Reading George Szirtes' poetry is like burrowing into the glove of an alternate world, a world that is the one i inhabit and yet other. Ensconced inside that glove i flex my fingers, i grope within its dark concavities and as my fingers attenuate and stretch, soldering themselves to their rightful places i experience vertiginous sense of simultaneous embedding and release. The expending of effort, the feeling of being spent, of expelling a misty breath into a pool of inert water. On the surface, the water is unchanged except for a brief ripple disturbing its placidity. Yet a breath, a mist has been exhaled, its vapory constituents have imperceptibly mingled with the waters of life. The poem is an amniotic fold from whose cavity i emerge, startled and bewildered at being thrust into a world i thought i inhabited, like a skin whose tissues had become familiar, whose crenellations and panoplies corresponded to the blueprint i had of them in my mental retina. All of a sudden the lens has splintered and fragmented, reconstituted anew because the i who thought reposed in the world, the self assured i who penetrated this poetic world has through a jagged sense of intermissions,like jolts been made aware of a reality. This reality has disturbing implications because it shreds my nerves, rips apart the tissues of my memory, severs the tenuous thread that clogs the past to maintain the present. As the floodgates burst forth a burgeoning unconscious swamps me in a deluge of tableaux which are unobviated by the voice of reason. Because the plug of memory has been pulled and the water whooshes and funnels below to a conscious that is made aware of its parochialism mingled with transcendence because the i that i thought i am, the i that i was, the i that i now reconnoitre are subsumed under the canopy of the i whose contingent contiguity can only be relocated by a return to the primordial womb, a womb whose waters i cleaved, thinking i was birthing myself, the primeval womb which through becoming made itself a reality i unraveled from, creating myself. All of a sudden that seething cauldron, those turbulent fusillades of recollection repossess me. I have been thrust into a world of which i am a speck, whose striations are indissolubly etched in me..I am streaked with its taint as my suppurating bones creak under the weight of this history which is also a metonym of the world i now live in. Volitionlessly, through me, i am being recast into a new homonomy. The words are a mirror which as i look at them look back at me. The words are not an ideal that propel me into a meconnaisance , rather the words are a lapse into my id whose primevality i must peregrinate, whose quadrangles i must navigate, whose possibilities of rupture i must go through to emerge anew. And because this journey is studded with structures whose surfaces i recognize, whose forms had constituted the forms that composed the inviolable universe it emanated from i am forced also to , through this trajectory redefine those forms because they are imbued with meanings hitherto unrecognized. I am falling out of love because the foundations of that love have been rendered precarious. Self contained, cocooned as i was i am unflexing my synapses, opening up my cranial nerves to unclench the fist of my self. I am , through a process unbeknownst yet unalterably my own course being predicated into a reality that my flesh viscerally recognizes as its womb from whose fleshly folds i emerged. Yet this womb is no longer the embodiment of the innocence that it possessed. In re entering it i am passing through its tracts with an altered sense of myself, it is a mirror that reflects me back, uncritically, yet whose glassy impermeability has become redundant through the aegis of my perception. The journey is not a downward pull of gravity, a inversely spiraling verticality. It is lateral. I belong to numerous founts of being that are a part of a continuum, part of a mingling and mangling into beings other than mine, into worlds different from mine yet threaded with a singular spool which stretches to the farthest limits but never snaps. Leaning into this thread i lose my center whose nebulous centrality and impalpable etchings become urgently suggestive. And there is a confused , disorientating awareness of forms and structures being entangled, intersected by my throbbing consciousness and from that entanglement i unspool myself, my sense of what i go through, reconstructing, restructuring and recreating a world unequivocally mine yet incontestably beyond me.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Monday, May 14, 2012
MARILYN MONROE- MYTHOLOGIES.
Cultures and myths go hand in hand. And while mythological persona are consolidated through time they are constituted and generated within the temporal interstices of the zeitgeist they belong to. Marilyn Monroe's mythical status has been well documented and the ways in which her life has been appropriated and signified to denote larger meanings are palpably apparent ,parenthetically. Mythologizing is romanticizing, an act of desubjectivizing and decontextualizing through a subsuming of individual contingent subjectivity into a larger narrative. Hollywood is the symbolic from which images proliferate. The images correspond to the significations imposed on them.Yet these images, these configurations are instituted and generated the moment they are created. There is no ontological reality underlying this market.
Marilyn's life is a metonym of what the industry represents. The poor orphaned girl, daughter of a mentally unstable mother, who throughout childhood and adulthood undergoes a series of transmogrifications and ends up as an successful actress. The foster homes, the precocious poetry, early marriage, feelings of deracination, alienation, self doubt are all woven into the tapestry of this tragic woman whose suicide is a fitting apotheosis, the actualization of the drama her life was leading up to. As a screen presence the incendiarism of her sexuality (the billowing dress) are underpinned by her essential ingenuousness, as though she is unaware of her own allure. The element of comic self parody augments her sexual state of unknowingness. Filtered and distilled through an allure unconscious of its own charms, an innocent all believing state of being, exacerbate the image of victimhood and the child woman whose subversive sexuality is restituted by a series of enactments that defuse its iconoclasm and reconfigures it in a way that satiates male fantasies and makes her a suitable cultural icon. It may be possible to harbor rococo fantasies subterraneously but hollywood operates through illusion. As a unproclaimed repository of culture hollywood reconstitutes disparate existential paraphernalia of Marilyn's life into an emblem. Every aspect of her life is part of a mythopoeic contiguity. Even detractors, critics who highlight subjective aspects of her life find their postulations inextricably coalesced into this myth game.
