Ideological Fission: Cloverfield and Terrorism
15.05.08Filed Under: Films and tagged Evil, Ideology, Monster, Terror with 0 Comments
Inter-disciplinary.net and At the Interface holds a conference on Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. I have had a paper accepted on Cloverfield and the evil of terrorism. The abstract is below.
Cloverfield’s monster is effective precisely because we never really see it, because it remains in our peripheral vision and seems to be mutating, changing, multiple and yet perhaps still one, all at the same time. To say that the monster is abject, is to miss the point. Being abject is part of a monster’s very nature, but the monster in Cloverfield is both frightingly different and hauntingly familiar. We have seen such monsters many times before in earlier movies, so we cannot fully feel that it is different and apart from ourselves.
At the same time, the monster is irrational, without meaning, murderous and incomprehensible. It is the perfect personification of how we in Western culture regards the terrorist - it is a myth of evil, which is absolute, which neither can nor should be understood. The monster of Cloverfield stands as the figure of evil as popular imagination sees it; it is a materialisation of an ideological fission which attempts to excise certain ideological constructions, yet paradoxically casting them in a form that is recognizable and familiar.
The monstrous metonomy which is used shows us glimpses of a horrid being, intended to vilify the attack on New York City. However, it is a being which is reminiscent of earlier monsters - from Godzilla to The Blob. It is evident that the Cloverfield monster is a paradoxical construction which attempts to articulate fear and loathing about terrorism, but ends up trapped in an ideological dead-end maze, unable to do anything other than magnifying popular fears into a familiar spectacle.
Tattoos in American Visual Culture, Mindy Fenske
09.05.08Filed Under: Books and tagged Cultural resistance, Performativity, Review, Tattoos, Theory, Transgression with 0 Comments
Tattoos have during the last few decades undergone a cultural transformation, from being a mark of deviance belonging to the lower social classes and something one should not “do to oneself”, to being relatively accepted in today’s society. This is not just as a passing fad, but also as representative of a broader change of how we view our bodies and their decoration.
Mindy Fenske writes in an American context, but many of her arguments remain relevant in a Danish context, and her most interesting points are not national, but relates to understanding tattoos and tattoo culture. Fenske basic premise is that tattoos not only function as cultural representations, though they are also that. Tattoos are also performative in J.L. Austin’s sense - they do something, both to the owner and the viewer. This understanding of tattoos comes primarily from Austin and Jacques Derrida’s conception of the performative, as well as Judith Butler’s conception of gender and identity as performatively produced. Fenske also draws on W.J.T. Mitchell’s picture theory (primarily from What Do Pictures Want?, but also Picture Theory), which specifically focuses on understanding images “as if” they are alive. This is meant metaphorically, but Fenske provides a good example of how pictures perform actions; even an example we know well here in Denmark: the Mohammed caricatures in Jyllandsposten. These images act in the way they position the viewer, and can be considered as alive, because their action demands a reaction. In this way of dealing with cultural products as performative, Fenske is closely aligned to similar views, such as those expressed by Matt Hills in his How to do Things With Cultural Theory.
This is approach is a very useful way to deal with tattoos, because as Fenske puts it herself, a tattoo is not just an expression of one’s identity, but also a way of creating that identity. Furthermore, Fenske points out that tattoos are not simply evidences of resistant practices, attempting to deny a specific body ideal or opposing a mainstream culture. Rather, it is because of tattoo culture’s existence and location within mainstream culture, that tattoo culture gains its performative force. This a well-conceived and nuanced way of doing cultural analysis. Rather than viewing culture as a struggle between two extremes, it is rather conceived of in terms of processes in a productive network. She gains much of this argument from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their rhizomatic and territorialization discourses.
The analyses of tattoos fall in three parts: tattoo conventions, tattoos in advertising and modern primitivism. In doing so, she locates fields within and outside mainstream culture, which provides a good and balanced overview.
Departing from her personal experiences, we get an account of how tattoo conventions function as both an inclusive and exclusive space. As conventions often take place in hotels where other, nontattooed, guests are also present, a specfic space is created both physically but also more symbolically and performatively - in here you are different, if you are not tattoed: an inversion, in other words, of the outside world. Fenske points out how tattoos function not just as identity markers, but also how tattoos performatively creates a distinct cultural and social space, which makes this identity construction possible.
