This post is about phallologocentrism. The gaze. Does it obviate or activate the libido in its aggressive and atavistic permutations or does it facilitate the sublimation of sexual impulses into commercial and patriarchial forms, or further, does it merge commercial and patriarchal forms, making them for all intents and purposes synonymous? Love, deployed conceptually within the matrix of patriarchy, serves as the alibi for any number of repressive identity formations and underpins a subjectivity tantamount to slavery. It constitutes an ideology, purveyed in such propagandistic offerings as the ones Carles takes to task here, that excuses the gendering of subjection and the subjection of gender. Carles writes, "Yall. I really want 2 fall in love. Looking for an authentic interpretation of ‘love.’ Feel like most movies about relationships are ‘just bull shit romanticized crap’ but not this 1. I am pretty sure I identify with it." In his final analysis, the process of ideological disciplining through "love" begins with a desire to be "in love" -- a transvaluation of the desire to desire itself, a ramification of the social manufacture of desire by corporate interests invested in the circulation of commodities associated with such desires. But immediately with the desire to fall in love comes a concern with authenticity -- the subject is aware that "love" has been reified by his own desire and has had its integrity always already compromised. The desire to be "in love" is actually a wish to be "authentic" in oneself, to feel ownership of one's desires, which have in fact been manufactured elsewhere and implanted in the subject through the hydraulic means of the marketing-media nexus. Then the media is attacked -- it is "bull shit romanticized crap" -- to clean the glass in preparation for the recognition of a sincere and true reflection of self in the mirror of mass consumption. Hence the cycle concludes with an identification with the ersatz subjectivity hollowed out within the given culture product, which the subject experiences as a new potential for "love", a revaluing of that concept, which is loaded with new meaning, which is of course the same old meaning -- an insecurity in the self fostered by desire for an inaccessible other. Love as such becomes the pursuit of a recession of chimerical ideals: "Want to marry some1 who plays a character in an alternative movie and then pretend that I am married to a character from a movie."
This insecurity ultimately supplies the malleable energy that can be used to shore up repressive structures revolving around such related social categories as gender. This is how the cycle of love indoctrination leaves Carles's fictive protagonist in this post: "I'm just a bro who wants to be in love, living in a world full of 'crazy cunts' and 'krazie slutz' who 'don't know what they want' and 'don't realize that they have a good bf.'" Primed for love, the protagonist suddenly regards women categorically in terms of their sexual availability, and measures their rationality in terms of how cooperative they are in their own subjugation to make libidinous cravings, now unmoored from constraint while at the same time "married" to a nomenclature of romance and sanctioned longing.
The specifically male desires, inscribed in the discourse of love as mediated through popular culture, conflates the sexually willing female with a life rich with rewarding and spontaneous experience. "Want a girl who is alternative, but also ’seems like a slut who is down 2 fuck.’ Want life to seem like an indie movie that is a mix of realism, quirky convo, and surreal events like ‘dance sequences’ and ‘moments that seem larger than life.’" But of course such moments are plotted, are generic cliches that are used to signify spontaneity where none is possible.
So it turns out we are trapped in a machine -- the culture industry -- that manufactures patriarchal relations as "love" and embeds them in our consciousness through co-opting the very natural-seeming desire for intimacy and meaningful relationships. The real possibility of intimacy recedes as perpetual insecurity (the triumph of the culture industry's resourcefulness in always fostering lack -- its successful effort to generalize the castration horror) takes root and expresses itself in gender inequality, which expresses itself in casual vulgarities, throwaway misogyny. And as Carles grimly points out, the indoctrination starts young, and it comes at a great cost: "sad that tweens can’t go to the movies any more and fngrbang eachother without ‘a lil bit of popcorn butter on their fingers.’ just s00 expensive." The "love" depicted in films merely facilitates sterile sexual contact, mediated by overpriced food products sold as experience-economy adjuncts. Thus sexual energy is channeled through several commercial nodes before finding a joyless expression in mechanistic reciprocal masturbatory sessions.
No comments:
Post a Comment