sex and the Signifier
Foucault Summer School, Lancaster University, June 11, 2010
I stumbled across this text—notes for a talk at a graduate summer school organized by Yoke-Sum Wong at Lancaster University in June 2010—while trawling through old files on my computer looking for something else. As was common during my talks at that time and since, I worked from a Powerpoint slide presentation containing images and quotations around which I extemporized (and broke often for discussion), working with only skeletal notes, of which these are typical.
The Powerpoint has long since disappeared, leaving me with this torso. I thought it nevertheless worth reproducing, as the ghost of a provocative article that never got written. I have provided as many hyperlinks to the images that likely would have been on the slides as I can manage—I have no permissions to reproduce the images themselves—as well as restoring some of the quotes I would have used on the slides.
Slide 1 Title
Intro: This talk is not an exposition of Foucault so much as a riff on themes emerging from his History of Sexuality, Part 1, centred also around the other two texts I asked you to read: the opening section of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, and the first two pages of Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye.
The image on the slide is Toyen (Marie Čermínová), illustration for Sade, Justine (Prague 1933: Edice 69, limited edition “for subscribers only”).
Slide 2 Warning
This is a warning—obligatory these days in academic contexts. The show contains images many would deem offensive or obscene. You are not obliged to stay/watch. The wording is that which precedes showing of True Blood on UK TV.
Some might think it an advertisement: we are promised fun, fun, fun “From the outset …”
Here goes …
PART 1 PURITY AND DANGER
Slide 3 Sally Mann Immediate Family, intro
First section of the talk is built around the controversial images in Sally Mann’s Immediate Family (1992). I’ve called it “purity and danger” (Mary Douglas) because it highlights the uneasiness of borderlines, in this case of sexuality and innocence.
Oxymoron of the sexualized child.
Mann is one of America’s most respected and renowned contemporary photographers, but these images caused great controversy at time of publication and even more since. Why? She sees them as natural, normal, family photos: a mother’s view of her kids as they grow <quote on slide, note Mann’s sarcasm>
Slide 4 Immediate Family, examples
(Open for discussion). Note: 1. Nudity (photos). 2. Signifiers of adult sexiness (pearl necklace, <candy> cigarette, laced-up boots/roller skates: think Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman). 3. Body poses (come hither/look at me).
Or is it just “dressing up”: childhood mimicry of adult behaviour? Close to the bone …
Slide 5 “Venus after School”
Especially perhaps this image.
(Open for discussion) Note: 1. Pose of body on couch, gaze, positioning of hand on crotch. 2. Background figure. 3. Title (again the titillating oxymoron).
Does this remind you of anything?
Slide 6 Manet “Olympia”
Why was Olympia so inflammatory? Because Manet took a classical nude pose (after Titian) and used a famous contemporary courtesan (i.e. a prostitute) as his model. Note directness of her gaze. Also the black ribbon around the neck—not functional clothing, emphasizes nudity.
Key issue here resonances between Mann’s Venus and Manet’s Olympia—transferring the attributes of the hooker onto the pre-pubescent girl, sexualizing the adolescent body by association (Derrida: the trace. Issue here is not representation but signification—what do the visual elements of the image conjure up, signify, connote).
Slide 7 Kate Moss “Obsession”
A notorious—but not censored or withdrawn—Calvin Klein ad featuring the 17-year-old naked Kate Moss, shot by her then boyfriend Mario Sorrenti.
Plays on same oxymoronic borderlines. Note the androgeny of the body (breasts hidden)—she could almost be a boy—the same direct gaze.
But also, in this case, the association of word and image: (1) the product being advertised, a perfume, is called Obsession (2) it is a perfume for men. Is the implication that this is what men clandestinely obsess about?
We can debate the morality of such ads later, but the main point I want to establish now is that sexuality is irreducibly caught up in (and arguably constituted by) the field of language, verbal and visual—the play of signification—and language, conversely, is shot through with sexuality. Which is why it is difficult to talk, appropriately, about today’s topic.
What language do we use that is not either complicit in the phenomenon we are studying (therefore obscene + pornographic) or does violence to the subject-matter by abstracting from precisely what makes the erotic what it is?
