Wednesday, 29 April 2009
Tuesday, 28 April 2009
Last additions
Narcissism-Tom says he can do a lacan on this.
Woman as seductress and original sin. Guilt.
p.s. taken from the article ibliography/ Excerpts from:
Woman as Abject: "Resisting Cultural and Religious Myths That Condone Violence against Women" Author(s): Elaine J. Lawless
Source: Western Folklore, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 237-269Published by: Western States Folklore Society
The biblical narrative of Garden of Eden forms religious myths about women, that are reinforced through popular programs. As effective means of controlling and subordinating woman, guilt and shame serves the interests of the society in which male supremacy is to be maintained.
The religious and cultural significance of the biblical story of Adam and Eve and their behaviors in the Garden of Eden has serious repercussions even in the postmodern context of contemporary society. Everyone knows this story and could recite a version of it without much difficulty -whether it is part of their "creation myth" or not. What is more surprising, perhaps, than its tenacity is the continued potency of this story, one of the oldest religious creation stories that has its roots in both oral and literary art and culture, particularly in the ways it prescribes beliefs about women and what they should be like. Even as the various versions of this story are questioned, the power of the core story remains in tact. Feminists' rereadings of the story disregard interpretations that posit that Eve's weak curiosity was the ruin of humankind. It has been suggested that Eve's curiosity was not weak at all but a healthy curiosity that brought about humankind's liberation from the passivity of the pastoral. The first and most popular interpretation of the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, particularly the parts that locate the blame for disobedience and the subsequent expulsion from the garden squarely on Eve. This is firmly entrenched in contemporary culture to such an extent that the view of Eve as the sinner and seductor who causes problems for men and for all of humankind pervades mental and cultural constructs. This narrative constructs of Eve as Evil. Woman as Evil continue to support a view of women as abject-that is, whatever is deemed polluted, dirty, and sinful-to such an extent that violence rendered against women is often construed, consciously or not, as justifiable given the degraded status of women within contemporary cultures. Was eating the apple a terrible misdeed that destroyed humankind's access to the pure Garden of Eden, or was Eve, in fact, courageous in opening the door to knowledge and consciousness, as well as mortality? Eve disobeyed God's warning in the Garden to not eat the fruit of the one designated tree; the snake (Satan) tempted her into taking a bite of the now totally symbolic apple. Eve, in turn, tempted Adam to eat of the apple as well. Eve is a seductress. It is also a role that society has assigned to her. She supposed to seduce as it is only 'natural' for her, as it is the role that she has subscribed to herself and it is reinforced by the Biblical narrative.
Understanding that most biblical narrative metaphorical .
that the "knowledge" Eve discovered was sexual knowledge. And she learned the mastery of suduction. She and Adam became ashamed of their nakedness, covered themselves, and fled from God's anger. It was in this manner, then, that sexual knowledge and desire came to be associated with sin. and woman represents that sin. The story has had tremendous power to shape perceptions of "women," perceptions that are imbedded in contemporary western culture and continue shaping cultures. The myth of Adam and Eve has is projected a negative image of the male-female relationship and of the 'nature' of women that is still deeply imbedded in the modern psyche" (Daly 1973:45)
"The point is simply that by its built `-in bias and its blind reinforcement of prejudice the myth does express the "original sin" of patriarchal religion. The message that this narrative unintentionally transmits leads to many the implications which are evident in our every day lives. In patriarchy, with the help of religion, women have been the primordial scapegoats." (Daly 1973:47)
The dangers of these implications are many, but perhaps most destructive for women themselves is that women who also know this pervasive myth often believe the message transmitted by the narrative of Garden of Eden is true.
Daly writes:
"It happens that those conditioned to see themselves as 'bad' or 'sick' in a real sense become such. Women who are conditioned to live out of the abject role assigned to the female sex actually appear to "deserve" the contempt heaped upon the second sex. " (Daly 1973:49)
On representation
Sally Robinson in Engendering the subject: Gender and Self-Representation writes:
"representation" is an act of violence, perpetrated by the self-present and knowing subject against, one can only assume, the Others that that subject desires to know and control. Thus, representation is a form of colonization, an imperial move on the part of the subject. Yet representation ... has another, and contradictory, meaning: representation must also be made to signify the process by which ("invisible") subjects"legitimize" themselves by inscribing their experience, their desires, and their "reality" into discourse. The difference between these two meanings of representation, both political, is in the conceptualization of the subject of representation. ... That subject is akin to the humanist "self."
[1991:190]
Solutions?!
This conscious transformation and peoples resistence to violence through surveillance and control marks the essence of the process of how women can and do redefine their roles and their intrinsic worth in ways that defy the power of the master narrative of woman as evil, sinner, and full of guilt, and in need to apologize and make up for the fact that she not “complete”..
Woman as seductress and original sin.
Guilt. Women feel guilty if they don't dress up for their husbands
knowledge of being naked. Eve nobody told eve about this and therefore she didn't know until she was told. In makeover scenario, as in Susan Boyle eg she was unaware of how people perceived her until Piers morgan then consequent beratting on youtube comments etc...
Woman as seductress and original sin. Guilt.
p.s. taken from the article ibliography/ Excerpts from:
Woman as Abject: "Resisting Cultural and Religious Myths That Condone Violence against Women" Author(s): Elaine J. Lawless
Source: Western Folklore, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 237-269Published by: Western States Folklore Society
The biblical narrative of Garden of Eden forms religious myths about women, that are reinforced through popular programs. As effective means of controlling and subordinating woman, guilt and shame serves the interests of the society in which male supremacy is to be maintained.
The religious and cultural significance of the biblical story of Adam and Eve and their behaviors in the Garden of Eden has serious repercussions even in the postmodern context of contemporary society. Everyone knows this story and could recite a version of it without much difficulty -whether it is part of their "creation myth" or not. What is more surprising, perhaps, than its tenacity is the continued potency of this story, one of the oldest religious creation stories that has its roots in both oral and literary art and culture, particularly in the ways it prescribes beliefs about women and what they should be like. Even as the various versions of this story are questioned, the power of the core story remains in tact. Feminists' rereadings of the story disregard interpretations that posit that Eve's weak curiosity was the ruin of humankind. It has been suggested that Eve's curiosity was not weak at all but a healthy curiosity that brought about humankind's liberation from the passivity of the pastoral. The first and most popular interpretation of the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, particularly the parts that locate the blame for disobedience and the subsequent expulsion from the garden squarely on Eve. This is firmly entrenched in contemporary culture to such an extent that the view of Eve as the sinner and seductor who causes problems for men and for all of humankind pervades mental and cultural constructs. This narrative constructs of Eve as Evil. Woman as Evil continue to support a view of women as abject-that is, whatever is deemed polluted, dirty, and sinful-to such an extent that violence rendered against women is often construed, consciously or not, as justifiable given the degraded status of women within contemporary cultures. Was eating the apple a terrible misdeed that destroyed humankind's access to the pure Garden of Eden, or was Eve, in fact, courageous in opening the door to knowledge and consciousness, as well as mortality? Eve disobeyed God's warning in the Garden to not eat the fruit of the one designated tree; the snake (Satan) tempted her into taking a bite of the now totally symbolic apple. Eve, in turn, tempted Adam to eat of the apple as well. Eve is a seductress. It is also a role that society has assigned to her. She supposed to seduce as it is only 'natural' for her, as it is the role that she has subscribed to herself and it is reinforced by the Biblical narrative.
Understanding that most biblical narrative metaphorical .
that the "knowledge" Eve discovered was sexual knowledge. And she learned the mastery of suduction. She and Adam became ashamed of their nakedness, covered themselves, and fled from God's anger. It was in this manner, then, that sexual knowledge and desire came to be associated with sin. and woman represents that sin. The story has had tremendous power to shape perceptions of "women," perceptions that are imbedded in contemporary western culture and continue shaping cultures. The myth of Adam and Eve has is projected a negative image of the male-female relationship and of the 'nature' of women that is still deeply imbedded in the modern psyche" (Daly 1973:45)
"The point is simply that by its built `-in bias and its blind reinforcement of prejudice the myth does express the "original sin" of patriarchal religion. The message that this narrative unintentionally transmits leads to many the implications which are evident in our every day lives. In patriarchy, with the help of religion, women have been the primordial scapegoats." (Daly 1973:47)
The dangers of these implications are many, but perhaps most destructive for women themselves is that women who also know this pervasive myth often believe the message transmitted by the narrative of Garden of Eden is true.
Daly writes:
"It happens that those conditioned to see themselves as 'bad' or 'sick' in a real sense become such. Women who are conditioned to live out of the abject role assigned to the female sex actually appear to "deserve" the contempt heaped upon the second sex. " (Daly 1973:49)
On representation
Sally Robinson in Engendering the subject: Gender and Self-Representation writes:
"representation" is an act of violence, perpetrated by the self-present and knowing subject against, one can only assume, the Others that that subject desires to know and control. Thus, representation is a form of colonization, an imperial move on the part of the subject. Yet representation ... has another, and contradictory, meaning: representation must also be made to signify the process by which ("invisible") subjects"legitimize" themselves by inscribing their experience, their desires, and their "reality" into discourse. The difference between these two meanings of representation, both political, is in the conceptualization of the subject of representation. ... That subject is akin to the humanist "self."
[1991:190]
Solutions?!
This conscious transformation and peoples resistence to violence through surveillance and control marks the essence of the process of how women can and do redefine their roles and their intrinsic worth in ways that defy the power of the master narrative of woman as evil, sinner, and full of guilt, and in need to apologize and make up for the fact that she not “complete”..
It's a wrap
1. Intro: (2 mins)
1. Knowledge production and representation.
2. The whole point of this presentation is to discuss how we live in a society of survelance which controls and modify/restricts our behaviour in terms of sexual difference. And we are going to demonstrate this through comparing the modern day makeover to the the ideology of the Garden of Eden.
2. Introduce Video which is going to outline the key concepts of Butler’s theory of heteronormativity (6 mins)
3. How is heteronormativity represented in the Garden of Eden? (Tom) (1 min and 20 seconds)
[Just to clarify the way in which we've used the Garden of Eden story from the book of genesis, I'd like to point out that we've taken it purely as a text rather than as any kind of historical event or historical document. We're going to look at the Garden of Eden purely within a modern discursive framework. This isn't to say we aren't going to deal with the way it's imagined as a historical document as this is quite central to it's heteronormativity. The fact is, as a text, it's taken as a model, perhaps even in some cases as an original and an ideal, to which human life must conform and aspire.
4. How is heteronormativity and the ideology of the garden of eden infiltrated (1.5 min) contemporary society? (Ina) – (It is not obsolete: The Biblical narrative has permeated our current society but do they have the same significance now-can we talk of the past with present language?).
1. The belief that human beings fall into two distinct and complementary categories, male and female [and that the default human relationship is between the two with men being androcentrically prioritized], has influenced contemporary society in several ways:b) Social life in heteronormative society is set up in such a way as toprivilege and revere the (male) masculine and to relegate the feminine to objects of ridicule or desire. For example, we can see this in women driver jokes, wife jokes, mother-in-law jokes etc. Furthermore, a whole industry ranging from hard porn and prostitution to soft-core advertising markets women’s bodies as objects of consumption by men.c) Behaviour that is incorrectly and essentially considered to be Lesbian, gay, and/or bisexual normally strongly disapproved --> often results in an internalisation of homophobia. For example, most heteronormative societies only have boxes for “male” and “female” on administrative forms. We have Women’s and Men’s washrooms, but few spaces for those who consider themselves transgendered [rather than this, I'd say 'without allowing for any alternate forms of identity, such as the sexually diverse space occupied by transgendered individuals' or something, it just sounds more general.] Moreover, the institution of marriage is usually been viewed as valid in the eyes of the state only if existing between a man and a woman. The use of the word 'gay' and ‘queer’ to describe something stupid or unfortunate.d) instant surgery of babies with indecisive genitals to fix them into one gender category (explain this a bit)
[However, heteronormativity goes beyond these surface manifestations of prejudice and also represents the unconscious adoption of a 'neutral' position which favours heterosexuality, and also maleness, as normal, and thus presents homosexuality and femaleness as a supplementary Other. This shows itself in our society through our use of language (such as how 'man' is used as a signifier for humanity rather than just men, while 'woman' remains specific) but also, the way in which social structures and kinship ties such are implicitly heterosexual unless we specify otherwise. Marriage, for example, is by default a heterosexual institution unless we specify we are talking about a supplementary 'gay' marriage. Finally, and most importantly for this presentation, heteronormativity also manifests in the way we by default look at our bodies as being for the purpose of attracting mates and ultimately as tools towards reproduction, which cuts out and supercedes any alternate function they might have.]
5. To what extent is the garden of eden ideology, sexual difference and performativity packaged up and sold to us through TV shows such as how to look good naked or what not to wear? (Thea) [Make explicit the links back to the Garden of Eden and the similarities therein]
How do these programmes reinforce and modify/control behaviour? Panopticon - Garden of Eden/360degree [Gaze of God, make it explicit.]
6. How does this type of self-image programme reinforce the masculinity/ feminity binary? Cattle proding, Class, [Woman as the desirer of man – as in the bible.]
7. Subjectivity in the Makeover
The 'true' self.
The Lacanian mirror stage (or better still psychic mimesis, but I need to read up on the mimesis) as a metaphor for Makeover Shows - In the makeover, the 'unrealised' body (innocent of its own insufficiency and ugliness) is held up to a mirror (literally or metaphorically) and reconstructed. Parts which were formerly incorporated into the boundaries of the body ('bad' haircuts, clothing style etc) are cut out first metaphorically and literally, and the self is recreated around socially acceptable perameters, this self then becomes the 'true' self, which is normally affirmed by presenters who express pleasure and affirm the naturalness of the body which has been created. [I can expand on this because essentially the whole process of a makeover is a kind of psychic mimesis.] In the same way, by eating of the tree of knowledge Adam and Eve become aware of their own bodies and clothe themselves. Just as the previously innocent female subject is forced to adapt their gaze to that of the male subject in order to understand their inadequacy, Adam and Eve see themselves through the eyes of God by achieving self awareness and are thus aware of their shame. [I'll try to make this clearer, make the link more natural and produce some kind of conclusion from it, but I need to read some more.]
7. Susan Boyle case study [Include something about how the nature of her image and identity is the subject of battles for control. People wanting to keep her in her ‘natural’ state represents a kind of reverse-makeover in itself. They’re trying to enforce a ‘true’ self for some kind of personal end.]
8. Commodification of the body-adverting, purchase
A woman through is portrayed as nothing more than just another commodity. In these public displays of surveillance and control of what is considered “normal”, “acceptable” “sexy”, "seductive" and “desirable”, audience is never just an observer. Through these (makeover) programmes we observe these comodifications of women as though they are set apart and separated from the real us. Within these programmes the gender roles are reinforced, for example woman as –“mother”. “housewife”, “sexually desirable woman", " sex object”, that must please and tease, pleasure, gratify, entertain her man and by looking sexually desirable and attractive she can contribute to his social status. The biblical narrative of Garden of Eden has given her a role that she is expected to subscribe to and what she must be "naturally" good at-which is seducing and producing (babies). It is strongly suggested and reinforsed by the make over shows, such as Trinny and Suzanna. These images of commodified women entangle us within process of signification, by being spectators ourselves we complete this process of signification. As we already have the knowledge through the Biblical narrative of a woman as a sinner, guilty, seductress, worthless, in constant need for improvement, incomplete, secondary to a man and also woman as lacking. Women themselves also reinforce the need to compensate for her/their lack(s) through subjecting themselves through these public scrutinies. These negative characteristics are strongly supported and infiltrated in society by the Garden of Eden narrative. Even if this knowledge and the fact that it comes from the Biblical narrative is unconscious, and for the most part it is, this aspect makes the issue even more tragic and unsolvable. These popular programmes reinforce the gender binaries. Public-the spectators of these make over programmes and as well as women themselves who take part in these shows reinforce gender binaries. Also it is strongly anchored and pumped up by the patriarchal and capitalist relations. To maintain the effectiveness of the Garden of Eden narrative is commercially viable (feasible) on many levels. Therefore it is very likely that it will just continue to get endorsed and encourage. Especially by the contemporary media. Depends how much something is at stake? Fancy a new automobil, simon?
The cultural codes are entrusted with the two fold function of maintaining the social order's dominant binary oppositions and providing the means necessary to perpetuate the so-called natural hierarchies in the social order through its literature, history, cinema, religion, law, and so on. Eve is as submissive, inferior, and less fully developed. Normality has been to Abnormality as Adam has been to Eve; or, put in a slightly different way: Adam is to Normality as Eve is to Abnormality. As with the creation of Eve, abnormality is understood by that which Normality is not; abnormality is defined by the Lack.
The cultural codes are entrusted with the two fold function of maintaining the social order's dominant binary oppositions and providing the means necessary to perpetuate the so-called natural hierarchies in the social order through its literature, history, cinema, religion, law, and so on. Eve is as submissive, inferior, and less fully developed. Normality has been to Abnormality as Adam has been to Eve; or, put in a slightly different way: Adam is to Normality as Eve is to Abnormality. As with the creation of Eve, abnormality is understood by that which Normality is not; abnormality is defined by the Lack.
Solutions?!
This conscious transformation and peoples resistence to violence through surveillance and control marks the essence of the process of how women can and do redefine their roles and their intrinsic worth in ways that defy the power of the master narrative of woman as evil, sinner, and full of guilt, and in need to apologize and make up for the fact that she not “complete”..
[I'm not convinced we should use Susan Boyle. While she's topical, we already effectively have two case studies, and we have loads of material already. We should definately leave the stuff on the blog, but I think for the presentation I'm not convinced we need her.]
Psychoanalytic take on the Garden of Eden narrative. (from the article posted couple of weeks ago)
Adam was defined in the affirmative and Eve was defined by that which Adam was not; Eve was defined by The Lack.
Eve was created as a consequence of Adam's Lack - as in his lack of companionship-- and Eve was created to fill this Lack - as in to fill Adam's loneliness. And, at the same time, Eve's creation was a cause of Adam's Lack - as in Eve's creation was to create an anatomical Lack (of a rib) inside of Adam. Eve, in her very creation and existence, was the living and breathing embodiment of the consequence of Adam's Lack, the cause of Adam's Lack, and the solution for Adam's Lack ... all at the same time. Eve became responsible for the loss of the Language of Adam through her gullibility, her innocence, and her curiosity. Eve became responsible for the loss of the Language of Adam through her gullibility, her innocence, and her curiosity. She was to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and Wisdom. Eve became the living and breathing embodiment of the Forbidden Fruit. And with Eve's earthly appetites and carnality came the Casting out from the Garden ... into mortality, Death, and the decay of the Flesh. The Language of Adam had been scientific, rational, objective, and primary in juxtaposed-hyphenation to the Language of Eve which was of the corporeal world of the senses, the carnal world of touch, the language of the body, textures, and blends.... The Language of Eve speaks the image of woman as flesh, temporality, and earthiness. Carnal Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was to be found in the shame of one's nakedness and to be cast out and removed from the Garden of Eden.
P
[Conclusion ideas]
[One thing I think I'd like to make clear before we finish is that, in doing this presentation, we have quite unfairly and quite arbitrarily grouped things together which are in now way intrinsically related. In a way, we've constituted heteronormativity ourselves as a discursive practice and as the subject of our knowledge, investigation and critique. The link between the Genesis story and the format of a Makeover programme, is completely arbitrary and based on a fairly loose demarcation of both as heteronormative. In fact, in many ways it might be argued we've enforced a completely alien discourse onto both by forcing them into comparison with one another. I'd go so far as to say that if you went out and randomly asked people to try and link the two, they'd probably have trouble doing so. It's only because we've collated these disparate fragments of knowledge into a discursive formation, heteronormativity, which allows us to see them as similar that we're able to group them together and create a presentation about them.
What I hope we're showing now is that we're aware of this, and in fact it's partially intentional. There is no natural organization of ideas and thoughts, after all, and we don't feel what we're doing is really any less relevant or less natural than if we'd followed up more 'obvious' links. True, we've drawn some pretty arbitrary parallels between aspects of religion and pop culture, but then, why is the separation between the two any less arbitrary in itself. Our point is that heteronormative elements, whether you have an understanding of them as heteronormative or not, do permeate and flow through diverse strands of our cultural life, and perhaps in this case the creation of new discursive practices is justified when it can provide a means towards changing the social fabric itself. There is, after all, no neutral discursive position, and thus no way to stand on the fence.] (1 minute 30 seconds)
[I'm going to keep checking the blog all evening, so as we add more to this post I'll keep updating the conclusion and I'll try and come out with some point which summarizes and brings the whole thing together. For now though..]
