NOT "clickbait" . . .
Wikipedia: Pornography
This page documents some of the discussions the Wikipedia community have had regarding matters related to pornography. While there is no formal policy, the Wikipedia: Profanity guideline has the advice:
"Words and images that would be considered offensive, profane, or obscene by typical Wikipedia readers should be used if and only if their omission would cause the article to be less informative, relevant, or accurate, and no equally suitable alternatives are available. Including information about offensive material is part of Wikipedia's encyclopedic mission; being offensive is not.". . . and so it is with this blog."clickbait" & the use of Art and/or Pornography
Abduction!This image, a painting by Évariste-Vital Luminais is used in an article published by History Ireland, Ireland's History Magazine, in May/June 2009. The title of Luminais' painting is "Norman Pirates in the 9th century". He is best known for works depicting early French history, and so the type of subject matter Luminais chose for his painting, along with many other historical subjects, led to the artist being sometimes called "the painter of the Gauls".
Slave Traders
The article in History Ireland is headlined The Viking slave trade: entrepreneurs or heathen slavers?, and is referenced in a Re:LODE Cargo of Questions page in the Ceatharlach Information Wrap - Arrivals.
The relationship of the LODE Re:LODE project to information remains critical and questioning, hence the requirement to contextualise the presenting of such information and imagery in this way.
For example: It may have some contextual value to access information about the artwork or artist being used as documentation or as an illustration.
Évariste-Vital Luminais
So, this page addresses the use of imagery as "bait" in the particular information environments encountered in the LODE Re:LODE art project under the heading:
"clickbait"
Acceptable versus Unacceptable?
In this article the discussion on Pornography comes before Art - Up Front!
Pornography - the depiction of prostitution
. . . . a street in Rome.Prostitute is derived from the Latin prostituta. Some sources cite the verb as a composition of "pro" meaning "up front" or "forward" and "stituere", defined as "to offer up for sale".
The depiction of slavery . . . at the slave market.
Up front . . .
. . . and from the back
"clickbait"
A new "portmanteau" word from the 1990's, combining "click" on the link, as with hypertext and hyperlinks, with "bait", as in to "entice" or "entrap" our attention whilst browsing on the internet.
Baggage?The word portmanteau was first used in this sense by Lewis Carroll in the book Through the Looking-Glass (1871), in which Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of the unusual words in "Jabberwocky", where slithy means "slimy and lithe" and mimsy is "miserable and flimsy". Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the practice of combining words in various ways:You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.
In then-contemporary English, a portmanteau was a suitcase that opened into two equal sections.
This kind of imagery is clickbait, and along with our short attention span, there comes a lot of baggage.Hence the need for some kind of annotation on the part of this project for the reproduction of this archival imagery.
Jimmy Wales - Pornographer?
FAKE NEWS!
Art coming up behind Pornography?
"clickbait" & "Classical" subject matter?
Conspiracy, Racism, Pornography, Democracy?
This image of five naked black men and one blonde white woman is a racialised image, and pornographic because it depicts five erect penises.
When it comes to the "paranoid style" in the ongoing and present global culture wars, Gordon Fraser, who argues that conspiracy theories after the middle of the twentieth century proliferated to such a degree that Hofstadter's imagined, rationally liberal audience no longer exists, if it ever existed in the first place, writes his own essay:
Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy: The Recurrent Aesthetics of the American Illuminati
The Abstract for Gordon Fraser's essay Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy: The Recurrent Aesthetics of the American Illuminati describes the essay's argument thus:
This essay examines reactionary, countersubversive fictions produced in the context of two conspiracy theories in the United States: the Illuminati crisis (1798–1800) and Pizzagate (2016–17). The author suggests that both cases emblematize a pornotropic aesthetic, a racialized sadomasochism that recurs across United States culture. Building on the work of Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye, Jennifer Christine Nash, and others, this essay argues that observers should understand countersubversive political reaction as an aesthetic project, a pornotropic fantasy that distorts underlying conditions of racial subjection. In the context of a resurgent far right that describes its enemies as “cuckolds” and frequently deploys the tropes of highly racialized pornography, this essay suggests that we might find the deep origins of pornographic, reactionary paranoia in the eighteenth century. It suggests, moreover, that understanding and contesting the underlying conditions of racial subjection require that scholars consider the power of pornotropic, countersubversive aesthetics to bring pleasure, to move people, and to order the world.
It is the organising idea emerging from the work of Hortense Spillers that Re:LODE Radio foregrounds here, the concept of the sexualization of black bodies. In "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" Spillers states that the black community is "captive" and treated as a "living laboratory".
In this essay Spillers creates a distinction in the case between "body" and "flesh"
The body, in this case, is representative of the captor whose existence represents that of the free or the "liberated subject-position[s]". "Body" is a discrete entity whereas "flesh" is related to desire, sexualization, and that the flesh is an undistinguished mass of black people; particularly black women.
The massification of black bodies stems back to her point about black people becoming "ungendered". To her, "gendering" took place within domesticity, which gained power through cultural fictions of "the specificity of proper names". While Spillers's explication of the body/flesh binary naturally lends itself towards a discussion of heteronormative gender relations, her reading of the black body as becoming a site of ungendering points to a queering of our understanding of Western domesticity and with it the place of both black men and women in Western society.
In a 2006 interview entitled, "Whatcha Gonna Do?—Revisiting Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" Spillers was interviewed by Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Jennifer L. Morgan, and Shelly Eversley. In that interview Spillers shares insight into her writing process, and her interviewers collectively elucidate the seismic impact of the essay on the conceptual vocabulary available to subsequent generations of Black Feminist scholars.She states that she wrote "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" with a sense of hopelessness. She was in part writing in response to All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982). Spillers was writing to a moment in history where the importance of black women in critical theory was being denied. She wrote with a sense of urgency in order to create a theoretical taxonomy for black women to be studied in the academy.
All the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave . . .
. . . is a landmark feminist anthology in Black Women's Studies printed in numerous editions, co-edited by Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith.
In Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, Kimberlé Crenshaw begins her argument with a reference to this work. She says:
One of the very few Black women's studies books is entitled All the Women Are White; All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us are Brave. I have chosen this title as a point of departure in my efforts to develop a Black feminist criticism because it sets forth a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis.
It was in this 1989 paper that Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality as a way to help explain the oppression of African-American women. Crenshaw's term is now at the forefront of national conversations about racial justice, identity politics, and policing—and over the years has helped shape legal discussions. In her work, Crenshaw discusses Black feminism, arguing that the experience of being a black woman cannot be understood in terms independent of either being black or a woman. Rather, it must include interactions between the two identities, which, she adds, should frequently reinforce one another.In order to show that non-white women have a vastly different experience from white women due to their race and/or class and that their experiences are not easily voiced or amplified, Crenshaw explores two types of male violence against women: domestic violence and rape. Through her analysis of these two forms of male violence against women, Crenshaw says that the experiences of non-white women consist of a combination of both racism and sexism. She says that because non-white women are present within discourses that have been designed to address either race or sex — but not both at the same time — non-white women are marginalized within both of these systems of oppression as a result.In her work, Crenshaw identifies three aspects of intersectionality that affect the visibility of non-white women: structural intersectionality, political intersectionality, and representational intersectionality.
Structural intersectionality deals with how non-white women experience domestic violence and rape in a manner qualitatively different than that of white women. Structural intersectionality is used to describe how different structures work together and create a complex which highlights the differences in the experiences of women of colour with domestic violence and rape. Structural intersectionality entails the ways in which classism, sexism, and racism interlock and oppress women of colour while molding their experiences in different arenas. Crenshaw's analysis of structural intersectionality was used during her field study of battered women. In this study, Crenshaw uses intersectionality to display the multilayered oppressions that women who are victims of domestic violence face.
Political intersectionality examines how laws and policies intended to increase equality have paradoxically decreased the visibility of violence against non-white women. Political intersectionality highlights two conflicting systems in the political arena, which separates women and women of colour into two subordinate groups. The experiences of women of colour differ from those of white women and men of colour due to their race and gender often intersecting. White women suffer from gender bias, and men of colour suffer from racial bias; however, both of their experiences differ from that of women of color, because women of colour experience both racial and gender bias. According to Crenshaw, a political failure of the antiracist and feminist discourses was the exclusion of the intersection of race and gender that places priority on the interest of "people of color" and "women", thus disregarding one while highlighting the other. Political engagement should reflect support of women of colour; a prime example of the exclusion of women of colour that shows the difference in the experiences of white women and women of colour is the women's suffrage march.
Finally, representational intersectionality delves into how pop culture portrayals of non-white women can obscure their own authentic lived experiences. Representational intersectionality advocates for the creation of imagery that is supportive of women of colour. Representational intersectionality condemns sexist and racist marginalization of women of colour in representation. Representational intersectionality also highlights the importance of women of colour having representation in media and contemporary settings.
As in Playboy?
The African American female model featured here as the Playboy Playmate of the Year is Eugena Washington. When it comes to Representational Intersectionality it goes without saying that Eugena Washington has her own voice in sharing her experience of being a professional model in an industry that commodifies the "body" as an image and a "sign".
Her professional "breakthrough" came when Eugena Washington was chosen to be the Playboy Playmate of the Month for December 2015 and Playmate of the Year 2016. She was only the third African American to be so named. She was also the first Playmate of the Year after Playboy eliminated its Centerfold.
In Playboy magazine's post-nude era, she was the first Playmate of the Year, and was the last to be announced by Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion. Previously, back in 2006, her career as a model was launched when Eugena Washington became the second runner-up on America's Next Top Model, Cycle 7.
Q. Was coming third a kind of humiliation? Or, a game plan?
Eugena speaks candidly about her experience on YouTube with Oliver Twix.
Oliver Twixt says:
Watch this video to get the behind the scenes secrets and tea on Cycle 7 of the hit reality tv show 'America's Next Top Model' from fan favorite, Eugena Washington! She reveals how having bad blood with Tyra Banks, even revealing Tyra potentially selecting bad best photos for her to "humble" her and even being told by fellow Top model alumn Mame that Tyra referred to Eugena as a "bitch" during filming for Cycle 22. SO MUCH TEA! She also talks about Melrose, AJ, Jessica, CarrieDee, the twins Amanda and Michelle, Anchal, and controversial contestant Monique, She also touched on Mr. Jay Manuel and Miss Jay Alexander. Washington tells a shady story about Nigel Barker after the show, too. Finally, she talks about her historic career with Playboy. We even talk about Nicki Minaj and Azealia Banks.
The seventh cycle of America's Next Top Model started airing on September 20, 2006 as the first to be aired on The CW network.
The season's catch-phrase was "The Competition Won't Be Pretty." The season's promotional theme song was "Hot Stuff (I Want You Back)" by Pussycat Dolls.
To hustle, or not to hustle? That is the question!
After finishing in the top three on America's Next Top Model, Eugena Washington had a plan for paving her own lane in the industry, which eventually led to her becoming a Playboy Playmate of the Year. Watch the supermodel share her story and the keys to making her dream a reality.
Whether this video of Eugena Washington, intelligently reflecting on her experience of the competition, is to some extent a post rationalisation or not, the message that comes through is that success in this highly competitive media sector relies on taking a strategic approach.
This is some of her story . . .
If Representational Intersectionality highlights the importance of women of colour having representation in media and contemporary settings, then the career of of Eugena Washington is a case in point.
However, when it comes to a consideration of Spiller's notion of the pornotropic aesthetic, then things and images do not lie so easily.
For Eugena Washington the professional experience of modelling, and being photographed naked, is normalised and validated as essentially aesthetic, and therefore not predominantly sexual, or sexualised, in the ongoing production of imagery that, while being "artistic", is classifiable in the category of softcore pornography.
Originally, softcore pornography was presented mainly in the form of "men's magazines", when it was barely acceptable to show a glimpse of a woman's nipple in the 1950s. By the 1970s, in such mainstream magazines as Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler, no region of the female body was considered off limits. This accepted, normalised, but gendered convention, did not admit the depiction of erections of the penis. Softcore pornography allows the inclusion of sexual activity between two people or masturbation, but it does not contain explicit depictions of sexual penetration, cunnilingus, fellatio, or ejaculation. That's hardcore! Commercial pornography can be differentiated from erotica, which has high-art aspirations, or pretensions, according to at least two different and divergent "points of view". Somehow, by the time Playboy presents Eugena as Playmate of the Year in 2016, the classic Playboy aesthetic occupies a "liminal" zone somewhere between softcore porn and the aesthetics of erotica.
Adjacent to this "liminal" zone is a space where the pornotropic aesthetic intrudes, albeit surreptitiously, under the guise of "art".
This is a recent cover for treats, featuring the African American woman of colour Eugena Washington. Treats is an American limited-edition erotica and fine arts magazine that is primarily available by subscription. The magazine, which debuted in 2011, is described as a quarterly although it was initially only published twice a year. Adam Tschorn of the Los Angeles Times noted that his "copilot" felt that the magazine's nude photography was "virtually indistinguishable" from Playboy's despite the "fine arts quarterly" billing. Indeed, the photographer for this cover is the same Josh Ryan who photographed Eugena Washington for the Playmate of the Month feature for the December 2015 issue of Playboy.
But something is happening here that you need to understand, Mr. Jones!
Q. What is represented here?
A. The supine body of an African American woman of colour, seemingly entangled in the kind of rope normally associated with the materials supplied by a maritime chandler.
All other possible, and multiple associations are crowded out by the obvious. The contrasts embedded in this aesthetic, add up to an indexical sign system. The naked and beautiful woman, of African descent, the rope, the dark interior, all point to the "horror", the "horror" and the "horror", of the "middle passage" and the "heart of darkness".
National Museums Liverpool with its webpages on the History of Slavery, and Black Lives Matter, have a webpage describing the appalling conditions suffered by those on board enslaver ships plying their trade on The Middle Passage.
In King Leopold's Ghost (1998), Adam Hochschild wrote that literary scholars have made too much of the psychological aspects of Heart of Darkness, while paying scant attention to Conrad's accurate recounting of the "horror" arising from the methods and effects of colonialism in the Congo Free State. "Heart of Darkness is experience ... pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case".
Disconcertingly, Josh Ryan's photo is lightly veiled in the guise of a tableau vivant, reminiscent of the Ziegfeld Follies, rather than a vehicle to carry the idea and/or the reality of the experience of of slavery.
The tableau vivant is itself another trope in the textual techniques and conjured imagery to be found in the writings of the Marquis De Sade.
The techniques of De Sade are considered by Roland Barthes in his book: Sade, Fourier, Loyola: (1976). He discusses the role of the tableau vivant in a section on De Sade headed:
Scene, Machine, Writing
"What a lovely group!" La Durande exclaims, seeing Juliette "occupied by four thieves from Ancona. The Sadian group is often a pictorial or sculptural object: the discourse captures the figures of debauchery not only as arranged, architectured, but above all as frozen, framed, lighted; it treats them as tableau vivants. This form of theater has been little studied, doubtless because no one does it anymore. However, must we be reminded that for a long time the tableau vivant was a bourgeois entertainment, analagous to the charade? As a child, the present author on several occasions attended, at pious and provincial charity bazaars, performances of grand tableau vivants - Sleeping Beauty, for example, he did not know that this social game is of the same fantasmatic essence as the Sadian tableau; perhaps he came to understand that later by observing that the filmic photogram is opposed to film itself because of a split which is not created by its having been extracted (one immobilizes and publishes a scene taken from a great film), but, one might say, by its having been perverted: the tableau vivant, despite the apparently total character of the figuration, is a fetish object (to immobilize, to light, to frame, means to cut up), whereas film, as function, is an hysterical activity (the cinema does not consist in animating images, the opposition between photography and film is not that of the fixed and the mobile image, cinema consists not in figuring, but in a system's being made to function)
An illustration to De Sade's Juliette
Now, despite the predominance of tableau, this split exists in Sadian text and, it appears, for the same purposes. For the "group" which is in fact a photogram of debauchery, is contrasted here and there with a moving scene. The vocabulary charged with denoting this commotion within the group (which virtually changes its nature, philosophically) is an extensive one (to execute, to continue, to vary, to break up, to disarrange). We know that this functioning scene is nothing but a machine without subject, since there is even an automatic ticking ("Minski approaches the hitched-up creature and fondles his buttocks, bites them, and all the women instantly form six ranks").
The rope! And hands tied!
What does this imagery signify?
Don't ask the meaning! Ask the use!
(Axiom borrowed from the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein)This image was used for the Guardian - The briefing (Mon 25 Feb 2019) by Kate Hodal on how slavery affects more than 40 million people worldwide – more than at any other time in history. The briefing is headlined:
One in 200 people is a slave. Why?
This image is capable of signifying . . .
. . . slavery!
Three years earlier the same Shutterstock image was used for an article in The Conversation by Kevin Bales, Professor of Contemporary Slavery, University of Hull (June 7, 2016).
The headline for the article runs:
Modern slave trade: how to count a ‘hidden’ population of 46 million
The Wikipedia article on the Atlantic slave trade contains an image of this painting in the article's margin on the history of the slave trade during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.
The painting's title is The Slave Trade (1840) and is by François-Auguste Biard. The aesthetic values of this work effortlessly accommodate the brutal branding of a young African woman as she is translated from the state of humanity to one of property (see detail below).
Alexander G. Weheliye's article Pornotropes (April 2008 Journal of Visual Culture 7, according to the Abstract for the article, . . .
. . . foregrounds the link between slavery and sexuality explored by Hortense Spillers . . .
. . . what Spillers calls pornotroping . . .
. . . and which exposes some of the limitations of Giorgio Agamben's `homo sacer' (sacred man) figure by calling attention to how political violence frequently produces forces that exceed it.
Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (carried forth from the work of Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. More recently Agamben, has courted controversy in an article published by Il Manifesto on 26 February 2020, promoting the misinformation that the COVID-19 pandemic was an "invention":
"In order to make sense of the frantic, irrational, and absolutely unwarranted emergency measures adopted for a supposed epidemic of coronavirus, we must begin from the declaration of the Italian National Research Council (NRC), according to which 'there is no SARS-CoV2 epidemic in Italy.' and 'the infection, according to the epidemiological data available as of today and based on tens of thousands of cases, causes light/moderate symptoms (a variant of flu) in 80-90% of cases. In 10-15%, there is a chance of pneumonia, but which also has a benign outcome in the large majority of cases. We estimate that only 4% of patients require intensive therapy.'"A case of intellectual arrogance, and ignorance, in the face of reality?
On this Re:LODE Radio passes and returns to the matters raised in Alexander G. Weheliye's article Pornotropes, where there's an analysis of the film Sankofa.
Sankofa is a 1993 Ethiopian-produced drama film directed by Haile Gerima centred on the Atlantic slave trade. The word Sankofa derives its meaning from the Ghanaian Akan language which means to "go back, look for, and gain wisdom, power and hope," and stresses the importance of not drifting too far from one's past in order to progress in the future. Gerima uses the journey of the character Mona, a photographer's model, to show how the African perception of identity included recognising where you come from and "returning to one’s source" (Gerima).
