Tristes Tropiques Systems Theory and the Literary Scene

Friedrich Balke

Abstract: In Niklas Luhmann’s later works on social exclusion, his concept of environment is

no longer strictly epistemological but becomes increasingly ethnographic. From a systems the-

oretical point of view, environments are mere effects of social systems and their need to distin-

guish constantly between essential operations and operations that are of no consequence for

the continuous reproduction of the systems’ identities. However, under certain circumstances

environments turn out to be spatial. One could even say that on the analytical agenda the

spatial dimension of exclusion takes precedence over the temporal dimension of sociality to the

same degree that sociality becomes a primarily temporal reality – and systems theory

describes its own approach as a turn to radical temporalization of all social structures. In

these spaces or territories it is not communication that can be observed but human beings

reduced to their bodily state. Having become a kind of container for socially unadressable bod-

ies, this environment of the functionally differentiated world society does not require empiri-

cal social research or complex explanations, but the evidence-producing strategies of ethno-

graphic fieldwork or simply travel notes.

One of the essential qualities of self-operating social systems is that they are not directed from the outside and provide their own causality. But you may take it as a kind of fatal irony that systems theory – while removing all non-social, i.e. non-communicative, elements from the social dimension – has to face in the end the return of what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1998) has recently called ›bare life‹: a form in which certain human beings cannot be addressed socially and are thus reduced to their bodily existence. I say ›certain‹ human beings, but I have to correct myself: global social systems produce these bodies in large quantities by mere virtue of their operation. Niklas Luhmann has stated repeatedly (cf. 1984, 346ff.) that societies do not consist of human beings or individuals as their elements but of communications, although these communications are regularly attributed to human beings as ›actors‹. But a social theory that with good reason rejects any anthropological foundation still has to observe the growing masses of socially divested human beings subsisting in the environments of global social systems, like the barbarians described by Aristotle in his Politics (1973, 49), for whom he felt pity because they had the unhappy fate to live outside the polis, the perfect social community, which the Greek had invented. This paper calls the attention of the reader to the way Niklas Luhmann in his later texts on exclusion semantically, as he would have said, as literature, as I want to argue, stages the zones of exclusion. Luhmann had his most shocking experiences in Brazil’s zones of exclusion, where he occasionally visited the favelas. Urban life in those parts of Brazilian cities is characterized by a degree of misery that, as Luhmann (1995a, 147) writes, is «beyond any description«. The situation in these zones of exclusion defies description, yet it requires sociological analysis. Luhmann uses a couple of very revealing images or metaphors to perform this paradoxical task, that is, to describe the indescribable: Whereas in the zones of inclusion human beings matter as persons, in

the zones of exclusion it is only their bodies that count. Physical violence, sexuality and the urge to satisfy basic human needs are given free rein, and become directly and immediately relevant without being civilized by the symbolic codes developed by social systems for this purpose. There is no way to connect complex social expectations with situations in which these basic needs imperatively demand satisfaction. Under these circumstances human beings are only interested in the factors that determine the situation, and other human bodies and their behavior are of utmost importance. This may remind the sociological observer of very ancient social orders, but as a matter of fact, these zones of exclusions are merely by-products of a modern functionally differentiated society. (Luhmann 1997, 632f.) Luhmann’s description repeats a widespread symbolic understanding of sociality, which presupposes that social order can only emerge as a result of a fundamental rupture with a state of nature and that it has to be reminded constantly of the possibility of falling back into the primordial state of things. In the zones of exclusion an a-social, a socially bare life prevails. Human beings reduced to their bodies and bodily reactions no longer regard the communicative requirements of social systems and satisfy their needs and desires without respecting the socially and culturally legitimized forms of their fulfillment. The use of physical violence is no longer restricted to the sovereign state, which loses its monopoly of power; sexuality is performed in a way that does not respect any semantics of love; physical needs can be satisfied without spending money because people do not have any and would starve to death otherwise. The problem of exclusion, perceived sociologically and not morally, can by no means be solved with the rhetoric of universal human rights – »let alone with classical concepts like societas civilis or communitas« (Luhmann 1995a, 149f.). In relying on these concepts, we proceed, as Luhmann, quoting from Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz, puts it, like the widow Bolte, who goes down to her

cellar to get some sauerkraut, which she eats warmed up. In a footnote to his lecture »Beyond barbarism« Luhmann informs the reader that his reference to the widow Bolte was not really appreciated by his audience. Yet, in the published version of his text Luhmann (1995a, 150) confirms the reference to this classic topos of German humor and states: »Perhaps I came too close to the crucial point of the matter.« Now, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that here – as in many other passages of Luhmann’s works – the surprising switch from theoretical to literary discourse is of central and, maybe, symptomatic importance. He not only uses literary discourse at the end of the text, which leaves the reader in a state of perplexity, but literary discourse organizes the whole perspective Luhmann adopts to solve the problem of describing the indescribable. These paradoxical descriptions start with a discursive gesture of an unambiguously ethnological, or better, ethnographic origin – a gesture which serves as a subtle means to strengthen the credibility or authenticity of anthropological texts that explore strange worlds or, more precisely, the worlds of strangeness. This gesture is simply an attempt to convince readers of ethnological texts that their authors »were there in the full sense of the word.« As Clifford Geertz (1993, 24) writes at the end of his essay entitled »Being there: Anthropology and the Scene of Writing«: »A hundred and fifteen years (if we date our profession, as conventionally, from Tylor) of as severational prose and literary innocence is long enough.« Despite the fascination of fieldwork, Geertz argues that it is absolutely necessary to consider scientifically all the literary conventions or procedures an author resorts to in order to produce the effect of ›being there‹, which is the basis for the evidence and truth of anthropological texts.Now, Luhmann’s texts on the zones of exclusion very clearly reveal the moment that their author, who is not very enthusiastic about empirical social research anyway, discovers his utter fascination with what Geertz calls the effect of »being there«, that is, with fieldwork – though, as we shall see, it is fieldwork in a rather unprofessional and somewhat touristic sense. However, it is quite interesting to observe that this unprofessional and touristic approach to these zones, which are excluded from cultural norms and from the possibility of participating in the communications of global social systems, has been sanctioned by one of the leading anthropologists of our time as »a useful

training in observation«. Lévi-Strauss (1992, 62) writes in his Tristes Tropiques:»I have learned since then what a useful training in observation such short glimpses of a town, an area or a culture can provide and how – because of the intense concentration forced upon one by the brevity of the stay – one may even grasp certain features which, in other circumstances, might have long remained hidden.« For one short moment, for the moment of a short glimpse, the text of the sociologist reveals the moment when its author appears on the scene described by the title of the text: »Beyond barbarism«. »Beyond barbarism« does not mean, as one may well assume, ›in civilization‹, but, on the contrary, it marks a place which is even more barbarian than Greek barbarism, a kind of hyper-barbarism. »Beyond barbarism« indicates a distinction that has lost its other side, because barbarism in the Greek sense of the word does not function without constant reference to its antithesis or alternative, which is perfection and the »beauty of the form of life« as Luhmann (1995a,

