Taking a Ride on the Disco Stick: Sirens Song's of the Financial Crisis

"The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language."

-Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Inspired by Brüno's anarchic, situationist-style attack on the unconscious of the spectacle, I thought I might actually attempt to give my reading of what "power and the spectacle" really means in our moment of late capitalism, or what Fredric Jameson has called Postmodernity. What does it mean to read media, propaganda or newspapers, advertising or film when culture is the very logic of capital accumulation?

What is the Spectacle?

Published in 1967, Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle was a whole new direction for Western Marxism to take vis a vis the "relations of production."

"By means of the spectacle the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise. The spectacle is the self-portrait of power in the age of power's totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence. The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity in spectacular relationships conceals their true character as relationships between human beings and between classes; a second Nature thus seems to impose inescapable laws upon our environment. But the spectacle is by no means the inevitable outcome of a technical development perceived as natural; on the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that choses its own technical content. If the spectacle -- understood in the limited sense of those 'mass media' that are its most stultifying superficial manifestation -- seems at times to be invading society in the shape of a mere apparatus, it should be remembered that this apparatus has nothing neutral about it, and that it answers precisely to the needs of the spectacle's internal dynamics." (Thesis 24, Society of the Spectacle)

The key thought this passage is the "fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity" that accompanies the monologue of gratuitious "self-praise" or a "self-portrait" of power by power that can be read in the spectacle of images and discourses that we call culture. Power appears neutral, natural, inescapable; however, the society sustained by and immersed in the spectacle "is a form that choses its own technical content." We have a choice in what we read and what we see, but no matter what you chose, you feed and consume the beast of the spectacle. You're plugged into the matrix, etc. (To the left is shoe advertisement alongside a May '68 poster.)

The Local Cynicism of Power

While I am generally sympathetic to the Situationist project, and I think their critique of capitalism is pretty trenchant, I think they miss something about the way power functions differently on a tactical vs. strategic level. I have in mind something M. Foucault once wrote: "the rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power)...an implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost mute strategies which coordinate the loquacious tactics whose 'inventors' or decisionmakers are often without hypocrisy" (History of sexuality: the will to knowledge, 95). Power functions because at the strategic level there are no inventors, no one is to blame for the anonymous system, however on the localized tactical level, power is cynical

Reading the Cynical Contradictions of the Spectacle

If power is cynical on the local level at which it is inscribed in the spectacle, we could reasonably expect to find it engaged in a "loquacious" "monologue" talking about itself constantly, revealing it's contradictions to us. You have to listen for it, but I think pop music, in particular, and the following selection of music videos from Bowie, Britney, and Lady GaGa is a pretty uncanny example of the local cynicism of power showing its tactical hand. What will be revealed is that the cynical voice of the spectacle taunts us with come ons, seducing us with its wiles and charms. The conceit of this blog post is to take literally the idea that we can construct a narrative of the dual crisis of late capitalism and the Left from 1969-2009 from the materials of popular culture. That capitalism talks to us and all we have to do is listen, but, in the wake of the 60s-era radical politics has capitalism begun to disclose its overarching strategy in all of its babble? Does it show us it's underlying contradictions?

I will try to keep editorial comments to a minimum, periodising and contextualizing only slightly on this journey through the space and time of the spectacle.

Prelude 1969
One year after the situationist general strike ground Paris to a halt, the United States put a man on the moon, and we get this initial transmission from the spectacle: 1969, David Bowie's "Space Oddity" (which is a riff on Stanley Kubrick's 1968 cinematic masterpiece, 2001: Space Odyssey)

Ground control to Major Tom
Take your protein pills
And put your helmet on

The revolutionaries of 68 had "really made the grade." Apparently, "the papers want[ed] to know whose shirts [they] wear." Marx famously made a comment in his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte about how counter-revolutions always dressing up in old garb to repeat history as farce.

LESSON NO. 1: All good general strikes come to an end. "Now its time to leave the capsule if you dare."

Did the leftist "spaceship know which way to go" in this tripped out postmodern spectacle that began in 1969? Our scorecard from the past 41 years after Bowie's video doesn't look so pretty. In 1971, the US unilaterally withdrew from the Bretton Woods agreement, making the dollar the default reserve currency of the world. The world was plunged into a recession, and OPEC sent oil price shocks throughout world markets. In 1979, Paul Volcker ascended to the position of Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Regan was elected in the US and Thacher in the UK, and the neoliberalsim bueyed the capitalist system by deindustrializing much of the core countries in the First World.

Interlude: 2000

Britney's dot-com-era bubble pop anthem "Oops! I Did It Again" tops music charts around the globe, selling over a million CDs. This is the height of what Robert Brenner has called Bubblenomics



Sorry about the video remix. Having flashbacks to Bowie yet? Britney's people have disabled video embedding. "That is just so typically" her. The "original" is here. Indeed, spectacular capitalism is "not that innocent"! Though poor Britney was a tender 19 years old in 2000, when she was zipped into in that latex space suit.

