Aphrodite's Girdle

Aphrodite's Girdle, contributed by Mary Metzer to

The Museum of Fictional Literary Artifacts [1]

 

 

I. 

 

The girdle has a long, long history, reaching back into an ancient time that fashion historians term BP (Before Playtex). 

 

Perhaps the most famous girdle of all was one said to have been worn by Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love - although whether it was recognisably a girdle in the modern sense is debatable [2]. 

 

According to Homer, the girdle was imbued with the magical power to arouse desire in mortals and gods alike [3]. Thus, it can legitimately be regarded as an erotic accessory rather than merely a garment worn for practical reasons; Aphrodite, one assumes, didn't require any help maintaining her shape.  

The same might not be true of Hera, who had a fuller, more matronly figure and sometimes borrowed the girdle from Aphrodite when looking for a little extra something in order to capture the attentions of her husband (and brother) Zeus [4]. 

 

 

II. 

 

Interestingly, later authors claim that Aphrodite also lent her embroidered girdle to Helen, to ensure that Paris would succumb to her natural charms. 

 

But Aphrodite was always keen to have the item returned to her as soon as possible, however, and the 18th-century German poet and playwright Schiller explains why that is so in his long philosophical essay On Grace and Dignity (1793) [5]. 

According to Schiller, Aphrodite - or Venus as he prefers to call her in the Roman manner - can be stripped naked and still remain beautiful; but without her girdle she lacks grace - and without grace she is no longer so alluring. 

 

In other words, even a naturally beautful woman is desexualised the moment she is stripped naked; something that Roland Barthes picks up on in his essay on striptease in Mythologies. 

 

Ultimately, it's the clothes and jewellery and make-up - "in short the whole spectrum of adornment" [6] that give the living flesh its erotic fascination and places the body within the realm of luxurious objects.

   

 

Notes

 

[1] The Museum of Fictional Literary Artifacts is an amusing digital project created by students at Dakota State University. The aim is to establish an online archive of imaginary objects that might - had they been actual things - have been sought after by collectors. The MFLA houses a vast number of such artifacts found in all genres of literary work, from novels to comic books. For more details, please click here.  

 

[2] The Girdle of Aphrodite has variously been imagined as a strap, a belt, or a breast-band rather than a girdle as we might think of it today in a post-Playtex world of rubber. Whatever it was, Aphrodite's girdle has been a popular theme in the arts and literature of Europe, particularly during the Baroque and Neoclassical periods.  

 

[3] See Homer, Iliad 14: 159-221. Homer. An English translation of the full text by A.T. Murray can be found on the Perseus Digital Library: click here to read Book 14.

 

[4] Theirs was not what you might call a happy marriage; she may have found him agreeable at first - just as he found her sexually attractive - but their relationship is marked by infidelity, jealousy, and violence. 

 

[5] Über Anmut und Würde (1793) is an attempt to reconcile aesthetics and ethics based upon the philosophy of  Immanuel Kant. For Schiller, the trick is to synthesise the physical and spiritual nature of man and thus produce a beautiful soul. An English translation of this essay by George Gregory can be read as a pdf online via the Schiller Institute website: click here.

 

[6] Roland Barthes, 'Sriptease', in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, (The Noonday Press, 1991), p. 85.   

 

  

Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 3: Hauntology

Le fantôme gris 

Mark Fisher (1968-2017)

 

 I.

 

"Conjecture: hauntology has an intrinsically sonic dimension." [a]

 

I suppose that's true; we're all familiar with a ghostly wail and the creaking sounds of a haunted house, for example. And it's amusing to realise that, as Fisher says, sometimes it's a question of hearing what's not there; "the voice no longer the guarantor of presence" [120]. 

 

Derrida's neologism thus "uncovers the space between Being and Nothingness" [120]; that spooky realm where objects that go bump in the night are real but not actual and Schrödinger's cat silently meows.    

 

Real ghosts - and ghosts of the Real: there's no need for a notion of the supernatural, which is what one of Fisher's favourite books and films [b] - The Shining - makes clear. Horror is already present within the world, within the everyday, within the family: home is where the haunt is ...  

And this word, haunt, is, says Fisher, one of the closest we have in English to the German term unheimlich. For just as the latter can switch from that which allows for the familiar (or homely) to the unfamiliar (unhomely) in the blink of an eye, so the former "signifies both the dwelling-place, the domestic scene and that which invades or disturbs it" [125].

 

 

II. 

