A few weeks back I wrote about Dara Birnbaum’s video art piece, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman. Corey Creekmur mentioned in comments that there was an entire book on the piece written by T.J. Demos.
Dara Birnbaum – Technology/Transformation… by merzboy
So now I’ve read the book…which confirms my thoughts in some ways, and raises some other issues as well.
Demos basically divides critical reception of the work into two waves (analagous to my two takes on the video in my earlier piece). The first reaction — which is close to the intention of Birnbaum herself — views the work as a project of feminist and Lacanian deconstruction. The narrative of the Wonder Woman TV show is broken apart, images are repeated, and the special effects are decontextualized so that they register as studio trickery. Finally, a disco song at the end comments directly on Wonder Woman’s sexuality, showing that she is not an empowered subject but a fetishized object. The video’s purpose in this reading, then, is to defamiliarize the narrative, and to show the artificiality of the transformation from secretary to hero. The effect is iconoclastic, lambasting an oppressive image foisted on women by capitalism and patriarchy.
Again, this is how Birnbaum saw the video herself. Demos quotes her saying that her work was meant to push against “the forms of restraint and near suffocation imposed through this current technological society.” She adds.
all the works completed from 1976-85 are ‘altered states’ causing the viewer to re-examine those ‘looks’ which on the surface seem so banal that even the supernatural transformation of a secretary into a ‘wonder woman’ is reduced to a burst of blinding light and a turn of the body — a child’s play of rhythmical devices inserted within the morose belligerence of the fodder that is our average television diet.
Demos notes that this was in part dependent on the context of the time, when most people did not have access to tools to manipulate video. In a world where you had to take what the studio doled out, repurposing or reshaping the image seemed subversive.
Today, of course, things are somewhat different — and, indeed, over time, the critical take on Birnbaum’s video has changed. Instead of focusing on its deconstructive critique of television, more recent viewers have tended to see it as celebratory. Instead of alienating viewers, Birnbaum’s video itself becomes a source of visual pleasure. The video has, for example, been played in dance clubs…and, as I pointed out in my earlier post, there are video montages of Lynda Carter spinning on YouTube which look a lot like Birnbaum’s video. As Demos argues, late capitalism has “commodified the process of consumerist participation.” (84-85) Mash-ups aren’t critique; their marketing. In this context, Birnbaum’s video looks less like a stinging deconstruction of television, and more like a potentially viral advertisement for it.
Demos acknowledges this…but goes on to insist that while affect is manipulated by capitalism, it still “remains indeterminate”, and he adds that this is especially true because “unlike emotion, it is unstructured by social meanings.” (101)
Which, to me, seems like blatant bullshit. Why isn’t affect structured by social meaning? And if it isn’t structured by social meaning, if pleasure and power don’t have anything to do with each other, then how exactly can pleasure resist or affect power? The whole thing just seems like special pleading; a way to have your shallow media rush and still call yourself a revolutionary. (Or to paraphrase Tania Modleski, “I like Dara Birnbaum, I am a radical, therefore Dnra Birnbaum must be a radical.”) You can try to wriggle and dodge, but I don’t see how you get around the conclusion that Birnbaum’s work has been completely co-opted. She thought she was critiquing, and instead she’s complicit. As Demos says, she’s part of the long history of the avant-garde being assimilated by capitalism — almost as if the avant-garde is a branch of capitalist R&D, rather than some sort of alternative to it.
Of course, the baseline assumption here is that capitalism is evil,and that art which is complicit with capitalism is therefore meretricious. Demos doesn’t question this, but it seems like it might be worthwhile to do so. Specifically, Wonder Woman’s creator, William Marston, believed that new, capitalist modes of reproducible entertainment could be used to change society for the better — specifically by providing new images of powerful, loving women who could challenge conservative ideas about patriarchy and dominance. For Marston (who Demos mentions only briefly), capitalism could be used progressively to change the gendered way in which society functioned.
Marston linked Wonder Woman’s persuasive power to her “allure” — a connection which, as Demos notes, has been controversial with feminists…not to mention with Marxists, for whom the pleasures of capitalist consumption are to be avoided rather than exploited. Yet, in the end, whatever radicalism Birnbaum’s video manages is, at this point, predicated on the libidinous, capitalist, iconic charge that Marston gave to the character. The deconstruction of television tropes has been thoroughly deconstructed by capitalism. All that’s left is the pleasurable thrill of seeing a woman repetitively changed into a sexy hero — and perhaps the rush of creating and controlling that change, manipulating the tools of capitalism not so much for one’s own liberation as for one’s own pleasure. Always presuming that, in capitalism, it’s possible to tell the difference.
It’s a long standing kerfuffle between relational art people (who like party art) and critical art people (who like Party art– or at least fucking shit up). I’m writing now about universal salvation and metacriticality– there’s the quibble between Liam Gillick and Claire Bishop in 2008 in October, or back in 1980, the Benjamin Buchloh critique of Joseph Beuys at the Guggenheim. Here’s this paragraph, which I find hilarious.