You see my problem is this:
I'm dreaming away;
Wishing that heroes, they truly exist.
I cry watching the days.
Can't you see I'm a fool
In so many ways?
But to lose all my senses...
That is just so typically me.

The dialogue at the end of the video is a reference to the 1997 movie Titanic.

Capitalism: "But I thought the old lady dropped it into the ocean in the end"
The Left: "Well baby, I went down and got it for you"
Capitalism: "Awwwwe...you shouldn't have"

"Ground control to Major Tom" the boat was sinking! And surprise, the dot-com bubble popped.

LESSON NO. 2: Speculative bubbles pop. The spectacle began "dreaming away / Wishing that heroes, they truly exist"

Chorus: 2003-2004

Toxic ass(et)s were flying high. Two years after jihadis hijack planes to destroy monuments of American global military and financial hegemony, and at the height of the real estate bubble and recovery of the airline industry: Britney fills out the stiletto pumps of a poisonous femme fatal stalking the landscape of loft-dwelling urban financiers for her masterpiece, "Toxic." US Bankers start funelling investments through Japanese savings accounts, issuing a globalized come-on to keep consuming and producing.



Again, a video mash-up with Gwen Stefani's 2004 journey down the rabbit hole in "What You Waiting For." Because no one on the internet can share Britney's "intellectual" property. Original video here.

The wink at the end of the original is delicious. In this version, Britney Spears actually throws a bomb at the gates to a building labeled "Toxic Industries" and Gwen Stefani grows too bloated for a nice piece of real estate.

The song is composed in C minor, like Ludwig von Beethoven's ominous, or alternatively heroic "Symphony No. 5," composed two centuries ago. Spears "Toxic in C Minor" is, however, just as infectious, perhaps, more dance-y.

The zeitgeist of post-9/11 subsequently sang her chorus (which was apparently used to torture Guantanamo Bay detainees in a "noise room") for 4 long years:

"With a taste of your lips, I'm on a ride
You're toxic, I'm slippin' under
taste of a poison paradise
I'm addicted to you
Don't you know that you're toxic?
And I love what you do
Don't you know that you're toxic?"

We mustn't forget the bridge of the track:

"Too high, can't come down
Losing my head,
Spinning 'round and 'round
Do you feel me now?"

Do you feel her now? Was the "taste of a poison paradise"? "Taking a sip" of the "devils cup" is incidentally precisely the genealogical account of debt obligations that Nietzsche traces all the way back to the Christian morality of "guilt."

LESSON NO. 3: "What you waiting for? Take a chance you stupid hoe!"

2007: Another Day, Another Drama. The Real Estate Bubble Pops

On September 9, two days before the six year anniversary of "9/11", Britney made her "comeback" at the MTV Video Music Awards. The media burst into a frenzy tearing her performance and her bodyweight to shreds. The performance eclipsed an entire news cycle that could have reckoned with the legacy of an interminable "War On Terror"



Blackout debuted at number two on the UK Albums Chart and the U.S. Billboard 200. making Spears the only female music artist to have her first five albums go to number one and two.

This demonstrates another important point: attacking pop culture as degraded or advocating a revolutionary seizure of the State is as futile as trying to decapitate a hydra. It also repeats the drama of mysogyny, you can't hate on the "whore of Babylon," who's busy bailing out your banks and subsidizing your student loans and mortgages. The contradiction of shameless autophagy -- Kronos eating his children -- is simply how late capitalism works when value is abstracted into 1s and 0s. Fag bashing, woman-hating or smashing the capitalist State, is also the very engine of fame, the very life blood of our current stage of capitalism. Britney's "disastrous" performance also propelled another budding starlet to fame, the uncanny Chris Crocker



"What you don't realize is that [Capitalism] is making you all this money and all you do is write a bunch of crap about her!"




You Still Want a Piece of Miss American Dream?

Still, in 2007 rearranging the chairs on the Titanic appeared fun, glamorous and sexy! Love her or hate her, the mouthpiece of late capitalism will preemt your criticism:

I'm Miss bad media karma
Another day another drama
Guess I can't see the harm
In working and being a mama
And with a kid on my arm
I'm still an exceptional earner
And you want a piece of me

I'm Mrs. Lifestyles of the rich and famous
(You want a piece of me)
I'm Mrs. Oh my God that Britney's Shameless
(You want a piece of me)
I'm Mrs. Extra! Extra! this just in
(You want a piece of me)
I'm Mrs. she's too big now she's too thin
(You want a piece of me)

Side Note: in the post-production of the bathroom dance scene, Britney's body required some special effects wizardry. They thinned her waistline. She's still an "exceptional earner," so you better "Tighten your belts!"

LESSON NO. 4 Capitalism will always be "misses she's too big now she's too thin."