Our society and its narrative and discursive structure is permeated with heteronormative elements to such a point that many of the narratives and ideas it produces are inherently heteronormative. What we've demonstrated is that strands which might normally be considered quite distinct (religious texts and pop culture) both contain traces of this heteronormative legacy.
[Also, throughout the presentation we need to touch on the heterosexual matrix and heterosexual / homosexual as well as male / female. The heterosexual matrix is interesting in regards to bible stuff because it implies that heterosexuality needs homosexuality to exist. What's happening in the bible isn't heterosexuality because there's no need for a word for it, there is no alternative. However, this does kind of just confirm our point.. if there's not considered to be any need of an alternative, isn't that ultimate kind of heteronormativity?]
1. Knowledge production and representation.
2. The whole point of this presentation is to discuss how we live in a society of survelance which controls and modify/restricts our behaviour in terms of sexual difference. And we are going to demonstrate this through comparing the modern day makeover to the the ideology of the Garden of Eden.
2. Introduce Video which is going to outline the key concepts of Butler’s theory of heteronormativity (6 mins)
3. How is heteronormativity represented in the Garden of Eden? (Tom) (1 min and 20 seconds)
[Just to clarify the way in which we've used the Garden of Eden story from the book of genesis, I'd like to point out that we've taken it purely as a text rather than as any kind of historical event or historical document. We're going to look at the Garden of Eden purely within a modern discursive framework. This isn't to say we aren't going to deal with the way it's imagined as a historical document as this is quite central to it's heteronormativity. The fact is, as a text, it's taken as a model, perhaps even in some cases as an original and an ideal, to which human life must conform and aspire.
I think that the model that the Garden of Eden proposes is almost a model of heteronormativity and androcentrism in itself. Adam is created as this kind of pure being, self sustaining and without the need for another, his masculinity is the default, in fact, originally is no alternative and no Otherness. Adam's male body is the model for humanity, in fact, it is humanity because he is the only human. Eve, on the other hand, is created as the fulfilment of Adam's desire for a mate. She is something drawn out and separated from his body, the human body, and rendered as Other. She is a copy of the original, Adam, but also she is a supplement to the humanity he embodies. As well as being androcentric though, the story also creates and enforces a particular heteronormative understanding, that woman is created by the male gaze, and exists purely to fulfil a role in the male symbolic order. She achieves her meaning through reference to men. As the Bible puts it, her desire “will always be for her husband.”]
4. How is heteronormativity and the ideology of the garden of eden infiltrated (1.5 min) contemporary society? (Ina) – (It is not obsolete: The Biblical narrative has permeated our current society but do they have the same significance now-can we talk of the past with present language?).
1. The belief that human beings fall into two distinct and complementary categories, male and female [and that the default human relationship is between the two with men being androcentrically prioritized], has influenced contemporary society in several ways:b) Social life in heteronormative society is set up in such a way as toprivilege and revere the (male) masculine and to relegate the feminine to objects of ridicule or desire. For example, we can see this in women driver jokes, wife jokes, mother-in-law jokes etc. Furthermore, a whole industry ranging from hard porn and prostitution to soft-core advertising markets women’s bodies as objects of consumption by men.c) Behaviour that is incorrectly and essentially considered to be Lesbian, gay, and/or bisexual normally strongly disapproved --> often results in an internalisation of homophobia. For example, most heteronormative societies only have boxes for “male” and “female” on administrative forms. We have Women’s and Men’s washrooms, but few spaces for those who consider themselves transgendered [rather than this, I'd say 'without allowing for any alternate forms of identity, such as the sexually diverse space occupied by transgendered individuals' or something, it just sounds more general.] Moreover, the institution of marriage is usually been viewed as valid in the eyes of the state only if existing between a man and a woman. The use of the word 'gay' and ‘queer’ to describe something stupid or unfortunate.d) instant surgery of babies with indecisive genitals to fix them into one gender category (explain this a bit)
[However, heteronormativity goes beyond these surface manifestations of prejudice and also represents the unconscious adoption of a 'neutral' position which favours heterosexuality, and also maleness, as normal, and thus presents homosexuality and femaleness as a supplementary Other. This shows itself in our society through our use of language (such as how 'man' is used as a signifier for humanity rather than just men, while 'woman' remains specific) but also, the way in which social structures and kinship ties such are implicitly heterosexual unless we specify otherwise. Marriage, for example, is by default a heterosexual institution unless we specify we are talking about a supplementary 'gay' marriage. Finally, and most importantly for this presentation, heteronormativity also manifests in the way we by default look at our bodies as being for the purpose of attracting mates and ultimately as tools towards reproduction, which cuts out and supercedes any alternate function they might have.]
5. To what extent is the garden of eden ideology, sexual difference and performativity packaged up and sold to us through TV shows such as how to look good naked or what not to wear? (Thea) [Make explicit the links back to the Garden of Eden and the similarities therein]
How do these programmes reinforce and modify/control behaviour? Panopticon - Garden of Eden/360degree [Gaze of God, make it explicit.]
6. How does this type of self-image programme reinforce the masculinity/ feminity binary? Cattle proding, Class, [Woman as the desirer of man – as in the bible.]
7. Subjectivity in the Makeover
The 'true' self.
The Lacanian mirror stage (or better still psychic mimesis, but I need to read up on the mimesis) as a metaphor for Makeover Shows - In the makeover, the 'unrealised' body (innocent of its own insufficiency and ugliness) is held up to a mirror (literally or metaphorically) and reconstructed. Parts which were formerly incorporated into the boundaries of the body ('bad' haircuts, clothing style etc) are cut out first metaphorically and literally, and the self is recreated around socially acceptable perameters, this self then becomes the 'true' self, which is normally affirmed by presenters who express pleasure and affirm the naturalness of the body which has been created. [I can expand on this because essentially the whole process of a makeover is a kind of psychic mimesis.] In the same way, by eating of the tree of knowledge Adam and Eve become aware of their own bodies and clothe themselves. Just as the previously innocent female subject is forced to adapt their gaze to that of the male subject in order to understand their inadequacy, Adam and Eve see themselves through the eyes of God by achieving self awareness and are thus aware of their shame. [I'll try to make this clearer, make the link more natural and produce some kind of conclusion from it, but I need to read some more.]
7. Susan Boyle case study [Include something about how the nature of her image and identity is the subject of battles for control. People wanting to keep her in her ‘natural’ state represents a kind of reverse-makeover in itself. They’re trying to enforce a ‘true’ self for some kind of personal end.]
8. Commodification of the body-adverting, purchase
A woman through is portrayed as nothing more than just another commodity. In these public displays of surveillance and control of what is considered “normal”, “acceptable” “sexy”, "seductive" and “desirable”, audience is never just an observer. Through these (makeover) programmes we observe these comodifications of women as though they are set apart and separated from the real us. Within these programmes the gender roles are reinforced, for example woman as –“mother”. “housewife”, “sexually desirable woman", " sex object”, that must please and tease, pleasure, gratify, entertain her man and by looking sexually desirable and attractive she can contribute to his social status. The biblical narrative of Garden of Eden has given her a role that she is expected to subscribe to and what she must be "naturally" good at-which is seducing and producing (babies). It is strongly suggested and reinforsed by the make over shows, such as Trinny and Suzanna. These images of commodified women entangle us within process of signification, by being spectators ourselves we complete this process of signification. As we already have the knowledge through the Biblical narrative of a woman as a sinner, guilty, seductress, worthless, in constant need for improvement, incomplete, secondary to a man and also woman as lacking. Women themselves also reinforce the need to compensate for her/their lack(s) through subjecting themselves through these public scrutinies. These negative characteristics are strongly supported and infiltrated in society by the Garden of Eden narrative. Even if this knowledge and the fact that it comes from the Biblical narrative is unconscious, and for the most part it is, this aspect makes the issue even more tragic and unsolvable. These popular programmes reinforce the gender binaries. Public-the spectators of these make over programmes and as well as women themselves who take part in these shows reinforce gender binaries. Also it is strongly anchored and pumped up by the patriarchal and capitalist relations. To maintain the effectiveness of the Garden of Eden narrative is commercially viable (feasible) on many levels. Therefore it is very likely that it will just continue to get endorsed and encourage. Especially by the contemporary media. Depends how much something is at stake? Fancy a new automobil, simon?
The cultural codes are entrusted with the two fold function of maintaining the social order's dominant binary oppositions and providing the means necessary to perpetuate the so-called natural hierarchies in the social order through its literature, history, cinema, religion, law, and so on. Eve is as submissive, inferior, and less fully developed. Normality has been to Abnormality as Adam has been to Eve; or, put in a slightly different way: Adam is to Normality as Eve is to Abnormality. As with the creation of Eve, abnormality is understood by that which Normality is not; abnormality is defined by the Lack.
The cultural codes are entrusted with the two fold function of maintaining the social order's dominant binary oppositions and providing the means necessary to perpetuate the so-called natural hierarchies in the social order through its literature, history, cinema, religion, law, and so on. Eve is as submissive, inferior, and less fully developed. Normality has been to Abnormality as Adam has been to Eve; or, put in a slightly different way: Adam is to Normality as Eve is to Abnormality. As with the creation of Eve, abnormality is understood by that which Normality is not; abnormality is defined by the Lack.
Solutions?!
This conscious transformation and peoples resistence to violence through surveillance and control marks the essence of the process of how women can and do redefine their roles and their intrinsic worth in ways that defy the power of the master narrative of woman as evil, sinner, and full of guilt, and in need to apologize and make up for the fact that she not “complete”..
[I'm not convinced we should use Susan Boyle. While she's topical, we already effectively have two case studies, and we have loads of material already. We should definately leave the stuff on the blog, but I think for the presentation I'm not convinced we need her.]
Psychoanalytic take on the Garden of Eden narrative. (from the article posted couple of weeks ago)
Adam was defined in the affirmative and Eve was defined by that which Adam was not; Eve was defined by The Lack.
Eve was created as a consequence of Adam's Lack - as in his lack of companionship-- and Eve was created to fill this Lack - as in to fill Adam's loneliness. And, at the same time, Eve's creation was a cause of Adam's Lack - as in Eve's creation was to create an anatomical Lack (of a rib) inside of Adam. Eve, in her very creation and existence, was the living and breathing embodiment of the consequence of Adam's Lack, the cause of Adam's Lack, and the solution for Adam's Lack ... all at the same time. Eve became responsible for the loss of the Language of Adam through her gullibility, her innocence, and her curiosity. Eve became responsible for the loss of the Language of Adam through her gullibility, her innocence, and her curiosity. She was to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and Wisdom. Eve became the living and breathing embodiment of the Forbidden Fruit. And with Eve's earthly appetites and carnality came the Casting out from the Garden ... into mortality, Death, and the decay of the Flesh. The Language of Adam had been scientific, rational, objective, and primary in juxtaposed-hyphenation to the Language of Eve which was of the corporeal world of the senses, the carnal world of touch, the language of the body, textures, and blends.... The Language of Eve speaks the image of woman as flesh, temporality, and earthiness. Carnal Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was to be found in the shame of one's nakedness and to be cast out and removed from the Garden of Eden.
P
[Conclusion ideas]
[One thing I think I'd like to make clear before we finish is that, in doing this presentation, we have quite unfairly and quite arbitrarily grouped things together which are in now way intrinsically related. In a way, we've constituted heteronormativity ourselves as a discursive practice and as the subject of our knowledge, investigation and critique. The link between the Genesis story and the format of a Makeover programme, is completely arbitrary and based on a fairly loose demarcation of both as heteronormative. In fact, in many ways it might be argued we've enforced a completely alien discourse onto both by forcing them into comparison with one another. I'd go so far as to say that if you went out and randomly asked people to try and link the two, they'd probably have trouble doing so. It's only because we've collated these disparate fragments of knowledge into a discursive formation, heteronormativity, which allows us to see them as similar that we're able to group them together and create a presentation about them.
What I hope we're showing now is that we're aware of this, and in fact it's partially intentional. There is no natural organization of ideas and thoughts, after all, and we don't feel what we're doing is really any less relevant or less natural than if we'd followed up more 'obvious' links. True, we've drawn some pretty arbitrary parallels between aspects of religion and pop culture, but then, why is the separation between the two any less arbitrary in itself. Our point is that heteronormative elements, whether you have an understanding of them as heteronormative or not, do permeate and flow through diverse strands of our cultural life, and perhaps in this case the creation of new discursive practices is justified when it can provide a means towards changing the social fabric itself. There is, after all, no neutral discursive position, and thus no way to stand on the fence.] (1 minute 30 seconds)
[I'm going to keep checking the blog all evening, so as we add more to this post I'll keep updating the conclusion and I'll try and come out with some point which summarizes and brings the whole thing together. For now though..]
Our society and its narrative and discursive structure is permeated with heteronormative elements to such a point that many of the narratives and ideas it produces are inherently heteronormative. What we've demonstrated is that strands which might normally be considered quite distinct (religious texts and pop culture) both contain traces of this heteronormative legacy.
[Also, throughout the presentation we need to touch on the heterosexual matrix and heterosexual / homosexual as well as male / female. The heterosexual matrix is interesting in regards to bible stuff because it implies that heterosexuality needs homosexuality to exist. What's happening in the bible isn't heterosexuality because there's no need for a word for it, there is no alternative. However, this does kind of just confirm our point.. if there's not considered to be any need of an alternative, isn't that ultimate kind of heteronormativity?]
Extremely Beautiful
there is a new makeover show in germany called "Extremly Beautiful - Finally a New Life", which its aired on RTL II, one of the biggest channels in German TV. The picture shows the contestant Daniela, who endured 20!!! surgeries (including new teeth, new boobs, new nose and all filmed for the show) to make "her husband kiss her again"...and people actually watch this
Sex on a stick
Sex on a stick, The female equivalent of a Ferari... You have to click on the 'sex on a stick= lollipop' link to the left and read those body analysis.... jeeez!
thea.
See you at Four!
thea.
See you at Four!
Monday, 27 April 2009
Star Magazine interview with Susan Boyle
What sort of audience was it? They didn't seem to take you seriously beforre you stunned them into silence.
"You have to take yourself seriously, thats whats important. What I did was concentrate on my song and not worry about them"
When you go on the live shows, are you going to flirt with Piers?
"No comment"
Are you happy on your own?
"I'm not on the hunt, i'm happy on my own"
So would you like a man to sweep you off your feet?
"Hmmm... lets wait and see"
And will you Girate your hips like last time?
"NO!"
Are you content the way you are?
"Appearance is everything in this industry but i'm happy the way I am"
And what about losing weight? How did you think you looked on TV?
"They say (Bio Power) that TV makes you look fat and it certainly did. I looked like a garage. It was Mortifying to see and a bit of a shock. I didn't realise I could reduce people to tears and i hope it wasn't because of that"
I can't bear to go on...
"You have to take yourself seriously, thats whats important. What I did was concentrate on my song and not worry about them"
When you go on the live shows, are you going to flirt with Piers?
"No comment"
Are you happy on your own?
"I'm not on the hunt, i'm happy on my own"
So would you like a man to sweep you off your feet?
"Hmmm... lets wait and see"
And will you Girate your hips like last time?
"NO!"
Are you content the way you are?
"Appearance is everything in this industry but i'm happy the way I am"
And what about losing weight? How did you think you looked on TV?
"They say (Bio Power) that TV makes you look fat and it certainly did. I looked like a garage. It was Mortifying to see and a bit of a shock. I didn't realise I could reduce people to tears and i hope it wasn't because of that"
I can't bear to go on...
New T&S inspired Question
13) To what extent is the garden of eden ideology, sexual difference and performativity packaged up and sold to us through TV shows such as how to look good naked or what not to wear? How do these type of self-image programmes reinforce the masculinity/feminity binary?
In 2004 Trinny and Suzzanah produced an episode of what not to wear which addressed the confused identities of poorly dressed young mums...
The episode contained a narrative of progress whereby any woman, if she tries hard enough, and consumes the right products, can become her ‘true’ self.
Like Gods Laws outlined when Eve and Adam enter into the garden of eden, having an identity acceptable to trinny and suzzanah who claim to represent the general public by being our fashion police they also have a strict set of laws which you have to follow in order to fit in. For instance: The presenters examine their wardrobes, often discarding or destroying items, they subject the participant to scrutinise themselves and be scrutinised by being gazed at in a 360 degree panopticon mirror. They are given £2,000 to spend, on the first day they shop on their ‘own’ while being filmed, on the second, Trinny and Susannah evaluate the clothing that has been bought and finally their hair and make-up is styled. The ‘new’ woman is revealed to herself in a mirror, her true identity is released, she is no longer an unfulfilled social outcast.
Like Butlers groundbreaking work of performativity, the show higlights the discourse of the production of the self. This self is by no means finally produced, but requires constant reproduction under an internalized and external gaze.
Trinny comments about one of the participants husbands: “he got back a woman he thought he’d lost, and I think that’s a big thing for a man when a woman has kids, that they sort of – sometimes stop being a wife” (BBC1, 2004).This violently embroils the fabricated gender binary constructed in the show with heterosexuality, the role of the mother, desire and image as identity. Like the Gaze of God in the Garden of Eden, self-image shows expect us to constantly gaze at ourselves and imagine ourselves as entities which need to be represented by a system of signs familiar to mainstream culture, it so happens that this is a masculine gaze and a patriarchal culture, so 'women' are viewing themselves without a great deal of agency from a alienated standpoint.
In 2004 Trinny and Suzzanah produced an episode of what not to wear which addressed the confused identities of poorly dressed young mums...
The episode contained a narrative of progress whereby any woman, if she tries hard enough, and consumes the right products, can become her ‘true’ self.
Like Gods Laws outlined when Eve and Adam enter into the garden of eden, having an identity acceptable to trinny and suzzanah who claim to represent the general public by being our fashion police they also have a strict set of laws which you have to follow in order to fit in. For instance: The presenters examine their wardrobes, often discarding or destroying items, they subject the participant to scrutinise themselves and be scrutinised by being gazed at in a 360 degree panopticon mirror. They are given £2,000 to spend, on the first day they shop on their ‘own’ while being filmed, on the second, Trinny and Susannah evaluate the clothing that has been bought and finally their hair and make-up is styled. The ‘new’ woman is revealed to herself in a mirror, her true identity is released, she is no longer an unfulfilled social outcast.
Like Butlers groundbreaking work of performativity, the show higlights the discourse of the production of the self. This self is by no means finally produced, but requires constant reproduction under an internalized and external gaze.
Trinny comments about one of the participants husbands: “he got back a woman he thought he’d lost, and I think that’s a big thing for a man when a woman has kids, that they sort of – sometimes stop being a wife” (BBC1, 2004).This violently embroils the fabricated gender binary constructed in the show with heterosexuality, the role of the mother, desire and image as identity. Like the Gaze of God in the Garden of Eden, self-image shows expect us to constantly gaze at ourselves and imagine ourselves as entities which need to be represented by a system of signs familiar to mainstream culture, it so happens that this is a masculine gaze and a patriarchal culture, so 'women' are viewing themselves without a great deal of agency from a alienated standpoint.
The dirty underbelly of our CT Presentation...
Me: I've got that susan boyle article, i'll type it up onto the blog some of the interesting Q and A
165786: cool
I've added a new article to the blog
on susan
me: I'll read through the makeover artile too and think of some ideas to brng it into the pael show
165786: and the backlash
k
There's a good link to the shit Daily mil
*mail
and a biblical reference to her being godlike, commanding authorty!
*authority
me: just looking now, as an introduction on the panel, you could introduce the case study of susan boyled we could all comment on how we can read garden oden ideology, heteronormatviity into her treament and draw on the quotes from the essay
165786: good idea
yes, start off with her and then relate it to the garden of eden and vileness of makeovers in general
I'll find some good trinny stuff
Ieva's boyfriend knows Trinny!!
me: we should get her to come in and make one of us over...
165786: HA HA
i dont need it!
i'm happy with my cellutite!
oops, funny freudian slip-cellutite instead of cellulite!
me: Ha ha
They cal her the scottish spinster!!
165786: i'm looking forward to this presentation
me: we should just have fun with it
165786: i hope the video gets dont b4 tmrw
coz we need it before we meet so we can work out what is and isn't already covered,
here's the link for the makeover essay http://deepermindfield.blogspot.com/2009/04/critically-examine-use-of-makeover.html
me: yeah, send me a text when your putit on you tube
sweet
165786: cool
will do
speak later if nec-i'll be online for an hour or so
me: cool, i'm reading yp
up
165786: whta's yp?
me: up
reading up
165786: o i c
me: not down
binary...