 

When I was younger, I used to love Angela Carter and read nearly all of her books, be they novels, short stories, or works of non-fiction. One book I particulary loved was American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (Vintage, 1994), which consists of nine tales, the first four of which are based on American folklore. 

I don't know if Fisher ever read or ever refers to Angela Carter in his work, but when I came across the following paragraph in Ghosts of My Life it reminded me of the above book by her:

 

"America, with its anxious hankerings after an 'innocence' it can never give up on, is haunted by haunting itself. If there are ghosts, then what was supposed to be a New Beginning, a clean break, turns out to be a repetition, the same old story. The ghosts were meant to have been left in the Old World ... but here they are ..." [128]

   

 

III.

As a child of the 1970s, I grew up watching a lot (and I really mean a lot) of television. 

 

So when Fisher writes of "uncanny spectres entering the domestic environment through the cathode ray tube" [133] [c] - particularly in the children's programming of this decade - it was obviously going to pique my interest. 

 

And I have to admit, I love the idea of a TV set as a ghost box; that's certainly preferable to the idea of it being a device designed for the amusement of idiots - a boob tube as our American cousins used to call it.

 

I still watch a lot of television - and a lot of it is still British television from the 1970s. It's not just that it reminds me of my childhood, but that it has "a certain grain [...] that got smoothed away by 80s style culture gloss" [135] [d]. 

 

I like the voices and the faces (and the clothes) of the people in the 1970s. They may all be dead now - may just be ghosts in a machine - but they're my kind of people and make me feel at home. Nostalgia doubtless plays a part in this, but it's more than that - Fisher would say it's a longing for what he terms popular modernism and not so much a lost past as the promise of a lost future. 

 

Speaking of promises ...

 

 

IV.

I hate the promise of digital music: which, as Fisher says, is the promise of an "escape from materiality" [144] and the eradication of crackle - i.e., the sound of dust, dirt, and damage; the sound of static build-up; the sound of joy. 

 

The loss of crackle spells the death of pop. 

 

No wonder then that many artists still release tracks on vinyl and invoke the sound of the past and a "whole disappeared regime of [tactile] materiality [...] lost to us in an era where the sources of sound have retreated from sensory apprehension" [144].      

 

I don't care about keeping music live - but I do want to keep it analogue. For in an enchanted sound-world, crackle should not be excluded and the pleasure of placing a needle into the outermost groove should not be denied.     

 

 

V.

 

Is this true: 

"What is suppressed in postmodern culture is not the Dark but the Light side. We are far more comfortable with demons than angels. Whereas the demonic appears cool and sexy, the angelic is deemed to be embarrassing and sentimental [...]" [155]

 

I mean, it might be true - but I don't think it is. And where's the evidence for this claim, which, like so many of Fisher's other claims, is made without any real attempt to back it up.

 

I do tend to agree, however, that encounters with angels might prove to be "as disturbing, traumatic and overwhelming as encounters with demons" [155] [e], though I'm not sure that's because nothing could be "more shattering [...] and incomprehensible in our hyper-stressed, constantly disappointing and overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy" [155].    

 

Actually, such angelic tranquility - an experience of what Rudolf Otto terms the numinous - might actually be very welcome in the world right now, even if it is "associated with feelings of our own fundamental worthlessness" [157].

For contrary to the idea that we should feel good about ourselves and always be positive, "the awareness of our own Nothingness is of course a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace" [157]. As Fisher goes on to note: "There is a melancholy dimension to this grace precisely because it involves a radical distanciation from what is ordinarily most important to us" - i.e., our own egos. 

As D. H. Lawrence would say, grace is the sinking of one's soul into the magnificent dark blue gloom, the glory of darkness; a willingness to be erased and made nothing; to be dipped into oblivion in order that we might be renewed [f].

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2022), p. 120. Future page references to this work will be given in the text.

      Of course, as Fisher later notes, hauntology doesn't just have a sonic dimension, there is also an important visual dimension; "the eerie calmness and stillness of photography" [152], for example, which is so good at capturing lost moments and presenting absences. Photography - the art of painting with light - also allows one a glimpse of a world that is radiant and not weighed down with darkness (although this is arguably a Gnostic quality rather than hauntological).      

[b] The Shining is a 1977 horror novel by American author Stephen King. It was adapted into a 1980 film directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson as the writer Jack Torance. King hated the movie because of its deviations from his book (and the fact that Kubrick had rejected his screenplay, preferring to co-write his own with novelist Diane Johnson). 

