Man, sometimes it's like, you just wake up, and everything is all about necrophilia! You know?
So this morning I finally gave up on Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, by Mark Andrejevic. Not only do I find the political stance of this book irritating ("Proletariat fools! You are being distracted from your revolutionary potential by reality television's false promise of democratic entertainment! Bread and circuses! Entertainment is never democratic! You're being put to work even while watching t.v. through the commodification-magic of surveillance!"), but the language is obsessively intricate, and after a couple days of stubbing my metaphorical toe every other sentence against indecipherable references to cultural theorists I have not read, I finally just decided to skim it and write it off as something I can't use.
I did that, and picked up Susan Zimmerman's The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre, and oh, wow -- what a difference! Man, this book is so useful and accessible to me so far! I mean, I'm only ten pages in, but the promise is extraordinary. For one thing, this is the book that, in some senses, I have been trying to write myself for the past couple of years. Zimmerman is talking about the ideological significance of the corpse in the desperately shifty world of Early Modern performance. I keep trying to get at this idea, at the way in which the corpse, the corpus, the corse, is absolutely and totally central in some way to so many of the ideological anxieties or uncertainties that drive early modern performance. Because, see, it's a body that is and is not a person; it's the ultimate liminal; it represents (or, as Zimmerman points out, following Kristeva, maybe more "shows" than "represents") all of humanity at the same time as being ultimately individual; and (this is where I started on this particular fascination) its constituent parts are at the same time utterly meaningless and utterly meaningful. That is: dismemberment of a corpse is in some ways worse than dismemberment of a living person. There's this sense that the corpse is intruding on early modern theatre in a way that it doesn't at other periods.
So anyway, Zimmerman's book so puts all of that way more succinctly than I have been doing, and it's really exciting. And it's also really, really useful (I hope) to some of the things I've been trying to pin down about the centrality of "idolatry" and the celebrity body (or unbody) to American Idol -- hopefully this book will help me focus my observations on the way in which I think American Idol's framing of celebrity gets back to the way performance and personality were represented all the way back at the beginnings of "modernity" (and getting into what I mean by that is so out of my league I can't even begin it). I want to talk about the generative anxieties that produce both early modern stage representation of corpses and very-modern stage representation of reality celebrities.
As you can see, the weak link here is that I do not really want to assert that, say, Kelly Clarkson is the same thing as a corpse. She so is not. Her very liveness is absolutely central to her celebrity and to her appeal. Maybe I want to say that that's the point, though? That American Idol enacts some way in which the very-very-not-dead realitycelebs proclaim the "death" of traditional celebrity and traditional television? Or the "death" of the "dead" tv-viewing audience, who didn't get to respond?
I'm also losing track of what it is I wanted to say about fan or community ownership of the show. There's a way in which American Idol is more civic than other television shows. I don't want to get into whether it's "really" democratic or some shit like that – that's stupid, it's splitting hairs, and I don't care about it. What I care about is that it presents itself as more civic than other television shows, and its pleasure derives in large part from the audience's feeling that the show is more civic – like the Lord Mayor's shows or the City Comedies in early modern London. Whether they actually in any way represent "true" merchant concerns is beside the point. What's interesting to me is that they are pleasurable and pleasant because they claim to represent those things – that fan-ownership, civic ownership is a form of viewing pleasure.
Okay, but where does the necrophilia come in? Because, so, I'm reading this book, and I’m all excited about it, but then I decide to check out some blogs and first I go read Waiterrant, with which I became silently and slightly shamefully obsessed about a week ago. And lo and behold, he's posted a (fairly simplistic and unfortunately slightly offensive) entry on fetish today!
(Side note: how is it at all possible for someone to grow up in our current American society and not have an implicit understanding of fetish? I'm really honestly surprised. I mean, as I understand my world, almost everything has to do with fetishization. I may not use that word for it all the time, but from the onset of my awareness of self-in-society, I've been attuned to the way in which the substitution of object-for-body and body-for-object is so primary as to almost not be kinky. [When a kink becomes straight?] I just kind of assume everyone lives in the world of fragmented sexuality and commodified bodies that I do. And I also assume that everyone kind of wants to think and know about those things. It shocks me when people are shocked at what I consider really very tame variations on heteronormativity. Am I really that weird? I don't think so. I think those who don't understand, or claim not to understand fetishism are the weird ones.)