Monroe's life demonstrates the hegemony of mythologizing and its appropriative, self amplifying tactics. Marilyn was made a mythical personage through acts of repeated osmosis wherein aspects of being, rather than posing contradictory counterpoints to the myth making business actually seamlessly absorb and assimilate, transforming even sordid ,unprepossessing facts into agreeable, sanguine tidbits. Marilyn has thus become an emblem of the tragic suffering actress whose dependence on barbiturates, alcohol and eventual suicide are seen in her Bollywood counterparts Meena Kumari and Parveen Babi. Undoubtedly singular and possibly even unrepresentative these lives may be in actuality they are transmuted through elisions and manipulations into emblems.
A bourgeoisie predilection is discernible here. The mundanities of the quotidian are suspended through the movie hall which ironically creates a facsimile, a simulacrum of reality by romanticizing it, kitschifying complexity. Not just is the chimera cinema perpetuates otherwordly but its own constitutive nature postures as 'other'. Marilyn's abject victimhood, her capitulation to the depredations of this world constitutes her chief charm, her vulnerability in real life to real life problems metamorphose into her unfittedness to a brutal film world which eviscerates her and finally consumes her. This obliteration is essential for her image because without it she would cease to be larger than life.
What purpose does such an image confer? What kind of autogenesis does this perpetuate ? The film industry's essential amorality, its elastic ethics, its baroque apparatuses are not vilified but exoticized because it serves a dual purpose. Audiences can partake of cinema's vicarious pleasures while simultaneously denouncing its mode of existence. At the same time women's burgeoning sexuality and considering that Monroe's acting career is coterminous with beginning second wave feminism creates a space where threatening, dynamic forms of sexuality in women are concealed and repackaged in a format that reinstate her as an object of male fantasy, approachable yet unattainable, divested of sordidity, denuded of its putative prurience. The tart, pert, innocent, unrealized sexuality commodifies the woman as an object of a fantasy that completely disconnects her from herself. The blondeness as dumbness is a demonstration of ingenuousness, an unawareness, willed perhaps, of adult preoccupations. The regressing of the woman into infantilism, her childlikeness reinscribes patriarchal notions of protectiveness, condescension and rationalization of its premises .
The reality of myth making is not just its intransigence but also its appropriativeness. Monroe's Manic depression is now another myth, the myth of the gifted mentally ill woman whose creativity is an essential precondition of her suffering. Whenever a particular myth is contested what invariably happens is that the fact or facts countering it, demystifying it, congeal into alternative mythologies itself which then serve the purpose of extending the romantic narrative of the original myth. Demystifying becomes remythifying. Today the compendium of Marilyn's life, the numerous interpretations that it has occasioned are seamlessly amalgamated into that one, large myth which has merely branched out into numerous strands but whose strands, like rivers follow a path to the same source. Perhaps we need this myth and its persistence through time testifies to its endurance. At the same time the numerous insertions into it are not to be seen as validations but as ways of resignifying that deconstruct the premises of myth making by showing the premise to be a premise, not a prediscursive reality. A myth is a becoming..not a being. A myth is enacted, performed, brought into being and constructed through repetition. Its allure is seductive but its apocryphal nature, an irreducible reality.
Marilyn's life is a metonym of what the industry represents. The poor orphaned girl, daughter of a mentally unstable mother, who throughout childhood and adulthood undergoes a series of transmogrifications and ends up as an successful actress. The foster homes, the precocious poetry, early marriage, feelings of deracination, alienation, self doubt are all woven into the tapestry of this tragic woman whose suicide is a fitting apotheosis, the actualization of the drama her life was leading up to. As a screen presence the incendiarism of her sexuality (the billowing dress) are underpinned by her essential ingenuousness, as though she is unaware of her own allure. The element of comic self parody augments her sexual state of unknowingness. Filtered and distilled through an allure unconscious of its own charms, an innocent all believing state of being, exacerbate the image of victimhood and the child woman whose subversive sexuality is restituted by a series of enactments that defuse its iconoclasm and reconfigures it in a way that satiates male fantasies and makes her a suitable cultural icon. It may be possible to harbor rococo fantasies subterraneously but hollywood operates through illusion. As a unproclaimed repository of culture hollywood reconstitutes disparate existential paraphernalia of Marilyn's life into an emblem. Every aspect of her life is part of a mythopoeic contiguity. Even detractors, critics who highlight subjective aspects of her life find their postulations inextricably coalesced into this myth game.