The next chapter focuses on advertisements who use tattoos. Here we are dealing with representations only, with no actual people behind. This also makes the chapter the weakest in the book, for even though it is shown how Tampax advertisements reinvent Rosie the Riveter, or the PlayStation game UmJammer Lammy employs tattoos, it does not move beyond standard representational analysis. Here it becomes evident how difficult it is for perfmative criticism to deal with textual products. The chapter remains interesting, but is not as strong as the other chapters.
The final chapter deals with the movement that Fakir Musafar has spearheaded in many ways: modern primitivism. Fenske convincingly shows how the modern primitivism movement employ earlier, often primitive, cultures’ use of tattoos, and how they view themselves as a continuation of these traditions. Fenske points out this use of original, primitive traditions is both an expression parallel to Edward Said’s Orientalism and a deeply felt desire to find one’s own space. These authentic cultures are not used in their historically founded actuality, but rather as a performative act and identity strategy.
The conclusion argues for the use of performative criticism, which the book itself is a fine examle of. It is evident that this method achieves more with this subject, while also making the analyses more dynamic, and so Fenske does not fall into classic traps of reductionism. It is, however, also evident that the more text-based a cultural product is, the more difficult it will be for performative criticism to deal with it.
Written on the Body: Difference and Transgression
02.05.08Filed Under: Culture and tagged Counter-culture, Detournement, Difference, Identity, Subculture, Tattoos, Transgression with 0 Comments
My paper for the Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders conference was accepted today. The abstract is below.
Our bodies define a border between ourselves and the world around us. However we might feel about our body, it is what we present to the world. Victoria L. Blum in her book Flesh Wounds discusses how bodies are a form of inkblots, where discontent is projected onto. As bodies can be modified, we may choose to alter how we are perceived and to at least some extent control the discontent we may project onto our own body. Through body modification, we can alter the impression of our personality and express a cultural solidarity, as Chris Rojek points out.
Tattoos, piercings and other body modifications become ways to express a difference from or identification with, a particular cultural segment. Body modification marks a personal subjectivity, just as it marks a border around those who participate. A distinctive bodily border is formed through the use of body modifications, and it can be viewed as a semiotic strategy to negotiate and navigate cultural borders.
Suicidegirls.com is a website which is both an online community, but also a softcore pin-up site, where the models feature extensive body modifications in the form of tattoos and piercings. The website promotes a democratic approach to the photo shoots, as the models remain in control, not the photographer. Marked by their body modifications, the Suicide Girls (as they call themselves), they actively attempt to subvert the typical pin-up conventions, by transgressing mainstream standards of beauty.
In what seems remarkably similar to Judith Butler’s account of subversive bodily acts, the pin-up shoots of the Suicide Girls mount a critique of a culture’s view of the body as a natural entity. Cultural borders are crossed, as the bodies of the Suicide Girls embed ink into their bodies in the form of tattoos, and gender is played as a subversive game against the expectations of pin-up conventions. Acting as different and impure bodies, the Suicide Girls represent a threat to conventional conceptions of the body.
David Bowie’s Hauntology
22.04.08Filed Under: Music and tagged David Bowie, Gothic, Hauntology with 2 Comments
I’ve just had my paper accepted for the conference Uncanny Media in Utrecht, August 7-9. Below is the abstract, so I guess I’ll be posting more on music, gothic and hauntology at some point.
David Bowie’s now-defunct rock-opera trilogy’s first installment 1. Outside is filled with uncanny mediations of rock music’s chameleon. The inner sleeve booklet is titled The Diary of Nathan Adler, or the Ritual Art-Murder of Baby Grace Blue: A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-Cycle. Behind this long-winded title, is the story of a murder, narrated by several characters through both text, music and images.
Bowie, however, is the narrator of all these different voices, using technology to distort his voice into these different characters as separate entities. His voice and presence haunts the entire album in uncanny forms, just as all images in the booklet are distorted images of Bowie himself, made into uncanny doubles. The story begins with the murder of Baby Grace Blue, who is enacted by Bowie himself. Symbolically, Bowie is murdered by himself, while Baby Grace haunts the entire album’s Gothic and labyrinthine structure.
My paper will focus on the mediated double of David Bowie, his ventriloquist voice and simulacral presence as character, creator and ghost. I will problematize the notion of an outside to the album, focussing on what can be termed the album’s hauntological status.
Soft Machines and the Design of Perception
31.03.08Filed Under: Culture and tagged Cyborg, Posthuman, space, technology with 6 Comments
This weekend, I was at a succesful conference in Copenhagen, on the subject of “The Word Becoming Flesh”. It was organized by Circle 4 at Nordisk Sommer Universitet. I’m posting my talk here, after the cut. Right here, however, are the slides.
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