      In his piece on The Shining (adapted from a k-punk post dated 23 Jan 2006), Fisher chooses to side-step "the wearisome struggle between King fans and Kubrickians" and treats the novel and the film "as a labyrinth-rhizome, a set of interlocking correspondences and differences". See Ghosts of My Life, p. 120. 

      I don't dislike the film, but can't say it's one of my favourites. And as I've never read the novel, I don't intend to say very much here about Fisher's interpretation of The Shining.

 

[c] One obviously thinks of the famous scene in Poltergeist (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1982) when five-year-old Carol Anne (played by Heather O'Rourke) presses her hands to a TV screen displaying post-broadcast static and declares: "They're here" (referring to the spirits of the dead). 

 

[d] As Fisher writes elsewhere when analysing why it is programmes made today fail to capture this '70s grain: 

      "There must be some technical reason - maybe its the film stock they use - that accounts for why British TV is no longer capable of rendering any sense of a lived-in world. No matter what is filmed, everything always looks as if it has been thickly, slickly painted in gloss, like it's all a corporate video." - Ghosts in My Life, p. 76. 

 

[e] Fisher is making this claim on the basis of work by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his 1917 text (translated into English as) The Idea of the Holy.

 

[f] See the poems 'The State of Grace', 'Glory of Darkness', and 'Phoenix', in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 591 and 641. 

To read part one of this post on Lost Futures, click here. 

 

To read part two of this post on the Return of the 70s, click here. 

 

Reflections on The Tranparency Society by Byung-Chul Han (Part 2: From The Society of Pornography to The Society of Intimacy)

David Spriggs: Transparency Report (2014)

davidspriggs.art

 

 

 

III. 

The Society of Pornography

If we must engage in aesthetics, then it's legitimate to point out that transparency "is not the medium of the beautiful" [a] and remind ourselves of Benjamin's argument that beauty requires "what conceals and what is concealed to be inextricably joined" [21]. 

 

In other words, "The beautiful is neither the veil nor the veiled object but rather the object in its veil." [b]

 

This means, somewhat ironically, that beauty can never be revealed or seen; that like truth, beauty hates to go naked: in fact, naked beauty, like the naked truth, does not exist. Having said that, Benjamin thinks the naked human body sublime - i.e., beautiful beyond all beauty and exceeding representation. 

 

But that doesn't hold true it seems for the naked human bodies within pornography: Han is quick to emphasise that the miserable body revealed in pornography may have exhibition value as a piece of flesh, but is lacking in all sublimity: "It is precisely exhibition that destroys creaturely sublimity." [22]

 

The pornographic body is obscene because it lacks grace. But - even if true - we might ask, so what? We admire the graceful movements and gestures of the ballet dancer or gymnast, but why should we expect such (or desire such) from the pornographic model or prostitute? 

 

I tend to agree with Giorgio Agamben, who maintains that "exhibition affords a prime opportunity for a nudity to emerge" [23] that is free of theo-aesthetic value and which, having become transparent, has a singular appeal (or unique allure) [c]. 

 

The girl posing pornographically online doesn't want you to admire her beauty with cool detachment as she exposes her gaping cunt (she's indifferent to your immaculate appreciation); she wants you to jerk off. Porn is a shameless incitement to masturbation, not contemplation [d]. 

 

Han might not like this, but to complain that porn is graceless - or disgraceful - seems to miss the point and all he's doing (apart from revive religious language) is reinstate the "essential difference between the erotic and pornographic" [25]. And that, like all such metaphysical binaries, is philosophically untenable (not to mention a form of violence).   

 

As to whether capitalism "heightens the pornographication of society by exhibiting everthing as a commodity and handing it over to hypervisibility" [24], well, that's another matter. I suspect it probably does and, in as much as it does, Han is justified in borrowing the old Situationist term to describe today's society as "a society of the spectacle" [28].

      

  

The Society of Acceleration

 

Pure movement, which "accelerates just for its own sake" [29] and is going nowhere fast, is something else that Han finds obscene: "it no longer really moves anything or anywhere, and it does not really bring about anything" [29]. 

 

He prefers, in contrast, those narrative processes that elude acceleration and structure time in a meaningful manner; rituals and ceremonies: 

 

"Rituals and ceremonies have their own temporality, their own rhythm and tact. The society of transparency abolishes all rituals and ceremonies becase they do not admit operationalization; that is, they impede the accelerated circulation of information, communication, and production." [30]

The result of this abolition is that our world is uneventful, in the philosophical sense of that term; plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. 