2008: Reprieve, or "Lovegame" of Failed Utopias?

I want to kiss you
But if I do then I might miss you, babe
It's complicated and stupid

Where did she learn that fist gesture?

Still got love for all those suits on a plane (not to be confused with Snakes on A Plane)? Maybe if we just follow the Leninist revolutionary script and nationalize those "mothafuckin' [suits] on a mothafukin plane" the world would be a better place! Unfortunately, this is still the libidinal project of most Marxists. Jameson argued in an NLR piece titled "Politics of Utopia" that utopia was "structured like desire." Utopian projects, and capitalism is not exempt from this, begin to work precisely when the impossible object of desire has failed, when it is realized as unattainable. The divine Lady GaGa has realized this, however, in her long nights cabareting on the Lower East Side, she probably never had the time to read Jameson's 2004 essay. The love affair with late capital is a game, a "lovegame" to be precise. The libidinal economy is just as real as the so called "real economy."

Why hasn't the left followed Samuel L. Jackson's lead and just blow a hole in the plane, take the whole thing down? Why are we still debating where the chairs on the Titanic should be placed? Perhaps your ass is still "squeezed by sexy cupid"?

LESSON NO. 5: Capitalism says, "I wanna take a ride on your disco stick." But it also gives us a fair warning.

"It always starts the same
with a boy and a girl and a *grunt* game
...a lovegame"

The stakes of this lovegame are pretty high considering the emminent likelihood of a premature capitalist ejaculation. "Green shoots" the media tells us! Maybe this toxic cumshot can "green wash" our mode of production. Maybe capitalism could make babies with the environmental movement and produce a new legion of working class proletarians, working in some new "green collar economy." Capitalism -- much like Sappho's dialectical line about Eros -- is always "bittersweet":

"Maybe three seconds is enough
For my heart to quit it?"

The Current Conjuncture

Britney's 2009 album is appropriately titled Circus. A previous generation of Brazilian radicals in the psychedelic Tropicalia scene (Os Mutantes) called the phenomenon of reactionary bourgeois consciousness "Panis e Circensis" (Bread and Circuses) to harken back to the gladitorial spectacle of Ancient Rome



Substituting "markets" for dancefloor and Briney's first person pronoun for the Ich of Capital is instructive :

I feel the adrenaline moving through my veins
Spotlight on me and I'm ready to break
I'm like a performer, the [market] is my stage
Better be ready, hope that you feel the same

Ms. Spears lesson for Leftists of 2009?

"There's only two types of guys out there
Ones that can hang with me
And ones that are scared
So, baby, I hope that you
came prepared
I run a tight ship
so beware!"

The lumpen so satyrized by Marx in 18th Brumaire have "claws and teeth" to appropriate the presocratic fable Aristotle recounts of the hares and the lions. Louis Napoleon may have been a circus clown, but he became the ring leader of the 2nd Empire.

The symptom of Capitalism in crisis: "Everybody let go, we can make a [market] just like a circus."
The prescription for the Left: "Don't stand there watching me, follow me, show me what you can do"

Thus: Spectacular, capitalism as the obsessional repetition of the farce of 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, or rather a single track that keeps skipping. We are all lumpen swamp creatures, swimming in the muckety-muck of late capital. Raking the muck around isn't likely to do much to tidy things up.

During the fire dance sequence at the end of "Circus" anyone else having flashbacks to "Oops I Did It Again"?

How to avoid the mistakes of failed revolutions?

How to not let capitalism "do it again" to our hearts, and our Utopian imaginary? Is the Odysseus strategy for dealing with these syren songs of late capitalism is the best remedy: Tie your ass down to the mast of the ship, put plugs in your sailor buddies' ears, and listen to the music? Perhaps.

Bob Fosse's 1973 (See Prelude) masterpiece Cabaret, which is incidentally set in the Weimar Republic 1931, before the ascent of Hitler may prove instructive. Sing it Liza !



The daughter dressed in the garb of her mother! Marx would have had a field day with that!

However, we leftists should all have so much courage to perform our contradictions so fully and so nakedly, to confront them in such a way that we can heroically overcome them. This is the heart of the materialist dialectic pioneered by Marx. I've chosen figures who are ostentatiously female or faggy for all of these posts because I think we need to submit the vitriolic attack on lumpen to a dialectical critique. To observe that many Marxists are homophobic or misogynist is to state a commonplace: politically this troublesome libidinal structure is suicide. Hating capitalism, or hating petty bourgeois culture for its glitter and frills will get you nowhere. She's still the sexiest thing in the room. These women (and men) have been put on the sacrificial altar of capitalism, as superstars, as scapegoats on which we can heap our scorn and hatred of the system when they stumble and fall, when their waist lines grow or become too thin. To think dialectically is to embrace the tactical opportunities of the spectacle. We need sexier propaganda and more tripped out Utopian dreams. The Left should sit down on Lady GaGa's "disco stick" for a while. I'm convinced that we can learn from mistresses.