143) writes, i.e. in Greek terms éthos and philía. If modern barbarism has to be considered as the opposite of the modern functionally differentiated world society and if this society is at the same time identified as the cause of barbarism (and not its solution), then »Beyond Barbarism« marks a space with no exit or escape. The Greeks did not completely exclude the possibility of former barbarians adopting the structures of the polis, the city-community, and thus becoming human in the philosophical sense of the word, that is, following the definition of Aristotle: political beings. Modern sociology, on the other hand, has to confront its barbarians with the theoretically gained knowledge that the »many-too-many« (die Vielzuvielen), as Nietzsche called them, have to accept their destiny and remain in the territorial environment of the globalized social system. At the end of Luhmann’s text, a process that transforms an epistemological concept into an ethnographic one has been accomplished. From a systems-theoretical point of view you cannot enter the environments of social systems, because these environments are mere projections of the systems, which permanently have to distinguish between essential operations and operations that are of no consequence for the continuous reproduction of the systems’ identities. However, under certain circumstances environments turn out to be spatial, one could even say: to the same degree that sociality becomes a primarily temporal reality – and systems theory describes its own approach as the turn to radical temporalization of all social structures – the spatial dimension of exclusion takes precedence over the temporal dimension of sociality on the theoretical agenda. What can be observed in these spaces or territories is no longer communications but human beings reduced to their bodily state. This environment, which has become a kind of container for socially unadressable bodies, a container, by the way, with the obvious function of containment – if we consider the response of the ›first world‹ to the problems of global mass migration –: this environment of the functionally differentiated society does not require empirical social research, but the evidence-producing strategies of fieldwork or simply travel notes. Travel notes that enable the reader to grasp certain features of the situation without any empirical or even theoretical sophistication. The knowledge of the anthropologist as well as that of the sociologist descending from the heights of theoretical abstraction is of a far less empirical than phenomenological nature. It obeys the logic of evidence and the full presence of sense. The decisive passage of his lecture in which the sociologist, adopting the literary manners exhibited in anthropological field research, strongly affirms his having been there:

Although it may surprise all those who are well-meaning, it has to be confirmed that there are exclusions and that they occur massively and lead to a kind of misery which defies description. Anybody who dares to make a trip to the favelas of the big South American cities and succeeds in leaving them alive can attest to this. Even a trip to the settlements left behind as a result of the shut-down of the mining industry in Wales will convince you of this. Empirical research is not necessary for this purpose. Anybody who trusts his eyes can see it – to such a degree of intensity that every explanation fails. (Luhmann 1995a, 147) Let me underline: exclusion is a fact; it occurs massively and manifests itself in enormous misery. It defies description, a remark that should be a provocation for sociological constructivism, which does not accept any ›data‹ or ›pure givens‹ outside the categories of description and the perspectives created by them. Luhmann understands systems theory as a theory of observation and description of modern society – informed and guided by the semantic material continuously produced by society in its operations of self-observation and

self-description. What meaning can a phenomenon which defies description, that is to say, is not only beyond the observation of the professional sociologist but also eludes those who are massively excluded – what meaning can this phenomenon have for such a highly reflective theory? Now, the sociological paradox – the indescribability of the misery of exclusion – is connected with a second paradox that is even more striking: what defies description can on the other hand be »reported« by any – what Lévi-Strauss calls – »Sunday anthropologist« who is out there in the zones of exclusion.An object which functions as a kind of black box, because it resists every attempt of description, can suddenly be penetrated by any observer, whether or not he or she is a skilled sociologist.But the ease of making observations contrasts very sharply with the observer’s willingness, which is typically ethnographic, to risk his own life. Ethnological expeditions are always journeys of life and death; they require a ›subject who is willing to take risks‹: You don’t simply visit the favelas, you dare to enter them, which implies that it is uncertain whether or not you will ever return. Alluding to the high risk involved with being a fieldworker in anthropology is one of the typical literary conventions of ethnographic adventure. In the following sentences, Luhmann opens the zone of exclusion geographically to avoid connotations of exoticism: From the sociological perspective, Brazilian favelas are comparable to the zones of recent deindustrialization in the centers of the First World. You don’t actually have to take a trip to the triste tropics, because you can find what you are looking in your own neighborhood. But before anyone can ask about the theoretical perspectives or the basic statistical parameters which would make a comparison of Brazilian favelas and deindus-

