Another Porn is Possible (Review of Nina Power's "One Dimensional Woman"

Posted by Maladjusted on 05/04/2010 · 6 Comments 

[note: I've now walled off the Badiou section so that people who don't want to know can skip down to the bit about Power's book - Mal]

Nina Power’s incendiary One-Dimensional Woman is one of those books that leaves its reader with the exhilarating sense of having been an accomplice in bringing about the kind of carefully placed explosion that at once renders entire shelves of the library redundant while at the same time opening a door through which bold new ideas and dusty, long-neglected arcana can rush through and jostle with each other over which of them gets to become the emblem or portent of a future that – but for Power’s intervention – would have remained proscribed by the present epoch’s bland prescriptions of the possible.

Thus, while ODW is not exactly a “desert island” book (it’s probably insufficiently – to borrow one of Power’s more memorable constructions — ‘chocolatey’ for this purpose) the book is an exemplary political intervention whose wit and wisdom makes you feel that everything you’ve read on its subject (feminism in a putatively ‘post-feminist’ age) in the last 20 years was one great desert in which Power’s book is the only oasis that can claim to be more than an hallucination brought on by overly close contact with one’s camel.

The book’s topic is, as the Marcuse-inspired title suggests, the laughably limited picture of freedom and fulfillment that is held out to women as the space for the realization of their possibilities under the conditions of “late” (“Post-Fordist”, or “flexible”) capitalism.

Power, a young English academic, is known for her work on Marxism, cultural theory in the mode of Raymond Williams, film criticism, and is also distinguished for being one of a handful of academics who are responsible for bringing Alain Badiou to the attention of the Anglophone world. Her long-running blog “Infinite Thought” (named — I think — after one of the first collections of Badiou’s essays in English, although perhaps it’s the other way around?) is one of the obligatory passage points of the philosophical blogosphere – so much so that in my head, it’s less a blog and more an enormous ramshackle share-house in which it’s impossible to take more than two steps without stumbling over another Antipodean philosophy student lying in a puddle of their own drool while saying: “I coulda been a contender.”

The book’s style is engaging, terse, unaffected, and, at times, so deceptively breezy that the number of brilliant, aphoristic sentences that end her paragraphs still emerge like rapier-thrusts so fast that you can’t help thinking that the wounds they inflict will go entirely unnoticed by the people on whom they’re inflicted right up into the moment at which they keel over like “Bill” from Kill Bill. confronted with the “Five Point Palm Exploding Hand Technique”.

Knowing some of Power’s academic work, I was expecting that there would be far more in this book about Badiou, Zizek, and other heroes of the philosophical left. As it happens, Badiou makes a single (if memorable) cameo (an extract from an excoriating piece on the foulard affair in France) and Zizek’s famous thesis on the post-modern super-ego and its imperative to “Enjoy!’” is mentioned , but not discussed at length and that’s about it for what people in English departments call ‘theory’. Given this, it’s fair to say that ODW is a book whose academic credentials are principally made apparent in the way that the sustained, systematic nature of its argument, which makes the book, compared to Ariel Levy’s otherwise admirable Female Chauvinist Pigs) a series of thought-provoking anecdotes punctuated with (understandably) bemused questions.

So, while ODW is entirely (perhaps mercifully) devoid of mathemes, I do think that Power’s book — along with Peter Hallward’s equally remarkable Damning the Flood is proof of the extent, if not of Baidou’s generally salutary influence on contemporary philosophy (on the question of which it is probably too early to tell) then at least evidence that those who have been most influenced by the scourge of Sarkozy have shown themselves capable of turning directly to political discussions with a deftness that is, arguably, unusual for academics leaving behind the familiar warmth of the journal and conference circuit.

This is especially the case, because although much (too much?) has been written deploring academic esotericism, many of these jeremiads against obscurantist prose and faux-erudite shibboleth-swapping have the unfortunate tendency (especially in the allegedly higher brow conservative press) to disingenuously act as if Professorial ventures outside of what the dominant corporate-New Age idiom would call academic ‘comfort zones’ were not possessed of their marked tendency to ditch the Socratic vocation along with the jargon and the footnotes, thus giving us the less than edifying spectacle of someone fastidiously preserving their bath water in glass-bottles as another baby is hurled from the rooftop balcony. Put otherwise: although it is certainly possible to feign profundity through obscurity, this does not mean that evidence of relatively clear writing by someone with academic credentials should be taken as proof that said academic actually has something to say. But in contrast to either the ponderously fatuous or the breezily vacuous, both Power ‘s and Hallward’s books are rare examples of works which combine the obvious virtue of refreshingly clear, trenchant prose with the philosopher’s trademark the virtue of realizing and struggling against the strange obscurity of the obvious, and of the taken for granted.