165786: yes, always read not down
i'm not on
(I'm off)
notbadbye
me: We should def say something about how they are all critising her forhaving a makeover, its like they want to keep her as this objet of disgustion, keep her abjected, so we can all look at her and feel better about ourselves!!
165786: exactly
to 'preserve her unique looks'
me: which we have classified as ugly
and 'virgin' is batted about as a dirty word
165786: 'they' not us
me: we
165786: Ina hasnt' seen the trinny and susanna stuff so see if you can find any good short clips to send her
me: yeah
165786: Pagans protest at Trinny & Suzanna TV show http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRygEvMfuCU
Pagans protest at Trinny & Suzanna TV show
me: we could show the south park clio too
165786: yeah
mind you. we would have to make it a really short clip
This is a better one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2h1Up0vKHo&feature=related
Pagan Sexuality - The Druids Reply
me: I'll check those out
165786: oops, i accidently closed my email and lost the conversation
have you still got it?
i want to cut and paste it to the blog
me: still got it
165786: abvioulsy removing any personal bits
me: about your cellutite...
165786: thereby altering the conversation
no, that bit is ok!!
the ones with other peoples names in it
producing knowledge
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/we-wont-wear-it--pagans-furious-with-trinny-and-susannah-456019.html
me: Thats amazing. I clicked on the link and a John Lwis, win a makeover pop up appear which I couldn't close out of and covered the whole screen!!!
165786: me too
shit, should have clipped that too
will do it again
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinny_&_Susannah_Undress_the_Nation
me: http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/11_03/longman2311_800x513.jpg
165786: Ha frickin ha-that's actually quite funny
aklthough the pagans don't think so!
me: The stunt was one of many in the series' campaign to "give the great British public a more stylish future". Others included kitting out every woman in an entire town with a properly fitted bra, going down the red carpet wearing a giant pair of fake breasts, and transforming Susannah into a 70-year-old woman.
165786: He's just said 'personally i think the wilmington man was female orriginally anyway'!!
165786: why do you think they put shape on the two big sticks?
I can see why they have shaped the ankles and hips but not why the sticks
Sent at 19:47 on Monday
me: i think they were always there
165786: no, look on the phot-the sticks seem to have had flowers or bells or something added to them
probably to make them less phallic and a bit girly
i've popped it on the blog
me: oh yeah, its probably a pole for her to dance around
shes wearing shin pads too
165786: ha-that's to make them look more shapely
to make her ankles look more slender
165786: funnliy enough, it seems even easier to organise this presentation remotely than when we are together!! not the talking bit but by using the blog and this chat thing we can almost see how each others mind is working
me: it digital infomation, much more efficient, don't have to worry about that social interaction business
165786: exactly
!
me: it dead at work now so ts a perfect time to do Critical theory stuff
165786: great
me: interestingly my colleague spends his evenings on facebook at
165786: i think i am starting to feel the structure coming on-do you?
he he
they should ban it
me: chat, so he's doing a similar thing
165786: should we leave this last sentence in when we paste this to the blog?!!
me: ha
165786: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-488236/Trinny-Susannah-reveal-12-womens-body-types--you.html
me: this essay is really very good
165786: OMG-read the description for the 'Brick'!
me: Al those women look the bloody same
165786: read the lollipop
me: ... youre masculine lines!!
essentailist bullshit
165786: such crap
anyway, my shape isn't there-how on earth am i going to know what to wear? How to fit in?
me: You dont, you should just kill yourself
sex on a stick
165786: or buy a new body
me: thts rank, i'm going t lift quotes out of this
165786: or really expensive clothes so the men dont notice my unfeminine body
yuo just made me laugh out loud
me: or pad yourself out with toilet tissu
165786: in the computer room
!
we so have to subvert the comments below it
noone has yet so we would be the first
we could take the pages cherry
me: lets dirty it up
165786: i' just writing something...
Sent at 20:06 on Monday
me: me too
165786: cool
165786: ah, shit-i did it but didnt copy it
then when i submitted it it goes to a premoderation sight
how brilliant is that
*site
make sure you copy yours just in case
I called my 'self' the woman with no body name
me: Shit, only just read that. I bet they wont pubslish them, wish i'd saved it
165786: ha-you did the same thing too!
me: we must remember to chck back, no one has commented since 2007, maybe now nobody cares aboutbody imge...
165786: online chat wasnt that popular back then i guess
or maybe it has been deleted
Sent at 20:16 on Monday
me: check the blog and watch the vid
165786: k
Sent at 20:18 on Monday
165786: he he
i need to get going
damn shame coz this is really productive
shame we didnt think of it before
me: i know
i'll copy the full caht into blog with appropriate deleteions
165786: please cut and paste this removing the bits that talk about other people...ta.x
yup!
leave this bit in tho where we discuss cutting bits out!
me: sure
see you tomorrow at four, JCR
165786: sure
notbadbye
me: oh andtheirs indian headmassages in G4 tomorrow for FREEE
165786: geddit?
me: i geddit
165786: ooooh
what time
?
me: from one, but sign up he morning
165786: k
me: he morning... gendered
165786: ciao 4 not-later
me: See you yesterday....?
165786: we could do a derridian crossword
x
me: clare stop. go home
Sent at 20:24 on Monday
165786 has entered text165786 is offline. Messages you send will be delivered when 165786 comes online.
165786: cool
I've added a new article to the blog
on susan
me: I'll read through the makeover artile too and think of some ideas to brng it into the pael show
165786: and the backlash
k
There's a good link to the shit Daily mil
and a biblical reference to her being godlike, commanding authorty!
*authority
me: just looking now, as an introduction on the panel, you could introduce the case study of susan boyled we could all comment on how we can read garden oden ideology, heteronormatviity into her treament and draw on the quotes from the essay
165786: good idea
yes, start off with her and then relate it to the garden of eden and vileness of makeovers in general
I'll find some good trinny stuff
Ieva's boyfriend knows Trinny!!
me: we should get her to come in and make one of us over...
165786: HA HA
i dont need it!
i'm happy with my cellutite!
oops, funny freudian slip-cellutite instead of cellulite!
me: Ha ha
They cal her the scottish spinster!!
165786: i'm looking forward to this presentation
me: we should just have fun with it
165786: i hope the video gets dont b4 tmrw
coz we need it before we meet so we can work out what is and isn't already covered,
here's the link for the makeover essay http://deepermindfield.blogspot.com/2009/04/critically-examine-use-of-makeover.html
me: yeah, send me a text when your putit on you tube
sweet
165786: cool
will do
speak later if nec-i'll be online for an hour or so
me: cool, i'm reading yp
up
165786: whta's yp?
me: up
reading up
165786: o i c
me: not down
binary...
165786: yes, always read not down
i'm not on
(I'm off)
notbadbye
me: We should def say something about how they are all critising her forhaving a makeover, its like they want to keep her as this objet of disgustion, keep her abjected, so we can all look at her and feel better about ourselves!!
165786: exactly
to 'preserve her unique looks'
me: which we have classified as ugly
and 'virgin' is batted about as a dirty word
165786: 'they' not us
me: we
165786: Ina hasnt' seen the trinny and susanna stuff so see if you can find any good short clips to send her
me: yeah
165786: Pagans protest at Trinny & Suzanna TV show http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRygEvMfuCU
Pagans protest at Trinny & Suzanna TV show
me: we could show the south park clio too
165786: yeah
mind you. we would have to make it a really short clip
This is a better one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2h1Up0vKHo&feature=related
Pagan Sexuality - The Druids Reply
me: I'll check those out
165786: oops, i accidently closed my email and lost the conversation
have you still got it?
i want to cut and paste it to the blog
me: still got it
165786: abvioulsy removing any personal bits
me: about your cellutite...
165786: thereby altering the conversation
no, that bit is ok!!
the ones with other peoples names in it
producing knowledge
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/we-wont-wear-it--pagans-furious-with-trinny-and-susannah-456019.html
me: Thats amazing. I clicked on the link and a John Lwis, win a makeover pop up appear which I couldn't close out of and covered the whole screen!!!
165786: me too
shit, should have clipped that too
will do it again
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinny_&_Susannah_Undress_the_Nation
me: http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/11_03/longman2311_800x513.jpg
165786: Ha frickin ha-that's actually quite funny
aklthough the pagans don't think so!
me: The stunt was one of many in the series' campaign to "give the great British public a more stylish future". Others included kitting out every woman in an entire town with a properly fitted bra, going down the red carpet wearing a giant pair of fake breasts, and transforming Susannah into a 70-year-old woman.
165786: He's just said 'personally i think the wilmington man was female orriginally anyway'!!
165786: why do you think they put shape on the two big sticks?
I can see why they have shaped the ankles and hips but not why the sticks
Sent at 19:47 on Monday
me: i think they were always there
165786: no, look on the phot-the sticks seem to have had flowers or bells or something added to them
probably to make them less phallic and a bit girly
i've popped it on the blog
me: oh yeah, its probably a pole for her to dance around
shes wearing shin pads too
165786: ha-that's to make them look more shapely
to make her ankles look more slender
165786: funnliy enough, it seems even easier to organise this presentation remotely than when we are together!! not the talking bit but by using the blog and this chat thing we can almost see how each others mind is working
me: it digital infomation, much more efficient, don't have to worry about that social interaction business
165786: exactly
!
me: it dead at work now so ts a perfect time to do Critical theory stuff
165786: great
me: interestingly my colleague spends his evenings on facebook at
165786: i think i am starting to feel the structure coming on-do you?
he he
they should ban it
me: chat, so he's doing a similar thing
165786: should we leave this last sentence in when we paste this to the blog?!!
me: ha
165786: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-488236/Trinny-Susannah-reveal-12-womens-body-types--you.html
me: this essay is really very good
165786: OMG-read the description for the 'Brick'!
me: Al those women look the bloody same
165786: read the lollipop
me: ... youre masculine lines!!
essentailist bullshit
165786: such crap
anyway, my shape isn't there-how on earth am i going to know what to wear? How to fit in?
me: You dont, you should just kill yourself
sex on a stick
165786: or buy a new body
me: thts rank, i'm going t lift quotes out of this
165786: or really expensive clothes so the men dont notice my unfeminine body
yuo just made me laugh out loud
me: or pad yourself out with toilet tissu
165786: in the computer room
!
we so have to subvert the comments below it
noone has yet so we would be the first
we could take the pages cherry
me: lets dirty it up
165786: i' just writing something...
Sent at 20:06 on Monday
me: me too
165786: cool
165786: ah, shit-i did it but didnt copy it
then when i submitted it it goes to a premoderation sight
how brilliant is that
*site
make sure you copy yours just in case
I called my 'self' the woman with no body name
me: Shit, only just read that. I bet they wont pubslish them, wish i'd saved it
165786: ha-you did the same thing too!
me: we must remember to chck back, no one has commented since 2007, maybe now nobody cares aboutbody imge...
165786: online chat wasnt that popular back then i guess
or maybe it has been deleted
Sent at 20:16 on Monday
me: check the blog and watch the vid
165786: k
Sent at 20:18 on Monday
165786: he he
i need to get going
damn shame coz this is really productive
shame we didnt think of it before
me: i know
i'll copy the full caht into blog with appropriate deleteions
165786: please cut and paste this removing the bits that talk about other people...ta.x
yup!
leave this bit in tho where we discuss cutting bits out!
me: sure
see you tomorrow at four, JCR
165786: sure
notbadbye
me: oh andtheirs indian headmassages in G4 tomorrow for FREEE
165786: geddit?
me: i geddit
165786: ooooh
what time
?
me: from one, but sign up he morning
165786: k
me: he morning... gendered
165786: ciao 4 not-later
me: See you yesterday....?
165786: we could do a derridian crossword
x
me: clare stop. go home
Sent at 20:24 on Monday
165786 has entered text165786 is offline. Messages you send will be delivered when 165786 comes online.
Useful Parts from Makeover essay
The central theme to this genre has been the individualistic ideology of self-improvement (Rimke, 2000:62, Weber, 2005: 4) with a narrative of progress whereby any woman, if she tries hard enough, and consumes the right products, can become her ‘true’ self (Weber, 2005).
Conversation with one of the presenters in a set that is symbolically designed to look like a psychotherapist’s office. Friends and family are interviewed on the subject of the women’s ‘style’, Trinny and Susannah examine their wardrobes, often discarding or destroying items.
Watch their videos and discover ‘what people really think’ of them. Scrutinise themselves and scrutinised by the presenters in a 360 mirror, often in a favourite piece of clothing. Given a set of style ‘rules’ to follow when shopping and given £2,000 to spend. The shopping task is divided into two days – on the first, they shop on their ‘own’ while being filmed, on the second, Trinny and Susannah evaluate the clothing that has been bought, then shop with the women to direct them. Their hair and make-up is styled by stylists. The revelation – the ‘new’ woman is revealed to herself in a mirror. The ‘new’ woman is revealed to (usually) delighted friends and family.
The formula for the show illustrates the discourse of the production of the self (Rose, 1989). This self is by no means finally produced, but requires constant re-production under an internalized and external gaze (Weber, 2005).
What Not To Wear presents a discourse of self-fulfilment through consumption.
This fairly essentialist concept that ‘inside’ each of these women is a ‘true’ self, waiting to be unveiled is demonstrated in the language used by the presenters throughout the ‘Young Mums’ episode. Particular to this episode is the discourse surrounding ‘being a mother’ and the effect of this on a woman’s subjectivity. At the end of the episode, Trinny comments of Michalina’s husband: “he got back a woman he thought he’d lost, and I think that’s a big thing for a man when a woman has kids, that they sort of – sometimes stop being a wife” (BBC1, 2004). The way in which both women are portrayed throughout the episode is as a collection of identities; mother, employee, wife . The premise of the episode is that their ‘mother’ identities have taken over.
Conversation with one of the presenters in a set that is symbolically designed to look like a psychotherapist’s office. Friends and family are interviewed on the subject of the women’s ‘style’, Trinny and Susannah examine their wardrobes, often discarding or destroying items.
Watch their videos and discover ‘what people really think’ of them. Scrutinise themselves and scrutinised by the presenters in a 360 mirror, often in a favourite piece of clothing. Given a set of style ‘rules’ to follow when shopping and given £2,000 to spend. The shopping task is divided into two days – on the first, they shop on their ‘own’ while being filmed, on the second, Trinny and Susannah evaluate the clothing that has been bought, then shop with the women to direct them. Their hair and make-up is styled by stylists. The revelation – the ‘new’ woman is revealed to herself in a mirror. The ‘new’ woman is revealed to (usually) delighted friends and family.
The formula for the show illustrates the discourse of the production of the self (Rose, 1989). This self is by no means finally produced, but requires constant re-production under an internalized and external gaze (Weber, 2005).
What Not To Wear presents a discourse of self-fulfilment through consumption.
This fairly essentialist concept that ‘inside’ each of these women is a ‘true’ self, waiting to be unveiled is demonstrated in the language used by the presenters throughout the ‘Young Mums’ episode. Particular to this episode is the discourse surrounding ‘being a mother’ and the effect of this on a woman’s subjectivity. At the end of the episode, Trinny comments of Michalina’s husband: “he got back a woman he thought he’d lost, and I think that’s a big thing for a man when a woman has kids, that they sort of – sometimes stop being a wife” (BBC1, 2004). The way in which both women are portrayed throughout the episode is as a collection of identities; mother, employee, wife . The premise of the episode is that their ‘mother’ identities have taken over.
Hairy angel no more: Britain's Got Talent star Susan Boyle gets a £100 makeover
This romanticisation of Susan's looks relates to the choice that women have to be either/or one of a limited array of ideal types: wife, mother, whore, old lady (i cant remember the feminist word for this)
Read this also: Susan Boyle backlash begins
And this: ITV, YouTube and Simon Cowell miss out on Susan Boyle windfall
"her new look has caused consternation behind the scenes with sources on the show said to be 'frantic', as they wanted to preserve her unique looks for the live finals."And here's a lovely biblical reference...
Read the article and comments HERE"She has even been compared to - wait for it - Jesus.
A vicar said her 'inner gift' and 'authority' reminded her of the son of God."
Read this also: Susan Boyle backlash begins
And this: ITV, YouTube and Simon Cowell miss out on Susan Boyle windfall
Overgrown Garden revisited
'Performing Paradise' is sooo relevant to the Trinny and Suzanna playing God and making us feel guilty if we don't please our men etc. They are saying they are giving us 'knowledge' and at the same time castigating us for not using it correctly and so on and so forth-it would be a good way to bring the debate in a new light and through a different lense.
We cud find a good name that encapsulates it. The Overgrown Garden (of Eden) or something?...
21st century Garden of Eden
Also, Thea said:
Thats a great idea and we can use susan boyle as a case study, that lady who sang les mis on britains got talent and now they've given her a make-over and everybody loves her!! Where as before hand they thought because she was 'ugly' that she couldn't sing. i'll put the link at the bottom. I don't know how we'd fit it in with the question time panel idea though... any ideas. we are still cool for dedic\ating monday to preparing too?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk
Thea x
onebrandofdemocracy
I heard that Susan used the men's restroom before performing. Anyone know why?
Someone will have to shave Susan before she performs next time.
Has anyone figured out whether Susan is a man or woman?
Add more....
We cud find a good name that encapsulates it. The Overgrown Garden (of Eden) or something?...
21st century Garden of Eden
Also, Thea said:
Thats a great idea and we can use susan boyle as a case study, that lady who sang les mis on britains got talent and now they've given her a make-over and everybody loves her!! Where as before hand they thought because she was 'ugly' that she couldn't sing. i'll put the link at the bottom. I don't know how we'd fit it in with the question time panel idea though... any ideas. we are still cool for dedic\ating monday to preparing too?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk
Thea x
onebrandofdemocracy
I heard that Susan used the men's restroom before performing. Anyone know why?
Someone will have to shave Susan before she performs next time.
Has anyone figured out whether Susan is a man or woman?
Add more....
SUDDEN DEATH
This should be our Sudden death, Tie breaker Question...
What is Butler trying to say in the following passage.... ? (It should come up on a Power point behind us)
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power"
What is Butler trying to say in the following passage.... ? (It should come up on a Power point behind us)
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power"
Friday, 24 April 2009
Overgrown garden-Eden in the 21st century
Deleted this in blogging stupidity.. Does anyone have a backup copy. :S
Monday, 20 April 2009
Questions in order-add you answers in any state!
Thea:
Performativity is Judith Butler's offering to gender theory which is influenced by Derrida's reading of Kafka's 'before the law', a parable in the trial. In the short story the one who9 waits for the law sits vefore the door of the law and attributes a certain force to the law for which it waits. The anticipation of an authority conjures its object.
Performativity works in two ways:
a)Performance of gender is not conscious like Goffman's performance, it revolves around the anticipation of a gendered essence which it sees as outside itself (Butler 2007)
b)Secondly performatviity is a repetition, a ritual, which achieves effects through naturalization of the body, the naturalization that occurts centres around the heterosexual matrix which is prevalent in popular discourse. The ‘heterosexual matrix’ Butler argues is upheld through the discourse on ‘sex-as-nature’ but also through the arbitrary category ‘gender’, which suggests that gender is the formed, shaped and culturally coherent embodiment of a sexual identity.
Gender is not a noun, nor a free-floating set of attributes. Instead Gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence, you've got to make sense, you have to fit in, in order to be understood and accepted. You have to be heteronormative. The perfromance of gender is a doing, it is the deed which is gendered not the doer, gender does not require a gendered subject which pre-exists the deed.
9) Can we ever avoid identity categories? How do we minimize the violence of the other by exclusion? Is it ever possible? How do we escape this violence and yet not become politically passive?
10) Why is it so easy to be heterosexual yet so subversive to be homosexual?
11) How do you see the discourse of gender binary oppositions would have developed, lets say, in 50 years time?
Identity categories are slowly becoming less static, and possibly in time identity categories will be accepted as more fluid. Discourses on heterenormativity and identity categories should reach wider audiences....
12) The terminology and the language used in academic discourses is often very specific and complicated. How do you think this might be affecting the level of understanding and accessibility for wider audiences that do not necessarily come from the academic arena? Do you not think that this aspect might be excluding non-members and might be an elitist in itself? If so, what possible problems and consequences could arise from this inaccessibility and do you think that the scholarly work is as effective as it might have been hoped for?