In a position he has named "anti-anti-Utopianism," Jameson subjects the concept of Utopia to a rigorously immanent critique or a determinate negation in order to extract truth from the ideologies of the various utopias and their detractors. He writes, "what these utopian oppositions allow us to do is, by way of negation, to grasp the moment of truth of each term. Put the other way around, the value of each term is differential, it lies not in its own substantive content but as an ideological critique of its opposite number." A truly rigorous dialectical thought about a particular utopia requires that we acknowledge its position as a partial or ideological view of society as a whole, and that no utopian discourse is exempt from this. He continues, "[a]nother way of thinking about the matter is the reminder that each of these utopias is a fantasy, and has precisely the value of a fantasy -- something not realized and indeed unrealizable in that partial form."

So what is Jameson's prescription for the failed utopias of the left, in our era of rétrenchment?

The boredom or dryness that has been attributed to the utopian text, beginning with More, is thus not a literary drawback nor a serious objection, but a very central strength of the utopian process in general. It reinforces what is sometimes called today democratization or egalitarianism, but that I prefer to call plebeianization: our desubjectification in the utopian political process, the loss of psychic privileges and spiritual private property, the reduction of all of us to that psychic gap or lack in which we all as subjects consist, but that we all expend a good deal of energy on trying to conceal from ourselves.

"Model railroads of the mind," Jameson writes, "these utopian constructions convey the spirit of non-alienated labour and of production far better than any concepts of écriture or Spiel" (pp. 40-41).

Another world is possible. A city of thousands is built every year in the "spirit of non-alienated labour." 1986: Inspired by the anarchist concept of creating "temporary autonomous zones," the Cacaphony Society built a laboratory for utopias at Baker Beach in San Francisco with a mere 20 people. At it's peak population in 2008, 49,599 people arrived to tinker with the supposedly "natural" "objective" reality of the the world. This city is not about performing some subjective écriture; there is no audience. People come there for the purpose of building "model railroads of the mind," and to experience a "loss of psychic privileges and spiritual private property." Stop spending all that energy trying to hide from your psychic gap, your Lacanian lack.





Mae West, born in 1893 in the now hipster neighborhood of Bushwick in Brooklyn, New York, and living to the ripe old age of 87 once quipped, "say anything you want about me so long as you mention my name." The left should try being a brazen hussy for a change.

Fredrich Nietsche once said, " I have certainly seen more men destroyed by the desire to have a wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink or harlots."

LESSON NO. 6: Kill the asshole boyfriend, kill the husband, kill the father, burn your God (ie. money). "He" was the problem all along. Only then will you learn how to start building utopian erector sets and "model railroads of the mind."

Did you catch the dialectical reversal hidden within the Lady GaGa "Paparazzi" video? She actually reverses the narrative structure after all those fantastic dance numbers: She dons the costume of the battered wife who tricks the spectacle into thinking that she has forgiven him for having pushed her off a balcony. As if! Dressed literally as mini-mouse, or mickie mouse in drag, she assasinates the paparazzi and fashion models who got you to consume her image.

I'll let the would be assassain of late capitalism speak for herself:

"Im your biggest fan
I'll follow you until you love me
Papa-paparazzi,
Baby there's no other superstar
You know that i'll be your
Papa-paparazzi"

Marriage is For Old Folks: I Want New Year's Every Eve

"I gotta sing my song
Why should I belong
to some guy who says that I'm wrong?"

and

"I'm exploding with youth and with zest
Who needs corroding in some vulture's nest?
I gotta fly on my wings,
go places, do things.
My freedom bells really gonna ring"

 

 

Brüno's Political Strategy: Bleach Yo "Aussenwich"

[Bruno Tea-Bagging alleged homophobe Eminem at the MTV Movie Awards May 31, 2009]

Like some post-postmodern Icarus, an outrageous fag fashionista has ceased to be the swishy darling of the Spectacle, having fallen from the sparkly heights of culture to take his place among the tarnished rabble. In what has proven to be the most ingenious consequence of one war machine of a film, Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen's eponymous hero is fictionally and now actually AUS.

The funniest thing about Cohen's "Bruno" schtick has always been the way his EuroFag television anchor persona turns the camera lens back around on media production, exposing the vacuity of our culture industry and how much the people who work in it will compromise themselves at the slightest whiff of fame or money. Brüno has actually thrown a monkey wrench into the gay-dominated culture industry in what is the most refreshing situationist-inspired assault on the spectacle that I've ever witnessed.

