posted under
Dean
,
Ryan Jones
,
Sexuality
,
Subculture
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Ryan M. Jones, History
Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy provided a provocative experience on Monday, December 8, one that I was honored to participate in. I read the section of this book with a certain bias—two people I know recently found themselves facing life-changing news due to their sexual experiences, and as such, reading about a subculture that actively cultivates the HIV virus as a form of kinship struck me as particularly pathological. However, I also understood that part of the exercise Dean’s work intended to complete was to challenge an initial response such as mine, one cultivated by two decades of safe-sex education, but also one that is enmeshed in competing ideologies of health and illness, risk and pleasure. I believe that Dean succeeds, although ethical concerns seem to be unresolved with the current form of his book...
The event was headlined by Dean reading from his work, followed by an insightful look the process by which books are reviewed and revised on their trajectory towards publication. This was offered by Prof. Matti Bunzel, who had been one of the reviewers of the text. Bunzel’s primary claim was that a tension existed in Dean’s work between the self-reflexive revelation of his HIV status and at times dismay at activities in the bareback culture (such as the intention infection of others) and his desire to remove discussion of the subculture to a neutral ground where new insights into sexuality and society could be better evaluated, free from kneejerk reactions that were biased against bareback culture. Bunzel asserted Dean could have his cake and eat it too—at once create a neutral space as well as offer his own judgment on the subculture, something that I too found desirable from Dean as author, yet didn’t find in the text. Following Bunzel, Cris Mayo offered a reading of Dean vis a vis her work on queer youth, citing similarities in the way that subcultures rewrite more mainstream cultures (such as through appeals to risk and nonnormative behaviors), as well as her concerns on the implications of bareback culture for queer youth already surrounded by a confusing array of sexual information, especially as these youth are entering complex adult cultures partially unaware of the significance of the activities taking place. As for me, I had a number of questions as the final respondent, which I have elaborated on below. I do wish to thank the Unit for inviting me to participate and for helping make my presence in person possible.
Masculinity
On my own second reading of he text, a number of questions remained unresolved for me. First, I found it difficult to believe that bottoms (men who are penetrated) were as actively praised as “heroes” for the subculture and as hypermasculine men as Dean described. This is due in part to the manner in which the bottoms are treated, from parties in which negative bottoms are proffered to tops of indeterminate HIV status in a sort of roulette game, to the gang-banging of a bottom in which he is
It seems to me that far from a bonding event, a hierarchy remains that privileges tops over bottoms, whether in terms of power (such as who is dominating who towards a certain desire), in terms of tops being “gift givers” who can bestow HIV on someone else, or in the lack of evidence that after sex, bottoms were affirmed as hypermasculine and that the degredation during sex was just part of the fantasy, rather than an expression of reality.
Versatility
Do people actually inhabit versatile roles, or are they more demarcated. Dean offers that one can be both a gift giver and someone who receives a gift, a top in one moment and a hypermasculine bottom in another. But, like with the unclarity towards the status of bottoms in bareback subculture, I’m left wondering if people in bareback subcultures are truly versatile, or if versatility, a stated goal of many gay rights organizations and a feature of North American gay cultures that at least partially eschewed heteronormative gender identities, is part of the homonormativity which bareback subculture also attempts to undermine.
Health and Risk
If bareback subculture rewrites the manner in which we can conceive of health and risk in that it refuses to link infection with illness, what they do we do with the bodies involved in such a subculture, especially as the subculture is identified as one that worships muscularity and masculinity. Many men who are HIV positive also take testosterone supplements, thereby promoting a stereotypical masculine physique at the gym which translates into a body desirable in ways similar to mainstream culture: big muscles, ripped physique, an appearance of overall health. In this way, bareback subculture seems to ratify mainstream health perspectives (e.g., those of gym culture), even as the appearance of health belies the possibility of infection. Additionally, what of the presence of bareback twinks? Gay porn sites are rife with younger, less muscular men having “raw” sex (think Chaosmen, HotStuds or Bareback Twinks). Two questions then: first, in relation to Cris Mayo’s points on the problems with young queers who grew up with little sex education being initiated into a complex subculture they may not fully grasp the consequences of, what role do twinks have in the bareback culture? Or in another way, what role do those who do not have muscular bodies have in this subculture? Are they more frequently found in the bug-chasing or bottom positions vis a vis more experienced members? Tim Dean did have an interesting response in the presence of emaciated, diseased bodies in bareback porn—this then points to the subculture’s possible glorification of other forms of eroticism, but more evidence would be needed. The second question is this: is the presence of barebacking now in mainstream gay porn—which has long been a bastion of promoting safer-sex practices after AIDS forced the abandonment of the pre-condom romps of the 1970s—an attempt at the normalization of bareback subculture by those in the mainstream who themselves like (whether as fantasy or reality) unprotected sex, but prefer it under a regulated guise, rather than the free-flowing, often anonymous practices of the subculture. That is, under circumstances which do not transmit the disease, such as is required by many of the websites through the constant screening of models for HIV. Is homonormativity striking back, bringing this unruly subculture under its regulatory purview by eroticizing “deviant” behavior inorder to control it and reaffirm the commitment of the mainstream gay community to stopping HIV.