Right, right, back to the main topic. Now, the interesting thing about fetish for me today is that the problem of the fetish, in psychoanalytic terms, is the same as the problem of idolatry: the taking of the "dead" object for the living, the palpable confusion of generative sexuality (or spirituality) with "dead" materiality. And so, necrophilia is, in this sense, the perfect fetish. The necrophiliac literally enacts the troublesome confusion of death and sex upon the overdetermined object/subject, the corpse. In SotL (probably this is not unique to SotL, in fact), we had for a while a running joke about the Ultimate Fetish, – pyronecrobestiality. The conflation here is three-fold: the dead corpse with the living, generating person; the animal with the human; and destruction with generation. The "pyro" part also serves to link the ultimate fetish with voyeurism, as well – the voyeur always needs to assert (false) control over his fetishistic action – the watching has not excluded him, has not made him subject, but in fact has put him in (secret) control over his sexuality and the sexualities of those he watches. In some sense, he continually needs to destroy the object he desires. So the pyronecrobestialiac would be enacting his false control over the, say, dead deer, by setting it on fire.
Now, this is a very negative way to look at voyeurism, and at fetish, and I don't necessarily subscribe to it. (Especially as regards mutually-agreed voyeurism, which isn't accounted for in traditional psychoanalytic formulations.) But it does bring up interesting ideas about the necessity of violence as part of the commodity-idolatry-voyeurism formulation.
And…. then after I read Waiterrant, I went over to In the Middle, and I found this totally awesome post on poaching, desecration, and necrobestiality! It's like the universe is conspiring!
Although, I'll admit – if what the universe is conspiring to do is make me think really hard about pyronecrobestiality, the universe is possibly more disturbing than I tend to think it is.
So this morning I finally gave up on Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, by Mark Andrejevic. Not only do I find the political stance of this book irritating ("Proletariat fools! You are being distracted from your revolutionary potential by reality television's false promise of democratic entertainment! Bread and circuses! Entertainment is never democratic! You're being put to work even while watching t.v. through the commodification-magic of surveillance!"), but the language is obsessively intricate, and after a couple days of stubbing my metaphorical toe every other sentence against indecipherable references to cultural theorists I have not read, I finally just decided to skim it and write it off as something I can't use.
I did that, and picked up Susan Zimmerman's The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre, and oh, wow -- what a difference! Man, this book is so useful and accessible to me so far! I mean, I'm only ten pages in, but the promise is extraordinary. For one thing, this is the book that, in some senses, I have been trying to write myself for the past couple of years. Zimmerman is talking about the ideological significance of the corpse in the desperately shifty world of Early Modern performance. I keep trying to get at this idea, at the way in which the corpse, the corpus, the corse, is absolutely and totally central in some way to so many of the ideological anxieties or uncertainties that drive early modern performance. Because, see, it's a body that is and is not a person; it's the ultimate liminal; it represents (or, as Zimmerman points out, following Kristeva, maybe more "shows" than "represents") all of humanity at the same time as being ultimately individual; and (this is where I started on this particular fascination) its constituent parts are at the same time utterly meaningless and utterly meaningful. That is: dismemberment of a corpse is in some ways worse than dismemberment of a living person. There's this sense that the corpse is intruding on early modern theatre in a way that it doesn't at other periods.
So anyway, Zimmerman's book so puts all of that way more succinctly than I have been doing, and it's really exciting. And it's also really, really useful (I hope) to some of the things I've been trying to pin down about the centrality of "idolatry" and the celebrity body (or unbody) to American Idol -- hopefully this book will help me focus my observations on the way in which I think American Idol's framing of celebrity gets back to the way performance and personality were represented all the way back at the beginnings of "modernity" (and getting into what I mean by that is so out of my league I can't even begin it). I want to talk about the generative anxieties that produce both early modern stage representation of corpses and very-modern stage representation of reality celebrities.