Of course, in mentioning Hallward and Power’s relationship to Badiou, I’m not, of course, saying that credit for either One Dimensional Woman or Damning the Flood should go to the author of L’etre et l’evenment (he, to wax biblical, “has his reward”.) Nonetheless, I can’t help thinking that the excellence of two recent books written by young Badiou scholars owes something — if not to the more esoteric details of Badiou’s philosophy — then at least to some of his central theses and attitudes.

So, apart from the famously Cartesian clarity of Badiou’s own prose (a virtue that is also present in both Hallward and Power), Hallward and Power both make their political interventions in a manner that suggests the strength of Badiou’s notion of the ‘subtractive’ quality of politics.

For those of my Vast Army of Readers (henceforth my “VAR”) to whom the last phrase is gobbledygook unhelpfully interspersed with pre-Enlightenment invocations of proper names: a quick explanation.

*** Badiou section starts here, skip if you do not care or are easily bored by philosophy***

Among philosophy-types, Badiou is known for his studied irreverence towards what might be called “the mystifications of ‘difference’” which were once the bread and butter of every cultural studies department and ‘theory’ seminar in the Anglophone world. For anyone who’s never been the victim of a modern-day English department, I’m referring to the tendency (the basis of many people’s entire undergraduate education) to take a few out of context passages from influential French philosophers and to mutilate them into slogans that conveniently express a ubiquitous ideological sophistry: (“everything is relative!”, “it’s all a matter of perspective!”, “all values come down to ‘culture”) as if such things were a) the most original profound things ever to have been thought, b) profoundly daring acts of intellectual rebellion and c) what Derrida, Foucault et al were actually on about.

Basically the attitude of difference mystification starts from the obviously correct premise that the world is complicated (marked by a rich diversity of cultures, languages, interactions between heterogeneous elements at different of reality) and then all-too-quickly moves to the position that there is a virtue – and most mysteriously — a political virtue in trying as much as possible to avoid the apparent ‘violence’ inherent in any concepts and categories that (allegedly) distort the underlying plurality of existence by making claims to universality or veracity. Unfortunately, although the motive for such thinking is often what seems like a salutary liberal respect for ‘pluralism’, the result of such thinking is far less often the kind of rigorous, patient hermeneutic analysis that we might imagine in an ideal-encounter between different civilizations, and far more often simply a way for students and academics to SPIN a capacity to dizzy themselves in a labyrinth of particularisms as the best hope for the oppressed peoples of the earth. It’s as if, given all the violence that has occurred between people of different creeds, the best thing to do would be to have as many academics as possible having the courage to write as if they were stupefied by the ineffability of experience and of ‘difference’: this is the kind of thing which, I’ve said elsewhere, means that a thousand ethnography doctoral theses are published every year that ultimately amount to nothing more than pseudo-lyrical dream-diaries in which the author records her experiences as if they constituted a mystical experience that required the constant use of new jargon to not betray the underlying ineffability of what was witnessed.

Against this forced convergence of academic fashion and public platitude (a convergence which elevates a strangely democratized New Age Nietzsche into the unlikely philosophical icon of a vaguely outraged liberalism) Badiou argues that while there is, of course, a plurality of languages, affects, sensations, ways of seeing, and ways of thinking, living, and desiring (across space and time) in short, a plurality of worlds; the ability to be a subject (and not simply a clever ape) is, for Badiou, contingent on a capacity for human beings to have a relationship with that which cuts through, indeed bores a hole in the matrices of language and culture, the idioms of an epoch, the vagaries of “taste” understood as a system of preferences, and all other systems, signs and bodies that make up the baroque real and virtual universes in, alongside and through which we exist.Like Sartre, Badiou believes this capacity for transcendence is actually grounded in an inconsistency of reality itself, i.e. that not only do all our ‘symbolic-imaginary’ constructions of meaning fail to grasp the Real (a Real which can be grasped only at the highest levels of abstraction, i.e. at the furthest distance from the realms of the ‘meanings’ that make up the worlds in, through and by which human beings live and speak) but also that there is in an incompleteness, a fold, a proximity to the void within the real itself which allows the possibility of the unexpected, the birth of the new, of the event.

