Benjamin Cope

 

(Drawing – apologies for stepping into ground which is largely unknown to me, absurdly obvious or ridiculously far-fetched – I hope they launch some thoughts which others will be able to explore properly.)

 

                      Firstly, many thanks for being invited to this conference, particularly as I am not at all sure that an academic conference on gender and pop culture has any sense. It seems perfectly possible to me that gender and pop culture by themselves form an intersection which leaves academia wondering what it does and why. I mean that where gender and pop culture meet is where we get seriously challenged as to what it means to think: for this is a point which arouses emotions and desires/repulsions, which gives or vampires out energy, which asks questions about the influence of society in manipulating our responses or creating our tastes and raises the question about what a cultural manifestation does. (What does an academic conference do? What am I doing at an academic conference? What relations does academia have with the pop culture (with the wider population) or with gender?) These sort of risks are what I understand Luce Irigaray as meaning when she says in the opening essay of Ethics of Sexual Difference (a valuable essay for thinking about what gender and pop culture might have to offer) that gender (or sexual difference) is perhaps the philosophical question of our time (p. 13). For here, I think she means it in the sense of whether it is possible for us to think about what gender means for a radical democratisation of thinking where thinking is both a product and a dynamic motor of physical and social experience and not just the mode of keeping the physical and the social under control.

Irigaray’s statement suggests that gender studies, at least in its current form, cannot be thought about outside the phenomenon of pop culture or at least the popularisation of culture. The link between the rise of gender studies over the last twenty years and the period of the rise and rise of pop culture (the novel as early form of pop culture associated with women) is perhaps especially clear in the post-communist space: (as drawings indicate) the fifteen years following the fall of the Soviet Union have brought to the surface questions of sexuality and the role of women, which had remained strenuously repressed at least in the period from the Second World War onwards (Week By Week), and has also witnessed a huge influx and flourishing of pop culture. But it does not seem, however, that this sexual revolution is working out quite as we might have hoped. Sexuality seems to find its expression in the media largely with an objectification of the impossibly perfect female body and an unpleasant collusion between the female body and capitalist consumption. In a competitive (or one could even say drastic) employment situation women are faced with a need to present themselves as sexually ideal as well as ideal employment material (cf. Pilkington). So what is the nature of the sexual upheaval currently underway and what role does pop culture play in it?

To deepen these analyses will require thinking further about pop culture and how it works. What is pop culture: it certainly does not seem to be exactly the idea of a liberating mass culture that Eisenstein dreamed of the cinema as forming. But I do think that the phenomenon of pop culture, the making available to an enormous number of people on the planet of the words and images associated with the visual media and pop music, is a real revolution both in the form in which ideas are transmitted and the type of ideas (?) which receive wide public attention.

But is it possible to talk about pop culture? I would suggest that following Marshall MacLuhan’s idea about the evolution of media that specific media function differently depending on the environment in which they are introduced could be very helpful here. This was brought home to me on the beach on an unpromising morning on the Polish Baltic Coast, when a host of boys and girls in the striking red shorts and with the bewilderingly looking space-age technological devices now familiar from the programme in English called Baywatch first gathered and then set off running down the beach. Despite the familiarity of the scene I couldn’t help feeling a long way from California (I wondered for example about the clash of Baywatch style with the post communist Polish endless list of regulations of things not to do) and the mind fuzzed with an image of all the corners of the world where variations of Baywatch might at that moment be taking place in very different ways. Perhaps a more serious way of posing the same question would be the fact that I perceive a difference between the use of the term pop in English and the Russian term ‘popsa’ which seems to have the definite connotation of ‘rubbish’. In England, as I was growing up anyway, the term pop music simply meant ‘not classical’ and therefore for me meant anything worth listening to (this might be an English phenomenon).

