Consuming Passions E-Book

Judith Williamson

• Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1988

Beschreibung

Judith Williamson explores how our cultural tastes, in films, food, television, advertising, music poetry, song lyrics,photography,political movements and even the BritishRoyal Family influence our thinking and how we govern our own lives, and shape those of our children

Leseprobe

Judith Williamson

CONSUMING PASSIONS

The Dynamics of Popular Culture

MARION BOYARS LONDON NEW YORK

To the memory of my father Tom Williamson 1915–1985

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION: ‘CONSUMING PASSIONS’

MODERN GIRL

When Women Were Women and Men Were Men

The Leg-Warmer Syndrome

Sex by Numbers

It’s Different for Girls

Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life

PICTURE THIS

… But I Know What I Like

Royalty and Representation

A Piece of the Action

Family, Education, Photography

HOLLYWOOD NIGHTS

Two or Three Things We Know About Ourselves

Nice Girls Do

Prisoner of Love

City of Women

Subversive Situations

Consuming Passions

No More Than A Man

DO NOTHING

Belonging to Us

Urban Spaceman

Nuclear Family? No Thanks

Three Kinds of Dirt

The Politics of Consumption

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Copyright

FOREWORD

With the exception of half a dozen new pieces, the articles and essays in this book have been written over a period of about eight years, and first appeared in a variety of publications. I have not made any fundamental alterations to them since retrospective editing would, in a sense, turn them all into products of the present. However, where significant alterations were made by these publications I have reinstated my own versions, and included sections that were cut through lack of space. Where my original title for a piece differs from the one it was published under, I have used the original but indicated the published title at the end.

These minor changes aside, I have let the work stand; for despite the stretch of time over which they were written, the articles share certain concerns and perspectives and, I believe, add up to an investigation of some of the many forms in which passions are consumed.

I am grateful to all the publications which have commissioned and printed my work, but I would particularly like to mention City Limits magazine, having been a founder member of the co-operative, and I would like to thank all its workers, past and present. I also want to thank Helen Dady, who typed the final manuscript, Katherine Shonfield and Janet Williamson, for their perceptive comments on many pieces, Don MacPherson, who co-wrote ‘Prisoner of Love’ and whose generous encouragement helped me get the whole project off the ground, and Brand Thumim, whose advice and support have been invaluable to me during the completion of this book.

INTRODUCTION: ‘CONSUMING PASSIONS’

We are consuming passions all the time – at the shops, at the movies, in the streets, in the classroom: in the old familiar ways that no longer seem passionate because they are the shared paths of our social world, the known shapes of our waking dreams. Passions born out of imbalance, insecurity, the longing for something more, find forms in the objects and relations available; so that energies fired by what might be, become the fuel for maintaining what already is. Every desire that needs to be dulled, every sharpness at the edge of consciousness that needs to be softened, every yearning that tries to tear through some well-worn weakness in the fabric of daily life, must be woven back into that surface to strengthen it against such exposure. ‘Consuming passions’ can mean many things: an all-embracing passion, a passion for consumerism; what I am concerned with is the way passions are themselves consumed, contained and channelled into the very social structures they might otherwise threaten.

The subject most avidly consumed in academic work over recent years has been ‘desire’, which has gained prestige in the theoretical world as a ‘radical’ topic. But in our society where sensuality is frozen, arrested in the streets of our cities, stretched out over every surface, public imagery has accustomed us to a sexuality that is served up in slices, and theory offers the cold slab of the dissecting table to further this operation. For academic interest in ‘desire’ is not unrelated to the obsession with ‘revealing’ sex on every hoarding. People who study things aren’t fuelled by different drives from anyone else. Desire has become the subject of numerous books, conferences, articles, lunchtime lectures and so on; but the drive to read endless articles about it in theoretical journals has ultimately the same impetus as the drive to read endless articles about it in Cosmopolitan or Over21; it is just that academic work satisfies both appetite and duty, and gives an important sense of control. Desire itself is channelled into this endless, obsessive theorizing about desire – harnessed in its own pursuit; and with theory, as with sex, the more elusive its object, the more interesting this pursuit is.

But passion – passion is another story. It is to be written about, but not with: for the essence of all this academic work on ‘desire’ is to staycool. In the dominant ideology of our culture, and particularly its more ‘intellectual’ layers, it has never been fashionable to over-invest in any activity. And the bourgeois etiquette whereby any violent display of feeling is automatically taboo, any raising of the voice rude no matter what the reason, merely sets out the pattern of a much wider social phenomenon, the consensus by which any form of the ‘extreme’ is outlawed. Passions are fine on the cinema screen or in hi-fi advertisements – but not on the demonstration or picket line. For in the peculiar but familiar customs of consumer capitalism, our emotions are directed towards objects, rather than actions.