While there’s no time to explain such portentous sounding things especially given my whole not- exactly-being-sure-that-I-understand- -all-of-the-arguments-of-Being-and-event-anyway-thing what’s important, for the moment, is to note the way in which the whole of Badiou’s philosophical enterprise revolves around saying that as well as there being (what is) there is also (because of a metaphysical proximity between being and nothingness) the possibility (that can be marked out formally, i.e. mathematically) that ‘something happens’: such that which has previously been taken for granted as ‘reality’, ‘the way things are and has always been’ can be made to tremble by rare, unassimiliable, whose occurrences as St. Paul, sort of says) have always been, by their very existence, a scandal to metaphysics.

The point, for Badiou, is that events, as things that cannot be predicted or accounted for from even the most exhaustive list of “everything that we grant has existence by our present understanding of what beings there are”, ‘if and when they happen’, , not only possess the ability of showing the ‘Real’ that surpasses reality as we know it, but also have a markedly ambiguous ontological status (they might not have happened, and, in fact, have not happened except to those who allow themselves to be ‘seized by the event’) which consequently compels decisions, which themselves compel different ways of working through the consequence of these decisions. These decisions and this working through are the space, for Badiou, of ‘subjectivity’, understood here, not as the ‘personal, the idiosyncratic, the kind of stuff you put on your Facebook profile’, but rather the ‘becoming-subject’ of the human beings, where becoming a subject means (in Peter Hallward’s apt formulation) ‘being a subject to truth.’

Thus Badiou relates events to subjectivity, which for him is not the idiosyncratic psychological make-up of a human animal with a particular history, culture et cetera but a dance that is always going to look mad to those who hear not the music.

Thus, in speaking of ‘truth’, Badiou speaks not of correspondences between words and things, but of a process of ‘fidelity’ (his term), which is a process of working through the consequences of our belief that ‘x has happened’, that ‘some universal possibility’ has been announced which we now try to make sense of via statements and axioms that try to make sense of the event (‘all people are created equal/the Messiah comes for both the Greeks and the Jews/love conquers all et cetera’), such that this work of art, this scientific formula, this revolutionary uprising, this surge of love between two people requires devotion, thought, rigour and discipline that will carry its ‘subjects’ through all the potentially labyrinthine twists and turns of the ‘truth process’ over years, decades, millenia. This is precisely because — being unaccounted for on the basis of all that we thought we previously thought we understood about life and the universe , about politics, art and love, — the unknown legacy of this event that may or may not have happened requires those people whose devotion to the idea that ‘something has happened’ to build for that event a legacy that doesn’t stop at the borders of an individual human life: the truth process, the process of fidelity goes on as, long as there is still even one person trying to work through the consequences (what does it mean now, what’s the next step, what now?) of the strange (and necessarily universalisable) propositions that – from the perspective of all our received wisdom, all our knowledge of conflicting bodies and languages make no sense, because they point to something that is defined, at least initially, by its unintelligibility to, i.e. its irreducibility to a mere ‘continuity’ with what has gone before.

Thus, for Badiou a musician seized by a certain musical event might say: “Music changes after Schönberg [or Charlie Parker or Brahms or the Sex Pistols.] What can I, as a composer, a rock god, a critic do – to acknowledge that this artist happened, not just to me, but to music.?” Similarly, when I say, “I love you” to someone, I’m ambiguously tying a predicate between two subjects that is invisible to anyone outside the love relationship (which is why it’s so easy to be cynical about love when it doesn’t involve oneself).

Lovers are forced to ask themselves: what does this mean, this thing that has occurred between us: to confront the fact that ‘love’ names something obscure, something dubitable that can happen to anyone, but each time it happens, whose trajectory meaning (and thus even existence is obscure but for the commitment of two or more people to its existence.) We are in love, but what does that mean, what effect does that have on the situation of our lives prior to the declaration, or years after it was first made? Where will this take us – given that love (like politics or revolutionary art and thought) is, for Badiou, always going to be the sort of things that interrupts our plans and our sense of the world. Love, qua love is something that interrupts both our casual pragmatic hedonism (“I hope I can get some spicy romance and relaxing sex in between advancing towards my career goals”) as much as it interrupts our equally pragmatic “let’s settle down and share a mortgage” ways of thinking: love, as is testified to in works of art from the dawn of civilization, spoils plans, cuts across borders, punches a hole through the knots of sense (meaning, but also direction) by which we usually try to hold our lives together.