13) To what extent is the garden of eden ideology, sexual difference and performativity packaged up and sold to us through TV shows such as how to look good naked or what not to wear? How to this type of self-image programmes reinforce the masculinity/ feminity binary?
In 2004 Trinny and Suzzanah produced an episode of what not to wear which addressed the confused identities of poorly dressed young mums...
The episode contained a narrative of progress whereby any woman, if she tries hard enough, and consumes the right products, can become her ‘true’ self (Weber, 2005).
Like Gods Laws outlined when Eve and Adam enter into the garden of eden, having an identity acceptable to trinny and suzzanah who claim to represent the general public by being our fashion police they also have a strict set of laws which you have to follow in order to fit in. For instance: The presenters examine their wardrobes, often discarding or destroying items, they subject the participant to scrutinise themselves and be scrutinised by being gazed at in a 360 degree panopticon mirror. They are given £2,000 to spend, on the first day they shop on their ‘own’ while being filmed, on the second, Trinny and Susannah evaluate the clothing that has been bought and finally their hair and make-up is styled. The revelation – the ‘new’ woman is revealed to herself in a mirror, her true identity is revealed, she is no longer a social outcast.
Like Butlers groundbreaking work of performativity, the show higlights the discourse of the production of the self (Rose, 1989). This self is by no means finally produced, but requires constant re-production under an internalized and external gaze (Weber, 2005).
Trinny comments about one of the participants husbands: “he got back a woman he thought he’d lost, and I think that’s a big thing for a man when a woman has kids, that they sort of – sometimes stop being a wife” (BBC1, 2004).This violently embroils the fabricated gender binary constructed in the show with heterosexuality, the role of the mother, desire and image as identity. Like the Gaze of God in the Garden of Eden, self-image shows expect us to constantly gaze at ourselves and imagine ourselves as entities which need to be represented by a system of signs familiar to mainstream culture, it so happens that this is a masculine gaze and a patriarchal culture, so 'women' are viewing themselves without a great deal of agency from a alienated standpoint.
1) What is performativity?
Performativity is Judith Butler's offering to gender theory which is influenced by Derrida's reading of Kafka's 'before the law', a parable in the trial. In the short story the one who9 waits for the law sits vefore the door of the law and attributes a certain force to the law for which it waits. The anticipation of an authority conjures its object.
Performativity works in two ways:
a)Performance of gender is not conscious like Goffman's performance, it revolves around the anticipation of a gendered essence which it sees as outside itself (Butler 2007)
b)Secondly performatviity is a repetition, a ritual, which achieves effects through naturalization of the body, the naturalization that occurts centres around the heterosexual matrix which is prevalent in popular discourse. The ‘heterosexual matrix’ Butler argues is upheld through the discourse on ‘sex-as-nature’ but also through the arbitrary category ‘gender’, which suggests that gender is the formed, shaped and culturally coherent embodiment of a sexual identity.
Gender is not a noun, nor a free-floating set of attributes. Instead Gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence, you've got to make sense, you have to fit in, in order to be understood and accepted. You have to be heteronormative. The perfromance of gender is a doing, it is the deed which is gendered not the doer, gender does not require a gendered subject which pre-exists the deed.
2) How is heteronormativity represented in the garden of Eden?
Genitals stand as a sign of inner hidden substance which classifies a body/person as male or female. The social importance of genitals is that they stand as signs of reprodcutive capacity. Like no other place, the Garden of Eden is an environment where the physical union of persons with complementary genitals can co-exist. It is the site where the belief that two mutally exclusive and exhaustive categories of people exist in order to reproduce was created. And on the other side it is the reason why those who use their genitals for purposes other than heterosexual reproduction are othered, alienated and subordinate by popular discourse.
The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, chs. 2-3, has historically been taken to endorse male normativity, especially in sexuality. The view that Adam is the normative sexual being to whom Eve is subordinate has shaped gender attitudes for the Western religious tradition.
I will adress a few ways in which heteronormativity is represented in the Grden of eden: 1) The true sexual nature Adam 2) God's curse on Eve and 3) Adam's naming of the woman.
Many feminist theologians have tried to argue that Adam was androgenous and that eve and adam were created from one embodiment of human kind, this posits that female subordination only came about after eve cursed. However God 'built' the woman out of the 'earthling'. This implies that one came out of another rather that a seperation of a whole into two halves.
God's address to Eve states: "I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you." genesis verse 3 chapter 16, this highlights how desire and sexuality if heterosexual. When eve takes the fruit off the tree and gives it to adam, God is greatly angered, but adam responds by saying 'The woman you gave me, she gave me from the tree, and [that's why] I ate,' (3.12), trying to place the blame on god for providing a defective woman. This highlights that womans role is to conduct heterosexual reproduction, and that this is the centre of their difference.
To quote von Rad, who writes that, 'Name-giving in the ancient Orient was primarily an exercise of sovereignty, of command', it could be argued that Adam giving a name to 'the woman' implies his mastery over her. Genesis 2:20 quotes 'So the man named all the animals, the birds of the air, and the living creatures of the field, but for Adam no companion who corresponded to him was found', then Adam said , “This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one will be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man” and "The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all the living". This renders 'woman' as rooted in nature, to be mothers and to partake in child birth because the differences between men and woman appear incommensurable in genesis.
Buter, Judith (2007) Gender Trouble. London: Routledge [1990]
Gellman, Jerome (2006) 'Gender and Sexuality in the Garden of Eden' in Theology & Sexuality
Volume 12(3): 319-36
The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, chs. 2-3, has historically been taken to endorse male normativity, especially in sexuality. The view that Adam is the normative sexual being to whom Eve is subordinate has shaped gender attitudes for the Western religious tradition.
I will adress a few ways in which heteronormativity is represented in the Grden of eden: 1) The true sexual nature Adam 2) God's curse on Eve and 3) Adam's naming of the woman.
Many feminist theologians have tried to argue that Adam was androgenous and that eve and adam were created from one embodiment of human kind, this posits that female subordination only came about after eve cursed. However God 'built' the woman out of the 'earthling'. This implies that one came out of another rather that a seperation of a whole into two halves.
God's address to Eve states: "I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you." genesis verse 3 chapter 16, this highlights how desire and sexuality if heterosexual. When eve takes the fruit off the tree and gives it to adam, God is greatly angered, but adam responds by saying 'The woman you gave me, she gave me from the tree, and [that's why] I ate,' (3.12), trying to place the blame on god for providing a defective woman. This highlights that womans role is to conduct heterosexual reproduction, and that this is the centre of their difference.
To quote von Rad, who writes that, 'Name-giving in the ancient Orient was primarily an exercise of sovereignty, of command', it could be argued that Adam giving a name to 'the woman' implies his mastery over her. Genesis 2:20 quotes 'So the man named all the animals, the birds of the air, and the living creatures of the field, but for Adam no companion who corresponded to him was found', then Adam said , “This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one will be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man” and "The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all the living". This renders 'woman' as rooted in nature, to be mothers and to partake in child birth because the differences between men and woman appear incommensurable in genesis.
Buter, Judith (2007) Gender Trouble. London: Routledge [1990]
Gellman, Jerome (2006) 'Gender and Sexuality in the Garden of Eden' in Theology & Sexuality
Volume 12(3): 319-36
Ina:
3) How is heteronormativity and the ideology of the garden of eden infiltrated contemporary society?
The belief that human beings fall into two distinct and complementary categories, male and female, has influenced contemporary society in several ways:
a) Heteronormative society holds that only males can be attracted to females, and only females to males, and that’s the way it should be. moreover, each gender has certain natural roles in life (e.g : woman = home, children & man = public, money)
b) Social life in heteronormative society is set up in such a way as to
privilege and revere the (male) masculine and to relegate the feminine to objects of ridicule or desire. For example, we can see this in women driver jokes, wife jokes,
mother-in-law jokes etc. Furthermore, a whole industry ranging from hard porn and prostitution to soft-core advertising markets women’s bodies as objects of
consumption by men.
c) Lesbian, gay, and bisexual behaviour is normally strongly disapproved --> often results in an internalisation of homophobia. For example, most heteronormative societies only have boxes for “male” and “female” on administrative forms. We have Women’s and Men’s washrooms, but few spaces for those who consider themselves transgendered. Moreover, the institution of marriage is usually been viewed as valid in the eyes of the state only if existing between a man and a woman. The use of the word 'gay' to describe something stupid or unfortunate
d) instant surgery of babies with indecisive genitals to fix them into one gender category
4) To what extent can we dismiss the issue of biology and 'natural science' when talking about gender and sexuality?
Judith Butler's theory has often been criticised for failing to take into account the materiality of the body. From my understanding, Butler does not dispute the materiality of the body, but aks how materiality itself has come to be. As such, we need to think about sex as a norm that is imposed on us, and not primarily neccessarily grounded in biologal facts.
As matter of fact, we cannot make a clear-cut distinction between what is material and what is cultural. This is because we simply cannot conceive of material things such as the body without using a variety of culturally mediated assumption defined by what is (and what is not) sayable and thinkable in a certain historical period. As such, we perceive the body through a cultural lense
Take the example of impregnation. Common held assumption is that because you can become pregnant, you are obciously a woman. And while this link is of course valid, there are many female bodies which cannot be impregnated (female infants and children, older women), and there are all of those who just dont want to have babies. Therefore it can be said that reproduction is no the salient feature of being female. Sexing of the body comes about by the imposition of a norm, not a neutral description of biological contraints.
This can also bee seen in our continued inability to definintively define female anatomy despite great scientific effort. Let's take the example of the G-Spot: It's existence has not been proven a 100%, and scientist struggle to define what and where it actually is (Hyde 2008).
Also, the assumption of two distinct anatomical sexes only makes sense within a framework that presumes that we have 'naturally' evolved for heterosexual reproduction. this seems to be a false assumption based on cultural stereotypes. Zoology provides us with a great example (Bagemihl, 1999): There are a hundred of species which have same sex relationships and indulge in pratices such as caressing, kissing and penis fencing (love it!). For example, same-sex dolphins have group sessions of mutual caressing and sexual activity.
But back to Butler: Her theory allows us to begin to see 'sex' as an effect if a complex interplay between culturally defined modes of thinking about sex and the boud in process. Biology and culture are mutually defining processes that are never quite complete and always subject to variation as they complete themselves.
Bibliography
Bagemihl, B. 1999, Biological Exuberance. Animal Homosexuality and
Diversity. New York: St. Martin's Press
Butler, J. 1993, Bodies that Matter. London: Routledge
Hyde,M. "The Human Body Indeed Remains the Final Frontier" in The Guardian, 23th of February 2009
The belief that human beings fall into two distinct and complementary categories, male and female, has influenced contemporary society in several ways:
a) Heteronormative society holds that only males can be attracted to females, and only females to males, and that’s the way it should be. moreover, each gender has certain natural roles in life (e.g : woman = home, children & man = public, money)
b) Social life in heteronormative society is set up in such a way as to
privilege and revere the (male) masculine and to relegate the feminine to objects of ridicule or desire. For example, we can see this in women driver jokes, wife jokes,
mother-in-law jokes etc. Furthermore, a whole industry ranging from hard porn and prostitution to soft-core advertising markets women’s bodies as objects of
consumption by men.
c) Lesbian, gay, and bisexual behaviour is normally strongly disapproved --> often results in an internalisation of homophobia. For example, most heteronormative societies only have boxes for “male” and “female” on administrative forms. We have Women’s and Men’s washrooms, but few spaces for those who consider themselves transgendered. Moreover, the institution of marriage is usually been viewed as valid in the eyes of the state only if existing between a man and a woman. The use of the word 'gay' to describe something stupid or unfortunate
d) instant surgery of babies with indecisive genitals to fix them into one gender category
4) To what extent can we dismiss the issue of biology and 'natural science' when talking about gender and sexuality?
Judith Butler's theory has often been criticised for failing to take into account the materiality of the body. From my understanding, Butler does not dispute the materiality of the body, but aks how materiality itself has come to be. As such, we need to think about sex as a norm that is imposed on us, and not primarily neccessarily grounded in biologal facts.
As matter of fact, we cannot make a clear-cut distinction between what is material and what is cultural. This is because we simply cannot conceive of material things such as the body without using a variety of culturally mediated assumption defined by what is (and what is not) sayable and thinkable in a certain historical period. As such, we perceive the body through a cultural lense
Take the example of impregnation. Common held assumption is that because you can become pregnant, you are obciously a woman. And while this link is of course valid, there are many female bodies which cannot be impregnated (female infants and children, older women), and there are all of those who just dont want to have babies. Therefore it can be said that reproduction is no the salient feature of being female. Sexing of the body comes about by the imposition of a norm, not a neutral description of biological contraints.
This can also bee seen in our continued inability to definintively define female anatomy despite great scientific effort. Let's take the example of the G-Spot: It's existence has not been proven a 100%, and scientist struggle to define what and where it actually is (Hyde 2008).
Also, the assumption of two distinct anatomical sexes only makes sense within a framework that presumes that we have 'naturally' evolved for heterosexual reproduction. this seems to be a false assumption based on cultural stereotypes. Zoology provides us with a great example (Bagemihl, 1999): There are a hundred of species which have same sex relationships and indulge in pratices such as caressing, kissing and penis fencing (love it!). For example, same-sex dolphins have group sessions of mutual caressing and sexual activity.
But back to Butler: Her theory allows us to begin to see 'sex' as an effect if a complex interplay between culturally defined modes of thinking about sex and the boud in process. Biology and culture are mutually defining processes that are never quite complete and always subject to variation as they complete themselves.
Bibliography
Bagemihl, B. 1999, Biological Exuberance. Animal Homosexuality and
Diversity. New York: St. Martin's Press
Butler, J. 1993, Bodies that Matter. London: Routledge
Hyde,M. "The Human Body Indeed Remains the Final Frontier" in The Guardian, 23th of February 2009
Clare:
5) Is the search to transcend the 'self' by 'performing' drag simply a circular argument?
6)
Ieva:
7) What would Butler's garden of eden look like?
+ 8) Does Butler provide us with ways to challenge the heteronormativity within society?
+ 8) Does Butler provide us with ways to challenge the heteronormativity within society?
9) Can we ever avoid identity categories? How do we minimize the violence of the other by exclusion? Is it ever possible? How do we escape this violence and yet not become politically passive?
10) Why is it so easy to be heterosexual yet so subversive to be homosexual?
11) How do you see the discourse of gender binary oppositions would have developed, lets say, in 50 years time?
Identity categories are slowly becoming less static, and possibly in time identity categories will be accepted as more fluid. Discourses on heterenormativity and identity categories should reach wider audiences....
12) The terminology and the language used in academic discourses is often very specific and complicated. How do you think this might be affecting the level of understanding and accessibility for wider audiences that do not necessarily come from the academic arena? Do you not think that this aspect might be excluding non-members and might be an elitist in itself? If so, what possible problems and consequences could arise from this inaccessibility and do you think that the scholarly work is as effective as it might have been hoped for?
13) To what extent is the garden of eden ideology, sexual difference and performativity packaged up and sold to us through TV shows such as how to look good naked or what not to wear? How to this type of self-image programmes reinforce the masculinity/ feminity binary?
In 2004 Trinny and Suzzanah produced an episode of what not to wear which addressed the confused identities of poorly dressed young mums...
The episode contained a narrative of progress whereby any woman, if she tries hard enough, and consumes the right products, can become her ‘true’ self (Weber, 2005).
Like Gods Laws outlined when Eve and Adam enter into the garden of eden, having an identity acceptable to trinny and suzzanah who claim to represent the general public by being our fashion police they also have a strict set of laws which you have to follow in order to fit in. For instance: The presenters examine their wardrobes, often discarding or destroying items, they subject the participant to scrutinise themselves and be scrutinised by being gazed at in a 360 degree panopticon mirror. They are given £2,000 to spend, on the first day they shop on their ‘own’ while being filmed, on the second, Trinny and Susannah evaluate the clothing that has been bought and finally their hair and make-up is styled. The revelation – the ‘new’ woman is revealed to herself in a mirror, her true identity is revealed, she is no longer a social outcast.
Like Butlers groundbreaking work of performativity, the show higlights the discourse of the production of the self (Rose, 1989). This self is by no means finally produced, but requires constant re-production under an internalized and external gaze (Weber, 2005).
Trinny comments about one of the participants husbands: “he got back a woman he thought he’d lost, and I think that’s a big thing for a man when a woman has kids, that they sort of – sometimes stop being a wife” (BBC1, 2004).This violently embroils the fabricated gender binary constructed in the show with heterosexuality, the role of the mother, desire and image as identity. Like the Gaze of God in the Garden of Eden, self-image shows expect us to constantly gaze at ourselves and imagine ourselves as entities which need to be represented by a system of signs familiar to mainstream culture, it so happens that this is a masculine gaze and a patriarchal culture, so 'women' are viewing themselves without a great deal of agency from a alienated standpoint.
That 1890 communist woman...
From http://www.sacred-texts.com/wmn/tge/tge03.htm
Religious theory, in inquiring into the creation of man, has pursued the method precisely the reverse of this. Having found man on the earth, it assumes that be was a special creation; that is, that God, having purposed in Himself That He would create man, set Himself about to prepare a place in which he was to live; the earth, formed according to the account in Genesis, being that place. I say that this is the theory of religionists; but it is by no means certain that their account of the creation justifies any such conclusion. The biblical account of the creation is an allegorical picture of it, which, in detail, is strikingly in harmony with the real truth. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void." There were light and darkness--day and night. There were the divisions into water and land; the vegetation, fish, fowl, beast, and man; and next, the rest from labour. In so few words, who could make a clearer statement of what we know about the creation of the earth than this?
We must remember that the Bible does not pretend to be a scientific book at all. It deals altogether with the inspirational or spirit side of the universe. St. Paul informs us that the God of the Bible "is a spirit." At least the translators have made him state it thus; but it is not exactly as he wrote it, although in the end it has the same significance, since if God is a spirit, a spirit is also God. The original Greek of ibis, which is what Paul meant to say, and did say, and which is the truth, religiously and scientifically also, is Pneuma Theos--Pneuma, meaning spirit, and Theos God. According to St. Paul, then, spirit is God, and according to science, the life that is in the world is its creative cause; so both agree in their fundamental propositions, however much the priestcraft of the world may have attempted to twist St. Paul into accordance with their
Saturday, 18 April 2009
next meeting?
monday seems a good idea, but i won't be able to make it before 4pm - would that work? reckon that tom will have submitted his dissertation by then as well so we can all discuss answers/questions together.
Saturday, 11 April 2009
Hi,
I'm back in Manningtree now yippeee!
Working on my Critical theory essay.
Hope everyone is getting on alright.
I'm writing up my J Bulter theory which i'll post on here soon, we are waiting on Clare now to affirm the questions and then we can all start coming up with answers.
Its quite soon, so stay on top of things, anybody wan't to get in touch with Tom?
Thea
I'm back in Manningtree now yippeee!
Working on my Critical theory essay.
Hope everyone is getting on alright.
I'm writing up my J Bulter theory which i'll post on here soon, we are waiting on Clare now to affirm the questions and then we can all start coming up with answers.
Its quite soon, so stay on top of things, anybody wan't to get in touch with Tom?
Thea
Friday, 10 April 2009
presentation time...
hola lovely people,
i replied to chris's 'ordering' email yesterday and was the third to do so, which puts us in the 12.30 slot apparently. so it's presentation time at 12.30 on the 29th of april...
i replied to chris's 'ordering' email yesterday and was the third to do so, which puts us in the 12.30 slot apparently. so it's presentation time at 12.30 on the 29th of april...
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
Update from todays sesh: 6 questions please.
So, to give me something to work with on Thursday--my appointment with the specialist friend is at 11am so before then would be great--we think it would be a good idea if we all come up with 6 questions each to get me started.
It doesn't matter what they are or how simple or even complicated they are. Even if you think of something whilst doing the dishes: 'how does performativity relate to my life', for example, i will then formulate them into a script.
Does anyone have a preference as to who they want to play? The contestants are: Butler, Foucault, Marx and person from the street/NORMAL person!! To be honest, i don't think it matters too much since it will be scripted. Although we anticipate the normal person needing to be rather animated so this is the one that needs to do the most acting. The others can simply read the script (if they want to)
Anyway guys (and girlies) please come up with ANY 4 questions by Thursday 10am iff you can. Leave them on this post-just click the pencil thing to gain access.
Thea:
1) Why is it so easy to be heterosexual yet so subversive to be homosexual?
2) How has the ideology of the garden of eden infiltrated modern secular society?
