Why I'm Not a Party Animal

Marina Molares The Wild Party (2011)  

flickr.com

 

Party animal (n); a very gregarious and outgoing person 

who enjoys parties and similar social activities.

 

 

I. 

 

Like Dorothy Parker, I hate parties; although they don't bring out the worst in me [a], so much as make me anxious, bored, depressed and long to get away. 

 

In other words, I experience a sense of alienation at social gatherings that are meant to be fun and friendly occasions; a feeling of estrangement from my fellow party goers who are all trying so hard to enjoy themselves. 

 

Like Michel Houellebecq, I can't help asking from the moment I walk into the room: What the hell am I doing with these jerks? [b] 

 

In fact, I would echo and endorse many of the things that the French poet and novelist says about parties. This, for example, seems insightful and true:

 

"The purpose of the party is to make us forget that we are lonely, miserable and doomed to death; in other words, to transform us into animals." [43]

 

According to Houellebecq, that's easily done if you belong to primitive humanity; "it doesn't take much to keep them amused" [43] - some drugs and music and they're off. 

 

In contrast, most Westerners have no sense of party at all: "Profoundly self-conscious, radically alien to others, terrorised by the idea of death, they're quite incapable of achieving any exaltation." [43] 

 

This inability to really let go and party might make them ashamed and resentful, but there's nothing they can do about it; attempts to pass as a party animal are just that - attempts to fool themselves and others.

 

And so, whether gathering simply to have fun, to celebrate an event, or to fuck with strangers, it's all a bit of a sham; no one really believes in what they're doing or in who they're pretending to be. You can see it in the eyes of the participants. 

 

Even at a sex party, it's the same thing; everyone is either thinking about making their excuses to leave, or desperately wants to ask the pretty young thing penetrating them with a strap-on dildo: What are you doing after the orgy? [c]     

 

 

II. 

 

Houellebecq concludes that the best thing to do is probably avoid going to parties altogether - even if this means your social life and reputation as fun-loving will invariably suffer as a result. However, if it becomes absolutely necessary to attend a party, then he has some tips to help you get through it without excess suffering or boredom.

 

These include: drink before as well as during the party, as alcohol (in moderate doses) produces "a socialising and euphoric effect that has no real competition" [46]; always make sure you have booked a taxi to take you home - and always plan to go home alone; never stay too long - a good party is a brief party. 

 

I think my favourite piece of advise, however, is this:

 

"Be aware beforehand that the party will inevitably be a failure. Visualise examples of previous failures. You don't really have to adopt a cynical and jaded attitude. On the contrary, the humble and smiling acceptance of the common disaster makes it possible to achieve this success: to transform a failed party into a moment of pleasant banality." [46]   

 

And, finally, Houellebecq offers this consoling perspective on the subject: "with age, the obligation to go to parties decreases, the inclination towards solitude increases" [46]; i.e., the acceptance of death triumphs.   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] I'm referring here to Parker's poem entitled 'Parties: A Hymn of Hate', which can be found on poets.org: click here. 

 

[b] Michel Houellebecq, 'The Party', in Interventions 2020, trans. Andrew Brown, (Polity Press, 2022), p. 43. Future page references to this text as it appears here will be given directly in the post. This amusing short piece was first published in 20 Ans in 1996. 

 

[c] See Jean Baudrillard, 'After the Orgy', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993). 

      I have referred to Baudrillard's idea in numerous posts on Torpedo the Ark over the years; see, for example, this post from 23 October 2015, entitled 'After the Orgy: Rise of the Herbivores'. 

 

 

Couscous with Rancid Butter: Thoughts on Charles Fourier

François Marie Charles Fourier 

(1772 - 1837)

 

Le bonheur consiste à avoir de nombreuses passions 

et de nombreux moyens pour les satisfaire. 

 

I. 

 

Antisemitic pervert, feminist, and founder of utopian socialism, Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was - to say the very least - an odd duck. 

