sommer, Robert. “Sexual Exploitation of Women in Nazi Concentration Camp Brothels.”

Essay. In Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, edited by Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, 45–60. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010.

“System of Triangles.” Memorial and Museum: Auschwitz-Birkenau: Former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp. Accessed March 12, 2021. http://auschwitz.org/ en/history/prisoner-classification/system-of-triangles.

“The Unsettled, ‘Asocials.’” The unsettled, “asocials” : Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies : University of Minnesota. Accessed March 12, 2021. https://web.archive.org/ web/20080604015908/http://www.chgs.umn.edu/histories/docu entary/hadamar/asocials. html.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Nuremberg Race Laws.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, September 11, 2019. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nuremberg-laws.

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Eating the Pain of Others: Reflections On Susan Sontag and bell hooks in Light of War-Photography, the Movement for Black Lives, and the CoVid-19 Pandemic

By Nelly Bateman Edited by Neyve Summerville

Ron Haviv’s era-defining photograph from the Balkan war is as morbid as it is shocking1. Morbid because of the unknown Bosnian woman face-down on the ground, murdered by a Serbian soldier; shocking because of the curious reaction it provokes in its audience. The woman’s downturned face permits the non-Balkan viewer to admit the situation depicted is rationally bad without really engaging with the body on the ground. In doing so, the viewer maintains the separation of their experience and the woman’s experience. This distance keeps the Subject safe from the Other’s distress. Additionally, this distance can be likened to the faculty of sympathy, a distant feeling of regret for another person’s suffering. However, its counterpart, empathy, a proximity that allows the Subject to feel what the Other is feeling, might not be the morally superior alternative that it seems to be at first glance. Within the context of the CoVid-19 pandemic and the Movement for Black Lives, I will consider empathy, sympathy, and the aesthetics of distance with an analysis of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others and bell hooks’ ‘Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.’

Sontag’s aesthetic manifesto, ‘Against Interpretation,’ is just that: a scathing rebuke of glorifying interpretation, which she claims is an essentially distancing way of engaging with art. The interpreter literally and figuratively takes a step back from the picture to examine it as a whole. They separate their immediate reactions to the work in order to achieve a sanitized, rational analysis of what it ‘means.’ They also distance the art from itself; once the viewer has soared above the realm of experience, they break the painting down into its composite parts before sewing them back together to create a resuscitated monster of meaning. Her final recommendation is that we need an “erotics of art”2. According to Sontag, we need to think of art in terms of touch, taste, smell, sight, aspects of sensual experience that necessarily require proximity.

At the end of Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag famously asserts that sympathy “proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence”3. Seeing an image of a Serbian soldier mutilating the corpse of a dead Muslim woman stirs sympathy, but the distance between the viewer of the photograph and the moment the photograph captures, and the literal distance between the picture and ourselves, creates ample space for dissociation. If taken with Sontag’s aesthetic consideration that, “we need an erotics of art,” the moral alternative becomes empathy: taking on another person’s pain as if it were our own. When we put morality in terms of an aesthetics of space, empathy’s proximity comes to oppose the distance of sympathy. Being empathetic, then, means entering into the soul of the other, and following Sontag’s model, it is morally preferable to sympathy because it destroys the distance between ourselves and the Other.

In 2020, distance has become central to how we navigate the world and not merely as an aesthetic consideration. The CoVid-19 pandemic has at once radically distanced us from one 1 Ron Haviv, ‘Bosnia.’ 1992 2 Susan Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others. (New York: Picador, 2004) 3 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 100 70

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another and brought us radically closer to each other with Zoom, social media, and all the false proximity of the internet. Then, in June, the aesthetic and moral dimensions of these questions came to the fore once more. Mass protests against anti-Black racism reignited, and, quietly and long-overdue, the following question emerged in discourse amongst non-Black folks trying to support the Black community: ‘how do I help those whose experiences I do not — and cannot — understand without centering myself?’ If we follow Sontag’s model, epistemological proximity to experience of another person is the condition of empathy. However, gaining knowledge can also be an assertion of power, even and especially under the guise of empathy. Entering into the suffering soul of another person is a deeply personal and intimate experience. Is knowledge worth the price the Object of empathy pays by having their soul seen by a detached observer?