Monroe's life demonstrates the hegemony of mythologizing and its appropriative, self amplifying tactics. Marilyn was made a mythical personage through acts of repeated osmosis wherein aspects of being, rather than posing contradictory counterpoints to the myth making business actually seamlessly absorb and assimilate, transforming even sordid ,unprepossessing facts into agreeable, sanguine tidbits. Marilyn has thus become an emblem of the tragic suffering actress whose dependence on barbiturates, alcohol and eventual suicide are seen in her Bollywood counterparts Meena Kumari and Parveen Babi. Undoubtedly singular and possibly even unrepresentative these lives may be in actuality they are transmuted through elisions and manipulations into emblems.
A bourgeoisie predilection is discernible here. The mundanities of the quotidian are suspended through the movie hall which ironically creates a facsimile, a simulacrum of reality by romanticizing it, kitschifying complexity. Not just is the chimera cinema perpetuates otherwordly but its own constitutive nature postures as 'other'. Marilyn's abject victimhood, her capitulation to the depredations of this world constitutes her chief charm, her vulnerability in real life to real life problems metamorphose into her unfittedness to a brutal film world which eviscerates her and finally consumes her. This obliteration is essential for her image because without it she would cease to be larger than life.
What purpose does such an image confer? What kind of autogenesis does this perpetuate ? The film industry's essential amorality, its elastic ethics, its baroque apparatuses are not vilified but exoticized because it serves a dual purpose. Audiences can partake of cinema's vicarious pleasures while simultaneously denouncing its mode of existence. At the same time women's burgeoning sexuality and considering that Monroe's acting career is coterminous with beginning second wave feminism creates a space where threatening, dynamic forms of sexuality in women are concealed and repackaged in a format that reinstate her as an object of male fantasy, approachable yet unattainable, divested of sordidity, denuded of its putative prurience. The tart, pert, innocent, unrealized sexuality commodifies the woman as an object of a fantasy that completely disconnects her from herself. The blondeness as dumbness is a demonstration of ingenuousness, an unawareness, willed perhaps, of adult preoccupations. The regressing of the woman into infantilism, her childlikeness reinscribes patriarchal notions of protectiveness, condescension and rationalization of its premises .
The reality of myth making is not just its intransigence but also its appropriativeness. Monroe's Manic depression is now another myth, the myth of the gifted mentally ill woman whose creativity is an essential precondition of her suffering. Whenever a particular myth is contested what invariably happens is that the fact or facts countering it, demystifying it, congeal into alternative mythologies itself which then serve the purpose of extending the romantic narrative of the original myth. Demystifying becomes remythifying. Today the compendium of Marilyn's life, the numerous interpretations that it has occasioned are seamlessly amalgamated into that one, large myth which has merely branched out into numerous strands but whose strands, like rivers follow a path to the same source. Perhaps we need this myth and its persistence through time testifies to its endurance. At the same time the numerous insertions into it are not to be seen as validations but as ways of resignifying that deconstruct the premises of myth making by showing the premise to be a premise, not a prediscursive reality. A myth is a becoming..not a being. A myth is enacted, performed, brought into being and constructed through repetition. Its allure is seductive but its apocryphal nature, an irreducible reality.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
STUMBLING INTO WRITING- MY JOURNEY
We are fortunate to live in times of proliferating self expression. We have, at our disposal,tools, like the internet that facilitate this process and augment our quest to write. To confess at the outset, writing was something that came naturally to me. Unbeknownst to myself i composed a poem at age eleven. In parenthesis, there was something singularly attractive in the alignment of evanescent thought to a form replete with its own structural configurations. The pen irradiated, materialized, brought into being, the fleetingly haunting thoughts that traversed my brain and set syncopating on the page, dancing, flickering, the strumming contralto of my synapses. The joy , in retrospect was as yet unsullied by the fear that though claims to originality could be stated, nonetheless bespoke of an imitation, a vague, indeterminate obeisance to a pre existing form.
Writing shaped my adolescence . I remember reading 'Harry potter and the goblet of fire' at fifteen and writing the next book in the series, an act of precocity i eventually relinquished both because the largeness of the enterprise and the scarcity of time were invariable deterrents. But words always enticed me with their luminosity. They would ,at times dissolve seamlessly in the tongue, at others leave a tart astringent aftertaste. But their impact was forceful and consolidated through time. That incandescent words could illumine thought, actualize it, give it a shape and explication is a mystery whose delights i can still recapture, with vivid poignancy.
There was a brief phase in my life, 4 years back at 20, when for two years i wrote nothing. I toyed with the idea of being an other but the bounteous wellsprings had frozen within me. This was also the time when i was diagnosed as a manic depressive. I sought articulation desperately but my benumbed consciousness refused to unravel dizzying verbal pyrotechnics, my accustomed mode of expression. I remember that phase as being bereft of hope, an inexpressible emptiness, crippling bouts of irrational panic and vacillative meanderings between mania and depression.
But writing sought me out in the end. I was randomly looking at facebook when , all of a sudden, a thought surfaced in me. With immediate urgency i inscribed in on facebook. One thought became two and by the time morning rose i had posted ten philosophical snippets expressed, in what i felt, a style that became ineluctably mine. The next day came a poem. Its been two and a half years and i have written everyday, something or the other. Perhaps a lapse into non being was essential, for me to rediscover the circuitous, equivocal interplay between my flickering consciousness, its ebbs and flows and the inviolable sanctity of writing.
