Byrne and Eno together again
14.10.08Filed Under: Music with 0 Comments
You can’t really go wrong, can you?
Ideological Fission: Cloverfield and Terrorism
29.09.08Filed Under: Films and tagged Evil, Hegemony, Horror, Monster with 0 Comments
After the very successful conference Monsters and the Monstrous, I’m posting my paper here.
One of the first things which is immediately noticeable about Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield is the way it serves as a form of the return of the repressed of 9/11. Most critics who saw it, could not help but remark upon the similarity between the images we saw on September 11 and the ones that are presented in Cloverfield. People running away from crumbling buildings with dust swirling, panicked screams and most of all, the uncertainty of the situation certainly recalls the feeling most people had. Far from arguing against this point, I want to take the argument even further, and say that what we are actually dealing with, is more than simply the return of the repressed. It is a willed attempt at articulating cultural anxieties and frustrations. and in this process the film inevitably ends up in an ideological position, which I want to investigate in the following.
I do not wish to argue that the film is a simplistic reflection of the cultural environment in USA today, nor do I even want to say that the film represents how the majority feels or reacts. Instead, I claim that this is simply one response among many to the events that unfolded on 9/11 and in the years since then. If anything, these events have clearly revealed that the US cannot be said to be a homogeneous cultural entity, but rather a heterogeneous multitude of responses. Cloverfield itself is representative of this split, for in its attempt to articulate a sense of the evil of terrorism, the film ends up at an ideological dead-end, unable to properly reflect and engage with the events it re-frames.
My paper will first detail the encounter with the monster and how it is represented as a metaphor of evil and terrorism – the two are equated by the film. Having done this, I will turn to the fact that although the film would like to portray the monster as abject and monstrous, it also draws upon a discourse that we know very well – monster films and their cultural history – which in turn results in us not feeling as estranged and frightened by the monster as the film would like. The monster is more a part of ourselves than the film would care to admit. It is this final point that will round off my paper, analyzing how the ideological system which the film proposes is interpellated by its use of a too-familiar metaphor, thus resulting in what I refer to as an ideological fission.
I want to proceed from the banal yet insightful point set forth by Judith Halberstam in Skin Shows. As she states: “monsters are meaning machines” (Halberstam, 21), pointing out that monsters are not so much discovered as they are made. We make monsters – in our fictions, but also in our daily lives – in order to express and articulate certain concerns, where monsters play specific roles. In much horror fiction, boundaries are challenged and brought into play – sometimes violated and sometimes reinforced. As David Russell points out:
[...] horror films can function to reenact and reaffirm social repression and contain disorder and violence by eliminating the monster, which symbolically stands in for social disorder and rampant desire (as exemplified in so-called reactionary horror films). Yet Otherness itself expressed through the horror film and its monsters may also serve to point to the breakdown and failure of repression as symptomatically expressed through a realization of unconscious desire for which the monster acts as medium.” (Russell, 237)
It is from these two observations that Cloverfield can be seen as a problematic and interesting cultural text. Despite its clear intention to present a monocular vision of evil, its position within the history of monster films opens up the film’s meaning to different spectator positions, which may in the end deconstruct the film’s ideological message.
The Monster as Terrorist
I have already mentioned the extent to which much of the visual language of Cloverfield has been drawn almost directly from the television images shown on September 11. It seems to be no coincidence that all of Cloverfield is shot as if by a hand-held camera, placed within the diegesis. Although narratively motivated to be present in the film – it is being used to document the surprise party held for Rob – it also reproduces the fact that many of the newsreels from 9/11 were actually amateur photography. Cloverfield attempts to create a sense of immediacy and urgency by placing the camera squarely within the frame of action, indicating a cinema verité-effect that is hauntingly familiar.
The film begins with a couple going on a romantic date to Coney Island. These images are fragments, left over from that day. Right now, in the present time of narration, the film is meant to be a documentation of the surprise party for Rob, who is going to Japan. Already here, the alien and other is introduced as a problem, for it is the very fact that Rob is going to Japan that has caused his girlfriend to leave him, despite the two potentially still being in love. Had he remained in America, this problem would never have occurred, thus priming us for a skeptical view of things outside the US.
When the monster strikes, it comes as a shock for the party-goers and to some extent for the spectators as well. We have not been introduced slowly to the fact that the monster is descending upon New York City, but of course know this going into the cinema. The point is, however, that any knowledge of the monster has been suppressed. At first, no one even knows that it is a monster; they simply suspect (coincidentally?) that it may be a plane which has crashed. The first thing to be visibly destroyed is the Statue of Liberty; a symbolic target more than one that causes any spectacular explosions, but is fully congruent with the film’s ideological slant – this is an attack upon American values as much as on American soil.
This is the first clue to reading the monster as terrorist – it attacks the symbolic landscape of USA, and it does so from a position of secrecy. As we are slowly introduced to the monster, it remains constantly at the edge of our vision, always disappearing just as we think we can see it. It attacks without apparent rhyme or reason, and moves more or less randomly about New York City. The few images that we do see of the monster, reveals that it is both one and many – it is a huge, lumbering beast, but smaller, vicious raptors are discharged from it, spreading across the city. If one is injured by the monster or the smaller raptors, one becomes infected and must be quarantined and shot. In other words, anything that comes into contact the monster or its brood, must be put contained since they have become part of it as well. The virus breeding within the borders of normality is seemingly as dangerous – if less spectacular – as the monster itself.