 

Nevertheless, he inspired a diverse range of thinkers and writers with a queer politics of desire that portrays heteronormative civilisation as inherently repressive and imagines some kind of libidinal revolution in which we can all be free to not only fuck whom we want, but when we want, where we want, and how we want.  

 

It's a politics that I subscribed to at one time and still find vaguely attractive even now, despite living after the orgy in a transsexual world of ambient pornography from which the illusion of desire is absent [1]. 

 

And despite the fact that we never did get the lemonade seas we were promised ... 

 

II. 

In the 20th century, Fourier's seminal importance was widely acknowledged amongst those searching for a form of radical politics outside of the Marxist mainstream; figures including André Breton, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse all sang his praises. 

 

It seems clear that Michel Tournier was also writing (to some extent) under Fourier's influence, adapting the latter's rhetoric of sexual liberation for his own purposes. Like Fourier, Tournier privileges non-reproductive forms of eroticism and sticks up for the sexually deviant and marginalised (those whom the world often thinks of as monstrous). And like Fourier, he decries the social restraints and prescriptive norms that seek to regulate love and penalise pleasure.  

 

As one critic notes, for both of the above, "it is on the experence of the 'deviant' that a tolerant and humane social order must be based" [2]. However, whilst Fourier "provided a fantastic blueprint for the whole enterprise" [3], Tournier left details of this nouveau monde amoureux deliberately vague.

 

One suspects that, like D. H. Lawrence, Tournier realised that his role, as a novelist, is to help bring forth new feelings, not to suggest practical reforms [4]. And one can't help thinking he was probably wise to realise this. For as David Gascoigne reminds us, Fourier's "massive and whimsical elaboration of the structures of his ideal community are often so preposterous and parodical that they subvert systematisation even while mimicking it" [5].      

 

 

III.

 

I think my favourite text on Fourier remains that written by Roland Barthes [6]. It's many years since I read this essay and have doubtless forgotten some of the finer points regarding Fourier as a logothete, but I do recall Barthes opening with some très amusant remarks about couscous served with rancid butter. 

 

According to Barthes, the goal of Fourier's project was quite simple: to remake the world (via an obsessive form of writing) for the sake of pleasure. Never mind justice and equality; it's pleasure that counts for Fourier. And not pleasure conceived in a eudaemonic manner (i.e., as a form of ethical behaviour that produces wellbeing), but sensual pleasure that results in actual happiness and what Fourier terms Harmony.

 

The kind of pleasure we find in amorous freedom, fabulous wealth, and those other delights that are often condemned as forms of vice. Fourier dreamed of a world of fine weather, perfect melons, and little spiced cakes; a world in which one can enjoy the company of lesbians and there is no longer any normality.

 

As Barthes points out, this coexistence of passions isn't simply another form of liberalism and Fourier doesn't wish to unite people in the name of humanism: 

 

"It is not a matter of bringing together everyone with the same mania [...] so that they can be comfortable together and can enchant each other by narcissistically gazing at one another; on the contrary, it is a matter of associating to combine, to contrast. [...] There is no noble demand to 'understand', to 'admit' the passions of others (or to ignore them, indeed). The goal of Harmony is neither to further the conflict (by associating through similitude), nor to reduce it (by sublimating, sweetening, or normalizing the passions), nor yet to transcend it (by 'understanding' the other person), but to exploit it for the greatest pleasure of all and without hindrance to anyone." [7].

Ultimately, I don't quite know what to make of M. Fourier - the original 24-hour party person, for whom no day is ever long enough for all the merry assignations and pleasures it promises ... 

 

Ultimately, his erotic utopia in which everyone fucks forever sounds exhausting and one thinks again of Baudrillard's story of the porn star on set who turns to one of the other actors and asks: What are you doing after the orgy? 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm using concepts developed by Jean Baudrillard. His argument is that signs and images have erased all secrets and ambiguity, making sex transparent and, at best, something that is simply acted out over and over again with a kind of ironic indifference, or a sense of nostalgia. Whilst we might perhaps challenge this, I think it certainly fair to say (as Michel Houellebecq says): We're a long way from Wuthering Heights.