“Obviously, it is possible to ignore or reject the basic scientific steps that have been taken in twentieth century science, such as Freudian psychoanalysis or de Saussure’s linguistic and semiotic concepts (to give only the two most prominent examples that Beuys does reject). It is also possible to reject or ignore crucial epistemological changes that have occurred in one’s own field of discourse, for example the consequences of Duchamp’s work for art in the second half of the 20th century. But again, such infantile behavior, closing one’s eyes and disavowing phenomena apparently threatening one’s existence in order to make disappear, is of very limited success.”
You could really have wide lapels and an attitude back then.
But back to Wonder Woman, what makes the video enjoyable is that it reads both ways– crowd-sourced art about false subconsciousness. It’s not easy to hit it right down the middle like that– and Marston and maybe even Peter have something to do with that.
“party vs. Party” — that should be a rock band (with a serious message!)
They could do musical covers of Yakoff Smirnoff comedy routines.
It also has to do with the nature of an image. Power and pleasure are always present in an image, but knowledge really doesn’t stick. The clarity of that in this piece makes it pretty worthwhile, even if we had no idea who Wonder Woman is. Other than a phallus.
The affect/emotion distinction follows out of Massumi’s critique of Jameson’s use of the latter, and gets picked up by various folks concerned with problems of postmodern representation (at least that what it seems like based on the context here). This isn’t my bag at all, but most of what I’ve read on affect deals with states like disgust or desire, stuff that’s unstructured, and non-conscious. Emotions are, on the other hand, are more structured and conscious. I don’t know the literature well enough to have an informed opinion as to whether the distinction is tenable. That said, there does seem to be a difference between desire and love, disgust and hate, etc.
So Demos is arguing that the affective charge of the video is empty enough to be deployed toward a variety of ends. The problem, of course, is that this ignores that it is (as you and he both point out) getting deployed in pretty predictable ways, which suggests that it isn’t really empty.
The thing is, in Marston, WW is *not* a phallus. Very, very much not a phallus. It’s kind of central to what he’s doing.
I’m not really convinced that disgust and desire are different in kind than love and hate…and certainly not convinced that either is somehow outside of social constructions.
To follow up on Nate, Massumi takes it from Deleuze and Guattari: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_%28philosophy%29#In_Deleuze_and_Guattari
I’m pretty sure that’s Demos’s reference–and if it’s BS, that is because a lot of D&G (after Anti-Oedipus) is…
I suppose you can get out of unconstructed essentialist psychoanalytic categories if you want, but I don’t see how you get out of Wonder Woman being a phallus. She’s an evasive signifier, thoroughly implicated in castration, and it makes her able to seek the communal vaginal jouissance of the yannic utopia. She rules through authority rather than force, presence rather than absence. One might argue that a phallus is not the only possibility for a powerful eroticized woman, especially written by a man, but I would be dubious.
Well, I wrote 20,000 words about it or something (which I think you read, right?) Marston explicitly rejects Freudian phallic readings in his theoretical work, and I think in his comics as well, where the symbolism is insistently yannic, not phallic. Among other things, castration becomes not a wound but an apotheosis in Marston’s symbolic world. Men don’t gain power by having the phallus. Quite the opposite.
I think it perhaps makes sense to see the tv show as more typically phallic. But Marston does a lot of work to get away from that, which is a big part of why his comics are so…well, queer I suppose is the word.
Again, this is sort of my problem with Birnbaum’s piece as a deconstructive effort. Marston’s a lot more thoughtful and I think a lot more successful in questioning and reimagining gender roles. Creating a piece of art the point of which is to say, “Wonder Woman is a sexualized phallus” — and I think that that is part of what Birnbaum is doing — is pretty dimwitted if you’ve read Marston/Peter. Or so it seems to me, anyway.
I love your book, and I think Marston/Peter are absolutely queer and pacifist and feminist and beautiful and bizarre! And I am not lacking in dimwittedness– I touch hot stoves and eat paste. And they are infinitely more thoughtful and crafted and aesthetically worthwhile than Dara Birnbaum’s fun throwaway art piece.
But Wonder Woman is a phallus. She isn’t suffering from castration anxiety, she conquers it. She doesn’t have to desire a phallus because she is one– she is the empty lack made full. She overcomes symbol after symbol of male potency, Names-of-the-Father, by being the final one, the mother without incompleteness. She is unique, certainly, but not by being unlike any other female character ever, but by being the female character that resolves the shortcomings of female characters.
That’s the underground “affective” connection that I would have drawn, if I were writing the book– and we’re all glad I didn’t.
I don’t think Freud’s phallus is an absolute truth. It’s an idea and a symbol. You can imagine other symbolic worlds and other symbolic ideas. For example, you can, like Marston, decide that the vagina isn’t a lack, but a fulness in itself, and that the male isn’t a symbol of potency in the first place.
And WW isn’t unique in Marston/Peter. Her mother is more her than she is, and Aphrodite is more her mother than her mother.