Violent, contagious and senselessly, the monster rages through the streets, as it is attacked by US soldiers without any apparent effect. We see images of soldiers shooting at a target they do not understand, do not try to understand and cannot defeat. The only solution the army can respond with, is the so-called “hammer down” tactic of carpet-bombing all of New York City. What is so particular about the film, is that it never questions this situation or these responses. It remains fully on the side of the incomprehensible nature of the monster, and the necessity of responding forcefully. When Rob foolhardily ventures out to save the girl he loves, it is characterized as bravery rather than folly. This is a film which celebrates the courage to take action against the horrible events that unfold.
At the same time, the monster is irrational, without meaning, murderous and incomprehensible. It is the perfect personification of how we in Western culture regard 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 materialization of an ideological fission which attempts to excise certain ideological constructions, yet paradoxically casting them in a form that is recognizable and familiar. It is this paradox which I will turn to now.
The Monster as Monster
Here, I do not intend to discuss in detail the generic traits or belongings of Cloverfield to the horror genre, but simply wish to proceed from the banal fact that Cloverfield clearly draws on the tradition of monster films, such as Godzilla, The Blob, The Thing and many more. At least part of our response to Cloverfield comes from our familiarity with and enjoyment of these earlier monster films. The narrative structure of Cloverfield is relatively identical to these earlier films, and the frightened struggle against the monster is also similar. The monstrosity of the Cloverfield monster is turned into evil because of its lack of morality and respect for “fighting fair” – it attacks civilians as much as soldiers. In this case, the film casts the monster as the dangerous and threatening cultural outsider which must be isolated.
Cloverfield’s monstrosity is thus quite conventionally coded – the dangerous and threatning is cast in what Nöel Carroll refers to as a horrific metonomy (Carroll, 52). The impurity of the monster comes not just from its murderous inclination, but also from the fact that it is not one but many. The brood of the monster is as significant and dangerous as the monster itself. The monster itself thus conforms to Carroll’s category of fission as the structure of its horrific metonomy – it is spatially divided into these different beings. It is hardly, therefore, a coincidence that the monster’s brood are contagious – this is a deadly virus that will spread, of not kept in check.
In this way, the monster fulfills all the requirements of being a monster; it is, in fact, a very proper monster, conforming to the conventions of the genre. What is different, however, is the monster’s motivation. It is unlike the Godzilla films of Japan, or even Roland Emmerich’s travesty. In these earlier films, the monster was not decidedly evil but rather misunderstood – a victim of circumstances, if you will. Gojira always simply tried to live a life in peace, but was disturbed by foolish humans. Not so with the Cloverfield monster; it itself instigates the conflict, it strikes first and we get a sense of it willfully destroying New York City, even if we never get any hint of its motivation. Here, the citizens of New York are the hapless victims of a force they do not and cannot understand. There is no sense of them transgressing any values, they are completely innocent when confronted with a source of indecipherable evil.
If we accept David Russell’s argument that “[Horror] mediates between culture and ideology through an indirect mode of representation” (Russell, 237), we can argue that the monster is meant to indicate the Other of American culture – in this case, the very specific Other of the terrorist. However, precisely because of the film’s structural dependence on the history of monster films, what is supposedly unfamiliar and Other instead becomes hauntingly familiar. We are familiar with these cinematic monsters, even if we are not fully comfortable with them. I will argue that more than reminding us of transgressive and dangerous Otherness, these movie monsters have disseminated into our culture as particularly and distinctively American responses to social fears. We recognize these monsters, but not as Other to US culture but rather as an integral part of it. These monsters work more as the return of the repressed of the culture’s own internal fears.
It is for this very reason, that I argue that we cannot regard the monster as abject – this is to miss the point. The monster is of course abject, as all monsters are. It certainly conforms to Julia Kristeva’s point that the abject disturbs order and does not respect borders (Kristeva, 4). However, the monster is made up, as I have already pointed out as a very conventional spectacle of evil – one that we are so familiar with that it cannot be said to be truly Other or even abject. What the film proposes, is that the monster represents the culturally abject of the terrorist attack, and in that sense the film functions as a form of “working through” of the trauma experienced in 9/11. However, I argue that this is problematic, in the way that the monster is more familiar than other. It is this that I refer to as ideological fission and is what I will round my paper off with.
Ideological Fission
My basic point here is that traces of earlier films clings to Cloverfield. There is a metaphoric dependency which makes the film’s ideological message split in two, so to speak. 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. While the film attempts to create a monster which violates a proposed distinction between human and terrorist, this never succeeds because the film never seriously engages with the monstrous vision of evil it shows us. Precisely because this vision of evil is so limited, it prevents us as spectators to truly engage with it, as a moral construction.
The fact that the monster is so recognizable, means that we do not see the monster as other, but instead as same. The attempt at articulating a sense of the cultural trauma fails, and instead the monster becomes a representation of the inability to do anything. The monster is reduced, I would argue to pure spectacle – an image of pure and total war in Paul Virilio’s terms – rather than traumatic therapy. My reading of the monster argues that rather than reveling in an ideological split between American and terrorist, the monster instead becomes an interpellation, a rupture in the ideological force of the narrative. Instead, we cannot help but see the monster as the very face of evil, but the face of an American evil. By magnifying the evils of terrorism into this monster, the film’s representation becomes a concave mirror which only reveals how American terror discourse is constructed; indeed, the film itself serves as a premier example.