Evidence
As a historian, I wanted more evidence to support Dean’s work. I wanted to see more oral histories or at least evidence why the anecdotes chosen were representative. I wanted, perhaps, more numbers on participants and roles played in the subculture, as well as evidence on how the visual aspects of bareback subculture—the pornographic aspect, for example—actually influence the decisions and desires of the participants. I imagine some of this evidence will be provided in the later chapters we didn’t get to read. Additionally, I was unsure about the significance of etymology to the subculture. Dean makes some provocative, insightful, and elegant readings of the etymology of “gift” and “virus” and how older meanings of these terms related to current realities in the bareback subculture. I wanted to know, however, if the individuals actually were thinking of etymology as they fucked.
Death culture
One of Dean’s most interesting and crucial assertions is that bareback subculture has reconfigured what “life” and “death” are, making death a part of life rather than the opposite of life itself. This occurs in the relexification of HIV as a gift rather than as a death sentence, HIV as a trial of masculinity rather than a stigma, and death as something to be eroticized rather than feared, among other ways. I saw parallels to this relexification in the Death culture of Mexico, a place where death is celebrated yearly on Dia de los Muertos and is seen as a passage in life, rather than life’s end. Anti-AIDS campaigns in Mexico have at times linked themselves to Mexico’s different perspective on death as a means to destigmatize the disease, even as mainstream culture can be significantly phobic about those with the disease. However, if death is seen as part of life rather than its end, then like in bareback culture, death is seen as a consequence of living and as a means of potentially challenging the medicalization of health and life. Moreover, an acceptance of death provides spaces for attaining desires at least partially free from the fear of HIV, as well as a lifestyle that is bittersweet: cognizant of the dangers and risks of sex, but desirous of both the risks and potential consequences as a result of having lived, with death as the freedom from sexual regulation and previous concerns in life.
Condom culture
In contrast, many Latin American nations such as Brazil have also had successful condom campaigns that took unsafe sex—which is the general norm in Latin America—and deroticized it in favor of condom culture. For one Brazilian campaign, it was a matter of honor for fathers and sons to use condoms and get tested, regardless of their sexual proclivities. Using fun commercials and phrases like “strapping on a condom,” safe sex was eroticized in a culture that had seen it as the male right to inseminate any orifice he chose. It is interesting, therefore, that in North America, bareback subculture was the solution to the restrictions of the AIDS epidemic, while condom culture sprouted in Latin America for the same reasons, seeing condoms not as restrictive (as bareback culture did) but liberating from previous notions of sexuality and a conservative backlash against sex during the epidemic.
Conclusion
Overall, a fascinating and provocative study which generated much discussion among professors and students at the Unit’s event. I look forward to further conversations about this work. If you attended…any thoughts?.
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posted under
Medieval
,
Nostalgia
,
Reading
,
Trilling
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Amity Reading, English
Shortly after listening to Renée Trilling’s paper and the provocative discussion it sparked, I found myself trying to very roughly summarize her ideas for an undergraduate in my medieval literature and culture course. I explained as succinctly as I could that Trilling was exploring the aesthetic function of nostalgia both within modern constructions of the medieval and within medieval texts’ constructions of themselves. Although different, both nostalgias perform the work of fantasy: they are a longing for an idealized past, a time when things were different, better, other than they are now. These fantasies of the past provide the present with something it is perceived to lack even though, of course, the ‘past’ that is mourned is imaginary, constructed based on the needs and desires of the now.
“Oh,” said my student. “Isn’t that what you do every day in class? Talk about how great the Anglo-Saxons were and what a disaster the Norman Conquest was?”
I smiled politely.
Of course, my student was not incorrect. It is hard to keep scholarly distance when you love something, but you have to love something to study it as a scholar. Thankfully, we can get ourselves out of this pickle by studying our method of studying. As both a medievalist and a lover of medievalisms, the question of distance, nostalgia, and the medieval is one that I find both extremely interesting on a personal level and also crucial for understanding the intellectual tendencies of medieval scholarship—not too surprising, given my own interests. But Trilling’s talk was relevant to more than just the sub-field of Anglo-Saxon studies, or even medieval studies in general. Her arguments were about our own historical moment as much as they were about the medieval one.
Trilling began her paper with an amusing and incisive summary of popular “medieval” movies, focusing on Michael Curtiz and William Keighley’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Robert Zemeckis’s more recent Beowulf (2007). Although ticket and DVD sales reveal that such movies are clearly appealing to modern audiences, Trilling pointed out that they are rarely good cinema and are obviously not concerned with representing a historically accurate or even feasible version of the Middle Ages. How, then, can we begin to explain their popularity? By looking at the cultural work they perform through their nostalgia, separate from their function as mere entertainment.
Robin Hood, for example, is obviously a product of its own historical moment—the economically- and politically-fraught 1930s—more so than it is a representation of twelfth-century England. With its forceful assertion of class equality and its vivid depictions of the plenty of Sherwood Forest, the film takes the desires and concerns of the moment in which it was produced and projects them onto another moment that was perceived as similar-but-better, this one situated vaguely in ‘medieval times.’ It would be an over-statement to say that the medieval setting of the movie is purely accidental—after all, it is the story’s very medievalness that made it appealing and appropriate. But certainly it is the idea of history behind the figure of Robin Hood that is of importance here, not his historicity.