bell hooks provides the tools to answer this question in her essay, ‘Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.’ hooks describes the commodification of the Other, the transformation of the Other’s experience–––specifically, the racialized Other–– into an object of consumption for the white Subject’s pleasure. When one commodifies the Black Other, one presents their lived experience as an object to be pleasantly “eaten, consumed, and forgotten,” while covering up its inherent racism — treating another person’s experience as consumable and thus disposable — under the veil of a desiring Subject wanting to know the desired Other4.The Subject exerts power over the Object by analyzing it and turning it into a Thing to Know rather than a dynamic, equally agent Subject. In this way, hooks uses the following metaphor to describe the problem with our way of understanding empathy: “It is by eating the Other […] that one asserts power and privilege”5. Is the consumption of pain we do not understand a way of asserting power over it? Empathy, when we understand it as Sontag does, as a unique proximity through knowledge to another person’s experience, might very well be. The way we access knowledge about other peoples’ pain — through war photography, the news cycle, and social media — represents a power dynamic. The concern is that so-called allies have gone about their bid for liberation of oppressed groups in a way that further exerts power over them. That is, in our quest to develop empathy for that which is beyond our individual comprehension, the commonly accepted understanding of empathy might have only ended up commodifying the most vulnerable aspects of human experience.

Not only the above might be true, that empathy might actually only end up exerting power over oppressed groups, but this application of hooks presents another concern: that empathy might bring about a false equivocation that erases the unique experience of the Other. In an attempt to understand their neighbours, non-Black allies might be replacing the experiences they observe with their own. That is, they hold more space for their pain from knowing that racism exists in the world than the actual embodied, lived experience of being subjected to racism.

Worse, they might equivocate their pain with that of the sufferer’s. We might see an ICU nurse on live television crying over the tragic death of a CoVid-19 patient and assume that we understand their experience because we have lost a loved one too. However, it almost goes without saying that these two experiences are starkly different. To equivocate is not to understand — and it is hardly to love — one’s neighbour. Saying one’s experience is the same as another’s is to destroy both experiences, because at the core of human subjectivity is the individuality that each person brings to the world. If one understands empathy as the all-consuming proximity that the previous analysis of Sontag does, empathy’s proximity can easily turn into a replace4 bell hooks, ‘Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.’ Black Looks: Race and Representation, (Boston: South End Press, 1992) 34 5 bell hooks, ‘Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance’ 35 71

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ment that destroys the unique experience of the sufferer. In this way, claiming empathy for an experience we have not shared may very well be the expression of privilege that hooks claims it is.

In February, Ron Haviv held an exhibition of his work to commemorate the anniversary of the Balkan War 6. War-photography expositions are hardly uncommon, and this certainly was not Haviv’s first. From the walls hung pictures of unspeakable violence: one in particular featured an ocean spray of blood from a man just shot in the face. An image such as the one described is difficult to distance oneself from. These people were shot in this world, in our shared reality, just as George Floyd was murdered not in some distant, uniquely racist land, but under the same racist ideology that props-up the ongoing reality of police violence. Additionally, clips from CoVid-19 wards might be taken from hospitals just down the road from where we sit, curled up on our couch, gorging on the news cycle’s latest morsels of suffering. However, to claim that we need to ‘eroticize’ war photography, that we need to bring ourselves closer to these horrific instances of violence, especially if we are neither Bosnian nor Black, reeks of necrophilia, sadism, and abuse of privilege.

The Bosnian woman Ron Haviv made the subject of his now-famous photograph did not know he was taking her picture. Now she is the centrepiece of a decade-defining image. She is the ‘main-dish’ of a new generation’s sensual feast for knowledge of a genocide Bosnia committed before they were even born. Similarly, the video of George Floyd’s murder was played endlessly over news cycles over the summer before being forgotten in the fall; left-leaning American news channels broadcast inside-looks into ICU wards to shock the apathetic viewer into wearing a mask and washing their hands. But the price of admission to these theatres of suffering might be the agency and subjecthood of the very people well-meaning outsiders are seeking to help.

6 Lamija Grebo, ‘‘This Was Real’: Bosnia Exhibition Looks at Wartime Loss of Liberty.’ Balkan Transitional Justice, February 2020.

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Works Cited Lamija Grebo, ‘‘This Was Real’: Bosnia Exhibition Looks at Wartime Loss of Liberty.’ Balkan Transitional Justice, February 2020. balkaninsight.com/2020/02/24/this-was-real-bosniaexhibition-looks-at-wartime-loss-of-liberty/ Ron Haviv, ‘Bosnia.’ 1992. mville.libguides.com/c.php?g=370027&p=5932225.

bell hooks, ‘Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.’ Black Looks: Race and Representation, (Boston: South End Press, 1992) 21-39.