As you can see, the weak link here is that I do not really want to assert that, say, Kelly Clarkson is the same thing as a corpse. She so is not. Her very liveness is absolutely central to her celebrity and to her appeal. Maybe I want to say that that's the point, though? That American Idol enacts some way in which the very-very-not-dead realitycelebs proclaim the "death" of traditional celebrity and traditional television? Or the "death" of the "dead" tv-viewing audience, who didn't get to respond?
I'm also losing track of what it is I wanted to say about fan or community ownership of the show. There's a way in which American Idol is more civic than other television shows. I don't want to get into whether it's "really" democratic or some shit like that – that's stupid, it's splitting hairs, and I don't care about it. What I care about is that it presents itself as more civic than other television shows, and its pleasure derives in large part from the audience's feeling that the show is more civic – like the Lord Mayor's shows or the City Comedies in early modern London. Whether they actually in any way represent "true" merchant concerns is beside the point. What's interesting to me is that they are pleasurable and pleasant because they claim to represent those things – that fan-ownership, civic ownership is a form of viewing pleasure.
Okay, but where does the necrophilia come in? Because, so, I'm reading this book, and I’m all excited about it, but then I decide to check out some blogs and first I go read Waiterrant, with which I became silently and slightly shamefully obsessed about a week ago. And lo and behold, he's posted a (fairly simplistic and unfortunately slightly offensive) entry on fetish today!
(Side note: how is it at all possible for someone to grow up in our current American society and not have an implicit understanding of fetish? I'm really honestly surprised. I mean, as I understand my world, almost everything has to do with fetishization. I may not use that word for it all the time, but from the onset of my awareness of self-in-society, I've been attuned to the way in which the substitution of object-for-body and body-for-object is so primary as to almost not be kinky. [When a kink becomes straight?] I just kind of assume everyone lives in the world of fragmented sexuality and commodified bodies that I do. And I also assume that everyone kind of wants to think and know about those things. It shocks me when people are shocked at what I consider really very tame variations on heteronormativity. Am I really that weird? I don't think so. I think those who don't understand, or claim not to understand fetishism are the weird ones.)
Right, right, back to the main topic. Now, the interesting thing about fetish for me today is that the problem of the fetish, in psychoanalytic terms, is the same as the problem of idolatry: the taking of the "dead" object for the living, the palpable confusion of generative sexuality (or spirituality) with "dead" materiality. And so, necrophilia is, in this sense, the perfect fetish. The necrophiliac literally enacts the troublesome confusion of death and sex upon the overdetermined object/subject, the corpse. In SotL (probably this is not unique to SotL, in fact), we had for a while a running joke about the Ultimate Fetish, – pyronecrobestiality. The conflation here is three-fold: the dead corpse with the living, generating person; the animal with the human; and destruction with generation. The "pyro" part also serves to link the ultimate fetish with voyeurism, as well – the voyeur always needs to assert (false) control over his fetishistic action – the watching has not excluded him, has not made him subject, but in fact has put him in (secret) control over his sexuality and the sexualities of those he watches. In some sense, he continually needs to destroy the object he desires. So the pyronecrobestialiac would be enacting his false control over the, say, dead deer, by setting it on fire.
Now, this is a very negative way to look at voyeurism, and at fetish, and I don't necessarily subscribe to it. (Especially as regards mutually-agreed voyeurism, which isn't accounted for in traditional psychoanalytic formulations.) But it does bring up interesting ideas about the necessity of violence as part of the commodity-idolatry-voyeurism formulation.
And…. then after I read Waiterrant, I went over to In the Middle, and I found this totally awesome post on poaching, desecration, and necrobestiality! It's like the universe is conspiring!
Although, I'll admit – if what the universe is conspiring to do is make me think really hard about pyronecrobestiality, the universe is possibly more disturbing than I tend to think it is.
Labels: books, death/mourning/corpses, idolatry, queer, tv
Interesting stuff. Quick question: why generative?