Tag Archives: Caro

Feminine Dignity and the Empowered Sexpot, Part 1

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The film version of Barbarella gets a semi-bad rap as an over-the-top sex farce with an almost-camp sensibility and a genuinely bad rap as a film either completely disengaged from its own gender politics or completely sexist:

While women strove to clothe their gender with dignity, Barbarella endeavored to strip them of it…Barbarella’s sexual appeal proves to be her most powerful weapon, but she does not control it as much as it controls her. Each episodic dilemma moves to the next by Barbarella’s sexual encounters with alien strangers, at first a pittance she pays them for saving her life. Notably, circumstances leading up to this event strip Barbarella of most of her clothes. The only exception is when she has sex with Duran Duran’s machine, in which her multiple orgasms ruin the device and foil his scheme to kill her. Opening with an erotic scene of Barbarella undressing herself, the film begins with the statement, woman equals sex [Ed.: italics added], for by that point the audience does not know who she is, and spends the remainder of the time underscoring their assertion. [Source here.]

This is a particularly egregious example of feminist critique, but the fact that anybody can seriously advance the notion that a simple striptease is sufficient to denote “woman equals sex” indicates that we may be to the point where we’re so deft with the feminist critique of objectified female bodies that we overlook the ways in which those bodies function not just as oppressive representations of women but as ambivalent representations of cultural dynamics about women. (Not to mention for not-inherently-problematic aesthetic pleasure.)

One of the most striking lines from the film in this context is “The Mathmos has created this bubble to protect itself from your innocence.” The line is spoken by the Great Tyrant, after she and Barbarella are dunked into the ever-hungry Mathmos expecting to die, only to find themselves protected by a spontaneously generated enclosure that looks a little like the Jetsons’ car (I failed to find a decent picture online.) Delivered in the film’s final minutes, after Barbarella has eagerly rewarded three rescuers with sex and survived the Orgasmotron, the line encapsulates the film’s characteristically 1960s’ stance on the inherent goodness of sexual pleasure. Like much popular culture from the era, Barbarella works to recast the traditional, Puritanical distinction between innocence and corruption, making “purity of body” almost entirely inoperative and advancing the idea that the “good-hearted” (male and female) enjoy sex too.

This is not “woman equals sex.” This is “sex is really, really, fun but mostly irrelevant.”

As an artifact of sexual liberation, Barbarella is certainly subject to the more-limited feminist critique that the sexually liberated woman is a male wish fulfillment, but in the world of the film, Earth culture has evolved to a future state where the Hippie premises are simply business as usual and the power dynamics that inform them in the present have evaporated. Sex is casual; pleasure is paramount; goodness is manifest; and power is besides the point. The other stereotypical Hippie assumption, that mind-altering drugs are benign and progressive, has a surprisingly ambivalent status: on Earth, a drug that allows for the “rapport” of minds has replaced physical intercourse. Although the film doesn’t strongly disparage the use of the drug, it definitely depicts physical sex as both more “primitive” and better.

Thematically, Barbarella’s fantasmic sexual receptiveness is a function of that “primitive goodness” – the merging of physical sensuality with a nurturing and anti-violent sensibility – a concept not entirely unrelated to the later feminist concept of “woman’s wisdom.” The fantasy extends significantly beyond access to the desirable female body, and the film’s politics – sexual and otherwise – are consequently more complex. The critique of Barbarella as brute objectifiation is one of those reductive arguments deriving from an adherence-to rather than an awareness-of the contemporaneous feminist dictum that the personal is political, and it misses the extent to which there’s a lot of politics in this film that has nothing to do with Barbarella’s breasts.

Countercultural exoticism, in both its erotic and philosophical modes, often reflected the influence of the “Hippie trail” – the search for enlightenment in the uncorrupted cultures of the East, viewed as more primitive, authentic, or “in touch” with nature. This affection for primitive eroticism drives the film’s motifs, although the space-exotic aesthetic owes more to the curvy “woggles” of Morris Lapidus than to primitive art or the ethnic tapestries of the subcontinent so characteristic of more earthbound 60s mythologies. Barbarella’s primitivism takes a particularly Western formulation: She is Eve in the Garden of Eden before the Fall: a helpmeet and sexual partner to man, but “innocent” and “pure,” uncorrupted of spirit, naïve about the ways in which her sexuality is both powerful and political.
Released in 1968, the year of the Battle of Saigon and the My Lai massacre, the movie is also ambivalent about violence: the opening sequence, in which the President of Earth sends Barbarella to locate and stop Durand Durand from an as-yet-unknown nefarious plan, establishes that “the Universe has been pacified for centuries.” When the (completely nude) Barbarella receives weapons to help her in the mission she campily complains about being “armed like a naked savage.”

Societies with a propensity to war are described as “in a primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility.” Without even a hint of contradiction, primitive violence is every bit as bad as primitive eroticism is good. Make love, not war.

Aesthetically, the film is a shaky and rollicking hybrid of this hippie utopia with space age bachelor fantasy: Barbarella is beautiful, strong, available for sex at the drop of an innuendo, handy with gadgets, and pacificist, but a perfect shot, able to destroy aircraft from an entirely unbelievable distance with merely a handgun. The world she inhabits is fashionable, uninhibited, and full of stylized villians who are easily defeated.

But perhaps the most illuminating element of the hybrid lies in the residue of domesticity. Barbarella does not keep house; she does not cook; she is not waiting around for the men she sleeps with to take care of her or provide for her. She is a “five-star, double-rated astronavigatrix” with her own spaceship who gets direct calls from the President of Earth. She is also immensely kind, consistently nurturing, and completely not manipulative in any way. This is surely male fantasy, but it is not the oppressive “barefoot and pregnant” male fantasy of first wave feminism or even the “hang around the Mansion and look gorgeous” fantasy of Hugh Hefner. If Barbarella dressed in a smart polyester pantsuit and unzipped it less frequently she would be as unobjectionable as Mary Tyler Moore.

Watch this spot for a link to part 2.