It is this movement that I call an ideological fission: in attempting to reconcile social trauma into a neat categorical distinction, the film is itself subjected to this ideological fission and we come to see the rupture inherent in the film. I have shown how the familiarity with the monster and monster films, has resulted in this split, and so the very form that the film employs, results in this internal schism. For this reason, it is also no surprise that the film ends with no closure – we do not learn if the main characters survive and we certainly don’t know what happens to the monster. This lack of closure is an attempt, I would say, to reduce the monster to a monolithic vision of evil, as ideologically uncontained and as a disruptive element. In doing so, the film itself rehearses an evil argument, by imposing a totalizing truth on the spectator: by arguing that the monster must always be evil, the film itself takes on the structure of evil, and so becomes not just a vision of evil, but an act evil.
Although the monster is meant to function as an unspeakable deviation, it is rather the film’s projection of the monster onto the Other as terrorist, which is the unspeakable act. The real monster in Cloverfield, I would argue, isn’t the beast that we only see glimpses of, but the film itself. The film is a monster, because it renounces engagement with the Other in order to construct a world when one is one, and not a world where one is two (Badiou). This reductionism is the film’s monstrous act.
Written on the Body: The Suicide Girls’ Difference and Transgression
29.09.08Filed Under: Culture and tagged Body, Gaze, Identity, Subculture, Transgression with 0 Comments
The naked female body, as opposed to the authentic male body, is considered vulnerable as sexually accessible, susceptible to penetration and exploitation (Benthien, 127). This is no less the case for the nude female body, where her body is transformed into an object instead of a subject – a spectacle for the desiring gaze of the male spectator. However, I will argue that there are strategies and spaces where the cultural production of the nude female is negotiated and normative borders are crossed and transgressed. The alternative culture website Suicidegirls.com represent such a space and offers such a strategy, through the use of tattoos and other alterations of the body and the skin.
Skin
Skin, as Caudia Benthien points out, has often been seen as the border between self and the world, and as the only boundary where subjects can encounter each other (Benthien, 1). However, what interests me here, is not so much the materiality of the skin, but instead the symbolic boundary established by the skin, especially as it is given to cultural and historical change. Historically speaking, skin and its markings have been seen as representative of the inner character of a person. Smooth, unblemished skin has been the desired norm for most of Western history. Blemishes, flaws and scars are markings of bad character and psychological failings.
Skin is important, because it is perceived as that which maintains the integrity of the body, keeping it safe from the outside world. At the same time, the skin also “mediates the world by mingling with it” in Steven Connor’s words (Connor, 29). The skin is not just something we display to the world, but also something with which we perceive the world. Our skin is therefore more intimate than is perhaps immediately obvious. The wholeness of the skin is important to us, because we feel that the rest of our sense organs are mostly made up skin – it is through our skin that we connect with life, the universe and everything (Connor, 34). Any breach of our skin is a danger as it exposes us to the outside, yet at the same time, the skin should not be imagined as “possessing an inside which is on the other side of its outside” but rather “a complex manifold” impoverished by “simple alternatives of inside and outside” (Connor, 37).
The skin is, rather, a site of encounter, a place where touches, traces and markings are negotiated in a productive struggle of meaning. We constantly inscribe meaning to what touches our skin, whether it is a lover’s touch, a creepy look that makes our skin crawl, the scar of a childhood accident or the trace of needle. Such interruptions of the skin, is always filled with meaning and signification, to the extent that the skin constantly undergoes a semioticization: we always try to understand the signs left upon our skin, and the markings left on the skin are always read as culturally significant signs. The skin and the gaze thus exist in a close relation of meaning-making.
Gaze
The gaze, although immaterial, certainly also leaves its mark on the skin of the other. The act of looking must be understood as performative in Judith Butler’s sense of the word. We know from Laura Mulvey onward that pleasure in looking has always been considered active on the male part, and passive on the female’s part (Mulvey, 837). Not only does this act of looking turn women into erotic spectacles, emphasizing their to-be-looked-at-ness as Mulvey states it, and thus produce a certain type of femininity and female subject position.
What is more significant is that Mulvey also turns the male gaze back on itself and points out that the image of woman as erotic object is necessary to complete the male subject; that it is only by possessing the female object that the male subject is fully a subject. It is because of this male lack that the male gaze becomes one of control as well as desire. The male gaze thus exerts power over the female by only allowing it to exist in the cultural space as an object – the female is objectified as erotic spectacle and is therefore bound by the patriarchal culture’s phallocentric conventions.
In the case of the pinup girl, we find a very specific case of this male ascription of meaning to the female body. Anette Kuhn points out that:
The pinup’s singular preoccupation with the female body is tied in with the project of defining the ‘true’ nature of female sexuality. Femaleness and femininity are constructed to a set of bodily attributes reducible to a sexuality which puts itself on display for a masculine spectator. In these ways the pinup invites the spectator to participate in a masculine definition of femininity. (Kuhn, 43)
The gazer and the gazed-upon thus enter into a complex relationship, which negotiates issues of subjectivity and objectification. This operation partakes in what Judith Butler discusses about the production of the female subject, and is a place where her notion (which she borrows from Louis Althusser) of the ‘bad subject’ comes into play. The operative word in the Kuhn quotation – properly italicized by Kuhn herself – is ‘true’. The typical pinup images as seen in magazines from Playboy and onward, reproduce a distinctive view of female sexuality as not only passive, but as sexually accessible, as I noted already at the beginning concerning nude female skin.
My argument is, that by problematizing the notion of nude skin, the suicide girls produce a new territory for themselves, a territory not only contingent on a transgression of cultural borders, but also contingent on injecting their nude skin with a different meaning, one they may control themselves, through a material and oppositional practice of an interpellation of pinup conventions, gender categorization and sexual practices. This material practice is both one of semioticization and one of performativity: it is an injection and interjection of ink in their skin.
