I found Monday night’s class discussion so helpful and useful-especially in terms of discussing DeBord’s use of the term “spectacle” to theorize about a global media economy. I found it very interesting to talk about what can enable access to the spectacle and whether or not everyone has the same access or can avoid or resist the spectacle altogether. I felt much of this conversation we were trying to determine whether or not we consciously participate in the spectacle and in what degree are we conscious or participatory? Part of me really wants to take that route and do a very theoretical discussion parsing out my ideas on these matters. However, for the sake of “fun” and “play” I am going to wrestle with these ideas via DeBords notion of “celebrity.” My previous reading of Debord was really in the context of visual representation and I find his notions of spectacle to be applied not only to the banal and mundane but also to those who take up a spectacular lifestyle through celebrity. I find this especially poignant and amusing in cases of reality television.
Although my translation is different, I found that DeBord identifies the spectacle in thesis 10, as, “Affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance.” If the spectacle is appearance, is image, is representation and the affirmation of these images, we can see this being performed so plainly in so many places. In the context of celebrity, we can see how images are affirmed, especially through their repetitive use and for the desire of others in the spectacle to mimic celebrities. As a professor at my undergraduate institution once said, “Celebrities are celebrities because they are celebrities, they are famous for fame’s sake.” Celebrities are not only a part of the spectacle, they are spectacle themselves—performing a spectacular image of what it means to be a celebrity whether it be the multiple attempts in rehab, excessive spending, or adopting children from foreign nations. As DeBord notes in thesis 60, “The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role…Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society —unfettered, free to express themselves globally (emphasis original). What I notice from this is exactly what my professor noted, celebrities are not celebrities because of their acting, singing, or dancing ability but because they give us, the little people, models of the ways we should desire to live.
As a society we are presented with a character like Paris Hilton, who has no direct connection to being a celebrity, no specific talent (although some will argue that modeling was her talent and that she was a celebrity for that,) yet becomes famous for her spectacular lifestyle — mainly the fact that she is an heiress to a fortune. The recognition of Paris as a celebrity makes it possible for her to later launch an acting and singing career and even more ironically her “reality” show, The Simple Life. In this “reality” show, Paris and one of her friends are transplanted into different situations far removed from their Hollywood lifestyle, usually into small towns with common people, and everyone voyeuristically watches to see if she will in fact stick her hand into the cow’s rectum on the dairy farm while wearing her Prada dress. The fact that the show is even called The Simple Life alludes to the fact that these girls are actually the opposite of simple, but high maintenance, big spenders, causing a scene with the town’s local boys no matter where they are. The connection between the spectacle, celebrity, and capitalism becomes quite clear that they are all in fact contingent upon one another for success of propagating “the spectacle.” But it is also important to return to the question of our participation in the spectacle and whether or not we are conscious in our participation. I provide a clip of Ellen, in which, she becomes Paris Hilton's new BFF (also based off of a reality television show) and in turn partly because she is a comedian, but also because she is at least somewhat of a social critic, makes fun of the Paris Hilton enterprise.
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While Ellen may be poking fun at Paris Hilton's spectacle celebrity lifestyle, commenting on all of her pictures, driving her around in the Smart Car, and dancing in "the club" on the stripper pole, in a sense Ellen simply creates a different celebrity lifestyle of which to potentially mimic. We also begin to see the ways that Paris's lifestyle is taken up in shows like MTV’s Made, Cribs, Sweet 16 and others, which, generally turn ordinary people into celebrities by giving them a make-over, buying them a new car, or showing them living in an extravagant house. While we may think that a Smart Car may be resistive to the spectacle as opposed to driving a "pimped out" SUV it actually creates a new spectacle based on a different celebrity with a different lifestyle. In turn as we discussed in class I do not think DeBord would be more fond of Ellen's commentary on Paris's life since she makes money from her show and resisting the spectacle can not necessarily be done in terms of using capitalistic means, but I did feel that it could illustrate nicely two different examples of celebrity spectacles, different, yet the same. However, I wonder as we also talked about in class is it possible to as Audre Lorde writes, "Dismantle the master's house with the master's tools?" Is it possible to use the spectacle, as a mediated form of communication as a "celebrity" in order to change the existing spectacle?