Fish without Bicycles: Feuchtenberger and the Distortion of Scopophilia

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Over in the comments to Erica’s introductory post, Robert Stanley Martin commented that the art of Amanda Vahamaki’s The Bun Field (the subject of the last Fish without Bicycles) doesn’t appeal to him. I’ve heard similar things recently from male friends about both Vahamaki and Anke Feuchtenberger, specifically W the Whore Makes Her Tracks. Although Feuchtenberger’s drawings are sharper than Vahamaki’s with much more contrast, they’re aesthetically related (maybe someone with more art knowledge can give me some vocabulary here), and there’s indeed something about this aesthetic that doesn’t appeal to a number of men I know. Not all the men of my acquaintance – the book was recommended to me by a man. But women seem to like it more. It’s not a scientific sample, but it’s good enough to trigger a blog post.

In the same comment, Robert also called out an objection to French Feminism, specifically Hélène Cixous, who is perhaps best known for coining the term écriture féminine – used by all the French Feminists to describe a kind of richly metaphorical, non-linear writing that “inscribes the female body,” playing off the Pythagorean table of opposites and trying to embody the elements associated conventionally in the West with the female half of the table.

Male Female
Odd Even
One Many
Right Left
Straight Crooked
Activity Passivity
Solid Fluid
Light Darkness
Square Oblong

 

In prose, this project often results in writing that is nearly impossible to parse; the (intentionally) less-than-comprehensible Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche by Luce Irigaray (whom Robert also has issues with) is the definitive case in point.

Feuchtenberger’s work, in contrast, strikes me as far more successfully accomplishing Cixous’ ambitions for “women’s writing”:

“A world of searching, the elaboration of a knowledge on the basis of a systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity.”

Her work “inscribes the body” with a crystalline clarity that the prose experiments never quite master.

Given that, and the apparent frequency with which men dislike this style of art, does the reaction against the aesthetic imply that it alone constitutes something like an “écriture féminine” for comics, something that is inherently, if unconsciously, challenging to male readers and empowering for women? It’s not impossible, especially if you’re very Freudian, but I don’t think so: The shadowy, filtered aesthetic gives a surreal quality that makes room for Cixous’ metaphorical, non-linear écriture féminine, but the aesthetic in itself isn’t sufficient to make that happen. Although it’s common to see this type of aesthetic deployed in the service of metaphorical or non-linear graphic narratives — narratives which are always, somewhat condescendingly, called “dreamlike” — the aesthetic doesn’t mandate any particular content, and I’m hesitant to gender a visual style independent of what it represents.

I find Feuchtenberger’s book remarkably more “feminine” than Vahamaki’s, but the gendered perspective is not in the aesthetic so much as in the imagery. I would not describe The Bun Field in Cixous’ terms, whereas they seem precisely appropriate for W the Whore Makes Her Tracks, despite the surface similarities in aesthetics (and with no implication of intent). Whereas Vahamaki’s text deals with the experience and perception of older children of both genders (a topic often interesting to women but not exclusively so), the subject matter of W the Whore Makes Her Tracks is explicitly sexed: the perspective not (only) of a woman’s mind but of the female’s body.

There is something very much interior about this style of art, something dark and fluid and in keeping with the right side of Pythagoras’s table. It certainly makes sense aesthetically for Feuchtenberger’s narrative. The perspective is intimate – no wide angle here – and the light is dim. The landscape is clearly imagined rather than seen; it does not yield readily to the creation of a “mental map”, except metaphorically. It is immensely difficult to orient yourself in space and impossible to orient yourself in time, except very slightly in terms of relative time internally to the narrative (such as it is.) The use of one panel per page rather than a grid enhances this sense that the story’s movement through time is less important than the visual metaphor of the landscape. The narrative is almost entirely metaphorical, and the overall effect is, again, either of the surrealist mindscape or the imagined Other-world.

But these elements are only obliquely “feminine,” and insufficient to account for any immediate aesthetic reaction against this kind of drawing. It seems wrong to say that men have an unconscious reaction against metaphorical, dreamy, non-linear stories. (One of the men who objected said, “It’s not that I don’t like it really. It’s that it looks like it’s going to be a lot of work.”)

Although the aesthetic itself is not gendered, it would surely be difficult for a man — at least a heteronormatively gendered man — to “recognize” the imagery in the book as true to his experience, especially the more metaphorical imagery:

Feuchtenberger creates the contours of her landscape out of fragments of the female body during the sex act – but unlike most representations, the perspective imagines sex from the interior of the woman’s body:

 

Of course, men can certainly “parse” the imagery – all the typical Freudian visual metaphors for sex make appearances in the book: tunnels and trains, phallic-shaped anythings, orchid-like flowers…they’re all there, and they still mean the same thing.

These images are semiotically packed: as stand-alone panels their signification is already varied. The last image for example is simultaneously (most representationally) the view of a woman from above, a view of sex from inside the woman, and a view of birth from outside. It also carries narrative significance for the book’s foregrounded conceit about sexual objectification and the marked-ness of the female gender.

But that turned-around perspective resonates more with a woman’s experience of her body…

…than with a woman’s visual image of her body, whether from the mirror, photographs, or a sexual gaze.

So what can we conclude from this? Despite this sexual subject matter, the book is not erotic. Bart Beaty comments, in a discussion of Feuchtenberg’s earlier “W the Whore” in TCJ 233, that “even in her nakedness none of the images are particularly sexualized.” Although I don’t have the earlier book to compare, the statement is true for this book as well, even though W the Whore (the character) is not naked very much in this volume.

But why is it that these evocative sexual images don’t have an erotic effect?Of course, they’re not intended to have an erotic effect, because that would undermine the critique of objectification. But what is it about them that interferes? Beaty’s observation puts into perspective not only how much our ideas about what counts as “erotic” are shaped by artistic (aesthetic/dramatic) representations of sex, but how conditioned we are to perceive even our own sexuality from the external perspective of most of those representations: “sexualized imagery” generally is based on something you can see during sex, not on things that you feel. Watching sex on TV or seeing sexually provocative images in a comic or illustrated book doesn’t replicate the experience of sex, it replicates the experience of voyeurism. This is – or at least has the potential to be – an immensely objectifying construct for both men and women, making sex less of an experience and more of a performance. To no small extent, the immense anxiety over body image that many women suffer is connected to this distorted, externalized perspective — as Feuchtenberger’s narrative explicitly points out.