trialized zones in Wales possible and plausible, Luhmann reassures his readers

31

in the final lines of the passage I have just quoted from that the fact of exclusion cannot be adequately perceived by a theoretically organized or empirically verified knowledge. It isn’t necessary to do empirical research or resort to old or new explanations to discern the fact of exclusion. Being an eyewitness is enough: »Whoever trusts his eyes can see it.« And he can observe its dramatic features far better than he can trust the current explanations of Marxian or post-Marxian theorists of the world system – an argument, which by the way not only applies to the theoretical explanations of which Luhmann disapproves but also to his own sociological explanation, which declares exclusion to be a normal and possibly normalizable by-product of the simple functioning of global social systems.When Luhmann dismisses all empirical research on exclusion as well as all current attempts to grasp exclusion theoretically on the grounds that neither empirical inquiries nor theoretical arguments do justice to the brutal fact of what they are trying to explain, which in a certain respect is situated outside the symbolic order and therefore, in psychoanalytical terms, manifests the irruption of the »real« or the »symptom« – when Luhmann argues in this way, he visibly repeats a certain gesture that is typical for the ethnographic mode of knowledge and can be found perhaps in its purest form in the work of the dean of structural anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss. The texts of Lévi- Strauss, undoubtedly one of the greatest anthropologists of the last century, can be compared with the work of Niklas Luhmann in more than one respect – I mention the degree of theoretical abstraction, which is only the other side of their ability to evoke scenes of overwhelming phenomenological concreteness and evidence. In the chapter concerning Tristes Tropiques of his book on »The Anthropologist as Author«, Clifford Geertz (1993, 39) reminds his readers that Lévi-Strauss in writing this »absolute book« reaffirms the tradition of a strong polemic against the Occident. There is no doubt that Tristes Tropiques was an indictment of Europe because of the influence it wielded over the non-European civilizations. Compared with the »devastating bitterness and power of Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques «, Geertz argues, the radical anti-colonialist Franz Fanon sounds »positively genial«.Now, we shall see that Luhmann, although he does not get involved in the business of morally condemning the Occident, in certain important respects agrees with Lévi-Strauss because he also rejects all the explanations of misery that connect it with structures of »exploitation« or »social repression« and thus indicate a perspective of social and political liberation. All the diagnoses of exclusion that can more or less be traced back to the work of Karl Marx are too »friendly« – the intensity of their verdict on the centers of inclusion is irrelevant – because they impute an interest on the part of powerful social groups in perpetuating the misery of exclusion: »Capitalism, the ruling alliance of financial and industrial capital with the military or the powerful families of the country«, is one of the classic explanations for the existence of massive global inequality that Luhmann cites. Now again, it is quite interesting to see that Luhmann (1995a, 147) does not really replace these rather complex theories derived from the discursive context of political economy with even more complex theories, but simply rejects them in the name of the ›first glimpse‹ or immediate perception: »When you look closely, you do not find anything that can be exploited or repressed. What you find are human beings reduced to their bodily existence, trying to survive to the next day.« Luhmann entitled his essay »Beyond barbarism,« and he located the new barbarism geographically in the Brazilian favelas. However, for more than one rea-

son barbarism is not the appropriate term for the social reality that obtains in those areas of the world. One of these reasons is that the Greeks, who coined the term, regarded the barbarians – who literally are those who do not possess articulated language – as politically inferior but of equal rank as military opponents. »Beyond barbarism« therefore indicates a zone whose inhabitants can never become dangerous for the ›civilized‹ regions of the world because, not having the status of political subjects or persons, they are unable to launch an

attack against the supposed oppressors. »There is great evidence for the thesis«, Luhmann writes in another text on »Inclusion and Exclusion« (1995b, 262) that »in the zones of exclusion human beings are only regarded – and only regard themselves – as bodies and not persons«. Giving an example for this observation, Luhmann once again refers to the »Brazilian cities«. It is quite interesting to see that the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss (1992, 96) shows a similar emblematic use of Brazilian cities in his Tristes Tropiques when he comments on his first view on Sao Paulo: »I was staggered to discover that so many of their districts were already fifty years old and that they should display the sign of decrepitude with such a lack of shame«. And he continues: »Rusty old iron, red trams with the appearance of fire engines, mahogany bars with polished brass rails; brick-built warehouses in deserted streets, there was only the wind to sweep away the rubbish. [...] mazes of seedy buildings«. However, despite the »heterogeneous shapes« of the »concrete blocks« that face each other in a »frozen jumble«, Lévi-Strauss (1992, 97) leaves no doubt of his admiration of Sao Paulo: »I never thought that Sao Paulo was ugly.« It is therefore not Brazil –the privileged field of his anthropological research – but India that finds itself exactly in the place that Luhmann indicates with his formula »Beyond barbarism«.The section in Tristes Tropiques is simply entitled »Crowds« (1992, 134) signalizing the problematic symbolic status of its members. I would like to comment on some passages taken from this section of Lévi-Strauss’travel notes: [...] the large towns of India are slum areas. What we are ashamed of as if it were a disgrace, and regard as a kind of leprosy, is, in India, the urban phenomenon, reduced to its ultimate expression« – the ›crowds‹ are only another expression for the phenomenon that Luhmann describes as an »existence reduced to its bodily aspects«. Lévi-Strauss goes on: »the herding together of individuals whose only reason for living is to herd together in millions, whatever the conditions of life may be. Filth, chaos, promiscuity, congestion; ruins, huts, mud, dirt; dung, urine, pus, humors, secretions and running sores: all the things against which we expect urban life to give us organized protection, all the things we hate and guard against at such great cost, all these by-products of cohabitation do not set any limitation on it in India. They are more like a natural environment which the Indian town needs in order to prosper. To every individual, any street, footpath or alley affords a home, where he can sit, sleep, and even pick up his food straight from the glutinous filth (Lévi-Strauss 1992, 134). While the European visitor is confronted with strange social relations in tropical America – relations which he can still regard as such and analyze with his anthropological tools – the slum areas of Indian towns are situated in a dimension which we may call beyond the line. In Lévi-Strauss’s view, this line does not simply separate better forms of social life from worse forms, it is not simply the well-known and well-balanced line of social inequality – it marks what we may call the ›great divide‹ between human and subhuman life, it opposes ›bare life‹ to ›human existence‹, or to express it another way, it reintroduces forms of life which are culturally perceived as subhuman into the sphere of human life itself. Therefore, the transgressing of this line provides the greatest challenge to all forms of scientific analysis, sociologically oriented forms as well as anthropologically oriented forms. Lévi-Strauss (1992, 135) concludes: »In southern Asia, on the contrary, reality seems to be either far below or far in excess of what man is entitled to demand of the world, and of man.« The reason for this philosophical statement is rooted in daily life: »Daily life appears to be a permanent repudiation of the concept of human relations.«Yet, Lévi-Strauss does not simply pretend, as Luhmann does, to abandon this concept because of its obvious inapplicability to the reality of certain areas of the world. He does not do so, although like Luhmann, he is one of the most prominent critics of humanist or anthropological illusionism: societies do not consist of human beings; human beings, or in sociological terms, actors are mere points of social attribution – not final elements of sociality. According to Luhmann as well as the structuralist Lévi-Strauss, sociality is defined as a specific level of order which cannot be reduced to one of the factors that is necessary to establish and maintain that order. However, both Luhmann and Lévi-Strauss characterize the zones of exclusion in a way that cannot be understood without reference to the symbolic dimension of so-called humanist discourse.The abandonment of humanist discourse does not create a vital problem for the zones of inclusion because the human beings included are symbolically respected by the social order in more than one way – although of course even under conditions of inclusion the social order is not simply a mirror of the needs and interests of individuals. What irritates the European observer more than anything else about the situation in southern India is the willingness of the people there to renounce their fundamental right to be treated as equals: »It never occurs to them [...] to set themselves up as equals. [...] If one tried to treat these unfortunate wretches as equals, they would protest against that injustice of one’s doing so; they do not want to be equal; they beg, they entreat you to crush them with your pride, since it is from the widening of the gap between you and them that they expect their mite« (Lévi-Strauss 1992, 136). As long as we consider social relations under the aspect of mutual respect and acknowledgment, we have to deny the social quality of what occurs in the zones of exclusion. Therefore, Lévi-Strauss (1992, 136) writes: »All the primary situations which establish relationships between people are distorted; the rules of the social game are falsified and one doesn’t know where to begin.« This is what Luhmann (1995b, 262f.) repeats in his essays on exclusion, using nearly the same words: »Anything that we as persons can perceive loses significance, and any attempt to achieve social effects by influencing attitudes is futile. This would require a context of social control and social community that cannot be assumed.« Thus in the zones of exclusion one does not know where to begin. Under such circumstances you cannot communicate in the full sense of the term but must rely heavily on your ability to react promptly to constantly changing conditions. In Luhmann’s opinion, what really counts is the ability to adjust one’s behavior immediately to new, unexpected events. In the zones of exclusion sociality, then, is more or less a question of perception and not one of communication.Yet, it is quite interesting that Luhmann does not regard the conditions in the zones of exclusion as absolutely separate from the situation in the centers of inclusion. In a quite symptomatic footnote in one of his texts on exclusion, he considers the widespread interest in soccer, tennis, ice hockey and other speed sports as a ›preadaptive advance‹: admiration of a faculty which is not required of most of us at the moment (Luhmann 1995b, 263). So it may well be that the management of ›bare life‹ in the future will become a requirement for all of us.The situation in the zones of exclusion could be a foreshadowing of future developments: under the social surface of the large functional systems Luhmann detects ›services of friendship‹, or networks of mutual benefit, which elsewhere are simply called ›corruption‹ and whose main feature is that they are not formally institutionalized and therefore cannot be represented as they function surreptitiously. It is the total separation of sociality from the normative, the reduction of social structures to mere temporary realities or events that are constantly substituted with other, functionally equivalent social arrangements which makes the situation in the centers of modern society comparable to the zones of the ›absence of sociality‹. Lévi-Strauss clearly brings this point into focus when in his final remarks on southern Asia he describes the cultural prerequisites of all mass – that is, very heavily populated – societies in contras to the very sparsely populated native communities in Brazil which are characterized above all by the existence of a symbolic structure that bridges the ontological gap between the social and the non-social, or the ›natural‹: In America, I was, first and foremost, looking at natural or urban landscapes, and in both cases these are objects defined by their shapes,colors and peculiar structures, which confer on them an existence independent of the living beings who occupy them. In India, these large objects have disappeared, having been destroyed by history and reduced to a physical or human dust which has become the only reality. [...] A sociological order worn away over hundreds of centuries was collapsing, and it was replaced by a multiplicity of interpersonal relationships, so completely did the density interpose itself between the observer and the disintegrating object. (Lévi-Strauss 1992, 143) What systems theory theorizes is in fact the zero degree of social order – or, I should say, the minimum social order required to stabilize a reality in which these »large objects« have been replaced by a concept of communication that grounds in the model of Ego/Alter (Stäheli 2000, 41). For Lévi-Strauss, the term ›large objects‹ designates the »structures that in the past maintained a few hundred million human particles within organized frameworks«. As systems theory has no place for cultural or ›symbolic‹ processes, apart from the cultural and symbolic codes that organize the reproduction of functional systems, it begins its line of reasoning with the total rejection of all ontology,which is just another word for the philosophical knowledge of large objects.