Ink
The ink of the tattoo needle does not paint upon my skin, nor does it penetrate my skin to settle below it. Instead, it becomes part of my skin and so a part of me. In that becoming, the tattoo exceeds mere signification and becomes a mark that something real has happened – a something which is both a sign and a denial of the sign (Connor, 53). Mindy Fenske argues in her book Tattoos in American Visual Culture that tattoos are not simply images placed on the skin, but that these images generate and participate in discourse (Fenske, 4). Tattoos thus help in the production of subjects – in the case of the suicide girls, I will argue that they produce ‘bad subjects’.
While skin is usually in the background, “tattoos and other markings push it in the foreground” (Connor, 39), because we notice the transgression against the purity and wholeness of the skin that we have come to take for granted. This also goes for pinup images – especially so, I would argue – despite the fact that we see nothing but skin in these images. In fact, we do not see the skin of the nude woman: we see sexual invitation and the to-be-looked-at-ness that Mulvey discusses. What happens when we encounter the tattoo, is that we are interpellated by the tattoo and forced to reconsider our (male) possessive gaze’s production of the female body as sexual object. Unlike plastic surgery and diets, which also discipline the body according to a specific (often unspoken) ideal, tattoos are still considered a mark of deviance. Tattoo is close to taboo and has often been understood in that sense.
As Judith Butler points out, “the very contours of ‘the body’ are established through markings that seek to establish specific codes of cultural coherence” (Butler 2007: 178). A tattoo is a subversive mark, because it breaches the specific codes. We need to keep in mind, however, the point that Christine Braunberger makes: a tattoo is a mark of excess and “when a woman’s body is a sex object, a tattooed woman’s body is a lascivious sex object” (Braunberger, 1). I agree that tattoos can serve as heightening the sexual image of a woman, but we also need to distinguish between the ‘feminine’ tattoos of flowers, butterflies, unicorns and so forth that have been incorporated into mainstream pinup conventions, and the more elaborate and less femininely coded tattoos so often found on the suicide girls’ website.
The significance of the tattoo, becomes clear when we keep in mind Butler points out about Mary Douglas’ conception of taboo: the boundaries of the body become the limit of the social. In the case of the suicide girls, the tattoos serve as a challenge to conventional conceptions of beauty. Just as gender usually conceals its own construction, so do beauty ideals tend to be unspoken until they are breached. The suicidegirls, by invoking the conventions of traditional pinups, deconstruct the power relation of the male gaze and the conventional image of the pinup is disrupted. One suicidegirl presents of herself as:
James is on the road less travelled. She defines herself and allows others to be themselves and amazingly creates a wonderful community full of true individuals. To know her is to love her… and to love yourself. (James)
This is how suicide girl James describes herself in her profile on suicidegirls.com. This brief description is one of the ways that the models of the website can establish their own identity and provide readers with a sense of who they are watching pictures of. As can be seen from this brief description, James views herself as different from most people (“the road less travelled”), but emphasizes that she does not judge people, nor want them to behave in a specific way or be anything other than what they are (“allows others to be themselves”). This creates a sense of idealizing individual freedom, which will in turn create “a wonderful community of true individuals”.
The word “true” here is significant and overdetermined with meaning. One sense of the word could be in conjunction with individuals, so that the community established around James is filled with true individuals as opposed to other (presumably more mainstream) communities which are then “false individuals”, indicating a sense of conformism in mainstream society. Another sense of the word could be that it is necessary to accept and respect other people’s decisions in order to be a true individual, or that “true” is simply meant to indicate a separation from what is seen as false individuality, originating in mainstream society but not indicating any sense of connection to the sense of community also established in her profile.
What this shows us, is that the suicide girls see themselves as more than simply erotic spectacles due to the community-driven nature of the site, where the models knowingly display themselves to an audience, reflect on the process and open up for discussions regarding these images. This is an indication that the suicide girls are more than simply passive objects consumed by the male gaze. The power typically exerted over individual female bodies when they are displayed nude through the socially constructed norms of pinup photography is thus challenged on suicidegirls.com. By inviting people to look at her and engaging with the viewers (male and female alike) James (and other suicidegirls) engages in the network of power as an active agent, and pushes against the cultural understandings of the pinup as quiet, passive object for consumption. While the pinup convention might not be fully disrupted or displaced, it is at least challenged.
The pinup performance which the suicidegirls engage in is obviously a bounded act, circumscribed with rules and conventions. Any performance involves the deployment of signs which have already attained meaning in the social space. What is particular about the suicidegirls is the fact that they blend two conventions in order to perform a contestation of their sexual objectification. The pinup conventions are part of a mainstream, dominant discourse but are contested by the introduction of the body modifications: the body modifications alter the mainstream conventions, as the girls repeat the pinups but with a difference; they perform a different subjectivity.
This performance is achieved through a reflexive use of the pinup conventions; the suicidegirls are aware of the tradition in which they exist and due to their own degree of control over their photos, they are free to playfully engage critically with these conventions. Since it is the model rather than the photographer that chooses the conventions and poses to be used, the girls are able to play with or against these conventions. This is not to gloss over the fact that some suicidegirls may be tempted to reproduce the mainstream pinup conventions uncritically, but the fact is that the institutional practices surrounding the suicidegirls are different, and the power relations are different from magazines such as Playboy.
