Dialectics of Desire and Revolution: Viénet’s Girls of Kamare more

Joel Kuennen Dialectics of Desire and Revolution: Viénet’s Girls of Kamare In the Fall 2008 issue of October, Kelly Baum wrote an article entitled The Sex of the Situationist International. In it, she radically reformulates the accepted art historical understanding of a common “leitmotif” in Situationist publications, that of nude or semi-nude women.1 Previously, critics ignored the usage either by dismissing it as, in the words of Thomas Levin, “problematic depictions of scantily clad women”2 or by condemning it, as did Susan Suleiman, as the product of a “men’s club.”3 Baum, however, asserts that the Situationists, while reproducing some of the gender biases4 of the time, were actually using these images as a way to critique the alienation of desire as present in advanced capitalism5. Baum goes even farther, indicating that the images the Situationists used in their publications of women were not actually images of women, but rather images of desire. Relying on work done by Thomas Y. Levin, Giorgio Agamben and Henri Lefebvre, Baum succeeds in developing an analysis that situates the Situationist use of images of desire as gendered politicization of desire to attempt a “revolution in desire.”6 In this paper, I intend to extend Baum’s analysis of printed images and a curt examination of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle to a film directed by Situationist International member René Viénet called Girls of Kamare, on which there is little to no theorization available, while exploring the revolutionary implications of this detourning of desire through a psychoanalytic and visual studies lens. Girls of Kamare was released in 1972 as the sequel to his influential Can Dialectics Break Bricks?. Girls is a détournement of two subversive Japanese porn films that were edited together 1 Baum, 23 2 Levin, 74 3 Suleiman, 214 4 Baum, 24 5 For my purpose, any references to late-capitalism or advanced capitalism should be viewed from within a Marxist framework. 6 Baum, 25 and redubbed by Viénet to become a vehicle of the Situationist polemic7. The two original texts from which Viénet took his material, Teruo Ishii's Wild Woman Boss Story and Norifumi Suzuki's Horror High School Women were both subversive pornographies to begin with, depicting a sexual revolt against established patriarchies, one at a school led by female students clad in, of course, their school girl uniforms and the other at society in general lead by four anarchistic heroines. Pornography, though the object of much critical debate in its role as a reiterative vehicle of female objectification8, has roots as a subversive genre of material production culminating in the European Libertine movement. Viénet takes advantage of this dual inscription of the genre in his film by allowing the juxtaposition present in these manifestations of subversive pornography to critique themselves. This radical juxtaposition is a classic use of the Situationist practice of détournement, a practice central to the Situationists’ aesthetic and political goals and formative of their assault on the frustrated desires of spectacular society. Baum characterizes détournement in two ways, firstly9 as consisting of a “double meaning, from the enrichment of most of the terms by the coexistence within them of their old senses and their new immediate senses…Détournement is thus first of all a negation of the value of the previous organization of expression.”10 And secondly, as constituted by Debord’s practice of montage described by Agamben as “consist[ing] of two distinct yet related critical procedures: repetition and stoppage. While repetition (as in the repetition of something already made) restores possibility to the past, transforming a fact into a potentiality before which the viewer is no longer powerless, stoppage generates a temporary ‘noncoincidence’ or ‘prolonged hesitation’ between an image and its meaning.”11 7 Baum correctly states, the best way to describe the Situationists is as both “polemic and constructive.” 8 These two films work in this way through integrating female agency to power into an eroticized patriarichal fantasy that is less threatening to established gendered posture. 9 Quoting an anonymour SI editor in Détournement as Negation and Prelude 10 Baum, 28 11 Ibid. Wild Woman Boss Story and Horror High School Women follow in this tradition, refocusing the SI critique effectively on gendered issues of power applied to active resistance through a radically violent sexuality made political. At one point in Horror, the headmaster is tricked by a group of female students who then go on to rape him, enacting radical fantasies while subverting his purity and therefore authority. This juxtaposition of powers subverted and realigned while, phantasmatically, aggressive social desires are fulfilled, creates a détourned situation. This new confrontation forces a reformation of desire. In one of the first Situationist editorials (anonymous) regarding the use of film for Situationist purposes found in the first issue of International Situationist, it is stated: “we can envisage two distinct ways of using cinema: first, its employment as a form of propaganda in the pre-Situationist transition period [as they transitioned from the Lettrists to the SI]; then its direct employment as a constitutive element of an actual situation.”12 In this case, however, the situation immediately referred to is one which occurs in the physical realm of experience, requiring an interaction between people and the film similar to the derivés practiced by the group that involved much more visceral interventions, yet I see no reason why the creation of a situation could not include one that takes place between imagistic systems of representation such as the cinema and the desirous