      See Jean Baudrillard, 'After the Orgy' and 'Transsexuality', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993). 

     The line from Houellebecq is from his first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), trans. into English as Whatever by Paul Hammond, (Serpents Tail, 1998) and refers to the progressive effacement of human relationships and passions.       

 

[2] and [3] David Gascoigne, Michel Tournier, (Berg, 1996), p. 91.

 

[4] The passage in D. H. Lawrence that I'm thinking of is this one:

 

"As a novelist, I feel it is the change inside the individual which is my real concern. The great social change interests me and troubles me, but it is not my field. I know a change is coming - I know we must have a more generous, more human system, based on the life values and not on the money values. That I know. But what steps to take I don't know. Other men know better."

 

See: 'The State of Funk', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge Universty Press, 2004), p. 221. 

 

[5] David Gascoigne, Michel Tournier, op. cit., pp. 92-93. 

 

[6] Roland Barthes's essay on Fourier can be found in the much underrated study, Sade / Fourier / Loyola, trans. Richard Miller, (University of California Press, 1989), pp. 76-120.  

 

[7] Ibid., pp. 99-100. 

 

 

For another recent post on Fourier, click here.  

On the Truth of Masks

A stone mask from c. 7000 BC 

Musée Bible et Terre Sainte (Paris)

I.

Worn by peoples belonging to many different cultures since the very earliest of times and for a wide variety of reasons - ceremonial and practical, sacred and profane - the mask is that which is más que la cara and which seems to mock the very idea of a real face.

Indeed, it ultimately exposes the shocking truth that the human face isn't a unique natural formation, but a type of social machine that covers and overcodes the front of the head and, eventually, the entire body, thus ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance.

As Oscar Wilde knew very well: we are least ourselves when we present our grinning white face to the world and speak in our own name; it is only when we put on a mask and dare to disguise the self we have been given, that we find the courage to speak with free anonymity.      

II.

Like Wilde, Nietzsche also asserts the philosophical profundity of masks and says that every artist recognises the need to wear such. Indeed, the greatest of men often don monstrous masks in order to best inscribe themselves in the memories, dreams and affections of humanity.    

And of course, beautiful women too are lovers of the mask. Indeed, there are some women who, no matter how carefully you attempt to look beneath their surface, have no natural depth or interior truth but are purely their facades.

Men who love these seductive creatures of veiled appearance and cosmetic disguise, are fated to seek their souls or uncover their nakedness in vain. Yet, it is precisely such women who are often best able to (fetishistically) arouse male desire. 

Remember: after the orgy, the masked ball ...

The Art of Love

 Franz Von Stuck: Cupid at the Masked Ball (1887)

We have long endeavoured to make love identify itself to us; to have Eros speak his name and reveal the truth of sex. And, historically, there have been two main methods for achieving this; a scientific method (based on interrogation) and an aesthetic method (based on amplification of effects). 

I suppose, push comes to shove - and without wishing to suggest that these two methods are diametrically opposed - it's the latter which continues to most fascinate and which seems to hold out the most promise in a transsexual era described by Baudrillard as existing after the orgy.  

The promise not necessarily of producing still further truth, but of creating new pleasure understood as a practice that is not considered "in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility" [57], but only on its own terms (evaluated, that is to say, according to what is queer and kinky, rather than normalizing moral and medical standards).

What appeals about an ars erotica is that its most important elements are not to be found in the "humanist dream of a complete and flourishing sexuality" [71], nor in the obsession with orgasm. Rather, it involves playing a secret and sophisticated game with sign and symbol in which lovers wear masks, not because they are ashamed or because there's what Michel Foucault terms an element of infamy attached to love, "but because of the need to hold it in the greatest reserve" [57]. 