In the same vein, Badiou thinks that politics is not at all about the patient work of translation or compromise or communication but instead about the moment where people proclaim things (at a certain distance from contemporary knowledge and contemporary prejudices) like the Rights of Man and Citizen that are supposed to be as universalisable as the knowledge of geometry as shown in Plato’s Meno. (a knowledge that even a slave possesses). And the point about these declarations is that they are made at a distance to what is known, accepted, and understood: radically pointing to a world that could be organised under entirely different principles.

Thus, when the Jacobins talk of “liberty, equality and fraternity”, or when Badiou’s own political organization makes the pronouncement: ‘everyone who is here is from here’ (a claim for the rights of ‘stateless persons’ all over the world), such statements do not obviously attest to empirically verifiable truths – or to things that are part of any extant ‘language game’. You can’t, after all, find something like equality or justice by performing the right kind of statistical analysis: equality is a matter of declaration, i.e. of an axiom.

So, like love, these axiomatic propositions refer to truths which are invisible outside of our commitment to them, our attempts to work through them, our patience to follow their consequences where they will take us, to make mistakes, repent them, and pick ourselves afterwards and continue.

Thus: I can search the entire universe and still not find anything resembling love because I can reduce it to the sexual urge + sentimentality + certain culturally variable representations of the above common pathos of breeding as attached to social institutions to do with courtship, marriage contracts and so on. But I will never prove the existence of love as something irreducible to all of these things, just as I will never prove that ‘all men are created equal’ if I treat it like a hypothesis rather than an axiom. (After all, remember that empirically equality, is as Badiou notes difficult to find: we find difference first: she’s smarter, he’s better looking, they have more money et cetera. Inequality is empirical; equality is rational.)

This is why, for Badiou, political “truths” like the equality of all human beings have to be posited and then worked through – not in the form of unchangeable injunctions which require that because something once happened nothing will ever change (e.g. staying in a relationship even though it’s killing us both, continuing to defend the USSR as a bastion of freedom even though it’s run by Stalin, hanging on to Euclidean geometry to the point that one denies Riemann because one is nostalgic for its clarity in one’s youth) but, on the contrary, acting, thinking, seeing what happens, changing the plan, reconsidering what is to be done, moving on, fighting, losing, trying again, starting over, like a religious believer who realizes that following the animating spirit of her faith might mean leaving the Church, becoming an atheist, but even so refusing to renounce the truth to which she once bore witness as mere illusion.

The point is that, for Badiou, this ‘malleability’ that is necessary for ‘fidelity’ is not the ‘malleability’ of pragmatic-utilitarian compromise. Badiou objects to nothing more than propositions like “oh, well, communism ended in a bloody tyranny, so best to just accept the present political order – mumble, mumble something about human nature et cetera.” Instead, the question is: how do I remain faithful to the political principle of equality, or to what was revealed to me about the nature of love on that night by the shores of the Mediterranean twenty years ago? How do I continue to trace the consequences of this glimpse of truth? How do we comport ourselves to what –we still maintain – has, against all odds, happened.

So, when Hallward takes on the task of telling the story of Haiti (before the earthquake) one of the poorest nations on the planet as a result of over a century of reparation payments to the French government for revenue lost by said government by the loss of its slaves, Hallward knows that he’s no expert in Haitian culture (despite his perfect French): nonetheless, he looks to the nation, and its fate since the revolt by Toussaint L’ouverture, devotes his considerable intellectual resources to studying it and to trying to bring to the world’s attention to an injustice so shocking and grotesque that it still reduces my rowdiest and least interested students into half-respectful silence. It’s as if Hallward operates under the principle that if Toussaint L’ouverture was motivated by the idea that liberty, equality and fraternity applied to Haitians and not only to white, bourgeois Frenchmen, then, why shouldn’t Hallward’s own approach to Haiti be to tell the story of how these principles were betrayed by our own epoch’s masters rather than taking the blandly, safe, “post-colonial studies approach” that would instead talk endlessly of the impositions of a white academic presuming to speak of such things, thereby demonstrating that the primary concern was saving the beautiful soul of the academic rather than, demonstrating to anyone who has eyes show another instance in which the axioms of equality or of justice had been betrayed.

Anyway. To Power’s book itself.