Susan Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others. (New York: Picador, 2004).

Susan Sontag. ‘Against Interpretation.’ (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1966).

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When Everyone is the Flâneur: The Flâneur in a Supermodern World

By Kerri Lawrence Edited by Anya Deady

As gyms and fitness centers, shopping malls and public spaces all closed down, many people began to replace what they felt they were missing with a new common pastime: walking.

The COVID-19 pandemic left many feeling trapped, as if they were under house-arrest—all in all, not a wholly inaccurate sentiment. In mass numbers, people were cut off from society at large, and in order to fulfil their daily fitness goals, to get out of their houses, and to feel as if they were a part of a broader society from which they were isolated, many began walking daily—going for long strolls around the neighbourhood, or the local park, or on the other side of the city, for a little bit of variation. The figure of the stroller, the idle observer, or people-watcher used to be the flâneur, popularized in Charles Baudelaire’s essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ as a passionate crowd-watcher. However, the flâneur of Baudelaire was very much a product of the time in which he was written about, and the 21st century is not that time. Walking as a hobby and habit is back in vogue, for reasons related to health and intellectual stimulation, and yet the concept of the flâneur is not, as it has been entirely removed from its context. This may make it an unsustainable figure to embody or consider being embodied by modern walkers.

Instead, I argue that the flâneur no longer exists in its original intention, but has instead evolved during the transition from Baudelaire’s modernity into what French anthropologist Marc Augé terms “supermodernity”, becoming in the process a “pedestrian” rather than a “flâneur.” This “pedestrian” does not carry the same connotations of class, gender, and race as the flâneur, and yet still retains the original, observational spirit of flânerie. The period in which Baudelaire lived was a time of chaos and transition: from the old world to the new, the gaslit empire to the popularization of electricity, long-distance trips travelled by horse and carriage to mass travel by train, Haussmann’s modernization of Paris’ architecture and infrastructure, and the creation of the proto-mall: the arcades. Advertisements were plastered on the sides of those carriages, newsboys stood on street corners shouting headlines, more advertisements were hung in the windows of shops. Fashion was as ever changing, with Victorian skirts, bodices, and corsets changing fashions from year to year and season to season, and the dandy’s fashion being just as subject to minor adjustments.

As a writer, Baudelaire describes the transition to modernity in terms of beauty: the eternal, that which is recognized as being beautiful in a way that transcends time, and the ephemeral, or that which changes from one age to the next. The season’s fashions, the architectural style of the decade—these were all ephemeral aspects of beauty which were nonetheless integral to a complete picture of beauty which would last through the years. For Baudelaire, the defining feature of beauty in modernity was its integrative properties: he writes that “[e]verything combines to form a completely viable whole.”1 This statement is particularly prescient to the women 1 Charles Baudelaire and Jonathan Mayne, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life, and 74

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of his age, in the way in which Baudelaire characterizes them: “[a]bove all [woman] is a general harmony, not only in her bearing and the way in which she moves and walks, but also in the muslins, the gauzes, the vast, iridescent clouds of stuff in which she envelops herself […] what poet, in sitting down to paint the pleasure caused by the sight of a beautiful woman, would venture to separate her from her costume?”2 While this statement is specifically about the fashion and art of the era, it can be expanded upon as the characterization of modernity as a whole, due to Baudelaire’s conception that fashion is indicative of the age in which it is in vogue; thus it applies also to art, to architecture, to design and all forms of creative generation.

It is within this context of “modernity” that the flâneur is found. The development of the arcades created a clean space to shop, socialize, and wander, away from the hustle and bustle of the streets, with their carriages, mud, and chamber-pots being emptied out of windows. In their style, the arcades were as integrative as the rest of Baudelaire’s modern period, with the combination of glass ceilings and sweeping gardens creating the impression of a sheltered “outdoor” veneer within the safe confines of a building. The flâneur was able to stroll and wander safely within this environment, with much less risk of either being splashed by a passing carriage, or run over by one in the process. And so the “passionate observer” emerges: The crowd is his element…his passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.3

For the flâneur, his curiosity about the world is a “fatal, irresistible passion”4 which involves his presence in the crowd and his simultaneous distance from it: he is not there to partake in the crowd, per se, but rather to observe it, and so while he is physically present, he is present with a different intention, and in a different state of mind, than the rest of the crowd. Baudelaire characterizes the difference between the flâneur and the dandy precisely by the form which their investment takes, with the dandy “[aspiring] to insensitivity”5 in a much more frivolous and distant manner, and the flâneur instead being deeply invested; Baudelaire claims that anyone “who can yet be bored in the heart of the multitude is a blockhead!”6 Thus emerges the “paradox of modernity,” which is to say that it is possible for a person to be bored when surrounded by such persistent hustle and bustle, that one can be “bored in the heart of the multitude” without feeling “as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy.”7 A passionate observer is not simply one of the many who are susceptible to this; the flâneur is distinguished from the dull masses by his very deliberate intention of being there.