I do not think that there are many examples of this out there but one that immediately came to mind from reading José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications, was Pedro Zamora, a man/character on MTV’s the Real World: San Francisco. A gay Latino man living with HIV/AIDS, Muñoz claims that Zamora used the medium of the Real World and television to enrich the world with gay Latino visibility as well as AIDS activism. Through his work as a “televisual activist”(143), Zamora was able to use the spectacle of reality television to engage social justice work and reach a large group of people as evidenced through the thousands of letters a week that he received. Zamora was very conscious of his participation in the spectacle from the time he submitted his audition tape but knew that in order to reach a large range of people he would have to use the spectacle to sort of set his own agenda. He accomplished this, by becoming a focal point of the show giving a human face to homosexuals of color living with AIDS. He died soon after the show finished taping and thus, never experienced he kind of celebrity that “reality” television stars are often afforded now. And although there are historical, political, social, racial, gendered, sexualized differences between Hilton and Zamora, we can see how the spectacle may be used for purposes of social justice and not solely spectacle or celebrity.
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Not to conclude too sharply but I do believe we are all caught up in the spectacle at different levels, with different amounts of consciousness. There are certain parts of the spectacle (certain celebrities) we identify with and others we resist. Our choices are limited but the spectacle is not all bad as Gladys pointed out in class Monday night. The spectacle does allow us the medium to transmit messages and access information otherwise denied to us. I leave with another clip of Zamora, maybe a certain type of spectacle or celebrity himself, but one who was conscious enough to know how to use the spectacle to engage the work of resistance and social justice.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
class blog posts #1
Disciplining Sex
Foucault is one of the foundationalists in discussing sex and sexuality and queer theory. His poststructuralist notions of sexuality combined with his theories of power underscore the idea that there are no essentialialisms, no fixed ideas about bodies, and in theory, no fixed identities. This is taken up often in the form of queer studies by theorists such as Judith Butler who assert that there is no congruency between sex/gender/and sexual desire. His theories have had profound impact on my own work as a feminist and queer scholar. As Foucault writes:
“We, on the other hand, are in a society of ‘sex’ or rather, a society ‘with a sexuality’: the mechanisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used…I am looking for the reasons for which sexuality, far from being repressed in the society of that period, on the contrary was constantly aroused”(269).
In context this quotation comes from a chapter of Foucault’s history of sexuality a provocative essay, which, asserts that, in a sense a genealogy of ideas or which have disciplined bodies into asexualized and yet overtly sexual beings. Beginning with the idea of “Biopower” Foucault theorizes about the shifts in ways to control and discipline bodies, through the “right to take life or let live” (259), continuing to ideas about sexuality and the concern with sexuality as a “micropower concerned with the body.”(267). Sexuality organizes society through disciplinary tactics, which, occur through the stigma of homosex, of reproductive rights, and eugenics. The right to sexuality is the right to take life or let live. The right to determine sexual norms are created and reinforced by those in power and the repetition of disciplinary practices instituted by such people.
Situated within Foucault’s earlier notions of power and discipline of bodies where Foucault asserts, “The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of substantial unity), and a volume in disintegration”(83). What we can begin to see as a product of Foucault’s earlier arguments integrated with his more updated ones in The History of Sexuality that bodies are constructed and organized-not based around essences but around language, experience, and modes of power, which discipline bodies into conformity. Bodies are disciplined through practices of sexuality and sexuality is a destabilized discipline and not necessarily built around biological or essentialized phenomenons. As the first quotation illustrates, sexuality is a echanism of power of control of determining what sexual practices are normalized and which ones stigmatized, or even outlawed. If sexuality is a mechanism of power, and not fixed or biological, then this power has the potential to be subverted by reinventing new notions of sex and sexuality. This has proved invaluable for work being done which, centers around bodies and sexuality—mainly through the denaturalization of sex/gender/and sexuality.
In this sense we do begin to see the roots of queer theory and with that critiques of that very theory. While queer theory allows us to see the ways that bodies are disciplined, especially in terms of heterosexual and gender normativity, it also allows for the possibility of agency for those very bodies. If we have the potential to be a culture that is built around the disintegration of the body and at the same time be most concerned with sexuality than we may be able to rewrite the body to free it from constraining notions of heteronormativity.
With this however, comes the very real and very valid critique of post-structuralist and queer theories. Scholars have posed the question that if bodies are only constituted by disciplinary practices such as language and discourse than how do we account for marginalization of those bodies based on their materiality? Bodies face real material consequences through practices of racializing, gendering, classing, and sexualization. And thus, I see the problematic issues surrounding the ideas of Foucault and other thinkers following in his same vein. Bodies may be a product of history, language, and experience, but bodies are still based on their materiality or the way that they look. Whie these judgements may be based on social/political/historical/and cultural constructs they do prove to have real consequences for bodies which, are othered and often devalued.