The Media Reaction

The New Yorker derides it as a "big skip backward" full of "immature" jokes "plucked from the crotch." Apparently indulging in the fantasy that "sexual inversion would take its place in the dustbin of history alongside other empty referenda on character such as red hair and left-handedness," Salon was outraged calling it a "mincing minstrel show." The writer even asserts that if Cohen were gay, his performance would have ensured "his essential uncastability." The NYTimes, hip to Freud and Cohen's comedic genious, registers the discomfort that Brüno causes liberal viewers and the comedic release of lauging at the "homophobes" on film but also misses the point, stating, "What "Brüno" tries hardest to be, and fails most significantly to become, is a sendup of the empty vanity of celebrity culture." The predominant mediatic narrative could be summarized as follows: Cohen does not authentically have butt sex ergo he is a pink-faced minstrel; Bruno is an uninteresting stereotype, disconnected from the experience of normal gays; the film is vulgar; it may provoke and parody homophobia simultaneously.

Facts are always stranger than fiction, or so the cliché goes.

The media criticism of Brüno reminds us that faggots still profoundly disturb society -- gays and straights alike -- which is still willing to publicly bash flamboyant fags verbally in the form of outraged reviews. However, our society *loved* Brokeback Mountain. It was nominated for Oscars. The Brokeback Mountain narrative was palatable to the "general public" because a gay man, Jack, who didn't or couldn't pass as a heterosexual was murdered. Americans love movies where the faggot dies in the end; they tolerate this kind of narrative about gays. They do not like movies where heterosexuality is the butt of the joke, where the character of heterosexuality is assassinated. This trope has a very long history stretching back to old Pulp Novels.

All this liberal "tolerance" makes me miss good old-fashioned, knee-jerk gay panic! Brüno preempts tolerance. In an interview with a "Second Level" gay conversion therapist, the dialogue reveals tolerance to be the very function of heterosexuality itself, which "tolerates" women, their "nagging," their flamboyance, discursive circumlocution, the lack of a "point" in what they say. Interestingly, this is the predominant mediatic criticism of the film itself! The Salon reviewer even asserts that Sacha Baron Cohen would be "uncastable" in the future, if he were actually gay in real life.

Barbara "I don't need to know how you are doing anal intercourse" Walters actually admitted to having a gay-panic attack in the movie theater, unlike her "tolerant" peers.



Unwittingly, Walters demonstrates the multiple levels of irony that are embedded within the film when she states, in the first degree of irony, "now this is going to make you all want to go out and see the movie." In the second degree of irony, one actually states the truth outright, while intending the opposite of what one says.

The so-called "gay community" has been scandalized by the film. The usual suspects, including GLAAD, et al have virtually denouced it in the post Prop 8 propaganda campaign to put out a respectable face -- and well-turned ankle -- to the public (San Francisco's pride parade this year had the creepy -- almost eugenicist -- slogan "A More Perfect Union.") One anonymous gay Hollywood "insider" stated: "It makes you sickened by gay sex, even if you are someone who participates in it"

Faggotry as political strategy

In this morass of supposed criticism, only The Slate historically situates the film providing a commentary that has obviously brushed up on Vito Russ Celluloid Closet and praising "the aggression of [Cohen's] literally confrontational method," having turned gay-panic into an "offensive strategy." The review is worth reading, and the video content in the article is superbly chosen. In spite of this historicization and because of this clear-minded take, the Salon review cogently distills the central media narrative that I take aim at:

"And are the gays who anxiously anticipate the mocking, hostile reactions of the unenlightened really that blind to Brüno's obvious counteroffensive strategy, which is to make that mocking, hostile idiocy the subject of his film? The beauty—and perhaps even the moral logic—of Baron Cohen's method is that those who're not in on his joke are invariably the butts of the joke."

The above Slate review misses the actual "point" of jokes, and lacks the essential insight of psychoanalysis into the way jokes work. This short wiki entry about Freud's joke-work is important to read to understand my take on the film, which I read as one long joke.

My reading of the film could be summarized as follows: Performing flaming faggotry in film and in real life makes most heterosexual people uncomfortable. It makes a lot of gay people uncomfortable too. We tend to laugh at things that cause discomfort, which is Freud's insight about jokes.

Freud's discovered that telling jokes is psychologically similar to recounting a dream to someone. This is because the discomfort caused by a really funny joke -- what is commonly called nervous laughter -- opens up a view into the unconscious of the person telling the joke. It also opens up a view of the disturbing unconscious of the culture in which the joke is embedded. In the same way, dream analysis works because, as someone being analyzed, you have to reconstruct a narrative around events that occurred in your sleep, events that you don't exactly remember or understand, and you begin tripping up in your words, saying things you didn't intend, hearing double entendres in your own speech, etc. The experience of telling your dream to someone makes you uncomfortable because of ignorance, what you don't know that you know. A joke makes your interlocutor uncomfortable if it grips something in his or her unconscious that he or she doesn't totally understand.

The point of camp humor is not (contra Sontag's famed essay on the subject) to draw battle lines between those who are "in on" -- or have adequately penetrated -- the joke and those who play the role of its "butt," though camp humor may also do this. The joke (and I take camp to be a way of embodying or performing a joke) is that which subverts the signifying function of discourse, in other words, the joke is the phallus which is frustrated by the "butt."