Ultimately, I don't want to reconsecrate love and make of it again our highest ideal. I may want to dress it up and disguise it, but I don't want to put Eros back on a pedestal. I am, if you like, a fetishist, not a priest of love. I want so-called desires to be deferred (or sublimated), not fulfilled. And I want any truths that are produced to be paradoxical.      

Note: Lines quoted are from Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998).  

After the Orgy: Rise of the Herbivores

Édouard Manet: Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1862-3)* 

When asked, twenty-five years ago, to characterize the present, Baudrillard described it as after the orgy. It was then and remains now a brilliant characterization.**  

Although the orgy in question doesn't refer merely to a feast of the flesh, but, more widely, to modernity's explosive liberation in every sphere, this obviously includes a sexual component and it's this that I wish to comment on here, with reference to what are known in Japan as the herbivore men. 

The problem with revolutions, says Baudrillard, is that they never turn out as expected or as hoped - and this includes the so-called sexual revolution. By freeing sex from its containment within bodies and their organs and thereby allowing it to enter into a state of pure circulation and incessant commutation, it has become increasingly subject to indeterminacy and virtual indifference (in all senses of the word).  

Thus, rather than the promised utopia dreamed of by the priests of love who thought they could fuck their way into the future, we witness a gradual fading away of sexual beings, of men and women, of what we had mistakenly believed to be natural desire, and even of biological function. And we end up with asexual beings and celibate grass-eaters, who have little or no interest in dating, marrying, and reproducing (if pushed, they might express an interest in cloning or parthenogenesis).

And so to the land of the rising sun ...      

Sōshoku danshi is a term coined by the writer Maki Fukasawa to describe those young men who express no wish for a conventional love life, or, indeed, to struggle in the macho world of business. Recent surveys conducted amongst single Japanese males in their twenties and thirties found that two-thirds were happy to be considered herbivores (a figure large enough to seriously concern a government which was already worried about falling birth rates).

According to Fukasawa, such men are not entirely sexless, but they have a non-assertive and casual attitude towards pleasures of the flesh; many choose to have exclusively on-line relations, for example, or to masturbate with pornography; others enjoy the company of actual women, but prefer loving friendships that are free from sexual imperatives and conjugal duties.

Of course, this trend is observable in many advanced societies and is not exclusively a Japanese phenomenon; who hasn't inwardly groaned on occasion with displeasure and boredom at the thought of having to groan with sexual pleasure and excitement; what man (or woman for that matter) hasn't resented the pressure to perform and conform to gender stereotypes?

After the orgy, one just wants to chat over coffee, go for a stroll in the park, order a salad, or roll over and sleep ...

Notes

* For me, Manet's picture provides evidence that there have always been young dandies more interested in discussing fashion and philosophy, oblivious to the appeal of naked female flesh. Arguably, the rather bored young woman peers out of the canvas in the hope of catching the eye of a carnivore.   

** See: Jean Baudrillard, 'After the Orgy', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993). 

This post was suggested by Katxu, to whom I'm grateful.

Ours is the Day of Realization

Cover (detail) of the 1961 Penguin edition

The latest news from the Lawrence world is of a new adaptation of Lady C. made by the BBC and to be broadcast this autumn. Do we really need such? I don't know: it's debatable. What was once a vital and necessary book no longer seems so today. Nevertheless, the news has made me want to rethink the novel and, here, look again at Lawrence's surprising defence of it in the opening pages of his posthumously published essay A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'. 

After briefly detailing the various pirated editions, Lawrence claims that he wrote and published his most notorious novel in good faith as an honest, healthy book containing an obscene litany of four-letter words that shock at first, but "don't shock at all after a while". Is this because we as readers are rapidly depraved by familiarity? No, says Lawrence, it's because such words only ever troubled the eye and ear and never really disturbed the mind which has evolved far beyond the body and its overly-sensitive organs prone to "violent and indiscriminate physical reactions" that threaten culture and society.