Marx talks of the commodity as ‘congealed labour’, the frozen form of a past activity; to the consumer it is also congealed longing, the final form of an active wish. And the shape in which fulfilment is offered seems to become the shape of the wish itself. The need for change, the sense that there must be something else, something different from the way things are, becomes the need for a new purchase, a new hairstyle, a new coat of paint. Consuming products does give a thrill, a sense of both belonging and being different, charging normality with the excitement of the unusual; like the Christmas trips of childhood to Oxford Street, to see the lights – and the lighted windows, passions leaping through plate-glass, filling the forms of a hundred products, tracing the shapes of a hundred hopes. The power of purchase – taking home a new thing, the anticipation of unwrapping – seems to drink up the desire for something new, the restlessness and unease that must be engendered in a society where so many have so little active power, other than to withdraw the labour which produces its prizes. These objects which become the aims of our passions are also shored up to protect us from them, the bricks of a dam held together by the very force it restrains. Passion is a longing that breaks beyond the present, a drive to the future, and yet it must be satisfied in the forms of the past.

For passion has no form of its own and yet, like the wind, is only revealed in forms; not a ready-made object, it is what breathes life into objects, transforming movement into shape. It is not found in things, but in ways of doing things; and the ways things are done are another kind of shape, less solid to our touch than products, but equally forms in which passions are consumed. These forms, not merely of objects but of our activities, provide at once our passions’ boundaries and their expression: they are a shared language, for the shapes of our consciousness run right through society, we inhabit the same spaces, use the same things, speak in the same words. The same structures are found at every ‘level’: the property laws that underpin bourgeois capital also govern personal relationships, marriage, sex, parenthood; the deferred gratification of emotional investment mirrors the very forms and strategies of economic investment. And they are found on every ‘side’: the back-to-nature organic commune in Wales or California reveals many of the qualities and values of capitalist ‘private enterprise’ and distaste for urban politics; the need for constant change in ‘radical’ styles reflects a consumer system based on built-in obsolescence. The forms of oppression frequently provide the mould for its resistance; thus the Labour Party sets itself the task of producing a strong ‘leader’ to ‘match’ Mrs Thatcher, rather than questioning the terms of ‘leadership’ in the air at the last election. And the highly visible, individual violence focused on by the media in mining communities during the miners’ strike, exists in exact proportion to the less immediately visible, social violence of the plans that have caused it – plans for closures which could ravage those communities in an ultimately much more far-reaching way.

The dominant political notion in Britain has been for decades that of a ‘consensus’: there are agreed limits to what is and is not acceptable, and although these are constantly shifting, they must always be seen as fixed, since they form the ground-plan of social stability. The shapes of an era are more easily found in its fashions, its furniture, its buildings – whose lines do seem to trace the ‘moods’ of social change – than in the equally significant outlines of its thoughts and habits, its conceptual categories, which are harder to see because they are precisely what we take for granted.

How then can we ‘see’ them? If it is in shapes and forms that passions live – as lightning lives in a conductor – it is likely to be in images – in films, photographs, television – that such conduits are most clearly visible. Our emotions are wound into these forms, only to spring back at us with an apparent life of their own. Movies seem to contain feelings, two-dimensional photographs seem to contain truths. The world itself seems filled with obviousness, full of natural meanings which these media merely reflect. But we invest the world with its significance. It doesn’t have to be the way it is, or to mean what it does. Who doesn’t know, privately, that sense that desire lives, not in ourselves, but in the form of the person desired – in the features of their face, the very lines of their limbs? The contours of our social world are equally charged, the shapes of public life equally evocative, of passions that are in fact our own. And in the most crucial areas of meaning, public and private intersect: for example, in the way that ‘Woman’ carries a weight of meanings and passions hived off from the social and political world and diverted into ‘sexuality’, a process seen at its crudest in the way Britain’s highest circulation daily paper replaces news with the page 3 pin-up. The whole drive of our society is to translate social into individual forms: movements are represented by ‘leaders’ (‘Arthur Scargill’s strike’), economic problems are pictured as personal problems (‘too lazy to get a job’), public values are held to be private values (‘let the family take over from the Welfare State’).