The film opens with the scene of an elderly Divine Drummer, Sankofa, beating on African drums and chanting the phrase "Lingering spirit of the dead, rise up." This is a direct communication with the ancestors of the African lands, specifically Ghana, and bringing the spirit of his ancestors who were killed in the African diaspora back home.
The story then goes on to show Mona, a contemporary African-American model on a film shoot in Ghana. She has a session at Cape Coast Castle, which she does not know was historically used for the Atlantic slave trade. While Mona is on the beach modeling, she encounters the mysterious old man Sankofa. Sankofa tells Mona to return to her past. When Mona decides to go take a look inside the castle herself, she gets trapped inside and enters a sort of trance in which she is surrounded by chained slaves who appear to have risen from the dead.
Mona attempts to run out of the slave castle and is met by white slave masters who she tries to reason with and claiming that she is of American descent and not of African descent. The slave masters pay no attention to Mona's claim and push her to a fire, strip off her clothing, and put a hot iron on her back.
Mona is then transported into the body of a house servant named Shola "to live the life of her enslaved ancestors." She is taken to the Lafayette plantation in the Southern United States where she suffers abuse by her slave masters and becomes a victim of rape.
Ostensibly an uplifting narrative about the horrors of slavery, Alexander G. Weheliye's article considers the risk that the cinematic depiction of the historical reality of slavery cannot help but eroticise the brutality that the filmmaker seeks to denounce, and which demonstrates the visual logic of pornotroping. Is this a problem that originates in film and is embedded in cinema, and therefore a quality immanent in the medium itself?
Medium HOT? Medium COOL?
So, back to the Playboy Interview with Marshall McLuhan to help answer these questions!
In this interview McLuhan explains this essential difference between a high definition media technology and a low definition medium. In Understanding Media McLuhan has a chapter titled Media Hot and Cold where he says:
A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition."Speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener.
On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience.
Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.
Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium.Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than dialogue.
Some Like It HOT!
Film, or the "Movies", or "Cinema", or High Definition Video formats are therefore HOT!
McLuhan's take on the movies, or the Reel World, in Understanding Media includes these pointers as a way to understand how the medium of film is itself the message. He says:
Movies as a nonverbal form of experience are like photography, a form of statement without syntax. In fact, however, like the print and the photo, movies assume a high level of literacy in their users and prove baffling to the nonliterate.
It was Rene Clair who pointed out that if two or three people were together on a stage, the dramatist must ceaselessly motivate or explain their being there at all. But the film audience, like the book reader, accepts mere sequence as rational. Whatever the camera turns to, the audience accepts. We are transported to another world. As Rene Clair observed, the screen opens its white door into a harem of beautiful visions and adolescent dreams, compared to which the loveliest real body seems defective.
The close relation, then, between the reel world of film and the private fantasy experience of the printed word is indispensable to our Western acceptance of the film form. Even the film industry regards all of its greatest achievements as derived from novels, nor is this unreasonable. Film, both in its reel form and in its scenario or script form, is completely involved with book culture.
. . . the screen opens its white door into a harem of beautiful visions and adolescent dreams, compared to which the loveliest real body seems defective.
Film, both in its reel form and in its scenario or script form, is completely involved with book culture. All one need do is to imagine for a moment a film based on newspaper form in order to see how close film is to the book. Theoretically, there is no reason why the camera should not be used to photograph complex groups of items and events in dateline configurations, just as they are presented on the page of a newspaper.
The realistic novel, that arose with the newspaper form of communal cross-section and human-interest coverage in the eighteenth century, was a complete anticipation of film form.
Hot stuff? The book, the genre, the film and how realism conforms to the pornotropic?
Re:LODE Radio attempts to consider how these "understandings" point to the pornotropic aesthetic as it applies to 12 Years a Slave, the 2013 biographical period-drama film directed by Steve McQueen, an adaptation of the 1853 slave memoir Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup. The writer for this film was John Ridley but the starting point for the film project began when the director's partner, Bianca Stigter, came across Northup's 1853 memoir, a "realistic account" of a New York State-born free African-American man who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., by two conmen in 1841 and sold into slavery. Northup was put to work on plantations in the state of Louisiana for 12 years before being released. The first scholarly edition of Northup's memoir, co-edited in 1968 by Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon, carefully retraced and validated the account and concluded it to be accurate. Other characters in the film were also real people, including Edwin and Mary Epps, and Patsey.
McQueen later told an interviewer:"I read this book, and I was totally stunned. At the same time, I was pretty upset with myself that I didn't know this book. I live in Amsterdam where Anne Frank is a national hero, and for me, this book read like Anne Frank's diary but written 97 years before – a firsthand account of slavery. I basically made it my passion to make this book into a film."
Historian James Olney has observed that "slave autobiographies, when read one next to another, display an 'overwhelming sameness.'" That is, though the autobiography by definition suggests a unique and personal story, that slave narratives present a genre of autobiographies that tell essentially the same story. When read in conjunction, as in this anthology, there is a distinct repetitiveness. While this repetitiveness disallows the creativity and shaping of one's personal story, as Olney argues, it was equally important for slave narratives to follow a form that corroborated with the stories of others to create a collective picture of slavery as it then existed. In fact, the "same" form presented in all of these unique and individual stories created a powerful and resounding message of the consistent evils of slavery and the necessity of its demise."
A journal article published by The Johns Hopkins University Press and written by Sam Worley states that "Northup’s narrative, though well known, has often been treated as a narrative of the second rank, albeit one with an unusually exciting and involving story as well as, thanks to the research of its modern editors, Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon, one with considerable historical value."
Noah Berlatsky's article on the film in The Atlantic (28 October 2013) is headlined: How 12 Years a Slave Gets History Right: By Getting It Wrong, and then in a subheading opines:
Steve McQueen's film fudges several details of Solomon Northup's autobiography — both intentionally and not — to more completely portray the horrors of slavery.
Berlatsky quotes critic Isaac Butler who had recently written a post attacking:
"what he called the "realism canard" — the practice of judging fiction by how well it conforms to reality. "We're talking about the reduction of truth to accuracy," Butler argues, and adds, "What matters ultimately in a work of narrative is if the world and characters created feels true and complete enough for the work's purposes." (Emphasis is Butler's.)
Berlatsky thinks:His point is well-taken. But it's worth adding that whether something "feels true" is often closely related to whether the work manages to create an illusion not just of truth, but also of accuracy. Whether it's period detail in a costume romance or the brutal cruelty of the drug trade in Breaking Bad, fiction makes insistent claims not just to general overarching truth, but to specific, accurate detail. The critics Butler discusses may sometimes reduce the first to the second, but they do so in part because works of fiction themselves often rely on a claim to accuracy in order to make themselves appear true.
This is nowhere more the case than in slave narratives themselves. Often published by abolitionist presses or in explicit support of the abolitionist cause, slave narratives represented themselves as accurate, first-person accounts of life under slavery. Yet, as University of North Carolina professor William Andrews has discussed in To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, the representation of accuracy, and, for that matter, of first-person account, required a good deal of artifice. To single out just the most obvious point, Andrews notes that many slave narratives were told to editors, who wrote down the oral account and prepared them for publication. Andrews concludes that "It would be naïve to accord dictated oral narratives the same discursive status as autobiographies composed and written by the subjects of the stories themselves."
12 Years a Slave is just such an oral account. Though Northup was literate, his autobiography was written by David Wilson, a white lawyer and state legislator from Glens Falls, New York. While the incidents in Northup's life have been corroborated by legal documents and much research, Andrews points out that the impact of the autobiography — its sense of truth—is actually based in no small part on the fact that it is not told by Northup, but by Wilson, who had already written two books of local history. Because he was experienced, Andrews says, Wilson's "fictionalizing … does not call attention to itself so much" as other slave narratives, which tend to be steeped in a sentimental tradition "that often discomfits and annoys 20th-century critics." Northup's autobiography feels less like fiction, in other words, because its writer is so experienced with fiction. Similarly, McQueen's film feels true because it is so good at manipulating our sense of accuracy. The first sex scene, for example, speaks to our post-Freud, post-sexual-revolution belief that, isolated for 12 years far from home, Northup would be bound to have some sort of sexual encounters, even if (especially if?) he does not discuss them in his autobiography.
The difference between book and movie, then, isn't that one is true and the other false, but rather that the tropes and tactics they use to create a feeling of truth are different. The autobiography, for instance, actually includes many legal documents as appendices. It also features lengthy descriptions of the methods of cotton farming. No doubt this dispassionate, minute accounting of detail was meant to show Northup's knowledge of the regions where he stayed, and so validate the truth of his account. To modern readers, though, the touristy attention to local customs can make Northup sound more like a traveling reporter than like a man who is himself in bondage. Some anthropological asides are even more jarring; in one case, Northup refers to a slave rebel named Lew Cheney as "a shrewd, cunning negro, more intelligent than the generality of his race." That description would sound condescending and prejudiced if a white man wrote it. Which, of course, a white man named David Wilson did.
A story about slavery, a real, horrible crime, inevitably involves an appeal to reality — the story has to seem accurate if it is to be accepted as true. But that seeming accuracy requires artifice and fiction — a cool distance in one case, an acknowledgement of sexuality in another. And then, even with the best will in the world, there are bound to be mistakes and discrepancies, as with Mistress Epps's plea for murder transforming into Patsey's wish for death. Given the difficulties and contradictions, one might conclude that it would be better to openly acknowledge fiction. From this perspective, Django Unchained, which deliberately treats slavery as genre, or Octavia Butler's Kindred, which acknowledges the role of the present in shaping the past through a fantasy time-travel narrative, are, more true than 12 Years a Slave or Glory precisely because they do not make a claim to historical accuracy. We can't "actually witness … American slavery" on film or in a book. You can only experience it by experiencing it. Pretending otherwise is presumptuous.
But refusing to try to recapture the experience and instead deciding to, say, treat slavery as a genre Western, can be presumptuous in its own way as well. The writers of the original slave narratives knew that to end injustice, you must first acknowledge that injustice exists. Accurate stories about slavery — or, more precisely, stories that carried the conviction of accuracy, were vital to the abolitionist cause.
Sentimentality? Pornography? Pornotropia?
The content and subject matter of the film is shaped by a determination to realise the experience and witness in Northup's "realistic account".
There are two "scenes" in McQueen's film that Re:LODE Radio considers particularly in terms of form and content. Firstly, a scene of an attempted lynching, that follows on from a growing tension between Northup and plantation carpenter John Tibeats finally breaks as Tibeats tries to beat Northup. Northup snaps and beats Tibeats with his hands before beating him with his own whip. Tibeats and his group try to lynch Northup, but they are stopped by the plantation overseer.
The long take that McQueen chooses to subject his audience, where Northup is left on tiptoes with the noose around his neck for hours before Ford arrives and cuts Northup down is excruciating to witness. This effect is amplified in this extended scene by its being rendered visually as an example and apogee of what some would consider an "aesthetic purity". This includes the continuation of a production value in cinematography, consistent throughout the film, at its most intense, in high definition, in sunlight, shadow and near silence.
This type of visual aesthetic is the opposite of the kind McQueen used in his 2002 Caribs Leap.
The second scene is of a sustained and brutal whipping of Patsey, a favoured slave who can pick over 500 pounds of cotton a day, twice the usual quota. The plantation and slave owner Epps regularly rapes Patsey while his wife abuses and humiliates her out of jealousy. Patsey is caught by Epps going to a neighbouring plantation in order to acquire soap, as Mrs. Epps will not let her have any. In retaliation, Epps orders Northup to whip Patsey. Rather than risk harm to himself, Northup accepts the whip from Epps and strikes Patsey over a dozen times, drawing blood, tears, and shrieks. Epps then takes the whip back from Northup, and whips Patsey brutally, to the point of near death.
Steve McQueen is quoted as saying:
"There's a subtlety that leads up to the crescendo of Patsy being whipped by Solomon. I had to do it because I couldn't look at myself in the mirror as an artist and not do it that way."But, what kind of artist, and what kind of mirror?
The end result of the process of realising in a heightened and high definition "pure" and "visual aesthetic", a reality that originates in experience, then translated into the text of a "realistic account", ends up with the cinematic depiction of the historical reality of slavery risking the eroticising of the brutality that the filmmaker seeks to denounce.
This video montage begins with an edit by Double FacePalm, Gone With The Wind vs 12 Years a Slave. They explain:
Two movies separated by decades of film-making and sociological changes but set in the same era in the same location. Their themes were bound to overlap but I didn't think they would contradict so dramatically. It's interesting to see the theme of racial oppression skimmed over in GWTW, made in a time where segregation was still widely practised vs a modern film made when oppression is openly ridiculed.
If only!
Gone With The Wind . . .
Their edit ends with the 12 Years a Slave scene of the brutal whipping of Patsy. The audience knows that this scene, the "crescendo", according to McQueen, is a construction. Adam B. Vary, BuzzFeed News Reporter, looks at this scene in his report:
Inside The Most Unforgettable Scene In "12 Years A Slave"
In this piece the actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong'o, and screenwriter John Ridley, explain how they weathered bringing a scene of unspeakable brutality to life on screen.
At the Toronto Film Festival, screenwriter John Ridley (Red Tails) told me that the most difficult thing about the scene for him as a writer was not allowing Solomon to prevent Patsey from coming to any real harm. "You wanted Solomon to do more, but you realize the circumstances, he couldn't," he said. "You don't want that to go down the way it went down." Ridley added that once he committed to capturing the scene as Northup described in his memoir, the intellectual exercise of giving the scene its necessary cinematic structure allowed him to remain at a remove. But after seeing the sequence once in a private screening room, he says he could not bring himself to watch it again at the film's gala premiere at Toronto.
"I can't imagine what it was like being an actor in that moment and having to channel those things," he said. "That's a moment where I was very glad to just be the writer."
So how did the actors get through being in the scene?
Logistically, it was a matter of some old-school camera trickery — the whip never came close to Nyong'o's back, but it looked like it did thanks to the camera angles director Steve McQueen chose for the scene, and Nyong'o moving her body as if she was being whipped. And when the camera swings around to capture the ruin inflicted upon Patsey's back, the effect is a combination of practical make-up and CGI.
Emotionally, however, it was far less cut-and-dried. For Nyong'o — acting in her very first feature film — it was about finding the right psychological touchstone to help her arrive at a place where she could do her job.
"Patsey in the book, in the script, is described as being effortlessly sensual," she told me. "I thought about that for a long time. What does that mean, to be effortlessly sensual? Then I found this quote from James Baldwin's book A Fire Next Time. He says, 'To be sensual, I think, is to [respect and] rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in everything that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.' That was Patsey. She was present. So that was a guiding principle for that scene. I couldn't possibly prepare for it an any other way than just to be there."
And being there was more than enough to handle. "The reality of the day was that I was stripped naked in front of lots of people," Nyong'o said. "It was impossible to make that a closed set. In fact, I didn't even ask for it to be a closed set, because at the end of the day, that was a privilege not granted to Patsey, you know? It really just took me there. It was devastating to experiencing that, and to be tied to a post and whipped. Of course, I couldn't possibly be really whipped. But just hearing the crack of that thing behind me, and having to react with my body, and with each whip, get weaker and weaker…" She grew quiet, and sighed. "I mean, it was — I didn't practice it. It was just — it was an exercise of imagination and surrender."
At a remove?
For the writer John Ridley what was bearable as text, in the original account, and in his screenplay, when the "realistic account" was translated to a new level as a visual form, and in high definition, and experienced in the "reel world" of a photographic hyperreality - cinema, it became intolerable.
Marshall McLuhan in his chapter on the HOT and the COOL includes this example of a documented effect of a hot media event upon a captive audience:
An Associated Press story from Santa Monica, California, August 9, 1962, reported how:
Nearly 100 traffic violators watched a police traffic accident film today to atone for their violations. Two had to be treated tor nausea and shock.
Viewers were offered a $5.00 reduction in fines if they agreed to see the movie, Signal 30, made by Ohio State police.
It showed twisted wreckage and mangled bodies and recorded the screams of accident victims.
Whether the hot film medium using hot content would cool off the hot drivers is a moot point. But it does concern any understanding of media.
The effect of hot media treatment cannot include much empathy or participation at any time.
Cooling it!
In the context of the 1960's Cold War, and a policy of nuclear deterrence (or mutually assured destruction - M.A.D.), McLuhan goes on to say:
Is it not evident in every human situation that is pushed to a point of saturation that some precipitation occurs? When all the available resources and energies have been played up in an organism or in any structure there is some kind of reversal of pattern.
The spectacle of brutality used as deterrent can brutalise.
Brutality used in sports may humanize under some conditions, at least. But with regard to the bomb and retaliation as deterrent, it is obvious that numbness is the result of any prolonged terror, a fact that was discovered when the fallout shelter program was broached. The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
Q. What alternative strategy does McLuhan propose?
A. The cultural strategy that is desperately needed is humour and play. It is play that cools off the hot situations of actual life by miming them.
The passive consumer wants packages, but those . . . who are concerned in pursuing knowledge and in seeking causes will resort to aphorisms, just because they are incomplete and require participation in depth.
The principle that during the stages of their development all things appear under forms opposite to those that they finally present is an ancient doctrine.
Interest in the power of things to reverse themselves by evolution is evident in a great diversity of observations, sage and jocular.
Alexander Pope wrote:
Vice is a monster of such frightful mien As to be hated needs but to be seen; But seen too oft, familiar with its face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
Having endured, then pitied, the embrace is actually NO SUCH THING! It's a visual spectacle where audience derives a certain uncomfortable - to - comfortable pleasure in a constructed and ideological distance. And that ends up being an entirely fake version of power relations for consumption on the internet.
Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion: a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture!
Feelings of horror generated by the whipping of Patsey by Epps in 12 Years a Slave reveals a crucial and unintended discrepancy in the dramatic or empathetic effect. Re:LODE Radio wonders:
Is this film an artwork or a horror movie?
If this directorial ploy had been an intended or deliberate discrepancy the art and the work would mark a signifiant shift in character and quality. The potential for such a subversive approach, the creative use of a catachresis has probably been missed, though it was probably never looked for in the first place. The production line from "realistic account" through screenplay and treatment to shooting and editing is a continuous and un-interruptible industrial process. Classic! No wonder then that the accolade at the Oscars for McQueen and the film, undoubtedly reflects the values of the Academy and as an example of the white saviour narrative in film. Tierney Sneed said in U.S. News & World Report the year after the film was released, "Doubts still lingered about its ability to truly bring about a newfound racial consciousness among a national, mainstream audience ... The film also was a period piece that featured a happy ending ushered in by a 'white savior' in the form of Brad Pitt's character." At The Guardian, black Canadian author Orville Lloyd Douglas said he would not be seeing 12 Years a Slave, explaining: "I'm convinced these black race films are created for a white, liberal film audience to engender white guilt and make them feel bad about themselves. Regardless of your race, these films are unlikely to teach you anything you don't already know." A Black writer Michael Arceneaux wrote a rebuttal essay "We Don't Need To Get Over Slavery... Or Movies About Slavery". Arceneaux criticized Douglas for being ignorant and having an apathetic attitude towards black Americans and slavery.