****Badiou section ends ****

Power’s wonderful opening goes like this:

Where have all the interesting women gone? If the contemporary portrayal of womankind were to be believed, contemporary female achievement would culminate in the ownership of expensive handbags, a vibrator, a job, a flat and a man – probably in that order. Of course, no one has to believe the TV shows, the magazines and the adverts, and many don’t. But how has it come to this? Did the desires of twentieth-century women’s liberation achieve their fulfillment in the shopper’s paradise of ‘naughty’ self-pampering, playboy bunny pendants and bikini waxes? That the height of supposed female emancipation coincides so perfectly with consumerism is a miserable index of a politically desolate time.

The first chapter of Power’s book is called “Sarah Palin: or How not to be a feminist”. Power starts by investigating two of the more bizarre arguments as to why ‘feminists’ are told today that they should accept that ours is a world in which feminism has been so completely victorious that any suggestion that this is not the case should be met with old-fashioned Victorian suggestions of hysteria brought on by lack of sex.

The first of these arguments is that when someone points out the massive disparities between men and women in salaries, opportunities, the retort of the ‘why-don’t-you-whiny-chicks–get-over-it” brigade is (bizarrely) to point to the fact of a woman (any woman) in any position of power: “What do you mean ‘sexism’? Don’t we live in a world where Margaret Thatcher, Condoleezza Rice, Palin have wielded power that few men could dream of &c. &c.? ? It’s, like feminist utopia, babe.’

The bizarre idea underlying such a retort is, as Power points out ,that women should accept any woman in power as a victory for women everywhere irrespective of how much that particular woman might be actively arguing for the abrogation or renunciation of long-fought for rights, or even, advocating the death-and-tortue–by-extra-judicial processes of others (women as well as men): as if ‘feminism’ were (and had always been) nothing but an inverse chauvinism instead of what feminism has always truly been, a flash-point for a universal emancipatory struggle.

Second, Power points out that Palin represents herself as an icon of a ‘new’ (read: non- feminist) ideology that suggests that the e life of a modern woman is inherently a feminist utopia, because women ‘these days’ can ‘have it all’ : work and motherhood, a bad girl’s sexiness with a good girl’s hoices about who she sleeps with, and so on: “surely, says this dominant ideology (particularly prominent. in my experience, of 18-year-old girl students at certain inexplicably prestigious Australian universities) the ‘modern woman’ doesn’t need feminism, because feminism would simply be the partial perspective of ‘hairy man-hating lesbians’ who wanted to deny a woman’s right to party, shop, love her family all at the same time and so on.

To these and other bovine stupidities, Power points out, that Sarah Palin does appear to incarnate a number of allegedly ‘feminist’ ideals, insofar as she “transgresses” several roles or stereotypes whose ‘overcoming’ the dubious ‘post-feminist discourse’ discussed above, would see as inevitably leading to an increase in women’s options. The point of course, is that Palin’s ability to be is both ‘attractive-but-powerful/a woman with a job but a dedicated mother and so on’ and so on, does not overcome the fact that Sarah Palin is, well, Sarah Palin: where, Power, asks, did it become ‘feminist’ to say that anyone with a double X chromosome should be treated as a ‘feminist hero’ irrespective of her attitudes, her policies, her use of her power? Wasn’t there something about feminism that had to do with hopes for and attempts at bringing about universal emancipation, from the perspective of which attempts Palin can only be looked at as a reactionary obstacle?

From here, Power turns to the major argument of the book that is suggested by in its title. In the interests of rushing to a conclusion, I would suggest that the central thesis of the book is reflected in its central metaphor: namely, chocolate. As much as this may sound silly, I do in all seriousness think that chocolate is the ‘white whale’ of Power’s book. In her acicular analysis, chocolate becomes a symbol (figurative more than literal) of a readily, cheaply available, perfectly innocuous substance, that is somehow advertised as if access to it were the key to unlocking feminine power, independence, and achievement.

Thus: Power is incredibly eloquent (and also very funny) talking about the way chocolate is advertised to women, as a kind of symbol of the ‘modern woman’ in touch with her capacity for delight. (My favourite two-word phrase in the book has Power talking about the laurels going to the woman with the most ‘chocolatey sex’ among other trophies of ‘modern, emancipated, capitalist womanhood’). So chocolate is presented as something naughty, something that combines girly innocence with girly rebelliousness: something that allows you to be half Alice from Lewis Carrol’s Wonderland books and half Angelina Jolie. Something sensual and indulgent that shows a woman’s ability to give herself pleasure without the necessity of men. The problem, as Power points out, is that eating chocolate is, in the end, eating chocolate. But does access to literal or figurative chocolate really represent the pinnacle of the emancipation of women? Power is not, obviously, so much interested in running an anti-chocolate philippic as she is in chocolate’s capacity to serve as a metaphor for the way in which the present phase of capitalism presents the fact that women have the opportunity to “pamper themselves” with consumption as proof that the feminist utopia has been handed down to us — by capitalism.