My strong view is not simply that writing is a process, which it is, but also that with the passage of time, as our selves unfurl, new dimensions percolate our writing because our sense of who we are has undergone an imperceptible metamorphosis. We aren't passive obsequy who proffer our votive appeasements to the culture which determines our writing. We are also opalescent presences because our subjective transmutations transfigure the friable texture of reality, blurring edges, daubing spots, reconstituting a kaleidoscopic avalanche of impressions, thoughts, moments which are a singular way of life yet mnemonics of the collective consciousness of the universe of which we are microcosms.
Finally writing is an absent presence. Its written manifestation attests its presence but the gossamer construction of it, the nebulous realms of interiority it has traversed, the dredging up of hitherto unforeseen perceptions demonstrate its impalpability. Writing is in the interstices between conception and execution, between experienced feeling and articulated thought. The jouissance in medias res is indefinable. But its the hope of experiencing experience, inscribing and materializing it and letting like a mother bird, let go of the infant whom we brought into being, threading the quadrangles of the vast world to determine its own course and live its own life.
Writing shaped my adolescence . I remember reading 'Harry potter and the goblet of fire' at fifteen and writing the next book in the series, an act of precocity i eventually relinquished both because the largeness of the enterprise and the scarcity of time were invariable deterrents. But words always enticed me with their luminosity. They would ,at times dissolve seamlessly in the tongue, at others leave a tart astringent aftertaste. But their impact was forceful and consolidated through time. That incandescent words could illumine thought, actualize it, give it a shape and explication is a mystery whose delights i can still recapture, with vivid poignancy.
There was a brief phase in my life, 4 years back at 20, when for two years i wrote nothing. I toyed with the idea of being an other but the bounteous wellsprings had frozen within me. This was also the time when i was diagnosed as a manic depressive. I sought articulation desperately but my benumbed consciousness refused to unravel dizzying verbal pyrotechnics, my accustomed mode of expression. I remember that phase as being bereft of hope, an inexpressible emptiness, crippling bouts of irrational panic and vacillative meanderings between mania and depression.
But writing sought me out in the end. I was randomly looking at facebook when , all of a sudden, a thought surfaced in me. With immediate urgency i inscribed in on facebook. One thought became two and by the time morning rose i had posted ten philosophical snippets expressed, in what i felt, a style that became ineluctably mine. The next day came a poem. Its been two and a half years and i have written everyday, something or the other. Perhaps a lapse into non being was essential, for me to rediscover the circuitous, equivocal interplay between my flickering consciousness, its ebbs and flows and the inviolable sanctity of writing.
My strong view is not simply that writing is a process, which it is, but also that with the passage of time, as our selves unfurl, new dimensions percolate our writing because our sense of who we are has undergone an imperceptible metamorphosis. We aren't passive obsequy who proffer our votive appeasements to the culture which determines our writing. We are also opalescent presences because our subjective transmutations transfigure the friable texture of reality, blurring edges, daubing spots, reconstituting a kaleidoscopic avalanche of impressions, thoughts, moments which are a singular way of life yet mnemonics of the collective consciousness of the universe of which we are microcosms.
Finally writing is an absent presence. Its written manifestation attests its presence but the gossamer construction of it, the nebulous realms of interiority it has traversed, the dredging up of hitherto unforeseen perceptions demonstrate its impalpability. Writing is in the interstices between conception and execution, between experienced feeling and articulated thought. The jouissance in medias res is indefinable. But its the hope of experiencing experience, inscribing and materializing it and letting like a mother bird, let go of the infant whom we brought into being, threading the quadrangles of the vast world to determine its own course and live its own life.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
AMPLIFICATION
He came into being parthenogenetically. Almost, it seemed, he was brought to existence, by me, through a leap of faith. When i first glimpsed him, i experienced vertiginous intimations of transcendence because he seemed to embody a self i yearned towards helplessly but never seemed to attain. My conscience validated his existence because my awareness of right and wrong seemed contained in him. The possibilities he offered made his corporeality seem a superfluous integument. Fusillades of ecstasy would ricochet of me when i anticipated the prospect of our togetherness.
Yet, embedded within my paean to him was a sense of lack. By seeing him thus, larger than life made the shrivelling of my puny self grow ,in inverse proportion. My votive offerings of obeisance made me realize how impossible commingling with him would be. I would be loath to label what i felt for him as 'love' though certainly it was love of a kind. It was more that he was an extension of my self conception, at once distant yet close. Which is why spasms of inadequacy assailed me when i encountered him, an inward tumult assailed me. I felt what i was mingling, coalescing with what he was so that, by imperceptible degrees, i became him. Yet this metamorphosis was never satisfying, never wholesome because i felt all my instincts and desires contradicting my process of becoming.