subject. Authors of the visual like Mulvey, Solomon-Godeau and Doane who all address issues arising from the male gaze, have done well to lay bare the workings of this process and the role which desire plays within visual identifications. I only wish to go over the pieces of their work that I believe pertain to the workings of the gaze and desire in this specific instance. In SolomonGodeau's essay, Legs of the Countess, she examines the appropriation of the male gaze by the Countess de Castiglione in personal photographs. What is striking when considering these photographs are the poses that de Castiglione would inhabit for the photograph, legs bared, petticoat lifted above the waste, a wry eye starring at the viewer from a slightly angled mirror. SolomonGodeau believes this to be evidence of the male gaze internalized,13 saying "their [the photographs 12 “Avec et contre le cinéma,” IS 1. June 1958, p. 8-9 13 Not surprising since Castiglione was a professional courtesan, most notably to Napolean III. of de Castiglione] reading thus needs to be both symptomatic and dialectical: symptomatic in that they are the personal expression of an individual woman’s investment in her image--in herself as image; dialectical in that this individual act of expression is underwritten by conventions that make her less an author than a scribe." Solomon-Godeau is referring to this acting-out of what de Castiglione perceives to be the desired posturing of her identity. This type of acting-out of the gaze is indicative of the development of an alienated desire that the Situationists took upon themselves to critique. Advanced-capital cultural systems have a way of authenticating, or ignoring authenticity altogether, this sort of imagistic representation acting as a series of mirrors that perpetuate a mise en abyme of cultural mimetics.14 In Christopher Metz’ chapter “Identification, Mirror,” from his book Imaginary Signifier, he states, “this mirror [the cinematic mirror] returns us everything but ourselves, because we are wholly outside it.” Already, we are beginning to see the construction of two distinct tensions that the Situationists sought to resolve; firstly the tension between desire and the image and the performance of the image as an ill-conceived attempt at achieving the goals of desire as illustrated by Solomon-Godeau and secondly, the tension between the beholder and the beheld in a social context as illustrated by Metz, both of which led, the Situationists believed, to an alienation of desire experienced as an internal lack or fragmentation, which can only be corrected by binding desire to the libidinal object which serves as its signified, not the representation of a libidinal object.15 In other words, the stoppage of desire by late-capitalistic forms of representation that presents the image as a whole without an authentic signified can only be overcome through reconnecting desire to its objective goal. It is this type of perpetuation of alienated desire that Viénet ultimately set his sights on when making Girls. We may do well first, though, to go back to Laura Mulvey’s contribution of a psychoanalytic outline of the position of the audience to the spectacle16, more specifically positing the reception of women in film as, and I quote, “an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet 14 See Christopher Metz, Identification, Mirror. 1977 15 I will return to the theoretical workings and lineage of this process later in this essay. 16 Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Feminism and Film Theory 1975 pp. 60 her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.” This abduction,17 or stoppage of desire by the image in a moment of “erotic contemplation” is perfectly illustrated by Viénet’s film. Viénet espouses his personal philosophy of Situationist film making while behind the subtitles, two women caress away in a forbidden18 striptease. The viewer, in my case, the male viewer, and arguably, the audience in general19 experiences a tenuous desire for erotic fulfillment facilitated by the tools I’ve already mentioned. Gaze, in this context, must be understood as very specific and direct in its application. The controlling nature of the gaze, as Mulvey suggests, is expressed as a narrowed gaze and directs sight according to specific desires, desires which in this context have been détourned, firstly by late-capitalistic forms of representation (ambiguating desire from it’s authentic object of desire), then by Viénet to expose a tension within the viewing subject. Simply, one cannot read the subtitles and gaze upon the erotic enticement at once, one must choose. This tension of choice is metaphorical and illuminating in that the revolution in desire spoken of previously becomes apparent. It’s not a revolution in desire, rather a desire for a revolution of the dialectic of desire. It is a revolution in desire in that the SI hoped to shift the object of our desires from that of the empty image (the erotic image) to the full social realm (libidinal experience) that the image signifies, propagating a desired revolution away from the alienated desire of advanced capitalism which finds it’s fulfillment, if one can call it that, solely in the image or materiality of a product. This transposition of desire must be predicated on the Marxist conception of reification. In Kleinian psychoanalytic terms, the subject/viewer projects onto the image/object what is lacking. This formulation situates the image, whether it be a whole or a part, as an ideal in the eyes of the beholder. The image is seen as already being whole and acts as an identifacatory opposition 17 One of the many translations of détournement discussed by T. Levin 18 Represented in this case both by homosexuality and its location in a bathroom stall, an almost literal scatological affront to alienated desire. 