The suicidegirls, by using the same visual conventions and inviting the same sexual looks as the mainstream pinups but displaying a body altered from the conventional image, disrupt mainstream society’s erotic spectacle and insist that there are alternatives to mainstream beauty. This disruption is deliberate and confronts the social norm of a masculine definition of female sexuality. In this case, the nude bodies of the suicide girls take on a meaning more than just the image and the representation of their female nakedness. Rather, their marked bodies become material sites for the disruption of mainstream nudity. Simply put, their nude bodies represent a different view of gender and sexuality, and become part of the way these girls to achieve their own sense of self. I will argue that this is a liberating move on behalf of the suicide girls, who are able to resist the oppressive view of woman as passive, erotic spectacle.
By producing their own version of the erotic spectacle, they enter into the productive network of power and subvert it until it becomes possible to produce their own identity through the strategy of alternative representational modes of the pinup. In other words, they insist on being subjects who chose to offer themselves up as erotic spectacles but in a way that is controlled by them and done in the way they desire. In this case they insist in their femininity by showing off their nude bodies, but they reject and resist the mainstream norm of socially accepted beauty, and so represent an alternative. As Braunberger insightfully points out: “There is a reckless kind of freedom in horrifying others, in making one’s body into the seductive and scary and strange combination that is monster beauty.” (Braunberger, 12)
By entering into the productive network of power, the suicide girls take power for themselves as active subjects rather than being given a passive object position. Replacing the mainstream pinup aesthetic, they construct their own cultural space for representing sexualized versions of femininity which are endowed with cultural power. They achieve this by aestheticizing their own bodies and controlling the appearance of their own bodies by modifying it with tattoos and piercings. While some suicide girls may also use cosmetic surgery such as breast enhancement or similar procedures, the majority of the girls transgress cultural norms by choosing alternative modes of bodily appearance.
It is this aesthetic reconstruction which is the greatest difference, flying in the face of the mass media culture where nude images of women are airbrushed to make them appear more smooth. Instead, the suicide girls deliberately modify their bodies and so challenge the construction of the masculine subject position for the spectator and no longer is the project of the “true” nature of female sexuality viable. Instead, it is complicated by employing the same mode of representation, the same sexual invitation, and playing up to the same male gaze, but then offering up a markedly different body for consumption. The male gaze is thus turned back upon itself and forced to confront itself with the kind of desire it had expected as opposed to what is actually there. What the suicide girls succeed in doing, I think, is to mark out a territory for themselves where they can negotiate both pleasure and beauty on terms which they themselves help produce. In this way, their tattoos succeed in an interjection against mainstream beauty standards, their tattoos
do violence to the primary violence that deprives me of my body, the violence of representation, naming, abstraction, the alienation of the body into significance. (Connor, 72)
This is why there are photo set of pregnant suicide girls and why one of the longest running suicide girls – Amina – actually has a prosthetic leg which is featured openly in her photos. The monster beauty of the suicide girls thus extend beyond tattoos and into other territories, that are otherwise closed off and taboo for mainstream pinups. My argument is that this would never have happened, unless the tattoos had been there first.
The creasing and folding of the skin that tattoos represent, contaminate the gender discourse otherwise established and serve as a disruption and challenge of the conventional image of the female body. It articulates a territory which lies folded inside the sexual pleasure of the image, and allows the production of a subjectivity where female sexuality is not dependent on the male gaze, but rather invites a broader conceptualization of desire.
Reading War Fictions
03.09.08Filed Under: Culture and tagged War with 1 Comment
When studying fictions on war, it seems reasonable to begin with the question of why war? What is it about war that makes it so significant and relevant that we need to investigate its cultural representations? My point is that war is one place of many where images, memory, truth, fiction, history and contemporaneity collide. Viewed in this way, war becomes an interesting and significant cultural complex where the cultural and literary critics can investigate a distinct cultural ordering.
It seems significant to keep in mind that war theortician Carl Von Clauswitz stated that “war is a mere continuation of policy by other means” (On War), which indicates that war is power, but I would argue in the Foucaldian sense that it is power that is productive, even as it is destructive. It is here that we should keep Chris Hedges’ argument in mind: “war is a force that gives us meaning”. Even those opposed to war, gain meaning from opposing it.
This construction of meaning will always find its way into texts, and cultural structures will operate in and through these texts. This makes it even more significant that we pay attention to how war is structured in texts, because it will reveal something of how war is structured in the culture. Even if we regard culture as a fragmented field of power relations (Matt Hills’ argument in How to Do Things With Cultural Theory and an argument I’m sympathetic towards), war becomes a very concrete structuring force, which inevitable will re-orientate other fields.
Reading texts culturally is thus one way of delimiting the texts chosen, but it also orientates my way of approaching war fictions. I specifically argue for a five-pronged approach which is inevitably interconnected. While it is often argued that the truth value of fiction is bracketed, authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O’Brien who have experienced war themselves often struggle with their personal experiencs and the truth that they feel connected to that. The experience of war is difficult to articulate for them, especially as regards the isue of truth. They want to make sure that people realize that what they are reading is true, at least on some level.
Connected to this, is the issue of memory – Vonnegut’s and O’Brien’s memories might be considered to be distorted, due to their experiences, but on the other hand, they could also be trusted more than others because they were present at these events.
Generally, media images have a tendency to influence our general understanding of history. Here the term cultural memory enters the frame, to account for our understanding of historical events. These images, whether they come from media or literature, will challenge our view of historcal events, and enter into our cultural memory.
This opens up the debate of history vs the present. What does historical distance mean in terms of understanding the text? Can we ignore facts such as Slaughterhouse-Five – which is about the fire bombing of Dresden during WWII – is published during the Vietnam War, with its napalm bombings?