This transformation of social forces into individual terms is not inevitable; but we are used to the same old furnishings of our conceptual world and frightened to grope around in the dark for different ones. It is a relief when half-formed fantasies, new outlines struggling out of old arrangements, fall back into their familiar shapes, daylight certainties stripped of danger. But even in the yearning for normality, for conformity, can be found the passion for a shared world; a sense of possibility expressed in the sensation of the obvious. There is a kind of poignancy for the way things are, when the familiar seems to contain more than itself: in the way that a landscape can be filled with longing, a street – as in so many songs – paved with passions. (‘I get a funny feeling inside of me, just walking up and down – Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner that I love London Town’.) There is a passion when you glimpse what could be in what already is – in a lighted bus through a winter city, on a summer’s day in a public park. In the present forms of our passions it is possible to trace, not only how they are consumed, but the very different future they might ultimately produce.

MODERN GIRL

He wakes and says hello

Turnsonthebreakfastshow

Shefixescoffeewhilehetakesashower

Heythatwasgreathesaid

Iwishwecouldstayinbed

ButI’vegottobeatworkinlessthananhour

Shemanagesasmileashewalksoutthedoor

She’saModernGirlwho’sbeenthroughthismoviebefore

Shedon’tbuildherworldroundnosingleman

Butshe’sgettingbydoingwhatshecan

Sheisfreetobe

Whatshewantstobe

Whatshewantstobe

IsaModernGirl

Nanananana

Nanananana

Nanananana

She’s a Modern Girl

It looks like rain again

Shetakesthetrainagain

She’sonherwayagainthroughLondontown

Sheeatsatangerine

Flicksthroughamagazine

Until it’stimetoleaveherdreamsontheunderground

Shewalkstotheofficelikeeveryoneelse

Anindependentladytakingcareofherself

Shedon’tbuildherworldroundnosingleman

Butshe’sgettingbydoingwhatshecan

Sheisfreetobe

Whatshewantstobe

Whatshewantstobe

IsaModernGirl

Nanananana

Nanananana

Nanananana

She’s a Modern Girl

She’s been dreaming ’bout him all day long …

Soonasshegetshome

It’shimonthetelephone

Heaskshertodinner,ShesaysI’mnotfree

TonightI’mgoingtostayathomeandwatchmyTV

Idon’tbuildmyworldroundnosingleman

ButI’mgettingbydoingwhatIcan

Iamfreetobe

WhatIwanttobe

WhatIwanttobe

IsaModernGirl

Nanananana

Nanananana

Nanananana

She’s a Modern Girl

Bugatti/Musker, ‘ModernGirl’ (for Sheena Easton)

WHEN WOMEN WERE WOMEN AND MEN WERE MEN

‘For girls who don’t want to wear the trousers’ runs the copy of a London underground ad for tights. Now strangely enough, when I was first allowed out of socks in the mid-sixties, tights were Freedom Fighters for Liberation, and featured prominently in images of women hopping in and out of aeroplanes, wielding guns, and otherwise engaged in demanding, up-to-the-minute activities. So how come panti-hose has become the prerogative of girls in flimsy dresses who look as if they couldn’t, but more importantly, wouldn’t do anything remotely less feminine than be bought a Babycham? And how come it is now seen as a defiant ‘choice’ to be feminine?

If being female was the same thing as being feminine the question wouldn’t arise. But femininity, like any representation, needs to be defined against something else; and as that something else shifts, so does our image of ‘femininity’. For example, another recent underground ad shows a woman’s white-stockinged legs standing out amongst a train seat of pin-striped male legs. Femininity is clearly marked in contrast to the masculinity of businessmen. But there’s something new here: it’s also marked in contrast to the ‘masculinity’ of being a businesswoman: for the image, in which everyone, including the woman, has an executive briefcase and ‘top’ newspaper, is also about professional equality. And the notion of this equality is a precondition for the ad’s way of showing sexual difference – it has to ‘kick off’ against something, the ‘unfemininity’ of the professional woman’s job.

‘Girls who don’t want to wear the trousers’ seems to be disarmingly simple in its appeal as though it meant ‘girls who don’t want to be men’. Of course what it really means is ‘girls who don’t want to be feminists’: the contrast isn’t with men, but with other, ‘liberated’ women. For the women’s movement has made possible a new form of definition for femininity: one that kicks off againstfeminism.