19 See bell hooks’ chapter “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination” from Black Looks which posits that films are constructed so as to be viewed by a white male audience and therefore, those in the audience who are not of this “intended” audience, assume the gaze so as to identify with the work. much in the same way that Lacan conceived of the mirror-stage and Metz later elaborated upon in reference to film. Bound up with this identification, in that it reflects the libidinal, is a narcissistic manifestation of the eros drive, a love (sexual or otherwise) of the self and through this a love of the other with which one identifies. In the erotic image this is apparent and through various processes characterized by the fetish, this libidinal drive can be seen to be rerouted onto parts that suggest a whole. This is, abstractly, what Debord would have characterized as spectacle, "not an ensemble of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images."20 In this quotation we can see the primary role that disjuncture with the libidinal or authentic plays and the hope that a re-identification with the social as the source from which authentic experience can be derived remains. The Situationists believed that the era of advanced-capitalism, specifically modes of spectacular representation, is made apparent in the society of the spectacle, that is a society that finds identification not in that21 which they come into contact with but the images they encounter. This conception shares a strident linearity with Hegelian conceptions of desire and through these, Marxist conceptions of representation in that they become a baseline consideration of prespectacular society from which the SI can launch their critique. Baum cites Butler’s description of desire in her book Subjects of Desire: “Hegel, Kojève, and Hyppolite each understood the mutual imbrication of desire and subjectivity.”22 This beautiful little phrase, “imbrication of desire and subjectivity” allows us a great starting point from which to analyze Viénet’s understanding and use of desire within Girls. Desire, in this case, is seen as what shapes the aeteologies of the individual ontologies of the subject. This is accomplished through the desirous subject’s movement through space and time, seeking fulfillment of their provocational desires. Ultimately, by politicizing erotic desire, Viénet shapes a mirror of gendered fetishism, a fetishism that is also key to understanding 20 From the first few minutes of Debord's film version of Society of the Sepctacle 21 Predicated on the Marxist reliance of an inherent authenticity in the material. This means that there is a notion of the essential bound up within Marxist dogmas, and it is ultimately the abstraction and loss of materiality, or reification that the Situationists are reacting against. 22 Baum, 36 Situationist desire. Baum goes on to say that “for the Situationists, desire was also a fact of the body, of its needs, drives and impulses, and the expression of embodied desire constituted a revolutionary act in itself.”23 The revolutionary aspect of seeking the fulfillment of desire was two fold. Baum discusses the libertine24 remnants of this philosophy, grounding the politicization of desire within the transgression of normative behaviors, an analysis which finds a home in Viénet’s use of pornography as a dually inscribed text. I would argue that there is another aspect of revolution within this process, the revolutionarity, or rather the oppositionality is within the restructuring of desire itself. This restructuring attempts to return to Hegelian desires that find satiety within the material fulfillment of the desire itself rather than the promise of fulfillment that is experienced as superficial and incomplete. Lacan summarized Hegelian desire in the following way: “for in Hegel it is desire (Begierde) that is given the responsibility for the minimum connexion with ancient knowledge (connaissance) that the subject must retain if truth is to be immanent in the realization of knowledge (savoir). Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’ means that, from beginning to end, the subject knows what he wants.”25 A much plainer way of saying this, is that knowledge means less if it is not desired. Yet, interestingly, if desire leads to the authentic or what Lacan called objet petit a and the stoppage and reiterations of images of desire breaks with the society of the spectacle, then the Situationists were attempting to fight fire with fire, by subjecting already stalled images of desire to the processes which had originally cleaved desire and objet petit a apart in the first place. Viénet’s work transposes erotic desire of the spectacle, a desire that is permanently cleaved from le objet petit a, back towards the subject. 26 By doing this, he frustrates the frustrating, preventing a fulfillment of desire with the nothingness of spectacular society by returning it to sender, so to 23 Ibid. 24 Baum, 37 25 Lacan, 301 26 Again, see Christopher Metz’s discussion of the workings of film on the subject in The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema for a deeper analysis of this process. speak. In Lacanian psychoanalytics, desire is seen as always incomplete, focused on objet petit a, an imaginary part-object (in Kleinian terms), a paradox of desiring an image is created by placing the primacy of the action of desire not in the subject, but on the variable object, or objet petit a. Yet much of Hegelian desire and through ancestral reference, Situationist desire, is predicated upon the agency of the subject within this process. Baum paraphrases Lefebvre for her discussion on this trope, saying “a subject who lacks power over the object of his desire has not only lost ownership of that object, he has also lost ownership of his desire and, by extension, of himself. Instead of the subject of desire, he finds himself subject to another’s desire.”27 To recap, the Situationists were reacting to not only the loss of the authentic but the frustration of personal agency as a result of this form spectacular representation. 