With that said, certainly not everyone could afford to be a flâneur and engage in flânerie.

The passionate observer must have “the money and the leisure”8 in order for their passion to become truly elevated. This immediately creates a distinct class divide: he must have the means to stroll, the leisure time to spare, and he must belong in these spaces which he observes. The Other Essays (London: Phaidon Publishers, 1965), 13.

2 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 30-31.

3 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 9.

4 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 7.

5 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 9.

6 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 10.

7 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 9.

8 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 27.

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working class would not be privy to the pastime of flânerie, as they would not have the time in which to do so, nor would they have the means to access the key locations, primarily the arcades. What distinguishes the flâneur from the others attending the arcades is their intention: the others are there to shop, to buy, to engage with commodities, while the flâneur is there to observe the others. He has the means with which to be in a marketplace without any intention to purchase or trade, without so much as desiring to observe the objects on sale, and without the desire for any companionship, contrasting him greatly to those at the arcades because they were a place of sale. Additionally, the flâneur is inherently gendered: through this paper I have referred to the flâneur solely as “he,” “him,” or a “man,” as women did not have the social freedom that would allow them to engage in flânerie. Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting” is a short story that follows the thought process and internal narrative of a woman engaging “safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter—rambling the streets of London.”9 The manner of wandering “safely” which she describes here is specifically under the pretense or excuse of needing to purchase a pencil; this is a necessary justification for the narrator—a woman of presumably upper- to upper-middle class—to be on the street without an escort at her side so that she may enjoy this “greatest pleasure.” Throughout the story she engages in the same observational activities as Baudelaire’s flâneur, watching a little person in the shoe shop, the people on the street as she strolls, the shopkeepers from whom she purchases the pencil, and yet for her it is necessary—unlike the flâneur—to have an excuse or a reason: “one must, one always must, do something or other; it is not allowed one to simply enjoy oneself.”10 As has been demonstrated by the flâneur as a man with “the money and the leisure,” this is not an issue for men, who are allowed to do as they please without requiring an excuse. In fact, the woman on the streets specifically becomes an aspect of the male gaze of the flâneur, as seen with Baudelaire’s descriptions of women being the embodiment of the modernity which the flâneur so apparently marvels at and adores. Instead, the domain of the woman who wishes to engage in flânerie is one of memory and imagination. The narrator of Street Haunting specifically recalls interactions and people through physical objects within her house—the scorch mark on the carpet from a visitor, the china bowl purchased from a woman while they were on vacation, the pencil from the shopkeepers—and imaginations in locations outside of her house, as she imagines the Prime Minister’s life at that very moment. These are instances which she is not privy to on her own, and so she must engage in creation herself by conjuring these memories and imaginations: the woman who wishes to be flâneur can only do so safely, not with merely an excuse known only to herself, but within the confines of her own mind.

It is possible that Baudelaire’s concepts of modernity are entirely outdated and irrelevant, and the flâneur is no longer to be considered important for the contemporary age. In Marc Auge’s 1995 book Non-Places: An Anthropology of Supermodernity he proposes this concept of “supermodernity,” which is, in short, the digital age, characterized by excess: specifically, excess of time and space. It is a world in which its habitants are simultaneously living in a much smaller and much bigger environment: there is now the ability for people to travel around the world in less than 24 hours (contrasting to Jules Verne’s famous novel Around the World in 80 Days, which was considered a radical notion at the time of its publication in 1872) and to simultaneously contact people on that other side of the world instantaneously. While at the time of Auge’s writing, SMS text and messaging services were not as widespread as they are now, 9 Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting,” in The Death of the Moth: and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1947), 19.

10 Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 27.