I am deliberately introducing Jeannette Kupfermann’s book, TheMsTakenBody, in this context because it is so very much for girls who don’t want to wear the trousers, and so very dependent (even for publication) on precisely what she attacks – the efforts of people she refers to as ‘The Libbers’. Despite setting itself up as a cosmic opposition to the women’s movement, this book could only, historically, have come after it. It is also a symptom of something very real, best illustrated by a recent Guardian Women’s fashion page which without a hint of irony described the need for frills and flounces in times of economic hardship and distress. Obviously any book is part of a historical climate of feeling but it needs special emphasis here because Kupfermann herself leaps from century to century and from Africa to New Guinea, in describing Woman and Her Symbols – while I for my part read her book with an interest in women and our symbols here and now.

The main thesis of TheMsTakenBody is that ‘symbolism can protect the body’ and that the kinds of symbols and rituals found in societies where women have well-defined roles, and where women’s and men’s activities are clearly demarcated, afford women greater protection and happiness than in our society. But this summary makes Kupfermann’s argument sound less confused than it actually is, because despite her anti-modern-rationality-technology stance she never seems to say what she really feels. Instead she quotes and cites a hodge-podge of writers and anthropologists, on the following lines;

‘Modern physics reveals that all life is based on a system of opposites and their dynamic interplay and exchange … to deny male and female is to preclude any possibility of interchange and to promote a breakdown of exchange at the level of the body itself … the increasing problems women experience with their bodies relate to the blurring of the lines between the sexes, the trend towards bisexuality, the loss of opposites’ … men’s presence at childbirth is indicative of male ‘identity crisis’ … women in rigid Hassidic societies suffer no ‘problems of meaning’ … there is ‘no such thing as rape’ in the Arapesh people of New Guinea, where women are excluded from ceremonies and perform clearly separate tasks from the men … in religious or community groups, ‘mental health is as much facilitated by the social structure, i.e. the rigid separation of men and women and their roles, and the accompanying ritual, as by the ideological imperatives …’ and so on and so on.

While her point about women’s segregation being a form of protection is fairly clear, what is not clear is what she suggests we do about it, since all her examples are from small, non-industrial, tribal societies, which could only correspond to this country in pre-capitalist times. The strongest note in all this is really one of nostalgia, not for a remembered, but an imagined past: a world where Women were Women and Men were Men, where a profusion of symbols and rituals spun a soft cocoon around women, wrapped us in a safe space, cushioned us from the world, from men, from pressures and decisions and violence and our own sexual demands and from writing books and dealing with publishers and filling in tax forms and writing articles for deadlines … I could go on for ever, which of us couldn’t? How often, crippled with period pains, I have wished someone would stand up and offer me a seat in the underground. Locked in a heavy industrial dispute, I want to look pretty, because I’m trying to be tough. How I wish there was some way of being a woman in the 1980s without endlessly battling and struggling to be as good as men while feeling threatened as a woman, uncertain of roles at work and at home, wanting security and trying to get taken seriously etc. etc. This is obviously very much what Jeannette Kupfermann feels too – but I wish she’d come right out and say it.

More important, this uncertainty and confusion and fear of being undermined are also felt by millions of other women; and the reason this book is so pernicious is that it actually blamesthewomen’smovement for our problems – even, would you believe it, for period pains. ‘The dismal inventory of some of the leading feminists’ battles with their own bodies – the depressions, the abortions, the dysmenorrhoea, the painful labours, the weight problems, menopausal horrors – provide a sad statement of cosmic disconnection; they have lost, abandoned, thrown away their symbols, and the price they pay is their own body.’

Most of such surface arguments in TheMsTakenBody aren’t worth refuting in detail, since I expect most readers of this article would disagree with them anyway. The idea of feminists ‘paying the price’ of dysmenorrhoea and suchlike is ridiculous, a punishment for being naughty girls. What really matters is why Ms. Kupfermann is so angry with ‘them’ (us); what is this sense of loss which is so profound and which is laid at the door of ‘the feminists’?

The problem, according to Ms. Kupfermann, is ‘symbol starvation’. Because of ‘The Libbers’, ‘women are being educated [does she think all women are passive?] only to understand the literal, physical meaning of their bodies, and to know nothing of their symbolic values.’ Or again, ‘An attempt has been made to destroy the symbol of women’s bodies, and we have been left with a physical husk.’ ‘The symbolic aspects of the body have been largely ignored or denied by the women’s movement – hardly surprising for the symbolic generally is disparaged and underestimated by all Marxist-inspired movements.’

