“Punching down” versus “sinking to their level:” why choose?

Everyone seems to love “On Satire,” Joe Sacco’s cartoon for the Guardian responding to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, but some may not. Some may detest “On Satire” because the cartoon was reverent toward the victims. They may think Charlie Hebdo‘s Muhammad cartoons justified the attack, or were straightforwardly racist. On the other hand, some may detest Sacco’s cartoon because it portrays a mob chasing Muslims. Knowing that he made an earlier ethnographic comic about Palestine, they may suspect Sacco of trying to distract viewers from the real business of condemning Islam wholesale, stepping up drone attacks, and leveling Gaza.

For my part, however, I detest it for being so thoroughly middle-of-the-road and ambivalent even as it affects a seemingly bold, seemingly nuanced stance on an subject that is not simply abstract “issues,” but a messy, bloody conflict with a long history. Allow me a condensed close reading.
 

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First panel: Oh, Joe Sacco is passionate to be sure, but he is not hotheaded! He is sincere and reverent, and looks good in a loincloth.

Second panel: Pens made into crosses, how very poignant, yet so visually klunky. Hey, you know who kills lots of journalists? The U.S. But their victims mostly aren’t Christian, so you’d have to figure out how to make a laptop into a crescent and star, so never mind. And there were Muslim Charlie Hebdo victims too, but whatever.

Third panel: Walks away still musing metonymically on “the pen.” If only it were a clever reference to Le Pen, but it isn’t.

Fourth panel: Black man falling out of a tree with a banana but no loincloth, with a big branch suggestively hiding his indubitably endowed groin, equals not racist because aware of its racism! Why don’t you just burn one of those pen-crosses on his lawn? Oh, because he lives in a tree. Ooo, Joe Sacco is such a firebrand, I can’t wait to see an anthropomorphized Koran going down on a pig!

Fifth panel: “The More You Know,” the less you worry about offending Israel. France actually has laws on the books prohibiting hate speech, and it has recently used those laws to shut down anti-Semitic Twitter users. Now hundreds of French troops are deployed protecting Jewish sites. Where are the troops protecting Muslims? Why don’t you look THAT up?

Sixth panel: The professor plods on- remember anti-Semitism? Subtext: perhaps Muslims are anti-Semitic, perhaps? And by the way, what is this about the evil Jew preying on the “working class?” Stalin was a genocidal anti-Semite, but in the West the conflation of Jews and Communists should be so familiar as to be unworthy of mention. Get your hate straight. And of COURSE anti-Semitism matters in 2015, just like in 1933- France has had dozens of hate attacks against Jews in the last few years.

Seventh panel: More rambling prattle, but I’m getting distracted by Sacco’s face– are those eggs with eyelashes strapped to his head?

Eighth panel: Again, so brave! Martyred for his bold stance on reasoned meandering ambivalent equivocation. “But perhaps when we tire of holding up our middle finger we can try to think about why the world is the way it is…” So mature, so stoic, so profoundly deserving of the royal “we.” Sure talks a lot for a guy with a severed larynx.

Ninth panel: Abu-Ghraib Joe sez, “What is it about Muslims?” Wait, what is what about who? Who tortured who again? Traumatized prisoners say the darnedest things!

Last panel: Oh, I get it! “Drive them from their homes,” sort of like Israel right? He is part of an angry mob now– Israeli settlers? the IDF? Right-wing European nationalists? Well, there’s no hilarious stereotype to explicate that tragic-ish image- you just figure out that the woman being chased has a headscarf, the guy being chased has a beard and a taqiyah, and there’s Joe Sacco looking tough and angry again, this time holding a club while ironically continuing to mouth reasoned platitudes. But wouldn’t “sorting out how we fit in each others’ world” be illustrated better by the Prophet getting a back-door fist-bump from Gene Simmons of KISS—a Jew who genuinely doesn’t give a fuck who he offends?

But seriously, did Sacco say, “What is it about Muslims?” Not “some Muslims,” not “jihadi Muslims” or “fundamentalist Muslims” or whatever, but “Muslims in this time and place” (so qualified, yet so totalizing). The issue here is all about context. Explicit context: the jungle Negro and the hook-nosed moneylender are inoffensive because we are told not to be offended. Implicit context: the reader is not a Muslim, and can relate to crosses and complaints about those Muslims nowadays. Ignored context: radicalized Muslims are responding to a state of indiscriminate, cowardly, automated, endless imperial warfare. Arbitrary murder is answered by arbitrary murder.

And there is no reason to think that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were unaware of the threats made to the lives of American cartoonists drawing the Prophet, as well as of the infamous Danish Muhammad cartoon (which the CH staff can be seen discussing on video). They absolutely deserved to draw their cartoons and not lose their lives, BUT what if they deliberately took a risk based on principle? What if they chose a stance that put them in the line of fire? Is that foolish or brave? Are they martyrs or casualties of war? Don’t ask Joe Sacco.

Writing in Slate on French secularism, or laïcité, Rachel Levy points out that in French public schools, “Muslim girls can’t wear their veils, Jewish boys can’t wear their kippot, and Christians can’t draw attention to their crosses.” As a country that has always had religious fanatics and never, despite strenuous fantasizing, a substantial monoculture, Americans don’t readily identify with a political stance that curtails expression of personal beliefs. And yet, America has the enormously successful Family Guy, a show that I think tops South Park, Ed The Happy Clown, Angry Youth Comix, or any Ralph Bakshi movie for unfettered omnidirectional contempt and bile. In France, culture is taken seriously enough to enforce bans on clothing, whereas in the U.S., to paraphrase Slavoj Zizek, culture is what people believe in without taking it seriously.

This is where I come from in trying to explain my repulsion at Sacco’s nonspecific sanctimony. France embraced African-American expatriates, but seems committed to marginalization of religious minorities. America elected a black President, but also keeps imprisoning black men, or just executing them in the street, or in Wal-Mart (maybe they all just fell out of trees?). Plus Americans can’t make art about serious ethical issues without being mealy-mouthed and pompous, unless it’s just a TV show and is thus divorced from any larger meaning. Saudi Arabia, from which the Charlie Hebdo attacks (like the 9/11 attacks) may have been planned, is the country with the most repressive Islamist regime in the world, and is also our key Arab ally. These three seemingly distinct places share one philosophy: money talks. And if all you have to offer by way of protest are overexplained, hyperqualified, utterly trite faux-provocations, that bullshit walks.
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For all HU posts on Satire and Charlie Hebdo click here.

The Glory and the Hole

This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007 . A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
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Blessed are they who have wives, as though they had them not.

I had my most memorable argument over the worldview of the new aesthetic left after seeing the movie adaptation of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta with a good lesbian friend, who was a better friend than I to the orthodox conception of “the gay utopia.” I was fairly repulsed by this cardboard morality play, in no way thickened by the sub-cardboard acting of Natalie Portman. In this pathetic tale, a loquacious clown-faced humanist “revolutionary,” who is supposedly lent some kind of soul by — what else? — his appreciation of Billie Holiday, magically overthrows the corrupt police-state overlords in a largely bloodless (not to mention classless and raceless) revolution. As the reader may infer, I was rabidly contemptuous, and felt that Billie Holiday’s grave deserved no more desecrations. My companion, whose intelligence I did not and do not impugn, was resentful of the wet blanket with which I spoiled the warmth she had felt from viewing a movie with such an upbeat and morally agreeable conclusion (certainly a rare event in Hollywood). Aside from the likelihood of such a remarkable series of events as those depicted, I wanted to know what the results would be of this groundswell of goodwill. What system were they ushering in? Who would take power? Where would the money flow? Never mind picking up the trash or fixing the streets, what the hell WAS this revolution? For who and by who and to result in what? She wasn’t interested in answering. But I think one reason I succeeded in being so thoroughly irritating that evening was that I was perceived as badmouthing the dewy-eyed hope for liberation, power source of the gay utopia.