Beaty describes Feuchtenberg as “exploring the outer margins of the comics form with seemingly no interest in making concessions” and “casting the very project of comics storytelling into doubt,” but I think this is too narrow a vantage point to accurately discern what makes this work so distinct an artistic achievement. The conventions of comics storytelling are no more called into question than the conventions of films and books for how to represent stories of women’s erotic experience. Comics form is part of the same broader culture of representation, and it is illuminating to shift the emphasis away from limited questions of form to questions about the extent to which gendered – in this case, sexed – erotic experience informs and shapes perception in general.

It’s a bit of a truism that women find erotic fiction much more arousing than erotic images, and Feuchtenberger’s perspective throws some light on why this is: representing the “inside out” experience of feminine sexuality is, on the surface, much more difficult in art than it is in words. Prose is appealing – and representational art vastly limited – for capturing interior experience: mind, imagination, sensation. In prose, you can just describe the experience, whereas the visual artist has to find a way to bring non-visual sensation to mind through visual means. Resonating with Cixous’ challenge to women writers, Feuchtenberger’s images make clear that French Feminism is profoundly physical but not in the least bit scopophilic. (The French Feminist emphasis on physicality has resulted in charges of essentialism by a great many Anglo-American feminists, including Susan Gubar, whom Robert also didn’t much like). When Feuchtenberger does represent scopophilia it is very distorting:

or creepy, represented by a crowd of anonymous watchers (also visible in images 5 and 6 below). The watchers represent that “experience of voyeurism” discussed above, and stand symbolically in the narrative’s interior space for the ways women internalize the perspective of these collective, objectifying voyeurs.

To parse the literal strain of the narrative, recognizing the distorting effects of this scopophilia is “freeing” for W the Whore, but ultimately futile.

Despite this rather despairing narrative thread emphasizing the futility of écriture féminine, Feuchtenberger’s text in conversation with Cixous’ is “freeing”: it allows us to see the effects of a cluster of binaries between text and image, voyeur and participant, inside and outside, seeing and feeling, male and female. W the Whore Makes Her Tracks illuminates the cultural insistence that “the body” is what we see from the outside rather than what we imagine and experience from the inside, and it turns that insistence “inside out.”

The conventions of illustration and representational art insist that we think of Feuchtenberger’s vantage point as “metaphorical” and “dreamlike.” And yet, Feuchtenberger’s most significant achievement in the book is very direct: the reminder that there is no reason why what we find erotic should be based on the perspective of the voyeur, and that there is so much more to the body than what that voyeur can see. Although I think it definitely matters that this book was written by a woman, it seems like that insight applies equally well for men.

Everyone Gets Into the Fight

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The Fiore vs. Berlatsky kerfuffle was so much fun other folks threw some punches as well. I thought I’d do a brief roundup of some of the more entertaining/enlightening blows.

Mike Hunter, in a comment over at the mainpage, did an extensive fisking of R. Fiore’s fisking of me. Here’s the first bit:

R. Fiore:
The reasonableness of the West is demonstrated by its relative freedom from religious warfare. It is a case where a problem that bedeviled mankind for centuries was solved by human agency. It is one of the greatest achievements of human history.
——————
Indeed a great achievement! But what we need here are more qualifiers, such as “The reasonableness of the West in this area“; for, does the West not indeed support the most corrupt and exploitative dictatorships for the most cynical of reasons?
That there are plenty of tyrants trampling their people without our aid hardly excuses our keeping others in power.
——————
R. Fiore:
The Danish Jyllands-Posten, lulled into a false sense of security by a period of reason and good fellowship in Europe dating all the way back to 1945, published their suite of cartoons featuring Muhammad on the assumption that no one was crazy enough to sacrifice their lives and liberty or commit horrible crimes over a drawing.
—————–
(?????!!!!) The Jyllands-Posten is a right-wing publication which wanted to show what a bunch of berserk nutsos all Muslims were by doing a deliberately provocative action which it knew perfectly well Fundamentalist members of the faith world predictably go apeshit over.

Caro, to no one’s surprise, had a really insightful take.

It seems to me the most telling sentence in the second piece is this: “The reasonableness of the West is demonstrated by its relative freedom from religious warfare. It is a case where a problem that bedeviled mankind for centuries was solved by human agency.”

This idea that social problems are ever “solved” is, at the risk of melodrama, dangerous. They go dormant, conditions obtain at a given period of time when the are less of a problem, but that doesn’t mean they are solved, like some utopian science fiction novel.

This is precisely where Fiore’s “cultural materialism” is insufficient: you might be able to explain the past in cultural materialist terms, but you will not be able to imagine how the past might “return” to inform the future, because by denying the dialectic you leave yourself no mechanism for examining how that past is immanent in the present.

Maybe the errors of fact arise from this too: how would the families of the victims of Srebrenica feel about the notion that the West has solved the problem of religious violence, or even that Europe and “the Muslim world” have diverged in the first place? (His use of the word “Europe” to mean “Western Europe” is really irritating.) Or the European religious philosophers of the 17th century feel about secular pluralism as the cause for the advancements of Western civilization, since it ignores the religious pluralism on which secular pluralism is based? (I want to include the statement “Radical…Islam is not a remedy” here but I can’t figure out what he’s saying it’s not a remedy for…)

Fiore thinks in terms of cause and effect rather than in terms of “conditions of possibility” and I think that’s why Fiore’s essay feels so wrong to us: he treats history as something completed, a riddle to be explained, rather than as a powerful immanent presence that we have to engage with. His inability to perceive religion as anything other than an adaptation is probably why he can’t perceive History in this way: immanence was originally a religious concept, and if you take a strict materialist approach to religion it’s hard to exhibit the forms of mind necessary for imagining things that are temporally infinite. Fiore, imagining history as as series of finite cause and effects rather than an ongoing process that he is part of, sets himself outside history. I guess that’s the binary that I see informing this piece the most.

And in what I think is the closest thing we’ve gotten to a defense of Fiore, Andrei Molotiu chastised me for my second response to Fiore.

Noah, whatever one might think of Fiore, this is not a response, it’s a trolling post. It makes you sound like JF Ronan in his prime. It’s the kind of post that makes me not want to check HU as often anymore.

I think Fiore may well be sick of the back and forth, so this may be the end of the brouhaha. Thanks to all those who read and commented…and to R. Fiore himself, for engaging as long as he did. I hope we’ll get a chance to fight again soon.