In Jacques Derrida's ideas of deconstruction, catachresis refers to the original incompleteness that is a part of all systems of meaning. He proposes that metaphor and catachresis are tropes that ground philosophical discourse.
Postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak applies this word to "master words" that claim to represent a group, e.g., women or the proletariat, when there are no "true" examples of "woman" or "proletarian". In a similar way, words that are imposed upon people and are deemed improper thus denote a catachresis, a word with an arbitrary connection to its meaning.
In Calvin Warren's Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation, catachresis refers to the ways Warren conceptualises the figure of the black body as vessel or vehicle in which fantasy can be projected. Drawing primarily from the "Look a Negro" moment in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Chapter 5: "The Fact of Blackness", Warren works from the notion that "the black body…provides form for a nothing that metaphysics works tirelessly to obliterate", in which "the black body as a vase provides form for the formlessness of nothingness. Catachresis creates a fantastical place for representation to situate the unrepresentable (i.e. blackness as nothingness)."
When it comes to a deliberate discrepancy what about De Sade? When dialogue begins, propaganda ends!
De Sade's strategies and tactics in the text Philosophy in the Bedroom is to intersperse a number of philosophical dialogues with a number of pornographic episodes.
This is "clickbait" before "clickbait", and where the attempt to expose the fallacies of normative social values, using textual images of phalluses and orifices, depends on the Baudelairean "Hypocrite lecteur", or "Hypocrite reader", addressed as "You!" (surely, and therefore, pointing to "us"), juggling the erotic and philosophical in an "Enlightenment sleepover".
"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom""Enough or too much"
Just two of The Proverbs of Hell, by William Blake to be found in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Police Open Probe Against Obscene Play
Police in Hamburg are investigating a Spanish theater group for displays of pornographic sex and bestiality in a controversial play which premiered in the city last week.This controversy was reported by DW 24.08.2004:The play "XXX" by Catalan theater group La Fura dels Baus is based on a 1795 story, "Philosophy of the Bedroom" by French playwright the Marquis de Sade. Notorious for its uninhibited display of naked lust and violence, the multimedia performance is billed as a modern theatrical response to the porn industry.
But its scenes depicting graphic incest, rape and pornography proved too much to bear to theater-goers in Hamburg last week.Violence and bestialityFollowing reports in Germany' mass-selling tabloid Bild on Friday that the play included a video sequence showing a woman having sex with a donkey, Hamburg police opened a probe against the Spanish group for the "spread of violence and bestiality."
A police officer called in to investigate said, "Bestiality is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison."
A separate report said an outraged woman in the audience alerted police after witnessing scenes of urination and simulated rape and oral sex during the play's opening night. The play is also said to have encouraged two audience members to come on stage and masturbate to make it more interactive.A separate report said an outraged woman in the audience alerted police after witnessing scenes of urination and simulated rape and oral sex during the play's opening night. The play is also said to have encouraged two audience members to come on stage and masturbate to make it more interactive.
Many theater-goers who went to see the 105-minute performance at Hamburg's Kampnagel Theater are said to have walked out in disgust halfway through. Others asked for a ticket refund.Freedom of expression?"First we'll probe whether the video is covered by the right to freedom of expression," a spokeswoman for Hamburg's state prosecutor said. She added that no charges had been filed relating to the play. "We're investigating in general against all responsible for the performance," she added.
It's not the first time that the Spanish group has run into trouble for the controversial play. Two years ago it created a furor when it opened in Frankfurt. Last year the Spanish production met with protests and police investigations in London.
Meanwhile the Kampnagel Theater in Hamburg, famous for its experimental performances, has announced it has dropped the offensive video from the performance."Apart from that, the play will continue unchanged," a spokesman for the theater told news agency DPA. "We reckon that the investigation will be dropped because 'XXX' is an entire artwork," he added.
Hamburg's Cultural Ministry has thrown its weight behind the theater. "It's an important and correct play, it plays with the boundaries between pornography and art," spokesman Björn Marzahn told DPA.
The ministry, he said, welcomed the fact that the Kampnagel Theater had reacted so promptly to the criticism and excised out the controversial video from the play.
'We use the body as theatre'
The Guardian reported on Fura dels Baus in 2007. Laura Barnett (Thu 19 Jul 2007) writes:
La Fura dels Baus certainly know how to make an entrance. The last time the Barcelona theatre collective came to Britain, they brought a hardcore theatrical sex show called XXX. It sparked a tabloid storm and an investigation by Scotland Yard into whether "criminal activities", aka sex acts, were committed on stage (they were not).
Nudity is pretty much La Fura's calling card: in XXX, a rendering of the writings of the Marquis de Sade featuring re-enactments of sex, torture and mutilation, the actors were rarely clothed. Its run in London and the Edinburgh Festival in 2003 prompted irate tabloid headlines - "Stop this filth," stormed one - along with predominantly scathing reviews and the involvement of the vice squad.
What about crowd participation? Audience plants at XXX rushed the stage to indulge in "sex acts", and spectators at La Fura's 1997 production Manes in London's Docklands were pelted with plastic chickens and drenched with buckets of water.
Sex Acts?
An XXX review - Edinburgh Fringe Festival - says:
From the very start XXX hands out both a full responsibility and an invitation to participate. As the audience enters one finds out that by sending a text message via mobile phone to a given number, his or her message appears projected on the stage. La Fura cleverly, and to set the mood, turn a passive moment into something that involves the audience. The show is a free adaptation of the Marquis De Sade's Philosophy of the Boudoir, and as such it is not surprising that it involves a lot of sex, and a lot of 'uncommon' practices.Philosophy in the Bedroom
The plot is rather simple: we observe as the young and innocent Eugenia is taught a number of lessons in depravity by a group of three libertines, Lula, a glamorous Madame/porn star, her incestuous brother Giovanni, and the aggressive Dolmance. The lessons go from how to pleasure a woman orally, to sadism and ultimately raping her own mother.
However the real shock of the piece is the way it portrays sex as an experience that has become extremely mediated.
This is slightly drilled into the audience as we are confronted with pornography clips, cyber-sex, a menu of sex toys and sex machines, and ultimately a live cam-chat with a girl somewhere in a strip club in Barcelona.De Sade's text is equally revolutionary and in addition to it we hear statements such as 'Plastic is much better than flesh' or 'Time and body no longer exist'. Formally the performance is equally mediated as a camera is moved around stage filming the actors. Theatre becomes cinema as camera angles impossible to archive due to the proscenium arch are projected on stage. We constantly see screens upon screens, or behind screens. The effect of seeing the actors' actions superimposed, on stage and on screen is somewhat dazzling at first, but ultimately works in favour of what La Fura is trying to say, or rather, shouting out at us. There is of course a great sense of humour in the piece, as it does not portray sex as something necessarily obscure and dirty but as having delicate and complex balance. The two best examples of this 'toilet humour' are a conversation one of the four characters has with his disappointed penis, projected on stage but appearing with a talking mouth; and the presentation of the 'Globalised Cunt' that comes with it's own travel case and it's own incorporated light. This light-hearted mood is broken on several occasions shortly after it settles on stage, making XXX a true rollercoaster. Moreover the show does not stop at the proscenium arch, it rolls into the auditorium to see if any adventurous audience members want a ride. There is a 'pheromone experiment' in which the audience are sprayed with pheromones and the lights turned off, whilst a crew members passes row after row recording with night-vision what people do. When the lights come back on, one of the characters is so disappointed in the audience's inability to spontaneously start an orgy that he starts asking for volunteers. Without giving too much away all I will say is that several spectators do get naked during the performance, one even receiving a fellatio from one of the characters. But don't be unnecessarily alarmed, not all you see in XXX is absolutely real. No, there is no live sex on stage and no, there probably were no pheromones. There are more important things to think and debate with yourself about, than whether it is all real or not. It is a piece with a sharp philosophical and political message, and it does not bite its tongue. The rhythm is frenetic and the images stunning. As you may guess, this is not a show for kids, the prude or fainthearted, but will certainly entertain anyone willing to take up a challenge. Whether you decide to remain in your seat or not, XXX makes you question your moral standards and preconceptions as well as question what kind of a society produces this kind of mediated 'sex'.
Why is there a continued fascination with De Sade?
There continues to be a fascination with de Sade among scholars and in popular culture. Prolific French intellectuals such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault published studies of him.
Re:LODE Radio hazards the suggestion that this continuing interest in de Sade relates to the abiding fascination in "horror" as a genre within popular culture, and reflects the violence and "the heart of darkness" at the core of a capitalist European class society, that profits from imperialism, colonialism, racism, but revealed when the veil that covers the truth is torn away, by Sade, amongst many other artists and philosophers.Geoffrey Gorer, an English anthropologist, and noted for his application of psychoanalytic techniques to anthropology, wrote one of the earliest books on Sade, entitled The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis de Sade in 1935. He pointed out that Sade was in complete opposition to contemporary philosophers for both his "complete and continual denial of the right to property" and for viewing the struggle in late 18th century French society as being not between "the Crown, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy or the clergy, or sectional interests of any of these against one another", but rather all of these "more or less united against the proletariat." By holding these views, he cut himself off entirely from the revolutionary thinkers of his time to join those of the mid-nineteenth century. Thus, Gorer argued, "he can with some justice be called the first reasoned socialist."Simone de Beauvoir in her essay Must we burn Sade?, published in Les Temps modernes, December 1951 and January 1952, and other writers have attempted to locate traces of a radical philosophy of freedom in Sade's writings, preceding modern existentialism by some 150 years.
He has also been seen as a precursor of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis in his focus on sexuality as a motive force.
The surrealists admired him as one of their forerunners, and Guillaume Apollinaire famously called him "the freest spirit that has yet existed".Pierre Klossowski, in his 1947 book Sade Mon Prochain ("Sade My Neighbour"), analyzes Sade's philosophy as a precursor of nihilism, negating Christian values and the materialism of the Enlightenment.One of the essays in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) is titled "Juliette, or Enlightenment and Morality" and interprets the ruthless and calculating behaviour of Juliette as the embodiment of the philosophy of Enlightenment. By associating the Enlightenment and Totalitarianism with Marquis de Sade's works—especially Juliette, in excursus II — the text also contributes to the pathologisation of sadomasochist desires, as discussed by sexuality historian Alison Moore (Moore, Alison M. 2015. Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, Masochism and Historical Teleology. Lanham: Lexington Books). In the Introduction to this work the author writes:Tracking the usage of the words ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ from their invention by European psychiatry in the nineteenth century, to their theorization in twentieth-century psychoanalysis of culture, and to their articulation in descriptions of Nazism, this book aims to show that the nexus linking perversion to barbarism within an historical teleology of progress has a continuous genealogy which has not yet passed from use, and is never acknowledged by any of those who repeat these patterns of thought.
In this sense itcan be understood as the true ‘unconscious’ that continues to haunt understandings of violence and progress, though this book does not attempt a transcendental analytic reading of culture in the style of Horkheimer, Lacanor Žižek; Instead it follows a genealogical approach focused on both the direct and contextual relations between later ideas and their earlier incarnations. I have chosen the word ‘myths’ to describe these patterns of thought and representations about sexuality, violence, progress and modernity, cognisant of the specific uses of this term in various disciplines. It is the multiple meanings of the term that make it perhaps the only fitting word for the elaborate multiplicity of ideas that linked sexual perversions to the corruption of modernity. But if the reader is reminded of a certain sociological definition of myth as a kind of binding story of past origins that secures social identity, this will not be inappropriate to the ideas described in this book; nor will the reader be misled if reminded of Roland Barthes’s notion of ‘mythologies’, which drew attention to the way myths in modernity become naturalised, and thereby form the contents of unthinking repetitions.
Similarly, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan posited in his 1963 essay Kant avec Sade that Sade's ethics was the complementary completion of the categorical imperative originally formulated by Immanuel Kant.In contrast, G. T. Roche argued in An Unblinking Gaze: On the Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade that Sade, contrary to what some have claimed, did indeed express a specific philosophical worldview. He criticizes Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's view in their work Dialectic of Enlightenment. Additionally, he criticizes the idea Sade demonstrated morality cannot be based on reason.In his 1993 Political Theory and Modernity, William E. Connolly analyzes Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom as an argument against earlier political philosophers, notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes, and their attempts to reconcile nature, reason, and virtue as bases of ordered society.
Similarly, Camille Paglia argued that Sade can be best understood as a satirist, responding "point by point" to Rousseau's claims that society inhibits and corrupts mankind's innate goodness: Paglia notes that Sade wrote in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when Rousseauist Jacobins instituted the bloody Reign of Terror and Rousseau's predictions were brutally disproved. "Simply follow nature, Rousseau declares. Sade, laughing grimly, agrees."In The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography (1979), Angela Carter provides a feminist reading of Sade, seeing him as a "moral pornographer" who creates spaces for women.
Similarly, Susan Sontag defended both Sade and Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'œil (Story of the Eye) in her essay "The Pornographic Imagination" (1967) on the basis their works were transgressive texts, and argued that neither should be censored.
By contrast, Andrea Dworkin saw Sade as the exemplary woman-hating pornographer, supporting her theory that pornography inevitably leads to violence against women. One chapter of her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1979) is devoted to an analysis of Sade. Susie Bright claims that Dworkin's first novel Ice and Fire, which is rife with violence and abuse, can be seen as a modern retelling of Sade's Juliette.
On the other hand the French hedonist philosopher Michel Onfray has attacked this tendency to reclaim Sade as innovative, transgressive and political, in his writing, and declaring that "It is intellectually bizarre to make Sade a hero."
Edgar Degas' 'Scène de guerre au Moyen-âge', 1865, is one of the exhibits said to be inspired by Sade (RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)
On the occasion of an art exhibition in Paris to celebrate Sade's 200th anniversary in 2014, The Independent newspaper referenced Onfray's position. John Lichfield writes (Friday 14 November 2014):
In his many guises, including nearly 30 years as a prisoner under three regimes, royal, republican and imperial, the marquis never turned his hand to painting. It seems perverse, therefore, for the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to celebrate his 200th anniversary with an art exhibition.“Sade – Attaquer le soleil” (Sade – attacking the sun) seeks to prove that Sade’s writing, although officially banned in France until the 1950s, had an enormous impact on 19th- and 20th-century art. It traces – sometimes convincingly, sometimes wilfully – Sade’s influence on the work of, amongst others, Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène Delacroix, Francisco Goya, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and the surrealists.The exhibition is part of a bicentenary push by French intellectuals to release Sade, who lived from 1740 to 1814, from the shadows and into the literary and artistic mainstream. There is an avalanche of new books. There is an exhibition in Paris of his letters and manuscripts, including the scroll of The 120 Days of Sodom whose catalogue of 600 recommended “passions” includes the rape of children as young as five. The “divine”, or damned, marquis also made his bow this week as a character in a video game in the Assassin’s Creed series.Since he was “rediscovered” and championed by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1909, Sade has been placed by some of his admirers alongside Rousseau or Voltaire as one of the French 18th-century iconoclasts who “killed God”, smashed the mould of conventional thought and created the modern world.Pierre Guyotat, a French erotic-literary novelist, says: “Sade is, in a way, our Shakespeare. He has the same sense of tragedy, the same sweeping grandeur. Taking pleasure in the suffering of others is not such an important part of his writings as people claim. He has his tongue sticking out permanently. He is incessantly ironic.”To claim Sade as humanist and liberator, rather than deviant or pervert, sticks in the throat of other intellectuals. A new book by the philosopher Michel Onfray (La Passion de la Méchanceté or the “passion for wickedness”) makes an excoriating attack on the cult of Sade amongst French left-wing or avant garde thinkers.“It is intellectually bizarre to make Sade a hero,” he says. “Even according to his most hero-worshipping biographers, this man was a sexual delinquent.”Mr Onfray says that a “myth” has been fashioned that Sade was a “libertarian, anarchist and revolutionary” – even a “feminist”. Not a bit of it, he says. Sade was an arrogant “feudal” aristocrat who thought that he had a right to torture and sexually abuse servants or beggars. His recorded exploits include the kidnapping and sexual torture of pre-adolescent serving girls.Period genre? Horror genre? Art genre?
Infamous? . . .
Following this antidote to the intellectualising of a period piece of art and horror, provided for by The Three Amigos, here is another case of: The spectacle of brutality used as deterrent can brutalise?
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma)
Among the numerous film adaptions of Sade's work, the most notable is Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, an adaptation of his infamous book, The 120 Days of Sodom.
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is the 1975 period horror/art film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The film is a loose adaptation of the book The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade, set during World War II, and was Pasolini's final film, being released posthumously three weeks after his murder.
The film focuses on four wealthy, corrupt Italian libertines, in the time of the fascist Republic of Salò (1943–1945). The libertines kidnap eighteen teenagers and subject them to four months of extreme violence, murder, sadism and sexual and mental torture.
The film explores the themes of political corruption, consumerism, capitalism, nihilism, morality, abuse of power, social darwinism, sadism, sexuality and fascism.
Cinematic tour of the "Circles of Hell"!
The story is in four segments, inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy: the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Excrement, and the Circle of Blood. The film also contains frequent references to and several discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche's 1887 book On the Genealogy of Morality, Ezra Pound's poem The Cantos, and Marcel Proust's novel sequence In Search of Lost Time.
The Wikipedia article on this film cites Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader wrote of the film:"Roland Barthes noted that in spite of all its objectionable elements (he pointed out that any film that renders Sade real and fascism unreal is doubly wrong), this film should be defended because it 'refuses to allow us to redeem ourselves.' It's certainly the film in which Pasolini's protest against the modern world finds its most extreme and anguished expression. Very hard to take, but in its own way an essential work."
Stephen Barber writes:
"The core of Salò is the anus, and its narrative drive pivots around the act of sodomy. No scene of a sex act has been confirmed in the film until one of the libertines has approached its participants and sodomized the figure committing the act. The filmic material of Salò is one that compacts celluloid and feces, in Pasolini's desire to burst the limits of cinema, via the anally resonant eye of the film lens."Barber also notes that Pasolini's film reduces the extent of the storytelling sequences present in de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom so that they "possess equal status" with the sadistic acts committed by the libertines. (Barber, Stephen (2010). "The Last Film, the Last Book". In Cline, John; Weiner, Robert G. (eds.). From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse: Highbrow and Lowbrow Transgression in Cinema's First Century. Scarecrow Press).
Enough? Or too much?
This is one of William Blake's Proverbs of Hell, proverbs that provide a useful guide to navigating ideological territories. Blake's Hell is the inverse of a Heaven, that in the scheme of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is where the seat of the "powers (and the ideas) that be" reside. But for Blake the "space" between these opposites can provide a "situation" for dialogue, and . . .