This, it has to be said, is a rather astonishing argument coming from Lawrence of all people. For it implies our sensory organs work independently of consciousness and that their perceptions are superficial, dim-witted, and dangerous. Lawrence thereby not only reinforces a damaging mind/body division, but unexpectedly opts to come down squarely on the side of the former. Indeed, he says quite openly in this astonishing essay that individuals without minds don't interest him and don't matter.

Modern men and women, he continues, are superior to the people of the past precisely because they are capable of a more sophisticated and relaxed relationship with language; they can assign to words "only those mental and imaginative reactions which belong to the mind" and thus not respond like crude savages to every provocation and stimulus without thinking. 

Thus, whilst Lawrence wants us to act, "the great necessity is that we should act according to our thoughts" and not allow ourselves to be so feeble-minded  that we are incapable of contemplating our own bodies (and the words that relate to bodily functions) without "getting all messed up" and carried away. In particular, Lawrence wants us to be able to think sex. 

This, he writes, is the real point of Lady Chatterley's Lover. It's neither a manifesto for sexual liberation nor an apology for adultery. Rather, it's a bold - and puritanical - attempt to realise sex in the head; "fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly". Lawrence knowingly aims at an explicit literary representation of desire; that is to say, he wants to transform the intensity of physical experience and erotic sensation into a pure piece of knowledge. 

Indeed, it's his conviction that a large number of people are happiest "when they abstain and stay sexually apart, quite clean: and at the same time, when they understand and realize sex more fully". He continues, in a startling passage that anticipates Baudrillard's thinking on the world that exists after the orgy:

"Ours is the day of realization rather than action. There has been so much action in the past, especially sexual action, a weary repetition over and over, without a corresponding thought, a corresponding realization. Now our business is to realize sex. Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more important than the act itself. After centuries of obfuscation, the mind demands to know and know fully. The body is a good deal in abeyance, really. When people act in sex, nowadays, they are half the time acting up. They do it because they think it is expected of them. Whereas as a matter of fact it is the mind which is interested, and the body has to be provoked. The reason being that our ancestors have so assiduously acted sex without ever thinking it or realizing it, that now the act tends to be mechanical, dull, and disappointing, and only fresh mental realization will freshen up the experience."

Lawrence, we might conclude, ultimately encourages us to spend less time in the bedroom and more time in the library. Lady C. is a book for thinking, nothing else: a call for a new form of chastity, it belongs to those thought-adventurers for whom the pleasure of the text is the greatest pleasure of all. 

I'll be extremely impressed if Jed Mercurio's new BBC adaptation manages to get this point across and isn't merely another lame and ludicrous work of pretentious soft-porn. We'll see ...


Notes

A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' can be found in the Cambridge Edition of  Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (CUP, 1993), pp. 303-35. The lines quoted from this essay here can be found on pp. 307-08. 

Readers might be interested and amused to know that later in the same essay, Lawrence flagrantly contradicts what he says here by arguing the complete opposite and indulging in a far more familiar anti-mind, pro-body rant; calling for greater harmony between the two, whilst still keeping them separate within a system of metaphysical dualism. As with Nietzsche, you can find textual support in Lawrence for almost any position; the challenge is not to determine the author's genuine view, but to critically examine all perspectives and realise that truth can never be fixed or given absolute moral-logical consistency. 

   

Like a Virgin: Madame B. and Lady C.

Illustration of Gustave Flaubert and Mme. Bovary

from online arts and culture magazine Salon

http://www.salon.com/2005/08/21/flaubert/   

According to Andrea Dworkin, the modern era of rebellious married women who seek freedom via adultery and sexually transgressive acts begins with Madame Bovary (1856): she is the first in a long line of female characters for whom heroism consists in taking a lover and experiencing a genuine orgasm; i.e. in being fucked and fucked good.

But, somewhat paradoxically, Emma Bovary also redefines virginity as well as heroic rebellion. For according to Flaubert, a woman who has not been overwhelmed by sexual passion, not broken the law in order to be carnal - who has been fucked by a husband, but never been truly touched or transformed by her experiences in the marital bedroom - remains essentially a virgin and a type of slave who leads an unfulfilled life of domestic boredom and impoverished fantasy.