References

Agamben, Giorgio (1998): Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford

University Press.

Aristoteles (1973): Politik. München: dtv.

Geertz, Clifford (1988): Works and Lives. The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford

University Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1992): Tristes Tropiques Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Luhmann, Niklas (1984): Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt

a.M.: Suhrkamp.

Luhmann, Niklas (1995a): Jenseits von Barbarei. Pp. 138-150 in: N. Luhmann,

Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen

Gesellschaft,Vol. 4. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

Luhmann, Niklas (1995b): Inklusion und Exklusion. Pp. 237-264 in: N. Luhmann, Soziolo-

gische Aufklärung 6: Die Soziologie und der Mensch. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.

Luhmann, Niklas (1997): Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

Stäheli, Urs (2000): Writing Action. Double Contingency and Normalization. Distinktion,

No. 1, 39-47.

Dr. Friedrich Balke, Kulturwissenschaftliches Forschungskolleg »Medien und kulturelle

Kommunikation«, Universität zu Köln, Bernhard-Feilchenfeld-Str. 11, D-50969 Köln

f.balke@uni-koeln.de

Tristes Tropiques. Systems Theory and the Literary Scene

37

tropiques

"or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat."

"Tristes Tropiques"

Claude Lévi-Strauss

delighted Alienation

the spirit of the beehive

Víctor Erice’s spellbinding The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena), widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s. In a small Castilian village in 1940, in the wake of the country's devastating civil war, six-year-old Ana attends a traveling movie show of Frankenstein and becomes possessed by the memory of it. Produced as Franco’s long regime was nearing its end, The Spirit of the Beehive is a bewitching portrait of a child’s haunted inner life and one of the most visually arresting movies ever made.

Infinitely Small Things

A Case for Boston as a Liquid not a Solid
Catherine D’Ignazio

Member, The Institute for Infinitely Small Things; Co-Director, Art Interactive

Is it possible to actively strive to produce an architecture of excess, in which the “more” is not cast off but made central, in which expenditure is sought out, in which instability, fluidity...act as powerful forces?
—Elizabeth Grosz, Architectures of Excess

[1] This essay makes a case for the city of Boston as a liquid, not a solid. The four projects presented here as case studies were completed over the last year in the Boston area. Each project makes a part of Boston leak. Let us think about what a leaky place might mean.