But is the ability to have the odd sensual treat (occasional orgasms! occasional sweet treats!) really proof that everything that feminists have ever talked about is now merely the semi-mad reminiscences of the aforementioned ‘hairy lesbians’ (about whom incidentally, Power writes a hilarious passage that basically says something like: “who are these women whose body hair has apparently terrorized the imagination of so many rabid generations of ‘anti-feminists’?”) Never have so many been so frightened by so few.

The fact that ‘feminism is over, according to the chocolate argument’, is an entrée into Power’s broader argument that feminist issues must be seen, not in moral terms, as issues that require the ‘re-education’ of crypto-misogynist tendencies existing in the vacuum of men’s minds, but rather, issues that almost all arise (in the rich countries of the West) from the fact that women (like everyone else) suffer from the vagaries of the market-economy and its determination (‘in the last instance’) of social life. Thus, Power writes a number of incredibly lucid passages on how today’s women are often held up as the models for success and achievement, but that this has less to do with the victory of feminism and more to do with the fact that women are to some extent moulded to be (and thus unsurprisingly considered) ideal members of the ‘new economy’, where that economy is defined by a) the necessity of adaptability and b) a corollary of “a” ; the need that one should sell oneself at all times (in order to avail oneself of opportunities which, to paraphrase Marx and Engels “ossify before they are fully formed.”)

Thus, for Power, the one-dimensional woman of her title (the career woman who – god bless universal emancipation — has time, for kids, but also the ‘fun and fulfilment’ of handbags, vibrators, and the occasional chocolatey shag), are models of the new economy insofar as they have moulded themselves into (literally and figuratively) flexible people who have the opportunity to work constantly at maintaining ‘breeziness, niceness’, chattiness, sexiness, that serves as a general currency in any situation (the qualities most desirable in the new ‘service based’ job markets). Power’s question, of course, is simply why women’s excellence and women’s potential should be judged by its ability to be sculpted into what is most effective at selling across the greatest number of contexts? For Power, the charming “men’s magazines’” tendency to refer to a woman’s breasts as her ‘assets’ :grasps something of contemporary social reality: namely that the right and imperative to be a one-dimensional women is a right to be on display at all times, an ad for something (even if it is herself), something that is not so much sculpted to have access to all possible opportunities imaginable, but to convey a sense of opportunity to the world in which the modern woman, like the modern male, is supposed to spend most of her time working, preparing for her work, and recovering from work with the odd (blessed freedom!) chocolatey indulgence.

Power also manages to suggest the asset-calculating mentality in the present ‘post-feminist’ discourses about love and desire, as best represented by Sex and the City. What Sex and the City tells us, according to Power, is that the independent woman goes through a phase of working for conspicuous but ephemeral consumption (sex that doesn’t impinge on the rest of her life, job, partying, beauty enhancements, handbag acquisition et cetera), that is supposed to come to an end when she finds ‘the One’. But the sentimental “romantic” fixation on the “One” for whom a given woman will renounce at least some of our chocolatey pleasures in the name of the lentil soup of monogamy and family obscures the fact that the attitude to ‘oneness’ that Sex and the City cultivates is as pragmatic-utilitarian-calculative as the “hedonistic” phase that is supposed to precede it: the whole notion of “The One” is essentially the idea of a guy who is a safer investment than the other guys, someone with whom you can share a mortgage when you make the transition from the phase of working-to-buy-ephemeral things, to the apparently more mature phase of working to buy less ephemeral things (a “nice house at last!”)

For Power, this narrow and very obviously consumer-society conception of love and desire, is predicated on the idea that it is the only viable alternative to the puritanical, 1950s housewife vision, which would condemn all women to the fate of a poorer cousin of Betty Draper from Mad Men.

But, Power’s question, is always: is this it? Is Sex and the City consumption the most that women can hope for, the proof of emancipated women, in an emancipated society? What about, as Ariel Levy says, being an astronaut, or, hell, living in a society that gives a shit about its less fortunate one billion?

Aren’t there higher aspirations available to women to men to human beings?