And because medieval movies like Robin Hood are fantasy only loosely disguised as history, it really shouldn’t surprise us that they scoff at accuracy, textual or historical—their whole purpose runs counter to it. In order to function as they do ideologically, they must make use of the ideas of facts, not facts themselves. As Trilling phrased it, they must be and are “a pastiche of stereotypical images,” images that easily and quickly conjure medieval for a modern audience but that do not risk acknowledging the complexities and uncertainties that must necessarily accompany the study of a period’s history and culture. Onto this fabricated and homogenous but nevertheless ‘historical’ background, we are able to fling fantasies and anxieties about our own culture—an act in which we find pleasure despite the discomfort of our longing.
Trilling then turned to the modern and the medieval versions of Beowulf. Beowulf is interesting, Trilling posited, because its fantasies are harder to identify. What are we longing for when we watch the movie Beowulf? And if we ask this question, we must ask another: What were the Anglo-Saxons longing for when they read or heard the poem Beowulf? This question is crucial because the poem itself is thick with nostalgia, as are all Anglo-Saxon texts. The heroic culture of the poem, the culture that modern nostalgia attributes to the Anglo-Saxons, was already a thing of the past even in the late Anglo-Saxon period (ninth- to eleventh-centuries) when Beowulf was committed to manuscript. The poet, in essence, was already engaged in his own nostalgic act: Beowulf is a commemoration of the heroes of old, the pagan ancestors of the poem’s Christian audience. But in its nostalgia, the poem also maintains distance—men like Beowulf were heroes, yes, but they were not Christian, and while they can be judiciously celebrated, they are not meant to be emulated. So, in Beowulf, our longing for the medieval period, concentrated on the idea of Anglo-Saxon heroic culture, collides with the period’s longing for its own past, creating something of a nostalgic mise en abyme.
Trilling finished her paper with a solid reading of the Old English metrical and linguistic features of the poem that contribute to its own sense of ‘pastiche’ and nostalgia. While Beowulf itself ought not to be read as history or as a window into the ‘historical’ heroic culture of the Anglo-Saxons, one of the things the poem does do, and quite fruitfully, is tell us something of what the Anglo-Saxons thought about their own past. The same model can be useful for us: what can our versions of the medieval tell us about our own culture? Trilling concluded with the thought that the violent and sexually explicit Beowulf movie presents us not with the idealized past of Robin Hood, the past as it should have been, but rather the past as we fear it might have been. What does this anxiety say about our own moment, our own project of nostalgia?
Eleonora Stoppino’s response reformulated the questions raised in Trilling’s paper and presented them back to the audience as touch-points—a technique that encouraged a wide range of enthusiastic and productive responses from the audience. What does it mean that movies like Beowulf are produced in America? We didn’t actually experience the medieval period (not in the United States as a country, nor in our own personal lives as people), so we are being nostalgic for a time and place largely unconnected to us. This, too, links us to the object we are romanticizing: Beowulf itself, although an Anglo-Saxon poem written in Old English, was nevertheless a poem about Danish and Geatish heroes set in Scandinavia. In what ways is the idea of Beowulf, both the poem and the movie, related to a desire for origins, a desire for a foundational myth? Is nostalgia also a desire for belonging, community, history? Can we think of personal or individual nostalgia as separate from group nostalgia? Is the aesthetic function of nostalgia altered when it is employed in an epic as opposed to a novel? Why is it that violence seems to be an inherent feature of our modern nostalgic desires? Was the Anglo-Saxon conception/use of nostalgia different from the modern?
And perhaps most strikingly: is nostalgia always backward-looking? That is, could the fantasies and desires and longing intrinsic to nostalgia ever look forward to the non-existent, the unavailable, rather than back? Such questions left the audience thinking about more than just the medieval.
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posted under
Basu
,
Cold Intimacies
,
Eva Illouz
,
nationalism
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Manisha Basu, English
As I began to read Eva Illouz’s 2007 book Cold Intimacies, I realized that this was one of those rare books that spoke around and across the boundaries of distinct regimes of knowledge. Indeed, as it moved deftly from modern selfhood to postmodern role-playing to the ontic self produced in the conjunction between psychology and new media, and again between Durkheim’s sociology, self-help pamphlets, and traditions of romantic love, it drew in, perhaps demanded even, different disciplinary responses. In particular, I think there are two principal conceptual energies that impel Illouz’s book in these different directions for thinking. The first is an emphasis on the fluidity, the malleability, and the infectious intermixing of rigid binaries like public and private, rational and emotional selves, the surprise of love and the regularities of the market.
The other and deliciously contrasting impulse is an emphasis on stasis. For instance, when in talking of “the writing down of emotions,” Illouz says, “The reflexive act of giving names to emotions in order to manage them gives them an ontology, that is, seems to fixate them in reality,” and later again, when she refers to the ontic self arrested in the intersection between psychology and new media, she is bringing to the foreground “the colonization of time and space” that underlies visions of fluidity. With these two conceptual energies as a kind of framing device, I am going to shift Illouz’s analysis to a slightly different domain of analysis—that of colonial and postcolonial studies with particular reference to the South Asian context. I hope that such a shift is not too cavalier on my part, because of course Cold Intimacies gestures toward this movement when it extends its analysis of interpersonal relations to the imagining of nation and in particular, when it draws attention to Benedict Anderson’s emphasis on style in his diagnosis of the nation as imagined community.