What I want to do in this paper is to use the pair of philosophical troublemakers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to try to provide some ideas about the relations between social change, pop culture and gender here, if not exactly in Vilnius, in the space ‘formerly called Eastern Europe’ (I am reminded here of ‘the artist formerly known as Prince’ and I think the connection is not arbitrary). Deleuze and Guattari are perhaps best known to feminist thinkers on account of their concept ‘becoming-woman’ (which has had a mixed reception). But in addressing the theme of today’s conference, my focus will be especially on The Anti-Oedipus, the first of the two major works which constitute the volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia (pub’d in lit?) The 2 books are an attempt to explore an apparently simple question: what is capitalism and how does it function? This question leads to a second, more apparently complex one of how capitalism influences our way of thinking. As a result of this, one reasonably accurate way of trying to characterise their philosophy is as a confrontation of philosophy with pop or with the other modes of experience (multiple, sexual, emotional, provocative, uncertain) which capitalism seems to bring to the surface. Much of the difficulty associated with reading them stems from the fact that they are trying to explore these contemporary, pop-culture challenges to thinking in the style of their own writing: for example, slogans like ‘becoming-woman’ sound like adverts, and like adverts are it is difficult to pin down exactly what we are being sold. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari in their book on Kafka speak in praise of Pop writing, Pop music, Pop philosophy (that I only spotted thanks to the optic granted by preparing for this conference) before going on to make a comment which suggests something more in this direction: ‘Is there a chance for philosophy which has been for so long an official and referential genre? Let’s profit from the moment when anti-philosophy today wants to be a language of power.’ (K 49-50) Here they equate the challenges of pop (of that which is anti-philosophy) to philosophy as a real chance to open the doors of thinking. But this air of celebration already seems to contain a warning, ‘let’s use profit from today before it passes’: Deleuze and Guattari were writing in the ‘popular’ context of post May 1968 Paris – in Vilnius 2004, might we shake our heads sadly and think the moment has indeed past and pop has become polluted.

                      But would we be right and if so why? Deleuze and Guattari’s major thesis in the 2 volumes that constitute Capitalism and Schizophrenia is that the social and desire are two sides of the same coin. They describe this as follows:

                      There is not on the one hand a social production of reality and on the other hand a desiring production of fantasy (…) In fact, social production is uniquely desiring production itself in determined conditions. We say that the social field is immediately traversed by desire, that it is its historically determined product, and that the libido has no need of mediation or sublimation, no psychic operation, no transformation, in order to invest productive forces and production relations. There is only desire and the social, and nothing else. Even the most repressive and morbid forms of social reproduction are produced by desire, in the form of the organisation that stems from it under such and such a particular condition which it is up to us to analyse. (A-O 36)

 There are not separate fields of production and desire, all production involves desire (somewhere) and all desire is production (even if this is disguised or perverted under various labels). As long as we consider these fields in isolation we will be making a great error: indeed, our function as thinkers seems to be to consider how a given social form determines the production of desire. Pop culture is that area with the distinction between production and desire becomes most blurred – as famously satirised in the Dire Straits song ‘Money for Nothing’, so what I want to do is sketch out a little of what Deleuze and Guattari argue about production and desire to better attack the strange phenomenon of gender and pop culture.

Deleuze and Guattari’s main idea is that human existence is composed of a continual, multiple connection making productive force which they call desire. The first objective of a society is to master these forces of desire and bring them under the control of a central codifying moment, for instance the figure of the despot, whose cruel authority provides the anchoring point against which any action must be considered. Thus pre-capitalist societies are marked above all by the excess of cruelty and hierarchisation with which they repress the expression of desire: all actions have sense to the extent that they relate to the codifying structures put in place by the tyrant. In capitalism, the situation is quite different. For, here, everything is no longer subordinate to the state, but quite the reverse, the state is dependent on merchandise and private property.

                      How does this happen? Capitalism functions on the basis of a force of labour which is alienated from the worker in that the process of production is sold to the capitalist on the basis of an exchange whereby the worker receives a salary on the understanding that the capitalist convert the product of his labour into profit. The processes of production are thus twice alienated: once, in an emphasis on the product, not on the process, and second in that the product is alienated from the producer. Yet, through the mediation of capital, the worker is given the means to acquire objects of desire, the products he or she requires to survive. The role of capital is central in maintaining this structure of alienation and acquiring of objects of production: its fluctuating sense makes possible an equivalence between things which basically have nothing in common, ie. a total non-coincidence between capital as salary which in the present can be exchanged for goods and capital as profit which can serve for future investments and linking on markets. Capital thus requires the encouragement of desire to increase or find new forms of production, while at the same time constantly having to find ways to keep this production within the bounds of society.