A Doctor in Every Panopticon: Response to Ben Schwartz

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Ben Schwartz posted a response/review to the first episode of the new Doctor Who season over on the main tcj.com site. I won’t summarize it in detail ‘cause it’s right here and you can just go read it. (Go read it! Support our host site! Give Ben some hits! He needs your support to counteract all the shit I’m giving him…)

Ben’s (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) thesis is that Eleven (the Doctor’s eleventh regeneration) is a “Tory” doctor – the idea being that this Doctor caves in to authority too quickly. I think this conclusion is wrong: it’s based first on overlooking the ways in which the plot of the first episode coheres internally, then overlooking how it coheres with the theme of the multi-episode story arc – the Doctor must decide whether the good of the many outweighs the good of the one – and then subsequently misreading how both that story arc and this specific story’s plot tie into contemporary British politics.

I’m not sure whether Ben feels like the old episodes are more tightly plotted than the new ones, but in my read, Dr Who has never been particularly about plot. It’s a secular morality play. If you don’t like morality plays, you’re probably not going to like this show (unless, these days, you just have a crush on the cute Doctor). But that doesn’t make it badly written. That’s like saying The Canterbury Tales is badly written because it isn’t The Lord of the Rings.

So although I think Ben is just mistaken about the plot points – something I go into in Ben’s comments section in nauseatingly geeky detail – mostly his post felt worth an argument to me because one of the reasons I do not watch a lot of tv in general is this notion, implicit in Ben’s position, that everything should be clearly spelled out bluntly and explicitly at the level of plot and dialogue, making it easy to get all the pieces on a casual viewing or two. To me, it’s the things that are not spelled out, but that can be reconciled via close reading (or even sometimes only by recourse to extra-diegetic elements) that give writing in any medium texture and life and complexity. I don’t share Ben’s concern with plotholes, but I also don’t agree that the episode actually has plotholes to be concerned about. I think it’s very tightly scripted and very well done.

Now, I’ll accept that the episode’s tightness is pretty subtle and easy to miss on one watching. (I’ve now watched it 6 times, because every time Ben said something I’d go, “Wait, what? Wait! Lemme watch that again!) But that subtlety is a tactic: just because it’s hard to catch precisely how things tie together in a single viewing doesn’t make the subtle bits “plotholes.” Having some things be tricky to figure out – but nonetheless tight – is what makes a video, tv or film or otherwise, worth watching and rewatching, that makes the viewer an active participant and rewards engaging for more than just a couple hours diversion. Dr Who is TV for geeks, which is why we’ve been watching it for 40-odd years.

So Ben and I, I think, disagree on what it means for an episode to be “well-written” because we think about plot in different ways. But that said, we also appear to have watched two very different versions of The Eleventh Hour. Ben argues:

[The Doctor] had direct contact with the Atraxi and then Prisoner Zero and was given the Atraxi message personally.

He points out that he leads the Atraxi to Zero by using his sonic screwdriver because they’re looking for alien technology — so, the Atraxi definitely know our world, that the Doctor’s not part of it, and then ignore this until it becomes a key part of catching Zero.

Ben rightly identifies the kernel of the plot in the second quote, but the details are wrong. The Doctor doesn’t lead the Atraxi to Zero using his sonic screwdriver. It’s actually fairly tricky for them to track something as small as the screwdriver. The Doctor tries to get their attention using it in the town square, and fails, because the screwdriver burns up before the Atraxi can, ahem, zero in on it.

The Atraxi don’t speak directly with him until the end, when he meets them on the roof. Prior to that, they’re just talking to his technology. Ben rightly remembers that in Amelia’s bedroom the Atraxi send their message directly – but it isn’t a personal message. It’s just the same rote “Prisoner Zero has escaped” that they’re broadcasting on every available communications medium, Earth-based and otherwise. They identify the alien technology of the sonic screwdriver and then broadcast their message directly onto the Doctor’s psychic paper.

But they don’t make the connection between the alien technologies and the biological alien. It’s not the Doctor they know; it’s the Doctor’s things. What they have a lock on is the technology they identified in Amelia’s bedroom and yard when the Doctor first arrived: that’s why they followed the Doctor away from Earth. (He says in the town square when he’s explaining why 12 years passed before they came back: “they’re only late ‘cause I am.”)

Tracking the Doctor in the Tardis is different – philosophically and in practice – from tracking the Doctor walking around. Atraxi scanning technology isn’t precise enough to find an individual the size of a human being quickly. Even with the sonic screwdriver going off in the town square and the Atraxi directly overhead, they can’t pinpoint the screwdriver, let alone identify the Doctor and Prisoner Zero, in that few seconds. In fact, although we don’t know it during the scene in the town square, the Atraxi don’t even know that the Doctor is alien until they scan him at the end of the episode on the rooftop – after he actually does succeed in phoning them. They scan him, and then they say “you are not of this world.”

So the Doctor’s being alien in fact isn’t a key part of catching Zero (except insofar as he’s smarter than we are). And the alien-ness of the Doctor’s technology doesn’t play any role either: what the Doctor did, he did entirely using present-day Earth technology: a laptop, a computer virus, and a camera phone. The Atraxi’s ability to scan alien technology in particular ends up being entirely irrelevant. Instead, what’s relevant is the distinction between the technology and the individuals who use it – and the fact that the Atraxi’s technology can’t tell the difference.

Insofar as there is something political in this episode, this is it. The use of earth technology is it. The gap between who a person is and the technology (s)he uses is it. This is well-played technology-as-Panopticon – and there aren’t many places, in the West at least, where the Panopticon has more present-day relevance than in 21st century Britain. According to the BBC, there are 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain – about one for every 14 people. That’s almost Orwellian, and it’s a huge issue for British politics.

But Ben gets the wrong party: the surveillance state is even more Labour than it is Tory. Officially the Tories support reductions in the surveillance state – but convicts are an exception to their plan to reduce the reach of their databases. In Britain-as-Panopticon, Labour and Tory are equally implicated. Certainly surveillance is a political issue, but it’s not one that falls out on the reductive liberal/conservative binary so characteristic of American politics.

