December 14, 2001, 7:48 p.m.
My links are woefully out-dated, but I have been going here and here
on a regular basis. I am proud to have been dubbed
a fellow "theory bitch."
Mark is in the bathroom rolling film in the dark and I am disappearing behind
towering piles of books and paperwork. At least Mark found
the stash of pens and pencils the cat has been hording in the bedroom closet
-- I have twenty recovered Pilot Precise blue pens to aid me in
my slow sifting through journals, essays, and books, slouching my way
toward the dissertation.
11:05 a.m.
I modifed my comments about irony below to be a bit more specific,
which is to say I'm always
processing and working these things out.
December 10, 2001, 11:12 p.m.
Mark (a.k.a. icki) has updated his photography website called
ACTION! I am a blur in one of the photographs. Thank god he didn't post the one of me in my Girl Scout dress, standing in front of the "World's Largest Boar" at the Indiana State Fair.
6:38 p.m.
"Irony, while declaring itself as an analytical, 'deconstructive'
mode, is also classically conservative in its operation. It implies that
if a long enough view is taken, all current events and individual dramas
are insignificant in the 'immensity of life.'" --Christine
Bridgewood, cited from an article elsewhere that I wrote down simply as
New Formations 21
I am thinking about the "ironic" display of
revolutionary memorabilia, in terms of supermodel Kate Moss wearing Che
t-shirts in the same manner she might wear a Judas Priest t-shirt --
for the "irony" of once relevant cultural icons made, according to the
leveling effect of this irony, into kitsch (whether figured as
"revolutionary" or "white trash"). I say
"once relevant" not because I believe Che is no longer relevant as
a political figure, but to note that this is how the logic of this
particular version of irony
works. This leveling effect depoliticizes the social powers and conditions that produced these subjects as
agents and as icons, and the South American guerilla and the heavy metal progenitors are made to occupy the same horizon as commodity images or "arrested moments" divorced from their specific historical significance.
(Which isn't to disparage Judas Priest at all; this is a band that
introduced the "leatherman" look to hordes of heterosexual boys who had
no idea that chaps weren't just for cowboys, or that some of those
cowboys might be gay. Yee haa! And so of course, while they occupy
the same horizon their images do signal differently in the US popular
imaginary.)
Derrick wrote me to say that he sees "students
wearing hooded sweats with CCCP or CUBA along with the actual or fake
college typeface look (I knew I should have got a Sunnydale High t-shirt
when I saw them). Funny, when I tried to teach a play dealing with the
Cold War and the rise of the New Right, the students universally hated
it. Sigh." What's going on? Why does this happen? What makes it
possible, under what conditions? What discourses produce and/or
circumscribe these particular versions of a historical memory? Like
anything else, we need
to look at the social forces that govern an appearance (or disappearance) -- Che as
a pot-smoking figure sewn onto a college student's backpack, the Black Panther mass-produced
on ashtrays sold at Urban Outfitters. Discourse always transforms the object and its meaning; our
inquiry should target the transformation, but admittedly, it's sometimes hard to know where
to begin.
Um, does anyone
else know?
I don't think irony or kitsch are inherently
conservative, though, and I think nostalgia is another sort of
creature as well. Plus there's that gap between intent ("I'm wearing this t-shirt because of this") and function
("Dude, seeing that t-shirt on that person makes me think this"),
and I don't think a Che t-shirt necessarily means anything until
it's given a context (e.g., what if Kate Moss is actually a
big fan of Che Guevara? how does her social status as a
fashion icon impact how we might read her in a Che t-shirt as a
"necessarily" frivolous gesture? what does it mean if she --or any other individual-- mediates
her identification, however uneven, with Che through this commodity image? etc.).
In any case I discuss the complicated politics of commodity images, revolution
as fashion, and "fan" identification elsewhere. Go, go Billie Jean! Angela Davis also has
quite a few things to say about how her image circulates in an essay
called, "Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia," which can be
found in an anthology called Names We Call Home: Autobiography on
Racial Identity. (I don't really like the rest of the book, though.)
5:18 p.m.
I have sworn to read all of Foucault's The Archaeology of
Knowledge and the Discourse on Language this winter break, which
I've only ever read in parts. I also hope to make a dent in
the piles of "to be read" books scattered throughout the apartment, for
now being used to display boxes of action figures from the various
characters in The Fellowship of the Ring to Linh, Viet Cong
Scout.