                      It may seem strange to be talking about desire and production as being the same, because desire as we understand it generally means something very different: I desire a Coca-Cola, or He desires her or him or I desire my mum. Deleuze and Guattari, however, argue that this is a misrepresentation of desire which has social origins. For if we say I want a coke, we say something that makes sense in physical and social terms: I can go to the shop, buy a coke and then drink it; but veils the durational nature of this drinking process (what really happens, the contact of liquid or sugar with my tongue, the passage of sugar/liquid into my bloodstream, the nervous excitement, the memories and fantasies of childhood, the rememberings and fantasies of advertising, etc.). Between the object ‘coca-cola’ and the process of my experience there is a huge divide which it is common for us to overlook.

                      For Deleuze and Guattari, it was Freud and psychoanalysis which opened the door to understanding desire differently, as an essentially chaotic and productive force undermining stable codes of signification, but which then also is largely responsible for shutting it again. For having discovered a chaotic, uncontrolled whirlpool of socially oriented pulsions in the unconscious, Freud went to see the roots of these drives in our frustrated desires for the objects that are the other members of our family. But, Deleuze and Guattari argue, if this is the case, is it not possible that we have these desires and frustrations because of a specific mode of social organisation where the family is a part of a wider repressive social whole rather than because this is the natural archetype of human existence. This is the core of the Anti-Oedipus: not that the Oedipus complex does not exist, but that it in itself is an organising structure forced on desires of a quite different social order. How is it, they wonder, that Freud manages to ignore all the social or chaotic animalistic elements in the delusions of his patients, and see everything as a sign of mummy or daddy. (with students on Da Vinci) What is he afraid of? What difference would it make, Deleuze and Guattari wonder, if the problems of the unconscious were not clamped within the structure of the family, but were invested in the wider social whole? Surely we don’t just desire our mothers or fathers, or even a lost signifier or moment of truth, but lots of stuff of which our mothers and fathers are some. Does Freud, for instance, really discovers the Oedipus complex in his own self-analysis or in his own classical Goethe-based cultural heritage (A-O 64). Is myth not itself a way of trying to structure forces which are essentially more barbaric, wild and subversive? Is this perhaps also a danger for us as academics that we are trying to find ways to structure forces, such as those of gender and pop culture, whose primarily element is to be chaotic and cause responses of a quite different nature.

                      Deleuze and Guattari congratulate Lacan on having discovered this rich domain of a code of the unconscious which envelopes all the chains through which we communicate and thus to have transformed psychoanalysis, but they add:

                      ‘How strange this domain is on account of its multiplicity, to the point at which we can hardly talk about a signifying chain or even a desiring code. Chains are called signifying because they are made up of signs, but these signs are not themselves signifying. (The code does not look so much like a language, but some sort of jargon, an open and polyvocal formation.) [The signs] have got no plan; they all work on all levels and in all connections; each speaks its own language and establishes with others syntheses that are all the more direct for being transversal than they remain indirect within the elements that they constitute in their own right.’ (AO 46)

                      This is a little complex, but what Deleuze and Guattari are basically asserting is the unconscious as an essentially multiple factory where nothing means anything stable, but connections are made perhaps more strongly between elements that seem to have nothing to do with each other than they do between elements which appear to be proximate. This argues for a multiplicity of human experience and also human mental experience where we respond to a whole variety of signs in a range of ways which might not necessarily be those of understanding.