What does V for Vendetta have to do with the gay utopia? For one thing, its flaccid message of tolerance has its most tolerable moment when Natalie Portman’s character is in prison being tortured, and is given strength by reading the letters of a lesbian former prisoner. However, when it turned out that this whole prison scene had been some kind of growth-experience fabricated by V, our anarchist Paliacci, I completely lost any sympathy for his nebulous agenda. That’s just me. But the nebulous nature of the program, parsed on the movie poster as “Freedom! Forever!” is, I believe, a key to why this shitty film, and many another campy ode to personal rebirth through social adversity, is unassailable to followers of the new politics of sentiment. Struggle is to be transparently a romance. The humanism of our era has but one virtue, truth, and thus only one true romance, authenticity. But even this truth is viewed from outside, and thus becomes contingent, like the transparent naiveté of cinematic empowerment (cf. Dirty Dancing, and many another nostalgic slumming-liberation romance). To me, Natalie Portman’s character being duped by the radical ethos-bearer into revolutionary loyalty through manipulation of her deepest terrors and desires was not just a deal-breaker, but inevitable. To my friend, who saw the big picture, I believe it was a metaphor for the traumatic journey of self-knowledge required of all seekers after justice, the individual contributing to the great collective uplifting/leveling of humankind. Again, no wonder Billie Holiday sings their anthem.

I had opportunity for pause the next day when watching the gallery for a show my inner-city high-school art students had created in response to the displacement of public-housing residents (I lay that bare in order to establish my progressive cred). The local erudite fascist wacko, who comes to every event at this solidly left-leaning art space in order to beat do-gooders about the temples with quotes from Wyndham Lewis, returned to engage me in an uncomfortably long discussion of how the coming environmental Armageddon would require every man to cleave to his family and affirm his race loyalty. I adhered to my position that race was obviously a consideration in the allocation of misfortune worldwide, but if the bell tolled for anyone, it tolled for whitey. Strangely, his story lacked the shining poetry of Goebbels, just as my friend’s response to the movie lacked the analytical acumen of Hannah Arendt. When he finally left to go attend to his weirdo fascist diet, I washed my face and hands vigorously, and tried to figure out what I was supposed to glean from two such opposed yet parallel experiences of perverse alienation. The conclusion I’ve now reached is that my friend’s shimmering fairy-tale has the certainty of eventual success. My eugenicist nemesis is possibly dangerous, especially if he gets hired by Fox News, but his attempt at post-Nazi policy proscription is ultimately irrelevant.

But nothing could have seemed more irrelevant in the early 19th century than the ideas of Charles Fourier. Though he was hardly the first post-Renaissance visionary of planning, his is the name I associate more than anyone with the concept of “utopia,” an engineered paradise in the here and now. Like Jeremy Bentham, he was an ardent feminist and utilitarian. He was, of course, a socialist, an early adherent of the concept Marx and Engels would come to name “the labor theory of value,” but a socialist who despised government, an early anarcho-syndicalist of sorts. He also believed in a vast array of familial and coital configurations. And that planets were bisexual and carried on some kind of intergalactic erotic communication. As a mystic of humanism, applying to society the anthrocentrism of hermeticist philosopher Giordano Bruno, Fourier more than anyone may have envisioned our cultural evolution as a rational-magic techno-pantheistic totality. Society is composed of freely-chosen collectives (“phalanxes”) of freely self-constituted monads. This is the legacy of the charismatic Left, but where can it be found in today’s world-weary world of cynical realpolitik?

It can be found everywhere. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn’t have any homosexuals in his country, and so our expansionist pro-life President would seek to send our military, in which gays are certainly represented in a generous proportion, to violently overthrow this un-gay utopia and give its women the right to vote for an American shill. My contention is that the gay utopia is already here — except that sexuality has turned out to be a cage rather than a key. Regardless, barring a global bloodletting, the Middle East is yet another frontier for the humanist assault of the West, in which the boundaries of abjection, on which the patriarchal walls of our civilization were erected, are doomed to corrode. Ahmadinejad can be in denial about homosexuality, but he cannot ignore the rhetoric of human rights. All he can do is lie and dodge accusations. He is incapable of answering directly to the power which cannot be acknowledged. His magically pure Iran is no match for the magically post-pure fantasy of the gay utopia. Faith will be crushed by identity.

Inevitability is a hallmark of the landmark theoretical utopia of modernity, Marxism. A strong utopia is not a romance. It is a statement about history. Lockean democracy is a utopia — it promised freedom for all, and delivered it to the professional middle classes of the industrialized world, while pushing its refuse to the margins, Slavoj Zizek’s un-flushable Real. The fluidity of capital has outmaneuvered any consciousness-raising among the proletariat, quickly finding new markets for suffering. But the limit of these markets is that, sooner or later, all that’s left are the things that cannot be property, and cannot be liquidated. Ironically, water is a prime example. At that point, the giant disparities in global resource access will manifest a verdict on Marx’s prophecies. Humanism, the basis of the gay utopia, has its Real as well. That ineradicable underbelly of the desire to liquidate boundaries of identity is the persistence of hierarchies. This is why it matters who is in charge of the gay utopia — who takes power without being acknowledged. If it’s academia and the global entertainment industry, then the power has been consolidated. The revolution is constantly being televised.

Paraphrasing Julia Kristeva, the existence of the boundaries of purity are what keeps sacrificial violence at bay. It’s easy for me to see holy war as the result of the Western attack on purity, just as Christian and Muslim fundamentaists would have it. I think that, in response, there is a need to elaborate the gay utopia much more completely, but in art and magic, its true voice, rather than theory, for which it has no use — V for Vendetta being the case in point. Kristeva quotes the rabid anti-Semite Celine, who rails against the technocracy thusly, “There is an idea that can lead nations. There is a law. It stems from an idea that can rise toward absolute mysticism, that rises still without fear or program.” The universal abjection of gender indeterminacy, purified by a new ideal of immanent boundless love, needs to be raised to the transcendent state it deserves.

Sexuality, on the other hand, is something I’ve barely touched on, because it is time to shake it off as a talking point. In fact, as the V for Vendetta anecdote illustrates, ideology far more than proclivity is really the point. For now, in this society, gay people need to be free of harassment and assault, and visibility is necessary. There is a need in the long term, however, to diminish sexual habits as a primary public signifier, much like the social importance of one’s race or income. Race distinctions will continue to diminish. Income differences, and attendant credit gambles, on the other hand, eventually may cause cataclysmic upheaval, but art can’t do much about that. The vast straight majority doesn’t need to embrace homosexuals; they need to stop monitoring sexual behavior. The fear of continuity, of lost individuality, is tied to gender, and a new romance of gender must emerge.

Quoting gender-essentialist feminist Helene Cixous: “One can no more speak of ‘woman’ than of ‘man’ without being trapped within an ideological theater where the proliferation of representations, images, reflections,… invalidate in advance any conceptualization.” For this reason, the morbid pedantry of much art about gender/sexuality does not point in a promising direction, no more so than the failed abstract jouissance of androgynous modernity that the pedantic art aimed at reforming. My version of a gay utopia is a gendered communitarianism, in which gender manifests in flesh and art, not subordinated to sexuality and the Deleuzian striving, after Artaud, for a “body without organs.” Lots of “body artists” I like create work that is admired for its undeniable power, but marginalized insofar as that power is gendered, and thus provides an obstacle for polite humanist discussion.

I’ve just about reached my limit of patience with male artists who more or less share my upbringing. Most of us seem to have nothing more on our minds than regurgitating the comic-book narcissism of our youth and mobilizing our raging insecurities against the alleged “politically correct” conspiracy against our once-proud cultural standing, or donning the signifiers of fashionable androgyny, and using their theory bookshelf as their dildo-bludgeon. I am part of this historically highly privileged group, and, while our fantasies of persecution and sensitive genius are disabling and unseemly, I would argue that rabid masculinity has a place in art. Just as feminist art has been hamstrung by negative, fearful work, shrilly extolling an insular platform, the face of serious art about maleness has been twisted into a permanent sneer of ironic defensiveness or a permanent grimace of pedantic clenched-ass sincerity.