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and Augé didn’t include them in his discussion of supermodernity, that fact only exacerbates his theory: the world is smaller, as we can access everywhere much more rapidly, and it is simultaneously larger, as we now have access to so much more than we did before. According to Augé, “what is seen by the spectator of modernity is the interweaving of old and new. Supermodernity, though, makes the old (history) into a specific spectacle, as it does with all exoticism and all local particularity.”11 Rather than engaging with the old, integrating it into a new fusion of styles, the historical becomes a tourist trap—a non-place in itself. But before engaging with the concept of a ‘non-place’, we must first have a working definition of ‘place’ in the anthropological sense. For Augé, a place is a location with a meaning to it. A house is a home; a school is a place of learning; an office is a place of work. In contrast, “supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places.”12 These non-places are spaces which do not have meaning, and which people only engage with in passing. A supermarket, which holds no interpersonal relationship, a gas station, a roadway in which a person does not interact even in passing with others (unless, of course, they decide to lean on the horn), a hotel room in which a traveller only stays when they need to shower and sleep, rapidly going to the airport, where they continue to be isolated in a place which does not feel truly like a place, but only a space: these are all non-places, which exist only in passing. In contrast to the paradox of modernity, which is simply a way of life for city-dwellers in the 21st century, Augé believes that the supermodern instead gives rise to “[a] paradox of non-place: a foreigner lost in a country he does not know (a ‘passing stranger’) can feel at home there only in the anonymity of motorways, service stations, big stores or hotel chains.”13 There is no longer a deliberate sense of distance between the wanderer and their surroundings; it is now manufactured.

And so the question emerges: if the modern age has progressed past Baudelairean modernity and the integration that accompanies it, transitioning into an age of supermodernity which is impersonal, disconnected, and characterized by a very lack of history and integration of the modern with that history—if this is so, where does the flâneur belong? If, according to Baudelaire, the defining characteristic of the flâneur is “to be away from home and yet feel oneself everywhere at home to see the world and be at the center of the world, and yet remain hidden from the world,”14 and according to Augé, a person feels only at home in supermodern anonymity, in which there is no concept of integration, can the flâneur exist? I contend that the character of flânerie has changed, having evolved with the times into a different form. Dr. Isabel Carrera Suárez writes about the transitioning identity of the flâneur in the contemporary age: specifically, that “the contemporary equivalent of the flâneur shares more ground with alternative figures such as the street walkers created (and sometimes embodied) by black and immigrant writers in the United States, whose observing and traversing of cities is conducted from the perspective of alterity.”15 She refers to this new identity as those “pedestrians”, which in and of itself has a connotation of being ‘outdoors’ rather than within Baudelaire’s arcades. The pedestrian belongs very much outside, on the street, where the classic flâneur would not have dared to venture. According to Suárez, The pedestrian differs from the flâneur in locatedness and physicality… The pedestrian’s 11 Augé, Marc, Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), 110.

12 Augé, Non-Places, 78.

13 Augé, Non-Places, 106.

14 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 9.

15 Suárez, “The Stranger Flâneuse.”

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body and embodiment are themselves a space which permits engaged interaction with the world around her. She is not a disembodied eye like the theoretical flâneur who wanders through the city ‘invisibly’ and untouched, but a sentient participant in the city. She realises boundaries as embodied and refutes the flâneur’s privileged boundary transcendence and Utopian, unified city. (Meskimmon 1997, 21).”16