                      This is of course a key feature of the signs with which capitalism confronts us. Whether it be a movie, an advert, a pop video or the contents of a magazine or an internet page, we are called on to interact with a huge of variety of signs in ways that defy the logical. (true of economics pages?) Thus a stable hierarchy of social signification is being undermined, and in the interstices thus opened the question of gender emerges. For capitalism and pop culture are undermining the prevailing hierarchy of gender roles. Pop culture likes gender, both in the form of explicit sexuality and gender related question (eg. tabloid newspapers, t.v. chat shows as opposed to the news). To give a site-specific example, in Warsaw for about two years now we have a pair of free newspapers called Metropol and Metro respectively. In a recent media survey of gender issues performed by students, a student presented an article from Metropol about how it was to be hoped that men would soon reach as far up the evolutionary scale as women and be using make up to make the world a more seductive space. This article carried provocations about gender conduct that it is difficult to imagine being repeated in Poland’s more serious, reflective newspapers. This sexualisation of the media in Poland is also witness to an increase in the prominence of women journalists hosting ‘serious’ media shows on t.v. and radio. A marketing point in advertising campaigns becomes the fact that the show will be hosted by a strong, dominant woman. (Aside about Academia Nauk?)

                      However, things are of course not so simply positive. The form in which sexuality is presented in capitalist society is also imbued with sex as object of consumption. To take just a few examples from these billboard adverts I photographed in Poland, sexuality, or rather women as sexual objects are substituted from material physical consumption, e.g. eating ice creams or chocolate, and therefore for capitalist consumption: the possession of the object of desire is enough for desire to be fulfilled. The use of sex as a sign for consumption maliciously occludes the process of production: either in the production of the object, or in the process of ‘making love’ (‘have sex’, ‘). So sex is in a sense everywhere and nowhere, since its form of being present is only in the sense of objects which make it different from the process of sexual pleasure or production that it is. (Irigaray: the sex which is not one, Deleuze and Guattari) This is true not only in the use of the female body as a visual sign for sex, that we can see everywhere from advertising to MTV videos, but in the strange concentration on and refusal to show the penis in even as gender challenging a film as Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education.

                      All this confusion is, according to Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism’s bread and butter: its characteristic feature is that ‘it liberates fluxes of desire, but in social conditions which defines its limit and the possibility of its dissolution, so much so that it unceasingly contradicts with all its exasperated forces the movement which pushes it towards its limit.’ (A-O 163) This comment seems particularly relevant with regard to the strange mixture of capital liberalism and repressive morality that marks George W. Bush or the embracing of capitalism and proliferation of rules and morality that marks contemporary Poland (where for example you might not be able to see out of a window because the whole bus is daubed in an advert, while on the inside the only thing to look at is page after page of rules for how to use public transport).

                      The confused picture of sexuality and gender relations that emerges from pop culture, I would argue therefore needs to be linked to the wider questions of desire and production. What we are being shown is desire alienated from the process which it is, from the processes of production, even production of one’s own sexual experience. In post communist Eastern Europe I would argue this form of sexuality is particularly prevalent and especially threatening because of the crisis of production. In Poland, we have 20% unemployment – even those who have jobs (at the last count, I had about 4) feel alienated from anything that might be called productive desire. Deleuze and Guattari describe the unconscious as a multiple factory: but what is the sense of this depiction if all the factories are being shut and we are moving into an age of service industries and unemployment. In this sense, the instilling of sexuality into the marketing of capitalism is a malicious perversion of the energy of production into a desire for sexual consumption. The chauvinism that I sense in Poland and the ex-USSR I think is best read in this sense: where there is nothing to do, sexuality represents an empty desire for consumption (and fulfilling sexual desire also is intimately linked with your ability to make purchases).

                      This mix of an excess of desire with nowhere to go is a potent brew and has great danger and potential for the countries of Eastern Europe. For, as mentioned above society needs to control undirected desires and therefore purposeless desire is often accompanied by repressive measures, not just in the states but also within those who feel this restlessness. This can often lead to sexism, intolerance and fetishised nationalism, as wonderfully portrayed in a volcanic novel by a young female Polish author Dorota Masłowska called The Polish-Russian War (under the Red and White Flag). This novel is a tale of the furious energy of liberated desire with nothing to do: nothing means anything, even the underlying Polish-Russian war of the title is just a nationalist fetish trying to force history onto the chaotic market relations of L&M cigarettes. The hero himself is a confused mixture of social discourses: his left wing dream for example is to have his own business where the secretaries will lie sexually available on the desks and he will export Polish fun-fair rides to the West.