While I believe there is no conclusion to this conundrum, as I do believe that Foucault’s knife is actually quite blunt so as to not cut off the possibilities for multiple endings, I do think that it may suffice to say that bodies are a hybridization of materiality and disciplinary practice and that it is possible to view bodies as material without essentializing them. And I do not necessarily see Foucault as disagreeing with this, I think instead he challenges us to be open to the possibility that bodies like identities are not fixed, and are instead contingent on historical/cultural/political/and social factors. In this way they have the possibility to be rewritten into new volumes once the previous ones have disintegrated.
Foucault is one of the foundationalists in discussing sex and sexuality and queer theory. His poststructuralist notions of sexuality combined with his theories of power underscore the idea that there are no essentialialisms, no fixed ideas about bodies, and in theory, no fixed identities. This is taken up often in the form of queer studies by theorists such as Judith Butler who assert that there is no congruency between sex/gender/and sexual desire. His theories have had profound impact on my own work as a feminist and queer scholar. As Foucault writes:
“We, on the other hand, are in a society of ‘sex’ or rather, a society ‘with a sexuality’: the mechanisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used…I am looking for the reasons for which sexuality, far from being repressed in the society of that period, on the contrary was constantly aroused”(269).
In context this quotation comes from a chapter of Foucault’s history of sexuality a provocative essay, which, asserts that, in a sense a genealogy of ideas or which have disciplined bodies into asexualized and yet overtly sexual beings. Beginning with the idea of “Biopower” Foucault theorizes about the shifts in ways to control and discipline bodies, through the “right to take life or let live” (259), continuing to ideas about sexuality and the concern with sexuality as a “micropower concerned with the body.”(267). Sexuality organizes society through disciplinary tactics, which, occur through the stigma of homosex, of reproductive rights, and eugenics. The right to sexuality is the right to take life or let live. The right to determine sexual norms are created and reinforced by those in power and the repetition of disciplinary practices instituted by such people.
Situated within Foucault’s earlier notions of power and discipline of bodies where Foucault asserts, “The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of substantial unity), and a volume in disintegration”(83). What we can begin to see as a product of Foucault’s earlier arguments integrated with his more updated ones in The History of Sexuality that bodies are constructed and organized-not based around essences but around language, experience, and modes of power, which discipline bodies into conformity. Bodies are disciplined through practices of sexuality and sexuality is a destabilized discipline and not necessarily built around biological or essentialized phenomenons. As the first quotation illustrates, sexuality is a echanism of power of control of determining what sexual practices are normalized and which ones stigmatized, or even outlawed. If sexuality is a mechanism of power, and not fixed or biological, then this power has the potential to be subverted by reinventing new notions of sex and sexuality. This has proved invaluable for work being done which, centers around bodies and sexuality—mainly through the denaturalization of sex/gender/and sexuality.
In this sense we do begin to see the roots of queer theory and with that critiques of that very theory. While queer theory allows us to see the ways that bodies are disciplined, especially in terms of heterosexual and gender normativity, it also allows for the possibility of agency for those very bodies. If we have the potential to be a culture that is built around the disintegration of the body and at the same time be most concerned with sexuality than we may be able to rewrite the body to free it from constraining notions of heteronormativity.
With this however, comes the very real and very valid critique of post-structuralist and queer theories. Scholars have posed the question that if bodies are only constituted by disciplinary practices such as language and discourse than how do we account for marginalization of those bodies based on their materiality? Bodies face real material consequences through practices of racializing, gendering, classing, and sexualization. And thus, I see the problematic issues surrounding the ideas of Foucault and other thinkers following in his same vein. Bodies may be a product of history, language, and experience, but bodies are still based on their materiality or the way that they look. Whie these judgements may be based on social/political/historical/and cultural constructs they do prove to have real consequences for bodies which, are othered and often devalued.
While I believe there is no conclusion to this conundrum, as I do believe that Foucault’s knife is actually quite blunt so as to not cut off the possibilities for multiple endings, I do think that it may suffice to say that bodies are a hybridization of materiality and disciplinary practice and that it is possible to view bodies as material without essentializing them. And I do not necessarily see Foucault as disagreeing with this, I think instead he challenges us to be open to the possibility that bodies like identities are not fixed, and are instead contingent on historical/cultural/political/and social factors. In this way they have the possibility to be rewritten into new volumes once the previous ones have disintegrated.
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