He seemed to offer me a passport to navigate the labyrinthine world. He legitimized my stake in things. He seemed, as i've said, ideal and the ideal is always universal. So my communion with him guarenteed me a smooth passage. His worldview was singularly attractive and he gave a heady sense of my own power. Never had someone i loved, through the process of identification, affirmed me, ennobled me thus. But i felt myself, shrinking inwardly as though the topography we traversed was one of his own making, his own construction and my complicit acquiescence to his perspective a negation of what i may likely have stood for.
He showed me the extent of my power by demonstrating how it could be wielded unabashedly before others. I could penetrate every nook, peregrinate any crevice, run through any orifice without any ramifications. I soon realized that the people over whom i lorded were necessary to me. Solitary proclamations of self worth are meaningless. One needs an audience, an interlocutor. One also needs a prism through which a sense of oneself is funneled. Yet much as i sluiced myself with the machinations of power i felt alienated. Remember, as i said i was living a self i had adopted by an imaginative leap. Who i might be was indeterminate but for once i desired to act in accordance with what i really wanted. I was both an instrument and a victim of the power i held. Because, in order to ratify existence, on worldly terms, a process of self abnegation was essential and also when it comes to a choice one would rather have than not have.
The love i had felt for him,which had arisen out of his difference from me and the suspension of being it wrought in me, soon turned to hate. And not hate for who he was because he was oppressive. It was, rather self hatred. I wanted to become the crevice i penetrated, i wanted to be loved as i had loved, without artifice. I wanted crenellations of my physiognomy lovingly explored. I wanted my flesh dappled with touch, striated with desire, streaked with kisses and studded with moments of love. I wanted to be that on which i had perpetrated my baroque fantasies as a man of power and yet i wanted the terms of negotiation that had defined those contracts of flesh completely reversed. I wanted to insinuate a possibility where my kind of being could exist. It was essentially a battle between the identity i donned and the identity i felt corresponded to my being. And since the identity i put on was something assumed and adopted, my belief in the immutability of he whom i loved vanished. It was time to actualize in potentia desires. Now that the process of disillusion set in, hope for change grew gradually.
I may never know myself but i would like the relief of knowing that the image is never the reality, the image is made a reality and only the unveiling of the image as an image would unravel the process of self determination. That, to me, spelt change.
Yet, embedded within my paean to him was a sense of lack. By seeing him thus, larger than life made the shrivelling of my puny self grow ,in inverse proportion. My votive offerings of obeisance made me realize how impossible commingling with him would be. I would be loath to label what i felt for him as 'love' though certainly it was love of a kind. It was more that he was an extension of my self conception, at once distant yet close. Which is why spasms of inadequacy assailed me when i encountered him, an inward tumult assailed me. I felt what i was mingling, coalescing with what he was so that, by imperceptible degrees, i became him. Yet this metamorphosis was never satisfying, never wholesome because i felt all my instincts and desires contradicting my process of becoming.
He seemed to offer me a passport to navigate the labyrinthine world. He legitimized my stake in things. He seemed, as i've said, ideal and the ideal is always universal. So my communion with him guarenteed me a smooth passage. His worldview was singularly attractive and he gave a heady sense of my own power. Never had someone i loved, through the process of identification, affirmed me, ennobled me thus. But i felt myself, shrinking inwardly as though the topography we traversed was one of his own making, his own construction and my complicit acquiescence to his perspective a negation of what i may likely have stood for.
He showed me the extent of my power by demonstrating how it could be wielded unabashedly before others. I could penetrate every nook, peregrinate any crevice, run through any orifice without any ramifications. I soon realized that the people over whom i lorded were necessary to me. Solitary proclamations of self worth are meaningless. One needs an audience, an interlocutor. One also needs a prism through which a sense of oneself is funneled. Yet much as i sluiced myself with the machinations of power i felt alienated. Remember, as i said i was living a self i had adopted by an imaginative leap. Who i might be was indeterminate but for once i desired to act in accordance with what i really wanted. I was both an instrument and a victim of the power i held. Because, in order to ratify existence, on worldly terms, a process of self abnegation was essential and also when it comes to a choice one would rather have than not have.
The love i had felt for him,which had arisen out of his difference from me and the suspension of being it wrought in me, soon turned to hate. And not hate for who he was because he was oppressive. It was, rather self hatred. I wanted to become the crevice i penetrated, i wanted to be loved as i had loved, without artifice. I wanted crenellations of my physiognomy lovingly explored. I wanted my flesh dappled with touch, striated with desire, streaked with kisses and studded with moments of love. I wanted to be that on which i had perpetrated my baroque fantasies as a man of power and yet i wanted the terms of negotiation that had defined those contracts of flesh completely reversed. I wanted to insinuate a possibility where my kind of being could exist. It was essentially a battle between the identity i donned and the identity i felt corresponded to my being. And since the identity i put on was something assumed and adopted, my belief in the immutability of he whom i loved vanished. It was time to actualize in potentia desires. Now that the process of disillusion set in, hope for change grew gradually.
I may never know myself but i would like the relief of knowing that the image is never the reality, the image is made a reality and only the unveiling of the image as an image would unravel the process of self determination. That, to me, spelt change.