PART 2 UPENDING THE REPRESSION HYPOTHESIS
Slide 8 Diverted traffic
Photo shot (by me) in London 2002. That pearl necklace again. I liked the juxtaposition of the nude, the phallic traffic light, and the sign “Diverted Traffic.”
But the notion of diverted traffic is central to the classical “repression hypothesis” that Foucault is attacking. Central to his argument is a reversal: far from society’s taboos and prohibitions repressing/diverting primeval sexual drives that are always already there, it is they that constitute and differentiate human sexualities in the first place.
Slide 9 Dangers of Pollution
Surrealists were major critics of what they saw as the “bourgeois” organization of sexuality, drawing on Freud as potential liberating force. Max Ernst’s 1931 article “Danger de pollution” is attacking the detailed, almost bureaucratic, moral classification of the relative sinfulness of various sexual activities, orifices, etc. in medieval Catholic texts.
“Thanks to the prescience of the Church doctors, the female body is now divided by horribly precise borders into decent and indecent areas. Irresistible passion may sometimes cause these borders to disappear, but they continually return with nauseating sharpness―until the glorious day when a happy massacre will rid the earth of clerical pests forever.”
A Foucauldian response would be to say that it is precisely the zoning of the body and division of sexual activities into decent and indecent that eroticizes them in the first place, creating the pleasures and gradations of perversion.
Slides 10 + 11 Hooker postcards
Hooker postcards in London telephone boxes (but also small ads, internet sites, etc.).
<Gloss photos>: fine-grained national/racial divisions (busty black lady, new Italian goddess, oriental cherry blossom, sweet Japanese model, Anglo-Asian spanking delights, French kissing); lexicon of activities—O and A levels, water sports, bubble bath, tie n’tease, 2-way spanking; details of “toys”—strap and slipper, uniforms, sexy lingerie; and a galaxy of masquerades—school girl, naughty nurse, French maid.
This lexicon of perverted pleasures is as detailed as in the notorious DSM—which in many ways it parodies. I am reminded of Foucault’s Chinese encyclopedia in The Order of Things.
To repeat my earlier point about language, this cornucopia of illicit delights depends in its very constitution upon an elaborate, if not always readily intelligible, system of classification.
PART 3 THE PLEASURES OF DISCIPLINE
Slide 12 The duplicity of the subject
Title is an allusion to the doubled nature—the duplicity?—of the Foucauldian subject (subject/agent, but also subjected). Disciplines do not only repress, they constitute agents and agency: as PhD students should know! They have their pleasures. Extreme, almost parodic exemplification of this thesis in the field of human sexuality is masochism.
Slide 13 Man is born free …
Celebrated example of such a masochistic sexuality is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, author of Social Contract, Emile, or Education, and Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.
Rousseau is the very embodiment of the Enlightenment. Keystones of his philosophy include (a) innate goodness of Man and (b) his infinite perfectibility through the application of Reason to social organization. Stands at the head of progressive political philosophies, influencing Marx among others. A key icon of modernity (opposite of Catholic doctrines of the Fall and original sin).
But Rousseau had a dark and dirty secret, which saw the light of day at the beginning of his Confessions. He harbored a lifelong longing to be put over a woman’s knee and spanked.
Slide 14 Dominatrix
Rousseau attributed this “bizarre taste” to a spanking he received at the hands of his adoptive mother, Mlle Rambercier, at the age of eight.
“Just as Mlle Lambercier had the affections of a mother for us,” he relates, “she also had the authority of one, and sometimes carried it to the point of inflicting children’s punishments on us, when we deserved it.”
For a rather long time she confined herself to the threat, and this threat of a punishment that was completely new to me seemed very frightening; but after its execution, I found the experience of it less terrible than the expectation had been, and what is most bizarre in this is that this punishment increased my affection even more for the one who had inflicted it on me.
“It even required all the truth of that affection,” he goes on, “to keep me from seeking the repetition of the same treatment by deserving it: for I had found in the suffering, even in the shame, an admixture of sensuality which had left me with more desire than fear to experience it a second time from the same hand.”
Elaborate on passage: what is so erotic? Not just the physical sensation of pain. The admixture of suffering, shame, and sensuality.