Here, attention to images, especially as the field of imagology deals with hem, can prove particularly useful, since this form of study attempts to get at the ideology of the image and the position of the image in what is called the iconosphere – the circulation of images within culture. Some images are given a higher priority than others.
Finally, these things all come togehter in a discussion of trauma and te experience or rather registering of trauma. Traumatic knowledge is aways problematic, becuse trauma is not experienced but registered. Representations of traumas are therefore problematic – which returns us to the notion of truth in trauma fiction. Discussing trauma and its effects are thus necessary.
War thus encapsulates a many different concerns, and can serve as an opening into discussions of culture and representations, not to mention the relationship between culture and fiction.
David Bowie’s Hauntology: 1. Outside and the Murder of Baby Grace
18.08.08Filed Under: Music and tagged David Bowie, Gothic, Hauntology with 8 Comments
The following is my paper at the excellent Uncanny Media conference, in Utrecht.
In 1995, David Bowie released an album titled 1. Outside returning for the first time since 1976 to collaborate with Brian Eno, which in itself was cause for interest, since Eno had worked with Bowie on the legendary Berlin-trilogy consisting of Low, “Heroes” and Lodger. It was also just the second come-back album after the mediocre Black Tie White Noise album from 1993, after Bowie’s Tin Machine venture. Many had already written Bowie off as a has-been rock star wallowing in the achievements of the past, but returning to Eno plus the ambitious intent of making a trilogy of albums and even a Broadway musical based on the albums, made fans and critics take note this album. The album did achieve chart positions, favorable reviews and positive fan feedback, and some of the songs were re-mixed by artists as diverse as The Pet Shop Boys and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.
Having said that, the album is hardly what one would call a mainstream rock album, not just because it is a concept album based on lyrics that were cut-up in the style of William Burroughs, but also because it mixed new developments in electronica with more typical rock standards, something Bowie would take further in his next album Earthlings. The unusual nature of 1. Outside is also evident in its full title, mentioned on its sleeve booklet: The Diary of Nathan Adler, or the Ritual Art-Murder of Baby Grace Blue: A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-Cycle. The story told through the songs and a number of spoken intermissions called segues is this art-murder of Baby Grace and the subsequent investigation by one Nathan Adler, a film noir-style detective.
The album thus consists of two significant parts: the songs and segues and the booklet which serves as a frame for the songs. Furthermore, the album songs are all narrated by different characters, so the narrative is pieced together through music, text and images. However, David Bowie functions as the narrative voice of all these characters, as various voice-codings have been employed to distort Bowie’s voice into these different characters, emphasizing their status as separate individuals, yet of course remaining Bowie at the core. David Bowie’s voice and presence can thus haunts the entire album in various uncanny forms, just as all the images of the people in the booklet are distorted images of David Bowie himself.
In what is the first of several uncanny doublings, we realize that Bowie thus speaks both as the murdered Baby Grace, the investigator Nathan Adler as well as the other five characters. Bowie is therefore not only uncannily doubled, but also paradoxically investigates his own murder, in addition to possibly being his own murderer as well – since the trilogy has been left incomplete, we do not have knowledge of who Baby Grace’s murderer is.
In the following paper, I propose that the album’s structure is a gothic labyrinth, haunted by several uncanny mediations of David Bowie, his ventriloquist voice and his simulacral presence as character, creator and ghost, all at once. As the album and narrative is referred to as a hypercycle, we may also wonder about the status of an outside. I will problematize this notion of an outside and focus on what can be termed the album’s hauntological status.
Uncanny Doubles
As the author of the text, Bowie is naturally part of each of the characters of the album, a fact which is even more underlined in music when Bowie sings all the lyrics – there are no duets or guest singers, but instead voice-codings have been used to render each character individual and unique, creating the sensation that we hear different people speaking. The aural medium becomes uncanny in the way Bowie’s presence is modified and altered and we hear him speak not just as Nathan Adler – white, middle-aged detective, probably the closest to Bowie himself – but also as Leon, a young black man, Ramona A. Stone, Algeria Touchshriek and finally, Baby Grace.
In these various roles, Bowie not only changes age, but also gender, race and ethnicity, while at the same time also remaining distinctly David Bowie. Bowie has always been called one of rock’s chameleon and it is certainly very clear in the case of Outside. Bowie’s play with appearance and cross-gendering, something he has done since the inception of his career with personas such Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, is made very real in the album’s booklet, where we find several different representations of the different characters. Again, all these images are manipulated photos of Bowie, visually transformed by make-up and costume, but certainly also by digital imaging. There is a decidedly uncanny effect in these images, seeing Bowie’s familiar face (since Outside is unlikely to be the first album by Bowie the listener encounters) transformed into the unfamiliar faces of Ramona, Leon, Baby Grace and so on.
All of the characters are uncanny doubles of Bowie, and present us with a thematic opening into the narrative, for as we know from Jean Baudrillard, the one “who sees his double, sees his death”, and we may continue with John Jervis’ point, that
We can superimpose the impossible materiality of representation on the impossible immateriality of the self, producing the represented self as spectral body: the very image of death. (Jervis, 16)
Jervis’ point relates to the presence of ghosts, but as I have argued the fact that Bowie (re)presents all the different characters of the story, means that Baby Grace is constantly present as a ghost in all the other characters. What we are confronted with are a number of Bowie deaths – Bowie’s presence clearly haunts the images of the characters, yet none of them are Bowie. Let us, therefore, have a closer look at the character images.