. . . where dialogue begins propaganda ends
And the potential for a "marriage", a dialogue between opposites, in this eighteenth century work by William Blake (1790-93), produced a couple of years before Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom was published in 1795. Both of these works were informed by the contemporary revolutionary turmoil and reaction in France and across Europe. In their different ways Blake and Sade required strategies of one kind or another, in order to strip the veil from the body of TRUTH.Twentieth century artists and philosophers produced their own methods for gaining awareness in ideological conditions that so totally shaped modern consciousness, as in deconstruction and détournement.
A détournement, meaning "rerouting, hijacking" in French, is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and later adapted by the Situationist International (SI), that was defined in the SI's inaugural 1958 journal as "[t]he integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of those means. In a more elementary sense, détournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres."
It has been defined elsewhere as "turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself" — as when slogans and logos are turned against their advertisers or the political status quo.
Détournement was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tactic called situationist prank that was reprised by the punk movement in the late 1970s and inspired the culture jamming movement in the late 1980s.
When it comes to Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is the film the "sickest film of all time"? The film is also claimed to be an early progenitor of the extreme cinema subgenre, along with Sweet Movie, the 1974 avant-garde surrealist comedy-drama film written and directed by Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev, whose film W.R. Mysteries of the Organism provides this page with a 1970's counterculture take on the Sexual Revolution's relation to East/West culture wars, at the height of the Cold War, and the anti-Vietnam War movement.While both films are considered to be examples of extreme cinema, one is a period horror/art movie, the other is quite different, an avant-garde surrealist comedy-drama.When it comes to the communication of material regarded as extreme when it comes the historical, the political, the social and the sexual, if this material is communicated via a HOT medium, then it's likely to trigger the activation of the Freudian "censor" alongside the film censor. As Marshall McLuhan explains all those years ago in his chapter Media Cold and Hot in the groundbreaking book Understanding Media:Intensity or high definition engenders specialism and fragmentation in living as in entertainment, which explains why any intense experience must be "forgotten," "censored," and reduced to a very cool state before it can be "learned" or assimilated. The Freudian "censor" is less of a moral function than an indispensable condition of learning. Were we to accept fully and directly every shock to our various structures of awareness, we would soon be nervous wrecks, doing double-takes and pressing panic buttons every minute. The "censor" protects our central system of values, as it does our physical nervous system by simply cooling off the onset of experience a great deal. For many people, this cooling system brings on a lifelong state of psychic rigor mortis, or of somnambulism, particularly observable in periods of new technology.
This is why the combination of play and humour is, as McLuhan suggests, capable of providing for an effective environment for learning, assimilating and communicating, especially when the material is either shocking or extreme. Nevertheless Sweet Movie is profoundly challenging to any general audience, and probably disappointing to horror genre devotees, because it is serious about the philosophical issues, and seriously, as well as playfully . . .
. . . about as extreme as you can get!
This YouTube video by You Have Been Watching Films provides a critical analysis of the film under the heading title and introductory text:
Sweet Movie - Interpreting Extreme Surrealism:This week's video essay focuses on attempting to dissect Dušan Makavejev's ever-perplexing and highly controversial surrealist comedy-drama, Sweet Movie! What initially begins as a surreal comedy delves into the extreme, challenging the boundary of what is acceptable in cinema (and, as of present, many countries still ban Sweet Movie). Makavejev was protective of the meaning of his challenging film, leaving it up to the viewer to process these difficult images on their own.
At this point in this montage of texts and images Re:LODE Radio is again navigating in territory redolent of The Divine Comedy.
The circle of the Sadomasochists?
This image can be found on Wikipedia's article on Sadomasochism. It is an example of artwork produced for Nights of Horror, an American series of fetish comic books, created in 1954 by publisher Malcla, drawn by comic artist Joe Shuster, who is also one of the original creators of Superman. The comic stories were written by an author under the pseudonym Clancy, who also used other pseudonyms for different issues of the books. The stories are based on situations of BDSM, bondage, torture, and sexual slavery, featuring both men and women as the tormentors and victims. The series was important in the conviction of Jack Koslow in 1954, during the trial of the Brooklyn Thrill Killers. The books themselves were seized and banned first by New York City, then by the State of New York for violating obscenity laws, and the case went to the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court determined that the ban was not in violation of First Amendment Rights, and upheld New York's request for destroying copies of Nights of Horror. Shuster was never named as the illustrator until Gerard Jones published the information in 2004.
The term sadomasochism is used in a variety of different ways. It can refer to cruel individuals or those who brought misfortunes onto themselves and psychiatrists define it as pathological. However, recent research suggests that sadomasochism is mostly simply a sexual interest, and not a pathological symptom of past abuse, or a sexual problem, and that people with sadomasochistic sexual interest are in general neither damaged nor dangerous.
The word sadomasochism is a portmanteau of the words sadism and masochism. The two words incorporated into this compound, "sadism" and "masochism", were originally derived from the names of two authors with the term "sadism" originating in the name of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), who not only practiced sexual sadism, but also wrote novels about these practices. "Masochism" is named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–1895), who wrote novels expressing his masochistic fantasies. These terms were first selected for identifying human behavioural phenomena and for the classification of psychological illnesses or deviant behaviour. The German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced the terms "Sadism" and "Masochism" into medical terminology in his work Neue Forschungen auf dem Gebiet der Psychopathia sexualis ("New research in the area of Psychopathology of Sex") in 1890.In 1905, Sigmund Freud described sadism and masochism in his Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie ("Three papers on Sexual Theory") as stemming from aberrant psychological development from early childhood. He also laid the groundwork for the widely accepted medical perspective on the subject in the following decades. This led to the first compound usage of the terminology in Sado-Masochism by the Viennese Psychoanalyst Isidor Isaak Sadger in his work Über den sado-masochistischen Komplex ("Regarding the sadomasochistic complex") in 1913.In the later 20th century, BDSM activists have protested against these ideas, because, they argue, they are based on the philosophies of the two psychiatrists, Freud and Krafft-Ebing, whose theories were built on the assumption of psychopathology and their observations of psychiatric patients. The DSM nomenclature referring to sexual psychopathology has been criticised as lacking scientific veracity, and advocates of sadomasochism have sought to separate themselves from psychiatric theory by the adoption of the term BDSM instead of the common psychological abbreviation, "S&M".The term BDSM is first recorded in a Usenet post from 1991, and is interpreted as a combination of the abbreviations B/D (Bondage and Discipline), D/s (Dominance and submission), and S/M (Sadism and Masochism). BDSM is now used as a catch-all phrase covering a wide range of activities, forms of interpersonal relationships, and distinct subcultures. BDSM communities generally welcome anyone with a non-normative streak who identifies with the community; this may include cross-dressers, body modification enthusiasts, animal roleplayers, rubber fetishists, and others.Activities and relationships in BDSM are often characterized by the participants' taking on roles that are complementary and involve inequality of power; thus, the idea of informed consent of both the partners is essential.The abbreviations sub and dom are frequently used instead of submissive and dominant. Sometimes the female-specific terms mistress, domme, and dominatrix are used to describe a dominant woman, instead of the sometimes gender-neutral term dom. Individuals who change between top/dominant and bottom/submissive roles—whether from relationship to relationship or within a given relationship—are called switches. The precise definition of roles and self-identification is a common subject of debate among BDSM participants.
Human rights and sadomasochism
On 18 June 2018, the WHO (World Health Organization) published ICD-11, and Sadomasochism, together with Fetishism and Transvestic Fetishism, are now removed as psychiatric diagnoses. Moreover, discrimination of fetish- and BDSM individuals is considered inconsistent with human rights principles endorsed by the United Nations and The World Health Organization.The classifications of sexual disorders reflect contemporary sexual norms and have moved from a model of pathologisation or criminalisation of non-reproductive sexual behaviours to a model which reflects sexual well-being and pathologises the absence or limitation of consent in sexual relations.The ICD-11 classification, contrary to ICD-10 and DSM-5, clearly distinguishes consensual sadomasochistic behaviours (BDSM) that do not involve inherent harm to self or others, from harmful violence on non‐consenting persons (Coercive sexual sadism disorder).In this regard, "ICD-11 go further than the changes made for DSM-5 … in the removal of disorders diagnosed based on consenting behaviors that are not in and of themselves associated with distress or functional impairment."In Europe, an organization called ReviseF65 has worked to remove sadomasochism from the ICD. On commission from the WHO ICD-11 Working Group on Sexual Disorders and Sexual Health, ReviseF65 in 2009 and 2011 delivered reports documenting that sadomasochism and sexual violence are two different phenomena. The report concluded that the Sadomasochism diagnosis were outdated, non scientific, and stigmatizing. In 1995, Denmark became the first European Union country to have completely removed sadomasochism from its national classification of diseases. This was followed by Sweden in 2009, Norway in 2010, Finland in 2011 and Iceland in 2015."Based on advances in research and clinical practice, and major shifts in social attitudes and in relevant policies, laws, and human rights standards", the World Health Organization (18 June 2018) removed Fetishism, Transvestic Fetishism and Sadomasochism as psychiatric diagnoses.The ICD-11 classification consider Sadomasochism as "a variant in sexual arousal and private behavior without appreciable public health impact and for which treatment is neither indicated nor sought."Further the ICD-11 guidelines "respect the rights of individuals whose atypical sexual behavior is consensual and not harmful."WHO's ICD-11 Working Group admits that psychiatric diagnoses have been used to harass, silence, or imprison sadomasochists. Labelling them as such may create harm, convey social judgment, and exacerbate existing stigma and violence to individuals so labelled.According to ICD-11, psychiatric diagnoses can no longer be used to discriminate against BDSM people and fetishists.Recent surveys on the spread of BDSM fantasies and practices show strong variations in the range of their results. Nonetheless, researchers assume that 5 to 25 percent of the population practices sexual behavior related to pain or dominance and submission. The population with related fantasies is believed to be even largerOn the RACK . . .
. . . or Risk-aware consensual kink (RACK, also risk-accepted consensual kink) is an acronym used by some of the BDSM community to describe a philosophical view that is generally permissive of certain risky sexual behaviours, as long as the participants are fully aware of the risks. This is in contrast to safe, sane, and consensual which generally holds that only activities that are considered safe, sane, and consensual are permittedFor the professional actors and performers at Kink.com, this is what governs the work environment.
From the whip to the wand!
Many of the industrial products churned out for consumption by the paying customers at Kink.com include bookends for the videos with a "Before and After" interview with the "sub" (as in "submissive", and female), that painstakingly underline the fact of their consensual involvement in a professional context of paid work. Whether risk is involved, or not, these interviews are part of a professional performance, an industrial construction that provides some cover for the behaviours "on view" with a veil of acceptability.
Seeing "red", and . . .
Welcome to Pornotropia!
The following video montage begins with a re-presentation of the Gone With The Wind versus 12 Years a Slave mash-up, but then segues into a sequence of edited examples of a niche genre of pornography - BDSM - that the pornography industry caters for, with pay sites for consumers such as Kink.com and given in the overlapping of the pornotropic aesthetic with a niche pornographic aesthetic.
From GWTW to the pornographic . . .
Via 12 Years a Slave!
In this racialised pornography the sight and sounds of the whip and the whipped are substituted by the sight, sound and fury of the wand, generating sounds of orgasmic pleasure, simultaneously transmutable into a substituted fantasy of pain.
This is along way from the "orgone energy accumulator", and close to the commodification of sheer abuse and misogyny, packaged for the passive consumer in 4K and/or VR!
Venus in Furs
"Venus in Furs" is a song by the Velvet Underground, written by Lou Reed and originally released on the 1967 album The Velvet Underground & Nico. Inspired by the book of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the song includes sexual themes of sadomasochism, bondage and submission. The song begins with this lyric:
Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather
Whiplash girl child in the dark
Comes in bells, your servant, don't forsake him
Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart
Lyrics from "Venus in Furs" the song by the Velvet Underground.
In his essay "Venus in Furs by the Velvet Underground", Erich Kuersten writes:
"There is no intro or buildup to the song; the track starts as if you opened a door to a decadent Marrakesh S&M/opium den, a blast of air-conditioned Middle Eastern menace with a plodding beat that’s the missing link between "Bolero" and Led Zeppelin’s version of "When the Levee Breaks".
Marguerita Passion has uploaded this video:
"Venus in Furs" - The Velvet Underground (Live Exploding Plastic Inevitable Footage)
Another image of a "nude female" and a mirror? A trope?
An image of this painting, known as Venus with a Mirror, by the Italian Renaissance artist Titian graces the Wikipedia article on the novel Venus in Furs by Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, and is referenced as an element of the author's inspiration for a story about female sexual dominance, male submission and humiliation.
As already mentioned, the first compound usage of the portmanteau term Sado-Masochism was by the Viennese Psychoanalyst Isidor Isaak Sadger a term that incorporates the author's name. However the term "masochism" was first coined in 1886 by the Austrian psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) in his book Psychopathia Sexualis:. . . I feel justified in calling this sexual anomaly "Masochism", because the author Sacher-Masoch frequently made this perversion, which up to his time was quite unknown to the scientific world as such, the substratum of his writings. I followed thereby the scientific formation of the term "Daltonism", from Dalton, the discoverer of colour-blindness.During recent years facts have been advanced which prove that Sacher-Masoch was not only the poet of Masochism, but that he himself was afflicted with the anomaly. Although these proofs were communicated to me without restriction, I refrain from giving them to the public. I refute the accusation that "I have coupled the name of a revered author with a perversion of the sexual instinct", which has been made against me by some admirers of the author and by some critics of my book. As a man, Sacher-Masoch cannot lose anything in the estimation of his cultured fellow-beings simply because he was afflicted with an anomaly of his sexual feelings. As an author, he suffered severe injury so far as the influence and intrinsic merit of his work is concerned, for so long and whenever he eliminated his perversion from his literary efforts he was a gifted writer, and as such would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings. In this respect he is a remarkable example of the powerful influence exercised by the vita sexualis be it in the good or evil sense over the formation and direction of man's mind.Sacher-Masoch was not pleased with Krafft-Ebing's assertions. As an Austrian nobleman, writer and journalist, during his lifetime, Sacher-Masoch was well known as a man of letters, in particular a utopian thinker who espoused socialist and humanist ideals in his fiction and non-fiction. Most of his works remain untranslated into English, and until recently, his novella Venus in Furs was his only book commonly available in English.The framing story concerns a man who dreams of speaking to Venus about love while she wears furs. The unnamed narrator tells his dreams to a friend, Severin, who tells him how to break himself of his fascination with cruel women by reading a manuscript, Memoirs of a Suprasensual Man.This manuscript tells of a man, Severin von Kusiemski, who is so infatuated with a woman, Wanda von Dunajew, that he asks to be her slave, and encourages her to treat him in progressively more degrading ways. At first Wanda does not understand or accede to the request, but after humouring Severin a bit she finds the advantages of the method to be interesting and enthusiastically embraces the idea, although at the same time she disdains Severin for allowing her to do so.Severin describes his feelings during these experiences as suprasensuality. Severin and Wanda travel to Florence. Along the way, Severin takes the generic Russian servant's name of "Gregor" and the role of Wanda's servant. In Florence, Wanda treats him brutally as a servant, and recruits a trio of African women to dominate him.The relationship arrives at a crisis when Wanda meets a man to whom she would like to submit, a Byronic hero known as Alexis Papadopolis. At the end of the book, Severin, humiliated by Wanda's new lover, loses the desire to submit. He says of Wanda:That woman, as nature has created her, and man at present is educating her, is man's enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he and is his equal in education and work.Sacher-Masoch's private life included an episode that appears to rehearse some of these narrative elements.
Fanny Pistor (in furs, with whip) and Sacher-Masoch
A young woman, Fanny Pistor was an emerging literary writer, and she met Sacher-Masoch after she contacted him, under the assumed name and fictitious title of Baroness Bogdanoff, hoping for suggestions on improving her writing and to make it suitable for publication. On 8 December 1869, Sacher-Masoch and Pistor, who was by then his mistress, signed a contract making him her slave for a period of six months, with the stipulation that the Baroness wear furs as often as possible, especially when she was in a cruel mood. Sacher-Masoch took the alias of "Gregor", a stereotypical male servant's name, and assumed a disguise as the servant of the Baroness. The two travelled by train to Italy. As in "Venus in Furs", he travelled in the third-class compartment, while she had a seat in first-class, arriving in Venice (Florence, in the novel), where they were not known, and would not arouse suspicion.Sacher-Masoch pressured his first wife – Aurora von Rümelin, whom he married in 1873 – to live out the experience of the book, against her preferences.
Sexploitation?
The role of sadism and masochism in fiction has attracted serious scholarly attention. Anthony Storr has commented that the volume of sadomasochist pornography shows that sadomasochistic interest is widespread in Western society (Storr, Anthony (2013). Human Destructiveness (Psychology Revivals): The Roots of Genocide and Human Cruelty. Routledge p. 87.). John Kucich has noted the importance of masochism in late-19th-century British colonial fiction. He says:
MASOCHISM is often regarded as a site of social and cultural intersec tions. But in late-nineteenth-century British colonial fiction, it focused one particular conjunction more than any other: the relationship between imperial politics and social class.
And, introducing how he sees the scope and purpose of this book, writes that:
Analyzing representations of masochism can help to rectify this imbalance. Although masochism is not usually associated with social class, images of colonial masochism tended to bear with special weight on problems of status hierarchy, no matter how much they were also articulated upon other forms of social identity. These strong correlations between masochism and social class are not the explanatory key to colonial experience, nor can they be studied in “privileged isolation.” But they do provide a reminder that class was a more important and a more complicated aspect of colonial life than recent scholarship has recognized. They can also demonstrate that ideologies of social class were intertwined with imperial self-consciousness in immensely variable ways.
The principal contention of this book is that figurations of masochism in British colonial fiction constituted a psychosocial language, in which problems of social class were addressed through the politics of imperialism and vice versa. I am not arguing that masochism had an inherent class or imperial politics. Neither would I wish to claim that social or imperial identity can be understood through collective psychology, masochistic or otherwise. My argument is simply that elements of masochistic fantasy resonated powerfully with both imperial and class discourses in late-nine teenth-century Britain. This discursive resonance presented writers of fic tion with an extraordinary opportunity to refashion both imperial and class subjectivities by manipulating the complex intersections between them that masochistic fantasy helped to forge. In this sense, I am arguing that masochism played a vital role in the shaping and reshaping of social identity at the imperial periphery, which had important consequences in domestic British culture as well. I am also arguing that imperial and class ideologies in nineteenth-century Britain exploited a common and very powerful form of affective organization.
John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) was a defining moment in English erotica, not just in applying novelistic technique to erotica, but in recognising that flagellation was a method to exploit English sexual fantasies.
Fanny Hill’s introduction to flagellation from Mr. Barville was both painful and bloody. These flagellation scenes were to become common to erotica circulating in England in the eighteenth century.
By the nineteenth century an illustration of Fanny Hill (1887) by Édouard-Henri Avril, reflects a widespread interest in various forms of sexual gratification in administering and receiving a whipping. The Wikipedia page listing examples of Sadism and masochism in fiction is replete with literary works featuring flagellation, with Fanny Hill as an early example from the eighteenth century. This was followed by: Exhibition of Female Flagellants (1830), where the principal activity described is flagellation, mainly of women by women, described in a theatrical, fetishistic style.