3) Should we celebrate or lament the paradox of modern society which forces us to affirm a sense of self when it is visible that this is an alienated and unachievable goal?
Ieva:
1) How do you see the discourse of gender binary oppositions would have developed, lets say, in 50 years time?
2) In regards to categories, what are the possible solutions in, for example, taking a stand in political activism?
3) Can we ever avoid identity categories? How do we minimize the violence of the other by exclusion? Is it ever possible? How do we escape this violence and yet not become politically passive?
4)The terminology and the language used in academic discourses is often very specific and complicated. How do you think this might be affecting the level of understanding and accessibility for wider audiences that do not necessarily come from the academic arena? Do you not think that this aspect might be excluding non-members and might be an elitist in itself? If so, what possible problems and consequences could arise from this inaccessibility and do you think that the scholarly work is as effective as it might have been hoped for?
Ina:
1) To what extent can we dismiss the issue of biology and 'natural science' when talking about gender and sexuality?
2) Does the obligatory heteresexuality actively affect who we fall in love with, e.g direct our inner feelings, or does it just mean that we might not act on them?
3) Who benefits from heteronormativity?
Clare:
1) What is performativity?
2) Can we fight these categories? And if so, how?
3) is the search to transcend the 'self' by 'performing' drag simply a circular argument?
Tom:
It doesn't matter what they are or how simple or even complicated they are. Even if you think of something whilst doing the dishes: 'how does performativity relate to my life', for example, i will then formulate them into a script.
Does anyone have a preference as to who they want to play? The contestants are: Butler, Foucault, Marx and person from the street/NORMAL person!! To be honest, i don't think it matters too much since it will be scripted. Although we anticipate the normal person needing to be rather animated so this is the one that needs to do the most acting. The others can simply read the script (if they want to)
Anyway guys (and girlies) please come up with ANY 4 questions by Thursday 10am iff you can. Leave them on this post-just click the pencil thing to gain access.
Thea:
1) Why is it so easy to be heterosexual yet so subversive to be homosexual?
2) How has the ideology of the garden of eden infiltrated modern secular society?
3) Should we celebrate or lament the paradox of modern society which forces us to affirm a sense of self when it is visible that this is an alienated and unachievable goal?
Ieva:
1) How do you see the discourse of gender binary oppositions would have developed, lets say, in 50 years time?
2) In regards to categories, what are the possible solutions in, for example, taking a stand in political activism?
3) Can we ever avoid identity categories? How do we minimize the violence of the other by exclusion? Is it ever possible? How do we escape this violence and yet not become politically passive?
4)The terminology and the language used in academic discourses is often very specific and complicated. How do you think this might be affecting the level of understanding and accessibility for wider audiences that do not necessarily come from the academic arena? Do you not think that this aspect might be excluding non-members and might be an elitist in itself? If so, what possible problems and consequences could arise from this inaccessibility and do you think that the scholarly work is as effective as it might have been hoped for?
Ina:
1) To what extent can we dismiss the issue of biology and 'natural science' when talking about gender and sexuality?
2) Does the obligatory heteresexuality actively affect who we fall in love with, e.g direct our inner feelings, or does it just mean that we might not act on them?
3) Who benefits from heteronormativity?
Clare:
1) What is performativity?
2) Can we fight these categories? And if so, how?
3) is the search to transcend the 'self' by 'performing' drag simply a circular argument?
Tom:
Obscurantism
In 1998 Butler won the first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature, for the following sentence:
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power".
Geddit?
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power".
Geddit?
Monday, 6 April 2009
Judith Butler Video II
Also, my phone has been stolen and I don't have a new number yet - So I just assume tomorrow 11am is still happening..
Friday, 3 April 2009
UPDATE
To Do:
By next Tuesday 11am in the JCR (7th April) we will all have read the photocopy of the article on the garden of eden and heterosexuality, and the perspective on butler which is a critique of her work. Can everyone have a well thought out question that we can discuss for the quiz show idea and a basic structure of how they would like the presentation to go?
By next Tuesday 11am in the JCR (7th April) we will all have read the photocopy of the article on the garden of eden and heterosexuality, and the perspective on butler which is a critique of her work. Can everyone have a well thought out question that we can discuss for the quiz show idea and a basic structure of how they would like the presentation to go?
Thursday, 2 April 2009
Interesting article:Leaving the Garden of Eden ... the Codes of the Culture,the Codes of Perversion and Psychoanalysis by Patrick B.Kavanaugh, Ph.D
Leaving the Garden of Eden ... the Codes of the Culture,
the Codes of Perversion and Psychoanalysis Ó
by Patrick B. Kavanaugh, Ph.D.
Copyright, 1998
Introduction: Michel Foucault considered the fundamental Codes of the Culture as "...those determining its language, its schemes of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices." (1973, p. XX) The codes of the culture speak to that which a culture sanctions as the legitimate ways of thinking, knowing, and perceiving. Further, these Codes of the Culture are understood as constituted by certain underlying rules that provide for the discursive rationality and social coherence that operate in any given culture. These rules, or rules of formation, can be found in the various organizing stories of the culture such as its history, religion, science, law, literature, music, theatre, poetry and in various other mythologies which provide for its people a continuous, unified and traceable link with a past heritage and a future destiny. Amongst other organizing functions, these largely unexamined rules of formation signify, prescribe, and perpetuate certain cultural definitions and idealized images of the subject of Woman and subject of Man, the most dominant and sacrosanct of all binary oppositions in the westernized cultures. Indeed, this logocentric assumption of the binary opposition of the masculine and feminine is at the center of the foundational metaphysics of westernized thought.
Philosophic inquiry provides a basic, necessary and vital kind of freedom to place into question that which has been considered to be the natural order of things, the self-evident and the foundational essence of the traditional What Is in our everyday lives. For example, inquiry into the organizing stories of the culture and their underlying rules of formation calls into question that which determines the essence of gender and gender role, defines the Normal and Perverse, and prescribes the good and bad and the appropriate and inappropriate in the social order. And further, such inquiry provides the freedom to call into question the systems of logic and ways of thinking underlying the Why of that traditional What Is. Inquiry into the Codes of the Culture places into question the culture's language and its referents in reality, its schemes of perception of male and female, and the hierarchies of social practices in everyday life and discourse; such inquiry calls into question the very matrix of enculturation and meaning from which dynamic constructions of reality are generated. Inquiry into these presuppositions of the Codes of the Culture speaks to a questioning of basic assumptions presumed by the westernized cultures' systems of thinking and logic and underlying its institutionalized beliefs and values which, all too often, are represented as natural, timeless, and unchanging. This freedom to inquire into the Codes of the Culture brings with it the risk of disturbing the axiomatic certainty of the underlying assumptions, core values, and beliefs on which many of the mainstream psychologies of psychoanalysis of the modern era have been premised. Such disturbance, however, provides an opportunity to consider different ways of thinking and conceptualizing. And in so doing, our world(s) might be somewhat more comprehensible, coherent, and meaningful.
As a contribution to the ongoing project of rethinking psychoanalysis, I would like to risk such a disturbance by considering a way of thinking about these fundamental Codes of the Culture, their underlying rules of formation, and their relationship to the images of Woman and Man during the modern era. A central thesis in this consideration is that certain of the fundamental Codes of the Culture have constituted, in and of themselves, Codes of Perversion which profoundly influenced our modernistic systems of thinking, determined the idealized images of Female and Male, and shaped the classical conceptions of Femininity and Masculinity. More specifically, I would like to consider one of the organizing religious stories of the westernized cultures, the story of the Creation of the World according to John (1:1). My focus in this consideration will be on the organizing rules of formation reflected in the idealized images of Adam and Eve in the narrative of the Garden of Eden. My emphasis will be on the influence of these rules of formation in shaping psychoanalytic thinking and theorizing during the modern era; consideration will be given, also, to some of the epistemological questions and ethical implications that derive from these rules of formation for the Codes of the Psychoanalytic Culture and everyday psychoanalytic practice. One last introductory comment: the following perspective regarding the Codes of the Culture is per (the) version of a skeptical phenomenalist and is intended as a contribution to the study of the psychoanalytic arts.
The Metatheoretical Assumptions of
Social Coherence, Representation and Rational Objectivity
"In the beginning was the Word..." and the beginning was created by the Word and before the Word there was Nothing .... until the Word had been spoken... And the Word defined an objectively existing, mind-independent, and predictable World. A Word and World that rested upon certain metatheoretical assumptions of an inherent social coherence by which a single and unified world functioned, an objective and accurate means of discovering and representing that world, and a rational objectivity by which the world could be thought about, conceptualized, and understood. "In the beginning was the Word..." and the Word was the Deity and the Word created the World... and the Word first created Adam and then Eve in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were to be both the idealized and, after tasting the Forbidden Fruit, the more humanized images of Male and Female in the westernized cultures. And... Adam and Eve were to serve as the idealized images of the parents of humanity. Interwoven in the narrative of the Creation are to be found these metatheoretical assumptions of social coherency, a means and method of representation, and a rational objectivity upon which the rules of formation of the modern era were premised and developed. And each of these metatheoretical assumptions were contained in the Language of Adam as spoken in the Garden of Eden. In the language of Adam, each word reflected and illuminated directly, immediately, and completely--precisely, accurately, and objectively-- the innermost nature and foundational essence of the thing being represented. In the Garden of Eden, there had been a perfect "goodness of fit" between the word that represented and that being represented. There were neither confusions nor ambiguities. The exact correspondence between names and that which they signified spoke directly to the innocence and the simplicity of the relationship between words and the simple, pure, and innocent Truth of a self-evident essence. The fig leaf of metaphor as a special linguistic device to speak indirectly about essence was not needed until after the eating of the Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Eden at which time the essentialist language of Adam was lost.
The systems of discourse, or the episteme, developed during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries assumed a philosophic premise of rational-objectivism in which The World was understood to have an essential, objectively existing and solid state traceable and reduceable to an organizing First Cause. Reality was self-evident and located in solid matter, the foundational building blocks of Newtonian physics and science. Assumptions of a social coherence and a rational basis by which this world functioned were foundational. It was assumed that this mind-independent world had spontaneously and naturally sorted itself into kinds, categories, causal hierarchies, and discrete spheres. Further, this world operated by rational and natural laws according to intricate, pre-determined, and pre-ordained designs of nature. These predetermined ways by which things ought to be were revealed to the objective and impartial observer through the evidences of natural design, function and purpose in nature; function follows form naturally and rationally. This naturalistic theory of social coherence was reflected in the Doctrine of Teleology, in which doctrine conceptions of people and their behavior presumed this natural state and order of things organized around biological purpose, function, and adaptation. These conceptual foundations of the Enlightenment's developing view of people and social life were believed to be as self-evident as were the prevailing notions of reality underlying Newtonian physics and science.
The World could come to be known through the discovery of these universal, unifying and natural laws that existed 'out there" in the real world. The authority of a Newtonian based science, method, and explanation rested upon the objectivist notions regarding the representation of knowledge derived from the scientific method. A metaphysics of presence was assumed in which '... something real would and could be represented in thought. This real is understood to be an external or universal subject or substance, existing 'out there' independent of the knower. ... Truth is understood as correspondence to it" (Flax, 1991, 34). A linearized 1-1 correspondence between the real world, naturally occurring observations, and the concepts that represented them was assumed by this classical epistemology. Language, it was believed, was object-based and simply reflected reality as it really was --- the Word represented accurately and precisely this mind-independent World. And thus, Science carried the promise of holding all natural phenomenon in its objectivizing gaze; understanding the nomothetic laws governing nature, people, and society could be accomplished through an empirical discourse. Like Adam in the Garden giving names to all of God's creatures (Genesis 2:19-20), Man could now identify and give names to naturally occurring phenomena, laws, and concepts by a scientific method and means--an empirical science had replaced the Deity as an enabler. A new World was waiting to be discovered and named. As suggested by Fraser (1977) the rise and quest of the Science of the modern era speaks to an attempt to regain the language, power and status of Adam that had been lost in the Garden of Eden.
Rational Objectivity and Natural Causal Hierarchies:
Adam and Eve and the "Rules of Formation"
"In the beginning was the Word..." and the World conceptually created by this Word was a cognitive, symbolic and reasoned World. During the Age of Reason, a rational objectivity emerged as hierarchically superior to passions and aesthetics. Mind took precedence over body, thought over feeling, and logic over intuition. A cultural ideology developed in which the rules of formation for discursive rationality and coherence were to be monologic and based upon a system of objectivist values, logic, and reasoning. Reasoning and logic were to be reified --- if not Deified. And Truth and its discovery were located with the intellectual sphere--the symbolic-cognitive order. Passions, emotions, and feelings were considered sources of interference and distortions of seeing things as they really were. And in the discursive field of the symbolic-cognitive order is found the direct link between the Codes of the Culture and the Codes of Perversion. In this hermetically sealed-off world of the symbolic order is found the discourse of a rational objectivity , the schemes of perception, and the hierarchy and exchanges of social practices of the culture as regards the subject of Woman and the subject of Man.
Rational Objectivity, Thinking, and Language: In the westernized tradition of rational objectivity, the world and the nature of that world are conceptualized as inherently and naturally dichotomous. The world had spontaneously and naturally sorted itself into natural pairings of hierarchical dichotomies beginning with the natural, dichotomous and hierarchical pairing of Adam and Eve which had been created and sanctified by the Deity. Direct lineage, authorization. and legitimacy for this natural pairing and its hierarchical relationship was traceable to the First Cause. The creation of Adam and Eve in the form of male and female was to naturalize a dichotomous metaphysics as central and foundational to the rules of formation in thinking and speaking about the world and people. And the inherent social coherency by which the world was believed to naturally function instructed us to represent these natural and hierarchical pairings of Adam and Eve precisely and accurately as this hyphenated unit of male and female existed in its natural state. This division into subject(ive) and object(ive) -- the subject-object division -- is the first, universal, and essential form of representation in thinking in the westernized cultures. And self-evident anatomical differences between Adam and Eve were paradigmatic in the dichotomous organization and categorization of concepts that ordered and organized the world, eg., Adam - Eve, male - female, cause - effect, Life - Death, before-after, reality-fantasy, outer objective-inner subjective, conscious-unconscious, analyst-analysand, and teacher-student.
As with the pairing of Adam and Eve, conceptual definition, meaning, and significance takes place when something is defined in terms of its binary opposite (Cixous, 1986). That is, in these naturally occurring hierarchies such as Adam and Eve, conceptual primacy is given to the first referenced in the pairing. That which is believed to be the dominant, superior, and more fully developed in these so-called natural hierarchies is referenced first with the second defined and understood by that which the first is not. Thus, Adam was defined in the affirmative and Eve was defined by that which Adam was not; Eve was defined by The Lack. Put another way: in this natural pairing, Adam existed in opposition to Eve; Eve, as the inverted version of Adam, was defined affirmatively in terms of the Lack which literally becomes an affirmative-negation. And in the social order, such natural pairings of hierarchical dichotomies as Man and Woman became organizing rules of formation and provided precedent and paradigm for the hierarchy of social preferences, social priorities, and social practices in the culture.
In the contextualizing mythology of the Garden of Eden, the Deity first created Adam in his own image from the dust of the ground and put the Man whom he had formed in the Garden of Eden (Genesis, 2:8). And, later, Eve was created as a consequence of Adam's Lack - as in his lack of companionship-- and Eve was created to fill this Lack - as in to fill Adam's loneliness. And, at the same time, Eve's creation was a cause of Adam's Lack - as in Eve's creation was to create an anatomical Lack (of a rib) inside of Adam. Eve, in her very creation and existence, was the living and breathing embodiment of the consequence of Adam's Lack, the cause of Adam's Lack, and the solution for Adam's Lack ... all at the same time. With the assistance of the creator, the First Cause, Adam gave birth to Eve as he slept. And Adam named Eve Woman because she was taken out of Man (Genesis, 2:23) And the idealized images of Male and Female, the parents of humanity, were given human form .... And Adam and Eve were sorted into a natural pair in which natural hierarchy Adam came first and was dominant as established and sanctioned by the deity --- Himself ... Of course, there was something more to the narrative of the Garden of Eden....
Schemes of Perception of Male and Female: Eve became responsible for the loss of the Language of Adam through her gullibility, her innocence, and her curiosity. Eve touched the untouchable and ate the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis, 3:6). She mindlessly fell under the sway of evil passions, appetites and the desires of the flesh. And with a bite of the apple, Eve bit into the carnal knowledge and corporeal dimensions of the temporal World of the physical. She was to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and Wisdom. In the Beginning was the Word. And the Word was made Flesh.... And the parents of humanity were given human form with the image of Adam becoming the unconscious embodiment of the Word and the image of Eve becoming the unconscious embodiment of the Flesh. Adam became the living and breathing embodiment of the spiritual, rational, and logical; Eve became the living and breathing embodiment of the Forbidden Fruit. And with Eve's earthly appetites and carnality came the Casting out from the Garden ... into mortality, Death, and the decay of the Flesh. The Language of Adam had been scientific, rational, objective, and primary in juxtaposed-hyphenation to the Language of Eve which was of the corporeal world of the senses, the carnal world of touch, the language of the body, textures, and blends.... The Language of Eve speaks the image of woman as flesh, temporality, and earthiness.
"And the Word was made Flesh" and these images of Adam and Eve were embodied in the Codes of the Culture as living and breathing systems of signification. And, from this perspective, the fundamental Codes of the Culture constitute Codes of Perversion in which the idealized image of Woman was to be a Mask of Man --- AND --- the idealized image of Man was to be a mask of Woman. As in the narrative of Adam and Eve in the Garden, gaining knowledge through the sense perceptions --the language of the senses and body--was silenced and repudiated in both Science and the Social Order. To be Found Under Carnal Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was to be found in the shame of one's nakedness and to be cast out and removed from the Garden.... To be Found Under the Carnal Knowledge of emotion or passion in the scientific method was considered to be contaminating of the objective findings, those contaminated findings were to be declared invalid, and they were to be cast out of the Garden of Truth. To be Found Under Carnal Knowledge in the Dark Ages was considered to be a crime against the Social Order and, if found guilty of the charge, was punishable by Death--to be removed and cast out from the community of the living. To this day, the acronym of the charge to be Found Under Carnal Knowledge is, itself, considered to be obscene and is not to be spoken in the community of the civilized:................. F.-U.-C.-K..
"And the Word was made Flesh..." And a process of othering produced an idealized hierarchical opposition between and within each side of the dichotomy of Man and Woman. In religious mythology, for example, new and idealizing images of Male and Female were provided between each side of the dichotomy by the narrative of the parents of redemption--Joseph and Mary --through which images, conception and birth could take place through the immaculate conception without the contaminating earthiness of carnal knowledge. Joseph and Mary were produced as the idealized others of Adam and Eve with the virginal angelic of Mary, for example, produced in opposition to the carnal corporeal of Eve, e.g., the angelic Madonna - and the carnal Whore existed within the categorical other of Woman. Paradoxically, carnality was divested of its carnality and became part of a purified angelic discourse in religious mythology, science, and the social order. In science, a Newtonian based method and explanation was entrusted to develop an angelic discourse in which, paradoxically, order was imposed on the physical and corporeal world so that the symbolic understanding of the carnal could be accomplished in the abstract. Structuralism was emphasized in this more predictable Cartesian-Newtonian world of certainty wherein universal patterns, themes, and parts were the objectives of scientific discovery (Fraser, 1977; Capra, 1982). Premised on a metaphysics of presence, the empiricist's doctrine and model advanced the notion that the world instructed the scientist-observer how to represent it. The scientist only discovers that which is already there in its naturally occurring state; causal relationships existed out there in an objective and knowable world. An alphabet of human thought comprised of numbers, quantifications, and formulae provided a dictionary of mathematical words and a grammatical context by which a linearized and deterministic reading of the World's text could take place. And in the normative vocabulary of this empirical discourse, deviations from the norm became evidences of abnormalities. Science became the Ultimate Knower and Signifier of meaning. And its quest to quantify and objectify the world, people, and life eventually led to an empiricism of wisdom, knowledge, and the soul.
The Codes of the Culture, The Codes of Perversion and the Other as Phallus
In the Social Order, the fundamental Codes of the Culture provide the discursive basis for the social reality in which the most dominant and sacrosanct of all binary oppositions is that between the male and female subjects. As noted by Silverman (1983, p 270), the antitheses of Male-Female are central to the organization of the cultural order to which they belong. The cultural codes are entrusted with the two fold function of maintaining the social order's dominant binary oppositions and providing the means necessary to perpetuate the so-called natural hierarchies in the social order through its literature, history, cinema, religion, law, and so on. And embodied in these Codes are the very Codes of Perversion that play out in everyday life in the idealized images and seemingly naturalized faces of the subject of woman and man. The Codes of Perversion are constituted by the language of binary opposition, the schemes of perception of Male and Female, and the hierarchy of social practices and values-.
