il n'y a pas La femme

Music: Martha Wainwright: [self-titled] (2004)

On Thursday Paris Hilton was released from jail because of an undisclosed medical condition; the sheriff claimed it is in the right of the police department to determine where she serves her sentence. Enraged, Thursday night the court of the judge that sentenced Hilton held a press conference designed to lure the district attorney into discussions. The talk on Friday morning's "news" shows was that Paris would be returning to jail; Saturday morning I learned she was back behind bars.

The debate among pundits this weekend is whether Paris is receiving "special treatment" or being "singled out" (of course the drama is symptomatic of both). I've marveled at the righteous anger of some commentators, who are jubilant after seeing images of Paris in handcuffs, Paris in tears, and so on. I'm not sure when I've seen so much smugness on the screen for quite some time.

As I've argued elsewhere, owning to the transgressive foundation of celebrity, there is no way to treat Paris like---as one commentator this morning put it---"a black guy from Compton." Similar to Martha Stewart, Paris had to be singled-out for our all-too-familiar pedagogy of patriarchy: women are always subject to the law, and even more precisely, transgressive women will always be subject to re-circulation. In our media-saturated age of surveillance and publicity, what was once the economy of women has now become the circulatory network of women, a spectacle in which the image or figure of a certain transgressive woman is "reset" into the imaginary of state power (the ruse of what Patemen calls "male sex-right"). Prior to Stewart and Hilton, the most conspicuous fantasy of re-circulation was the so-called runaway bride, the woman who got away.

The older idea of the economy of women is usually traced back to Levi-Strauss' Structural Anthropology---a book used to bore poor undergraduates in phenomenology classes to tears, but which said undergraduates eventually learn to appreciate because, despite fabricated data, the theory is useful. Owing to their status as bearers of culture (think here of deBeauvoir's riffs in The Second Sex), in a relatively famous passage Levi-Strauss compares the function of women in various kinship systems to words:

We may now ask whether, in extending the concept of communication so as to make it include exogamy and the rules flowing form the prohibition of incest, we may not, reciprocally, achieve insight into a problem that is still very obscure, the origin of language. . . . It is generally recognized that words are signs; but poets are practically the only ones who know that words were also once values [he neglects Nietzsche here, of course]. As against this, women are held by the social group to be values of the most essential kind, though we have difficulty in understanding how these values become integrated in systems endowed with a significant function. This ambiguity is clearly manifested in the reactions of persons who, on the basis of the analysis of social structures referred to, have laid against it the charge of 'anti-feminism,' because women are referred to as objects. Of course, it may be disturbing to some to have women conceived as mere parts of a meaningful system. However, one should keep in mind that the processes by which phonemes and words have lost . . . their character of value, to become reduced to pure signs, will never lead to the same results in matters concerning women. For words do not speak, while women do; as producers of signs, women can never be reduced to the status of symbols or tokens. (pp. 61-62)

Of course---and I'm sure you can see where this is going---my point is that in the shift from economy to network women are precisely that: they are reduced to the status of a token of value and exchange. In his characteristically faux-offensive way, Lacan charged that Levi-Strauss hedged a bit too much here: "It is as a result of the same mechanism that women in the real order serve [viz., primary/imaginary identification with the maternal phallus], if they'll forgive me saying so, as objects for the exchanges required by the elementary structures of kinship . . . (Ecrits p. 207)." As the primal or "elementary" bearers of value, women are figured in Freud's second Oedipal story of the primal horde, that gang that kills the father devours him, pissed off about the Mac-Daddy's unbridled enjoyment and hoarding of women. Lacan's reading of the whole situation is that these mythic stories outline the notion of an economy broadly speaking---any system of the exchange of values, and the most fundamental that of language itself. The equivocation of women, the phallus, money, and words thus speaks to a logic of symbolic (and imaginary) circulation that effects the lives of real women in ways that have been thoroughly discussed (e.g., Luce Irigaray's work, Judith Butler on Lacan, and so on).

When confronting the complicated French theory on sexuation and the status of woman in psychoanalysis, one is frequently tempted to dismiss the whole lot of it as high-fahlootin' hogwash. Yet when I see stories like the imprisonment of Hilton—her release, her return to prison, and so on—it is not difficult to see Levi-Strauss in all of this, to see the machinations of the symbolic order, to see Hilton as figure or token value exchanged among communities of men as yet another civic lesson over the real body of a woman. The public punishment of Hilton is more than ironic, of course, because Hilton has freely submitted to her own reduction; I suppose the double irony of the drama---to me, anyway---is the Paris-hatred of other women legal experts. They seem to regard Hilton as a universal type when, of course, the publicity of her disciplining exposes the logic of re-circulation for what it is: an economy of exchange.

If not Hilton, then someone else: Lindsay Lohan, the Runaway Bride, Madonna, Hillary Clinton. Men can, though rarely do, get inserted into this re-circulatory spectacle (I cannot think of a situation off hand, but he would be somewhat hysterical; heck, I think children fit the bill here too, in some disconcerting ways). And in this sense we'd do well to heed Levi-Strauss when he says that "as producers of signs, women can never be reduced to the status of symbols or tokens," to which we would add "completely" for our times. Unlike men, real women are not subject to generalization; they cannot be universalized. It is the general unwillingness to admit that Freud's woman as a "dark continent" is in some sense right that leads to the hostility and anger. What I find particularly instructive in Lacan's re-reading of Freud's misogyny is that he argues that, yes, "male" is the paradigm of the symbolic, but not necessarily so, and that this phallogocentrism is a problem (and also why the male is universalized). These public spectacles of re-circulation/valuation that attempt to reduce women to "coins that have lost their embossing"---to the purity of the phoneme---both re-assert patriarchy and deny the ungeneralizability of woman (as a figure outside of discourse except in terms of token). I recall that at her sentencing Hilton pleaded that she just did "what my publicist told me to do"---which, of course, is no different than becoming a ward of the state (moving from agent to guard, from one Daddy to another). Am I a woman? is the question Hilton seems to betoken. The answer is that communication as such is impossible.

Well, I realize this rumination on Paris and the question of woman isn't quite coherent—I'm just blogging aloud. Perhaps I'll "pull it together" in a more essayistic way sometime. I guess the lesson here is that one can neither be, nor control, the Word. Poets know this; Jack Spicer spent his life trying to teach us this (and drinking because he had trouble with his own lesson); and to some extent I think Judith Butler is a "chair of rhetoric" to help us with a similar kind of reckoning.

I've been reading Walter Ong this week. A new favorite quote seems to sum it up: "These media are a great but distracting boon. They overwhelm us and give our concept of the word special contours which can interfere with our understanding of what the word in truth is, and thus can distort the relevance of the word to ourselves" (Presence of the Word, p. x).