[2] Traditional Western logic reduces place to a container. Being home means being inside your house. Boston is what is inside the city limits as represented by lines and dots on a geographic map. This notion of place is solid in that there are clear limitations and definitions for what is inside and outside, where a place (and thus the communities “in” it) begin and end. In short, place is stable, contained, and solid. Artists who engage with place as a solid typically engage with the representation of place through mural, portrait, or image. Many valuable “solid” identity projects have happened in Boston in addition to the traditional community mural. For example, in recent years, the Fort Point Cultural Coalition along with the artists community has been engaged in organization and activism to retain their right to stay in the neighborhood despite rising rents and gentrification. Their success depends on the articulation of Fort Point as a place that includes artists. In 1998, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s acclaimed work “Bunker Hill Monument” helped to solidify the silent struggle against murders in the Charlestown neighborhood by projecting testimonials of mothers of murdered children onto the monument. This project is engaged in a “revealing” or a “making visible” of community tensions that are not apparent to those who visit Bunker Hill as a historic tourist site. These are engaging projects that reconstitute the boundaries of place and community in Boston in order to contest who is included and who is excluded from particular places. Yet, they remain engaged with place as solid because place is still conceived of as a container. What and who is inside the container may have changed but the projects are fundamentally about repositioning boundaries, not about creating on-going ways in which these places can consistently exceed their boundaries and open themselves to their outsides.

[3] The four projects discussed in this essay engage with place as liquid. They wrestle with the idea of place as mutable, temporal, and fluid. They assume that “place” is the site of excess. This is to say that instead of being contained neatly within a geographic map or a proper noun (such as “The South End” or “The Asian Community in Boston”), place has a way of spilling over and beyond its representations. Indeed, these projects begin from a non-representational practice—their point is never to represent Boston the way that a mural represents a community or that a monument represents a silent struggle, but to produce new lived experiences of place. It is exactly in this way—through the production of encounters and experiences that complicate our understanding of place - that these projects make Boston a liquid not a solid.

[4] Let me also be clear that I am speaking from the inside—I am an artist, arts professional and practitioner, and I have been involved in all of these projects in various capacities from artist to curator to producer to participant.

Case Study #1 - Glowlab: Open Lab at Art Interactive (2005)

[5] Glowlab: Open Lab was a nine-week psychogeography exhibition and festival at Art Interactive in Cambridge, MA, that ran from October 14^th, 2005, to December 11^th, 2005. The projects in Open Lab were deceptively simple, playful investigations of site and the social fabric of Central Square, Cambridge. “Hello”, for example, is a project by D. Jean Hester in which the artist followed particular walking routes in Cambridge and said “Hello” to every person that she passed. Hester documented the project through photos and charts, and led a group walk during which members of the public said “Hello” to strangers. Similarly nomadic, Jessica Thompson’s “Soundbike” is a bicycle that laughs louder the faster you ride it. Visitors to the gallery space checked out the bike and rode it around the neighborhood. “Boston by Chance,” by Jesse Shapins and Brian House, gives participants instructions for experiencing the city through chance operations. Morgan Schwartz invited participants to launch balloons with secret messages into the sky. On the “whether/weather” project website, you can track the progress of your balloon to determine whether it has been found by another person. All of these works invited the visitor to leave the Art Interactive gallery space and engage with the surrounding neighborhood.

[6] True to their Situationist lineage, these works create situations and engineer encounters. They engage with Central Square not by making a picture of it, but by creating communal experiences of it. They produce new relationships to the neighborhood that fall outside the logic of functionality (an anonymous balloon messaging system is not very useful, for example). These projects ask questions about social and temporal relationships to place: what happens when you say “Hello” to everyone you pass on the street? What happens when you don’t commute but you travel by chance? How can people talk to each other across space and time using balloons? For the artists in Open Lab, Central Square was used as a mutable site for experimentation.

Case Study #2: Sifting the Inner Belt (2004-5),
By Jeremy Liu and Hiroko Kikuchi, with Jeremy Chu,
Catherine D’Ignazio, William Ho, Natalie Loveless, and Kim Szeto.

[7] Sifting the Inner Belt was a year-long, site-specific project that consisted of a series of performance interventions and research experiments in the South End neighborhood in Boston with an emphasis on creating bridges between two places: the Boston Center for the Arts (BCA) and the Berkeley Street Community Garden (BSCG).

[8] The “Inner Belt” refers to the ill-conceived and uncompleted highway project that would have created a highway around downtown Boston and between the South End and Lower Roxbury. The Berkeley Street Community Garden sits on land that was taken for construction purposes for this project.

[9] For a year, the artists and community organizers involved in this project “researched” the neighborhood in iconoclastic ways ranging from performance art to cooking to soil testing to participating in garden governance. The final exhibition in the summer of 2005 at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Mills Gallery included numerous projects: a series of performance events, site-specific installations, video projection, podcasts, blogs, potlucks, photography, and written documentation. Due to time constraints, I will discuss one part of this project, a monthly practice called “Bridging Performances.”

[10] On the first Friday of each month, the artists convened at the Boston Center for the Arts to conduct a “Bridging Performance.” These performances made use of the “instruction work” form as developed in the Fluxus and Conceptual art practices of the 1960s and 1970s as a way of creating “bridges” between places and communities in the South End neighborhood. Some performances took place only at the Boston Center for the Arts. For example, our performance instructions for February were:

Bridging Performance #3: Spacing
Date: Feb. 4, 2005
Mark the height. Collect heights from everyone walking by and entering the Mills Gallery on Feb. 4, 2005

Using wooden 2x4s we asked visitors to the gallery to have their height measured before they entered the space.Other performances, such as “Turn,” involved roving throughout the neighborhood:

Bridging Performance #8: Turn
Date: July 1, 2005
Choose someone on the street to follow. Follow them until they turn.

“Turn” had us following people in diverse ways, including walking, jogging and full-blown running. We traversed the South End in multiple directions over the course of two hours, led by whomever we had chosen to follow. These performances had an Internet presence as documentation on the project blog and were recreated for the final presentation in the Mills Gallery where visitors were invited to perform them.

[11] These performances consciously constructed encounters with excess—with that which was not yet known or conceived by the project’s collaborators—as a means of developing a more complex understanding of the places that we were researching. “Spacing” served as a way of personally meeting over 300 visitors to the Mills Gallery or those who were passing through the BCA plaza. Performing “Turn,” we traced the paths of approximately 15 residents and visitors to the neighborhood, including low-income families, yuppies, tourists and transients. In both cases, what began as an investigation of place (as the BSCG and the BCA) led us to navigating many other places—social, economic, geographic and virtual. Both instruction performances, and consequently the sites under study, spilled out into the surrounding neighborhood, into the gallery and onto the Internet.