Chicago artist Paul Nudd is most certainly a member of my demographic. His drawings, collages, sculptures, and videos share a signature style, a design sensibility clearly informed by the 1980s thrasher aesthetic of Zorlac and Santa Cruz skateboards, abstractly but directly referencing viscera, bacteria, orifices, and wounds, nebulous cartoons signifiers of abjection. I’ve always been a fan of this work, but never more so than when I saw him speak at the Vonzweck space this August. Nudd shared his homemade mead, and the small crowd, entirely white and including only one woman, was certainly on his side. I was not inclined to judge him harshly, but my fraternal admiration was balanced somewhat against some uneasiness I’ve been feeling towards the group shows he’s been associated with of late, shows that feature mostly rather bitter, frustrated white-guy work. But my best suspicions were met by a presentation that did anything but massage his reputation or preach to the choir.

The mood was set by turning off lights in order to run the slide projector, which was eventually only briefly employed. It ended up that the only source of light, along with one slide that ended up dwelling on the wall for a time, came from Paul’s latest video of fluids silently surging in and out of a palpitating opening. The dominant color was red, which gave the proceeding an impression of flickering firelight. Nudd is currently collaborating with another local shock-jock artist, Patrick W. Welch (not in attendance at the lecture), who is best known for his works and shows around the idea of the “Micromentalist Manifesto.” Paul gave out photocopies of some of their collaborative drawings, intricate tableaux of vivisectionist pornography and general Armageddon. Paul spent the first 45 minutes or so of his presentation praising Walsh’s drawing skills and joyfully relating largely self-deprecating anecdotes of their collaboration. After this he passed out more free artwork, a photocopied booklet of drawings with a silkscreened cover, and reluctantly went through some of his slides, which, blown up from their modest scale, only emphasized his delicate, gracefully articulated linework, and his subtle palette. He was eager to answer my questions about influences from female biomorphic artists such as Lee Bontecou and Inka Essenhigh, and he moved on to passing out a series he had done of covers of books he loves, and gleefully read aloud from grossout passages, stopping frequently to make sure he wasn’t upsetting anyone.

Like the most exciting and inspiring “gay utopia” performances I’ve experienced, this lecture had a thick sense of atmosphere, a heady delectation of the body, and communal generosity. What separated this talk from matching up with the gay utopia “look” was the fashion aesthetic (metal band shirts instead of thrifted blouses and tank tops), a cosmetic distinction, and, more importantly, the lack of any affirmational bacchanalian exhortations. Now, while I have greater admiration of queer hippie fashion than of thirtysomething dudes in black, and I appreciate the hippies’ exultation in magic, much of the utopian fantasy rings so hollow (lacking hallucinogens, or at least fantastic music). The part of Paul’s presentation I found preferable to the latter-day Happenings I’ve attended is a sense of quiet, and laughter not weighed down with pretensions of Dionysian sensuality. And beatification found through a healthy dose of repulsion, rather than a program of forced cosmic optimism.

Echoing the insights of my heroes Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva, I want to emphasize that such repulsion is essential to transcendence (now more than ever), and there’s no lack of it in the work of strong gay and female artists. Photographer Cindy Sherman comes to mind as one of Paul’s favorites, but an artist I could not help but think of during the presentation I described is the gay Canadian artist Daniel Barrow. Barrow creates small, precious multiples, such as trading cards and balsa-wood airplanes, but his best-known work are his performances in which he “puppets” his drawings on a transparency projector, to the accompaniment of a recorded spoken narrative. A fan of the bemused world-weariness of Quentin Crisp, Barrow’s apocryphal stories of gay celebrities feature sickly children, magical animals, and a decidedly perverse fixation on the body — i.e., more than a little tainted with disgust and outright horror — all illustrated in romantic brushstrokes and rococo pastels.

The darkened room, the evocation of boundaries of pure and impure, the highly male fear and fascination with (Mother’s) exposed innards… Barrow and Nudd have so much more in common than, in my opinion, do Nudd and the attractive but mean-spirited work of John Currin, or do Barrow and the equally lovely orgiastic porn assemblages of Scott Treleaven. The wonderfully wanky psychedelic collages of Fort Thunder, Lightning Bolt, and other Providence products, however, strike me as pretty heterosexual, and yet are visually consonant with much aesthetic output of the pegpants noise-rock freak-folk kids of the early ‘Oughts, LTTR and/or otherwise. And I maintain that the magic of Animal Collective’s music comes from the scent of Wicker Man and Charles Mansen, the hint of sacrifice, moonlight murder, the protean anarchy preceding the legalism of Leviticus. Which, if it wasn’t repulsive, would have far less appeal.

On the topic of symbolism outside the phallic Law, Carolee Schneeman and Louise Bourgeois are two of the more prominent artists to have taken up the representational torch for the re-ascendence of matriarchy in the capitalist era. Multiplying bodies and their organs with a horrible joy, a simple inversion of the male joyful horror described above, Bourgeois’ mutant sculptures and Schneeman’s visceral performances claim a new kind of female power, a “phallus” of sorts, but a female phallus, formless, interior, and possessed of numerous eyes. Even more than in the work of Paul Nudd and Daniel Barrow, who also swim in shadow through a hallucinogenic sea of (inevitably) gendered bodies, vision for these women, and the artists who follow them, is occluded and questioned. Whether it’s Schneeman writhing in processed meat with kinetic umbrellas, or Bourgeois’ pillars of breasts, their emphasis on intuitive and haptic responses jar the visual supremacy of the Renaissance tradition, and the humanist grid does not burst into flowers of rational tolerance, but rather begins to creak and buckle down its own universal anus-eye in the absence of any faith to hold knowledge together.

Two thinkers that have contributed a great deal to my perhaps equally unstable worldview are a pair that would hardly have many kind things to say to one another, but controversial thinkers on gender who illustrate strong archetypes of the old male order and the new female order, both equally relevant in making sense of the post-humanist future. C.S. Lewis, vilified by liberals for Christian children’s stories opposing Islamic imperialism (Ahmadinejad anyone, again?), wrote profoundly in essays as well as fables on the structure of the natural order, as he saw it. In The Problem of Pain he opines that genders are not realized in individuals, but are metaphysical ideals subsisting throughout Creation. Gender is far more a matter of power than genitalia, and all of humankind is feminine in comparison to the grandeur of God — in this significant sense, all humans are women. Gender is found in an interior space, the place where a Christian faces his Maker. Essential gender difference is foundational as well to the revolutionary feminist writer Shulamith Firestone, who would end the nuclear family, end compulsory education for adolescents, and end pregnancy as we know it, turning reproduction over to technology and ushering in an era beyond rigid boundaries, in which women once again take control of society. Given the situation in which the world finds itself, it seems unlikely that all will fit the “feminine” stereotype of nurturance and inclusion. But, in an era of want and upheaval, it is appropriate that our trust be given to women (not masked jackasses a la V for Vendetta). Even if supporting Hillary does seem a bit too cynical for my taste at the moment.

Belief in gender power rather than atomistic “mere tolerance” is a direction that I wish to see pursued in art, and a direction that the “gay utopians’” magical stunts could aim at. That is, if performed in humility before divinity rather than affirmation among equals. Colonial appropriation of indigenous practices, the secular mysticism of phenomenology, are no replacement for the absolute amazement and anguish we must feel at the bodies we inhabit and the world we have destroyed. Contingency and democracy are realities of our daily life, and necessities of our group situation. But they are a poor replacement for the awe we must feel before a greater power, the Big Other outside of our reality, that has made it possible and worthwhile to work and love, though never to the point of even beginning to fulfill the infinity of desire.

So, if the gay utopia isn’t really about being gay, what about being gay? John Boswell, who wrote about the history of tolerance for homosexuals in medieval Catholic Europe — quite widespread before the 12th century — makes a number of strong points in defining the problem of what gayness or homosexuality is and how hard it is to locate in history. On one hand, there are sources that suggest that gay sex in highly tolerant societies (like classical Greek and Roman cities) is engaged in openly by a large proportion of the populace, whereas intolerant societies (like Persia in the Crusades or Iran today) proclaim no homosexuality whatsoever. This goes along with the conclusions of Freud and Kinsey (separately) that the split between heterosexuality and homosexuality is a highly questionable one. Of course, neither term existed before the bastard Greek-Latin term “homosexuality” was coined by Havelock Ellis at the end of the 19th century. Many people who have had homosexual feelings or experiences do not acknowledge themselves to be gay (such self-affirmation is still significantly tied to class status). Many people are attracted less to genitalia and more to eye color, curly hair, feet, humiliation, etc. Gay utopian scholar, artist, and activist Gregg Bordowitz phrases it evocatively: “all sexuality is queer sexuality.” Which is easily confused with the homophobic shibboleth about homosexuality being a choice. It is, in a sense — if hetrosexuality is a choice too. Sex is a vast array of thoughts, words, and deeds; desire is a shadowy cave; sexuality is an assumed identity, a lifestyle. Many people who are sexually repressed have severe problems both causing it and resulting from it — ditto for many people who are oversexed.