Surveillance is instead a political issue in the Foucauldian sense. Foucault explained it thus in Discipline and Punish:

Perhaps we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands, and its interests. Perhaps we should abandon the belief that power makes mad, and by the same token, that the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather than power produces knowledge…that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. These “power-knowledge relations” are to be analysed then, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free in relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject who knows.

Surveillance is about gathering information and turning that information into knowledge about the people under surveillance. What’s at stake in this episode is not the straightforward partisan allegory, but its moral facet: the omniscience of the panopticon, and the limitations of that omniscience.

That gap between the individual and the technology, the gap the Atraxi surveillance cannot bridge, cuts to the moral heart of the very existence of a state: the necessity for individuals to make decisions on behalf of the many that affect each individual one, and the inadequacy of the knowledge we base those decisions on. Where better to explore the relation of surveillance to power than in a story where the hero’s power so explicitly comes from knowledge?

This is why the question (blustering over the Internet on Whovian message boards at the moment) of why the Doctor gives up Prisoner Zero without any evidence of his guilt is missing the point. Foucault’s insight is that the perspective of the Panopticon is not just about monitoring the prisoner – it’s about the way in which the ability to monitor individuals creates a category of citizen subjectivity unique to the modern state: individuals are transformed by surveillance into objects of knowledge.

That’s what Prisoner Zero is to the Atraxi, and by the force and necessity of his power-knowledge and the limitation of Earthly time, to the Doctor as well. The Atraxi mothership is a Panopticon – in concept and in design – but it is the Doctor who is all-seeing. Zero’s body is trapped in a forcefield of power and knowledge articulated by both the Atraxi and the Doctor: a forcefield that renders any sense in which he might be “not guilty” irrelevant – secondary in the face of the need to “govern” and “protect” the rest of the world. The state depends on the prisoner. The sacrifice of the one is necessary for the good of the many. The Doctor, like Foucault, knows this – and it makes him sad.

This is the point Ben misses when he insists that the Doctor jumps when the Atraxi flash their badges. Yes, the Doctor is complicit in the use of surveillance technology against Zero – but when the Atraxi take Zero, the Doctor’s expression is heartbroken. He’s genuinely sorry. It’s not a rote caving to an external authority; it’s recognizing that no individual beings matter in this universal, timeless, always existing field of power-knowledge. The Doctor recognizes his own subjugation to his own power.

But he also recognizes that he is the one individual in a position to determine whether the field of power-knowledge serves good or evil. (I’m wondering whether this will be a theme in the upcoming Churchill/Nazi/Dalek episode.) The Doctor, contra Foucault, turns the surveillance technology back against the Atraxi too. He subverts the Atraxi by turning their attention FROM the technology TO the one individual who does matter in that field, the individual in the Panopticon, the organic, living Doctor – the Doctor who protects the Earth. The Doctor who is our Superhero. The Superhero whose superpowers are his compassion, his mind, and his knowledge.

This is why I just don’t think this episode can be easily reduced to partisan politics, as Ben suggests, or even to simplistic questions of whose authority is most compelling.

Doctor Who doesn’t just have knowledge and a conscience. He has the power to make decisions that challenge and test the limits of his conscience, and that have consequences for individuals – individuals with whom he feels genuine compassion but over whom he nonetheless has power. Ben not only completely diminishes the complexity of this story when he overlooks how much the Doctor struggles with this role; he diminishes – like so much of contemporary politics in the age where the most powerful Panopticon is the eye of the media – the extent to which political good always relies on the ability of those individuals fortunate enough to sit in the panopticon to watch themselves as clearly and as vigilantly as the prisoners below.

Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable: Liberty, Fecundity, Perversity

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My friend Chris loaned me his beloved, carefully encased in plastic, original issues of the full Alan Moore run of The Saga of the Swamp Thing for this roundtable. We’ve been talking about it off and on for the last couple weeks. This post is compiled from the highlights of our conversations.

Chris: Well, they weren’t carefully encased in plastic.

Caroline: No? You couldn’t prove it from how hard they were to get out.

Chris: I really do hate plastic bags. I typed a mini-rant that was totally off-topic, but you know, I’m not that much of a geek.

Caroline: You couldn’t prove it from this blog post.

Chris: Ha ha ha. Very funny.

Caroline: Well, I haven’t gotten them back in the plastic yet, but thanks for loaning me your Swamp Things.

Chris: You’re welcome. Did you like them?

Caroline: I did!

Chris: Really? I didn’t expect that. I never once thought about trying to hand you any Alan Moore other than From Hell.

Caroline: How come?

Chris: Well, they’re just pretty much straight-up genre work for the most part, albeit a kind of elevated version of it.

Caroline: Hey, I like genre!

Chris: You like SF.

Caroline: And romance!

Chris: OK, yeah, but you hate fantasy, and I’ve never heard you say anything about horror.

Caroline: Well, ok. That’s true. Sort of. I don’t absolutely hate fantasy and horror; it’s just that I don’t much like their post 19th-century incarnations, except when they’re really intended for kids. I like them fine in mythology or actual Arthurian legend, or Mary Shelley.

Chris: When I’ve steered you toward stuff, I’ve gravitated more toward the art than the genre side. Genre comics are books where the whole point is “this book exists to be liked,” and you tend to want more than that.

Caroline: Well it’s no secret how much I love art fiction. But I just read genre fiction differently from how I read art fiction. I’m less intellectually interested in it but it’s still pleasurable.

Chris: I guess I’m surprised you liked Swamp Thing because a) I didn’t think you were interested in genre fiction more than historically, and b) I think the problematic thing about SotST is that it kind of smacks of trying to redeem genre. You know: “World’s Best Swamp Creature Comic.” Everybody seems to struggle with “b”, and I didn’t think you would be any exception. But I didn’t think you’d get past “a.”

Caroline: Well, here’s the thing. I’m sure one of the reasons I was able to like this one is that the activation energy was very low, largely due to the prose doing the heavy lifting on the story. I could skim it. I can’t skim an art comic. I’m not sure anybody can really skim an art comic, at least not while actually “reading” it.

When I read genre, it’s for relaxation and the point is just to get swept along and enjoy it, not to really wallow in the details. I guess I read it like most people watch tv. Remember that reading for details is my job. So when I read for entertainment the whole point is not to worry as much about details, except the ones that I need to understand what’s going on.