Illouz points out how if “Victorian emotional culture had divided men and women through the axis of the public and the private, the twentieth century therapeutic culture slowly eroded and reshuffled those boundaries by making emotional life central to the workplace.” At the same time, Partha Chatterjee ,in an of-quoted articulation, has argued that the colonial situation and the response of nationalists to the critique of Indian tradition had already in the nineteenth century introduced a new flexibility in dichotomies like public/private, inner/outer, and spirituality/ materiality.
With the expansion of modern European powers into the Empires of the Orient, the Western male subject, fashioned on a principle of rational self-conscious individuality was confronted with a problem: How was he to practice slavery, oppression and exploitation of native men in the colonies who, as men, were rational individuals and, hence, equally deserving of freedom and dignity in the public sphere? Given this pressure to legitimize practices of domination, the public and private realms are reconfigured in terms of the colonial projects and their nationalist responses.
This reconfiguration involved the simultaneous effeminization and hypersexualization of Hindu Bengali men by colonial administrators who must naturalize the regularities of British imperial expansion, and by extension of British patriarchy. As a result, British women and Bengali men were both deemed incapable of rational political life because they were plotted on a continuum with one another. In response, at least the early Indian nationalists, many of whom were western educated, accepted the domination of the latter in the spheres of rationality, public works, impersonal bureaucracy, and modern education but maintained their cultural superiority in the ‘inner’ sphere, traditionally the domain of Indian women.
The modern Hindu Bengali woman was a key figure in this discussion—the nationalist text had painted her as the very repository of tradition, untouched by the profanity of the material world. But at the same time, she needed to have some idea of the world outside the home, into which she could even assay as long as it did not taint her core self. It is this latter criterion which loosened the boundaries of the home from the yoke of confines earlier defined by purdah to a more flexible, but nonetheless culturally determinate domain constituted by the differences between socially approved male and female conduct. The essence of woman had to be initially ossified in terms of certain culturally visible spiritual qualities, but once this was so, the domain constituted by differences clearly marked for the Hindu middle-class Bengali woman her "superiority over the Western woman for whom, it was believed education meant only the acquisition of material skills to compete with men in the outside world and hence a loss of feminine (spiritual) virtues” (Chaterjee). In other words, the binaries remained rigid for the western woman—she was a static figure who could be either feminine or masculine, either spiritual or material, either of the inner or of the outer world—whereas the Hindu woman was superior precisely because she was endlessly fungible and able to lubricate the boundaries between private and public spheres.
My point in bringing colonial and nationalist projects into the discussion is not a mere nominalism, but rather I think in some way to follow Illouz’s lead as she attempts to map how the self produced in the nexus between psychology, the language of productivity and the commodification of identity is further transformed and shaped by internet technology. In other words, in a situation where dichotomies like east and west or spirituality and materiality endlessly fold into one another through the neo-colonial traffic in alterity, how do we map popular understandings amidst the Indian middle-class, for instance, that ‘psychology’ is a ‘western’ luxury necessitated by the relentless materiality of that culture? How then do ‘eastern’ practices like yoga combine so seamlessly with ‘western’ psychology to provide a narrative of self-realization and infuse the materiality of the workplace with the spirituality of family and home? In what ways do we begin to theorize the packaged and codified re-entry of these forms into the newly liberalized Indian market when we witness management trainees in a swanky office building in Mumbai meditating after a long day of work, but this time not in response to a loin-cloth wearing ascetic, but rather a theater screen beaming an American CEO leading their meditation from his office in San Francisco. Is the apparent fluidity here undergirded by a stasis in which difference as a function of time and historicity is itself apprehended and arrested?
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posted under
Cold Intimacies
,
Eric Dalle
,
Eva Illouz
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Eric Dalle, Comparative Literature
Professor Illouz began her talk with an overview of her general research project which she describes as “how capitalism transforms the self.” That is an issue I have been struggling with in my own examination of Mainland Chinese literature beginning in the 1980s. This was, therefore, my personal point of departure in addressing some of the issues in Cold Intimacies.
As Mainland China moved away from high Maoism to a no-holds-barred global capitalism, major changes in the narration of the human subject have highlighted the relationship between economic conditions and psychological and emotional characterization. Beginning in the 1980s, writers began to purposefully write against the previously prescribed Maoist protagonist. They accomplished this by characterizing main characters that were often physically weak, maimed, prone to emotional outbursts, or severely mentally deficient.
My research thus far had concentrated on this particular time period of literature, so after reading Cold Intimacies I became curious about the current representation of the self as performed by the media and pop culture. As China has become a global economic competitor, has an emotional lexicon similarly been mobilized to treat the understanding of the self?
The answer is a resounding yes, and Professor Illouz in her justification for focusing her work on American pop culture and media gave some of the reasons why. Illouz stated that there is a global condition that facilitated the importation of the psychological model of business. Although this importation does undergo a cultural filter, it nonetheless is an importation of an emotional model of the self that is intertwined with capitalism. This model of the self had developed in the United States within corporate culture, and it is from here that it has spread worldwide.