Managing one’s identity is a way of navigating between desire and sex. Sexuality relates a person to a social order. A gay person signals by their identity that they relate to a social order of diversity, cosmopolitan values, political rather than familial affiliations — a worldview that does, in fact, resemble a great deal of contemporary First World social milieux, and the forward-looking politics of globalism and hybridity. But being “straight,” heterosexual, as normative as it is, is clearly defined in relation to its supplement, homosexuality. Socially, (though not for persecuted individuals) heterosexuality is an identity just as fraught with anxiety — anxiety, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains, about being gay. A straight person often uses their sexuality as a way to hide any number of flaws in their normality. In post-industrial societies, the institutions of heterosexuality (like marriage) evoke a bygone era: the rural past, when kinship affiliations were key to the survival of the wider group. Just like the straight person who uses “normality” as a mask, the culture uses nostalgia as an ideological front– in part, to cover up the non-rural present, the regime of individual control that Foucault famously termed “biopower,” a society where, despite the humanist dogma of personal liberty, everyone’s private habits are in fact a matter of public scrutiny — and individual self-hatred.

Sexuality is a modern necessity. It is involved with policing the murky infinity of desire within, and confronting the infinite policing of behavior without, but nonetheless, it is something we construct. Gender is often confused with sexuality — they are both concepts tangled up in discussions of modern identity. But I would argue that sexuality is the part that is presented, both to oneself and the world, for approval. Gender (not genitalia) is how our minds and bodies fit in with everything we perceive. Gender is the stable power that generates all instability. Hovering indeterminately between two eternal poles, our gendered mind experiences sexual desire, but this is a result of our gender, not the cause of it.

The perception of gender as a ramshackle hodgepodge of hegemonic proscriptions is the thin philosophical gruel served up by the legacy of cultural studies. Because intelligent American academics like Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, and Donna Harraway borrowed from eloquent French thnkers like Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Michel Foucault, and talented French writers like Jacques Derrida, Francois Lyotard, and Gilles Deleuze, feminists and queer theorists have followed the pull of gravity, moving further and further from explicit politics and into a stale rhetoric of endless dynamistic analysis and personal exploration, buying up blurry platitudes and hoping for cred at the margins of banality. A famine, a technological innovation, an orgasm, are all intriguing crises, equivalent affirmations of flux. Though these writers have articulated important points, they are seriously hampered by their inability to theorize their unacknowledged utopian aspirations, and thus their ideological location. The ideas of queerness that underlie the gay utopia resonate with such a stochastic worldview, as do the ravenousness of capital, the force of the feminine, and the amorphous violence of sexual desire generally. These certainly cannot all be the same thing. Or can they?

There are reasons that this shapeless political-poetic cluster applies with equivalent intuitive resonance to gender, sexuality, and economics. It is the case that technology mediates law and flesh, tending toward the specialization of tasks and replacing bodily strength, seemingly obviating the barrier between manual work (for men) and biological work (for women), as Shulamith Firestone proposes. Openly gay men are effeminate if only by definition — traitors to the masculinity they admire and reflect. But, precisely owing to the fear of betraying the fragile brotherhood, masculinity is an ill-fitting jockstrap for everyone. On the other hand, despite mulleted caricatures, lesbians lack this anxiety, and thus do not resemble men in the way that gay-appearing men resemble women. Slippery female sexuality detaches the phallus and multiplies the vulva.

The indigestible remainder of capitalism is hierarchy, the deepening of divisions in the erasure of differences, speculative liberty moved by the compressing force of its own iron limit. Hierarchy is not unique to capitalism, but it is synonymous with capital of all kinds. Monosexual situations often result in expressions of sexual violence to create order — schools and military organizations come to mind; conversely, Kristeva points out the way in which strict hierarchy in Indian society reduces emphasis on sexual and gender taboos. Desire cathected as dominance is a basic expression of power, from rape to the scintillating Freudian analysis of Woodrow Wilson’s spiteful and pedantic Messianic delusions.

Which brings up my preoccupation with the way in which Christianity and power are misunderstood, both liturgically and historically. Christianity is filthy with responsibility for many things, including some portion of transmuting classical humanism into our current “culture of life.” But we can see now that, through constantly agonizing over its history, the religion remains outside of its consequences, like the body which is eternal and the body which disintegrates. Transmuting, recall, is alchemy, a neo-Platonist animism, a non-Christian form of magic. Rather, thanks to Saint Paul, Christianity is not an experimental method, but a mystical resolution of cosmic impossibility — including the contradictions within Judaism that once alienated him. John Boswell avers that Paul, a central founder of the Church, did not condemn homosexuality, but rather child molestation, and excessive gratification generally. Elaine Pagels and others argue that the “pseudo-Pauline” passages marginalizing women were added later. Paul advocated a missionary approach that was humble and heartfelt, not a “cloak for greed.” His approach adopted the rhetorical approach of the Greeks in the service of revolt and revelation, not to subjugate populations in the service of power.

Despite their often honest intentions, perhaps the only significant favor American Christians have done the world, though it is quite significant, is not to free the hearts of men, but to secure the place of faith as an alternative to an instrumental materialistic worldview. Paul advocated the restraint of celibacy to inflame faith, prevent unwanted children, and protect the body, not to encourage the bigotry and repression of affect that Christianity is now known for. The emotional condition among Americans is not hope, faith that our lone trickle of love can fill the expanding endlessness of Creation — though this sounds a lot like the gay utopia — it is rage, resignation, anxiety, and despair in the face of unfilled “fulfillment.” Mannerisms adopted to intimidate, bluff, and seduce our comrades have the studied insincerity of a smile in a sickroom. This abject submission to unreason we see in advertising, in Hollywood, in Broadway, is too easily incorporated into queer irony.

Christianity strove to replace cold, abstract classical values (the forerunner of our progressive rationalized city), and the ancestry-bound, corporeal insularity of Judaism (conservative by the standards of any era) with an inward-looking practice that dwells forever just on the edge of infinite love, the border between humankind and everything we are not, unitary particularity and ultimate vagueness, the body with numerous organs.

The only boundary of humanist philosophy is the shadow the philosopher casts on his work, a shadow constantly swatted at ineffectually by subsequent philosophers, popping up like spring-loaded gophers in the grid of interchangeable positions. But boundary in religion is foundational. In Christianity we have not a marginal shadow but a central body, the crucified Christ, blood that becomes wine, meat that becomes bread, wounds that become windows on the infinite. Sacrifice and cannibalism are not reintroduced by Christ, but transubstantiated into an effort at mutual restoration. Miraculously the limp body of apassive man (the pariah of both pagan and Jewish society) becomes the phallus of the world’s hope. A Moon-Pie can be a blessed sacrament, our conduit between hunger and beasts, emblem of continuity with the world. We eat what we kill, and thus kill what we eat, far more than we copulate. From what we eat we derive energy, heat, shit, tears, and a rotting leftover, the body. “The body” might be a provisional site of intersecting discourses, or whatever, but the body is not. What we share with life we share with our kind the most, and with nobody completely. moving from ultimate newness and organization, ascending through levels of grace, facing the impotence of God in the impossibility of resurrection, and the glory of God in the impossibility of Creation.

Holy S/H/E/IT is the magic that allows us to reflect the many-tentacled thing-object of our unspeakable affections into a universal secret triumph over suffering through suffering, through law to go beyond the law. But this does not mean that Christianity is not crushed by the evil done in its name. Spreading love and peace was a vehicle for genocide and on a scale matched only by our contempt for ourselves. But no doomed private pride can match the grandeur of the Interior Castle. The Kingdom of God, like the gay utopia, is a paradise of orifices — the wounds of the suffering Christ. But unlike humanism, Christianity does not resist criticism through absorbing it and feeding from its energy. Some part of it resists the pale professional conversations in academic cloisters; rather, it exposes itself to the light of the world, and constantly cracks and crumbles into dust through publicly interrogating its aporia, under the weight of the hypocrisy it condemns. Is there any point in even trying to talk about it?