First and foremost with this change is the fact that the identity and ‘othering’ of the flâneur has been stripped from the concept, isolated and turned on its head: no more is the flâneur an upper class man of means, likely white, existing in a realm of fashion and privilege, but rather, Suarez argues, the pedestrian is commonly a person of colour, and in fact often characterized by their race; additionally the pedestrian is referred to as “she” and “her,” stripping her of the inherently male presence of the flâneur. No longer does the “passionate observer” exist within the confines of the arcades, within a distinct social class and location accessible to a certain group of people, but engages with the outdoors of the city. She wanders the streets—the non-places which are directed and dictated by street signs and lights, demands and directions— and is not simply observing the city, but engaging directly with it. Rather than the distance which Baudelaire deems necessary for the classic flâneur, the contemporary pedestrian recognizes herself as being a part of the city and a site of “interaction with the world.”17 Not only does interaction occur here, but the very integration between old and new styles and architecture which Baudelaire claimed characterized modernity, and which Augé subsequently claimed that supermodern structures and non-places lack. The personal distance of the flâneur was replaced with the inherent structural distance of supermodern non-places, and rather than it being the job of the observer to step away from that location and observe, it is now the job of the pedestrian to integrate and observe through action. The pedestrian is not a passive observer. The pedestrian does not need an excuse; her excuse is the very action of pedestrianism, because the act of pedestrianism is an act of integration. Baudelaire described this integration as being present in the fashions of the women of the age. In ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, Baudelaire reduces women to objects—little more than fashion mannequins whose clothing demonstrates modern sensibilities, with little analysis of how they relate to those sensibilities as people. In his writing, any women who are described in more detail are regarded as prostitutes, hardly to be considered women. The transition to pedestrianism and wandering the streets and the outdoors, the shifting identity of the observer from the white man to the person of colour––often a woman of colour specifically––allow her to claim agency that Baudelaire’s flâneur lacked by nature. She is “part of a continuum that begins from the local dweller who […] daily negotiates survival,”18 and does not have the option to be distanced and removed. In that daily negotiation for survival, and the fight to take a place which she has been denied, she inherently breaks that boundary in a very necessary way; she simultaneously denies the creation of the non-place. As someone who can be considered of a new age instead of the old, entering old spaces is a transgression of prior boundaries; this action forces the new world and the sensibilities of the present age to integrate with prior years. While the flaneur could disappear into the crowd, many times the pedestrian does not have such an option—as a woman, as a person of colour, perhaps as someone visibly queer, they are regularly identified during their entire time in a space, be it on the street or in a building. This visibility is a direct contrast to Auge’s non-places: locales where you are identi16 Marsha Meskimmon, Engendering the City: Women Artists and Urban Space (London: Scarlet Press, 1997), qtd. in Isabel Carrera Suárez, The Stranger Flâneuse and the Aesthetics of Pedestrianism (Interventions 17, no. 6, 2015), 853-865, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801x.2014.998259.

17 Suárez, “The Stranger Flâneuse.”

18 Suárez, “The Stranger Flâneuse.”

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fied only upon entering and leaving.

Because the passionate observer as Baudelaire characterized him was a direct product of the transition into Baudelaire’s era of modernity, the flâneur can no longer be considered to exist in the present age. Too much has changed for it to be sustainable and present: no more is observing integration of old and new a passive activity, a matter of leisure accessible to those with money, but rather is a necessary and active activity of performing that integration oneself, to those who choose to be pedestrians. The modern observer is not isolated or distanced from the scene that they perceive, rather they are aware that they are a part of it and behave as such. In a supermodern world in which history is no longer integrated with the contemporary, the pedestrian, the new flâneur, integrates her surroundings by engaging with the world, by interacting with new people and old places together. By crossing these boundaries and creating this integration, the pedestrian prevents the world from becoming as the flâneur was—both present and distant in a crowd—because the flâneur considered himself to be unique among all of the others. He believed that he was the only one present with the intention of being a passionate observer. Who is to say that the crowd was not full of other flâneurs? Indeed, who is to say that they were not all flâneurs? And who is to say that in a world where the supermodern forces emotional distance upon us, where a pandemic imposes physical distance upon us, that we are not engaging in pedestrianism together, integrating a world with its people as we go past?

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Works Cited Augé Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso, 1995.

Baudelaire, Charles, and Jonathan Mayne. “The Painter of Modern Life.” Essay. In The Painter of Modern Life, and Other Essays, 1–40. London: Phaidon Publishers, 1965.

Carrera Suárez, Isabel. “The Stranger Flâneuse and the Aesthetics OF PEDESTRIANISM.” Interventions 17, no. 6 (2015): 853–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801x.2014.998259.

Woolf, Virginia. “Street Haunting .” Essay. In The Death of the Moth: and Other Essays, 19–28.

London: Hogarth Press, 1947.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This journal would not have been possible without the care, support, and attention of many people. We would like to attempt to thank them all here: our talented writers, editors, and exec who put their time and energy into this work. Although it has been a challenge coming together to publish this journal as the pandemic has continued, all of you have shown up and worked together with us, whether behind the scenes or front and center. Thank you to our tireless editors, who helped shape the papers into their final form: Anya Deady, Izzy Ortner, Sarah Sharp, Neyve Summerville, and Audrey Green. Thanks as well go to the rest of our tireless exec, who have volunteered their time throughout this year to support this journal and all of our other projects: Sophie Harriman and Natalia Tola Maldonado. It has been a pleasure to work with all of you over the past year, and we are grateful for all of the time and care you have put into this work. We couldn’t have asked for a better group!

We would also like to express our gratitude to the King’s Student Union, as well as the CSP Department, for funding and supporting this journal, alongside the rest of our events.

Finally, a thank you to Dr. Dorota Glowacka, who has been a continual source of support for student projects and new initiatives around campus, and who is always working to bring new and challenging texts into our studies.

— Isabel Teramura, President

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