Case Study #3: Itinerant (2005) by Teri Rueb

[12] “Itinerant” is a site-specific project by Teri Rueb commissioned by Turbulence.org and exhibited at the Judy Rotenberg gallery during the Boston Cyberarts Festival 2005. To experience the project, you must don a pair of headphones and carry a small PDA device. As you walk through the Boston Public Garden, the Boston Common, and the surrounding neighborhood, your location is tracked through a GPS system. Your presence in various locations triggers different sounds to play. The sounds include walking noises, passages from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, and spoken passages from Rueb’s own writing. Each sound piece is a micro-meditation on place and displacement, territory and exile. As you walk, you pass through a sound’s territory or “hotspot” and the sound begins to play. It plays only as long as you remain within its spatialized boundaries and then fades away. Frankenstein’s tale is interwoven with stories of another narrator’s uncle: an itinerant salesman, alcoholic and rambler who would disappear for years and send Christmas presents in July. The narrating voice changes often, and the work demands a close listening to constantly resituate yourself in relation to the narratives at play. At the same time as you are listening, your own walking takes you through the Public Garden and the Boston Common, the oldest park in the United States. The weekend scenery is leisurely and idyllic, yet not long ago the Common was used as Boston’s primary site for public hangings, which notably included hangings prompted by religious intolerance. As one moves through the garden while listening to the ostracized Monster and the vagrant uncle, they cannot help but wonder who is absent from the public space of the Common.

[13] Contained within any notion of community are those who are excluded and exiled. In her essay, Architectures of Excess, Elizabeth Grosz calls these “the remainders they cast out, the figures they reject, the terms that they consider unassimilable, that they attempt to sacrifice, revile and expel.” In “Itinerant,” Frankenstein and the uncle are excess, cast-aways, remainders. Yet, through constant displacement during the project, the walking participant is also cast in and cast out of physical and sonic boundaries. The walker embodies excess, the “too much” that overflows its place, leaks and spills over into the urban landscape. While the system itself is easily functional and navigable, the experience of it is messy, uncertain and liquid. It addresses a place of unified publicness—the Boston Common—as a multiplicity, a heterogenous space of shifting boundaries, contradictory narratives and displaced persons. One is no longer either inside or outside but in a position of becoming, always on the road to the next territory.

Case Study #4: Corporate Commands (2005) by the Institute for Infinitely Small Things

[14] Corporate Commands is an on-going project by the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, a Boston-based research organization whose mission is to invent and distribute new practices of political engagement in everyday life. Corporate commands are advertising messages from corporations addressed to an anonymous viewer in the imperative. These include well-known messages like “Just Do It,” “Think Different” and “Have it Your Way” along with other, stranger messages such as “Be More of a Woman,” and “Be Yourself Only Better.”

[15] The Institute collects corporate commands on its website. In January 2005, the Institute started conducting “research performances” of corporate commands in the Boston area. The goal of each performance is to attempt to perform the corporate command in the space where it occurs as literally as possible. This means that if Cingular Wireless tells you to “Rollover,” then you literally rollover, as we did in February 2005. During each performance, certain members of the Institute perform the action and others document the “results”—the actions of the Institute, the conversations with the public, any shifts in the way that the space is used - through a host of methods including field notes, video and digital images.

[16] The Institute has conducted over fifteen research performances in various locations (including malls and other quasi-public spaces) in the Greater Boston area. We have also partnered with the Berwick Research Institute and Arts in Progress to perform corporate commands with urban youth from Dudley Square. In each performance, we attempt to critically engage with corporate language in public space at the most pragmatic level: that of the body. We have very simple questions: What are corporations telling us to do? Where are they telling us to do it? What happens when we do it?

[17] Corporate Commands does not reveal the corporatization of public space so much as embody it, use it, and develop alternative ends (outside the logic of consumerism) that the corporate command might serve. What kinds of social encounters can be produced using the research performance as a backdrop? What might we learn from each other in these temporary communities? Who feels threatened by our impropriety? What are the social and political boundaries of the space around the command? In this sense, we use the command not as a protest, but as a passage: a way to make the consumer background of everyday life a means to reinvent everyday life itself, to reconstitute its boundaries, to have different conversations, and to stage encounters with what is alien and unrecognizable (such as people rolling around in white coats). The corporate command becomes a tool to stage encounters with excess.

Conclusion

[18] All of these projects are experiments in navigating excess. These projects work to “complexify” Boston: to actually produce more questions about a site, to create connections between disparate entities, and to introduce new, often unrecognizable structures of public participation at particular sites. This is what it means when a place is liquid—it is leaky, destabilized, contested and mutable. It is always in communication with its outsides. It is always exceeding its own boundaries. It is always opening itself to those whom it excludes. Each of these projects has engineered a way of encountering the excess of place, and addressing this excess without assimilation or unification (which would constitute a return to the solid).

[19] Moreover, these four cases for Boston as a liquid demonstrate a commitment to the politics of the liquid as the starting point for talking about something as complicated as community—how do we live together? Rather than seeking to assimilate and subsume excess under a shared sociopolitical territory or to establish separate spaces for what what is not included in “mainstream” space (women’s spaces, queer spaces, asian spaces, and so on), these projects allow for fluid passages and flows from one space and position to another. Rather than representing what is, they are oriented towards the potentiality of place, “the anticipation and welcoming of a future in which the present can no longer recognize itself.” For this reason, we might use Grosz’ term and call all of these projects “experiments in future living.”

Project References

Glowlab: Open Lab—www.artinteractive.org/shows/glowlab

Sifting the Inner Belt—www.siftingtheinnerbelt.com

Itinerant—www.turbulence.org/works/itinerant

Corporate Commands—www.corporatecommands.com

Works Cited

Grosz, Elizabeth. “Architectures of Excess”. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.

Fantômas

“Fantômas”
“What did you say?”
“I said: Fantômas.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Nothing … Everything”
“But what is it?”
“No one … And yet, yes, it is someone!”
“And what does this someone do?”
“Spread Terror!!”

(Opening lines of Fantômas, the first novel in the Fantômas series by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, popular in early twentieth century Paris)

A bout de souffle

With his last breath,

Michel whispers "It's disgusting",

but the policeman tells Patricia that he told her "you're disgusting"

The young Jean-Paul Belmondo, his face battered by boxing, was cast in the lead, modelling his manner on his idol, Humphrey Bogart. He is introduced as a petty street thief in Marseilles. En route to Paris in a stolen car, he kills a cop who tries to stop him. Later he holes up in the Paris apartment of an American girl (Jean Seberg) who ekes out a perilous living selling newspapers.