The New Ladies' Tickler, or Adventures of Lady Lovesport and the Audacious Harry (1866) by Edward Sellon – dealing with flagellation and lesbian incest. The Romance of Chastisement (1866) by St George Stock, a probable pseudonym. A pornographic collection on the theme of flagellation. Reprinted by Charles Carrington in 1902 as The Magnetism of the Rod or the Revelations of Miss Darcy . . .
. . . and the list goes on, and includes, of course "Venus in Furs"!
Translations from book to film are mixed bag!
When it comes to the translation of the Venus in Furs narrative from the original medium of the book and its translation to film, it offers an insight into how popular culture in the cinema of the 1960's, during the so-called "sexual revolution", tended toward the obviously commercial sexploitation route. However, a look at the Venus in Furs (disambiguation) Wikipedia page shows a chronological list beginning with Venus in Furs (1965 film), directed by the Italian-American poet, publisher, actor and underground filmmaker Piero Heliczer, associated with the New American Cinema.After moving to New York in 1962 Heliczer became involved with the Film-Makers' Cooperative, appearing in films by Jack Smith and Andy Warhol. Eventually he bought his own 8mm camera and resumed making experimental films, including Satisfaction, Venus in Furs, Joan of Arc (in which Warhol appeared), and an "unfinished three-hour epic," Dirt.
With their primitive technique, anti-Catholic bent, and depictions of alternative sexuality, his films are often compared to those of Jack Smith.Most of Heliczer's films were silent, with sound added later. In some cases he used live musicians to provide a soundtrack. One band, the Falling Spikes, who played for a Heliczer show called The Launching of the Dream Weapon in early 1965, later changed their name to the Velvet Underground. At Heliczer's multimedia shows, which he called "ritual happenings," his films were projected through veils hung in front of the screen with coloured lights and slides superimposed on them, while dancers performed onstage and musicians played in the background. Andy Warhol began organising similar events in 1966; his Exploding Plastic Inevitable incorporated many of the same techniques and performers.In November 1965, during the filming of Venus in Furs, the Velvet Underground and Heliczer were featured in a CBS News segment titled "The Making of an Underground Film," which aired the following month. This brief appearance turned out to be the only network television exposure for either Heliczer or the band. Venus in Furs was named after the Velvet Underground song inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's eponymous sadomasochistic novella.
Sexploitation?
Examples of sadism and masochism in fiction has attracted serious attention from the "entertainment industry", especially film, so Venus in Furs fits the bill, literally, when it comes to 1960's commercially led sexploitation opportunities.
Next in the chronology for the Wikipedia Venus in Furs (disambiguation) page, is Venus in Furs, a 1967 sexploitation film, directed by Joe Marzano, and starring Barbara Ellen. The script was written by Marzano and Ellen, suggested by the novel of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.This is followed in 1969 by a Venus in Furs film that bears only a superficial resemblance to the 1870 Venus in Furs novel. It's a softcore Italian erotic thriller film directed by Jesús Franco.
The film (also known as Paroxismus and Black Angel) uses the title for commercial reasons, and the character names in Franco's original script were changed to the novel's for similar reasons. Franco's film is a surreal supernatural erotic thriller about unattainable love and how far one is willing to go for the person they desire. It is not a study in masochism.
The film is notable for the contribution of the British avantgarde fusion band Manfred Mann Chapter Three who wrote and recorded the soundtrack for the film.
The django of the sex wave
Then comes the Venus in Furs (also known as Devil in the Flesh) another 1969 Italian erotic drama film directed by Massimo Dallamano. Based on the novel Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the film was first released in 1969 in Germany under the title Venuz im pelz. In Italy, the film did not pass the censorship examination because of the sex scenes deemed too rough and all attempts to overcome the censorship's remarks, with various cut versions, were unsuccessful. The marketing ploy "Der Django der Sexwell" makes a connection to Django (1966 film), a film that had earned a reputation as one of the most violent films ever made at the time.
Venus nude?
The film was eventually released in 1973 under the title Venere nuda, but even this cut version was confiscated after a few days for contempt of decency. In 1975, the film was finally released in Italian cinemas under the title Le malizie di Venere, in a heavily censored version which was altered by a new editing and by the introduction of new scenes filmed by Paolo Heusch, which turned the film plot into a giallo, a particular Italian thriller-horror genre. The new title was a specific reference to lead actress Laura Antonelli's box-office success in Malizia.
The cruel woman
Ten years later the film Seduction: The Cruel Woman (Verführung: Die grausame Frau) is released in 1985. This West German film, directed by Elfi Mikesch and Monika Treut, and who both also wrote the screenplay, has Wanda played by Mechthild Großmann. The film was inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs as acknowledged in this film trailer.
Seduction . . .
. . . The Cruel Woman - Trailer (German)
In this film version Wanda is a dominatrix who runs a gallery in Hamburg. She lures men and women of all types into her sadomasochistic world where audiences pay for the privilege of seeing her humiliate her slaves. The end is an ultimate mix of eros and thanatos.
And when she is eventually gunned down, not by her American female lover whom she turns into an assistant-Mistress and not by her older tender shoe-fetishist motherly concerned lover either, but by — of all people — her husband (who is also her slave), the supreme joy on her face is absolutely ineffable.
Miodrag Kojadinović, "Seduction: The Cruel Woman I Could Have Been", Angles magazine, Vancouver, January 1994.
The next film version of Venus in Furs was the 1994 film by filmmakers and independent art-house Dutch film producers Maartje Seyferth and Victor Nieuwenhuijs. In this film the cinematography aestheticises the violence, amplifies the voyeuristic, sadistic and pornographic elements and then veils them invisibly with "Art".
A case of the Emperor's new clothes?
In 2012 a Korean film (모피를 입은 비너스) was based on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs with the title Venus in Furs, and directed by Song Yae-sup.
The following year the film Venus in Fur (2013) was released. This French erotic drama film directed by Roman Polanski is based on the play of the same name by American playwright David Ives, which itself was inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novel Venus in Furs.
This video montage begins with a trailer for the film that's followed by some key scenes including the film's finale. It ends with a "ricorso" of The Velvet Underground song Venus in Furs.
The film revolves around the interactions of two characters. Thomas Novacheck is the writer-director of a new play, an adaptation of the 1870 novel Venus in Furs by Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. The other lead character, Vanda Jordan, is an actress auditioning for a main role.
The film begins with Thomas alone in a Parisian theatre after a day of auditioning actresses for the lead character, Wanda von Dunayev. Thomas laments on the phone the poor performances to come through.
As Thomas prepares to leave the theatre, an actress named Vanda Jordan arrives disheveled. She claims to have had an audition slot earlier in the day, but her name does not appear on the audition list. In a whirlwind of energy and unrestrained aggression, Vanda persuades Thomas to let her read for the part. At first appearing untalented, when she begins to read it becomes clear that she is an excellent actress and perfect for the part.
Although initially appearing uneducated, throughout the movie Vanda displays knowledge and talent that seems superhuman. For example, she surprises Thomas by producing the full script, not just the portion given out to actors to use in the audition, and having memorized it. The audition is in a theatre and she shows not only a command of staging, but also lighting - adjusting the theater's lightboard, which presumably she has never seen before, without hesitation. And she also has brought a full set of costumes, including some for Thomas to wear which fit him perfectly. At one point she "guesses" an amazingly accurate picture of Thomas' fiancé's life and background.
The subject of the play is sexual domination and submission. As the audition continues Vanda attacks the script as sexist, soft-core S&M pornography. Thomas at first defends it as a faithful adaptation of a literary classic about passion and desire. Vanda accuses Thomas of having his own masochistic fantasies, which he denies. However, as the film develops, he increasingly identifies with the masochistic male lead in the play. By the end of the film he has become Vanda's slave.
In the final scene Thomas is bound and tied to a pole. Vanda appears, proclaims "Bacchae of the Cadmea. Dance for Dionysus!", dances before Thomas, and leaves. The movie ends with the quote from the Book of Judith: "And the Lord hath smitten him and delivered him into a woman's hands."
A. O. Scott of The New York Times said, "Working from a French translation of the play (which was widely acclaimed when it ran on and off Broadway a few years ago), Mr. Polanski has marked the text with his own fingerprints. One of the two characters — the splendidly volatile Vanda, an actress — is played by Emmanuelle Seigner, his wife. Her foil — a writer and theater director named Thomas — is played by Mathieu Amalric in a performance that is very close to a Polanski impersonation."
Once upon a time in Hollywood
The film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood plays with the facts surrounding a tragedy in Polanski's personal life. The facts of this tragedy have been commodified in lurid stories, churned out in various media, as a macabre human interest horror trope, up until the present day.
Polanski's personal life collided with the paranoid style in American politics, life, media and culture, when the Manson Family, a doomsday cult, became fixated on the idea of an imminent apocalyptic race war between America's black population and the larger white population. A white supremacist, Charles Manson believed that black people in America would rise up and kill all whites except for Manson and his "Family", but that they were not intelligent enough to survive on their own; they would need a white man to lead them, and so they would serve Manson as their "master".
On the night of August 8–9, four members of the Manson Family — Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian — drove from Spahn Ranch to 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills, the home of actress Sharon Tate and director Roman Polanski. They murdered Tate, who was 8½ months pregnant, along with hairdresser Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, aspiring screenwriter and Folger's boyfriend Wojciech Frykowski, and Steven Parent, an 18-year-old visitor. Polanski was not home that night as he was working on a film in Europe. Manson was an aspiring musician who had tried to get a recording contract with record producer Terry Melcher, who was a previous renter of the house with musician Mark Lindsay and Melcher's girlfriend Candice Bergen. Melcher had snubbed Manson, leaving him disgruntled and resulting in events that haunt Hollywood to this day.
Aja Romano, writing for Vox (Aug 7, 2019), is clear in his view that:
The Manson Family murders weren’t a countercultural revolt. They were about power, entitlement, and Hollywood
He writes:
Even if you don’t know much about vintage Hollywood, you probably know the name Sharon Tate. The up-and-coming actress and wife of director Roman Polanski was just 26, and eight and a half months pregnant, on August 8, 1969, when four people broke into her home at 10500 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills — a house their cult leader, Charles Manson, had previously visited as a guest — and killed everyone inside. The next night, desperate to make the first round of deaths look like part of a race war, Manson ordered his followers to a different address in Central Los Angeles, this one owned by middle-class couple Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, to kill again.
The Tate-LaBianca murders, a.k.a. the Manson Family murders, profoundly shook America’s perception of itself. They upended ideas of safety, security, and innocence, and effectively sounded the death knell of ’60s counterculture, ushering in a new decade of darkly psychosexual, conspiracy-laced cultural exploration of America’s seedy underbelly. The ritualistic nature of the killings set the stage for the rise of Satanic Panic, a phenomenon that never fully went away.And Manson continues to loom large in the cultural imagination, even 50 years after the murders and two years after his death in 2017. Media depictions of him proliferate in pop culture. Quentin Tarantino even revisits the topic of the murders in his latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.But what you may not know is that Manson’s followers had killed both before and after their most famous murders. The cultural narrative around the Tate-LaBianca murders is that they happened out of nowhere — that Manson’s followers simply erupted into unthinkable violence on command, after being thoroughly brainwashed. But in fact, Manson was a career criminal by the time he moved to California, and the Tate-LaBianca murders were part of a long period of escalating criminality from him and his followers. Their other major crimes included multiple murders, torture, hostage-taking, and the attempted assassination of a US president.Another longstanding public perception about the Manson Family murders is that they were a kind of psychic attack on America itself — an explosive release of tension, an inevitable result of the freewheeling, drug-happy counterculture of the ’60s. In countless depictions of the murders over the 50 years since they took place, they have largely been framed as a drug-fueled, randomized frenzy. But as we learned from a deep dive into the Mansons gleaned from books, trial transcripts, and archival media reports, the murders weren’t random at all, nor were they a reactionary backlash to normative American culture; rather, they were an outgrowth of Manson’s warped sense that he was entitled to all the power and fortune he desired.Manson, like many psychotically predatory men whose violence has hypnotized American culture, was really just an everyday misogynist. He wasn’t a product of ’60s counterculture — he was a master manipulator of it, one who used the “free love” ethos of the time to prey on a cadre of troubled, abused young women, who continued to carry out his thirst for violence even after he was in jail.The “Manson girls” and his other followers have continued to fascinate us. But the Manson murders were ultimately about Charles Manson himself. And Charles Manson craved wealth, fame, and power. That longing manifested in an obsessive love-hate relationship with Hollywood — an addiction that ultimately led to the Manson Family murders.Aja Romano's article sets out the context for this tragedy in depth and detail.
A column in the right hand margin of the article makes this significant conclusion under the heading:Manson was a staunch racist whose ultimate “Helter Skelter” goal was to rule over black AmericaCharles Manson’s cult philosophy was really a mix of predatory social engineering masquerading as religion and self-help — mainly culled from Scientology, with its abusive tactics, and Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People. But it was also full of racism. Manson was a lifelong white supremacist who had known associations to the Aryan Brotherhood. An article from 1976 noted that he seemed to fixate his fear and anxieties on black Muslims; Jeff Guinn, the author of Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, has referred to him repeatedly as a forerunner of the modern alt-right movement. Manson’s ideas about “Helter Skelter” weren’t just generalized drug-fueled mayhem and violence; it was a specific allusion to a race war that Manson believed black Americans — whom he viewed as violent savages — were going to start and then win.As his warped vision went, while the race war was raging, Manson would lead his followers into a vast underground city, which he called “the Pit,” where his followers would be able to morph into winged elves and other fantastic creatures if they wished. When the war was done, he would then emerge from underground to take over the world from black people — because he believed they would be unfit to rule themselves.This was the full vision of “Helter Skelter,” and the real reason Manson’s followers tried to make their murders look like they were done by the Black Panthers: If black Americans refused to start a race war, Manson wanted to start it for them.
Mashing the facts
The film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood mashes the facts, and in this playful fairytale world operates in a psychological space akin to the bubbles of paranoia that surround adherents to Scientology, conspiracy theories and presentiments of the apocalyptic. Sharon Tate and her friends are NOT murdered, but the would-be perpetrators receive a poetic justice and their just deserts. In the background the aesthetics of Playboy resonate furiously, and the Playboy Mansion is itself amply mythologised. Sharon Tate, as a person has been subsumed, fetishised "mythologically", as part of a process that represents the fantasy version of her "star quality phenomenon", and substituting this version for the reality. YouTube video edits of "all the scenes of Sharon Tate" in Valley of the Dolls are montaged here with all the scenes of Margot Robbie who plays the role Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
All eyes . . .
I am tired, I am weary
I could sleep for a thousand years
A thousand dreams that would awake me
Different colors made of tears
Lyrics from "Venus in Furs" the song by the Velvet Underground, written by Lou Reed and originally released on the 1967 album The Velvet Underground & Nico.
Let's have an ORGY!!
Driven by highly functional white supremacist conspiracy theories, the developing pathology of the far right adopt the tropes of a highly racialized pornography.
Hot Wife . . .
. . . BLACKED!!!
In our Looking Glass world "cuckservative" has become a pejorative term, formed as a portmanteau of "cuck", an abbreviation of the word "cuckold", and the political designation "conservative".
It has become a label used by white nationalists and the alt-right in the United States. The word "cuckservative" reached a high level of mainstream political conversation around mid-July 2015, where it gained media attention just a few weeks before the start of the first Republican primary debate for the 2016 United States presidential election.
The term, as well as the shortened form "cuck" for cuckold, originated on websites such as 4chan (specifically the /pol/ imageboard) and 8chan, the right-wing message board My Posting Career, the blog The Right Stuff, and other sites in the alt-right movement.
Joseph Bernstein, reporter for BuzzFeed News posted this report on July 27, 2015, with the headline:
Behind The Racist Hashtag That Is Blowing Up Twitter
"Cuckservative" is the GamerGate of the conservative internet.
Joseph Bernstein reporting, back in 2015, writes:
Over the past week, a coalition of social media–savvy white supremacists and hardcore trolls have lifted the derogatory term "cuckservative" from the fringes of the "alt-right" internet to the cusp of the mainstream political conversation. A portmanteau of "cuckold" and "conservative," the word refers broadly to mainstream Republicans who hold insufficiently conservative or even progressive positions on hot-button social issues like transgender rights, state use of the Confederate flag, and, especially, immigration.
The term's connotations are racist. By alluding to a genre of porn in which passive white husbands watch their wives have sex with black men, it casts its targets as impotent defenders of white people in America.
Let's have an ORGY!!
Yes! The "body" of his "hot wife" is going to have sex with a black man . . .
. . . and, while "white hubby" watches, the black man is reduced to "flesh" via the aesthetic of a pornotropic "sign system"!
Joseph Bernstein continues:Prominent "cuckservatives" include Jeb Bush, John McCain, and Marco Rubio, politicians who have, in the imagination of the term's promulgators, adopted a false — liberal — consciousness to appeal to the shifting opinions of the American electorate. In this narrative, the anti-cuckservative hero is Donald Trump, who is unafraid to speak a racially inconvenient truth about the dire trajectory of white men.
The explosion of the movement, which is in many cases explicitly racist, has prompted tortured meditations from some libertarian bloggers and commentators about the place of intolerance in their politics:[W]hile I have of course known there were racists in, or adjacent to, the conservative movement forever, and have really not denied this (I tend to instead point out, for the sake of context, all those xenophobic bitter clingers in the Democrat Party that so bothered our Lord King Barack Obama in his Glorious Ascent), I am right now thinking that there are more white supremacists than I previously acknowledged, and am currently up in the air as to whether to dismiss this solely as a fringe-of-the-fringe phenomenon.The precedent here is #GamerGate, a movement that similarly combined retrograde cultural politics and anonymous harassment with the bleeding-edge visual grammar of the meme internet, and impelled a similar round of self-examination among mainstream game writers.Like GamerGate, and like much of the major harassment on the internet in 2015, "cuckservative" finds its roots in the intersection of web nerd culture and the politics of cultural hate. And just like #GamerGate, even many of the prominent anti- "cuckservatives" — the people who use the term — aren't quite sure where exactly that is.The Twitter user @Cuckservative, one of the most prominent and active users of the word (he's tweeted nearly 2,500 times in less than four months), told BuzzFeed News that "the precise origin is something nobody in the alt-right has been able to pin down. ... It could have easily been MPC or TRS where I first saw it used, but I can't say with certainty and will definitely not take credit for it."MPC and TRS are, respectively, My Posting Career, a kind of 8chan-meets-far-far-right-politics forum, and The Right Stuff, a white supremacist blog dedicated to "Reinvigorating dialogue among a disparate and edgy right-wing" and "Inflaming anuses among the childish and regressive left-wing." The Right Stuff, which has an incredibly active commenter community, has clearly played a role in popularizing the movement. But it's deep within a subfourm of My Posting Career where an earlier reference to the term "cuckservative" appears, beneath a copied tweet by the conservative activist Grover Norquist.