In rummaging through recent scholarship on popular culture in China, I found much work that describes importation of a ‘vocabulary of the self’ (though not referring directly to the notion of “emotional capitalism”). I found interesting work on this in work looking at the popularity of women’s lifestyle magazines beginning in the 1990s. Woman’s magazines and pictorials are not new to Chinese popular culture. Similarly after 1949, the Maoist agenda necessitated pictorials and magazines to provide the model of behavior within the new society.
In the 1990s, these magazines drastically changed their overall project. Now, instead of the agrarian modern woman assisting in the work unit, the front cover of these magazines shows a solitary woman, in a business suit, with laptop. Accompanying this portrayal is a new lexicon of emotions geared toward the purpose of personal success through interpersonal relations. For example in 1999 one magazine ran an article called the “Thirty Traits of the Talented Woman” which lists among these traits: sensitive to the feelings of others, but not suspicious, intelligent, sharp-witted, independent, self-respecting, generous.”1
The reason for highlighting some similarities that I have found between the rise of the “homo sentementalis” as outlined in Cold Intimacies and the contemporary Chinese popular culture is not to suggest a completely parallel narrative between different contexts. Rather I see within the examples an intricate relationship between a desire for success and a parallel need for an emotional lexicon to express this striving for this success. This is shown in parts of chapter one which detail the adoption of psychological models by American corporations. If we are to agree that there is a modern appeal to quantitative emotional comprehension within the public/private sectors in which the capitalist subject inhabits, must we also look at the contribution to productivity? Why else, I would ask, should American corporations swiftly incorporate the various permutations of emotional self-reflexivity if in the end there is no perception of a monetary benefit? But what is actually gained and what is at stake when (as it is argued) that the persuasions of therapy, productivity, and feminism provide the rationale for extracting the emotional from the affective and sanitizing it into the “model of communication”?
I believe that the previous questions were addressed by Professor Illouz as she attempted to explain what she saw as the “political” aspect of the concept of emotional capitalism. This discussion ended our round table, but I found it extremely relevant to many questions that still remained for me. Illouz stated that she did not necessarily see a political agenda, but she immediately retracted and stated that there is perhaps one but it comes with many contradictions. What inspired my question is a need to figure out why the psychological model was so readily adopted by American corporations throughout the 20th century.
Finally, as argued in Cold Intimacies, the precondition of communication is the “suspension of one’s emotional entanglements” so that the project of the self might undergo evaluation, bargaining, and quantification. At what point can an individual categorize the self, so that one in the end one does not discriminate between affective emotions and their quantification? This was the final question that I posed at the end of my response, and again Illouz addressed this issue in explaining what she saw as the relationship between affect and emotion. In my reading of the conclusion to the last chapter, there is a separation of ‘emotion’ as a mechanism for categorizing and describing the self and ‘affect’— which was brought up in the following discussion as perhaps a narrative of affect.
In the end, I believe that the resounding consensus of the panel is that Cold Intimacies is a provocative work that resonates in diverse fields and allows us all to respond and reflect upon our own research from a fresh perspective.
1For this part of the presentation, I referred to the article “The New Chinese Woman and Lifestyles Magazines of the Late 1990s” found in Perry Link ed. Popular China: unofficial culture in a globalizing society
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Written by Bianca Isaki, Asian American Studies Program
Eva Illouz’s Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (2007) is a compilation of three Adorno Lectures she delivered in Frankfurt in 2004. This pedestrian statement, which I grabbed from an “About This Book” blurb from googlebooks.com, actually says a lot about the book’s pedagogical tone, its seemingly resolute antipathy to Foucault (not unknown to Frankfurt School theorists) and its coevalness with a burgeoning literature on cultural structures of feeling and affect (Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Michael Hardt – as well as other theorists of “biomediated” bodies – Antonio Damasio, Ilya Prigione, and some of William Connolly). But, for me, the best thing about Cold Intimacies wasn’t its genealogies and theory-archive so much as Illouz’s readings of popular culture – You’ve Got Mail and those who labor in the Internet-dating world.
Illouz definitely underlines that Internet-dating – with its projects of self-cultivation, articulation, representation, and marketing – are work. The wide-ranging apparatus under which these people - and to varying degrees, all of us – now labor is what she nominates “emotional capitalism,” defined as “a culture in which emotional and economic discourses and practices mutually shape each other, thus producing…a broad, sweeping movement in which affect is made an essential aspect of economic behavior and in which emotional life – especially that of the middle classes – follows the logic of economic relations and exchange” (Illouz 2007:5). The plan for Cold Intimacies is “to uncover another order in the social organization of capitalism” (4) because this un/re-covery “seriously alter[s]” what and how we usually analyze the “modern subject, the private-public divide and its articulation on gender divisions” (Illouz 2007:2). This other organization – emotional capitalism – takes form in “the psychological persuasion, the self-help literature, the advice industry, the state, the pharmaceutical industries, the Internet technology”; taken together, they constitute a “progressive fusion of the market repertoires and languages of the self” (Illouz 2007:108). Key components of this fusion were the language of psychology, a feminism that brought the public discourses about rights into the private sphere, and the new articulation of desire through the economic lexicons and instruments of consumer culture.