Apart from the different characters that I have already mentioned, we also find the image of a minotaur. Along with the lyrics – where update demons, ape men with metal parts and many other fantastic beings are mentioned – this creates an uncanny world where odd creatures live. The extent to which these beings are meant metaphorically is unclear, making the album status flicker between the fantastic and the uncanny. Although the temporal location is just around New Year’s Eve 1999, just before the popular conception of the new millennium, it is difficult to call this album strictly science fictional. There is, however, a sense of estrangement which pervades the album, along with the booklet. For a Gothic text, this doppelgänger-effect is of course nothing new, but the fact that we are presented not just with one but many doppelgängers makes me argue that we are dealing with a severe identity confusion. Linda Dryden points out that:
The transformations and doppelgängers of the modern Gothic exemplify this slippage of identity, this fragmentation of the self. Identities merge or are masked; individuals hide dark secrets that speak of another self; men and women melt into forms other than their known physical selves or into hideous liquescence; animals become parodies of the human and humans become animalistic.(40-41)
It becomes clear the characters are best seen as the fragmentations of a self, but which self are we talking about, then? While in classical Gothic tales the doppelgängers are doublings of the protagonist, it is difficult to argue that any one in particular is the protagonist. On the other hand, arguing that these characters are doubles of David Bowie also creates a distinctly uncanny blurring of the borders between author and fiction. However, I believe that we can say that it is precisely this blurring of Bowie and the personas he has in the text, is what makes Outside an example of uncanny media. It is in the process of mediation that the text takes on its meaning, in the way the medial processes help generate the fiction itself – Outside could not exist without the shadows of mediations, which turn Bowie into the different characters. In this process, then, Bowie is both murderer, victim and investigator.
The album’s title if Outside and begins with a prelude called “Leon Takes Us Outside”, yet it is not clear where this outside is, or outside of what. I believe that what we are taken outside of, is a stable division between Bowie, character and the representations of these – instead the text finds it place precisely by haunting the spaces between text, representation and reality. Just as Baby Grace is the ghost which haunts and informs the narrative of Outside, so the doppelgängers haunt and inform the album, creating a sense of ontological undecidability which I call a hauntological status, something I will return to a bit later on.
Uncanny Narrative
For now, having pointed out that the meaning of the text lies specifically in its uncanny in-betweenness, I want to return to the narrative which is set forth by the album, especially in the accompanying booklet containing The Diary of Nathan Adler. The diary starts off with the description of Baby Grace Blue’s murder and continues with the investigation of it. However, there are inserts from earlier dates as well, ranging from as far back as 1977, where Adler was in Berlin. We also learn that Adler was born in 1947, and currently lives in New York City, having moved there from London. All these biographical facts match Bowie’s own life, further blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. It is probably no coincidence that Adler’s name is also a homonym of the present tense of the verb to addle – the good Detective Professor Nathan Adler is surely an addler of the narrative.
In this way, it becomes clear that the story we are presented with can be considered non-linear in its presentation, but there are also traces of how time itself becomes fractured and fragmented. The fact that the murder takes place just before the new millennium is hardly coincidental, further adding to the many borders becoming unstable and being crossed. We hear Nathan Adler describe an encounter with Leon Blank in this way:
He couldn’t wait for 12 o’clock midnight / He jumps up on the stage / With a criss criss machete / And slashes around cutting a zero in everything / I mean a zero in the fabric of time itself (“Segue – Nathan Adler”)
Cutting a zero in the fabric of time itself seems to indicate that time stops, is destroyed or at least somehow altered – in many ways, the album’s narrative thus exists outside linear time. I see this as further evidence of the album’s hauntological status, but what I want to focus on here is the way that the detective story and its conventions of clues and suspects turns from a teleological journey into a labyrinthine structure which Adler attempts to navigate. The start of the story is clear, Adler’s diary beginning thus:
It was precisely 5.47am on the morning of Friday 31 of December 1999 that a dark spirited pluralist began the dissection of 14-year-old “Baby Grace Blue”.
But the uncertainties soon begin to creep in, for there are no immediate suspects only three people connected to Baby Grace: Leon Blank, Ramona A. Stone and Algeria Touchshriek. Frustrated with a lack of progress, Adler turns to the “the Mack-Verbasiser, the Metarandom programme the re-strings real life facts as improbable virtual-fact” – a further indication that there is a split between the world of the fiction and our world. What he gets from this experiment is the following string of words:
No convictions of assertive saints believed Caucasian way-out tyrannical evoked no images described Christian saints questions no female described christian tyrannical questions R.A.Stone christian machine believed no work is caucasian assertive saints assertive believed female convictions martyrs and tyrannical are evoked Female described the fabric machine Slashing way out saints and martyrs and thrown downstairs
On this album, as well as earlier, Bowie experimented with the cut-up technique popularized by William S. Burroughs, where pieces of text were physically cut into pieces and put back together in more or less random order. For this album, Bowie had developed a computer program to do the same thing, thus uncannily using a similar technique to create the lyrics for the Outside album that Adler uses to investigate the crime committed. We can see yet more blurring between the levels of reality and fiction. However, to return to the story, Adler actually gains something from the nonsensical string of words that the Metarandom program provides, but rather than moving forward with the narrative, Adler goes back in time and we are presented with two earlier periods of Ramona A. Stone’s life.