So I especially like genre fiction that really wallows in familiar tropes. If it gets experimental or tricky, I want it to be something with a lot of metaphorical sophistication, really more art fiction that’s playing with genre tropes than “well-done genre.” I don’t have the energy for some really thick plot-heavy worldbuilding thing, because then I have to pay a lot of attention for a payoff that essentially is only a decent story. And mostly I’m not interested in thinking very hard about stories. I kind of expect a story to resonate enough that I don’t have to.

Chris: Hm. I can see that.

Caroline: And hell, this Swamp Thing is the uber-incarnation of “wallowing in familiar tropes.”

Chris: I was just going to say…

Caroline: I could read through it pretty quickly, enjoy the atmosphere and feel grounded enough to know what the story was, but not really be obligated to dig into the details.

Chris: Although, “wallowing in tropes” applies mostly toward American Gothic, which has this artificial structure imposed on it…

Caroline: I don’t know about that. I think Moore takes tropes from different genres throughout. The romantic triangle with the jerky husband is very much a trope, then Abby falling in love with her best friend. There are science fiction tropes throughout, and some elements from noir interspersed, especially in Constantine. Everything was quickly recognizable. I didn’t feel like anything was particularly new.

Chris: Let me talk to your prose observation…You like it because it’s prose for all intents and purposes, but you said you did like the art, yes?

Caroline: Absolutely. It’s very lush and atmospheric. I love the colors.

Chris: Does the art just provide atmosphere? Does it contribute in any meaningful way, or is it just a substrate for Moore’s prose?

Caroline: Well, atmosphere is a big part of genre isn’t it?

Chris: Yeah.

Caroline: I think it mostly provides atmosphere and texture, but I think that’s essential to good genre. It happens to be the part that’s often not very effectively conveyed in prose, and art gets at it very efficiently. I thought this art was smart and mostly very consistent at a high-level with Moore’s aggregation of tropes. I’d probably even say the art overall was better quality than the writing; it was a huge part of the impact of the book.

Chris: I think one of the interesting things about Swamp Thing in this respect is that it is a collaboration. Bissette-Veitch-Totleben were pals and studiomates, so there was a more seamless union than you usually get. Generally penciller/ inker breakdown is just assembly line to grind out more product faster. This team, all of them were pretty simpatico.

Caroline: That makes sense. There was a tremendous difference in the issues that had a different art team: they weren’t nearly as alive. They really didn’t have anything like the same emotional texture. But I guess what I’m saying is that I wasn’t really relying on the art at all to make sense of the book.

From my perspective, as a very skilled fiction reader almost entirely unfamiliar with mainstream comics, the division of labor here – meaning the narrative labor, not the collaborative work of creating the book – is very sensible and practical: the words did the narration and dialogue, the stuff words are really good at, and the pictures set the atmosphere and the tone and the mood, created the emotional texture. And the prose is just really competent: the prose techniques and tropes were very recognizable, and that was a really easy way into the story.

And an easy way in was really essential for me as a first-time reader. The few times I’ve picked up mainstream comics before, I’ve immediately had a very strong sense of “this was not written for me.” There’s a hint of “go read these other things and get a grounding in this tradition, then come back and read this,” which requires a commitment to genre comics that I don’t have. That wasn’t here at all in this book, despite the strong genre tropes, because they were so immediately and totally recognizable from their fiction counterparts.

Chris: I think the art really does contribute maybe more than you’re implying, because the team was so sympathetic, both to what Moore was doing, and to the genre in general. I think Bissette was overjoyed to be associated with “Best Swamp Creature Comic Ever,” without irony or embarassment.

So if SotST had been drawn by whomever was just hanging around the DC offices looking for work, I don’t think it would have been the same, no matter what the caliber of writing. Steve Bissette in particular is BIG into horror, and I think his enthusiasm was kind of a driving force in a lot of ways.

Caroline: I don’t disagree with that. I’m not so much trying to downplay the art as explain how the prose worked for me. My point is just that I didn’t really find myself reading the art much. And really, my overall response to the comic wasn’t that the horror genre was so dominant.

Chris: Even in the art?

Caroline: I saw a lot of visual tropes from horror in the art, but there were so many other genres mixed in there that no single one ever rose to the surface. Constantine’s clothes: so noir. I recognize that the horror genre was the one they riffed on most explicitly in the American Gothic section, but the atmosphere, almost entirely coming from the art, really didn’t feel like a Friday the 13th movie or even horror from the 50s/60s like The Blob.

Chris: I think that effect – so much genre there’s a lack of genre – is Moore’s big contribution. American Gothic was probably a self-conscious attempt to “redeem” horror tropes, and I think it generally reads like a creative writing assignment (except for the zombie bits that I really love and we can talk about later…) Before that, I think the horror was more interesting, more organic, more free floating… it could seep into the story as needed.

Caroline: Exactly; it’s organic in form and content – which I really dug because it was so thematic.

Chris: Yeah, me too. I think that was on purpose: fecundity as motif…

Caroline: No doubt. I loved the way the idea of organicism was this overarching conceit for the first part, in the imagery, in the storyline, and then also in the way the different story elements were integrated together. In many ways it’s a very non-linear tale – at least, for mainstream genre.

Chris: Sure. And, you know, why shouldn’t a Swamp Creature comic demonstrate a high level of craft?

Caroline: This makes me think of Noah’s comment from early on, and I think Suat’s too, that they’re “massively massively overwritten.” That sort of implies a lack of craft, doesn’t it?

Chris: I suppose so…

Caroline: I guess, like I was saying at the beginning, I didn’t carefully read and commit to memory every textbox, so I’m sure there were particularly purple passages that I completely skimmed over. But I don’t think I’ve ever read a true work of genre fiction with that careful close reading. I’m not sure what the payoff of spending my time that way would be. I read Zizek that way, but not Heinlein.

Chris: There were passages and lines here and there that made me cringe… but overall, I thought he had a good batting average.

Caroline: Flipping back through it and looking at people’s examples, there are definitely purple passages, but they just didn’t bug me because I wasn’t reading at that grain. I was trying to hold on only as tightly as it took to stay on the ride.

