Carles asks a question that has haunted psychoanalysts since the time of Freud, the master himself: "Does some sort of subconscious sexual desire impact the acceptance of all females?" Can male subjectivity be deemed "healthy" without the subordination of female desire, or does it rely on that subordination in patriarchy? Or in Carles' preferred formulation, "Will men ever see women as ‘anything more than a fuck doll’?"
Carles's primary thesis is that the subculture associated with independent rock music is dictated by the vagaries of male psychopathology, with celebrated female performers serving fundamentally as cathexes for excess, semi-sublimated libidinal forces.
Will an ugly/not cute girl ever ‘make it’ as an indie artist? It seems like indie bros who ’shape’ the indie world will always have trouble evaluating female artists. I think the first thing men look at is ‘how attractive is the female.’ That seems to be ‘the most important element’ when evaluating a woman in any profession (strippers, actresses, accountants, secretaries, etc).The sexual role the female plays in the fantasy scheme of the male arbiters of cultural taste in this particular subculture occludes the appreciation of the women's efforts at sublimation; instead their artistic efforts are recast as estrual posturings. Though Carles concedes that it is "important for indie females to ’seem like they are real musicians,’ " this pretense serves merely to help men circumvent their own superegos in developing strong libidinal attachments. The artistic performance in the woman becomes understood as projection -- a reflection of the man's own talent, which is laid over (so to speak) the woman's primary carnality. The man can then achieve a purified form of narcissism, which routes his wish to love his own creativity through the woman, who is reduced to a vessel for the man's ego-defenses. Typically this plays out in the medium of music-fan commentary: "All blurbs about female artists by men are unintentional manifestos in which we ’search 4 a sexual identity.’" That is, sexual identity is secured through the cathexis with an idealized female performer, who is part male-performer-in-drag and part redeemed, nonthreatening sexual object.
All that matters, as Carles notes, is the "the level of ‘into-it-ness’ of her presence" -- the feigned commitment to the satisfaction of the desires of her male onlookers. The female indie musician becomes the ultimate example of the woman who forgoes her own orgasmic capabilities to protect that of the men who objectify her, and enable her to satisfy her own narcissistic needs to love herself as object qua object. She embraces this degraded form of alienated self-love in lieu of the capacity for jouissance, which is surrendered once her creative talents are injected/introjected into the commercial-art nexus. As Carles explains, her performance no longer emanates from her body authentically, that is, in a way incomprehensible to men. "It seems impossible for men to ‘actually like’ music by women, since many of the lyrical themes are coming from the ‘fucking dreamworld’ that exists inside of a girl’s head." But when men embrace a female performer, this is prima facie evidence that the woman has submitted to phallologocentristic imperatives.
Carles leaves many questions unresolved here; he is willing to grant that male subjectivty is derived from female cooperation with male needs, but does not explain why women consent to subordination, given their primary significance as cathected objects.
No comments:
Post a Comment