Monday, April 30, 2012
MIRRORING-A LACANIAN REREADING OF HOMOSEXUALITY
Psychoanalytic theory opens up new inroads to reconstitute through the psyche realities that are intrinsically embedded and alternate realities that dwell subterraneously, reconfiguring and interrogating the ontological assumptions of normative reality. When the unconscious, naturally prized as some kind of primordial reconnection is itself revealed to be a cultural byproduct then the ways in which an uncertain identity, operating within the interstices of culture and alterity becomes a site where proliferative substitutions are enacted.
Judith Butler conflates Lacanian notion of the phallus and his piece on mirror image by showing that the mirror image, wherein a disaggregated body , through the specular image, sees the image in the mirror by its ego ideal and by identifying its dominant functioning with a body part, consolidates its identity. While the phallus functions as a signifier which signifies through the imaginary the symbolic by reifying its partisan assumptions. A certain heterosexist presumption of sexual and social reality naturalizes and unfurls from these postulations which feminists question. Thus the mirror image concretizes a sense of being while the phallus legitimizes its ideological underpinning through the law.
Now this perspective of a homosexuals placement within this framework is purely imaginary but hopefully grounded on lacanian presuppositions and is based on personal experience. When a homosexual would see the mirror image he would naturally undergo a process of depersonalization because the ego ideal, which is the heterosexual matrix would be rendered ambivalent by his propensity towards a realm which is unoccupiable and resides as the ;other'. Through a process of melancholy this desire could be sublimated and repressed and a putative heterosexist orientation could be established. Conversely the heterosexist position's hegemony could be challenged from within as being a naturalized construction than a teleological reality. Moreover to be a homosexual would mean to undergo a symbolic castration because the notion of a stable, incontrovertible phallus would be imperiled. Therefore to be a homosexual would, if extrapolated, imply, both 'having'the phallus and 'being' the phallus. Because its heterosexuality would be underscored by its possession of a phallus, itself a suspect term while being the phallus would imply its necessity as a space through which normativity defines itself by categorizing it as alien and other.
If sex is looked at and placed within this framework., the phallus as a signifier would be seen as an incontestable site of pleasure and power. But consider the various other bodily parts which function within homosexual discourse as sites of pleasure. This effectively undermines the phallus as an unquestioned signifier and resignifies and reconstitutes sites of pleasure as fluid and kinetic. The reality of homosexuality dwells underground, within the heterosexual matrix, intimating possibilities of rupture and revealing the catachresis of heteronormativity and its synechdochality as fundamentally flawed.
The mirror thus becomes not only a space that demonstrates the homosexuals distance from himself but also subversively, transgressively, insinuates the possibility of questioning implicit ideas of normal. Perhaps that process of depersonalization is necessary on two counts. Firstly it creates opportunities for counter discourse that disrupt hegemony of singular representation. Secondly, the idea of a monolithic identity gets revealed as a misnomer, as something constructed. Rather identity becomes kinetic, existing laterally and inhabiting different temporal and spatial zones.
Homosexuality's analysis, as i've done through Lacan's mirror image shows that the body before the ego ideal, prior to its crystallization into a patriarchal discourse gets transmuted into the mirror where the ego ideal is revealed as indistinct and its very constitutiveness contains nascent seeds of its generative nature,exposing the repressions it induces. To live in a postmodern world is to be divested of any pre given conditions of creating identity. This void is ennobling because it makes of experience a palimpsest where the hieroglyphics of who and what we are undergo reconfigurations. We are in a constant state of becoming from moment to moment and if at all we posit a being it can only be done by navigating through dialectically with becoming.
Judith Butler conflates Lacanian notion of the phallus and his piece on mirror image by showing that the mirror image, wherein a disaggregated body , through the specular image, sees the image in the mirror by its ego ideal and by identifying its dominant functioning with a body part, consolidates its identity. While the phallus functions as a signifier which signifies through the imaginary the symbolic by reifying its partisan assumptions. A certain heterosexist presumption of sexual and social reality naturalizes and unfurls from these postulations which feminists question. Thus the mirror image concretizes a sense of being while the phallus legitimizes its ideological underpinning through the law.
Now this perspective of a homosexuals placement within this framework is purely imaginary but hopefully grounded on lacanian presuppositions and is based on personal experience. When a homosexual would see the mirror image he would naturally undergo a process of depersonalization because the ego ideal, which is the heterosexual matrix would be rendered ambivalent by his propensity towards a realm which is unoccupiable and resides as the ;other'. Through a process of melancholy this desire could be sublimated and repressed and a putative heterosexist orientation could be established. Conversely the heterosexist position's hegemony could be challenged from within as being a naturalized construction than a teleological reality. Moreover to be a homosexual would mean to undergo a symbolic castration because the notion of a stable, incontrovertible phallus would be imperiled. Therefore to be a homosexual would, if extrapolated, imply, both 'having'the phallus and 'being' the phallus. Because its heterosexuality would be underscored by its possession of a phallus, itself a suspect term while being the phallus would imply its necessity as a space through which normativity defines itself by categorizing it as alien and other.