This post, from April 28, uses "cuckservatives" in the contemporary way: Norquist has been "cuckolded" by the liberal acceptance of trans people because the trans person in question is within the Republican mainstream on economic issues. But the formulation, "cuckservatives.txt," is a common trope in chans and subreddits (it's a joke about a DOS prompt) and a clue that the term has even older roots.
The first open use on Twitter appears to have been published in January, by @Drunknsage. This same user is also a GamerGater who argued with Brianna Wu, the game developer and symbol of GamerGate harassment.
Last Thursday, @Drunknsage quoted a tweet retweeting his initial coinage, which reads "First known use of cuckservative"; in other words, he took credit for coming up with the word. But @Drunknsage doesn't seem to have been using the term in the now established sense of a conservative politician in thrall to liberal values. That honor seems to go to the Twitter user @stompthewaffle, also known as Ethan Enkisson.
That's right: These aren't garden variety conservatives, for whom reflexive support of Israel has become a core value. Indeed, supporting Israeli foreign policy to the detriment of white Christians is one of the hallmark traits of the "cuckservative"; Enkisson's Twitter is particularly, though not uniquely, anti-Semitic for a member of the movement. (Enkisson is also a proto-GamerGater who was tweeting antagonistically at GamerGate villain Anita Sarkeesian as far back as 2011). So it's fair to say that the term, in its present configuration and with its current associations, is at least four months old.
That "cuckservative" comes from the place where forum trolls, white supremacy, and GamerGate meet shouldn't come as a surprise. As I wrote earlier this month, mobile services like Kik have enabled a new group of young white supremacists who are totally fluent in the art of internet persuasion, for whom irony poses no contradiction to the intensities of race hate.As @Cuckservative — who told BuzzFeed News he is a 34-year-old trucker from Iowa — put it, "Whatever term you use for the alt-right, it's always been a place where memes and jokes were part of the discussion. I know I'm taking it seriously even if I'm simply stealing Bane quotes and filling them with slurs half the time, and I think everyone else pushing #cuckservative is as well."In other words, the forces behind "cuckservative" aren't new. It's just the first time they've been aimed at the right.
Back to paranoia? Back to the eighteenth century, "your reason" . . .
. . . and Bad Religion!
Psychological projection, a defence mechanism in which the ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves and attributing them to others, is essential to the paranoid style of U.S. politics, a style promulgated by "social" media on a global scale, along with the Americanisation of the World.
The Sleep of Reason . . .
. . . Produces Monsters
The punk rock band Bad Religion's song Do The Paranoid Style is inspired by Richard Hofstadter's essay and the state of American politics. It is on their 2019 album Age of Unreason.
Do The Paranoid Style
Hey let's jump around to the renegade sound of the paranoid style
Hey get upside down to the American sound of the paranoid style
Everybody have you heard the news the old dance with wicked moves
It’s been around for many a year so polish up your granddad's gear and
Shake shake shake with fear waive your rights like you just don’t care
Anyone can do it - it’s easy if you dare
It's the paranoid style in American politics Casey Jones you better watch your apocalypse
Illumination and fluoridation are communist plots against the population
Hey let's jump around to the renegade sound of the paranoid style
Hey get upside down to the American sound of the paranoid style
Hey kids on the right and left do you feel dispossessed
If you're on the left or right I feel your pain tonight
So shake off reality it's easy as you please soon everyone is dancing con-spir-a-tor-i-a-lly
It's the paranoid style in American politics Casey Jones you better watch your apocalypse
All kinds of wild interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination
Hey let's jump around to the renegade sound of the paranoid style
Hey get upside down to the American sound of the paranoid style
An age of reason?
The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology is a work by English and American political activist Thomas Paine, arguing for the philosophical position of deism. It follows in the tradition of 18th-century British deism, and challenges institutionalized religion and the legitimacy of the Bible. It was published in three parts in 1794, 1795, and 1807. Deism is known as the philosophical position that rejects revelation as a source of religious knowledge and asserts that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to establish the existence of a Supreme Being or creator of the universe.
It was a best-seller in the United States, where it caused a short-lived deistic revival. British audiences, fearing increased political radicalism as a result of the French Revolution, received it with more hostility. The Age of Reason presents common deistic arguments; for example, it highlights what Paine saw as corruption of the Christian Church and criticizes its efforts to acquire political power. Paine advocates reason in the place of revelation, leading him to reject miracles and to view the Bible as an ordinary piece of literature, rather than a divinely-inspired text. It promotes natural religion and argues for the existence of a creator-god.
Most of Paine's arguments had long been available to the educated elite, but by presenting them in an engaging and irreverent style, he made deism appealing and accessible to the masses. Originally distributed as unbound pamphlets, the book was also cheap, putting it within the reach of a large number of buyers. Fearing the spread of what it viewed as potentially-revolutionary ideas, the British government prosecuted printers and booksellers who tried to publish and distribute it. Nevertheless, Paine's work inspired and guided many free thinkers.
America, democracy and revolution?
In Lambeth is a 1989 play by Jack Shepherd, centred on a meeting between William Blake and Thomas Paine in 1791. Its title quotes from Blake's poem Jerusalem from plate 37, line 14 - "There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find".
The play was first performed at the East Dulwich Tavern in London on 12 July 1989, and then at the Donmar Warehouse, directed by Shepherd himself and starring Bob Peck as Paine and Michael Maloney as Blake. Peck reprised the role (alongside Mark Rylance as Blake and Lesley Clare O'Neill as Katherine) in an adaptation of the play for television in the BBC Two Encounters series. First broadcast on 4 July 1993, it was directed by Sebastian Graham-Jones. The video montage here includes this broadcast, preceded by a short account of William Blake's visionary work by the psychogeographer Iain Sinclair.
From Bunhill Fields . . .
. . . to Lambeth . . .
. . . at 13 Hercules Buildings, Hercules Road, in London's Lambeth, where lived Catherine and William Blake, from 1790 to 1800.This was a revolutionary decade in France, and a period of political reaction and suppression in "perfidious Albion", a phrase (originally in French) used to describe a treacherous Britain in Augustin-Louis de Ximénès' poem L'Ère des Français, published in 1793.
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. What he called his prophetic works were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language".
Work "so mad" it's genius!
Although Blake was considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, he is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of the Romantic movement and as "Pre-Romantic". A committed Christian who was hostile to the Church of England (indeed, to almost all forms of organised religion), Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions. Though later he rejected many of these political beliefs, he maintained an amiable relationship with the political activist Thomas Paine; he was also influenced by thinkers such as Emanuel Swedenborg, whose work and ideology he mercilessly and satirically de-constructs in his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. After all, and as he writes in his Prophetical work Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion (c. 1803–1820):
I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's;I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.Ch. 1, plate 10, lines 20-21 The Words of LosThe Book of Urizen is one of Blake's major illuminated prophetic books, using a unique and idiosyncratic printing process he refers to as the "infernal method". It was among those significant illuminated works printed and published in Lambeth following the setting up of his household and studio, where he was assisted by Catherine Blake in the essentially artistic process of colouring the printed pages. Blake’s invention made it possible to print both the text of his poems and the images that he created to illustrate them from the same copper plate, etched in relief (in contrast to conventional etching or engraving in intaglio), unassisted, using his own rolling-press. Significantly, this meant that he became solely responsible not only for the creation, but also for the reproduction of his works, largely free from commercial constraint and entirely free from censorship.
Originally published as The First Book of Urizen in 1794. Later editions dropped the "First". The book takes its name from the character Urizen in Blake's mythology, who represents alienated reason as the source of oppression. The book describes Urizen as the "primeaval priest" and tells how he became separated from the other Eternals to create his own alienated and enslaving realm of religious dogma. Los and Enitharmon create a space within Urizen's fallen universe to give birth to their son Orc, the spirit of revolution and freedom.
In the mythology of William Blake, Urizen is the embodiment of conventional reason and law. He is usually depicted as a bearded old man; he sometimes bears architect's tools, to create and constrain the universe; or nets, with which he ensnares people in webs of law and conventional society. Originally, Urizen represented one half of a two-part system, with him representing reason and Los, his opposition, representing imagination. In Blake's reworking of his mythic system, Urizen is one of the four Zoas that result from the division of the primordial man, Albion, and he continues to represent reason. He has an Emanation, or paired female equivalent, Ahania, who stands for Pleasure. They are divided because Urizen is unable to understand the necessity of pleasure for the mind. In Blake's myth, Urizen is joined by many daughters with three representing aspects of the body. He is also joined by many sons, with four representing the four elements. These sons join in rebellion against their father but are later united in the Last Judgment. In many of Blake's books, Urizen is seen with four books that represent the various laws that he places upon humanity.
There are two possible derivations of the name Urizen. It comes either from "Your Reason", or from the Greek verb "horizein", meaning "to limit".
Marshall McLuhan's book The Gutenberg Galaxy ends with this insightful and wide ranging essay that, at its outset, offers the methods and purposes of William Blake as the exemplar of how a "mosaic pattern of perception and observation" is crucial to an understanding of "the causes and effects of psychic change, both personal and social".
If Perceptive organs vary, Objects of Perception seem to vary:
If the Perceptive Organs close, their Objects seem to close also.McLuhan explains:Blake makes quite explicit that when sense ratios change, men change. Sense ratios change when any one sense or bodily or mental function is externalized in technological form:The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man, & when separated From Imagination and closing itself as in steel in a RatioOf the Things of Memory, It thence frames Laws & MoralitiesTo destroy Imagination, the Divine Body, by Martyrdoms & Wars.'Imagination is that ratio among the perceptions and faculties which exists when they are not embedded or outered in material technologies. When so outered, each sense and faculty becomes a closed system. Prior to such outering there is entire interplay among experiences. This interplay or synesthesia is a kind of tactility such as Blake sought in the bounding line of sculptural form and in engraving.When the perverse ingenuity of man has outered some part of his being in material technology, his entire sense ratio is altered. He is then compelled to behold this fragment of himself "closing itself as in steel." In beholding this new thing, man is compelled to become it. Such was the origin of lineal, fragmented analysis with its remorseless power of homogenization:The Reasoning Spectre Stands between the Vegetative Man & his Immortal Imagination.Blake's diagnosis of the problem of his age was, like Pope's in The Dunciad, a direct confrontation of the forces shaping human perception. That he sought mythical form by which to render his vision was both necessary and ineffectual. For myth is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects. In an age of fragmented, lineal awareness, such as produced and was in turn greatly exaggerated by Gutenberg technology, mythological vision remains quite opaque. The Romantic poets fell far short of Blake's mythical or simultaneous vision. They were faithful to Newton's single vision and perfected the picturesque outer landscape as a means of isolating single states of the inner life.Later in this "essay" McLuhan writes:The assumptions latent in typographic segmentation, and in applied knowledge by the method of fragmenting of crafts and the specializing of social tasks, these assumptions were the more acceptable in the degree that typography enlarged its markets. The same assumptions presided over the formation of Newtonian space and time and mechanics. So literature, industry, and economics were easily accommodated within the Newtonian sphere. Those who questioned these assumptions were simply denying the facts of science. Now that Newton is no longer synonymous with science, we can meditate on the dilemmas of the self-regulating economy and the hedonistic calculus with light hearts and clear heads. But eighteenth century man was locked into a closed visual system that had enveloped him he knew not how. So he proceeded, robo-centred, to carry out the behests of the new vision.However, in 1709 Bishop Berkeley had published A New Theory of Vision, which revealed the lop-sided assumptions of Newtonian optics. Blake, at least, had understood the Berkeleyan critique and had restored tactility to its prime role as agent of unified perception. Today artists and scientists alike concur in praising Berkeley. But his wisdom was lost on his age that was wrapped in "single vision and Newton's sleep."
Pornotropian aesthetics?
This is one of William Blake's sixteen intaglio engravings for the memoir that became an exposé of the horrors of slavery!
Is this image part of the beginning of a racialised pornotropia, or an attempt to represent what Joseph Conrad in the Heart of Darkness encapsulates in the final utterance of the character Kurtz:"The horror! The horror!"?
Although Blake has become better known for his highly experimental, and individual form of relief etching, his commercial work largely consisted of intaglio engraving, the standard process of engraving in the 18th century in which the artist incised an image into the copper plate, a complex and laborious process, with plates taking months or years to complete, but as Blake's contemporary, John Boydell, realised, such engraving offered a "missing link with commerce", enabling artists to connect with a mass audience and became an immensely important activity by the end of the 18th century.
Three Graces?
Europe supported by Africa and America is an engraving by Blake held in the collection of the University of Arizona Museum of Art. The engraving was for a book written by someone who as a result of this commission became one of Blake's friends, one John Gabriel Stedman. The book to be illustrated was called The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796), a memoir and account of his time in Surinam to suppress the ongoing resistance and rebellion amongst the Maroons, slaves who had escaped and who formed settlements away from slavery. They often mixed with indigenous peoples, eventually evolving into separate creole cultures.
The engraving depicts three women embracing one another and adhering to the conventional aesthetic found in the framing in art of the Charites, or Three Graces. Black Africa and White Europe hold hands in a gesture of equality, while White Europe enfolds Brown America.
The barren earth blooms beneath their feet.
Europe wears a string of pearls, while her sisters Africa and America, wearing slave bracelets, are depicted as "contented slaves", according to David Erdman, who speculates that the bracelets represent the historical fact while the handclasp - Stedman's "ardent wish": "we only differ in colour, but are certainly all created by the same Hand." (Erdman, David V. (2013). Blake: Prophet Against Empire. Princeton University Press. p. 241.) Kathleen Raine says it "expresses the climate of opinion in which the questions of colour and slavery were, at that time, being considered, and which Blake's writings reflect". (Raine, Kathleen (2002) [first published 1969]. Blake and Tradition. Routledge. p. 29.)
The image of these three female personifications, in this case symbolising Indigenous People, fits with the aesthetic precedents for such groupings, often including an erotic charge, as in Rubens version of The Three Graces, a picture he kept in his private collection until his death.
While the aesthetic envelope for the depiction of the unclothed "nude" female figure in European art since the Renaissance is celebratory, there is an abiding presence within the narratives representing the classic mythology of Greece and Rome of extreme violence, as in the Roman foundation myth of The Rape of the Sabine Women.
This painting depicting the myth of the violent abduction of the Sabine Women is by Peter Paul Rubens.
And, Stedman's Narrative, based on his diaries, was full of sex and violence.
Significant parts of the Narrative focus on descriptions of Surinam's natural environments, but Stedman also writes about the contrast between the beauty of the colony and his first taste of the violence and cruelty endemic there. One of his first observations involves the torture of a nearly naked enslaved woman, chained to an iron weight. His narrative describes the woman receiving 200 lashes and carrying the weight for a month as a result of her inability to fulfill a task to which she was assigned. Stedman relays several stories regarding the state of the slaves and the horrors to which they are subjected. In one story detailed in his Narrative, involving a group sailing by boat, an enslaved mother was ordered by her mistress to hand over her crying baby. The mistress then threw the baby into the river, drowning it. The mother jumped into the river after her baby, whose body was recovered by fellow slaves. The mother later received 200 lashes for her defiant behaviour. In another story, a small boy shoots himself in the head to escape flogging. In yet another, a man is completely broken on the rack and left for days to suffer until he died.
Stedman's Narrative was published by Joseph Johnson, a radical figure who received criticism for the types of books he sold. In the 1790s, more than 50 percent of them were political, including Stedman's Narrative. The books he published supported the rights of slaves, Jews, women, prisoners and other oppressed peoples around the world. Johnson was an active member of the Society for Constitutional Information, an organization attempting to reform Parliament. He was condemned for the support and publication of writers who voiced liberal opinions, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. Johnson, was imprisoned in 1797 for printing the political writings of Gilbert Wakefield. An article by Kristina Gaddy (July 26, 2018) for OZY, takes up the story with the headline:
A soldier in Suriname accidentally wrote an anti-slavery memoir
Kristina Gaddy writes:
Joseph Johnson had secretly hired an editor to revise the original text and then published a version Stedman condemned as an outright distortion. “My book was printed full of lies and nonsense,” he wrote to his sister-in-law.
It took nearly two centuries before readers were given an accurate account of Stedman’s Suriname adventure, after historians Richard and Sally Price painstakingly compared his diary to the published version and came out with a new edition in 1988. In some cases, the Prices, who are professors emeritus of American studies and anthropology at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, determined that the changes involved softening Stedman’s phrasing and word choice: The slightly derogatory “Smouse” had been replaced with “Jew,” while “a couple of hungry whores” became “a brace of the frail sisterhood.”What’s more, descriptions of Stedman’s sexual conquests had been entirely removed, along with his comments on the relationship between enslaved women and their White European masters, a quite common union known as a “Suriname marriage.” Johnson’s editor had also taken Stedman’s middle-of-the-road opinions and made them more pointedly pro-slavery, altering his words to say that slavery in Suriname was worse than in the British West Indies (it wasn’t) and that the fleeing Maroons were “savage.” Even with those unauthorized changes, however, the Narrative became “one of the strongest indictments ever to appear against plantation slavery,” the Prices write.Johnson's project
Through this connection to Johnson, Stedman's Narrative associated him with some of Europe's foremost radicals. Johnson commissioned William Blake and Francesco Bartolozzi to create engravings for the Narrative. Blake engraved sixteen images for the book and delivered them in December 1792 and 1793, as well as a single plate in 1794. The images depict some of the horrific atrocities against slaves that Stedman witnessed, including hanging, lashing and other forms of torture. According to Hugh Honour in his The European Vision of America (1975), the Blake plates are more forceful than other illustrations in the book and have the "fluidity of line" and "hallucinatory quality of his original work". Re:LODE Radio is not so sure. It is impossible to compare Stedman's sketches with the Blake plates because none of Stedman's original drawings have survived.
"The horror! The horror!"
In the 1902 novel Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad has Marlow/Conrad the narrator talking with others on a ship moored on the dark aired River Thames at Gravesend.
This river, a river at the heart of the British Empire is the setting from which Marlow begins his reminiscences and then tells his tale.
Steve McQueen’s film Gravesend (2007) is concerned with the mining of coltan, a dull black mineral used in capacitors, which are vital components in mobile phones, laptops, and other electronics. Juxtaposing an animated fly-by of the Congo River with footage of workers sifting through dark earth and robots processing the procured material in a pristine, brightly lit laboratory, the film’s disjunctions allegorise the very real economic, social and physical distance this material traverses as it moves from the third to the first world. Its final sequence, a time-lapse shot of a sun setting behind smokestacks, brings everything full circle, rendering visual a scene described at the outset of Joseph Conrad’s celebrated novel, Heart of Darkness.
Maya Jasanoff writes of Conrad and this novel in her book The Dawn Watch.