In the first, in Berlin in 1977, Ramona was the leader of a suicide cult, and in the second, in 1986 in London, Canada, she was the owner of a body-parts jewelery store: “Lamb penis necklaces, goat-scrotum purses, nipple earrings, that sort of thing”, where she was also pregnant. A significant fact, since that child would be about 14 years of age in 1999, thus being the age of Baby Grace Blue. The most likely suspect is thus Ramona A. Stone, but the challenge we are faced with comes from the attempt at piecing together the clues from the songs to continue the narrative started by Adler’s diaries.
It is evident that the songs do not come in linear succession, since Baby Grace’s presentation is track six, while earlier tracks already refer to her death. It may well be that this is because Baby Grace’s voice has been recorded (the subtitle of the track is “A Horrid Cassette”), but this only adds to the uncanny effect of the album – to hear Baby Grace’s voice, after she has died. However, the main challenge comes from the fact that we do not know who the songs are about. In “Oxford Town” we hear that
Baby Grace is the victim / She was 14 years of age / And the wheels are turning, turning / For the finger points at me / All’s well / But I have not been to Oxford Town (“Oxford Town”)
We know that it cannot be Ramona, since the lyrics also state that “If I had not met Ramona”, but this still leaves both Leon and Touchshriek. The other songs are equally obscure, leaving us within this narrative labyrinth where there seems to be no opening or way out. It is significant to keep in mind, that one of the characters of the booklet was a minotaur whose mythological origins come precisely from a labyrinth. Here, I want to draw on Judith Halberstam’s concept of the monster in Gothic fiction, where she also points to the similarity between Gothic and detective fiction:
There are many congruities between Gothic fiction and detective fiction but in the Gothic, crime is embodied within a specifically deviant form – the monster – that announces itself (de-monstrates) as the place of corruption. (Halberstam, 2)
Certainly, much crime fiction deviance is identified as the place of corruption, but usually in a psychological or sociological sense, rather than the physical sense it has in the Gothic. However, I will argue that the beside from the minotaur, the ape men with metal parts and so forth, there is one more specific monster: the album itself. In this case, monster should not be taken to mean a misshapen being, but rather as Halberstam defines it as when:
boundaries between good and evil, health and perversity, crime and punishment, truth and deception, inside and outside dissolve and threaten the integrity of the narrative itself. (Halberstam, 2)
The album, with its ghostly presences of David Bowie in all the characters, blur the narrative together into an uncanny reflection of itself. This is something which is also very evident in the use of voices and sounds, which is what I will briefly turn to now, before concluding.
Uncanny Media
Just as the images were uncanny doubles of Bowie, the voices that are used throughout the album are also spectral revisions of Bowie’s voice, together with the instruments used. The use of electronic music is something new for Bowie (even if many believe that he helped give birth to the genre in precisely his Berlin-trilogy), and introduces a number of uncanny effects. It has been said about the album, that Bowie and Eno created a number of different roles and let the musicians take on these different roles when they were playing. Even here, then, there is a playing around with the concepts of self. I do not want to over-emphasize the significance of this anecdote, for I myself cannot truly tell the difference in these performances, but just the fact that there was dimension to the recordings, shows the interest Bowie had in destabilizing typically quite clear boundaries.
Bowie’s voice and the changes it goes through remain the most prominent on the entire album. It is most clear in the segues, where specific roles are enacted, but it is also evident in the various songs. Furthermore, we also find strange echoes of voices (“Wishful Beginnings”), different passages of songs that are spoken or inflected completely differently from the main part of the song (“Oxford Town”) and inserted pieces of dialogue (“I’m Deranged”). Bowie’s presence becomes manifold and multifaceted, even more so because he deliberately takes on these different characters and personas.
While different vocal performances are to be expected within an album, it goes beyond this in the case of Outside, as Bowie’s voice is altered beyond that which is possible through regular vocal manipulation. The technology which is inserted between voice and listener – more so than the regular recording and production of an album – is what generates the hauntological space of Bowie-yet-not-quite-Bowie. Let me therefore turn to this hauntological space.
Throughout this paper, I have referred to the hauntological status of Outside. I have done so, because I find it a useful concept in this case, because the album’s ontological status is so weak. The interest of the Gothic – I am drawing again on Halberstam – lies precisely in the collapse of boundaries. In Halberstam’s study, she is particularly interested in the collapse of sexual boundaries, while in this case, I am more interested in the boundaries of identity and mediality. Bowie’s identity has been playfully fragmented for the purpose of this album, haunting the images of the various characters, the sound of their voices and the ears of the listener. Through this strategy, Bowie has shown us how media can turn uncanny, by transgressing the boundaries between performer and fiction.
It is this uncanny medial space between performer and fiction which creates the album’s hauntological status; the reason why it slips between our fingers and our attempts at pinning it down. As the spectral, it is not there, not really and not real. However, this absent presence – to echo the title of this workshop – is precisely what haunts the album, enters into whatever is present and disrupts the closure of the text. As blogger K-Punk has pointed out, excessive presences leaves no traces. Hauntology, however, is predicated on traces, is nothing but traces and uncovers the space between being and nothingness (K-Punk, “Hauntology NOW”).
As a detective story, traces are of course of great significance, but the traces continually disappear and vanish. We are haunted by the spectral presence of Bowie, interrogated by our understanding of a clear separation between reality and fiction, but as I have already pointed out, Outside uncannily disturbs that boundary, leaving us only with a trace of Bowie and a trace of the murderer. In this way, it is almost appropriate that the two later installments – provisionally titled Contagion and Afrikaan – have never been made. In this way, they can keep on haunting us with the almost, but not quite. The murder of Baby Grace will remain unsolved and her spirit will continue to wander freely outside.
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