If sex is looked at and placed within this framework., the phallus as a signifier would be seen as an incontestable site of pleasure and power. But consider the various other bodily parts which function within homosexual discourse as sites of pleasure. This effectively undermines the phallus as an unquestioned signifier and resignifies and reconstitutes sites of pleasure as fluid and kinetic. The reality of homosexuality dwells underground, within the heterosexual matrix, intimating possibilities of rupture and revealing the catachresis of heteronormativity and its synechdochality as fundamentally flawed.
The mirror thus becomes not only a space that demonstrates the homosexuals distance from himself but also subversively, transgressively, insinuates the possibility of questioning implicit ideas of normal. Perhaps that process of depersonalization is necessary on two counts. Firstly it creates opportunities for counter discourse that disrupt hegemony of singular representation. Secondly, the idea of a monolithic identity gets revealed as a misnomer, as something constructed. Rather identity becomes kinetic, existing laterally and inhabiting different temporal and spatial zones.
Homosexuality's analysis, as i've done through Lacan's mirror image shows that the body before the ego ideal, prior to its crystallization into a patriarchal discourse gets transmuted into the mirror where the ego ideal is revealed as indistinct and its very constitutiveness contains nascent seeds of its generative nature,exposing the repressions it induces. To live in a postmodern world is to be divested of any pre given conditions of creating identity. This void is ennobling because it makes of experience a palimpsest where the hieroglyphics of who and what we are undergo reconfigurations. We are in a constant state of becoming from moment to moment and if at all we posit a being it can only be done by navigating through dialectically with becoming.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
THE SUBVERSIVE DRAG QUEEN
The word 'drag' implies a conscious volitional act, the act of bringing into being, the act of creating, constructing and redefining. Drag is a movement across space and time, from one position to another, from one realm to another and from one one contingent mode of being to another. The irony is in the word 'being' which is not a teleological prediscursive space but a construction created by a hegemonic discourse to naturalize and validate gender dichotomy. That this polarization is the base from which possibilities of ruptures proliferate is undeniable and these fissures reveal a lacunae within gender construction itself.
Drag queen is the donning of an identity which is an act of political subversion. What you become and what you are becomes conflated, diffused and disorganized. You choose to become something you are societally not or you choose to become something you feel you are throws into peril the very notion of a unified, eternalized, immutable gender signifier. Yes, the drag queen operates within binary structures but by redistribution and reconstruction of its premises questions its ubiquity as suspect, a kind of cultural naturalization that masquerades as a natural fact of life.
More than the drag identity, taken on, defining itself against maleness and femaleness gender itself propagates its identity by not just defining itself but by marginalizing and ostracizing the other. Identity is exclusionary and is defined by what it is not because there are no preexistent telos that would give its definition of itself a quality of universality. The drag queen is forging an identity that dissolves the very notion of identity by making its notion polymorphous, fluid, permeable and protean. The drag queen is a lateral phenomenon coexisting with other sexual possibilities along a continuum of widespread gender configurations creating a dialectical space for questioning hegemonic premises.
Many would argue that the drag queen, butch femme are really appropriating already existing forms of gender positionings. But these are being reconfigured, being revealed not as universal realities but political, social, ideological creations designed to ratify a certain kind of sexuality from which iconoclastic, dissident forms are excluded.Neither fully masculine nor wholly feminine but creating a femininity demonstrates the essential fact that gender itself is an enactment of attributes assumed to be masculine and feminine. As beauvoir said 'one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one. Judith Butler points to the performative nature of gender and how by a repetition of acts it is consolidated. Gender , like the drag queen and the transvestite, to me reaffirms identity, however cultural its origins may be, as a form of personal coming into being. we are products of culture and are shaped and molded by it. It is equally difficult to imagine a state of things where this wasn't so, though it has been endlessly theorized. If the molding by culture is a palpable truth then equally valid is the creation of a self within these interstices. Identity becomes all the more incandescent when it is wrested from power than conceptualized in an abstract realm. And the drag queen, is an iridescent, affirmative and transgressive ideogram of that.
Friday, April 20, 2012
THE ONTOLOGY OF TRANSGENDER
The attempts of third wave feminism to revivify through redefining feminist tenets has resulted in a broadening of its set of assumptions and ideological positions. As it seeks to embrace variegated strands third wave feminism demonstrates a fundamental contradiction. A universalization of differing cultural realities and contexts both serves the humanist assumption of wholeness and a decontextualization of diverse forms of feminism into a monolithic rubric. In a sense even though the aim is liberatory feminists reduplicate patriarchal structures of naturalization and crystallize intractably, under an undifferentiated canopy , the multiplicitous realities of experience.
And to consolidate, to assimilate does fulfill a humanist ideology but the need for such wholesomeness reflects on our collective consciousness which presupposes communality of human experience. It would be churlish to deny subjectivity but it would be equally petulant to deny that what makes us the race it does is the shared experiences, the stories we narrate and are moved by, the accounts that bring tears to our eyes and the fact that its not impersonal expressions of compassion that prompts this but a space where one's subjectivity becomes part of a larger subjectivity which it both mirrors and defines itself through and against. The larger subjectivity, many would argue is a construct and the individual subjectivity a peregrination through realms of singularity constituted and legitimized socially. But given the experiential realms we inhabit a transcendent conception of an unequivocally immutable, inviolable self remains an abstraction, amorphous and indeterminate.
