With HT to Mr Freeze, an article in the NYT --Ex Cathedra giggles a little-- about gay culture as a matter of style. June is, after all, Pride Month. The author is either an icon or a stereotype of "queer studies".
My most recent shorthand ruminations about what gay men are for leads me in the direction of ornamentation and mentoring. So I guess style in included. I am certainly not at all insensible to beauty, although I am far more moved by a Romanesque arch than by Versailles. And I very frequently voice my pleasure at living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world...and my distress at the ugliness it still holds. When I was in the religion business, a good part of my liturgical passion was against thoughtless and careless ugliness and trash. I guess my uneasiness comes when I sense a concern for "beauty" which is really all there is, a kind of aestheticism that all too easily degenerates into fussiness, be it Bauhaus or bric-a-brac. Beauty in service of what?
Its opposite is the soulless concrete brutalism so often seen in industrial building and in Marxist countries. Very striking in a place like Europe, where the most magnificent buildings of the West are surrounded by post-war barracks towns.
Driving from Greve in Chianti to Volterra, you have to pass through Poggibonsi. Or to get to Paris from De Gaulle airport, you take a train through the concrete slums that surround that city.
Beauty is not optional to a good life. Defaced and graffiti'd NY in the 70's not only expressed but confirmed that soul sickness of that time and place.
But again, I wonder. Style is part of beauty. But what is beauty in service of?
I would certainly not leave that question to be answered by the LGBT likes of Professor Halperin.
My most recent shorthand ruminations about what gay men are for leads me in the direction of ornamentation and mentoring. So I guess style in included. I am certainly not at all insensible to beauty, although I am far more moved by a Romanesque arch than by Versailles. And I very frequently voice my pleasure at living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world...and my distress at the ugliness it still holds. When I was in the religion business, a good part of my liturgical passion was against thoughtless and careless ugliness and trash. I guess my uneasiness comes when I sense a concern for "beauty" which is really all there is, a kind of aestheticism that all too easily degenerates into fussiness, be it Bauhaus or bric-a-brac. Beauty in service of what?
Its opposite is the soulless concrete brutalism so often seen in industrial building and in Marxist countries. Very striking in a place like Europe, where the most magnificent buildings of the West are surrounded by post-war barracks towns.
Driving from Greve in Chianti to Volterra, you have to pass through Poggibonsi. Or to get to Paris from De Gaulle airport, you take a train through the concrete slums that surround that city.
Beauty is not optional to a good life. Defaced and graffiti'd NY in the 70's not only expressed but confirmed that soul sickness of that time and place.
But again, I wonder. Style is part of beauty. But what is beauty in service of?
I would certainly not leave that question to be answered by the LGBT likes of Professor Halperin.
6 comments:
Which does Ex Cathedra feel is better: fin-de-siècle aestheticism that, e.g. restores Victorian houses in Frisco to fill them with the psyche of anti-manliness gay sexuality and décadence sensibility? or heroic fascist aestheticism a.k.a. socialist realism that suppresses décadence to the underground?
P.S. I suppose ?David's "Oath of the Horatii" could find a place in décadence aestheticism as a camp tableau?
I remember well your hostility to the thoughtless and careless. ... But evidently the later Heidegger saw only camp in his earlier "Conscience is the call of care."
According to the newest translations of the Bible, God considers the tohu wa-bohu and then sighs "Does it matter? Grace is everywhere."
hmm. My reference to the tohu (content) and bohu (style; formalism) was even less irrelevant than I had assumed.
Halperin: »Instead of worrying that the feminine associations of diva worship, interior decorating or the performing arts may make gay male psychology look diseased, the real question we should ask about gay style is what its refusal of canonical masculinity achieves and what it enables its practitioners, straight or gay, to do.
»To inquire into melodrama, camp, irony, drag, bodybuilding or Art Deco as “gay” styles is to seek the content of gay culture in its practices — to describe the intervention gay culture makes in the world as it is given. Everything depends on the all-important and elusive meaning of style.
»That very notion may seem paradoxical. “Style,” after all, is routinely opposed to “content.” And, indeed, style is not a sign or a representation of anything else. Rather, it is a thing in itself, whose meaning is right there on its surface but remains difficult to specify.
»Unless we figure out how to specify that meaning, we will never understand gay male culture. We will never understand why it still survives, or why so many people, straight and gay, are so overeager to declare its death. And we will never understand the most essential thing about it: how gay culture continues to perform a sly and profound critique of what passes for normal.«
The decisive difficulty is that implicitly according to critical theory, the "normal," the "straight," "canonical masculinity" etc has preceded 'gay intervention' in culture since 'culture' is already purely an arbitrary construction (even the concepts of 'interests' and 'power' etc are not pre-given but constructed, as no doubt also are 'tohu' and 'bohu').
So the normal or straight is a sort of gayness, and gayness is a sort of gayness. I suppose the difference is that Mr and Mrs Methodist Hardware Store Owner in Iowa are gaily constructing an arbitrary normalcy for the unconscious purpose of giving the consciously gay something to do a "sly and profund critique" of.
As the Sufis emphasize, spiritually constructing political outer-path Shariah is purely only for the sake of having structures out of which to rapture self units along the sly-profound-critique religious inner path. _The_ world olam is constructed only for the sake of _this_ world cheled to take stuff out of. The purpose of purposiveness is having something to do to dispel boredom. The complexer the better -- which alas definitively proves that the Boas skoo is mistaken: our semiotic hypertrophy culture is by sheer scientific research value-neutralness vastly superior to primitive cultures with simple semoitics, and even more superior to the cultures esteem'd by Zarathustra in 1001 Goals. Sorry, but Calvin's Institutes reduced to and bloated into Reform'd epistemology systems is objectively incomparably preferable to Native American Spirituality.