 

Also, we are no longer able to linger in attentiveness (or dwell in peace); no longer able to live the vita contemplativa. The pilgrim is replaced by the tourist, who never really arrives anywhere or finds what they're looking for:

 

"The pilgrimage is a narrative event. For this reason, the itinerary is not a passage to be traversed as quickly as possible, but a path rich in significance. Being underway is charged with meanings such as atonement, healing, or thanksgiving. Because of this narrativity, pilgrimage cannot be accelerated." [31]

 

Han continues: 

 

"In terms of temporality, the pilgrim is on the way to a future in which well-being or salvation [ein Heil] is expected. For this reason, he is not a tourist. The tourist sticks to the present, stays in the here-and-now. He is not underway in the proper sense. The way he travels holds no significance [...] The tourist knows nothing of the rich significance, the narrativity, of the way." [31]     

No surprises to learn that Byung-Chul Han studied Catholic theology and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Heidegger. Nor to discover the same kind of prejudice when discussing tourism that his attitude to porn betrays [e]. I suspect his real objection to contemporary society is the fact that it's secular in character and that when he uses the word obscene he essentially means profane. 

 

And when he says that compulsive transparency "annihilates the fragrance of things" [32], I'm guessing the fragrance he has in mind is a mix of benzoin, frankincense, and myrrh ...

 

Han concludes this chapter:  

 

"The crisis of our times is not acceleration, but rather the scattering and dissociation of temporality. Temporal dis-synchrony makes time buzz without direction and disintegrate into a mere series of  punctual, atomized presences. Thereby, time becomes additive and is emptied of all narrativity." [32-33]

 

So what's the solution? Not deceleration, since acceleration per se is not the actual problem. I think, for Han - as for Heidegger - the answer is: Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten ... [f]     

 

The Society of Intimacy

 

Whilst 18th-century society was theatrical in character, ours, in contrast, is far more intimate, as we abandon distance for immediacy and symbolic representation yields to pornographic exhibition. People don't want to play clearly defined social roles, they wish to strive for authenticity:

 

"Intimacy is the psychological formula of transparency. One believes that one attains transparency of the soul by revealing intimate feelings and emotions, by laying the soul bare." [35] 

And where does one commit this soul baring? Not in the confessional, or in a potentially hostile public space, but on social media, which sets up a virtual space of absolute closeness and closedness; "the outside has been eliminated" [35]. 

 

One can at last be perfectly safe and perfectly alone with oneself: 

 

"This digital vicinity [Nachbarschaft] offers users only sectors of the world that please them. In this fashion, it dismantles the public sphere [Öffentlichkeit] - indeed, it dismantles public, critical consciousness - and it privitizes the world." [35]  

 

We have been transformed into digital narcissists who prefer to encounter ourselves everywhere, rather than the stranger, or Other, who just might help us escape from the hell of the Same ...      

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society, trans. Erik Butler, (Stanford University Press, 2015). Future page references will be given in the post itself. I would remind readers that the chapter titles given in bold are Han's. Part one of this post, which discusses the first three chapters (and preface), can be read by clicking here. 

 

[b] Walter Benjamin, 'Goethe's Elective Affinities', Selected Writings 1913-1926, Vol. I, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael. W. Jennings, (Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 351. Quoted by Han on p. 21 of The Transparency Society. 

[c] See Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, (Stanford University Press, 2010). Byung-Chul Han quotes fairly extensively from this work, even though he disagrees with what Agamben writes.

[d] D. H. Lawrence also pointed this out: "The pornography of today [...] is an invariable stimulant to the vice of self abuse; onanism, masturbation, call it what you will. In young or old, man or woman, boy or girl, modern pornography is a direct provocative of masturbation." See 'Pornography and Obscenity', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 244.

  

[e] This snobbish disdain for numerous aspects of popular culture - from tinned food to tourism; newspapers to cinema - was common amongst modernist writers in the twentieth-century - from D. H. Lawrence to T. S. Eliot; Theodor Adorno to Martin Heidegger. Although there are some deeply stupid opinions expressed in John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (Faber and Faber, 1992), it remains one of the go-to books on this subject. 

[f] This phrase - Only a God Can Save Us - is the title of an interview given by Martin Heidegger to Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff, published in Der Spiegel magazine on September 23, 1966. 

 

This post continues and concludes in part three: click here.