My feeling, however, is that the aim of the postmodern project to somehow correct the excesses of the Enlightenment has noticeably failed. If calculus teaches us anything metaphysical, it’s that change and volatility are far from unquantifiable. Deterritorialization, Deleuze’s concept of the tendency of social forces to multiply and disperse, is nothing new. Unity has had its fragility officially exposed ever since Galileo and Luther publicly flaunted the Church, and Thomas Hobbes was soon and forever after a black sheep of humanism for critiquing both democracy and the scientific method. The gay utopia champions both the autonomous uniqueness and the egalitarian interchangeability of all, and, with millions of people now living in deprivation and peril, it’s not clear what or who has yet to be freed through the rethinking abstractions of the West. I would like a reterritorialization to oppose but also to redirect the many reactionary reterritorializations that promote intolerance and imperialism, rather than merely leaving things to the inevitable ongoing deterritorialization, which continues blithely managing citizens, property, and information through a rhetoric of legalistic ethics and endless evolutionary growth. International law and multi-lateral treaties cannot be expected to yield equality and improvement. Like St. Paul our civilization has lived through the law in order to die to the law. Our culture is a culture of freedom. What remains to guide us?

The art of the body, rather than the theory of the body, has a lot to say about the potential of repulsion, the only curb of desire. Thresholds in monotheism exist to sustain purity and resist sacrificial violence. Such thresholds must be preserved, and this provides art with a small but meaningful role in the world. Violence against gays, women, and racial minorities are not wrong because they supersede the autonomous self-policing of Deleuze’s desiring machines, but because violence is wrong. Spreading our products, litter, and worldview to every corner of the world is not wrong because of the sacredness of freedom; it is wrong because we are not living up to our responsibilities to our communities and our nation.

Colonialism is the crisis of our time, as in sci-fi writer Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. A profoundly eco-aware species that deplored hierarchy includes a facilitating semi-shamanic third gender, known as ooloi. But despite their vast knowledge and capacity for nurturance, this species moved from world to world, sucking its resources dry. The freedom of capital is the freedom of desire, the freedom of a raging destructive conflagration. It can be deflected through voluntary boundaries. We must find a way to create a peaceful fortress. We cannot let the fluids of power flow without restriction in and out of our country. Christianity makes it possible to love our neighbor in isolation from her. National sovereignty, not individual fulfillment, is the only hope for the great mass of people.

Body art reminds us that we have physical boundaries that leak, just like the boundaries between sacred and profane. Transgressing these boundaries is a religious act, or a sin. Imperfection is universal, and not everything in nature is ours to touch, but art can touch it — this can be seen in the colonoscopy videos of Mona Hatoum, or in Annette Messager’s crocheted sweaters on taxidermied birds. These works are viewed in shadow because twilight dissolves boundaries. Twilight is therefore both holy and evil. The strong response I feel to art like this reminds me that the place of art is, in some sense if not literally, outside of the everyday world. This is why the magic of the gay utopia is so inspiring, but also so deceptive. A utopia is not a place for people to live. It is a place to look through a dark hole and imagine. Which might be, in a good sense, kind of gay.

The Post-Gender Mystique

Femininity is not frequently accorded respect. In gay culture, “femme” is still rarely an option associated with strength, meaning, knowledge, and freedom. At best, girliness may have a temporary strategic appeal, but it can’t be dissociated from values of impotence, consumption, and passivity, articulating itself only through cruel gossip and tacky melodrama. This may explain partly why the hyperfeminized scenes and characters of Japanese comics (manga) for adolescent girls (shojo) has had so little appeal to American fans of superhero comics, fine art, literary fiction, or their collective unholy offspring, alternative comics. And yet I insist that the art now on display in the group survey show Shojo Manga! Girl Power! at Columbia College’s modest C33 Gallery, is more worthwhile, on the whole, than the work on display in Los Angeles in the all-star Masters of American Comics show, soon to be coming to the Milwaukee Art Museum. The reason I find a collection of work by Japanese masters like Osamu Tezuka, Ryoko Ikeda, Moto Hagio, Masako Watanbe, and the female art and writing collective CLAMP so important is not only because the shojo manga form will continue to gain in influence in the U.S., but because it shows possibilities for comics that have been largely untested by Western creators.

Despite the show’s celebratory title, I would hardly make a claim that, if any form of pulpy pop culture is going to set young women free, shojo manga will be that emancipatory force. On the other hand, shojo manga exemplifies many of the seeming contradictions I often find moving in Japanese visual art. The page layout is utterly unlike the traditional ice-cube tray format of American comics, merging the elegant, startling shapes and juxtapositions of Russian Constructivism with the Eurotrash hair-model illustrations of Patrick Nagel and the enormous sparkling eyes of scruffy soulful orphans in thrift-store paintings. This sense of giddy, helium-sucking boundlessness applies generally to the storytelling in shojo manga as well. Distinctions blur between inner and outer states, waking and dreaming, past and future, male and female, gay and straight. Identities and realities swim in a candy-coated vision of romantic glory that, despite the petty objections of sundry aesthetes, hardly qualifies as disposable or superficial, particularly in comparison with the cartoony but macho post-Pop skater and graffiti art that has received undue respect in the art world for far too long.
 

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From Amaterasu,©Suzue Miuchi

 

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From Poem of Wind and Trees,©Keiko Takemiya

Writers in the two sources I consulted, the Shojo Manga! Girl Power! catalog and the July 2005 edition of The Comics Journal, which was devoted exclusively to shojo manga, obsessively reiterate the immense popularity of the medium, both in the U.S. and east Asia. In Japan, comics conventions peopled almost entirely by women (as yet unheard of here), most of whom are allowed and encouraged to self-publish and sell their fan fiction (ditto), can pack in upwards of 500,000 attendees. In the U.S., the market for manga has recently topped $100 million yearly, the majority of those sales going to shojo manga titles, presumably being bought mostly by teen and pre-teen girls. As I’ve intimated, though, the content of shojo manga is what makes it extraordinary. Themes of abuse, suicide, sex, and changing family structures are dealt with in operatic and soap-operatic style. But perhaps the most provocative aspect is the resounding success of comics for girls that deal with homosexuality and highly unstable gender roles. Beginning with the unchallenged master of the media of manga and anime (animation), Osamu Tezuka, the 1953-56 story Ribbon no Kishi (The Knight of the Ribbon, or Princess Knight), featured the princess Sapphire, who carries within her the heart of a man and the heart of a woman. She is prevented from ascending the throne as a woman, and is raised as a boy, but then falls in love with a prince from a neighboring kingdom, and so re-feminizes herself with a flowing, flaxen-haired wig. Another major series, Ryoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles (1972-73), focuses on Oscar, the daughter of a noble family who is raised as a boy and serves as a military commander under Marie Antoinette, falling in love with Andre, the son of her wet nurse. But cross-dressing suggestiveness, while its popularity endures, has since expanded into explicit homosexuality (primarily male), along with magical and futuristic gender-role chaos, as central features of top-selling comics for girls and women. While not featured in the exhibit, the SM! GP! catalog, as well as the Comics Journal special edition, discuss the established genre of explicit male homosexuality (aimed at female readers) known as yaoi, a term derived from the first syllables for the terms “no climax,” “no point,” and “no meaning” — though the acronym also serves for the phrase “Stop, my butt hurts!”