Inscribed in the social order, Woman was a symptom of Man and, at the same time, Man was a symptom of Woman. More specifically, in this pairing of male and female there is an inseparable and reciprocal dependence of Adam and Eve -- of subject and object. The image of Adam as independent, more superior and more fully developed than the image of Eve speaks to an opposition that is not an opposition. The apparent freedom of Adam as opposed to the necessity of Eve in this pairing suggests that there is no metaphysical break from the opposition of subject and object; the opposition is not an opposition at all. The images of Adam and Eve are rooted in one and the same essence; there is an inseparable interconnectedness between Male and Female. More specifically, Eve was needed by Adam to define the other of Adam as submissive, inferior, and less fully developed. And Adam was needed by Eve to define the other of Eve as more superior and fully developed. Woman was present in Man as the opposite and absence of Man; and Man was present in woman as the opposite and absence of Woman. The presence of self as Male is defined in opposition to the absence of other as Female; and that which is absent, the Female, is always present in self, the Male. Woman as a symptom of Man and, at the same time, Man as a symptom of Woman.
"In the beginning was the Word ... And the Word was made Flesh..." And in the Social Order the Word was Phallus. And Phallus is that means by which reality is conjured from illusion and ineffable chaos by the use of systems of signs and signification as contained in and provided by the Codes of the Culture (Sebeock, 199 1). The Phallus is signifier; the Lack is signified. Phallus signifies the meaning for that which is Lacking in other; the Haves define the Lack of the Have Nots. Thus, Phallus, from this perspective, is considered to be neither structure, nor institution, nor product. Phallus is considered to be a complex semiotic process of signification and enculturation in which Phallus is defined through female Lack. And Phallus is inseparable from the culture's organizing metatheoretical assumptions of rational objectivity, social coherence, and representation. This conception of Phallus is not organized around the orthodoxy that proceeds from anatomical differences. More specifically, Phallus does not equate with penus. And Lack of penus does not mean lack of phallus. Rather in the symbolic field, Phallus always exceeds the biological differences signifying Male and Female. In the hierarchy of social practices, Phallus has little, if anything, to do with gender or gender role.
The Phallus is constituted by those systems of signification in which the privileged signify the idealized ought to be for the other because they speak authoritatively in the Name and Voice of the Father such as in the analytic community, for example, the American Psychological or Psychoanalytic Association. And in so speaking, the privileged are possessed, at least partially, of the phallus located in this position within society's hierarchical organizations. Certainly, Phallus includes access to privilege, prerogative, and power as derived from position and positioning in the culture's matrix of meaning. More importantly, however, Phallus is power in its signification as to how the other ought to be.. Phallus is, thus, inseparable from Nietzche's "will to power" over others (1967). And in the Social Order, Phallus as the ever-present structuralizing Other casts its signifying and contextualizing gaze over every aspect of life in society. Other as Phallus is constituted by the Codes of the Culture and the rules that govem the formation of legitimate thought, perception, and the discourse of hierarchically organized institutions. And Other as Phallus is expressed through the ideological interweave of the Law, Science, History, Theory, literature and the organizing stories of the culture. The Codes of the Culture are Codes of Perversion when such codes advance any extreme, fixed and exclusive conception as to how others ought to be in their Being, Thinking, Experiencing, and Presencing. And when such conceptions are presented as claims to Truth by Other as Phallus around which Self is to be organized per (the) version of Other..
The Narrative of Adam and Eve: Some Thoughts
on the Perversions, The Codes of Perversion and Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis was born of the interweave of the epistemological premise, cultural ideology, and the world view prevalent in the latter part of 19th century Germany. And the What is of the times was self-evident and known in its essential state; the Why of the What Is was awaiting discovery by Science speaking its monologic Truth clearly, precisely, and objectively in the Language of Adam. Premised in a logical positivism, psychoanalysis developed in a paradigm of biology, medicine, and the natural sciences and pursued the status and respectability of a natural science of the mind. Under the profound influence of evolutionary biology, the Why of human behavior assumed biological foundations as currently reflected in developmental theories of psychology in which physiology underlies the psychology of the subject. And psychoanalytic psychology became preoccupied with those structures, mechanisms, and functions that failed to develop properly. The scientific sterility and mechanical imagery of people of the 19th century blended with a compassionately callibrated empathy to form the foundations of psychoanalytic thinking and treatment in this country for the greater part of the past century. And perhaps, the Codes of the Culture speak most clearly in the psychoanalytic culture as Codes of Perversion in the classical notions of The Perversions.
The word perversion is a derivation from the Latin word perversus meaning "...turned the wrong way" , or "...turned away from that which is considered to be right, good, or proper." (Barnhart, C., 1970 ) To the question, "Perverse in relation to what?", came the reply from classical psychoanalysis: Perverse in relation to "...the accepted adult norm of heterosexual genital intercourse". (Moore, B. & Fine, B., 1990, 142) Mediated by a medical ideology, sexual behaviors were considered to be pathological when and if they deviated in either object choice or aim from this socio-biologically defined normative standard. The teleological conceptualization of sexuality was procreation; the purpose of sexual activity was the biological perpetuation of the species. And in psychoanalytic thinking and theorizing, anatomical differences were conceptually tied to the biological imperatives of reproduction; non-procreative sexual activities must be perversions of that obvious and naturalized purpose. Indeed, the classical formulations of The Perversions proceeded from the reductive temperament, the essentialist assumptions, and the self-evident notions of the times, For example, in such formulations, it was axiomatically assumed that anatomical differences between the sexes were as self-evident and foundational to the conceptual understanding of The Perversions as solid matter was the self-evident building blocks of reality in Newtonian physics. And these anatomical differences provided the irrefutable criterion of Truth; anatomical differences were self-evident, the denial of which reality was central in psychoanalytic thinking about The Per-versions. And the presumption of an inherent attraction between the sexes was an assumed foundational essence, departures from which were understood as the consequence of a disordered development. Component elements of drives had not developed into the more fully integrated and mature drive leading to the ultimate purpose of coitus; the unbridled discharge of these component elements contextualized a unifying understanding of The Perversions. The Perversions were conceptualized as being "disorders of discharge" as repressive forces had not been sufficient to convert infantile libidinized fantasies into the neurotic symptomatology of the "disorders of inhibition" (Freud, 1905). Procreation presumed and mandated the fulfillment of a natural biological destiny for the Masculine and Feminine: diversion of expression was a perversion of normative behavior - and, a diversion from natural law was a perversion thereof.
It seems to me that for the greater part of the past century the organizing rules of formation in the narrative of the Garden of Eden have been paradigmatic for the development of modernistic systems of thinking. And infused with a medical ideology, these same rules of formation have been paradigmatic for the development of psychoanalytic thinking and theorizing. As with the culture at large, the rules of formation in the narrative of the Garden have provided the psychoanalytic culture with certain ways of thinking about, knowing, and perceiving the world, people and life. As with the classical conception of 7he Perversions, abnormality continues to be understood as the natural development of the individual having been "...turned the wrong way..." or turned away from the right, the good or the proper developmental track and outcome. For example, in the mainstream psychologies of Drive, Ego, Object and Self, differences amongst people are conceptualized as deviations from the idealized Law of the Normative, e.g., those behaviors, ways of thinking, or states of mind that deviate from the empirically established normative standards. In the conceptual foundations of each of these respective psychologies, it seems that Normality has been to Abnormality as Adam has been to Eve; or, put in a slightly different way: Adam is to Normality as Eve is to Abnormality. To briefly elaborate: As with the creation of Adam, the idealized image of the Normative is defined in the affirmative and is understood as that which ought to be or ought to have happened in the individual's development. And further, it ought to have happened in a predictable, linearized, and natural developmental sequence. As with the creation of Eve, abnormality is understood by that which Normality is not; abnormality is defined by the Lack; mainstream psychoanalytic thinking conceptualizes the Lack as foundational to modernistic notions of psychopathology. In current psychoanalytic thinking, there is a developmental deficit; something natural, foundational, and essential for Normal functioning is Lacking in the subject. By way of elaboration:--
Infused with a medical ideology, modernistic psychoanalytic thinking has understood differences amongst people in the organizing conceptual framework of symptomatology, etiology, and psychopathology. Certain ways of thinking, behaving, and feeling considered to be inappropriate in the social order are conceptualized as symptomatic of deeper underlying pathology. This symptomatology is conceptualized as the Consequence of an internal Lack e.g.,--- the Lack of sublimation and neutralization of drives, --or, the Lack of development of Ego structures and functions, or --- the Lack of internalization of whole object representations -- or, the Lack of development of a Self structure and its functions. There has been a Lack of development of specific structures and functions which ought to have happened but did not. And in each of these respective psychologies, these evidences of pathology are conceptualized in binary opposition to the Normative and are understood as caused by an external Lack...... e.g., there has been a Lack of sufficient repressive forces to convert the libidinal investments of infantile sexuality into neurotic symptoms --or, the Lack of an average and expectable environment-- or, the Lack of positive, consistent and stable identificatory figures-- or, the Lack of empathic attunement in the childhood surround. Or perhaps as is increasingly fashionable, the Lack of an integrative combination of each of the above. In the positivist tradition, each of these respective psychologies conceptualize an external Lack as causal to an internal consequence of a developmental Lack. And the person's subsequent development is turned the wrong way due to this internal Lack. The ensuing developmental deficit -- the absence of the ought to have been -- is expressed through the symptomatology, constitutes the psychopathology, and explains the etiology ...all at the same time. The Lack is conceptualized as both cause and consequence of psychopathology. This way of thinking seems remarkably similar to and consistent with the mythology of the creation of Eve who, in her very creation and existence, was the living and breathing embodiment of the cause of Adam's Lack, the consequence of Adam's Lack, and the solution for Adam's Lack, all at the same time...... Adam is to Normality as Eve is to Abnormality.
The rules of formation in the narrative of Adam and Eve premise largely unquestioned ways of thinking in the psychoanalytic culture in which the Lack as both the cause and consequence of psychopathology has become an institutionalized assumption and is taken for granted as natural and self-evident. These ways of thinking are embodied in the fundamental Codes of the Culture of the psychoanalytic community --the Diagnostic Codes such as found in DSM-IV. In the sacred text of such diagnostic and statistical manuals, the normative language of an empirical discourse scientifically places people in the various categories of diseases, disorders, and deficiencies. And institutionalized medical values and beliefs masquerade as carefully considered clinical evidences of pathology in need of reparative and normalizing treatment interventions by the therapeutic parents of redemption of the pathologized--- the analytic practitioners as health care providers. And medicalized versions of psychoanalysis continue to be science and pathology driven, seeking to discover, prevent, and cure the causes and consequences of the Lack.
In the psychoanalytic culture, systems of binary thinking, beliefs, and values seem to permeate basic psychoanalytic concepts such as, for example, the concept of the unconscious as process, structure, and dynamic; conscious thought and experiences are defined in opposition to unconscious thought and experiences. Conscious thought has been understood as rational, objective, Man-ifest thought in binary opposition to Unconscious or Latent thought, understood as that which is irrational, not directly seen, and not Man-ifest: Adam is to Conscious thought as Eve is to Unconscious thought. Conscious thought and experiences have been conceptualized in terms of the direct, knowable, and observable. Conscious thought can be seen and known in its manifest presence; unconscious thought cannot be seen and can be known only through inference because of its latent absence. Conscious thought is defined through its presence; the presence of unconscious thought is defined through its absence. In opposition to the developmentally superior, rational, and objective monocausality of Conscious thought as Adam, the Unconscious-latent-absence has been conceptualized as the embodiment of the developmentally inferior, irrational, and corporeal causality as Eve. As noted by Irigaray (1985):
"...we might wonder whether certain properties attributed to the unconscious may not , in part, be ascribed to the female sex, which is censured by the logic of consciousness. (We might wonder ... ) Whether the feminine has an unconscious or whether it is the unconscious." (p. 73, The Power of Discourse)
The unconscious-latent, conceptualized as Female Lack, can not be seen directly as it is not visible to the conscious I eye. The rythmic voice of the Unconscious, however, can be heard faintly from a distance. This voice of the Unconscious is heard from off stage, out of sight, and from a great distance with the embodiment of carnal flesh and rational irrationality visibly absent, like female sexual organs. Could this be an expression of visible anatomical differences at the center of the foundational metaphysics of psychoanalytic thinking? Is this conception of the Unconscious reminescient, perhaps, of the ancient Greek theatre in which that considered to be obscene took place off stage? In the Greek theatre, the ob-scene could be literally heard but not seen. The ob-scene was to be kept out of sight. The ob-scene was cast in the role of not being visibly scene; its presence was known only in and through its palpable absence. Conceptualized in the rationalist epistemology as Female Lack, unconscious-latent meanings as Eve reside in the shadows of the idealized observable of the Conscious Man-ifest content as Adam . And as Eve did in the Garden, the unconscious profoundly influences the Man-ifest content in ways pathological as evidenced by symptomatic acts, distorted perceptions, disorganized thinking, disturbed cognitions, and disorders of the self.
Unconscious meanings as Eve can only be inferred and brought in sight through the illuminating light of interpretive in-sight as spoken in the rational and objectivizing language and logic as Adam.. And all too often in the analytic discourse, unconscious meaning is signified and mediated through a hierarchical relationship in which Adam is to Analyst as Eve is to Analysand. And all too often, the unconscious meanings of actions, thoughts, and states of mind are pre-signified; that is, the meaning is known in advance by the analyst, and is to be known eventually by the analysand. And through the analytic discourse, the fig leaf of metaphor can eventually be removed and the angelic discourse of the Language of Adam can once again be spoken, speaking the essence of Woman and Man---directly, precisely, and objectively without ambiguities, misunderstandings or confusions. The Truth of Essence can be revealed, known, and celebrated. To return to the Language of Adam that existed before Eve touched the untouchable and ate of the Tree of Wisdom and Knowledge speaks to the desire in the analytic culture to return to the development of this innermost nature and foundational essence of the Masculine and the Feminine.... Let the unconscious-latent be made conscious- "Man"ifest, --- Where there is Id let there be Ego, Where there is a Lack of structures or functions let there be Ego strength or selfobject experiences to further the development of a cohesive sense of Self...
Assumptions of a universal, unifying, and foundational essence as to the basic nature of people -for example, drive discharging, object seeking, or some combination thereof- and how people ought to be is to assert the Truth of Otherness mediated by the idealized normative images of Woman, Man, and Child from the privileged position of Other as Phallus. Around such images of the ought to be, Self is to be organized in the analytic discourse per (the) version of Other in the service of repairing and normalizing that which is Lacking in the subject; the derailed can and should be put back on developmental track. Such medicalized and linearized ways of thinking lead to a psychoanalytic discourse in which the implicit, if not explicit, objective of analysis is to reconstitute repair, revise and Normalize the Self of the subject per (the) version of Other as represented by the analyst's respective theory. And in which discourse, Phallus as Other as embodied in one's theory serves as signifier of meaning and Truth, with the Lack awaiting signification per (the) version of Phallus as Other. This conceptual framework speaks the aim, focus, and objective of psychoanalysis as that of a psychic orthopedic designed to encourage and promote the development of that believed to be Lacking. And with the unquestioned assumptions of a universal and unifying essence as to the basic nature of people, medicalized psychological theories can be scientifically mass produced for mass distribution through our educational institutions for the purpose of mass empathic applications in the analytic discourse for the mass consumption by the pathologized. And psychoanalysis becomes a discourse of conformity and compliance to the idealized normative of the ought to be ---all the while proclaiming the uniqueness of the person. When the analytic discourse unquestioningly allies itself with the normative ideology of the Master Discourse, the Codes of the psychoanalytic Culture and their underlying rules of formation constitute Codes of Perversion in their expectation that the Self of the other ought to be organized per (the) version of Other as Phallus.
When a particular theory -- any theory-- is assumed and advanced as a neutral, scientific, and objectivized claim to Truth, it moves far beyond simply that of an interesting theoretical perspective or an intriguing set of propositions. A series of epistemological and ethical questions arise when the idealized and idealizing Law of the Normative serves as the standard of what ought to be in developmental and analytic outcome: Who is it that speaks.. in defining the essence of Man?...... in defining the essence of Woman?...... in defining the essence of Child? ... Does not the very conceptualization of Woman-Man or Man-Woman imprison subsequent debate, discourse and discovery within binary categorical oppositions, binary logic, values and systems of beliefs ... From what position, location or place in the culture's matrix of meaning and power does one speak? From what philosophic discourse? ... from what theoretical discourse? Is authorization for speaking granted by virtue of position in the Phallus?... by virtue of anatomy? Does one speak empirically?, objectively?, logically? intuitively? rationally? Does one speak as if speaking outside of a philosophic or theoretical discourse?
Rethinking Psychoanalysis
The freedom of philosophy to place into question largely unexamined philosophic presuppositions, presumed natural hierarchies, a dichotomous metaphysics, and seemingly self-evident propositions has led to the appearance of radically different understandings of the world, people, life ... and psychoanalysis. As psychoanalysis leaves the Garden of Eden and these various rules of formation, the project of rethinking psychoanalytic theory, practice, ethics and education has introduced many different versions of psychoanalysis each having a different focus, aim, and set of objectives. In the time remaining this afternoon, I would like to speak to a particular version of psychoanalysis as resituated in philosophy, the humanities and the arts in contrast to biology, medicine, and the natural sciences. This version of analysis is premised in a radicalized perspectivism, phenomenalism, and subjectivism. And from this perspective, the natural order of things is neither natural according to predetermining and preordaining designs of nature nor are events inherently ordered, independent of the organizing principles, dynamic processes, and psychic laws of the perceiver. The natural order of things is to be found in the eye of the beholder and is considered to be an extension of the unbroken flesh of the signifying Self of the enunciating subject. This radicalized premise recognizes a World of Differences amongst and between people. And speaks a philosophy of differences and singularity in the tradition of Nietsche and Heidegger in which there is appreciated an infinite interpretability of reality amongst people: the only world that can ever exist and be known is this world of interpretations of the world. Such a philosophy of differences acknowledges the uniqueness of the subject, the analytic discourse, and the drama of this discourse.
In this version of analysis, there are neither rules, nor essence, nor fixed foundational ought to be's. And in the analytic discourse, there is neither universal nor unifying theories as to the basic and essential nature of people. And there are neither goals nor objectives in this discourse... Except the deceptively simple purpose of engaging in a process of venturing into the vitally and radically metaphoric language of the person--a venture into the very personal and private World of the Word of the individual. The focus of psychoanalysis is upon the What Is and the Why of the What Is according to the enunciating subject rather than what ought to be according to the Other as Phallus. The discourse of psychoanalysis is concerned with the understanding of the idyosyncratic meanings, ideas, desires, passions, beliefs, motivational causalities and psychic laws of the enunciating subject, the ideothetic and paradoxical meanings of which derive from the associative context of the analytic moment. From this philosophic premise and perspective that which constitutes The Normal and Perverted, the Good and Bad, and Gender and Gender Role is found in the contextualizing perspective of each person and is inextricably linked to that person's core values, beliefs, assumptions, systems of logic and understandings of the world, people and life. Thus, the psychoanalytic discourse attempts to appreciate the metatheoretical assumptions of social coherence according to the ratio-nal objectivity of the person with whom one meets... and attempts to understand the essentialist meanings underlying representation as they reside in the eye of the enunciating subject. Psychoanalysis is concerned with the rules of formation underlying the social coherency that constitutes the very structure, function, and meaning of the individual's world.