I’m not repeating her strategy in order to frame a discussion of what is wrong with it, but I want to push it a little. The idea that knowing more will change what we know for the better is riddled with assumptions and fallacies that all of us involved in a tertiary level of the liberal education project know well. It is this better-ness that many of Illouz’s respondents and questioners seemed to be striving towards during the latter half of the roundtable. Everyone seemed to agree that Cold Intimacies had indeed “uncovered” an important dimension of capitalism, and was eager to set that discovery to work.
Respondent Eric Dalle (Comparative Literature) asked for a comment on how Illouz’s analytical framework might travel to “post-ideological China” (this is the phrase that Lung-Kee Sun uses in The Chinese National Character: From Nationhood to Individuality (M.E. Sharpe 2002), but I suspect Dalle’s meaning fits within Sun’s framework), where the New Chinese Woman is now more likely to be iconized as a solitary female in a business suit and laptop instead of a pre-1990s image of a women’s collective serving the poor wholeheartedly. Perhaps, Dalle suggested, the successful person put forth by the business world in China might be oriented by emotional capitalism’s new lexicon of interpersonal relationships.
Manisha Basu (English) focused on another dynamic of emotional capitalism – the articulation of fluidity (for example, the irregularities of the market) and stasis (as in the reflexive act of naming emotions in order to give them an ontology). She proposed that such an apparatus might be articulated within the neoliberal/ neocolonial project in India by allowing difference itself to be apprehended and arrested. On the neoliberal side, it could allow us to approach a corporate meditation class in India that is being led by its CEO in San Francisco via satellite. And, an instrument that can “capture” difference is useful to (neo)colonial configurations of the New Bengali Woman – a figure whose capacity to be a repository of tradition also allows her to venture in the modern world. (A digression - this operation is precisely what Anjali Gera Roy describes – but does not provide an argument for – in “Bhangra Remixes,” a chapter in India in Africa, Africa in India (Indiana UP, 2008) which the “Intimacy, Domesticity, and the Nation: South Asia and Beyond” IPRH reading group read this earlier this month). An audience member later speculated that the success of religion-affiliated Internet dating sites contradicts Illouz’s claim about the increasing rationalization of romantic object choice. I think that Basu’s suggestion that the development of technologies for apprehending difference (like religious values) and locating them in intimate sites (like a love-object) has explanatory power here, but this isn’t the way the discussion proceeded.
Finally, in the most gentle terms, Alejandro Lugo (Anthropology-Latina/Latino Studies) pushed Illouz to account for her research site (middle-class U.S. culture) and her focus on a narrow strain of second-wave feminism. I was most on board with this response because it points to the ways that capitalism takes particular forms as it articulates with site-specific histories, terrains and cultures. Illouz’s response had something to do with the capacity of the U.S. to spread culture via globalization, generally glossing Lugo’s insistence on the specificity of her research sites. I later followed up with a question about politics: how does it matter that emotional capitalism’s convergence between psychology and feminism happened in the U.S.?
I pointed to the specificity of the U.S. settler colonial context in which the early twentieth- century psychological discourses Illouz discusses (especially, Freud’s 1909 lectures at Clark University) were taken up because, I believe, that specificity matters a lot. Psychology (Illouz doesn’t differentiate between psychology and psychoanalysis) was instrumental in elaborating a psychological interiority, which thus became a vector for projects that were trying to make sense of a huge influx of immigrants, nationalizing naturalization, and disavowing the displacement of indigenous nations. Cultural pluralism, multiculturalism, and a transnational America could create a citizenry across seemingly insurmountable differences by projecting a liberal imagination of abstracted “hearts and minds.” I’m schematizing here but, my point is that the politics of psychology get “uncovered” when we see them within the project of building a white settler colonial society over and against the historical and ongoing displacement of indigenous nations. And, insofar as psychology signaled the onset of emotional capitalism, neither can be divorced from the production of the U.S. as a “nation of immigrants” and a white-centering “multiculturalism”.
By contrast, in Illouz’s estimation, emotional capitalism has contradictory effects that cancel each other out such that she can say; “emotional capitalism doesn’t have a politics.” Her answer suggests that her analysis of emotional capitalism exists in a space that isn’t yet situated within capitalism’s political economy or cultural politics. Yet, most of the respondents pressed up against this limitation; we/they wanted to know what an analysis of emotional capitalism can do. Specifically, how do Illouz’s findings allow us to approach different kinds of modern subjects - therapy-patients, housewives, CEO-meditation instructors, a Mexican working-class, and Jdate.com clients? The point (as Illouz acknowledges) is to see how capitalism’s “intertwining of rationality and emotionality” happens in and through the production of modern subjects (Illouz 2008). But the picture of emotional capitalism’s materiality offered by Cold Intimacies is fractured; Illouz “suggest[s] that there is no direct continuity between social spheres and that they do not necessarily mirror one another” (Illouz 2007:92). This is a plea for a method of working out from “a deep understanding of the concrete cultural practices of ordinary actors” (Illouz 2007:93). Otherwise, the aleatory capacity of the singular gets engulfed by a too-quick a priori prediction about how something will “behave” (Illouz 2007:92). Put plainly, we need to know how something works in order to determine what it does and Cold Intimacies is working on the first part of that process.