An informer (Godard himself) spots Belmondo, and the police offer her (Seberg) a deal that ends with her lover shot down on the street in front of her.

the last wave

The Last Wave (1977)

Directed by Peter Weir. Cast: Richard Chamberlain, Olivia Hamnett, Gulpilil, Frederick Parslow, Vivean Gray. The story of a lawyer defending a group of Australian aboriginals accused of killing one of their own. He suspects the victim has been killed for violating a tribal taboo, but the defendants deny any tribal association. Plagued by apocalyptic visions, he slowly realizes his own involvement with the aborigines... and their prophecies.

Plot

The film begins at an Australian school in the desert. Even though there are no clouds in the sky, the children hear thunder and a storm soon breaks out. In quick succession, a pounding rain, followed by grapefruit-sized hail, assail the schoolhouse. All while the sun is shining.

The rest of the film follows the personal journey of a corporate tax lawyer, plagued by recurring dream premonitions, who takes on the legal case of Aboriginals accused of murdering one of their group. The lawyer begins to suspect these are tribal Aboriginals living in the city, and that the death was a tribal killing (and subject to tribal law). As he questions one of the men, Chris, he suspects that his dreams are related to the case ... and to the increasingly strange weather phenomena besetting the city. As his dreams intensify, and his obsession with the murder case overcomes his life, the strange weather begins to bode of a coming apocalypse.

Rather than spell out the obvious spooky elements, Weir uses inference and mystery to build suspense. The film finally climaxes in a confrontation between the lawyer and the tribe's shaman in a subterranean sacred site beneath the city. The lawyer wins, killing the shaman and escapes to the surface to warn everyone about the Last Wave, but realises it's too late when he sees the wave bearing down on the city. The movie ends with shot of the lawyer collapsing in despair.

objecthood

Bidoun current issue on Objects
Bidoun Magazine and Bidoun.com Copyright 2007

NAGUIB MAHFOUZ'S WHITE LINEN SUIT
By Anand Balakrishnan

I was in Cairo, trying desperately to interview the aging pop star Ahmed Adaweya, whose penis, depending on whom you talk to, was or was not cut off by Saudi royalty. It was a uniquely American endeavor, mocked a friend of mine—invade the region with superior firepower, help topple a statue of Saddam Hussein, and then come in on a tourist visa to find a castrated singer.
"Next thing, you'll probably want to steal this guy's wife," my friend said, way too loudly, waving in the direction of a Sayeedi in the corner of the coffee shop where we sat. "You're like Genghis, but with loafers. You can just throw dollars at them. Or Michael Jackson records." I looked nervously over my shoulder at the Sayeedi, who was wearing a green djellaba. Thankfully, he seemed oblivious to my home-wrecker plan, his eyes glued to the flickering television set. 50 Cent had his shirt off and was bragging about his magic stick. His abs were glistening; they seemed almost extraterrestrial in their beauty. No one in the coffee shop was immune to their strange and terrifying allure.
"This is not the story of 50 Cent as object of the Sayeedi gaze," said my friend, touching my leg just above the knee. "This is the story of what you choose to see when you come to Egypt. All you see is castration."
"Isn't it better than being really into Umm Kulthum's glasses?" I asked. "Or Nasser's Hawaiian shirts? Or Sadat's car? Or Muhammad Naguib's presidency? Or Souad Hosni's white dress?" Ruby started dancing on the television. "Or Ruby's flared nostrils?" "Her nostrils are beautiful," said the coffee-shop owner. He finished adjusting the coals on our sheesha and blew his nose on the hem of his shirt. "I could write a ghazal about her nostrils."
"We're talking about Ahmed Adaweya's penis," announced my friend.
"Not much to talk about!" Exaggerated laughter. "Now Ruby's nostrils—there's an object worthy of being a subject!" He whistled lasciviously and traced the outlines of the female form as imagined by a horny monk—an infinity of rolling hills.
As he walked away, I tried to explain my idea about Adaweya. Because we spoke in Arabic, I used awkward, muddled phrases, each ending with a questioning lilt: It's about more than the rumored castration? It's about the history of Egyptian pop music? About the shift from classically trained poets and composers to working-class louts? About technology and the cassette tape? About the man who sold a million tapes, even though the government wouldn't allow his songs to be played on the radio? They were too lascivious? An allegory for the swamping of Egyptian nationalism by Saudi oil money?
"It's just so crass," my friend said. "You like Ahmed Adaweya because he's crass. You like him for the same reason you like this coffee shop, because it's crappy." He started pointing: the rickety wooden chairs with torn woven wicker seats, the dented, aluminum-topped tables, the grains of Keda tea floating in tepid water, the blanket of sawdust on the stained tile floor, the giant gap in the coffee-shop owner's top teeth, the subtle stench of garbage wafting in from the side alley, the spidery cracks that spanned the length of the walls, the sharp smell of butane from the gas stove, the single bulb swaying on a thin wire from the sooty ceiling ...
"What's wrong with Umm Kulthum?" he demanded. "What's wrong with being fascinated with Mahfouz or Abd al-Haleem Hafez or Fairuz? Something that requires a mastery of Arabic music or history or the goddamn language?"
"Yeah," said the coffee-shop owner, his jowls quivering with excitement, "and why don't you go to a nicer coffeeshop?"
"I'm leaving," the Sayeedi suddenly announced. He twirled his magnificent mustache, picked up his mysteriously bulky jute bag, and walked out of the coffee shop.
"Where is he going?" I demanded. My friend looked embarrassed. The coffee-shop owner ignored me. Outside, the Sayeedi hailed a minibus and got in, heading off to wherever it is that Sayeedis go. Where do Sayeedis go? Upper Egypt? Ain Shams? Ezbet el'Nakhl?
But this is not the Sayeedi's story. Nor is it the story of the Sayeedi's mustache, which nonetheless deserves a book-length study of its own. And it is most definitely not the story of Ahmed Adaweya, who is, let's face it, kind of crass. It is, rather, the story of Naguib Mahfouz, who turned out to be worthy of fascination after all.

It turns out that meeting a Nobel laureate is far easier than meeting a washed-up and possibly castrated pop star. The difficult part is figuring out what to wear.
In preparation for my interview with Mahfouz, I turned to the best-dressed man I knew, the owner of the corner store near my apartment. He was an old man, maybe sixty-five years old, and the very picture of worn elegance. He wore a three-piece suit to work every day and had four strands of hair on his head that he combed carefully. He even wore a fez, perched to display the four strands of hair.
He was very pleased that I was to meet Naguib Mahfouz. It was extremely important for a foreigner like me to meet someone like that. "There is no one alive in Egypt today who can take you into the heads of the people like Mahfouz can." He advised me, gravely, that I should take a notebook. "He will explain Egypt to you, so you can explain it to America."
He paused. "Of course, you've already read his books."
"Of course." Like everyone else, I had started and almost finished The Cairo Trilogy.
"Then you know that Ustez Mahfouz can describe anything." He looked around his store, at the artfully arranged pyramid of toilet paper, at the dark wood floor and polished glass surfaces. He was rightfully proud of his store. Though he sold the same Lux soap as every other store in Cairo, he sold it with dignity. After a moment, he pointed out the window at the coffee shop across the street, where I had been sitting with my friend.

