peter nesteruk (home page: contents and index)
Patina of Desire II
(The centripetal
force of attraction and its role in collective identification)
The public role of figureheads, their public consumption
- indeed their mass consumption, which constitutes the public role of the
figurehead - this very public coin of the realm is not to be excluded from the
realm of human desire. For this is an unrequited love that
gives birth to all the arts of human iconicity. A relation governed by a
one-sided recognition such that the perceiving subject has no hope of a return
of recognition - not least as an equal (the returns as we shall see are
to be found elsewhere). The best to be hoped for is an association forged
through the medium of badges, icons, and other representations of the
figurehead. Head or body, mimetic or metonymic, this relation offers a
second-hand fame by association, an association by faith, an act or profession
of ‘secular’ worship (the wearing of badges, the mantric
repetition of the figurehead’s words, the recital of their achievements, a
loyal defence of their name). Otherwise there is the notoriety to be gained by
the destruction of the object of identification and worship - increasingly
frequent in our century of recognition crime (including the ultimate in wounded
attention-seeking, that love letter to the media, mass murder).
Like a jewel on show, the apex of the pyramid has always
given out a greater lustre, held a greater attraction, than the practicalities
of negotiating the grey passageways of political power. Actual power tends
either to be seen as the source of enablement (favours, gifts, access to
essential routes of exchange) or as a point of
avoidance (risk, arbitrariness, exemption from justice). Yet desire too
operates in this arena, is triggered by the sight of the apex of the pyramid
(or any one of a number of pyramids in today’s more plural society). Desire too
is the light that emanates from the apex as from a lighthouse, its beams
piercing our privacy, illuminating our sex lives (real or imaginary… but mostly
imaginary) giving desire a cloth, form, image, target and object; the very
pattern and model for the ideal pair(ing). Both major
modalities of desire are fed by this social sun; the desire-for and the
desire-to-be-like someone, the desire of other’s bodies as sources of pleasure
and the desire that makes up our networks of recognition and identification,
the pleasure of being someone.
Indeed, the desire to be someone…
In this light (the light of sexual desire) the identification with the
ideal may include the (imaginary) appropriation of the ideal’s sexual partner,
their persona, their preference. We evince a desire for their objects of
desire, and even the association of our partner with theirs.
Here we enter the realm of public (political) figures
as attractors (more ‘strong’ than ‘strange’) triggering either emulation or
desire: Blair (in the early stages of his government) or Clinton (see also the
affairs of a Kennedy or a Mitterand). Even a Berlusconi. For we have entered the realm of the
politician as celebrity. But with an aura of power that has always been noted
for its aphrodisiac quality, a quality overcoming the drawbacks of mere
physical appearance (who ever said sex was about bodies!). The charisma of
power: the charisma of being at the centre.
Collective poles of attraction form collective laws of
attraction.
Collective ideals are also sexual ideals. Guides. Primed with mimetic force. Another source of collective identification. Providing yet
another source of social cohesion, of national unification; individuals and
their opposite numbers know how to count sexually, know who or what to count
on. And in large numbers, so collectively also: all families and ‘the First
Family’. Any number of families can be the first family. The Family at the
centre (at the apex) becomes the model for us all.
Some examples from history. Sheltering under the sign of hyperbole
(sign of the statue, the towering effigy, the giant Buddha). A
rhetorical trope or technique of presentation designed to match, or augment,
the aura of social standing (the opposite trope, meiosis, would be true,
therefore, in the case of denigration and the point of view of ressentiment). So we have the reference to ‘Stalin organs’
(giant artillery) or the (legendary) capacity of Melissa (wife of the Roman
emperor Claudius) or of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia.
Public prurience is the mark left behind by the
public’s desire…
The public role and image of couples
(more examples). Imperial households. Royal families.
Sisi and the Archduke, the couple at the centre of 19th
Sainted sexuality… A combination not unusual in Hindu
art (for example) where there is not such a rigorous separation of religion and
sex (desire actually, or the representation of sex as in Kujaraho;
actual sex in ritual is limited to past anecdotes such a those concerning
ancient Egyptian pharonic masturbation rites and
Celtic bestiality). But a combination unusual (in the sense of being conscious
deployed, consciously prescribed, not in the sense of its presence, its
existence, which continued and continues nevertheless) in the monotheistic
Christian West. Such matters were generally subject to taboo, ignored or else
simply pretended out of existence (read, out of representation and
consciousness). Yet another double standard, aided by the structure of the
‘public secret’ or the capacity for self-division as in the case of homo
duplex which can also be seen to operate here (as it does so often in matters
of gender representation and sexual difference).