Heart of Darkness remains one of the most widely read novels in English; and the movie adaptation Apocalypse Now has brought Conrad's story to still more. The very phrase has taken on a life of its own. Conrad's book has become a touchstone for thinking about Africa and Europe, civilization and savagery, imperialism, genocide, insanity - about human nature itself.It's also about a flash point. In the 1970's, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe declared Heart of Darkness "an offensive and totally deplorable book," rife with degrading stereotypes of Africa and Africans. Conrad, said Achebe, was "a bloody racist." Not long afterward, a half-American, half-Kenyan college student named Barack Obama was challenged by his friends to explain why he was reading "this racist tract." "Because . . . ," Obama stammered, "because the book teaches me things . . . About white people, I mean. See, the book's not really about Africa. Or black people. It's about the man who wrote it. the European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world."Page 4., The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
The author Adam Hochschild deals with the historical background to the Heart of Darkness. The exploitation of the Congo Free State by King Leopold II of Belgium between 1885 and 1908, including the large-scale atrocities committed during that period, are revealed in an exposé of multiple histories conveniently forgotten or suppressed in his bestseller King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998). He writes:
Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was fascinated with obtaining a colony and focused upon claiming the interior of Africa — the only unclaimed sizable geographic area. Moving within the European political paradigm existing in the early 1880s, Leopold gained international concessions and recognition for his personal claim to the Congo Free State.His rule of the vast region was based on tyranny and terror. Under his direction, Stanley again visited the area and extracted favorable treaties from numerous local leaders. A road and, eventually, a rail line were developed from the coast to Leopoldville (present-day Kinshasa). A series of militarized outposts were established along the length of the Congo River, and imported paddle wheelers commenced regular river service. Native peoples were forced to gather ivory and transport it for export. Beginning c. 1890, rubber — originally manufactured from coagulated sap — became economically significant in international trade. The Congo was rich in rubber-producing vines, and Leopold transitioned his exploitative focus from dwindling ivory supplies to the burgeoning rubber market. Slavery, exploitation and the reign of terror continued and even increased.Meanwhile, early missionaries and human rights advocates such as Roger Casement, E. D. Morel, George Washington Williams, and William Henry Sheppard began to circulate news of the widespread atrocities committed in the Congo under the official blessing of Leopold's administration.Women and children were imprisoned as hostages to force husbands and fathers to work. Flogging, starvation and torture were routine. Murder was common — tribes resisting enslavement were wiped out; administration officials expected to receive back a severed human hand for every bullet issued. Rape and sexual slavery were rampant. Workers failing to secure assigned quotas of rubber were routinely mutilated or tortured. Administration officials so completely dehumanized local peoples that at least one decorated his flower garden with a border of severed human heads. News of these atrocities brought slow, but powerful, international condemnation of Leopold's administration leading, eventually, to his assignment of the country to Belgian administration.
In the chapter called "Meeting Mr Kurtz" Hochschild says more about Conrad the man and the writer:
Heart of Darkness is one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism in all literature, but its author, curiously, thought himself an ardent imperialist where England was concerned. Conrad fully recognized Leoplod's rape of the Congo for what it was: "The horror! The horror!" his character Kurtz says on his deathbed. And Conrad's stand-in, Marlow, muses on how "the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." yet in almost the same breath, Marlow talks about how the British territories colored red on a world map were "good to see at any time because one knows that some real work is done in there"; British colonialists were "bearers of a spark from the sacred fire."
Marlow was speaking for Conrad , whose love of his adoptive country knew no bounds: Conrad felt that "liberty . . . can only be found under the English flag all over the world." And at the very time he was denouncing the European lust for African riches in his novel, he was an investor in a gold mine near Johannesburg.Conrad was a man of his time and place in other ways as well. He was partly a prisoner of what Mark Twain, in a different context, called "the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages."Heart of Darkness has come in for some justified pummeling in recent years because of its portrayal of black characters, who say no more than a few words. In fact, they don't speak at all: they grunt; they chant; they produce a "drone of weird incantations" and "a wild passionate uproar", they spout "strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language . . . like the responses of some satanic litany."The true message of the book, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has argued is: "Keep away from Africa, or else! Mr. Kurtz . . . should have heeded that warning and the prowling horror in his heart would have kept its place, chained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irresistible allure of the jungle al lo! the darkness found him out."However laden it is with Victorian racism, Heart of Darkness remains the greatest portrait in fiction of Europeans in the Scramble for Africa. When Marlow says goodbye to his aunt before heading to his new job, "she talked about 'weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,' till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit." Conrad's white men go about their rape of the continent in the belief that they are uplifting the natives, bringing civilization, serving "the noble cause."All these illusions are embodied in the character of Kurtz. He is both a murderous head collector and an intellectual, "an emissary of . . . science and progress." He is a painter, the creator of "a small sketch in oils" of a woman carrying a torch that Marlow finds at the Central Station. And he is a poet and journalist, the author of, among other works, a seventeen-page report - "vibrating with eloquence . . . a beautiful piece of writing" - to the International Society for the Suppression of savage Customs. At the end of this report, filled with lofty sentiments, Kurtz scrawls in a shaky hand: "Exterminate all the brutes!"Pages 146-47
European exceptionalism leads to exceptional European brutality!
Object of plunder:
The TRUTH and the European miracle!
The European miracle, a term coined by Eric Jones in 1981, refers to the surprising rise of Europe during the Early Modern period. During the 15th to 18th centuries, a great divergence took place, comprising the European Renaissance, age of discovery, the formation of the colonial empires, the Age of Reason, and the associated leap forward in technology and the development of capitalism and early industrialisation. The result was that by the 19th century, European powers dominated world trade and world politics.
The notion of a "European miracle" says more about the European world view than the realities represented. It is often the omissions, and the selections, that reveal more of this constructed perception of things than what is presented, represented and discussed. Looking at what has been dismissed, or is being dismissed, and why, is often significantly more revealing as to the character of a dominating eurocentric ideology.
The terms Afrocentrism vs. Eurocentrism have come to play a role in the 2000s to 2010s in the context of the political discourse on race in the United States and critical whiteness studies, aiming to expose white supremacism and white privilege. On this matter the Wikipedia article on Eurocentrism cites Alison Bailey, "Philosophy and Whiteness" in Tim Engles (ed.) Towards a Bibliography of Critical Whiteness Studies Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society (2006), p. 9.: "Philosophical methods are well suited for unpacking the political, ontological, and epistemological conditions that foster racism and hold white supremacy in place. However, on the whole, philosophy as a discipline has remained relatively untouched by interdisciplinary work on race and whiteness. In its quest for certainty, Western philosophy continues to generate what it imagines to be colorless and genderless accounts of knowledge, reality, morality, and human nature".Afrocentrist scholars, such as Molefi Asante, have argued that there is a prevalence of Eurocentric thought in the processing of much of academia on African affairs. And, in an article, 'Eurocentrism and Academic Imperialism' by Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi, from the University of Tehran, states that Eurocentric thought exists in almost all aspects of academia in many parts of the world, especially in the humanities.
This photo was used in a Guardian report (Wed 10 Jun 2020) with the headline:
Activists target removal of statues including Columbus and King Leopold II
The Guardian correspondents reported:
Campaign against symbols of racism continues around world after Black Lives Matter protests spark global reckoning
Statues of Christopher Columbus, King Leopold II of Belgium and a hero of Irish nationalism could be the next to fall as the campaign against symbols of racism and colonialism spreads around the world.
Activists have organised petitions – and in one case set a statue on fire – to remove monuments to historic figures tainted by racism or slavery.
None have gone as far as the group in Bristol that tumbled a statue of Edward Colston into the harbour on Sunday but they are pushing authorities to act in solidarity with protests in the United States over the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer.
The targets are disparate – their lives separated by continents and centuries – but they share a common fate of once being revered and now falling into controversy, even disgrace.
Belgian authorities in Antwerp took down a statue of Leopold II on Wednesday after it was set on fire and daubed with paint. It is being taken to a museum in the Flemish capital for restoration and is unlikely to be returned to its original spot.
TRUTH and DENIAL
At the end of the twentieth century in a Guardian article by Stephen Bates (13 May 1999) the quoted dismissals of Hochschild's exposé of the Belgian colonialist instigation of "The horror!" in the Congo is at least questionable, and at most, a blatant abdication of responsibility to acknowledge the facts of "The horror!":
It is clear that many of Leopold's officials in the depots up the Congo river terrorised the local inhabitants, forcing them to work under the threat of having their hands and feet - or those of their children - cut off. Women were raped, men were executed and villages were burned in pursuit of profit for the king.
But what has stuck in the gut of Belgian historians is Hochschild's claim that 10 million people may have died in a forgotten holocaust. In outrage, the now ageing Belgian officials who worked in the Congo in later years have taken to the internet with a 10-page message claiming that maybe only half a dozen people had their hands chopped off, and that even that was done by native troops.
They argue that American and British writers have highlighted the Congo to distract attention from the contemporary massacre of the North American indians and the Boer War.
Under the headline 'a scandalous book', members of the Royal Belgian Union for Overseas Territories claim: 'There is nothing that could compare with the horrors of Hitler and Stalin, or the deliberate massacres of the Indian, Tasmanian and Aboriginal populations. A black legend has been created by polemicists and British and American journalists feeding off the imaginations of novelists and the re-writers of history.' Professor Jean Stengers, a leading historian of the period, says: 'Terrible things happened, but Hochschild is exaggerating. It is absurd to say so many millions died. I don't attach so much significance to his book. In two or three years' time, it will be forgotten.' Leopold's British biographer, Barbara Emerson, agrees: 'I think it is a very shoddy piece of work. Leopold did not start genocide. He was greedy for money and chose not to interest himself when things got out of control. Part of Belgian society is still very defensive. People with Congo connections say we were not so awful as that, we reformed the Congo and had a decent administration there.' Stengers acknowledges that the population of the Congo shrank dramatically in the 30 years after Leopold took over, though exact figures are hard to establish since no one knows how many inhabited the vast jungles in the 1880s.
It is true too that some of those reporting scandals had their own knives to grind. Some were Protestant missionaries who were rivals to Belgian Catholics in the region.
Yet Leopold certainly emerges as an unattractive figure, described as a young man by his cousin Queen Victoria as an 'unfit, idle and unpromising an heir apparent as ever was known' and by Disraeli as having 'such a nose as a young prince has in a fairy tale, who has been banned by a malignant fairy.' As king, he did not bother to deny charges in a London court that he had sex with child prostitutes. When the bishop of Ostend told him that people were saying he had a mistress, he is reputed to have replied benignly: 'People tell me the same about you, your Grace. But of course I choose not to believe them.' His wiliness in convincing the world that he had only humanitarian motives in annexing the Congo, in persuading the Belgian government essentially to pay for his purchase and in buying up journalists, including the great explorer Henry Morton Stanley, to promote his cause show both cunning and skill.
Emerson claims Leopold was appalled to hear about the atrocities in his domain, but dug his heels in when he was attacked in the foreign press. He did indeed apparently write to his secretary of state: 'These horrors must end or I will retire from the Congo. I will not be splattered with blood and mud: it is essential that any abuses cease.' But the man who (as Queen Victoria said) had the habit of saying 'disagreeable things to people' was also reputed to have snorted: 'Cut off hands - that's idiotic. I'd cut off all the rest of them, but not hands. That's the one thing I need in the Congo.' Although few now defend him, strange things happen even today when the Congo record is challenged. Currently circulating on the internet is an anguished claim by a student in Brussels called Joseph Mbeka alleging he had his thesis marked a failure when he cited Hochschild's book: 'My director turned his back on me.' Daniel Vangroenweghe, a Belgian anthropologist who also published a critical book about the period 15 years ago, says: 'Senior people tried to get me sacked at the time. Questions were asked in parliament and my work was subjected to an official inspection.' At a large chateau outside Brussels in Tervuren is the Musee Royal de l'Afrique, which Leopold was eventually shamed into setting up to prove his philanthropic credentials. It contains the largest African ethnographic collection in the world, rooms full of stuffed animals and artefacts including shields, spears, deities, drums and masks, a 60ft-long war canoe, even Stanley's leather suitcase.
There is one small watercolour of a native being flogged, but a visitor would be hard-pressed to spot any other reference to the dark side of Leopold's regime. Dust hangs over the place. A curator has said changes are under consideration 'but absolutely not because of the recent disreputable book by an American'.
The real legacy of Leopold and of the Belgians who ran the country until they were bloodily booted out in 1960 has been the chaos in the region ever since and a rapacity among rulers such as Mobutu Sese Seko which outstripped even the king's. Leopold made £3m in 10 years between 1896 and 1906, Mobutu filched at least £3bn. When the Belgians left there were only three Africans in managerial positions in the Congo's administration and fewer than 30 graduates in the entire country.
Vangroenweghe says: 'Talk of whether Leopold killed 10 million people or five million is beside the point, it was still too many.' I asked Belgium's prime minister, Jean-Luc Dehaene, about the Congo legacy this week. 'The colonial past is completely past,' he said. 'There is really no strong emotional link any more. It does not move the people. It's part of the past. It's history.'
"It's history." In 2020 Re:LODE Radio asks: How wrong can you be?
Nearly two decades ago, an article in the Guardian by Linh Dinh (Fri 2 Nov 2001) proposed that:
Despite claims that Apocalypse Now - due for rerelease in an extended format - exposed the truth about the Vietnam war, it is riddled with grotesque falsehoods and scenes of breathtaking phoniness
The article was headlined:
Apocalypse lies
Here is the article in full:In Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, a character named Kurtz escapes civilisation and domesticity (England and his wife) to go wild in the Congo. In Apocalypse Now, drawn from this book, a character named Kurtz escapes civilisation and domesticity (the US army and his wife) to go wild in Cambodia. Travelling upriver, each man finds his proper domain in the jungle. Surrounded by "natives", each becomes a god, beholden to no rules of civilisation. Such absolute freedom cannot go unpunished, however, and so each man is pursued by an agent from the society he has left behind. In Apocalypse Now, that agent is Captain Willard.As a seasoned soldier and CIA agent, with one tour of Vietnam already behind him, Willard comes over as strangely innocent and unmarked. He appears more befuddled than shell-shocked, and his voiceover narration, written by the journalist Michael Herr, is much livelier than anything that actually comes out of his mouth. At the start of the film, Willard gets drunk, strips himself, and punches a mirror. Perhaps this is post-traumatic stress disorder, or maybe it's just someone trashing his dorm room after a frat party.Willard longs for the jungle, but it is never clear what he wants to do once he gets there. He has no real aim, not even a crazy one. He doesn't want to save democracy or kill the Commies, or even get high on the adrenaline of war. He accepts the assignment to hunt down Kurtz with blasé resignation: "I took the mission. What the hell else was I gonna do? But I didn't know what I'd do when I found him." Willard's passive face never betrays the angst of Klaus Kinski in Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God, to cite another crazy-quest-up-the-river movie. If anything he is a grown-up Huckleberry Finn.Instead of drifting down the Mississippi with a negro sidekick, however, Willard is now chugging up the Nung river in the company of Chief, Clean, surfer dude Lance and Chef. What they are heading towards is "the worst place on earth", Kurtz's compound in the heart of the jungle, and their gory, almost picaresque encounters along the way are the meat of this movie, its only points, because nothing really happens once they get there. The ending is a muck of half-baked ideas and well-done cinematography.Two nutcases bookend their journey. At the mouth of the Nung river, they run into a kinetic Colonel Kilgore. He appears to symbolise the ever-optimistic, gung-ho, goofy yet deadly US military machine. Attacking a village held by Charlie, he blasts Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries from the sky. He then orders some of his men to surf during the firefight. When one of the soldiers balks, Kilgore barks: "If I say it's safe to surf this beach, captain, it's safe to surf this beach!"At the end of their journey, what's left of the crew run into a raving photojournalist, played by Dennis Hopper. A jester in Kurtz's court, he swoons when the master declaims poetry and gushes out trippy inanities such as: "This is dialectics! It's very simple dialectics. One through nine. No maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, with fractions." He even manages to splice TS Eliot into his blathering: "I'm a little man. He's, he's a great man! I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas." Hard to imagine worse lines spoken by a first-rate actor.You may have noticed that I have so far mentioned no Vietnamese characters. That's because there are none. The only Vietnamese speaking part belongs to a south Vietnamese army translator, who gets to yammer: "This man is dirty VC! He wants water! He can drink paddy water!" This in a movie that Coppola famously declared "is not about Vietnam - it is Vietnam". This movie, then, is really about a bunch of pale guys, Coppola included, wading into their own hearts of darkness. It is certainly not about Vietnam. I'm not even sure it's a Vietnam war movie.Firstly, the Vietnam war was essentially a civil war. The two major combatants were the north and south Vietnamese, as borne out by the casualty figures: 1.1 m for the north, 223,746 for the south, and 58,200 for the Americans. Of the three major offensives of the war - Tet (1968), Easter (1972), and Spring (1975) - US ground troops participated in only one. You would never know that, however, from watching any American Vietnam war flick, be it The Deer Hunter, Platoon, The Boys in Company C or Apocalypse Now.To many Americans, the Vietnam war was an American extravaganza, staged in Vietnam. To concede that it was a civil war is to relegate America to a supporting role in someone else's drama. But that is exactly what it was: someone else's drama. In spite of all the billions spent by the US, the Vietnam war was essentially a Vietnamese affair. The stakes were simply much higher for them.To call it a civil war would also be to acknowledge ideological differences among the Vietnamese, an impossible concept if one perceives them as monolithic and incapable of squabbling among themselves. It is meaningful that Kurtz got into trouble for murdering four south Vietnamese "double agents". According to Willard: "Kurtz orders the assassination of three Vietnamese men and one woman. Two of the men were colonels in the south Vietnamese army. Enemy activity in his old sector dropped off to nothing." Scratch a south Vietnamese, the movie is saying, and you'll find a north Vietnamese.These murdered four at least share the distinction of being the only Vietnamese with actual names in this movie, as glimpsed on their ID cards. The rest are just a faceless horde scampering in the background, none more so than the montagnards. Unlike the Vietnamese double agents, they are not two-faced. To be a double agent, one has to be sly, deceitful, hypocritical - mental operations these folks are apparently not capable of performing. In fact, they seem incapable of speech: none of them has a single line in the movie. The montagnards are so simple, so childlike, they can be scared away with sirens. Hard to square that with the fearless warriors supposedly undaunted by artilleries and napalm strikes. Fulfilling the white man's fantasy, they worship Kurtz like a god, and after he is killed by Willard, they are ready to prostrate themselves before him too.The montagnards are also prized by Kurtz because they know how to tap into their primordial instincts: they know how to kill without feelings, just like the Viet Cong. Kurtz recounts his days in the special forces: "We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying ... We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile ... a pile of little arms. And I remember I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realised ... like I was shot. Like I was shot with a diamond. A diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought my God, the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realised they were stronger than we. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love, but they had the strength to do that. If I had 10 divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly."The US is bound to lose the war because it doesn't have 10 divisions of noble savages. That's why Kurtz has to raise his own army to fight his own war. The way to win this war is to be more methodically barbaric.This fabrication of an inspired atrocity by the Viet Cong is consistent with the movie's preoccupation with the dark primitives. With Heart of Darkness as its ideological ballast, this is inevitable. In Conrad's novel, the boat goes upstream towards "the earliest beginnings of the world". Along the way they encounter Africans with "faces like grotesque masks". One man is compared to "a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs". In Apocalypse Now, Vietnam is more or less one continuous jungle, with corpses casually dangling from trees, and arrows and spears flying out of the foliage. The arrow attack scene is lifted straight from Heart of Darkness, where a black river boat pilot is impaled by a spear. The phoniness of this is breathtaking. The NVA and Viet Cong did not win a modern war with arrows and spears. But a scene from a 1901 book has to be shoehorned into a 1979 movie because of Coppola's fascination with savages.As Willard's boat travels up the Nung river, the only signs of civilisation are two US army bases and, in the new extended version, a French plantation. This has nothing to do with the Vietnam of reality. As anyone who has been there will tell you, Vietnam is (and was during the war) grossly overpopulated. Rivers and roads are lined with settlements. The US, by comparison, is more wild. Another thing a visitor to Vietnam can readily see is the ubiquity of the written language - that is, of civilisation. Signs and banners are everywhere. None of this is apparent in any of the panoramic shots of Apocalypse Now. Coppola hasn't just withheld speech from the Vietnamese, he has also banned them from writing.The most trenchant political opinions in the new movie are mouthed by a Frenchman. Near the end of their journey, Willard's crew discover a French plantation emerging from the mist. Invited to dinner by its proprietor, Hubert de Marrais, they get to hear a mini lecture on the history of Vietnam. First de Marrais tells them that it was Americans who created the Viet Minh, a precursor to the Viet Cong, in 1945. That is nonsense. The OSS, later to become the CIA, only backed the Viet Minh in world war two because it was already an established guerrilla group, capable of spying on the Japanese. De Marrais then tells them: "The Vietnamese were nothing. We created something out of nothing. We fight for that ... you Americans fight for the biggest nothing in history." For the record, Vietnam was founded in 939, more than a millennium before France could stake any claim to it. As for the US, its objectives in Vietnam were never colonial in nature, but ideological. The botched history lesson is typical of this movie. Whenever it reaches for insights or profundity, it simply unravels.Let's examine the moral trajectory of this movie. Coppola writes: "I feel any artist making a film about war by necessity will make an 'anti-war' film and all war films are usually that. My film is more of an 'anti-lie' film, in that the fact that a culture can lie about what's really going on in warfare - that people are being brutalised, tortured, maimed and killed - and somehow present this as moral is what horrifies me, and perpetuates the possibility of war."All wars brutalise, torture, maim, and kill - that's all a war is. All the main characters in the movie know and accept these facts. They even glory in them. Willard, for example, never flinches at any atrocity committed in his presence. He becomes guilty of one himself when he kills a wounded Vietnamese female civilian halfway down the river. Unlike Lance, who has machine-gunned her entire family in panic, Willard shoots the woman in cold blood.Willard kills the woman because of expediency, because he is in a hurry to get to Kurtz. He also does it for the sake of consistency. As Willard explains: "It was a way we had over here of living with ourselves. We'd cut them in half with a machine gun and give them a Band-Aid. It was a lie. And the more I saw of them, the more I hated lies." Kurtz is likewise not disturbed by the killings, but by lies. He never questions the US army's objectives, only its methods. The difference between Kurtz and Willard is one of degrees, not of essence. They both believe in the war, and in the extra-legal means to pursue it. Willard shares Kurtz's contempt for the US military brass: "The war was being run by a bunch of four-star clowns who were going to end up giving the whole circus away." And he admires Kurtz's freelancing, freewheeling ways: "The more I read and began to understand, the more I admired him."If Willard identifies so strongly with Kurtz, why would he want to kill him? Willard himself offers no clues: "Part of me was afraid of what I would find, and what I would do when I got there. I knew the risks, or imagined I knew. But the thing I felt the most, much stronger than fear, was the desire to confront him." Confront him to do what? What can Kurtz possibly tell Willard that he doesn't already know? That Time magazine is misleading? Does someone who works for the CIA, who traffic in lies, need to be reminded of that?Willard's assassination of Kurtz, then, can only be interpreted as an acquiescence to US army authority. He's exorcising no demons. The scene itself has no drama. Emerging from a green pond, his baptism by slime, Willard sneaks into Kurtz's room and hacks the master to death. Outside, the natives are poleaxing a water buffalo in a ritual killing. It's a very cool scene, but the analogy is meaningless.His mission accomplished, Willard is only heading downstream towards the likes of Colonel Kilgore, whose similari ties to Kurtz are drawn by Willard himself: "He was one of those guys that had that weird light around him. You just knew he wasn't gonna get so much as a scratch here." Someone that invincible can only be a god, or an American film director working in the jungle, lost in his own heart of darkness."The horror, the horror" that is uttered by Kurtz in Heart of Darkness does not refer to the horrors of the jungle, as some believe, but the horrors of daily life anywhere. That is a much more profound point. In Conrad's book, Kurtz leaves his English wife only to shack up with an African one. He becomes "at home" in the jungle. Fleeing one domestic arrangement, he runs right into another. Savages, once you get to know them, turn out to be no different from the buddies and the wives you've left behind. Rescued, or rather kidnapped, by Marlow to be brought back to England, Kurtz dies halfway, but not before croaking out his "judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this earth": "The horror! The horror!" Back home, his English wife is eager to hear her husband's last words. Marlow answers: "The last word he pronounced was your name."Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Willard and Kurtz in Apocalypse Now are also escaping from the familiar, from the wives at home, into the exotic and the unknown. After their first Vietnam tour of duty, they signed up for another. Willard confides: "When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing ... I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce." Kurtz writes in a letter to his wife: "Sell the house. Sell the car. Sell the kids. Find someone else. Forget it. I'm never coming back. Forget it."This film, then, is not about the horrors of the jungle but its allures. The jungle becomes a hotbed of wild desires, where you can hobnob with savages, shoot them, get shot in turns, burn down acres of forests, get scared by tigers.It becomes, in short, the ultimate theme park. Halfway through this romp, Lance sums it all up: "Disneyland. Fuck, man, this is better than Disneyland!" Anything to get away from "the horror, the horror" of home.As Huckleberry Finn says at the end of his own wild boat ride: "She's going to adopt me and civilise me, and I can't stand it. I been there before."
Daydreaming of home?
"Galveston" is a song written by Jimmy Webb and popularized by American country music singer Glen Campbell who recorded it with the instrumental backing of members of The Wrecking Crew. The protagonist is a soldier waiting to go into battle who thinks of the woman he loves and his hometown of Galveston, Texas.
The song was first released in 1968 by a mournful-sounding Don Ho, who introduced Glen Campbell to it when Ho appeared as a guest on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. Campbell's recording of the song, released in early 1969, was understood by many as being a Vietnam War protest song, but Campbell performed it up-tempo, and in his original promo video, Campbell was dressed as a soldier in a military-style outfit. Webb has challenged the implication of Campbell's version that it was in any way "a patriotic song". According to Webb, the song is "about a guy who's caught up in something he doesn't understand and would rather be somewhere else". In Ho's recording, the second verse was:
Galveston, oh GalvestonWonder if she could forget meI'd go home if they would let mePut down this gunAnd go to Galveston.However, in both Campbell's version and in Webb’s own 1972 release, this verse runs as:Galveston, oh GalvestonI still hear your sea waves crashingWhile I watch the cannons flashingI clean my gunAnd dream of Galveston.
This video montage follows the song as recorded by Jimmy Webb using archive material and some edited Playboy photography of Eugena Washington. The intention of this edit is to shift the assumption that the "guy who's caught up in something he doesn't understand and would rather be somewhere else", is white, as is his girlfriend.
Juneteenth, . . .
. . . also known as Jubilee Day, Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, and Black Independence Day, commemorates the emancipation of African-American slaves. It is also often observed for celebrating African-American culture.
Originating in Galveston, Texas, it has been celebrated annually on June 19 in various parts of the United States since 1865.
Juneteenth's commemoration is on the anniversary date of the June 19, 1865, of the announcement of General Order No. 3 by Union Army general Gordon Granger, proclaiming freedom for slaves in Galveston, Texas, which was the last state of the Confederacy with institutional slavery.
Celebrations date to 1866, at first involving church-centered community gatherings in Texas. It spread across the South and became more commercialized in the 1920s and 1930s, often centering on a food festival. Participants in the Great Migration out of the South carried their celebrations to other parts of the country. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, these celebrations were eclipsed by the nonviolent determination to achieve civil rights, but grew in popularity again in the 1970s with a focus on African American freedom and African-American arts. Beginning with Texas by proclamation in 1938, and by legislation in 1979, 49 U.S. states and the District of Columbia have formally recognized the holiday in various ways.
The holiday is considered the "longest-running African-American holiday" and has been called "America's second Independence Day". Juneteenth is usually celebrated on the third Saturday in June. Historian Mitch Kachun considers that celebrations of the end of slavery have three goals: "to celebrate, to educate, and to agitate". (Hume, Noah; Arceneaux, Janice (2008). "Public Memory, Cultural Legacy, and Press Coverage of the Juneteenth Revival". Journalism History. 34 (3): 155–162.)
Early celebrations consisted of baseball, fishing, and rodeos. African Americans were often prohibited from using public facilities for their celebrations, so they were often held at churches or near water. Celebrations were also characterized by elaborate large meals and people wearing their best clothing.
It was common for former slaves and their descendants to make a pilgrimage to Galveston.
President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in the midst of the Civil War, announcing on September 22, 1862, that if the rebels did not end the fighting and rejoin the Union by January 1, 1863, he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation. It became effective on January 1, 1863, declaring that all enslaved persons in the Confederate States of America in rebellion and not in Union hands were freed.
More isolated geographically, planters and other slaveholders had migrated into Texas from eastern states to escape the fighting, and many brought enslaved people with them, increasing by the thousands the enslaved population in the state at the end of the Civil War. Although most lived in rural areas, more than 1,000 resided in both Galveston and Houston by 1860, with several hundred in other large towns. By 1865, there were an estimated 250,000 enslaved people in Texas.
Despite the surrender of Confederate General-in-Chief Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, the western Confederate Army of the Trans-Mississippi did not surrender until June 2. On the morning of June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived on the island of Galveston, Texas, to take command of the more than 2,000 federal troops recently landed in the department of Texas to enforce the emancipation of its slaves and oversee a peaceful transition of power, additionally nullifying all laws passed within Texas during the war by Confederate lawmakers.The Texas Historical Commission and Galveston Historical Foundation say that Granger’s men marched throughout Galveston reading General Order No. 3 first at Union Army Headquarters at the Osterman Building (formerly at the intersection of Strand Street and 22nd Street, since demolished), in the Strand Historic District. Next they marched to the 1861 Customs House and Courthouse before finally marching to the Negro Church on Broadway, since renamed Reedy Chapel-AME Church. The order informed all Texans that, in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves were free:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.
Longstanding urban legend places the historic reading of General Order No. 3 at Ashton Villa; however, no extant historical evidence supports such claims.On June 21, 2014, the Galveston Historical Foundation and Texas Historical Commission erected a Juneteenth plaque where the Osterman Building once stood signifying the location of Major General Granger's Union Headquarters and subsequent issuance of his general orders.
Formerly enslaved people in Galveston celebrated after the announcement. On June 19, 1866, one year after the announcement, freedmen in Texas organised the first of what became the annual celebration of "Jubilee Day". Early celebrations were used as political rallies to give voting instructions to newly freed African Americans.
In some cities, black people were barred from using public parks because of state-sponsored segregation of facilities. Across parts of Texas, freed people pooled their funds to purchase land to hold their celebrations. The day was first celebrated in Austin in 1867 under the auspices of the Freedmen's Bureau, and it had been listed on a "calendar of public events" by 1872. That year, black leaders in Texas raised $1,000 for the purchase of 10 acres (4 ha) of land to celebrate Juneteenth, today known as Houston's Emancipation Park. An estimated 30,000 black people celebrated at Booker T. Washington Park in Limestone County, Texas, established in 1898 for Juneteenth celebrations.
Emancipation Day 1900 Texas
In the early 20th century, economic and political forces led to a decline in Juneteenth celebrations. From 1890 to 1908, Texas and all former Confederate states passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disenfranchised black people, excluding them from the political process. White-dominated state legislatures passed Jim Crow laws imposing second-class status. Gladys L. Knight writes in "Juneteenth" (Encyclopedia of African American Popular Culture, 2011 Greenwood. pp. 798–801) that the decline in celebration was in part because "upwardly mobile blacks ... were ashamed of their slave past and aspired to assimilate into mainstream culture. Younger generations of blacks, becoming further removed from slavery were occupied with school ... and other pursuits." Others who migrated to the Northern United States could not take time off or simply dropped the celebration.
The Great Depression forced many black people off farms and into the cities to find work, where they had difficulty taking the day off to celebrate. From 1936 to 1951, the Texas State Fair served as a destination for celebrating the holiday, contributing to its revival. In 1936, an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people joined the holiday's celebration in Dallas.
Seventy thousand people attended a "Juneteenth Jamboree" in 1951. From 1940 through 1970, in the second wave of the Great Migration, more than five million black people left Texas, Louisiana and other parts of the South for the North and the West Coast. As historian Isabel Wilkerson writes in her The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010), "The people from Texas took Juneteenth Day to Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and other places they went." In 1945, Juneteenth was introduced in San Francisco by an immigrant from Texas, Wesley Johnson.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement focused the attention of African Americans on expanding freedom and integrating. As a result, observations of the holiday declined again, although it was still celebrated in Texas.
Juneteenth soon saw a revival as black people began tying their struggle to that of ending slavery. In Atlanta, some campaigners for equality wore Juneteenth buttons. During the 1968 Poor People's Campaign to Washington, DC, called by Rev. Ralph Abernathy, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference made June 19 the "Solidarity Day of the Poor People’s Campaign". In the subsequent revival, large celebrations in Minneapolis and Milwaukee emerged, as well as across the Eastern United States. In 1974, Houston began holding large-scale celebrations again, and Fort Worth, Texas, followed the next year. Around 30,000 people attended festivities at Sycamore Park in Fort Worth the following year. The 1978 Milwaukee celebration was described as drawing over 100,000 attendees. In the late 1980s, there were major celebrations of Juneteenth in California, Wisconsin, Illinois, Georgia, and Washington, D.C.
Since the 1980s and 1990s, the holiday has been more widely celebrated among African-American communities and has seen increasing mainstream attention in the US. In 1991, there was an exhibition by the Anacostia Museum (part of the Smithsonian Institution) called “Juneteenth ’91, Freedom Revisited”. In 1994, a group of community leaders gathered at Christian Unity Baptist Church in New Orleans to work for greater national celebration of Juneteenth. Expatriates have celebrated it in cities abroad, such as Paris. Some US military bases in other countries sponsor celebrations, in addition to those of private groups. In 1999, Ralph Ellison's novel Juneteenth was published, increasing recognition of the holiday. By 2006, at least 200 cities celebrated the day.
In 1997, activist Ben Haith created the Juneteenth flag, which was further refined by illustrator Lisa Jeanne Graf. In 2000, the flag was first hoisted at the Roxbury Heritage State Park in Boston by Haith. The star at the center represents Texas and the extension of freedom for all African Americans throughout the whole nation. The burst around the star represents a nova and the red curve represents a horizon, standing for a new era for African Americans. The red, white, and blue colors represent the American flag, which shows that African Americans and their enslaved ancestors are Americans, and the national belief in liberty and justice for all citizens.
In the late 1970s, when the Texas Legislature declared Juneteenth a "holiday of significance ... particularly to the blacks of Texas," it became the first state to establish Juneteenth as a state holiday. The bill passed through the Texas Legislature in 1979 and was officially made a state holiday on January 1, 1980. Before 2000, three more U.S. states officially observed the day, and over the next two decades it was recognised as an official observance in all states, except South Dakota.
In June 2019, Governor of Pennsylvania Tom Wolf recognised Juneteenth as a holiday in the state. In 2020, state governors of Virginia, New York, and New Jersey signed an executive order recognising Juneteenth as a paid day of leave for state employees.
In the 2000s and 2010s, activists continued a long process to push Congress towards official recognition of Juneteenth. Organizations such as the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation sought a Congressional designation of Juneteenth as a national day of observance. In 2016, Opal Lee, often referred to as the "grandmother of Juneteenth", walked from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington D.C. to advocate for a federal holiday.
On June 19 2020 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was speaking on HOT 97 about the history of Juneteenth, racism in America and the upcoming election.
Update 2021
Juneteenth became a federal holiday in the United States when President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law on 17 June 2021. For decades, activists and congress members (led by many African Americans) proposed legislation, advocated for, and built support for state and national observances. During his campaign for president in June 2020, Joe Biden publicly celebrated the holiday. President Donald Trump, during his campaign for reelection, added making the day a national holiday part of his "Platinum Plan for Black America".
Spurred on by the advocates and the Congressional Black Caucus, on June 15, 2021, the Senate unanimously passed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday; it subsequently passed through the House of Representatives by a 415–14 vote on June 16.
President Biden signs the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law
President Joe Biden signed the bill on June 17, 2021, making Juneteenth the eleventh American federal holiday and the first to obtain legal observance as a federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was designated in 1983. According to the bill, federal government employees will now get to take the day off every year on June 19, or should the date fall on a Saturday or Sunday, they will get the Monday or Friday closest to the Saturday or Sunday on which the date falls.
During this year, a year for Re:LODE Radio that's "2020 The Year of TRUTH", controversy ensued when President Donald Trump initially scheduled his first political rally since the COVID-19 pandemic's outbreak for June 19 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Angela Davis Slams Trump Rally in Tulsa, Massacre Site, on Juneteenth Celebration of End of Slavery
The text accompanying this video on YouTube by Democracy Now! says:
President Trump will resume holding indoor campaign events starting with a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 19, a day known as Juneteenth, that celebrates African Americans’ liberation from slavery. The rally also falls on the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa race riots, one of the worst acts of racial violence in U.S. history, in which white residents killed hundreds of their African American neighbors. Legendary scholar Angela Davis says it’s important to recognize that Trump “represents a sector of a population in this country that wants to return to the past … with all of its white supremacy, with all of its misogyny.” Given the historic uprising against racism and state violence, “We cannot be held back by such forces as those represented by the current occupant of the White House,” she says.
This Vox video from 2019 gives some historical context and why Tulsa was the site of the 1921 race massacre in the Greenwood district.
The massacre of Tulsa's "Black Wall Street"
Two days after announcing the rally in Tulsa, President Trump asked a Black secret service agent about Juneteenth. "Yes, I know what it is," the agent said to Trump, "and it’s very offensive to me that you’re having this rally on Juneteenth." That night, Trump tweeted that he wished to change the date of his rally.
Continued in PART 4.
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