                      One of the features of both the content and the form of this novel is that it follows the proliferation of signs of different kinds which as a whole simply cannot be fitted together: does the red and white of a Coca-Cola umbrella have anything to do with the way the buildings in the town have been transformed into a patriotic red and white flag the hero wonders (the very fact that the book is filled with pictures also illustrates this). This fragmentation in all its ambivalence is something Deleuze and Guattari identify as one of the truths being exposed by capitalism:

                      No chain is homogenous, but resembles a parade of letters from different alphabets, where suddenly an ideogramme will arise, or a pictogramme, the little image of an elephant that passes or of a sun that rises. All of a sudden in the chain which links (without transforming them into a composition) phonemes, morphemes, etc. daddy’s moustache appears, along with mum’s raised arm, a ribbon, a little girl, a cop, a shoe. (A-O 47)

All chains, whether unconscious or those of social production, compose items that are different from each other and the chains made visible in the media make this most obvious. I think for example of an advert for a sausage called Berlinki currently shown on Polish television, where the sausage dances onto the screen in a skirt and dark glasses causing all the vegetables to swoon in admiration before falling lasciviously onto a bed of lettuce. We live in the time of fragmentary objects which have no sense in relation to a total whole, but this does not prevent them from having a real impact or us from thinking about how they work.

                      For capitalism very often makes possible phenomena which resist categorisation, even by capital. Pop music, for example, has long been involved in queering gender relations: from the likes of Queen, David Bowie, to Boy George and the majority of male English pop artist of the 80’s, the artist formerly known as Prince, Michael Jackson, Madonna or Kylie Minogue, pop music has long involved in an intense production of sexual energy which does not easily allow itself to be relocated in any sort of code. Pop creates energy and responses which are essentially self-contradictory, but these contradictions do not stop it from having enormous potential to create chaotic energetic responses or controlled market success. An area which struck me during my unfortunately too brief time watching music television in Belarus was the extent to which singers of bands in what I considered macho Russian society, such as Mumin Troll and others too numerous to mention, appeared in videos as highly sexualised and rather feminine. Following this line, Tatu are especially interesting for the fact that they were the artificial brainchild of a Russian oligarch, and may or may not actually have been lesbians, were an enormous commercial success and opened up questions of sexuality in ways that escape any social or capitalist control.

                      The same ambiguity is evident in many areas, such as for example internet pornography which repeats the present/absence of sexuality, treats sexuality as commodity, yet has the potential to create unexpected events in the real world. (song) However it is always possible that capital will be the quickest to cope with these ambiguities: the photos, I passed around of adverts for MacDonald’s merely suggest liberated desire, freedom, where in them is the moment of consumption. Is even our freedom capitalised or is capital liberating desire beyond its own limits.

                      What is to be done? Deleuze and Guattari are in n doubt:

                      Schizophrenise, schizophrenise the field of the unconscious, and also the socio-historical field, in order to destroy the carcass of Oedipus and rediscover everywhere the force of desiring productions, to relink the analytic machine, desire and production with the Real. Because the unconscious is no more structural than it is personal, it does not symbolise any more than it imagines or makes figurative: it machines, it is machinic. Neither imaginary or symbolic, it is the Real in itself, ‘the impossible real’ and its production. (A-O 62)

Deleuze and Guattari’s applaud feminism is for the way it has reinstilled the question of desire in the wider social structure. For if a business, politics, advertising or education function, it is only through a machine of desires: what are those desires, how do they work, is it possible to create others? But even if we start to track this patchwork of liberations and repressions, how can we turn a system which already liberates and represses in a better direction? Their call to schizophrenise is not a simple act of hedonism: for all Deleuze and Guattari’s naivety and praise of pop, their own analyses remain rooted in examples from the highest of culture. The call for a schizophrenisation is more a request to link desire to the social structures of power and liberation in which we are situated, and to explore how we can produce in the interstices, in other words how can we and society with us ‘become-woman’. How?