27 Baum, 41 It is more than a coincidence that what Lacan describes as the Hegelian conception of desire is one that predicates a “connexion with ancient knowledge.” Ancient, authentic, valuable, True, no matter the adjective of knowledge, this attempt at qualifying phenomenological knowledge becomes primary to the construction of a pre-spectacular society. Now, the SI was not merely a regressive group, though they were reactionary in their politics, their proactive theoretical approaches in all their incarnations belie a certain amount of utopianism bound within their rhetoric and practice. This philosophical contextualization of the SI correlates to Baum's historical contextualization. She states, "According to the SI, the epidemic of commodity fetishism that accompanied the consolidation of capitalism after World War II, along with the advent of the spectacle, precipitated an acute crisis of desire. Stripped of its cognitive, psychological, and emotional core, desire was becoming a commercial transaction whose currency was images as well as things."28 An anonymous Situationist wrote, “the current framework of consumerist propaganda, the fundamental mystification of advertising is to associate ideas of fulfillment with objects (television, or garden furniture, or automobile, etc.)…This imposed image of fulfillment also constitutes the explicitly terrorist nature of advertising.29 Thusly, the SI sought to solve the problem of materiality through revolutionizing desire (the frustration of which they saw as leading to the need for materiality) instead of the modes of production. Now, interestingly, as they were revolting against the placement of a material or product as objet petit a, they hoped to replace it with another form of materiality, the materiality of the body as the source of authentic desire. This could be read superficially as merely a return to a physical relation between subjects or a qualification of sex over porn, which it was, but its consequences are also an attempt at repositioning desire in reference to libidinal, phenomological experience. Coming back to the two tensions described earlier, the tension between image and the performance of the image and the tension between the beholder and the beheld, we now see how 28 Baum, 34 29 Anon., “The Situationist Frontier.” 1960, in Theory of the Dérive, pp. 106 exactly desire operates within these tensions and why it is desire which must, for Viénet, ultimately be the object of revolt. In the tension between the image and the performance of the image, desire finds its source in the performer wanting to embody the image, a classically Lacanian construction of desire. In the second tension, it is the desire of the beholder to be the beheld, a purely spectacular desire, in other words, that means they are one in the same, collapsing back onto each other. As one can see, desire is what remains as the site of affective action between these subject/object positions, yet in a transverse posture, mediating and translating. What can be gleaned from this cleavage, however? Viénet would say that only by revolutionizing the role desire plays in these identifcatory processes, by realigning it with the authentic through a direct libidinal relation can the gaze be détourned to become what it was not, namely, authentic, not a flacid representation. In immediate terms, Girls of Kamare is representative of the revolution of desire working on the processes of imagistic, erotic reification in hopes of repositing desire as a Hegelian dialectic of identificatory construction, qualified by libidinal experience. Working Bibliography Baum, Kelly. "The Sex of the Situationist International," October 126 (Fall 2008) pp. 23-43 MIT Press Buck-Morss, Susan. "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The politics of Loitering," New German Critique 39 (Fall 1986) pp. 99-141 Debord, Guy. For the Debate on Reorientation, Spring 1970: A Note on the First Series of Text. P. 34-36 Doane, Mary Ann. Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge 1982 pp. 17-31 hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press 1992 pp. 165-178 Jack, Dana Crowley. Behind the Mask: Destruction and Creativity in Women's Aggression, Cambrdige Mass.: Harvard University Press 1999 pp. 199 Lacan, Jacques. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Ecrits. W.W. Norton & Co.: 1977 Levin, Thomas Y. "Dismantling the Spectacle," On the Passage of a Few People through a rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International. ed. Elisabeth Sussman, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989 Klein, Melanie, Riviere, Joan. Love, Hate, Reparation, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1964 pp. 5777 Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977 pp. 42-57 Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasre and Narrative Cinema," Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley, New York: Routledge 1975 pp. 57-67 Mulvey, Laura. "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' inspired by Duel in the Sun," Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley, New York: Routledge, 1988) pp. 69-79 Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 1999 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. "The Legs of the Countess," October 39 (Winter 1986) pp. 65-108 MIT Press Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990 Sussman, Elisabeth. ed. On the Passage of a Few People through a rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989 Viénet, René. Girls of Kamare. http://www.ubu.com/film/vienet_kamare.html