As a venture into this semiotic World of the Word of Other, psychoanalysis involves a continuous, very personal, and ongoing struggle for those who might engage in such a discourse which can be known through the immersion of Self of the analyst in the various versions of the world per (the) version of the subject. Entry into this World of the Word of Other involves an ongoing struggle and a continuous Death of the idealized images of Self and Other as constructed by the cultural codes. And as signified by each of the people in the analytic discourse--assuming, of course, there are two people. In effect, there is a mutual search for identity in this unique psychological discourse. In The School of the Dead (1993), the poet-thinker Helene Cixous speaks to this powerful struggle and this continuous death of Self-Other in the creative process of writing. Someone or something must die in order for good writing to be born .... She states:
"The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed. It is combat against ourselves, the author; one of us must be vanquished or die......... it's the one I want to write: I tear it from myself" (1993, p. 32)
Perhaps the same struggle and continuous Death of Self and Other holds for the analyst as both Self and Other (as analysand) in the analytic discourse. I believe that it does... The analytic discourse is guided by the relentless and passionate pursuit of knowing the What Is and the desire of knowing the Why of the What Is in one's life. In this pursuit, the author is in relation to her written text of the Word as the analyst- analysand are in relation to her spoken text of the Word in the analytic discourse. And in the creative writing of one's personal story and history, this Self-Other collaboration involves a passionate pursuit of the death of Self and Other. As to something of the Why of this struggle and pursuit of death, Cixous writes:
"... after all, the desire to die is only the desire to taste the fruits of the tree of Good and Evil. To be able to want to taste the fruits of the tree of Good and Evil, contrary to what the Bible says, one has to be mortal. It's very difficult if one isn't mortal. Not everyone is mortal. Not everyone has this difficult fortune (italics added; 1993, p.34)
And unfortunately it seems, not every analytic practitioner has had this difficult fortune of being mortal.
As a poetic work of art situated in philosophy, the humanities, and the arts, psychoanalysis speaks to the enduring and fixed traditions of the enunciating subject's phenomenal past as coexisting, codetermining, and costructuring with the subject's present wishes, desires and longings and future purposes and goals. In so doing, psychoanalysis speaks with the voices of the dead of the phenomenal past in this, the present moment of the past. As discourse, psychoanalysis engages in the continuous death of Self and Other in the present moment of knowing. And at the same time, paradoxically, the psychoanalytic discourse engages in a continuous birthing of Self and Other in that same moment of knowing; a quite non-linear and inexplicable something more of the analytic discourse that speaks to the dying and birthing of Self-Other as inseparably interconnected. As derived from philosophy and the arts, psychoanalysis is considered to be a poetic work of art in that it registers, monumentalizes, and speaks to the enunciating subject's passage of time. To engage in the conflict, dilemma, and paradoxical of the analytic discourse is to engage in, perhaps, the most intricately complex and human of discourses. And this unique psychological discourse speaks a basic, necessary and vital kind of freedom to place one's very personal and private World into question in a place and space not subjugated to the gaze of the Other as Phallus………
............ to be continued
the Codes of Perversion and Psychoanalysis Ó
by Patrick B. Kavanaugh, Ph.D.
Copyright, 1998
Introduction: Michel Foucault considered the fundamental Codes of the Culture as "...those determining its language, its schemes of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices." (1973, p. XX) The codes of the culture speak to that which a culture sanctions as the legitimate ways of thinking, knowing, and perceiving. Further, these Codes of the Culture are understood as constituted by certain underlying rules that provide for the discursive rationality and social coherence that operate in any given culture. These rules, or rules of formation, can be found in the various organizing stories of the culture such as its history, religion, science, law, literature, music, theatre, poetry and in various other mythologies which provide for its people a continuous, unified and traceable link with a past heritage and a future destiny. Amongst other organizing functions, these largely unexamined rules of formation signify, prescribe, and perpetuate certain cultural definitions and idealized images of the subject of Woman and subject of Man, the most dominant and sacrosanct of all binary oppositions in the westernized cultures. Indeed, this logocentric assumption of the binary opposition of the masculine and feminine is at the center of the foundational metaphysics of westernized thought.
Philosophic inquiry provides a basic, necessary and vital kind of freedom to place into question that which has been considered to be the natural order of things, the self-evident and the foundational essence of the traditional What Is in our everyday lives. For example, inquiry into the organizing stories of the culture and their underlying rules of formation calls into question that which determines the essence of gender and gender role, defines the Normal and Perverse, and prescribes the good and bad and the appropriate and inappropriate in the social order. And further, such inquiry provides the freedom to call into question the systems of logic and ways of thinking underlying the Why of that traditional What Is. Inquiry into the Codes of the Culture places into question the culture's language and its referents in reality, its schemes of perception of male and female, and the hierarchies of social practices in everyday life and discourse; such inquiry calls into question the very matrix of enculturation and meaning from which dynamic constructions of reality are generated. Inquiry into these presuppositions of the Codes of the Culture speaks to a questioning of basic assumptions presumed by the westernized cultures' systems of thinking and logic and underlying its institutionalized beliefs and values which, all too often, are represented as natural, timeless, and unchanging. This freedom to inquire into the Codes of the Culture brings with it the risk of disturbing the axiomatic certainty of the underlying assumptions, core values, and beliefs on which many of the mainstream psychologies of psychoanalysis of the modern era have been premised. Such disturbance, however, provides an opportunity to consider different ways of thinking and conceptualizing. And in so doing, our world(s) might be somewhat more comprehensible, coherent, and meaningful.
As a contribution to the ongoing project of rethinking psychoanalysis, I would like to risk such a disturbance by considering a way of thinking about these fundamental Codes of the Culture, their underlying rules of formation, and their relationship to the images of Woman and Man during the modern era. A central thesis in this consideration is that certain of the fundamental Codes of the Culture have constituted, in and of themselves, Codes of Perversion which profoundly influenced our modernistic systems of thinking, determined the idealized images of Female and Male, and shaped the classical conceptions of Femininity and Masculinity. More specifically, I would like to consider one of the organizing religious stories of the westernized cultures, the story of the Creation of the World according to John (1:1). My focus in this consideration will be on the organizing rules of formation reflected in the idealized images of Adam and Eve in the narrative of the Garden of Eden. My emphasis will be on the influence of these rules of formation in shaping psychoanalytic thinking and theorizing during the modern era; consideration will be given, also, to some of the epistemological questions and ethical implications that derive from these rules of formation for the Codes of the Psychoanalytic Culture and everyday psychoanalytic practice. One last introductory comment: the following perspective regarding the Codes of the Culture is per (the) version of a skeptical phenomenalist and is intended as a contribution to the study of the psychoanalytic arts.
The Metatheoretical Assumptions of
Social Coherence, Representation and Rational Objectivity
"In the beginning was the Word..." and the beginning was created by the Word and before the Word there was Nothing .... until the Word had been spoken... And the Word defined an objectively existing, mind-independent, and predictable World. A Word and World that rested upon certain metatheoretical assumptions of an inherent social coherence by which a single and unified world functioned, an objective and accurate means of discovering and representing that world, and a rational objectivity by which the world could be thought about, conceptualized, and understood. "In the beginning was the Word..." and the Word was the Deity and the Word created the World... and the Word first created Adam and then Eve in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were to be both the idealized and, after tasting the Forbidden Fruit, the more humanized images of Male and Female in the westernized cultures. And... Adam and Eve were to serve as the idealized images of the parents of humanity. Interwoven in the narrative of the Creation are to be found these metatheoretical assumptions of social coherency, a means and method of representation, and a rational objectivity upon which the rules of formation of the modern era were premised and developed. And each of these metatheoretical assumptions were contained in the Language of Adam as spoken in the Garden of Eden. In the language of Adam, each word reflected and illuminated directly, immediately, and completely--precisely, accurately, and objectively-- the innermost nature and foundational essence of the thing being represented. In the Garden of Eden, there had been a perfect "goodness of fit" between the word that represented and that being represented. There were neither confusions nor ambiguities. The exact correspondence between names and that which they signified spoke directly to the innocence and the simplicity of the relationship between words and the simple, pure, and innocent Truth of a self-evident essence. The fig leaf of metaphor as a special linguistic device to speak indirectly about essence was not needed until after the eating of the Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Eden at which time the essentialist language of Adam was lost.
The systems of discourse, or the episteme, developed during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries assumed a philosophic premise of rational-objectivism in which The World was understood to have an essential, objectively existing and solid state traceable and reduceable to an organizing First Cause. Reality was self-evident and located in solid matter, the foundational building blocks of Newtonian physics and science. Assumptions of a social coherence and a rational basis by which this world functioned were foundational. It was assumed that this mind-independent world had spontaneously and naturally sorted itself into kinds, categories, causal hierarchies, and discrete spheres. Further, this world operated by rational and natural laws according to intricate, pre-determined, and pre-ordained designs of nature. These predetermined ways by which things ought to be were revealed to the objective and impartial observer through the evidences of natural design, function and purpose in nature; function follows form naturally and rationally. This naturalistic theory of social coherence was reflected in the Doctrine of Teleology, in which doctrine conceptions of people and their behavior presumed this natural state and order of things organized around biological purpose, function, and adaptation. These conceptual foundations of the Enlightenment's developing view of people and social life were believed to be as self-evident as were the prevailing notions of reality underlying Newtonian physics and science.
The World could come to be known through the discovery of these universal, unifying and natural laws that existed 'out there" in the real world. The authority of a Newtonian based science, method, and explanation rested upon the objectivist notions regarding the representation of knowledge derived from the scientific method. A metaphysics of presence was assumed in which '... something real would and could be represented in thought. This real is understood to be an external or universal subject or substance, existing 'out there' independent of the knower. ... Truth is understood as correspondence to it" (Flax, 1991, 34). A linearized 1-1 correspondence between the real world, naturally occurring observations, and the concepts that represented them was assumed by this classical epistemology. Language, it was believed, was object-based and simply reflected reality as it really was --- the Word represented accurately and precisely this mind-independent World. And thus, Science carried the promise of holding all natural phenomenon in its objectivizing gaze; understanding the nomothetic laws governing nature, people, and society could be accomplished through an empirical discourse. Like Adam in the Garden giving names to all of God's creatures (Genesis 2:19-20), Man could now identify and give names to naturally occurring phenomena, laws, and concepts by a scientific method and means--an empirical science had replaced the Deity as an enabler. A new World was waiting to be discovered and named. As suggested by Fraser (1977) the rise and quest of the Science of the modern era speaks to an attempt to regain the language, power and status of Adam that had been lost in the Garden of Eden.
Rational Objectivity and Natural Causal Hierarchies:
Adam and Eve and the "Rules of Formation"
"In the beginning was the Word..." and the World conceptually created by this Word was a cognitive, symbolic and reasoned World. During the Age of Reason, a rational objectivity emerged as hierarchically superior to passions and aesthetics. Mind took precedence over body, thought over feeling, and logic over intuition. A cultural ideology developed in which the rules of formation for discursive rationality and coherence were to be monologic and based upon a system of objectivist values, logic, and reasoning. Reasoning and logic were to be reified --- if not Deified. And Truth and its discovery were located with the intellectual sphere--the symbolic-cognitive order. Passions, emotions, and feelings were considered sources of interference and distortions of seeing things as they really were. And in the discursive field of the symbolic-cognitive order is found the direct link between the Codes of the Culture and the Codes of Perversion. In this hermetically sealed-off world of the symbolic order is found the discourse of a rational objectivity , the schemes of perception, and the hierarchy and exchanges of social practices of the culture as regards the subject of Woman and the subject of Man.
Rational Objectivity, Thinking, and Language: In the westernized tradition of rational objectivity, the world and the nature of that world are conceptualized as inherently and naturally dichotomous. The world had spontaneously and naturally sorted itself into natural pairings of hierarchical dichotomies beginning with the natural, dichotomous and hierarchical pairing of Adam and Eve which had been created and sanctified by the Deity. Direct lineage, authorization. and legitimacy for this natural pairing and its hierarchical relationship was traceable to the First Cause. The creation of Adam and Eve in the form of male and female was to naturalize a dichotomous metaphysics as central and foundational to the rules of formation in thinking and speaking about the world and people. And the inherent social coherency by which the world was believed to naturally function instructed us to represent these natural and hierarchical pairings of Adam and Eve precisely and accurately as this hyphenated unit of male and female existed in its natural state. This division into subject(ive) and object(ive) -- the subject-object division -- is the first, universal, and essential form of representation in thinking in the westernized cultures. And self-evident anatomical differences between Adam and Eve were paradigmatic in the dichotomous organization and categorization of concepts that ordered and organized the world, eg., Adam - Eve, male - female, cause - effect, Life - Death, before-after, reality-fantasy, outer objective-inner subjective, conscious-unconscious, analyst-analysand, and teacher-student.
As with the pairing of Adam and Eve, conceptual definition, meaning, and significance takes place when something is defined in terms of its binary opposite (Cixous, 1986). That is, in these naturally occurring hierarchies such as Adam and Eve, conceptual primacy is given to the first referenced in the pairing. That which is believed to be the dominant, superior, and more fully developed in these so-called natural hierarchies is referenced first with the second defined and understood by that which the first is not. Thus, Adam was defined in the affirmative and Eve was defined by that which Adam was not; Eve was defined by The Lack. Put another way: in this natural pairing, Adam existed in opposition to Eve; Eve, as the inverted version of Adam, was defined affirmatively in terms of the Lack which literally becomes an affirmative-negation. And in the social order, such natural pairings of hierarchical dichotomies as Man and Woman became organizing rules of formation and provided precedent and paradigm for the hierarchy of social preferences, social priorities, and social practices in the culture.
In the contextualizing mythology of the Garden of Eden, the Deity first created Adam in his own image from the dust of the ground and put the Man whom he had formed in the Garden of Eden (Genesis, 2:8). And, later, Eve was created as a consequence of Adam's Lack - as in his lack of companionship-- and Eve was created to fill this Lack - as in to fill Adam's loneliness. And, at the same time, Eve's creation was a cause of Adam's Lack - as in Eve's creation was to create an anatomical Lack (of a rib) inside of Adam. Eve, in her very creation and existence, was the living and breathing embodiment of the consequence of Adam's Lack, the cause of Adam's Lack, and the solution for Adam's Lack ... all at the same time. With the assistance of the creator, the First Cause, Adam gave birth to Eve as he slept. And Adam named Eve Woman because she was taken out of Man (Genesis, 2:23) And the idealized images of Male and Female, the parents of humanity, were given human form .... And Adam and Eve were sorted into a natural pair in which natural hierarchy Adam came first and was dominant as established and sanctioned by the deity --- Himself ... Of course, there was something more to the narrative of the Garden of Eden....
Schemes of Perception of Male and Female: Eve became responsible for the loss of the Language of Adam through her gullibility, her innocence, and her curiosity. Eve touched the untouchable and ate the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis, 3:6). She mindlessly fell under the sway of evil passions, appetites and the desires of the flesh. And with a bite of the apple, Eve bit into the carnal knowledge and corporeal dimensions of the temporal World of the physical. She was to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and Wisdom. In the Beginning was the Word. And the Word was made Flesh.... And the parents of humanity were given human form with the image of Adam becoming the unconscious embodiment of the Word and the image of Eve becoming the unconscious embodiment of the Flesh. Adam became the living and breathing embodiment of the spiritual, rational, and logical; Eve became the living and breathing embodiment of the Forbidden Fruit. And with Eve's earthly appetites and carnality came the Casting out from the Garden ... into mortality, Death, and the decay of the Flesh. The Language of Adam had been scientific, rational, objective, and primary in juxtaposed-hyphenation to the Language of Eve which was of the corporeal world of the senses, the carnal world of touch, the language of the body, textures, and blends.... The Language of Eve speaks the image of woman as flesh, temporality, and earthiness.
"And the Word was made Flesh" and these images of Adam and Eve were embodied in the Codes of the Culture as living and breathing systems of signification. And, from this perspective, the fundamental Codes of the Culture constitute Codes of Perversion in which the idealized image of Woman was to be a Mask of Man --- AND --- the idealized image of Man was to be a mask of Woman. As in the narrative of Adam and Eve in the Garden, gaining knowledge through the sense perceptions --the language of the senses and body--was silenced and repudiated in both Science and the Social Order. To be Found Under Carnal Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was to be found in the shame of one's nakedness and to be cast out and removed from the Garden.... To be Found Under the Carnal Knowledge of emotion or passion in the scientific method was considered to be contaminating of the objective findings, those contaminated findings were to be declared invalid, and they were to be cast out of the Garden of Truth. To be Found Under Carnal Knowledge in the Dark Ages was considered to be a crime against the Social Order and, if found guilty of the charge, was punishable by Death--to be removed and cast out from the community of the living. To this day, the acronym of the charge to be Found Under Carnal Knowledge is, itself, considered to be obscene and is not to be spoken in the community of the civilized:................. F.-U.-C.-K..
"And the Word was made Flesh..." And a process of othering produced an idealized hierarchical opposition between and within each side of the dichotomy of Man and Woman. In religious mythology, for example, new and idealizing images of Male and Female were provided between each side of the dichotomy by the narrative of the parents of redemption--Joseph and Mary --through which images, conception and birth could take place through the immaculate conception without the contaminating earthiness of carnal knowledge. Joseph and Mary were produced as the idealized others of Adam and Eve with the virginal angelic of Mary, for example, produced in opposition to the carnal corporeal of Eve, e.g., the angelic Madonna - and the carnal Whore existed within the categorical other of Woman. Paradoxically, carnality was divested of its carnality and became part of a purified angelic discourse in religious mythology, science, and the social order. In science, a Newtonian based method and explanation was entrusted to develop an angelic discourse in which, paradoxically, order was imposed on the physical and corporeal world so that the symbolic understanding of the carnal could be accomplished in the abstract. Structuralism was emphasized in this more predictable Cartesian-Newtonian world of certainty wherein universal patterns, themes, and parts were the objectives of scientific discovery (Fraser, 1977; Capra, 1982). Premised on a metaphysics of presence, the empiricist's doctrine and model advanced the notion that the world instructed the scientist-observer how to represent it. The scientist only discovers that which is already there in its naturally occurring state; causal relationships existed out there in an objective and knowable world. An alphabet of human thought comprised of numbers, quantifications, and formulae provided a dictionary of mathematical words and a grammatical context by which a linearized and deterministic reading of the World's text could take place. And in the normative vocabulary of this empirical discourse, deviations from the norm became evidences of abnormalities. Science became the Ultimate Knower and Signifier of meaning. And its quest to quantify and objectify the world, people, and life eventually led to an empiricism of wisdom, knowledge, and the soul.
The Codes of the Culture, The Codes of Perversion and the Other as Phallus
In the Social Order, the fundamental Codes of the Culture provide the discursive basis for the social reality in which the most dominant and sacrosanct of all binary oppositions is that between the male and female subjects. As noted by Silverman (1983, p 270), the antitheses of Male-Female are central to the organization of the cultural order to which they belong. The cultural codes are entrusted with the two fold function of maintaining the social order's dominant binary oppositions and providing the means necessary to perpetuate the so-called natural hierarchies in the social order through its literature, history, cinema, religion, law, and so on. And embodied in these Codes are the very Codes of Perversion that play out in everyday life in the idealized images and seemingly naturalized faces of the subject of woman and man. The Codes of Perversion are constituted by the language of binary opposition, the schemes of perception of Male and Female, and the hierarchy of social practices and values-.
Inscribed in the social order, Woman was a symptom of Man and, at the same time, Man was a symptom of Woman. More specifically, in this pairing of male and female there is an inseparable and reciprocal dependence of Adam and Eve -- of subject and object. The image of Adam as independent, more superior and more fully developed than the image of Eve speaks to an opposition that is not an opposition. The apparent freedom of Adam as opposed to the necessity of Eve in this pairing suggests that there is no metaphysical break from the opposition of subject and object; the opposition is not an opposition at all. The images of Adam and Eve are rooted in one and the same essence; there is an inseparable interconnectedness between Male and Female. More specifically, Eve was needed by Adam to define the other of Adam as submissive, inferior, and less fully developed. And Adam was needed by Eve to define the other of Eve as more superior and fully developed. Woman was present in Man as the opposite and absence of Man; and Man was present in woman as the opposite and absence of Woman. The presence of self as Male is defined in opposition to the absence of other as Female; and that which is absent, the Female, is always present in self, the Male. Woman as a symptom of Man and, at the same time, Man as a symptom of Woman.
"In the beginning was the Word ... And the Word was made Flesh..." And in the Social Order the Word was Phallus. And Phallus is that means by which reality is conjured from illusion and ineffable chaos by the use of systems of signs and signification as contained in and provided by the Codes of the Culture (Sebeock, 199 1). The Phallus is signifier; the Lack is signified. Phallus signifies the meaning for that which is Lacking in other; the Haves define the Lack of the Have Nots. Thus, Phallus, from this perspective, is considered to be neither structure, nor institution, nor product. Phallus is considered to be a complex semiotic process of signification and enculturation in which Phallus is defined through female Lack. And Phallus is inseparable from the culture's organizing metatheoretical assumptions of rational objectivity, social coherence, and representation. This conception of Phallus is not organized around the orthodoxy that proceeds from anatomical differences. More specifically, Phallus does not equate with penus. And Lack of penus does not mean lack of phallus. Rather in the symbolic field, Phallus always exceeds the biological differences signifying Male and Female. In the hierarchy of social practices, Phallus has little, if anything, to do with gender or gender role.