It’s very important to note here that Power’s perspective is never moralistic, never about censuring women for sensual pleasure (or even consumer pleasures). Instead, her book is about pointing out that the capitalist super-ego that always demands that we “Enjoy!” produces the constant anxiety that we are ‘not-enjoying-enough’, while at the same time proscribing us with an incredibly narrow range of possible enjoyments (more consumption).

The best proof of this point is in Power’s discussion of pornography, from which I get the google-bot titillating title of this essay.

In a sense, Power shares with Ariel Levy a good deal of skepticism and bemusement about how what Levy calls ‘raunch culture’ became in a disturbingly common discourse the ‘feminism of the nineties and noughties.’ And one might indeed ask (with Power and Levy) how the “Hugh-Hefner is a feminist hero” camp (a camp of which Hugh Hefner is a founding as well as vociferous member) managed to convince anyone that there’s no better way to prove that GIRLS CAN DO ANYTHING and BE WHOEVER THEY WANT TO BE (in our time of post-patriarchal female empowerment) than by giving women the chance to take their tops off for a “Girls Gone Wild” video? As Levy says in her book, what is it exactly about the ability to take pole dancing classes that is proof of women’s emancipation? (Also: s sexuality, as Foucault might have asked, something that needs ‘expressing’, in the sense of ‘displaying?” )

But to see how Power avoids many of the pitfalls that would be laid in front of someone writing on this issue, we must see how she tackles the questions of ‘raunch culture’ via her discussion of porn. In this discussion, Power refuses the moral blackmail that would demand that a feminist writer either except the raunch culture line that ‘feminists should love porn’ (you go girls: emancipate yourselves for that camera!) or accept not only an older feminism’s points about the exploitative and misogynistic qualities of pornography, but apparently a puritanical anti-sex position that would put the feminist into unlikely agreement with the Christian Right.

Power cuts through much of the disingenuous blather on this subject by saying in an essentially Zizekian manner “Hairy lesbian’ [c.f. the above comment on this term] puritans or my life as a Barbie doll: yes please!” She does this by making the very simple point that that porn has a history, and that what we know of porn (despite the dizzying variety of fetishes catered for on the internet) shows that contemporary pornography suffers mainly by being beholden to a series of generic conventions which, as the history of erotica shows, could have been otherwise.

Thus, when Power turns from modern porn to French porn of the 1920s she sees things that we would never see today (despite the porn saturation of our culture), scenes that lack the grim seriousness of the standard ‘sex-as-combat’ porn scene and that instead have farcical elements, silly, fun stories: joking scenes about men having trouble with erections and needing to be coaxed into them by understanding women. (Without having seen the films that Power is talking about, I kind of imagine them as hardcore Jacques Tati films)

This is in marked contrast to the contemporary pornography which tends to portray sex as a battle between men and women that is always won comprehensively by the victorious power of the penis. (There is a Lacanian part of me, that has to admit to being amused by the fact that so much pornography contains dialogue that essentially goes: “you have the phallus!”/“That’s right! I do have the phallus. It definitely exists and I definitely have it! Let no one think otherwise!” “Penises. How awe-inspiring are they?!” “We women are awed by our lack of them, and not at all capable of surviving without them!” “Yes, I agree. Having the phallus, is to be devoid of lack/That’s soooo true et cetera.)

No matter how much pornography you can find on the internet (“Geese with Trilby hats!”) the one thing, I suspect, that even the most assiduous pornography search is likely to turn up is porn involving men having trouble with erections. The problem with porn, Power suggests, is not so much the fact that sex is represented explicitly for erotic purposes, but the fact that “our porn” reveals itself to be so saturated by the conceits, illusions, and, ultimately the political-economic ideologies of our epoch: sex on film must be about women subdued by the incontrovertible might of the phallus: it must be grim, slightly vengeful, prurient. But why so ‘one-dimensional’ a vision?

Do the clichés of the genre (and as Power points out, the multi-million dollar industry) mark all that the human race can think of as to sex? At this point, Power’s argument recalls not only Marcuse, but Marcuse’s Frankfurt School colleague, Theodor Adorno, specifically in his review of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In this essay, Adorno argues that on the one hand, Huxley is absolutely right in his portrayal of a dystopian future in which all human needs are perfectly administered to by a totalitarian government. But, Adorno goes on to say that Huxley is right, but for the wrong reasons, i.e. that while Huxley is right to feel the utilitarian calculation of pleasure administered by a new kind of ‘biopower’ no-one can take arms against pleasure itself without making a move to the wrong side of politics: i.e. to say that people’s happiness is bad because it lacks “meaning” is always to step away from the left to right.