The show of 23 landmark shojo manga artists at C33 isn’t always easy to look at. The pieces are crowded together under plexiglass and mat board, and are confusingly organized with respect to titles and explanatory labels. Numerous pieces are hung facing the windows as a lure to passersby, which means you have to climb into the windows, putting yourself on display, in order to get a good look at some images. Artwork of such fine detail and vivid color suffers from the cramped conditions (though it’s nonetheless impressive that someone figured out how to get all the art to fit). This show in this space feels something like a high-end airbrush studio specializing in sadomasochistic sci-fi wedding portraits. However, the art is often beautiful, the historical sweep is edifying, and it’s hard not to enjoy many of the plot synopses, such as that for CLAMP’s 2003 Cardcaptor Sakura series “Tsubasa (Wings),” which includes the line: “One day, when Sakura touches some old ruins, she falls down, and her memory flies beyond time and space. To help Sakura, Yiao Lion visits a witch and begins the journey to find Sakura’s memory.” The show is additionally enhanced by a stack of free Shojo Beat magazines. This provides an important element by allowing viewers a chance to see mainstream shojo manga in its natural habitat, black-and-white panel narratives on newsprint, as opposed to the painted pin-up images that rarely appear in print, but dominate the exhibit. Seeing these soft watercolor washes, the collaged textures, and the immaculate lines up close is a viscerally dazzling experience that, in its aggressive perfection and macabre, sexually charged energy, succeeds in belying, if subtly, Western preconceptions of the feminine. At the same time, its idealized internality and open-ended imagining evokes what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan termed “jouissance,” a state of bliss outside of language, accessible to only the female mind.
&nbps;

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Cover of Cardcaptor Sakura: Master of the Clow Volume 4 ©CLAMP

A version of this essay was first published in The Chicago Reader.
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This is part of the Gay Utopia project. A map of the Gay Utopia is here.

“Hasn’t anyone lost anything tangible?!” : Bloom County as realism

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I just watched Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in the recent biopic The Iron Lady on Netflix, and, as the writing was nowhere near equal to Streep’s uncanny performance, my favorite part was when the empowering patriotic-feminist flashbacks and poignant dementia hallucinations were finally over, so I could turn the sound down and play Morrissey’s “Margaret on the Guillotine” over the credits.  There was left-wing populism then, populism of the nostalgic anarchist variety, not just peacefully occupying parks but burning tires on the street, fighting police, and occasionally blowing something up.  It seems like a long time ago, because it was in fact a long time ago.

But going back much further, satire and revolution have a curious relationship.  Comic theatre and then the first novels appeared in the wake of early-modern wars and catastrophes, mocking the presumed practical piety of those who would consider a proposal, as Thatcher might have had it crossed her desk, to simply eat the Irish.  Later, Art Young’s stark cartoon allegories went well with contemporaneous German Expressionist grotesquerie and Brecht’s apocalyptic operettas.  And later still, matching roughly the span of the Thatcher era, Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County documented the denouement of the Cold War from the safe distance of the U.S.  One book’s introduction details a Kubrick-esque fantasia when the distance of the Soviets from American soil (American soil in Alaska that is) leads to a national panic.  And there is of course the prisoner swap of the re-educated Bill the Cat to the Soviets to get back Opus and Cutter John, along with the memorable inventions of a Basselope-based missile and an air defense shield composed of orbiting money.
 

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The proud modern heritage of satire, whose flame in newspaper comics may have burned most brightly in Breathed, indeed often bases its gags on a safe distance, a safety that renders every attempt at drama absurd—perhaps never less dramatically than in the anxiety closet representing Binkley’s deepest terrors, from which springs forth the unutterable banality of debating economists.  But whether it’s the presidential campaign of a catatonic cat, the hunting of a snake that turns out to be the battery cable of a ’73 Pinto, the prescient machinations of junior hacker Oliver Wendell Jones, or even the hijinks of a PMRC-baiting hair-metal band, the silence is deafening, broken up only, as in a spoof of bad stand-up, by the murmur of frogs and crickets.
 

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Irony has become a bad word again.  In spite of (or because of) the success of The Daily Show, Buzzfeed, etc., neither committed agitators nor edgy culture-makers want to have anything to do with “funny” art (Paul McCarthy and William Pope L being noteworthy exceptions).  But in the 1980s, amidst a brief resurgence of politicized youthful intransigence, there were the Dead Milkmen, the Young Ones, Culturecide, the Crucifucks, Flaming Carrot, Spitting Image, David Wojnarowicz, and Mike Kelley.  I had a cheap Casio keyboard and sundry found objects, and my high school friend and I had the temerity to call ourselves a band, and to call that band Nasal Plaque.  We mocked the abortion debate, we mocked warmongering, we mocked protest songs, we mocked bluesy authenticity.  The treacly hindsight is perhaps neck-deep at this point, but that there was a time when protest was endearingly mean and scruffy, at the same time it was bloody and destructive elsewhere, seems worth a look backward—especially now that the New Republic is claiming that the Onion is “America’s finest Marxist news source,” even while Jacobin is denouncing Adbusters’ crypto-fascist sympathies.  Can punk rock, in the end, get over itself?

With full treacly apology, I claim that Bloom County may have been the last great realist comic strip, a salutary deflationary attempt to show the safety pins holding together the tattered corset hiding the hemorrhoids of society.  Realists run the risk of being both dismal and arrogant in any such effort; the reluctant realist Ambrose Bierce defined realism in his 1911 Devil’s Dictionary as: “[t]he art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm.”  But in Bloom County of course such humble animals often have speaking roles, stripped of Disneyish innocence and cursed with the anxiety and frustration of a Philip Roth character.  Case in point: Portnoy, a frequently angry and bigoted groundhog named after a Roth character, whom Binkley inadvertently clubs senseless in the pointedly unremarkable “Battle of Shady Creek.”

In realist novels, the romantic aspirations of a knight like Don Quixote or a bored housewife like Emma Bovary are revealed as self-destructive neurosis in dense, deadening, deadpan detail, ending inevitably in an arbitrary pathetic whimper rather than a decisive bang of closure, much like when Steve Dallas uses up all the hot shower water (and panel space) singing Julio Iglesias.  The non-hero may uncertainly and ironically occupy a macho mise en abyme meta-narrative, as in Joseph Conrad’s mystical Heart of Darkness or Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea; Binkley’s anxiety closet is again Exhibit A, although there’s also the series where Milo is a comics artist being overseen by a hooded executioner, or the Lost and Found counter where Milo demands the return of his lost “youthful idealism” and his “sense of optimism,” ending with the frazzled attendant asking “Hasn’t anyone lost anything tangible?!”
 

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Jane Austen’s characters manage to deflate romance without erasing the stability of social relationships, but social relationships are sometimes the cause of the story’s grim non-resolution in Thomas Hardy, Richard Wright, or The Wire, as in Oliver Wendell Jones’ inevitable confrontation by the authorities (that he sends to Steve Dallas’ house), or by the bugs in his inventions.  In Bloom County, a Senator’s blatant corruption or Bill and Opus’ doomed campaign are as humorously bleak as a Sinclair Lewis novel.

When Roland Barthes writes in S/Z about Honore de Balzac’s story “Sarrasine,” he stresses the multivalences and enigmas in this realist tale of wealth and infatuation, and Breathed should similarly get credit for creating an open-ended, unstable stable of characters.  Breathed is no royalist, a la Balzac, but neither is he a Theodore-Dreiser-esque socialist realist; his stalwart defenses of “liberals” and “secular humanists” are the subject of many Bloom County strips.  Indeed, the political status of a realist art is a sticky matter; the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs stated that the alienation in realism was necessary, praising the effort to depict “totality,” but also that these novels were hardly revolutionary gauntlets.  Fair enough.  Jed Esty and Colleen Lye say of Mulk Raj Anand that his fiction about India’s poorer castes depicts a “collective subject whose gradual transformation is delineated through pragmatic modes rather than through metanarratives of emancipation.”  This reference may seem a trifle high-flown, as well as remote in terms of culture and class, but the cautious optimism of Breathed’s politics certainly dispenses with grand ideals, in favor of a reassuring possibility, once sundry ludicrous delusions are dispensed with, that community might be found among the dandelions.

There may be an attempt underway to re-assert political truths in culture, the loss of which Frederic Jameson bemoans in the postmodern replacement of illuminating parodies (like, I claim, Bloom County) by empty pastiche.  Recent writings on “speculative realist” philosophy, based in part on the work of one-time French Maoist Alain Badiou, posits an indeterminate infinity of objects beyond conceivability, though this has been critiqued by Alexander Galloway as complicit with the apolitical information infrastructure of late capitalism.  I, for my part, appreciate the moment when Oliver Wendell Jones introduces Opus to his “Great Unification Theory,” which explains the entire universe, albeit with the exception of flightless waterfowl.  Shouting in panic and clinging to his ice-cream cone, Opus starts to disappear, piece by piece, panel by panel, like Marty McFly in Back to the Future when his future parents are in danger of not falling in love.  Finally in the end Oliver figures it out, explaining to the camera, “Forgot to carry the two,” as the reconstituted Opus splutters next to his collapsed dessert.  The mathematical absolute itself is lampooned, illustrating that a culture that has sloughed off its illusions finds itself exposed to but perhaps intermittently redeemed by the deformations of a snarky perversity that refuses to die.
 