I make this point literally, in all seriousness, and psychoanalytically as double-speak. To illustrate the psychological layers on which Bruno's joke works, we should consider an example that is very far away from contemporary culture. It is so distant from us now that until James Davidson shined light on it's meaning, in his amazing book The Greeks and Greek Love, we were all aus of the joke.

Aristophanes' plays troubled gay and straight commentators for years because a colloquial Greek joke is frequently tossed around. The joke is an insult that constantly recurrs, someone in the play or some action done by someone is called "wide-assed," euruproktos. We have an insult in English that almost perfectly approximates the etymological structure, "wise-ass." Sophists, or wise dudes, were frequently the butt of this joke in Aristophanes. If we translated our insult back into ancient Greek it would be written sophoproktos, an irony Aristophanes would have loved, because it combines the terms for wiseguy and butthole. The idea of all philosophers being "wide-assed" is the central joke of Aristophanes' Clouds where it is frequently repeated. The near universal consensus in the litterature on these plays is that the "butt" of this joke is bottom boys and women, who were sexual objects for older men to chase and fuck. Their asses had been fucked so much that they were "wide as the Tigris river," as one of Aristophanes' bon mots points out. The idea behind this interpretation is that no bottom boy (or girl) wanted to become another notch in the bedpost of a slobbery bearded older Greek erastes, or lover. The idea behind this prevailing interpretation of the joke is also that the joke is homophobic or misogynist. James Davidson has actually provided the best account of who this joke is on. It is, quite simply, a joke about farting; this is why the joke is frequently applied to orators, lawyers and philosophers. Aristophane's joke is that they are all farting out of their faces, lips puckered and pursed, spewing foul air, just like a bunch of assholes!!! The joke is crude, sure. It is also "foul-mouthed," if I can continue in this manner. But the joke is definitively NOT an insult applied to boys and women, it is one that attacks the men of privilege of Ancient Greek Society, an attack "from below." "Toilet humor," the return of the repressed.

I appologize for this rather "long-winded" and "stale" return to the classics of comedy. These are the foundational texts of the genre in the West. High brow critics everywhere can eat their hearts out. They clearly don't know shit! I realize I'm being a bit Lacanian here, playing with language, but I'm trying to demonstrate the way camp works in the very form of this essay and prove that there is something very queer, strange about the joke. I return to the point about the structure of the joke and the gay joke in particular: The joke is always "on" the phallus. Our whole cultural vocabulary for talking about jokes is the language of anal sex in particular, and sex in general. Why is this so? Is candid talk or display of the asshole challenging to that other hole, the hole which speaks, which utters words? Are these two holes locked into an antinomy? On the one hand, the devouring hole (with teeth) that won't stop spewing philosophy, and, on the other hand, the excretory hole (with a prostate) which taunts us with the pleasure of shitting? Which hole is the input and which is the output? "The Gay Joke" would therefore be the joke par excellence. It is no accident that Cohen's comedy is based around the interview, sitting his subjects down on the couch, so to speak. The very perception of being "in on" Bruno's joke, laughing at it, is an effect of transferrence. You attribute some insider knowledge that he possesses, some sort of cultural caché and imagine yourself to have caught his drift. In simple language: if you laugh at it, it has gripped you somewhere in your unconscious, some thing that is not at the surface level of your subjectivity has been stirred, producing the hysterical response of laughter. Put even more simply: jokes are funny because they assault the symbolic points that orient you in the world; they trouble your "orientation."

That the Spectacle has experienced this cinematic gay joke as an experience of trauma, that the film has been narrated as a traumatic experience, is a profound symptom.

So After this long detour into Ancient Greece and psychoanalysis: My central arguments about Brüno

1. Cohen's cultural guerrilla warfare elides any claim to authenticity or politics of representation.
   
2. He embodies a faggy artifice that draws closer to the truth precisely by distancing itself from the idea of an authentic self, inhabiting the long tradition of a swishy satire -- or humorous negation -- and clever conversation. This tradition stretches back to Oscar Wilde and the Interview Magazine of Andy Warhol, and now BUTT Magazine, and the Socratic Dialogues and Aristophanes' plays at the root of Western philosophy and culture itself.
   
3. Like Socrates, Bruno's primary targets are world-wary urbanites, especially those inhabiting the culture industry, not naïve yokels or hoi polloi.
4. Brüno may be the most life-affirming, sex-positive portrayal of faggotry in the history of film and, certainly, in AIDS-era cinema.

I will ellaborate each of these points further, in the hopes to demonstrate my point.