Apart from all the errors – Marxist movements have not all disparaged the symbolic, and feminism is not a Marxist-inspired movement – there are two extraordinary assumptions here. The first is that women’s bodies just ‘have’ symbolic values – those values that feminists have ‘thrown away’ (we should be so lucky!) or taught women ‘to know nothing of’, the symbol that ‘an attempt has been made to destroy’. It’s as though our bodies had cosmic and eternal meanings that we have chosen, temporarily, to ignore, but in the right frame of mind we might win back again. This isn’t a parody, for Kupfermann quotes Jung and his ideas of ‘the male and female modes of our psyche’, as though these modes were quite separate from social life and imagery.

The second extraordinary assumption shows plain blind ignorance of all the current debates and work within the women’s movement and feminist writing. This is the assumption that feminists plan to ‘get rid of symbols’. It takes only the most elementary understanding of social communications to realize that you couldn’t ‘throw away’ symbols even if you wanted to, and the whole direction of recent feminist thought has been increasingly to intervene and try to change symbols, to engage in struggle within the symbolic, and precisely to understand how our bodies and our images are used as part of a network of social meanings. Women are also searching for new symbols of ourselves, our bodies – for symbols that mean something to us.

For the enormous aspect of meaning that Kupfermann leaves out, is who the symbols she is so keen on have meaning for. When Kupfermann says women have always been symbolic, she surely means that women have had meaning formen. We have had to interpret our own ‘meaning’ through their eyes. The ‘primitive’ societies which she cites as examples of harmony and happiness, and our own society with its films and bill-boards and TV, are alike in that women’s main symbolic value is to men – we are the language that is spoken on posters and screens, inasmuch as ‘Woman’ is an image.

The suggestion TheMsTakenBody makes is that we claim that language as our own, and that we will be happier and have less body-problems if we do. Kupfermann says of glamour and beauty culture that ‘through communications it unites women in a way no other comparable culture can or does’. She also asserts that women in psychiatric institutions can be ‘cured’ by it: ‘One tested way of helping to bring them back is via the beauty culture. A new hairdo and lipstick has been known to do more for these women than a month’s chemotherapy, for by helping them to use symbols again – to regain myths – they are being helped back into the world.’

But whose world? Why is it that women whose roles are more clearly defined and separate from men’s, e.g. housewives with young children, suffer from worse psychological distress than any other group? Aren’t they using enough lipstick? The one thing missing from this whole book is any mention of real social conditions and the structure of power we live under. The kind of protection which Kupfermann refers to time and again is connected with suppression and with inferiority – with treating women like children, and excluding us from public life. And if women really occupied the kinds of roles she suggests, she would hardly be getting her book published and mass-produced for £1.95; she’d be completely fulfilled breastfeeding babies and looking glamorously symbolic. Because, when it comes down to it, anyone writing a book doesn’t want just to be symbolic. I sense something patronizing in that Kupfermann seems to advocate Myth as a panacea for Other Women, while writingaboutmyth as a career for herself – just like Nietzsche. And the social implication of what she suggests is total stasis: not just reactionary, but also impossible, thank goodness.

All the same, underlying her invective is a very real feeling which can’t be dismissed without dishonesty. There is a valid reaction against some of the more ‘puritanical’ aspects of feminism, there is a deep-felt unease about social roles at a time of economic decline and rapid change: there is a recognition that women have formed ways of supporting, and communicating with, each other through traditional and ‘non-feminist’ channels – but the funny thing is, few feminists would dispute all this. Nor would many people dispute that lack of rituals of some sorts – mourning, for example – makes profound change or loss harder to deal with today, when we have few ‘rites of passage’. There are points like this which I agree with in her strange book; but it is her anger which is so revealing, and so misplaced, directed as it is against the women’s movement rather than the late capitalist society in which our personal and social crises are taking place.

Kupfermann ends her book with the claim that ‘the Eternal Feminine was the eternal outsider, and I for one, would never wish to relinquish that position.’ But that position, of ‘eternal outsider’, is precisely one embedded in society: that internal space for the ‘other’ which gives the sense of wholeness Kupfermann quotes so often. She doesn’t want to be outside, she wants to be snugly wrapped up inside, in a space marked ‘Eternal Feminine’. This safe enclosure of ‘mysticism, irrationality, gentleness, and Beauty’ (as she describes it) can be held up to compensate or justify the total lack of these qualities in any other part of society. How long can women go on bearing the values that society wants off its back? When are we going to kick those values into the office, the factory, the housing estate? Kupfermann’s fear of ‘losing’ her symbolic values can surely only be equal to the fear of those in power of having to acton those values, and to incorporate them into the social and symbolic life of women and men, no matter who wears the trousers.