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Loss of Interface: Teaching Cartoons Without Form

As the definitive ubiquitous stylized two-dimensional simplification of reality in the world since the advent of access to print and cinema images, cartoons, particularly comics, seem extremely promising to advocates of literacy and art education.  There’s good reason for this enthusiasm, as many young people have a sufficiently strong interest in comics and animation to learn the rules and expend the labor needed to produce a “readable” work of art.  But this is only the first step in beginning to envision a work that will interest and entertain strangers.  Understanding Comics creator Scott McCloud, praised as the grand popular theoretician of the graphical user interface, relates this kind of vision to knowledge and tangibility: “a vision of something which can be, which may be,” he expounded (with the visual aid of PowerPoint) in his 2005 TED talk.

It should be frankly acknowledged, however, that the vast majority of young people, who might get a lot of pleasure from consuming cartoons, absolutely do not have the level of focus and discipline to even approach, let alone excel in this area of highly specialized practice.  And for teachers trying to get students to that first step of readability, the challenge is to simultaneously foster artwork that is “expressive,” but at the same time a storyline which is in some measure coherent, as well as “appropriate” for school.  It is likely that both the student and the teacher will fail.  But after all, as queer theorist Judith Halberstam says, “…failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods” (2011, p. 3).  Drawing on my experience of 15 years teaching comics and animation in a wide variety of contexts in the Chicago area, I would like to think more about the fascinating nature of failed attempts at “sequential art.”

The last two decades, the ones in which I have been an adult teaching with cartoons (as opposed to a young person responding somewhat intuitively to cartoons) have seen the widening Western embrace of Japanese manga and anime, as well as the expansion of independently-produced animation on cable and online, not to mention a vast proliferation of print and online comics.  I don’t consider myself a true aficionado of any particular era or genre of cartoons, but as an enthusiastic dilettante, it is my sense that popular cartoons now are less and less narrative, and more and more visual, than at any point in my lifetime.  The problem for teachers who want to teach literacy, or relate the technical basics of producing cartoons systematically, is that the techno-primitivist works produced by young people are in many ways more relevant to cartoons being made now than is Scott McCloud’s rational visionary, questing after a “durable mutation,” yoked to a functional ideal of clear visual storytelling.  Young people’s comics pages are dominated by unprovoked emotion or violence interspersed with hypnotic patterns of line, and animations dominated by shapeless images and choppy, chaotic repetition.  Dialogue, if it exists, is in no particular order, as text or speech is generally sparse, garbled, or absent.
 

 
I want to make it clear that, while I am neither the most (nor the least) gifted art teacher in the world, I have always provided students with a great variety and quantity of examples, demonstrations, exercises, and preparatory steps, not to mention tireless encouragement.  Many students may not be inordinately proud of their work, but this does not mean that students did not, in some sense, make the work they wanted to make.  Elements of fantasy and pleasure, which dwell more in the implicit than the explicit schooling curriculum, flow throughout the transformations between the “input” of perception (to mangle Stuart Hall’s famed metaphor of cultural reproduction) and the “output” of participation.  The deficits of my students’ comics and animations, their lack of smoothness in plot, rendering, or motion, can be seen as an incomplete effort, a first level of scaffolding, but it can also be seen as an unrefined but equally undiluted reflection of what moves these young people, and stays with them.  They explicitly say a lot less than what highly realized cartoons have the ability to say, but they can express quite a bit about what we may not realize we all get from the experience of a cartoon.

It should be understood that cartoons have a distinguished history of blissful and brutal nonsensicality.  Contemporary with the dawn of European Surrealism in the 1910s, Winsor McCay and George Herriman drew comic strips that made no more sense then than, I would argue, they do now.  Max Fleischer and Lotte Reininger directed meandering somnambulistic animations that relied almost entirely on visual amazement rather than anything like a story.  Even superheroes, like Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, the Flash, and Plastic-Man, contributed to the general fever-dream nature of “golden age” mass-media cartoons.  In the world of Japanese cartoons, the aimlessly cavorting animals and monks of medieval scrolls have now given way to black-magic tech warfare and mystical post-gender romance, in stories created more for the beatifically glazed than the alertly attentive.  The late-century boom of uplifting Disney movies, banal newspaper strips, and patriotic comic books was perhaps the anomaly.  And even in those, the moments of absurdity and chaos were not entirely absent.

Actual plot lines did exist in many of my students’ comics—particularly the more “literate” ones.  There were sumo-wrestling hamsters, croquet-mallet wielding heroines, time machine hijinks, animal zombies, friendships, romances, and disappointments, supernatural power struggles, practical jokes, and many basketball games and ninja/samurai battles.  But in most comics I primarily see a visual density, an appreciation of certain shapes and atmospheres, reflecting a synthesis of what the artist is comfortable rendering and what she perceives as necessary for a complete comics page.  In animation there is the challenge of simply executing a successful simulation of movement, which severely restricts the options available to the artist.  But, in one of my earliest and most low-tech claymation classes, in which we simply recorded the camera fast-forwarding a series of still shots, one pair of students created an amazing vignette of a monster throwing a victim into a construction-paper lake, where he sank to his doom through the process of removing successive sections of the victim’s body.   This is certainly a plot line, but this, among all the dancing words and shapes and balls of clay my students have animated, is perhaps the exception that proves the rule.

In many ways, the chaotic power struggles of dramatic play are a more social and kinetic version of the chaos of a cartoon.  There is the sense that an ideal, unified world exists to be created by a story, but every element (every image in a cartoon or every player in a drama) is a misshapen contingent challenge to that world, in a way that words, written or spoken, or even audible sounds, which exist discretely in a temporal listening or reading experience, are not.  In the case of a cartoon, however, the contents of the artist’s or artists’ idea of a stylized reality can be discerned—as when I, as a five-year-old who had never in my life seen explosions before, drew pictures of Star Wars scenes featuring, primarily, numerous clouds of flying debris.   To correct this somehow (as I eventually did on my own), to bring my storytelling in line with the somewhat mundane plot of the film, was something of a pity—especially when, in Star Wars as in many cartoons, the visual world is what makes the experience worthwhile.  Around the same time, I also drew dozens of biomorphic mazes, with a focus and glee that probably would have raised some autism-spectrum flags in this day and age.
 

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What Gilles Deleuze said of Francis Bacon could be said (if immodestly) of my mazes and explosions, of Ben Strassman’s smudgy ninja story in my 2006 comics class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Victoria Gooden’s graveyard scene from a 2005 SAIC comics class, Joshua Franco’s seismograph-esque shading in his piece for my 2002 co-curated (with David Heatley) anthology The New Graphics Revival, or Austin Traylor’s amazing animation of a flying ball from a 2007 class at SAIC: “What interests him is a violence that is involved only with color and line; the violence of a sensation (and not of a representation), a static or potential violence, a violence of reaction and expression.”  (2003/1981, p. x).  There are myriad forms of music, imagery, choreography (including fight choreography), stories, poetry (including lyrics), and other practices that mirror these vivid elements that draw young people to cartoons in ways they both fail to articulate, yet triumph in expressing.
 

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Comic by Ben Strassman

 

Austin Traylor’s animation

 
This may be even more true with the use of pattern and superimposition in the romantic and reflective pages of students both Japanese and American, from a variety of backgrounds, but primarily female.  On back to back pages in The New Graphics Revival, Yesenia Limon’s nostalgic lament for her Mexican homeland and the wordless illustration of a flute-player by Japanese high-schooler Juri Ishii both create, through inwardness and repetition, the sense of jouissance, an unbounded field of emanating love. 
 