THE HEADLACE OF XERXES
By Tom Morton

On a wall in the ruins of Persepolis, Iran, there is a relief sculpture of Xerxes the Great, king of the Persian Empire from 485 to 465 BC. Sitting straight-backed on a throne with his bare feet resting on a dainty stool (the better not to touch the humdrum earth), he wears long, pleated robes and holds a lotus flower, symbol of his eternal dominance, in his left hand. Beneath his crown froths a fulsome head of hair, and from his chin juts a great crocheted beard, as long and as thick as his upper arm. Half-god, half-barroom bruiser, this Xerxes seems more than capable of keeping most of the known world under his thumb.
Fast-forward to 2007 and the release of Zach Snyder's 300. Based on a 1998 Frank Miller comic book of the same name, the film recounts the tale of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, in which three hundred Spartan warriors held off a vast Persian invasion force (Herodotus reports an improbable and improbably specific 5,283,220 men) for three days in a famous last stand that gave the united Greek city-states time to assemble a fleet that would banish Xerxes's troops from Greece forever. Snyder, however, evokes Thermopylae as a metaphor for present-day tensions between the West and Islam, and more particularly between America and Iran something not lost on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose blustery spokesman, Gholamhossein Elham, described the film as an act of "cultural and psychological warfare." And yet, while there is much that is politically suspect about 300, this CGI-heavy, nu-metal-sound-tracked adolescent power fantasy fails in its mission to equate the Spartan king Leonidas's band of outnumbered brothers with George W. Bush's military-industrial machine.
In his essay "The True Hollywood Left," Slavoj Zizek asks whether the Spartans "with their discipline and spirit of sacrifice [are] not much closer to something like the Taliban defending Afghanistan against the US occupation (or, as a matter of fact, the elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard ready to sacrifice itself in the case of an American invasion?)." Well, perhaps. But what's most interesting about 300 is not that the supposed heroes, with their ripped abs, rubber briefs, and taste for infanticide, are so unappealing; rather, it's that the villain is so unintentionally attractive. Elsewhere in his essay, Zizek describes Snyder's depiction of the Persian court as "a kind of multicultural different-lifestyles paradise [where] everyone participates in orgies[:] different races, lesbians and gays, cripples etc." At its center stands Xerxes the Great. But this Xerxes is not the Achaemenid alpha male of the Persepolis reliefs. Rather, as portrayed by the beautiful Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro, 300's Xerxes is Middle America's every subterranean fear and desire brought to burnished, glittering life. His unstable ethnicity flickers between southern European, sub-Saharan African, Arab, and Persian. He's a poster boy for miscegenation, containing within himself a genetic trace of every subject race in his continent-spanning empire. Standing some eight feet tall, he is possessed of a Brad Pitt-in-Fight Club (1999) musculature and a rumbling voice to rival Barry White's. Yet despite these signifiers of heterosexual hypermasculinity, he has a certain joyfully swishy quality, taking languorous sniffs of Leonidas's scalp when they meet to parley, wearing clear lip gloss, and dressing like the sartorial stepchild of Liberace and Dhalsim from Street Fighter II (1991). (In a recent South Park spoof of 300, Xerxes is depicted as an Iranian club owner who attempts to buy up an American lesbian bar named "Les Bos" and refurbish it with "blue carpets and gold curtain rods," only to fall in love with one of the protesting customers and reveal himself to be a drag king. Try applying your postcolonial queer theory to that.)
The only facial hair Snyder's Xerxes seems to possess is his exquisitely plucked eyebrows. Chains snake across his bald pate, and his smooth cheeks and chin are pierced with rings that glisten and shiver with every grimace or sigh. If these historically anomalous accessories are intended to suggest that the king is an S&M enthusiast, they also, in their asymmetric, almost haphazard, distribution, hint at another sexual peccadillo what the American porn industry charmingly terms "getting a facial," which is to say kneeling down before a masturbating man so that he might ejaculate on one's face. (Significantly, "facial" scenes are often filmed from the standing perspective, allowing the viewer to fantasize that it is he who is, um, delivering the goods.)
In a movie that seeks to portray the Persian king as effeminate a move beloved of Western Orientalists since Herodotus's Polymnia reading these baubles as blobs of semen seems oddly reasonable and becomes even more so when we consider the role proskynesis, or ritual prostration, plays in this tale. Snyder's 300 is all about not kneeling before a king only slaves and traitors do so, here and the implication is that by wearing these gilded sperm proxies, Xerxes is demonstrating that he bends the knee to a higher power. If Snyder is using this device to contrast masculine, rationalist, straight (ha!) Sparta with feminine, mystic, polymorphously perverse Persia, it's hard to know whether to find it grossly offensive or merely to laugh. With their Muscle Mary glutes and wipe-clean underwear, Leonidas and company look just about as gay as it gets, and one is tempted to suspect the director of a secret, shaming crush on them, like the homophobic frat boy who nurtures private fantasies of rubbing Deep Heat into the star quarterback's tectonic shoulder blades. Curiously, the director's other creation, the fictionalized Xerxes, is far better adjusted and seems to find his own ambiguous relationship with sex and power rather fun. An out bi man with the world at his feet, he wears his kinks on his sleeve, or rather his face.
In the concluding battle scene in 300, Leonidas, the sole remaining Spartan, hurls a spear at Xerxes in a final act of defiance. The historical Xerxes did not die at Thermopylae, of course, so Snyder has the spear glance his cheek, ripping out several of his ringlike facial piercings in a slo-mo spurt of blood. Some critics have interpreted this as the moment when the Persian king becomes aware of his mortality, the freedom-loving Spartan having divested him, albeit briefly, of the metaphoric ties that bind him to the idea that he is a living god. Me, I just think he looks disappointed. This Xerxes knows just what to do with a Spartan's spear, but it's not blood he had hoped to be wiping from his chin.

Bidoun Magazine and Bidoun.com Copyright 2007