One hardly has the least inkling that Reform'd Epistemologies are an inner-outer path sytem -- and that's why semi-Calvinist intellectuals who enthuse only for the sovereignty of God are among the best Sufis.
But the coded exoteric political includes also independent shadow input from man Noah, e.g. the Athenian Other in Plato's Laws, or Socrates in the Piraeus.
Shem and Japheth are never only negating-completing in Canaan the genealogy given by Ham. They must also deal with the shadow input from Noah which causes the homophobic war of spirit, hitherto in the format of 'slave revolt in morals' by protest-ants, along the Canaan-Shem/Severus axis, between Japheth/Albinus and Ham-Cush/Niger.
After WW2 Tillich declared an abolition of protest-ants, qua 'the end of the protestant aiôn.' I guess even though 'western Christianity' could not accomplish her proper tasks without protestants vs the Church. ... Seems to me Nietzsche had re-ignited the agôn by arguments vis-a-vis triumphant Anglo-Saxony and Bismarckian Germany that in most ways Catholic man was really higher than Protestant man. We prots must be grateful that Heinrich Denifle, O.P., made it impossible to consider Luther a philistine national moral hero. ... But I suppose much more important is Nietzsche's stress on Pascal vs the Jesuit attempt to unbend the bow of spiritual longing. He ranks the Jesuits' efforts along this line equal with democratic enlightenment.
Re-interpreting Catholic Christianity as having always been Thomist biblical political philosophy at spiritual war with nihilists and for the sake of re-animating man for self-transcendence I do not regard as an objectionable falsification as long as the war of spirit for self-transcendence is real, even if this means Luther must be an early Lockean and Calvin a proto-Voltairean, and the Jesuits who rescued the Council of Trent from zilch must be strong Augustinians.
Difficult to not take seriously the sense that this re-interpretation is not real. The conservative Catholics would be victims -- e.g., they like the persecution of the recusants, not the eras of glory of the establish'd Church in Europe, unless perhaps as contributing to Europe's "Culture."
Halperin again: »the real question we should ask about gay style is what its refusal of canonical masculinity achieves and what it enables its practitioners, straight or gay, to do«
The straight path out of this world into the world, then the gay path back out of the world into this world (although 'this world' isn't a place but only a fleeing, cheled, hejira, from the world. Transsexuals are call'd Hijras in India).
But nothing's straight in this world process: 'straight or gay' is 'gay style.' Reminds of Michel Foucault, who demanded the routinization of transgressiveness, which is only the transgression of the routine, and the routine is merely posited, formalist. Positivism and formalism seem the same in demanding validation although value-neutral -- as some Aristotelian-Thomisic Christian professors nowadays demand 'humility' as an intellectual virtue in replacement of Weberian value-neutrality: both value-neutrality and "humility" are to give the go-ahead approval valuation to stuff that they are to feel they are too humble to valuate.
Lots of anti-sensical theories have been workable in practice, e.g. strict constructivist constitutionalism, e.g. Robert Bork's, that forbears from admitting that valuation is occurring while the constitution is validated as obligatory.
But I worry that gayness as a critique of straightness that is merely constructed 'canonical' or positivistic isn't workable in practice. ...
P.S. And as usual in these matters, Halperin doesn't refer so much as once to Sigmund Freud, the great interpreter of sexuality, including homosexuality, after Victorianism and then Nietzsche.
Halperin would have it both that homosexual culture occurs in opposition to the moral, the straight, the normal: it is »a way of carving out space for an alternate way of life«. Nevertheless, he supports the demand for »complete social integration« of gay male sexuality.
I daresay that this practical impossibility in agenda doesn't matter. The normal, the straight, etc is now a ghost town, except when it is interpreted as criminality. I've never seen the TV show, but I suppose that the pre-1967 white men of "Madmen" are the real transgressors. Now we find transgression against the 'canonical' pieties not in higher white man but in lower white man.
The white gay male inclusivizers, who condemn white racism, homophobia, islamophobia, and even androphiles who refuse to subsume their androphilia into LGBTQ-etc, are chief among the canonical authorities for the meaning of higher man. ...
I wonder, is a homophobia and heterosexism attach'd to the Bible safer or more dangerous than Freud's secularist semi-psychiatric interpretation which (his unpublish'd alleged letter of 1935 notwithstanding) determined the meaning of homosexuality for normalness until 1973. Freud is obviously much smarter and he wrote for the educated, for higher man. Low-class white overweight homophobes and heterosexists are less mentally adept, but they do sort-of approve of the Bible.
I suppose Oscar Wilde really was dangerous vis-a-vis Victorian semi-Christian moralism, and the Mattachine Society was dangerous for Freud's attempt to reconcile Nietzsche's revelation of the underground with bourgeois civilization. Desublimational higher man doesn't feel threaten'd by gay males. Even the rumour'd "circuit parties" generate only a shrug.
The overweight, low-class-seeming Toronto mayor is a condemn'd transgressor for refusing to validate Gay Pride parades, which abound in behaviour and valuations that the United Church of Canada et al swore gay males are not normalizing Trojan horses for. ... I suppose today it is fundamentalist Christianity that could claim to be »a way of carving out space for an alternate way of life«. Not much has come from fundamentalist Christian carvings -- not yet, anyway.
Halperin writes for the best journals, which would reject in righteous indignation anything by Pat Robertson, with his alternative worldview shot through with numinous themes such as political covenants with the devil at the foundation of Haïti, etc. ...
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