My point is that I don’t think that this order of investigation works so well when we’re talking about social relationships under capitalism. Even theories of aleatory capitalism don’t suggest that capital produces difference for nothing. Rather, capitalism funds social transgressions in the short run, but only to exploit them in the end. Instead, Gayatri Spivak has suggested “begging the question” – showing how something works by first presuming that it does. Capitalism is useful as an analytic precisely because it describes processes that create value by trading on hierarchies of difference – the main difference being that between the differential between necessary and surplus labor. However, as feminist, marxist and queer analyses have shown (I’m thinking of the sociologist Roderick Ferguson in particular), hierarchies of race, gender, nationality, and, apparently, emotional appropriateness can also be exploited to produce differentials in social value. Begging the question would allow us to ask; how does emotional capitalism shore up, re/produce, extend, broaden, deepen, entrench or otherwise exploit hierarchies of difference?
This project offers a nuanced view of the ways that a language of emotion has been taken up into the waged-workplace and consumer culture; and I appreciate its attention to singularity and its eruption in strange and unexpected places like Internet-dating sites. But, as I indicated earlier, are we assuming too much when we risk thinking that we can know more by bracketing objects of study, and further, that knowing more will change how we know what we know for the better? This assumption shares at least morphology with Illouz’s “hyperrational fool, somebody whose capacity to judge, to act and ultimately choose is damaged by a cost-benefit analysis, a rational weighing of options that spins out of control” (Illouz 2007:113). Illouz was talking about a brain-damaged man trying to set a date for an appointment with a neurologist. She was comparing him to the Internet-dater who (mis)applies her economic literacy in her search for true love – or at least marriage, romantic happiness or a good time. I’m wondering if the same misapplied faith – that knowing more happens only in advance of seeing what the “big picture” is. The analogy, however misfitting, is with scholarly projects that bracket attempts to describe capitalist phenomena from their systemic location within productions of exploitation and hierarchy. I’m suggesting that the singularity of capitalism demands presuming that it has a politics (a systemic production of inequalities) and then showing how it does. This untimely order of analysis might better key to the asymptotic relationship between academic production and historically material struggles for lasting social redistribution, which, after all, will determine what any scholarship means in the long run.
Illouz, E. (2007). Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Malden, MA, Polity Press.
Illouz, E. (2008). Author's Roundtable II: Eva Illouz. Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Urbana, Illinois.
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posted under
Jennifer Bliss
,
Kaja Silverman
,
photography
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Jennifer Bliss (Comparative Literature)
As someone with only partial knowledge of Kaja Silverman's books and the works of Gerhard Richter, I prepared myself for the possibility of a lecture that might fly right over my head. Instead, on Friday afternoon I listened to a deceptively clear and accessible talk by Silverman on Richter's work and his relationship to German history and the field of visual culture. I say "deceptively clear" only because now, as I sit here attempting to collect my notes and thoughts, I find it rather difficult to summarize her talk while still doing it justice. (Perhaps there is a reason why her talk lasted nearly two and a half hours!)
Silverman began her talk by establishing Richter's art as works of "analogy," or a relationship of two or more things based on varying degrees of similarity. Analogies, according to Silverman and her Richter-inspired interpretation, work to neutralize our tendency to see things hierarchically as "either/or" or "identification / antithesis." The primary analogy that Silverman establishes is between figuration—that is, the close representation of reality, i.e. photography—and abstraction (i.e. abstract painting). Rather than being seemingly opposing tendencies, Silverman argues that Richter actually brings these two concepts closer together in his photo-paintings (paintings that trace a photograph on the canvas and then, while the paint is still wet, are blurred to varying degrees through the artist's use of a squeegee).
From this analogy, Silverman expanded her discussion of Richter to touch on a number of specific photo-paintings, putting them in conversation not only with the source photographs but with one another. The analogous paintings that seemed particularly significant were the series of Holocaust images, the Baader-Meinhof images, and the images of Richter's daughter Betty. In putting these three series of photo-paintings into analogous relations with one another, Silverman (via Richter) draws closer to the major connection she is trying to make: on Silverman’s account, Richter views history through the analogy between figuration and abstraction.
Perhaps this relationship would be clearer if Silverman had given a little more historical information concerning the Baader-Meinhof group in particular. For those who are not familiar with the Red Army Faction terrorist group, this website might be helpful in this respect. The sympathy and even tenderness with which Richter treats the images of Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof place them clearly in the position of victims. Silverman seems to be arguing that Richter approaches this period of German history in a similar way to the period of National Socialism—by acknowledging the victims' innocence and, simultaneously, his own place within those historical moments. Our standpoint as viewers (and Richter's as artist) puts us into the position of the state and of surveillance, thus acknowledging our own role in sanctioning the violence of the state. Yet there is a redemptive quality to Richter's images that, as Silverman says, "saves" the RAF members from the eternal death and disfiguration that the original source photographs create.
Moreover, by echoing the images of Ensslin and Meinhof in images of his daughter Betty, Richter conflates past, present and even future. Keeping Silverman's interpretation of the Baader-Meinhoff images in conversation with the representations of Betty, Richter's works seem to bring together a troubled past and an unknown, but optimistic, future. The image of Betty looking back at one of Richter's own pieces highlights this conflation of time, too, while also recalling Walter Benjamin's figure of the Angel of History. Richter's relationship to history seems to fit into Silverman's first analogy, the relationship between figuration and abstraction. Richter's works are both representations of reality or history, and emotional, individual, somewhat abstract responses to what Silverman calls "the infinite," or that which "lies outside of our perceptual world."