The word transgender is fascinating. As is the case with any linguistic signifier,it defines and excludes, contains and repudiates and by its very linguistic constructedness atomizes and compartmentalizes. There are two ways of seeing this. Transgender would imply beyond gender, beyond antinomian schisms, beyond dichotomous constructions. This, as has been noted, throws into doubt the compulsory heterosexist notion of gender distinction as pronouncedly male and female. And a polymorphous possibility is instated that subverts this homogeneous postulation by revealing its own artificiality. So far so good. However transgender also is a locus of equivocation because by itself indeterminate it is still defined in relation to its essential difference from male and female. Moreover embedded in this is the idea that the transgender's indefinability is placed against a panorama of gender dichotomy. A transgender is who he/she is because they aren't specifically he/she. However this defining themselves against this schism reaffirms the fact that the duality is the premise, the foundation from which other permutations and their possibilities of transgression are predicated.
And this is important because a nebulous indeterminacy, divested of cultural signification would always be an abstraction. To get at the heart of cultural constructedness its premises need to be tweaked from within. The irony is that it makes fluid and protean intransigent structures of power but unfortunately can exist only in relation to and in extension of the very structures of power it eschews and interrogates.
The question is that is it possible for us to think of a time when things were different, which becomes uncertain because the further we go back, the further does the beginning of things recedes. Or can we think of a time when things will be different. The past and future underscore the present which partakes of both yet validates none. It seems acculturation has, by naturalization, created its ubiquity and actualized it. Things, concepts have been the way they've been for so long that teleological redefinitions are impossible. What is possible is to question the world and what constitutes it and wrest indeterminacy from the very heart of cultural determinism. The Lgbt community has to focus on the fact that its iconoclasm will be incessantly underpinned by its unconscious complicity with the very institutions it seeks to oppose. We need to redefine not who we are because we are what we are but the spaces we inhabit and what we choose to do with what we were, are or become. That, to me, that radical re examination of spaces, from within, would institute change and create spaces for coexistence of multiple phenomena where the centrality of one is an chimera and the margins themselves sites of center, of an undefinable, undefined, kinetic center, open to diversified change.
And to consolidate, to assimilate does fulfill a humanist ideology but the need for such wholesomeness reflects on our collective consciousness which presupposes communality of human experience. It would be churlish to deny subjectivity but it would be equally petulant to deny that what makes us the race it does is the shared experiences, the stories we narrate and are moved by, the accounts that bring tears to our eyes and the fact that its not impersonal expressions of compassion that prompts this but a space where one's subjectivity becomes part of a larger subjectivity which it both mirrors and defines itself through and against. The larger subjectivity, many would argue is a construct and the individual subjectivity a peregrination through realms of singularity constituted and legitimized socially. But given the experiential realms we inhabit a transcendent conception of an unequivocally immutable, inviolable self remains an abstraction, amorphous and indeterminate.
The word transgender is fascinating. As is the case with any linguistic signifier,it defines and excludes, contains and repudiates and by its very linguistic constructedness atomizes and compartmentalizes. There are two ways of seeing this. Transgender would imply beyond gender, beyond antinomian schisms, beyond dichotomous constructions. This, as has been noted, throws into doubt the compulsory heterosexist notion of gender distinction as pronouncedly male and female. And a polymorphous possibility is instated that subverts this homogeneous postulation by revealing its own artificiality. So far so good. However transgender also is a locus of equivocation because by itself indeterminate it is still defined in relation to its essential difference from male and female. Moreover embedded in this is the idea that the transgender's indefinability is placed against a panorama of gender dichotomy. A transgender is who he/she is because they aren't specifically he/she. However this defining themselves against this schism reaffirms the fact that the duality is the premise, the foundation from which other permutations and their possibilities of transgression are predicated.
And this is important because a nebulous indeterminacy, divested of cultural signification would always be an abstraction. To get at the heart of cultural constructedness its premises need to be tweaked from within. The irony is that it makes fluid and protean intransigent structures of power but unfortunately can exist only in relation to and in extension of the very structures of power it eschews and interrogates.
The question is that is it possible for us to think of a time when things were different, which becomes uncertain because the further we go back, the further does the beginning of things recedes. Or can we think of a time when things will be different. The past and future underscore the present which partakes of both yet validates none. It seems acculturation has, by naturalization, created its ubiquity and actualized it. Things, concepts have been the way they've been for so long that teleological redefinitions are impossible. What is possible is to question the world and what constitutes it and wrest indeterminacy from the very heart of cultural determinism. The Lgbt community has to focus on the fact that its iconoclasm will be incessantly underpinned by its unconscious complicity with the very institutions it seeks to oppose. We need to redefine not who we are because we are what we are but the spaces we inhabit and what we choose to do with what we were, are or become. That, to me, that radical re examination of spaces, from within, would institute change and create spaces for coexistence of multiple phenomena where the centrality of one is an chimera and the margins themselves sites of center, of an undefinable, undefined, kinetic center, open to diversified change.
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