Thus, against the idea that Adorno is someone who thinks that people should just listen to Schoenberg until they can endure it no longer, Adorno is saying that it’s not that things are fun that makes them bad, but rather that what is offered to us as fun, is not actually fun, but rather requires us to lower our expectations, grin and bear it, and generally close our minds to other possibilities of pleasure than those on offer by contorting our bodies and souls until we can find the meager offerings of society equivalent to the ‘satisfaction’ of all possible human desires.

Along similar lines, Power’s book absolutely rejects the common blackmail that would say: either we should accept that the opportunities for women (or indeed for anyone) under capitalism represent the full gamut of human possibilities or we implicitly acknowledge our solidarity with the kind of puritan critic of modernity who would demand that women renounce all claim to enjoyment in the name of their being ‘female eunuchs’. Opposing this silly either/or , Power’ suggests that, on the contrary, capitalism doesn’t offer enough pleasure to women (or men) : that, just as the imperative of flexible capitalism makes us take ‘one-dimensional woman’ as the summit of female possibilities, our society also acts as if the few feeble chocolate crumbs we grab between endless cycle of meaningless work should be greeted as more fulfillment than anyone could ever need: that ours is a society in which the imperative to enjoy governs everything to the point of producing constant anxiety (“am I having enough fun? Getting out enough? Is my body primed, sufficiently toned, sufficiently devoid of blemishes for the true “fun” of joining the glamorous glitterati in which sex is treated with all the humourlessness of cocaine”? The point is that the mere existence of this imperative does not by any means suggest any great quantity of actual enjoyment, of unproductive fun, of pointless, lying on one’s back looking at the stars activities that are dissociated from our dominant conceptions of leisure thought under the aspect of work (Make sure you enjoy!) work dressed up as leisure (I go drinking with my boss!) or as the self-stupefaction that we undertake to simply forget the world of work and life.

Overall, in case you can’t guess: Power’s book is a wonderful joy that you should go and read immediately. (with or without the accompaniment of chocolate) It also contains far better arguments and far more lively and engaging writing than my own turgid prose can attempt to do justice.

To end here, I leave with a last – peripheral — thought:

Power’ discussion on pornography sheds some insight on something that I’ve always thought about – of all things genre fiction, and in particular what I’ve thought about as the pornographic nature of most such fiction.

To explain, I’ve often wondered why so much genre fiction is so bad, given that there is absolutely no necessity that something should be bad, just for adhering to certain conventions of gothic horror, epic fantasy, romance and so on. After all, I can think of any number of great literary works that consist in the masterful execution/exploration/ displacement of some generic convention or another.

However, what I’ve thought is wrong with a lot of actual genre fiction (apart from the fact that the worst genre writers show signs of having read nothing else apart from genre fiction) is it’s pornographic character, by which I don’t mean, its sexual content, but rather the fact that like most porn, bad genre fiction does nothing but ‘deliver’ – in a perfectly conventional form – what the genre fans wants. (Dragons, here we go! Murders! Bodice-ripping!).

But, as Power’s discussion of French erotic films of the 1920s shows, depictions of sex do not have to be confined to the usual, tawdry, woman-meets-plumber-plumber-proffers-pipe thing, there’s no reason that mystery novel mightn’t embrace more possibilities than a pallid Agatha Christie imitation or that a fantasy novel can’t be more than the billionth slavishly unimaginative homage to Tolkien. Thus, what makes for good genre fiction, is also what could save us from the banality of pornography: a world where the generic features of genre are a framework, or a platform and not, as they too often are the point of the whole process.

To believe that genre (like pornography) could not be otherwise is, after all, is to demean ‘genre’ in the name of literature in a way that actually demeans literature by treating literature as its own genre: an obscene habit that results in all manner of decadent and dull contemporary ‘lit-fic’ that seems to consist in syrupy pseudo-lyrical descriptions of inner experience along with moments of vague moralising about the kind of people whom the author finds irritating. But, following Power, following Badiou, we should ask of one-dimensional literature, the same question we ask of our one-dimensional conception of what human beings can do: i.e. is this all there is?

Love,

Mal

Filed under Beings and Events (Philosophy), Left-Right-Left (Politics) · Tagged with Badiou, capitalism, events, fantasy, feminism, genre fiction, ideology, nina power, one dimensional woman, philosophy, pornography, sex, utopia