Eliding Representation

Observations that Bruno is a "stereotype" are utter nonsense. This variety of flaming sex-and-fetish-positive faggotry and campy cynicism is NEVER represented in any media. Make no mistake, Bruno is not a silly queen like Jack from Will & Grace. Bruno has teeth, a latex jumpsuit, a pair of well-sharpened claws and can talk circles around almost anyone (not to mention she's got a stationary bike-powered fuck machine that will tear you a new one)! Cohen has a bigger pair of vacuum-pumped balls and more bona fides than Andrew Sullivan, who has remained curiously silent about the film, ever will.

Swishy Satire

It's actually embarrassing that this point has to be made: not all gay men understand or appreciate swishy humor. Many earnestly seek to beg for scraps of normalcy from the table of bourgeois society without ever realizing the subversive tactics at their fingertips.

Even Andrew Sullivan's silence is surprising, in light of his typical blogerrhea on all things gay and considering how much ink was spilled when his first book Normal reoriented the national gay political agenda.

The humorous dialectical negation of idiocy through candid conversation is as gay and as old as Western culture itself. Plato's Phaedrus makes an interesting read for anyone seeking to understand the critical lineage that Brüno inhabits.

The Joke's On Who?

It is far too easy to state that Bruno's targets are all naïve "little people," in Barbara Walters words. Socrates attacked the "culture vultures" of his day, speech writers, orators, sophists.

Sacha Cohen initially "promoted" the film at the spring MTV Movie Awards, by flying through the air, dressed up as Icarus, or an angel, hanging from visible wires in a bit of Brechtian theatre. He was literally soaring over the heads of hundreds of celebrities (some of them closeted gay people) in a jock strap, bare ass exposed for all the world to see. The flying machine "malfunctioned" and he fell to Earth, with his bubble butt landing four inches from the mouth of Eminem, four inches from the lips that frequently utter "faggot" as an insult in his music. Cohen literally anticipated that the media, and many gay people within it, would hate his character after the film was released, and he performed the narrative of his own fall from grace as a promotional effort. It was, in this sense, a pre-emptive shot across the bow at all of the subsequent public outrage. In this sense, Cohen used his film as a machine for exposing the way in which our whole culture is based in a hatred of faggots. He knows what buttons to push to make culture speak the truth of its unconscious. It's cinematic psychoanalytic joke-work!

He litterally asks a heterosexual mother if he could have 10 lbs liposuctioned off her 30lb baby -- one third of the toddler's weight -- and she says, with tears in her eyes, "whatever it takes." This scene should return as a flashback when a black audience would prefer that his baby be put in the hands of child services -- a horrific form of hell if there ever was one -- rather than remain in his own care. The situation diliberately provokes a vocalization of the heterosexual fear that gay men rape children. This fear is, in fact, a projection of heterosexuals' own predisposition to molest small children. Nearly all child molesters are fathers, step fathers and uncles who do not have sex with adult men. Straight men are the largest social danger to children, not flaming faggots. The statistics bear this out. Our cultural unconscious causes us to laugh at these two scenes; it is funny because heterosexual child abuse is real, it is repressed, and it makes us very uncomfortable. Homosexuality names the interruption of the narrative structure of heterosexuality, that is either violently repelled back, or laughed off as a harmless bit of camp.



There's something else I think Bruno exposes in all the laughter: homosexual desire is the unconscious desire of men, if it weren't the movie wouldn't be uncomfortable to so many. If you need further evidence of this fact walk into any Abercrombie & Fitch store, in any suburban super-mall in America, and look at the enormous photographs on the wall of hunky, naked muscled, young men with huge dick-sucking lips and bubble butts that would make Ancient Greek men blush. Founded in 1892 as a colonial-era adventure outfitter, A&F clothed John F. Kennedy, Teddy Roosevelt, Clark Gable and Dwight Eisenhower. There's a reason why swish, Bruce Weber, revitalized the companie's sales with his fashion photography, he knew how to seduce men, this is the narcissistic image men identify with.

Notice that the woman on the far left has been cut out of of the photo, so that the ass cheeks of the guy on the far right are fully within the frame. Men libidinally desire other men, regardless of what hole they fuck, indeed, I'd argue their desire has very little to do with sex and more to do about affirmation and recognition. I frequently attempt to point this out to men who identify as straight: they either reject the idea out of hand as absolutely impossible (these are usually the ones who are threatened by intelligent women and prefer spending time with "straight" men), or agree with you and like being around you and other faggots.

Cohen's character, Bruno, has done nothing less than declare war on the fragile fiction of heterosexuality itself, exposing its unconscious contours, as the following vintage Bruno video makes utterly clear.



A Rhinstone-Studded Gauntlet is Thrown

My political point about the film is that it empowers fags and sissies everywhere because it demonstrates a strategy for waging war on heterosexuality in general and heterosexual men in particular. This is a symbolic or psychological warfare to be sure (modern militaries even employ psychologists in their war efforts). However, the movie also shows us that this strategy can be dangerous because heterosexual men and women frequently respond to fags with "gay-panic," sometimes resulting in lynching. Matt Shepard, Harvey Milk, and countless other gay men are a constant reminder that being faggy threatens heterosexuality. The fact that murder is a common response to flagrant displays of faggotry is evidence that it poses an existential threat to heterosexuality.