And if the centre, the apex is not only a site of
secular power, but also a site or person of sacred power? Can the same be
argued of religious poles of identification? This would be (for the West at least)
an unusual union of religion and desire… (do all women desire the charismatic
preacher; do all men desire the nun)? However in the world of rhetoric at least
(and where is there a world without rhetoric); that is, in the world of
euphemism, in borrowed terms, such a union is to be found: as in the Bible
(Song of Songs); in the Koran (the promise of pleasure maidens in heaven); and
in the history of Hymns. This conjunction (mainly as a result of the above) can
also be found in the Western tradition of secular poetry, in the courtly love
tradition. A conjunction previously manifested in (the transgressive
use of sexuality in a classic ritual formula) in desire as illustrated in
Saint’s Lives, most notably in the Acts of the Martyrs, in the description of
the sexual dilemmas of wives and virgins alike, and the graphic depiction of
the torture of female martyrs (on the walls of churches not least…). More
public prurience put to ‘good’ use… the use of the ‘goodly’. A use which passed
first into the late-medieval Romances, then reappeared in the genres we know or
collectively label as the ‘Gothic’, and so to their modern heirs in the today’s
media.
Now revealed in newspapers and celebrity programmes…
the ‘front page spread’. The ‘rise’ of celebrity. Cults always carry a sexual
element; those of celebrity most transparently so. Again the formula:
recognition + desire, such that mass recognition leads to mass desire;
recognition as desire to be (like), and, of course, desire ‘as such’, the
desire to possess, or be possessed (either way to achieve sexual pleasure by
means of the desired one). ‘You are my princess/prince, my king/queen’, ‘my
Lord’, ‘My Lady’ (indeed, returning to religion, we have the phrase, ‘sex god’
and ‘sex goddess’), etc. Formulas in everyday use; with equivalents in the
restricted circuits of religions and cults and subcultures, echoing the
insistence of the social pyramids of the past. And today’s equivalents? Whose
image is it that graces our advertising? Incitement on the hoardings. Commodity
and celebrity in a union predestined by our propensity to project our sexual
desires onto (to have the content of our sexual desires filled by) the persons
of the powerful. Sex sells… but only through the medium of identification. (One
source of relief: politicians are not used to sell products in this way.
Question: who can and who cannot be used to sell commodities in this manner?
Not the same set, for example - or not yet, as those whose names can be
appended to charitable activities and the demands for charitable donations).
Meanwhile in the world of imaginary identifications
(and all identifications are essentially imaginary)… In the world of everyday
imaginary identifications… of everyday fantasy… We see the popularity of the
‘social other ‘: as evinced by talk-show and other programmes on television and
featured in the popular press (the tabloids). This popularity is not so much
the ‘lure of the other’ (this classification would include the ‘down-dressing’
and ‘roughing it’ types of identification and desire as well as the, more
typical, desire of those associated with the apex). Rather it is the lure
emitted by an ideal pole. This is the centre of the social web, the peak of the
social mountain as the focus of desire - and not its flip-side or abjected underbelly. Not so much structured through difference
(or a simple transgression of boundaries) which would be bipolar (up and down)
as much as through identification; through the mimetic force of the
powerful, as the effect of a unipolar world
(as in the global world of politics, where similar lines of mimesis may be
discerned). A social (or imaginary) world partaking of one single gradient, one
single line of magnetic force, one force of attraction (perhaps shared between
competing elites as reflected in various media cults of the ‘personality’, that
is… cults of the image). Culled from the imagination of the collective, yet as
intimate as the imagined caress, the private obsession, the love-talk in ones
head - as intimate as the taste in ones mouth. Public flavour of the month.
The shared sacrament, desire in common, public sex (in private),
communal sex; a wind that blows through all communicants, all members,
participants of a society or community from whose centre the wind of desire
obtains. A wind filling the sails of our desire, and so, unbidden, unnoticed,
setting its, our, sexual heading.
Copyright
2006, Peter Nesteruk.