Comment on the dominatrix image on the slide. She doesn’t have to be dressed like that to administer a spanking. Proximity of cane and buttocks—intimation of what the sub is about to receive, transposed onto the female body.
Slide 15 Hello Kitty
Such masochism is not an exclusively male preserve. An episode recounted in Kenneth Tynan’s diaries:
The most unexpected thing I ever heard said: after a dinner party in the mid-fifties. The host desultorily asked the guests to name the three things they loved the most in the world. The answers ranged from the predictably serious (‘Schubert’s Quartets’) to the predictably skittish (‘onyx cufflinks’) until Kitty Freud shook her dark hair and said with trembling candour:
‘Travel, good food, and being spanked on my bottom with a hairbrush.’
Could/would a man have said this—or got away with it? The (socially-constructed) feminine is—or was in Bohemian London in the 1950s—arguably a space in which masochism can be “play” in a way in which it is not for men, because it fundamentally subverts what defines masculinity (being on top). For good or ill …
Slide 16 Secretary
Not just the 1950s. Would the film Secretary have been such a success—or the poster be so sexy—if the roles had been reversed?
But possibly the erotic attraction of being spanked, especially for a man, lies precisely in the reversal itself. Is submission (to irrational desire) the ultimate transgression of an order based upon the fantasy of (male, rational) domination?
PART 4 SEX AND THE SIGNIFIER
Slide 17 Language games
I want to return, at this point, to the question of the interface between language and the body, introduced earlier in connection with the Kate Moss adverts for Calvin Klein’s Obsession.
This connection was dramatized by surrealist artist Hans Bellmer in his 1930s dolls <elaborate>.
"I tried to rearrange the sexual elements of a girl's body like a sort of plastic anagram," Bellmer told an interviewer in 1972. "I remember describing it thus: the body is like a sentence that invites us to rearrange it, so that its real nature becomes clear through a series of anagrams."
Frequently banned as obscene, Bellmer’s dolls are anathema to many feminists because of how they are seen to represent the female body. But playing with the signification of dolls—a more complicated issue—is not confined to surrealist sickos …
Slide 18 Pussycat dolls
The transvestite Thai Band Venus FlyTrap (Venus again: but in this case also a carnivorous plant) play (transgressively) on the visual signifiers of feminine sexiness illustrated by the Pussycat Dolls.
But the Pussycat Dolls themselves are no less inscribed in the field of language, playing on not only the whole repertoire of dollishness (Hello Dolly, Guys and Dolls, dollybirds, etc. etc.) which Bellmer perverts but also the connotations of pussy …
Which brings me to Georges Bataille.
Slide 19 The pleasures of the text
At the beginning of Bataille’s The Story of the Eye 15-year-old Simone asks:
“milk is for the pussy, isn’t it? Do you dare me to sit in the saucer?” Then I lay down at her feet without her stirring and for the first time, I saw her ‘pink and dark flesh,’ cooling in the white milk.”
Why is Bataille’s text sexy? Indeed powerfully erotic? There is nothing intrinsically sexual, after all, about a saucer of milk for the cat.
The English translation works because of the pun on pussy. The French chat has same double meaning (and the chapter title is “L’oeil du chat”—which is also where the book ends/climaxes). The original French text works through a different pun (“Les assiettes, c’est fait pour s’asseoir, n’est-ce pas, me dit Simone. Paries-tu? Je m’assois dans l’assiette”). Roland Barthes’ analysis: the eroticism lies in the play of signifiers.
Bellmer’s photographic illustration of this scene, I suggest, would have been less powerful, less erotic, because it is too literal: a crude representation rather than a playful and productive signification.
Slide 20 Exchanging glances with a cat
So I will leave you with an image which—in the context of this talk, and juxtaposed with another image from Picasso—might lead us to a different reading of Levi-Strauss’s famous closing words to Tristes Tropiques…
Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying! And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity can bear to interrupt its hive-like labours, let us grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to us in a mineral more beautiful than any work of Man; in the scent, more subtly evolved than our books, that lingers in the heart of a lily; or in the wink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat.
I am afraid I have can’t remember which two images I might have chosen to end the presentation with, though Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde is a distinct possibility. In which case the Picasso would likely have been his Two Figures and a Cat (1903).