It's symptomatic in our era of the "Gay Family" agenda that it took a comradely heterosexual man to remind us faggots of the spirit of André Gide's revolutionary battle cry, "Families, I hate you!" of which Badiou -- a "homophobe," apparently -- recently reminded me. It is important to remember that Nazi-puppet, Pétain famously replaced the slogan of the French Revolution, Liberté, égalité, fraternité, with the terrifying maxim, Travail, famille, patrie (Work, Family, Fatherland). Gide's bon mot also echos a line from Arthur Rimbaud:

'I do not love women: love is to be reinvented, everyone knows it. A secure position is all they're capable of desiring now. The position won, heart and beauty are set aside: all that is left is cold disdain, the food of marriage today. Or else I see women, with signs of happiness, of whom, me, I could have made good comrades, promptly devoured by brutes with the sensitivity of the stake…'" (Un Saison en Infer, 38, translation mine)

As of July 21st, Sacha Baron Cohen's Brüno had grossed $51,947,045 in US ticket sales. Assuming a ticket price of $10, we could estimate that over 5 million Americans have seen it. In the history of film, I would contend, so much laughter has never been generated by an explicit and gay sex scene! It's truly amazing that no one has yet pointed this out or only pointed it out to state that it was vulgar. That most movie goers have responded with laughter is progress. Though the movie may have been critically bashed, no one has mounted a lynching party, yet.

The other body in this traumatizing gay sex scene was, however, invisible. As Lacan would joke: anyone who got squimish during this scene or thought it was vulgar is actually "symptraumatized." Heavier sex goes on in American Soap Operas. Bruno has a quickie with the ghost of Milli from Milli Vanilli. If a special effects department had inserted his ghost into the film, it would have received an X rating from the MPAA and no one would have laughed. If you ignore the douchey introduction by the YouTube vlogger, the below video turns the mirror of the Brüno film experience back around on the audience.




What makes this scene funny or vulgar unlike, say, the ridiculous pottery wheel scene of Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in Ghost (1990)? I contend that it is precisely because the audience was left to generate their own fantasies about Bruno's interlocutor in this scene that generated the predominant mediatic narrative of trauma that has accompanied this film. The empty signifier on the other side of the unconscious allowed most people to laugh at gay sex, rather than be revolted by it.

My message to gay people who were "offended" by the film: Ultimately, if we cannot laugh about our sex, if our sex cannot be campy or humorous or fun, it becomes an empty and joyless mechanical exploitation of another person's body. Humor interrupts what would otherwise be a boring activity. Humourless sex is not worth fighting for. It is not worth an expensive and politically exhausting battle for same-sex marriage. Check your hearts, check your minds, and remember what the fight for gay liberation is all about!

Make no mistake: the joke is on all of us. Brüno demonstrates a point that any faggot born in America's heartland will appreciate: the hinterlands of "normal Americans" are a much more fun catwalk to strut your outrageous swish, provided you have a camera crew to document the petting zoo and keep the animals from ripping you to shreds. Gay sex tapes should be sought out, filmed, and released on the Internet of every politician, Democrat or Republican, who mobilizes politics promoting Marriage and Family. If you cannot actually film one, fake it; the fiction will be stranger than whatever facts come sputtering out of their mouths and whatever alibis they can produce. Marx & Engles discuss precisely this tactic, using fags to blackmail or take down conservative politicians, in a letter from 1868.

"Out of the city and into the periphery!"

Or, if you prefer, I'll give a shout out to my boy over at Socialism and/or Barbarism, with a line from the other, more anarchic, side of the human psyche. The line is from Heath Ledger's Joker in the new Batman: The Dark Knight film...

"Why so serious?"
It's okay, and sometimes subversive, to laugh at the joke.

Neophyte Badiou interviews Foucault

A fascinating 1965 interview on philosophy and psychology. Foucault schools Badiou on Kant, Freud, Lacan and the history of psychology. Too delicious. In part 2, Badiou lights a cigarette and relaxes a little bit. (Part 1 below)



Unfortunately for those who don't know French, there is no translation of this conversation. The French transcription (edited by both Foucault and Badiou) is published in Dits et Ecrits, Vol. 1, pp 466.

This interview was conducted a few years after Badiou received his degree from ENS and before his interest in Lacan via Althusser. In this interview, Foucault makes the historical point that "the unconscious was literally discovered by Freud to be a thing," effectively demystifying a whole tradition of primarily mytho-religious human reflection about the soul. This is essentially the argument that Badiou takes up in his "Sex in Crisis" chapter of The Century and even gives M.F. props (p. 70).