Most just didn’t strike me as overwritten, although the example Noah comes up with really is pretty egregious:

“the interminable, tortuous extended metaphor comparing the emergency care ward of a hospital to a forest is probably the absolute low point of this volume— “in casualty reception, poppies grow upon gauze, first blooms of a catastrophic spring…a chloroform-scented breeze moves through the formaldehyde trees…”

What do you think, can we defend that on the “fecundity as motif” grounds?

Chris: I would say yes.

Caroline: OK. But it probably works because of the tightness of that fecundity/organicism metaphor. I’d say the whole thing may be a little overgrown, but that’s kind of the point…

Chris: I’ll offer an example of a kind of overwriting that I think would irritate you: Hellblazer, the John Constantine spin-off. I haven’t re-read it in a long time, but it also used a very florid prose style. But to me, it seemed more like a coat of paint slathered over the story.

Caroline: That’s a good way to describe what I felt about this one. There was definitely purple prose in places, but it was like a bad paint job, not a rotten board.

Chris: I don’t think that’s quite what I mean. With Jamie Delano, who wrote Hellblazer, the purple stuff is all on the surface, it really detracts from the overall effect. Even when Moore’s at his most purple, I don’t think you’re intended to take the overwriting seriously: it all just seems very playful. Delano was (in my hazy memory) utterly humorless, and that made his writing really insufferable to me.

Caroline: I see where you’re going – with Delano, there’s an earnestness to the purple prose that makes you sort of laugh at him. With Moore, it’s like a Magic Kingdom ride through genre fiction with a somewhat outlandish character on the loudspeaker. Set in a swamp.

Chris: Talk about purple prose.

Caroline: I try.

Chris: But yeah, Delano struck me as “earnest angry young man in coffeehouse.” (I don’t want to rag on him totally. Hellblazer did have some good long term character development in it, but man, was it a slog to get through…) But Moore is very freewheeling, libertine. A little like Sam Delany.

Caroline: I’ve been on this Delany kick lately.

Chris: Yes, I know.

Caroline: Pfft.

Chris: It reminds me of that sequence I keep pointing out in Motion of Light in Water. I should maybe pull the quote, but basically, Delany talks about the ‘60s, and how the era crystallized for him as he listened to a Motown song: The song – with all the typically slick Motown production – was just full of callouts and references to all kinds of other things in music and in culture; it was kind of a smorgasbord of stuff from the larger world just distilled into 3 minutes of pleasureable pop. And Delany noticed from there that that was happening all over the place at the time. “Nothing was forbidden,” so to speak. It informed his writing and his life.

Caroline: Right, Moore is working with what is really not a single genre, but ALL the major pop genres in aggregate. But do you think he’s imposing this ‘60s sensibility onto the book?

Chris: I don’t know if it’s specifically ‘60s; Delany perceived it as ‘60s. I don’t know that Moore necessarily did/does. But a similar sensibility, yes.

Caroline: The yams are pretty psychedelic – and the yam sex sequence is very psychedelic, visually and conceptually. But the book is, of course, from the 1980s. I guess I think that in some ways, there’s a “visual history as trope” in the book. The colors are very ‘70s; the horror images do have a little bit of a ‘50s feel to them, the teenagers in the car especially; the ‘60s psychedelia. The scene in #20 with the gunmen standing around the shot-up Swamp Thing looks a little like 1940s-era military images. There’s nothing I’d really identify as ‘80s but it was early in the decade…

Chris: Well, Constantine is Sting…

Caroline: There ya go.

Chris: There were punk vampires and some side characters, too. The spirit is hippie-era, but I guess it’s a bit punk-era too. That sort of “try anything” ethos…

Caroline: The hippie feel definitely dominates the punk feel to me. The art doesn’t feel punk.

Chris: You don’t think so? Well, I guess not like Gary Panter or anything like that.

Caroline: This is some seriously skilled art. Bissette is not the Sid Vicious of cartooning.

Chris: True.

Caroline: Constantine is really Sting?

Chris: Supposedly. Bissette was a fan and just liked drawing him. It fell by the wayside by the time he got his own book.

Caroline: So he wasn’t doing anything with the fact that it was Sting. Sting was just the model for the physical character.

Chris: Yeah. I’ve always loved the way Constantine sort of knows everybody, from bikers to nuns to boho NYC artists to geeks to friggin’ Mento from Teen Titans. The way he sort of flits from world to world is very much in that Moore-Delany cosmopolitan spirit.

Caroline: Right. “Libertine” applies to Constantine in a slightly more conventional sense. But it’s all held together by this notion of being unrestrained. I suppose that’s ironic, but it’s a very playful irony. Worlds in this comic are very permeable, boundaries are very fluid and overlapping. Nothing’s discrete.

Chris: Characters, history, geography, genre. I’m impressed by Moore’s willingness to play genre mash-up. The most significant example of this is horror + heroics. I confess I’m not a horror guy, so I’ll cheerfully be corrected by someone who knows better, but it strikes me that horror protagonists tend to be victims, passive characters. Moore’s reimagining of Swamp Thing, post-Anatomy Lesson, casts him as an active hero. While the JLA commiserate up in their satellite HQ on how useless they are against Woodrue, who is down on earth (get it?) plowing through the muck (get it?) getting things done? Moore’s Swamp Thing is active, but he’s not the bad guy. He’s defined as a hero and an individual: “This is what I can do. This is how I am unique and where I can make a difference.” Or to use a direct quote: “I am in my place of power… and you should not have come here.” I must confess, I hadn’t reread these for some time, and while I vaguely remembered that Swampy-Arcane battle that included that line, I’d forgotten just what a can of whup-ass Swamp Thing unloaded there. It was awesome, and I mean that seriously. It’s heroics and horror… shouldn’t awe be a basic ingredient? I think it should, but, say, in a typical Justice League comic – it’s just not there. Moore gets it. He remembers to put it in.

Caroline: So this sense that things are libertine and unrestrained works from the perspective of someone coming into the book from the comics tradition as well as for someone like me, coming in via more general genre fiction. The expectations of people familiar with comics are equally muddied up.

Chris: Absolutely. You know, I think the perfect illustration of Moore’s take on genre appears in the Voodoo/Zombie 2-parter. I think some of the most perfect moments in Moore’s run are in that episode. The zombie bits really sing (for me, at least), and I really love the little moments that play against genre expectation in touching and logical ways.