The Phallus is constituted by those systems of signification in which the privileged signify the idealized ought to be for the other because they speak authoritatively in the Name and Voice of the Father such as in the analytic community, for example, the American Psychological or Psychoanalytic Association. And in so speaking, the privileged are possessed, at least partially, of the phallus located in this position within society's hierarchical organizations. Certainly, Phallus includes access to privilege, prerogative, and power as derived from position and positioning in the culture's matrix of meaning. More importantly, however, Phallus is power in its signification as to how the other ought to be.. Phallus is, thus, inseparable from Nietzche's "will to power" over others (1967). And in the Social Order, Phallus as the ever-present structuralizing Other casts its signifying and contextualizing gaze over every aspect of life in society. Other as Phallus is constituted by the Codes of the Culture and the rules that govem the formation of legitimate thought, perception, and the discourse of hierarchically organized institutions. And Other as Phallus is expressed through the ideological interweave of the Law, Science, History, Theory, literature and the organizing stories of the culture. The Codes of the Culture are Codes of Perversion when such codes advance any extreme, fixed and exclusive conception as to how others ought to be in their Being, Thinking, Experiencing, and Presencing. And when such conceptions are presented as claims to Truth by Other as Phallus around which Self is to be organized per (the) version of Other..
The Narrative of Adam and Eve: Some Thoughts
on the Perversions, The Codes of Perversion and Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis was born of the interweave of the epistemological premise, cultural ideology, and the world view prevalent in the latter part of 19th century Germany. And the What is of the times was self-evident and known in its essential state; the Why of the What Is was awaiting discovery by Science speaking its monologic Truth clearly, precisely, and objectively in the Language of Adam. Premised in a logical positivism, psychoanalysis developed in a paradigm of biology, medicine, and the natural sciences and pursued the status and respectability of a natural science of the mind. Under the profound influence of evolutionary biology, the Why of human behavior assumed biological foundations as currently reflected in developmental theories of psychology in which physiology underlies the psychology of the subject. And psychoanalytic psychology became preoccupied with those structures, mechanisms, and functions that failed to develop properly. The scientific sterility and mechanical imagery of people of the 19th century blended with a compassionately callibrated empathy to form the foundations of psychoanalytic thinking and treatment in this country for the greater part of the past century. And perhaps, the Codes of the Culture speak most clearly in the psychoanalytic culture as Codes of Perversion in the classical notions of The Perversions.
The word perversion is a derivation from the Latin word perversus meaning "...turned the wrong way" , or "...turned away from that which is considered to be right, good, or proper." (Barnhart, C., 1970 ) To the question, "Perverse in relation to what?", came the reply from classical psychoanalysis: Perverse in relation to "...the accepted adult norm of heterosexual genital intercourse". (Moore, B. & Fine, B., 1990, 142) Mediated by a medical ideology, sexual behaviors were considered to be pathological when and if they deviated in either object choice or aim from this socio-biologically defined normative standard. The teleological conceptualization of sexuality was procreation; the purpose of sexual activity was the biological perpetuation of the species. And in psychoanalytic thinking and theorizing, anatomical differences were conceptually tied to the biological imperatives of reproduction; non-procreative sexual activities must be perversions of that obvious and naturalized purpose. Indeed, the classical formulations of The Perversions proceeded from the reductive temperament, the essentialist assumptions, and the self-evident notions of the times, For example, in such formulations, it was axiomatically assumed that anatomical differences between the sexes were as self-evident and foundational to the conceptual understanding of The Perversions as solid matter was the self-evident building blocks of reality in Newtonian physics. And these anatomical differences provided the irrefutable criterion of Truth; anatomical differences were self-evident, the denial of which reality was central in psychoanalytic thinking about The Per-versions. And the presumption of an inherent attraction between the sexes was an assumed foundational essence, departures from which were understood as the consequence of a disordered development. Component elements of drives had not developed into the more fully integrated and mature drive leading to the ultimate purpose of coitus; the unbridled discharge of these component elements contextualized a unifying understanding of The Perversions. The Perversions were conceptualized as being "disorders of discharge" as repressive forces had not been sufficient to convert infantile libidinized fantasies into the neurotic symptomatology of the "disorders of inhibition" (Freud, 1905). Procreation presumed and mandated the fulfillment of a natural biological destiny for the Masculine and Feminine: diversion of expression was a perversion of normative behavior - and, a diversion from natural law was a perversion thereof.
It seems to me that for the greater part of the past century the organizing rules of formation in the narrative of the Garden of Eden have been paradigmatic for the development of modernistic systems of thinking. And infused with a medical ideology, these same rules of formation have been paradigmatic for the development of psychoanalytic thinking and theorizing. As with the culture at large, the rules of formation in the narrative of the Garden have provided the psychoanalytic culture with certain ways of thinking about, knowing, and perceiving the world, people and life. As with the classical conception of 7he Perversions, abnormality continues to be understood as the natural development of the individual having been "...turned the wrong way..." or turned away from the right, the good or the proper developmental track and outcome. For example, in the mainstream psychologies of Drive, Ego, Object and Self, differences amongst people are conceptualized as deviations from the idealized Law of the Normative, e.g., those behaviors, ways of thinking, or states of mind that deviate from the empirically established normative standards. In the conceptual foundations of each of these respective psychologies, it seems that Normality has been to Abnormality as Adam has been to Eve; or, put in a slightly different way: Adam is to Normality as Eve is to Abnormality. To briefly elaborate: As with the creation of Adam, the idealized image of the Normative is defined in the affirmative and is understood as that which ought to be or ought to have happened in the individual's development. And further, it ought to have happened in a predictable, linearized, and natural developmental sequence. As with the creation of Eve, abnormality is understood by that which Normality is not; abnormality is defined by the Lack; mainstream psychoanalytic thinking conceptualizes the Lack as foundational to modernistic notions of psychopathology. In current psychoanalytic thinking, there is a developmental deficit; something natural, foundational, and essential for Normal functioning is Lacking in the subject. By way of elaboration:--
Infused with a medical ideology, modernistic psychoanalytic thinking has understood differences amongst people in the organizing conceptual framework of symptomatology, etiology, and psychopathology. Certain ways of thinking, behaving, and feeling considered to be inappropriate in the social order are conceptualized as symptomatic of deeper underlying pathology. This symptomatology is conceptualized as the Consequence of an internal Lack e.g.,--- the Lack of sublimation and neutralization of drives, --or, the Lack of development of Ego structures and functions, or --- the Lack of internalization of whole object representations -- or, the Lack of development of a Self structure and its functions. There has been a Lack of development of specific structures and functions which ought to have happened but did not. And in each of these respective psychologies, these evidences of pathology are conceptualized in binary opposition to the Normative and are understood as caused by an external Lack...... e.g., there has been a Lack of sufficient repressive forces to convert the libidinal investments of infantile sexuality into neurotic symptoms --or, the Lack of an average and expectable environment-- or, the Lack of positive, consistent and stable identificatory figures-- or, the Lack of empathic attunement in the childhood surround. Or perhaps as is increasingly fashionable, the Lack of an integrative combination of each of the above. In the positivist tradition, each of these respective psychologies conceptualize an external Lack as causal to an internal consequence of a developmental Lack. And the person's subsequent development is turned the wrong way due to this internal Lack. The ensuing developmental deficit -- the absence of the ought to have been -- is expressed through the symptomatology, constitutes the psychopathology, and explains the etiology ...all at the same time. The Lack is conceptualized as both cause and consequence of psychopathology. This way of thinking seems remarkably similar to and consistent with the mythology of the creation of Eve who, in her very creation and existence, was the living and breathing embodiment of the cause of Adam's Lack, the consequence of Adam's Lack, and the solution for Adam's Lack, all at the same time...... Adam is to Normality as Eve is to Abnormality.
The rules of formation in the narrative of Adam and Eve premise largely unquestioned ways of thinking in the psychoanalytic culture in which the Lack as both the cause and consequence of psychopathology has become an institutionalized assumption and is taken for granted as natural and self-evident. These ways of thinking are embodied in the fundamental Codes of the Culture of the psychoanalytic community --the Diagnostic Codes such as found in DSM-IV. In the sacred text of such diagnostic and statistical manuals, the normative language of an empirical discourse scientifically places people in the various categories of diseases, disorders, and deficiencies. And institutionalized medical values and beliefs masquerade as carefully considered clinical evidences of pathology in need of reparative and normalizing treatment interventions by the therapeutic parents of redemption of the pathologized--- the analytic practitioners as health care providers. And medicalized versions of psychoanalysis continue to be science and pathology driven, seeking to discover, prevent, and cure the causes and consequences of the Lack.
In the psychoanalytic culture, systems of binary thinking, beliefs, and values seem to permeate basic psychoanalytic concepts such as, for example, the concept of the unconscious as process, structure, and dynamic; conscious thought and experiences are defined in opposition to unconscious thought and experiences. Conscious thought has been understood as rational, objective, Man-ifest thought in binary opposition to Unconscious or Latent thought, understood as that which is irrational, not directly seen, and not Man-ifest: Adam is to Conscious thought as Eve is to Unconscious thought. Conscious thought and experiences have been conceptualized in terms of the direct, knowable, and observable. Conscious thought can be seen and known in its manifest presence; unconscious thought cannot be seen and can be known only through inference because of its latent absence. Conscious thought is defined through its presence; the presence of unconscious thought is defined through its absence. In opposition to the developmentally superior, rational, and objective monocausality of Conscious thought as Adam, the Unconscious-latent-absence has been conceptualized as the embodiment of the developmentally inferior, irrational, and corporeal causality as Eve. As noted by Irigaray (1985):
"...we might wonder whether certain properties attributed to the unconscious may not , in part, be ascribed to the female sex, which is censured by the logic of consciousness. (We might wonder ... ) Whether the feminine has an unconscious or whether it is the unconscious." (p. 73, The Power of Discourse)
The unconscious-latent, conceptualized as Female Lack, can not be seen directly as it is not visible to the conscious I eye. The rythmic voice of the Unconscious, however, can be heard faintly from a distance. This voice of the Unconscious is heard from off stage, out of sight, and from a great distance with the embodiment of carnal flesh and rational irrationality visibly absent, like female sexual organs. Could this be an expression of visible anatomical differences at the center of the foundational metaphysics of psychoanalytic thinking? Is this conception of the Unconscious reminescient, perhaps, of the ancient Greek theatre in which that considered to be obscene took place off stage? In the Greek theatre, the ob-scene could be literally heard but not seen. The ob-scene was to be kept out of sight. The ob-scene was cast in the role of not being visibly scene; its presence was known only in and through its palpable absence. Conceptualized in the rationalist epistemology as Female Lack, unconscious-latent meanings as Eve reside in the shadows of the idealized observable of the Conscious Man-ifest content as Adam . And as Eve did in the Garden, the unconscious profoundly influences the Man-ifest content in ways pathological as evidenced by symptomatic acts, distorted perceptions, disorganized thinking, disturbed cognitions, and disorders of the self.
Unconscious meanings as Eve can only be inferred and brought in sight through the illuminating light of interpretive in-sight as spoken in the rational and objectivizing language and logic as Adam.. And all too often in the analytic discourse, unconscious meaning is signified and mediated through a hierarchical relationship in which Adam is to Analyst as Eve is to Analysand. And all too often, the unconscious meanings of actions, thoughts, and states of mind are pre-signified; that is, the meaning is known in advance by the analyst, and is to be known eventually by the analysand. And through the analytic discourse, the fig leaf of metaphor can eventually be removed and the angelic discourse of the Language of Adam can once again be spoken, speaking the essence of Woman and Man---directly, precisely, and objectively without ambiguities, misunderstandings or confusions. The Truth of Essence can be revealed, known, and celebrated. To return to the Language of Adam that existed before Eve touched the untouchable and ate of the Tree of Wisdom and Knowledge speaks to the desire in the analytic culture to return to the development of this innermost nature and foundational essence of the Masculine and the Feminine.... Let the unconscious-latent be made conscious- "Man"ifest, --- Where there is Id let there be Ego, Where there is a Lack of structures or functions let there be Ego strength or selfobject experiences to further the development of a cohesive sense of Self...
Assumptions of a universal, unifying, and foundational essence as to the basic nature of people -for example, drive discharging, object seeking, or some combination thereof- and how people ought to be is to assert the Truth of Otherness mediated by the idealized normative images of Woman, Man, and Child from the privileged position of Other as Phallus. Around such images of the ought to be, Self is to be organized in the analytic discourse per (the) version of Other in the service of repairing and normalizing that which is Lacking in the subject; the derailed can and should be put back on developmental track. Such medicalized and linearized ways of thinking lead to a psychoanalytic discourse in which the implicit, if not explicit, objective of analysis is to reconstitute repair, revise and Normalize the Self of the subject per (the) version of Other as represented by the analyst's respective theory. And in which discourse, Phallus as Other as embodied in one's theory serves as signifier of meaning and Truth, with the Lack awaiting signification per (the) version of Phallus as Other. This conceptual framework speaks the aim, focus, and objective of psychoanalysis as that of a psychic orthopedic designed to encourage and promote the development of that believed to be Lacking. And with the unquestioned assumptions of a universal and unifying essence as to the basic nature of people, medicalized psychological theories can be scientifically mass produced for mass distribution through our educational institutions for the purpose of mass empathic applications in the analytic discourse for the mass consumption by the pathologized. And psychoanalysis becomes a discourse of conformity and compliance to the idealized normative of the ought to be ---all the while proclaiming the uniqueness of the person. When the analytic discourse unquestioningly allies itself with the normative ideology of the Master Discourse, the Codes of the psychoanalytic Culture and their underlying rules of formation constitute Codes of Perversion in their expectation that the Self of the other ought to be organized per (the) version of Other as Phallus.
When a particular theory -- any theory-- is assumed and advanced as a neutral, scientific, and objectivized claim to Truth, it moves far beyond simply that of an interesting theoretical perspective or an intriguing set of propositions. A series of epistemological and ethical questions arise when the idealized and idealizing Law of the Normative serves as the standard of what ought to be in developmental and analytic outcome: Who is it that speaks.. in defining the essence of Man?...... in defining the essence of Woman?...... in defining the essence of Child? ... Does not the very conceptualization of Woman-Man or Man-Woman imprison subsequent debate, discourse and discovery within binary categorical oppositions, binary logic, values and systems of beliefs ... From what position, location or place in the culture's matrix of meaning and power does one speak? From what philosophic discourse? ... from what theoretical discourse? Is authorization for speaking granted by virtue of position in the Phallus?... by virtue of anatomy? Does one speak empirically?, objectively?, logically? intuitively? rationally? Does one speak as if speaking outside of a philosophic or theoretical discourse?
Rethinking Psychoanalysis
The freedom of philosophy to place into question largely unexamined philosophic presuppositions, presumed natural hierarchies, a dichotomous metaphysics, and seemingly self-evident propositions has led to the appearance of radically different understandings of the world, people, life ... and psychoanalysis. As psychoanalysis leaves the Garden of Eden and these various rules of formation, the project of rethinking psychoanalytic theory, practice, ethics and education has introduced many different versions of psychoanalysis each having a different focus, aim, and set of objectives. In the time remaining this afternoon, I would like to speak to a particular version of psychoanalysis as resituated in philosophy, the humanities and the arts in contrast to biology, medicine, and the natural sciences. This version of analysis is premised in a radicalized perspectivism, phenomenalism, and subjectivism. And from this perspective, the natural order of things is neither natural according to predetermining and preordaining designs of nature nor are events inherently ordered, independent of the organizing principles, dynamic processes, and psychic laws of the perceiver. The natural order of things is to be found in the eye of the beholder and is considered to be an extension of the unbroken flesh of the signifying Self of the enunciating subject. This radicalized premise recognizes a World of Differences amongst and between people. And speaks a philosophy of differences and singularity in the tradition of Nietsche and Heidegger in which there is appreciated an infinite interpretability of reality amongst people: the only world that can ever exist and be known is this world of interpretations of the world. Such a philosophy of differences acknowledges the uniqueness of the subject, the analytic discourse, and the drama of this discourse.
In this version of analysis, there are neither rules, nor essence, nor fixed foundational ought to be's. And in the analytic discourse, there is neither universal nor unifying theories as to the basic and essential nature of people. And there are neither goals nor objectives in this discourse... Except the deceptively simple purpose of engaging in a process of venturing into the vitally and radically metaphoric language of the person--a venture into the very personal and private World of the Word of the individual. The focus of psychoanalysis is upon the What Is and the Why of the What Is according to the enunciating subject rather than what ought to be according to the Other as Phallus. The discourse of psychoanalysis is concerned with the understanding of the idyosyncratic meanings, ideas, desires, passions, beliefs, motivational causalities and psychic laws of the enunciating subject, the ideothetic and paradoxical meanings of which derive from the associative context of the analytic moment. From this philosophic premise and perspective that which constitutes The Normal and Perverted, the Good and Bad, and Gender and Gender Role is found in the contextualizing perspective of each person and is inextricably linked to that person's core values, beliefs, assumptions, systems of logic and understandings of the world, people and life. Thus, the psychoanalytic discourse attempts to appreciate the metatheoretical assumptions of social coherence according to the ratio-nal objectivity of the person with whom one meets... and attempts to understand the essentialist meanings underlying representation as they reside in the eye of the enunciating subject. Psychoanalysis is concerned with the rules of formation underlying the social coherency that constitutes the very structure, function, and meaning of the individual's world.
As a venture into this semiotic World of the Word of Other, psychoanalysis involves a continuous, very personal, and ongoing struggle for those who might engage in such a discourse which can be known through the immersion of Self of the analyst in the various versions of the world per (the) version of the subject. Entry into this World of the Word of Other involves an ongoing struggle and a continuous Death of the idealized images of Self and Other as constructed by the cultural codes. And as signified by each of the people in the analytic discourse--assuming, of course, there are two people. In effect, there is a mutual search for identity in this unique psychological discourse. In The School of the Dead (1993), the poet-thinker Helene Cixous speaks to this powerful struggle and this continuous death of Self-Other in the creative process of writing. Someone or something must die in order for good writing to be born .... She states:
"The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed. It is combat against ourselves, the author; one of us must be vanquished or die......... it's the one I want to write: I tear it from myself" (1993, p. 32)
Perhaps the same struggle and continuous Death of Self and Other holds for the analyst as both Self and Other (as analysand) in the analytic discourse. I believe that it does... The analytic discourse is guided by the relentless and passionate pursuit of knowing the What Is and the desire of knowing the Why of the What Is in one's life. In this pursuit, the author is in relation to her written text of the Word as the analyst- analysand are in relation to her spoken text of the Word in the analytic discourse. And in the creative writing of one's personal story and history, this Self-Other collaboration involves a passionate pursuit of the death of Self and Other. As to something of the Why of this struggle and pursuit of death, Cixous writes:
"... after all, the desire to die is only the desire to taste the fruits of the tree of Good and Evil. To be able to want to taste the fruits of the tree of Good and Evil, contrary to what the Bible says, one has to be mortal. It's very difficult if one isn't mortal. Not everyone is mortal. Not everyone has this difficult fortune (italics added; 1993, p.34)
And unfortunately it seems, not every analytic practitioner has had this difficult fortune of being mortal.
As a poetic work of art situated in philosophy, the humanities, and the arts, psychoanalysis speaks to the enduring and fixed traditions of the enunciating subject's phenomenal past as coexisting, codetermining, and costructuring with the subject's present wishes, desires and longings and future purposes and goals. In so doing, psychoanalysis speaks with the voices of the dead of the phenomenal past in this, the present moment of the past. As discourse, psychoanalysis engages in the continuous death of Self and Other in the present moment of knowing. And at the same time, paradoxically, the psychoanalytic discourse engages in a continuous birthing of Self and Other in that same moment of knowing; a quite non-linear and inexplicable something more of the analytic discourse that speaks to the dying and birthing of Self-Other as inseparably interconnected. As derived from philosophy and the arts, psychoanalysis is considered to be a poetic work of art in that it registers, monumentalizes, and speaks to the enunciating subject's passage of time. To engage in the conflict, dilemma, and paradoxical of the analytic discourse is to engage in, perhaps, the most intricately complex and human of discourses. And this unique psychological discourse speaks a basic, necessary and vital kind of freedom to place one's very personal and private World into question in a place and space not subjugated to the gaze of the Other as Phallus………
............ to be continued
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