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posted under
campus ethics
,
Dan Colson
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Dan Colson, English
In my literature classes, I teach authors like John Dos Passos, Michael Gold, Jack London, and Jack Conroy. We talk about socialism, communism, fascism, and democracy and invariably someone in the class (myself or one of the students) draws a comparison between the events and ethos of the pre-WWII United States and our present situation. The idea of teaching the literature I study without discussing politics is comic: “Students, please skip the last section of Native Son, do not ask me to define words like ‘proletarian,’ ‘fellow-traveler,’ or (to be safe) ‘fascism,’ ‘democracy,’ and ‘war,’ and also ignore the time period in which all of these texts were written...in fact, let’s just pretend they were written during the Jurassic Period so we don’t have to touch on the complications of industrial capitalism and American democracy.” Recently, however, this humorous exercise in avoidance has become a looming reality.
Those of you at the U of I recently received an email outlining “prohibited political activity,” and you may be aware of the various responses by faculty and graduate students.* The university’s clarification of state law (it remains to be seen if their interpretation is tenable or not) raises serious concerns about free speech and academic freedom. But perhaps more importantly, these events reveal a floating definition of “political” speech/activity that can restrict what we teach and how we teach it. As a graduate student, I’ve been struck by the harsh truth of working for a public institution and I’m scared. The state seems to want to redefine the nature of the university and there are those locally and nationally who would go even farther.
Over the last week, I have repeatedly expressed my concern that extending the “prohibited political activity” restrictions to all university property places a special burden on graduate students: we move in and out of our roles as employees and students throughout the day. The Ethics Office’s guidelines, however, draw no distinction. So long as we are on campus, we are employees. Thus, when we take classes, meet with other students, or write portions of our dissertations in the library, we must censor our political expression. Clearly few of us will be writing “vote Obama” in our dissertations, but what counts as “political?” I posed this very question to ACLU attorneys and was disturbed by the answer.
We used the graduate seminar as our test case and the attorney claimed that any “electioneering”–that is, any support of a candidate, a party, or a referendum–should be suppressed by the instructor. In other words, it is the faculty’s responsibility to police the classroom and be sure that no inappropriate “political” content is aired. Presumably the same would be true for teaching assistants in their classes. Most of us carefully monitor our class discussions, being vigilant so no one is attacked or discriminated against, but now we must be even more controlling.
This restriction is frightening enough in itself, but the ACLU attorney was evasive when I pressed him on issues that I consider “political,” but that may not lend themselves to electioneering. Are there issues so intimately tied to party platforms that expressing a view on them would imply support of that platform? No real answer. Do issues of equality, human rights, social justice count as political? Maybe. I received no definitive answer, but I will cite one chilling example: if there comes a day when Illinois or the nation must vote for or against the rights of gays and lesbians to marry, we will not be able to express an opinion in our classrooms. LGBT studies? Good luck. And, if these laws are taken to their extreme logical conclusion, graduate students should be wary of using university resources (property, computers, etc.) to write papers that support or oppose any overtly “political” issues. Don’t expect the line to ever be overt, either. The ethics laws (like many academic freedom issues) function on a complaint basis: you’re free to express yourself, until someone takes offense.
I would rest easier if our vocal detractors were our only opposition. While they may be a larger part of American culture than I care to admit, I can dismiss critics like those who respond on the Daily Illini’s comment board. “Dough Boy” says, “...as an Illinois taxpayer I pay your salary and God knows what other untold benefits, I do not want you using your time and MY MONEY to spread your own political thought. Were it up to me, all of those who participated in yesterday's protest [the Barack Obama rally / free-speech protest held on Thursday, October 2] would be fired, period. They knew what they were getting into before they gathered and they should suffer the consequences of their stupid actions....SHUT UP and TEACH!”
I suppose we will always face this argument: “you are paid to teach, and politics have nothing to do with your subject matter [regardless of the subject matter].” But it is not only the proprietary taxpayers who should concern us.
Perhaps everything is politics, but few beyond the academy believe so. Who gets to define politics? The university says that support for John McCain is political, yet support for anarchism is not. The Office of the Executive Inspector General [the state agency responsible for executing the Ethics Act] claims that everyone, even students, are prohibited from political expression on campus, but they do not define politics. Even the ACLU–which has been supportive in our recent battle–has trouble drawing the line between political and apolitical subjects. Reproductive rights? Gay rights? Human rights?
I will soon write a dissertation that I find unquestionably political; I continue to teach classes in which politics are unavoidable; and I believe in social justice that is politically at odds with large swaths of American culture. I don’t know if any of these “activities” are prohibited, because I don’t know who in my uncertain future will define the “political.”
*On Thursday, October 2, graduate students organized an on-campus Barack Obama to protest the free-speech restrictions. On their own time, grad students and faculty wore Obama buttons, attended a political rally, and distributed campaign materials, all of which are prohibited to employees on university property. [Chicago Tribune]
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