Caroline: I was particularly keen on the first page of that, where he’s detailing the claustrophobia and tedium of “life” in the grave.

Chris: Yeah, you can argue that it’s Moore showing off his prose for its own sake…

Caroline: Wait, you really think it’s particularly prosaic? I didn’t really get that.

Chris: Well, it’s mostly prose. The pictures are just there for the punch line, when he rolls over onto his side: “He couldn’t sleep.”

Caroline: True.

Chris: But I think this imagining of the zombie POV pays off nicely down the road. When the dead father appears before his (now) middle aged daughter, we don’t get the standard “I will eat your brain” sequence, just a father-daughter reunion that is genuinely touching.

Caroline: Yeah, “touching” usually isn’t an emotion that shows up in zombie stories.

Chris: And when the walking dead is still walking by the end of the book and has to get a job, our hero gravitates back toward enclosure, and takes tickets at the local movie house (where the horror movie posters all look absurd in comparison). Come on! That’s funny!

Caroline: It’s that unrestrained permeability again. The undead are usually pretty non-human, but he humanizes them to great comic and emotional effect.

Chris: That’s what works for me: Moore inhabits the horror. He imagines himself as the zombie. The pathos is earned, the emotion is real, the absurdity wittily acknowledged. It’s drama and humor both. Straight-up horror would have bored me. It kind of did, in much of the rest of Gothic. (And generally, only during Gothic, and its plastic conception; not so much pre-Gothic). But Moore’s zombie arc is a sort of mini-masterpiece of sympathetic writing and willingness to dance outside the grave. It’s very polymorphously perverse…

Caroline: That’s such a great phrase. The polymorphism is a huge theme in this book and it’s present at every single level. That’s extremely satisfying to me, even from the “art reading” perspective.

There’s a couple of ways to think about it, I guess: you can think of mainstream comics as their own subgenre of genre fiction, like science fiction or romance or horror, with their own tradition and their own tropes. Or you can think of them as expressions of the same genres that you have in fiction, so that science fiction comics and science fiction novels and science fiction short stories are all instances of science fiction. I think Moore definitely went for the latter approach in this book, although he apparently also paid attention to the comic book tradition and tropes.

So the book is polymorphic in relation to these two ways of situating itself – I gotta say that even though I don’t think Moore was really showing off his smarts here, it really is smart how even at that very topmost almost meta-writerly level, he’s still consistent with his surface-level content and themes.

Chris: Moore recognizes that it’s all story: horror into superheroes into romance into comedy into “mainstream fiction.” He respects them all and, at his best, promiscuously blends them into one another with a true libertine spirit. The Swamp Thing–Abby romance is appropriate: breaking taboos and cross-kingdom pollenization – because why not?

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Matthias Wivel on Ware and Rembrandt

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Matthias Wivel wrote an extended response to Caro’s post on Chris Ware and criticism. I hated to see it buried at the end of that long comment thread, so I thought I’d give it it’s own post. Hopefully Matthias won’t take it amiss. So here it is:

Wow, great discussion! I’m not sure where to pick up, but let’s see…

Your basic criticism of Ware seems to me somewhat beside the mark and fairly typical of a ‘literary’ point of view. But comics is a visual medium too, if not first and foremost, and there’s nothing ‘merely’ about concentrating one’s efforts, if that’s indeed what Ware does, in the ‘drawings’ — by his own rather sophisticated, if unacademic, analysis of cartooning, that’s precisely what cartooning is about; a visual language that one reads, rather than looks at.

At a more fundamental level, the whole idea of separating form from content in the way you suggest — in order to locate some intellectual premise — is false. It strikes me as a more advanced iteration of the familiar “the drawings are good, but the story sucks”-type criticism one reads so often in comics reviews. Form and content are one, and attempting to separate them is an abstraction that does not necessarily tell us much of anything about the work.

And even if you could separate them, why is it that works that have an intellectual premise are inherently better than ones that concentrate on emotion, as you say Ware’s do? And, by extension, why does the ability of the artist to articulate this premise independently of the work make it greater? I like Cocteau and Jeff Wall fine (Rushdie less so), but they strike me precisely as the kind of intellectual, ‘literary’ artists, whose work gains from this kind of intellectual parsing, while that of, say, Rembrandt doesn’t. And there is no doubt in my mind whose work is greater.

As to whether Ware has written a text like Wall’s very interesting one (thanks for calling attention to it!) — no, I’m not sure, but he has written and talked at length about his medium of choice, addressing as does Wall both his precursors and his practice. One may well disagree with his take on it, which as mentioned carries a non-academic bias in favor of his own approach, but it is hard to deny that it is an intensely analytical, not to mention sophisticated, one — clearly formulated by a highly experienced and self-critical practitioner.

Regardless, therefore, of whether Ware thumbs his nose at ‘criticism’ — and I agree that the Imp letter is dumb — he practices it himself. The Comics Journal cover tells us as much, it being a commentary precisely on the history and reception of his chosen medium. Reading it straight, as you did in your piece, seems to me to be missing its point; that he places criticism at the bottom of the ladder, along with pornography, is (besides being a dig at Fantagraphics’ livelihood) only natural: what else could he do when covering the a magazine whose stated purpose it has been to drag the still fledgling, and frankly impoverished, discipline out of its primordial state?

The reason I’m engaging your criticism, is because I’m struggling with some of the same aspects of Ware’s work that you seem to. I don’t think the emotional truthfulness of his work is quite as advanced or true to life as he would wish it to be — pace the tenor of his Datebooks — but at the same time I admire him for trying so hard to arrive at it. In this regard, he has matured considerably as an artist, and I find his latest work — especially the “Building Stories” series — promising in terms of presenting a more fully human point of view.

I disagree that he is unwilling to make a mess — I think that’s largely what he’s been doing, by hacking away at the same set of emotions for so long — it’s just that the mess he makes is so neat that one doesn’t immediately notice.

Ware seems to me to be using comics to convey a specific perception of time and space — a kind of visual epistemology that reflects his own inner life and that of his characters, and ultimately speaks to our experience of the world. The ‘premise’ is precisely the creation of ‘a sympathetic world for the mind to go to’ that you deride in your post, ‘however stupid that sounds’, and I believe that we are the richer for it.