Of course, poor Emma's story ends tragically; she mistakes illicit romance for action in the real and wider social world and fucking becomes for her a "suicidal substitute for freedom", as Dworkin rightly notes. This, however, has not prevented a long line of writers finding inspiration in her sorry tale and inventing their own virgin wives whose only hope lies in what Lawrence describes as a phallic hunting out and which involves anal as well as vaginal penetration by the male.

In fact, it might be argued that Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover is the ultimate example of this phallocentric and phallocratic fantasy in which a woman, if she is to be liberated, must be repeatedly stripped and penetrated (or pierced, as Lawrence writes - as if it were a knife or sword rather than a penis forcefully entering and occupying her body). 

Connie risks her life, but she is happy to die a poignant, marvellous death just so long as she is fucked; the one thing she really wants regardless of consequences and despite the fact that during her night of sensual passion she is almost unwilling, a little frightened, and obliged to be but a passive thing. 

It's over eighty-five years since Lawrence wrote his last and most notorious novel, but the model of female sexuality based upon a metaphysical virginity which he helped shape is one which continues to grip the pornographic imagination and continues to exercise a real effect over the lives of real women as an obscene form of categorical imperative.

As Dworkin writes: "no matter how much [women] have fucked ... no matter with what intensity or obsession or commitment or conviction (believing that sex is freedom) or passion or promiscuous abandon", it's never enough; these dumb bitches never learn! And so they must keep consenting to penetration, being desirable, looking hot (the pressure to do so being exerted across an ever greater age-range; from pre-pubescent girls to post-menopausal grandmothers).

Surely it's time to notice that whilst more girls and women are freer than ever to get fucked, they are still unable to share "a whole range of feelings, express a whole range of ideas, address [their] own experience with an honesty that is not pleasing to men, ask questions that discomfit and antagonize men in their dominance".      

And surely it's time to admit - without denying the great beauty and brilliance of their work - that dead male novelists, poets, and philosophers might not be best placed to help us all move forward into a world after the orgy.


Notes

See Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, (Basic Books, 2007). The lines quoted are on pp. 140, 151 and in the 1995 Preface, pp. xxxiii-iv.

See also D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter sixteen. The italicized words are Lawrence's own.   

    

Women in Uniforms

I Love Women in Uniform by Griddles

www.deviantart.com

Many men are attracted to women in uniform; nurses, maids, flight attendants, and even officers of the law or girls with guns in military fatigues. The appeal is clearly twofold:

Firstly, there's the fetishistic aspect; the uniform itself has physical allure thanks to the material, the cut, the detailing, etc. all of which is designed to enhance the body and encode gender. 

Secondly, uniforms signify status and allow us to know not only what degree of power the wearer exercises within the legitimate and familiar world of work, but that they are prepared under certain circumstances to submit, to serve, and to obey - and nothing excites the pornographic imagination more than this!

Of course, when a lover puts on a uniform in the bedroom it is divorced from the social context from which it derives meaning and turned simply into a piece of erotic costuming. Nevertheless, a uniform may continue to excite long after it has been diverted from the realm of value and entered the world after the orgy; a world that is not about real power and politics or even sex, but purely a seductive play of appearances.    

In Praise of Stalking (The Case of Sophie Calle)

Stalking - be it of an actual kind in what remains of and passes for the real world, or a virtual activity conducted online - doesn't have a great reputation. Doubtless this is due to the fact that stalking is often related to harassment and intimidation and because it can be not only predatory but creepy in character; no one, it seems, likes to be followed and spied on by strangers (even in a world of Facebook and CCTV).

And yet, is it not possible that we might understand stalking not in terms of physical and psychological abuse, but rather as a fascinating instance of neo-courtly love in an age after the orgy ...?