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Yeseni Alimon, top; Juri Ishii, bottom

A similar impression is created in a hazy backlit stop-motion animation of paper heart shadows that two of my students at Bowen High School created last year.  Again flirting with grandiloquence, these recall for me Julia Kristeva’s reverie in The Powers of Horror (1982, p.12):

When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think.  The ‘sublime’ object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory.

 

Certainly these students could be encouraged to expand their skill base and use these powerful images in the service of a conventional format and narrative, but they also could be exposed to works of visual culture, highbrow and otherwise, that share these qualities of ecstatic levitation.

This is not to denounce storytelling or literacy education in any way.  But I would suggest that, in the attempt to include “youth culture” in teaching while encouraging a critical creativity, imagination (versus production) can be a useful place to spend some time.  While language, numbers, and music can seem baffling, an image has a presence that, even speaking as someone with a visual handicap, doesn’t seem to demand comprehension; thus the appeal of picture books for young readers.  There are no end of images that young people can use to make more images, through drawing, video, collage, assemblage, etc.  If the images and the goals of the project can be made meaningful, a story can be generated.  But beware demanding closure; encouragement is worthwhile, but when a student is done with an image, for the moment or for good, more than likely that student is done.  Closure, like clarity, is only an issue if the teacher lets it be one.

And if she does make it an issue, there could be resentment, or it could potentially yield benefits to a student, both in terms of building discipline and in learning how to generate meaningful content.  But my experience has been that only the most rudimentary comics, one to two pages in length, can be expected from an average student.  Animations may reach ten seconds, but don’t expect to necessarily have a soundtrack, or any edits.  Another interpretation of this problem, if it is a problem, is one of motivation.  So a different pedagogical design might be proposed, as cultural-studies-inspired education scholars Henry Jenkins and Mimi Ito have proposed, in which peer-to-peer learning, driven by student interests, should ideally be taking place over diverse, flexible, productive networks (Jenkins et al. 2009, Ito et al. 2013).  In one sense, of course it should, and it will, especially if teachers can facilitate student access to larger public learning spaces, online or physically.  This could recall the “trans-local” preservation of culture through games that has been practiced by African-American girls for generations (Gaunt 2006), or any other tradition of informal learning.  In another sense, though, this streamlining of education and culture into a rationalized mode of production is not necessarily a departure from McCloud’s idea of art as interface, form as content.

Georges Bataille opted for a third term, something without form or content, a concept he called informe, or “formless.”  Instead of simply affirming the universe as knowable, infinitely visible as McCloud might propose, Bataille might counter that:

affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. (p. 382)

Bataille did not expand much on this concept, but others have, including a creatively indexed 1997 catalog of art and writing entitled Formless: A User’s Guide by the art historians Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois.  To make the concept of informe part of an art lesson is not challenging, once the idea of a singular goal is put aside, perhaps to be returned to at a later time.  The experimental animations of Ivan Maximov, the Brothers Quay, or Norman McLaren, illustrational oddities of Trenton Doyle Hancock, Remedios Varo, Clamp, or W. W. Denslow, the surprising collages of Arturo Herrera, Wangechi Mutu, or John Stezaker, or the montages of Christian Marclay, could provide great jumping-off points for exploration of the twilight area between narrative and bedazzlement.

Certainly every student should be encouraged to build skills and pursue projects that she sees as meaningful, but the use of communicative media, like cartoons, to transmit various forms of noise is not a potential that should be overlooked.  As pointed out by Jacques Ranciere (2013), the aesthetic dimension of social revolutions in the modern era has made abundant use of the incomplete and unresolved, often more movingly than visions of the achieved ideal.  In an instrumentalized economy of symbols, the possibility of lending focus to formlessness could be a worthwhile purpose for teaching about and with culture.

 

Works cited

Bataille, G. (1985/1929). “Formless.” A. Stoekl, Ed. Georges Bataille. Vision of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927-1939, A. Stoekl w/ C. R. Lovitt & D. M. Leslie Jr., transl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (p. 382).

 

Deleuze, G. (2003 (1981)). D.W. Smith, transl. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. New York: Continuum.

 

Gaunt, K. (2006). Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes From Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. New York: NYU Press.

 

Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

 

Ito, M., Gutierrez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J. Salen, K., Schor, J. Sefton-Green, J., & Watkins, S. C. (2013). Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design. (PDF file). Retrieved from www.dmlhub.net, December 17, 2013.

 

Jenkins, H. w/ Purushitma, R., Weigel, M., Clinton, K., & Robinson, A. J. (2009). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

 

Kristeva, J. (1982). L. S. Roudiez, transl. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.

 

McCloud, S. (2005). “The visual magic of comics.” (video lecture). Retrieved from www.ted.com, December 14, 2013.

 

Ranciere, J. (2013). Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, Z. Paul, transl. London: Verso.

Groening Minus Groening

The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
____________
Dan Walsh’s Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to creating Beckett-esque (or Schulz-esque) soliloquies by, yes, removing Garfield and his dialogue from Garfield strips.

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As great as this site is, its lack of originality comes not only from being based on appropriation, but also from a history of Garfield appropriation that I associate with Ben Jones et al. in the Paper Rad collaborative (anyone remember the old castlezzt.net?). I find it an instructive counterpoint to the incredible gulf of quality that exists between Matt Groening’s breathtakingly lame Life in Hell comics, and the towering cultural treasure that The Simpsons has become. Hiring writers is pretty important, obviously, since Groenig’s treacly, patronizing attempts at whimsical spontaneity has taken years to be diluted to a sufficiently non-toxic level. But there’s more to it than that.

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While it cashed in on the reliable appeal of self-pitying misogyny, the best part of Life in Hell was always visual, a frequently grid-based evocation of Winsor McCay, but, like Peanuts or Garfield, stripped of all miniscule Art Nouveau detail in order to preserve its readability when reduced to fill available space in the alternative weeklies that ran it, starting in the 1980s and ending last year. It would be hard to argue that it wasn’t at least a somewhat original strip— there were no wisecracking animals, nor clown-guided magical dream zeppelins, nor angst-filled six-year-olds, but, rather, angst-filled rabbits and fez-topped gay midgets, with non-punchlines designed to appeal more to New Yorker subscribers than the Sunday funnies crowd. Along with Jim Davis and Charles Schulz, contemporary work by Keith Haring and Gary Panter could certainly have been an influence, but Groening’s distinctive compositions and renderings made him instantly brand-able as a middlebrow cartoonist.

The non-punchline format is the same thing that makes Garfield Minus Garfield a success. That was not Groening’s problem. I think probably his problem was that he was an artist and not a writer. Some people are multi-talented, but the stigma of collaboration in “fine art” after the rise of the auteur, ironically a byproduct of professional-industrial schemes of specialization, has made for no end of unsatisfying products from those who fall short of being polymath dilettante geniuses (cough, George Lucas, cough). But of course the reason “art by committee” has such a strong negative connotation is owing to the lack of freedom imposed in professional-industrial institutions of modern culture, be they commercial or educational.

Conversely, the victory of the professional-industrial auteur is her autonomy. This autonomy managed somehow to carry over into the collaborative production ethos of The Simpsons, and Matt Groening, either directly or indirectly, is probably very much to be given credit for that. When Lisa was inspired by an ultra-authentic old black sax player (“Bleeding Gums” Murphy) and Dustin Hoffman as an enlightened substitute teacher in the first and second seasons respectively, Groening’s saccharine-sticky fingerprints were all over it.

But in season thirteen, Lisa, portraying Joan of Arc, gets burned at the stake after a trial in which God Himself folds under cross-examination. In season sixteen, Lisa wins an “American Idol”-style singing championship; Homer becomes Lisa’s tour manager, and they have the following exchange.

Homer (angrily): Oh, you LOVE sausage, but you HATE to see it
getting made!
Lisa: I don’t love sausage!
Homer (meekly): Then would you like to see it getting made?
Lisa: NO!

At this point, Matt Groening’s leaden wit was nowhere in sight (not the case, unfortunately, with Futurama). Like any master artist of old (and a few superstar artists today), the apprentices do all the real work. In olden times, though, there was much less of a middlebrow (or perhaps protruding upper lip) to speak of, and so Matt Groening should perhaps be worthy of gratitude for having the relative originality to write himself out of the picture.