“I’m not really convinced that disgust and desire are different in kind than love and hate…and certainly not convinced that either is somehow outside of social constructions.”
In an earlier discussion of Butler you argued that love and desire were different, at least from the perspective of capitalism. Specifically, you argued that desire was less fixed that love, which is more or less in line with Massumi’s argument (I don’t remember my D&G well enough to speak to their argument). You also suggested that love is, as a result, a necessary condition for resisting late capitalism, as unlike desire, it is less manipulable. I’m wondering if you’re seeing a distinction I’m not, revising your argument, or simply working through it.
Hey! No fair quoting me at myself!
I probably haven’t worked it through that carefully, is the truth. I don’t think the difference is that one isn’t socially constructed and one is, anyway.
I don’t think my argument was that love was less manipulable…. More like it’s more of an alternative? Possibly I’ll figure out a clearer formulation someday, though I wouldn’t bet on it….
Freud is certainly not absolute truth. But if he provided a useful way of explaining how symbols work in our culture, you don’t just opt out of the culture by making a new symbol. But maybe it’s not useful, since Freud was a sexist coward who denied abusive incest. You do, in your book, offer some support for essential gender categories, at least in terms of meaning and desire, which is what we’re talking about.
Sure; I’m not saying Wonder Woman is not a phallus because there is no phallus. I’m saying she’s not a phallus because Marston put a fair bit of effort into defining her as not a phallus.
When there’s a phallic economy and women are figured as phallus, men are empowered by conquering the woman, or owning her (thus Bond and Pussy Galore.) Marston/Peter just doesn’t work that way. Steve isn’t empowered by owning or controlling Wonder Woman, and I don’t think Marston is either. He wants to be her, not own her…and to the extent he does want to own her, it’s through bondage imagery which is explicitly figured as yannic, not phallic.
Same with the unitary point. He goes out of his way to double the Diana Prince identity, so the secret identity becomes not a way of imagining (phallic) ascension of power, but instead a way of imagining love and relationships as sacrifice.
Again, the TV show is somewhat different…not least in making the transformation about an explosive attainment of power.
Marston’s take on gender difference, his gender essentialism, is based in his belief that the phallus is not the only source, and not the ultimate source, of power. Phallic economies insist that everything is one, the same, so even women are the phallus. Marston says, in contrast, that there is a sex which is not one.
Well sure, Lacan says that too (about the not-one-sex thing). In fact, men and women are both unstable, because men have been castrated and women lack the phallus.
I don’t know about opting out of the phallic economy. Certainly plenty of gynocentric feminists (Firesonte, Kristeva) deal with it as a reality, despite it being one they would transform. The concept of “love as the law” has in some ways come to pass, not only in sundry utopias but in the biopolitics of self-regulation, the bliss-yielding womb of capitalism– and yet the phallus defines relations of property and force. If the diffused phallus is a vagina, then okay– but trauma and disembodiment are still central to Wonder Woman’s utopia, and her pacifist revolution.
Marston identifies with Wonder Woman, I agree. He wants to be the thing she desires, which is the phallus– which then becomes her. So she is two, but cyclically deferred, she is one and complete- like the phallus.
Deleuze would be the place to look for an affirmation of void and difference and multiplicity over unity, Nate is right. You have plenty of backup. I just think he’s wrong– the foundation of reality is chaotic, but ultimately the order we know is not imaginary and malleable.
It’s not Lacan who says that; it’s Irigary. And she’s saying it in part as a rejection of Lacan.
WW doesn’t desire the phallus…or at least, a lot of her desire is directed into same sex communities. And trauma isn’t central to her origin or her utopia. In fact, her origin is somewhat unique among superheroes in that it is *not* traumatic. She becomes a superhero because she wants to help other people, not because she’s traumatized.
You can insist that all force is the phallus — but that’s you defining force that way, not the phallus. In any case, to make the phallus the foundation of reality is a metaphor; it’s an imagined relation. Feminism is very much about trying to imagine that relation in other ways…which doesn’t necessarily make the world malleable, on the one hand, but, on the other, has actually succeeded in changing the world quite a bit.
Women are split in Lacan, and have privileged access to jouissance before, beyond, and within language. Not entirely un-Wonder-Woman. The man forms his phallus-baby from shit, like Wonder Woman was formed from clay.
But your viewpoint is more uplifting than mine, and also includes encyclopedic knowledge of Marston/Peter, while mine is borrowed from your book. I very much like a non-revolutionary utopia and a non-traumatic hero (even though she is split, she isn’t castrated, she’s a woman).
I think she’s resisting phallocentrism, not transcending it. But that isn’t to piss on the inspirational value of your reading.
Well, it’s somewhat tricky. I think one of the reason you end up with so much queerness in Marston/Peter is that there’s a pushback against phallocentricism which, as you say, can’t always be completely successful, and so ends up with gender scrambling rather than with the hierarchical imposition of matriarchy.
Marston’s really an excessively optimistic fellow….