For it is certainly the case that many stalkers feel a strong and genuine bond of affection for the person they choose to secretly shadow and, in essence, there's a striking similarity between medieval erotico-spiritual practice and this illicit postmodern phenomenon: both are a highly specialized expression of a love that is all too human and yet transcendent; passionate and yet restrained; true and yet founded upon fantasy. 

The stalker, whilst accepting the independence of the object of their desire, nevertheless attempts to bring themselves to the attention of the latter by various means and often goes to extraordinary lengths in order to prove the seriousness of their ardour and commitment. They may or may not be hoping for sexual intimacy, but this hardly seems to be the point and it would be mistaken, I think, to posit this as the ultimate goal; there are certainly easier ways to get a date or get laid, even for the most incompetent or inadequate of would-be lovers. 

        

Indeed, in certain cases of stalking there is no sexual motive involved at all: consider the famous case involving French conceptual artist, Sophie Calle. Here is an example of a woman stalking a man - known as Henri B. - without having any particular interest in him and certainly no erotic aspirations or expectations. It was Calle's indifferent determination to follow Henri B., without motive or any identifiable type of psychoses or neurotic compulsion, that made her story so intriguing to Jean Baudrillard, who - as we shall see - interprets her actions in terms of his theory of seduction (i.e. an ironic and fatal game of hide-and-seek to do with power, appearance, reversibility, loss of will, and being led astray). 

For those of you who don't know this case, the facts are these:

After stalking several strangers through the streets of Paris, Calle met Henri B. at a party. He told her he was travelling to Italy the following day and so Calle decided to go to Venice herself and track him down. After phoning round a large number of hotels, she finally found him. Then, suitably disguised, she spent the next few days following Henri B. around the city; photographing his movements and encounters with others and recording details in a diary alongside her own musings. 

Eventually, Henri B. spotted and confronted his stalker and the game was effectively over - although Calle still contrived to arrive back in Paris at the same time as her object in order to get one last secret picture of him disembarking from the train on which he had made his way home. She eventually published the black-and-white photographs accompanied by a text as Suite vénitienne (1983).

The book also included a typically insightful essay by Baudrillard entitled 'Please Follow Me' which contains the following passage on the seductive joy of becoming-other and becoming-object:

"To stalk the other is to take charge of their itinerary; it is to watch over their life without them knowing it. It is to ... relieve them of that existential burden, the responsibility of their own life. Simultaneously, she who follows is herself relieved of responsibility for her own life as she follows blindly in the footsteps of the other. And thus a wonderful reciprocity exists in the cancellation of each existence, in the cancellation of each subject's tenuous position as a subject. Stalking the other, one replaces them, exchanges lives, passions, wills, transforms oneself in the other's stead. It is perhaps the only way one can finally find fulfilment."


Note: An English edition of the Calle/Baudrillard work, trans. Danny Barash and Danny Hatfield, is available from Bay Press (1988). 

  

Passion Ends in Fashion

Michel Houellebecq is right: We're a long way from Wuthering Heights. 

Our obsession with love and the forming of human relationships is today evidence only of a certain loyalty to the past. All our feelings are completely artificial and our nights are "no longer shaken by terror or ecstasy". Sex is a form of nostalgia.

After the naked excess of the orgy - which was all about bodies and organs and gross acts of penetration - there comes the masked ball in which desire for the flesh has been replaced by a passion for fashion and dressing-up has become more exciting than stripping-off. We can witness this in our popular culture and I would suggest that Carrie Bradshaw tells us a good deal more about ourselves today than Cathy Earnshaw.

For whilst her significantly older friend, Samantha, still faithfully subscribes to the myth of sex and sexual liberation, Carrie - despite the residual romanticism of her character - is keenly aware that a finely crafted pair of shoes is likely to last longer and bring more satisfaction than a relationship with a man. 

Ultimately, even Mr Big can't compete against Manolo Blahnik and you can't help wondering whether Carrie didn't marry the former simply so she might wear the Something Blue satin shoes designed by the latter ...?