Σε αντίθεση με το υφιστάμενο νομοθετικό πλαίσιο που αναγνωρίζει την εργασία στο σεξ ως νόμιμη παρά τους υπέρμετρους περιορισμούς που θέτει για την άσκησή της, η Γ.Γ.Ι.Φ. προτείνει με το πόρισμα τη μερική ποινικοποίηση του επαγγέλματος.

Θεωρεί εκ προοιμίου την εργασία στο σεξ ως εκμετάλλευση και συνεπώς την εξισώνει με τη σωματεμπορία, αγνοώντας το θεμελιώδες δικαίωμα του ατόμου στην αυτοδιάθεση, όταν δεν συντρέχουν συνθήκες βίας. Ακολούθως, δε λαμβάνει υπ’όψιν την επιχειρηματολογία και την τεκμηρίωση διεθνών οργανισμών όπως ο Παγκόσμιος Οργανισμός Υγείας, που υποδεικνύουν την πλήρη νομιμοποίηση της εργασίας στο σεξ, ως εργαλείο κοινωνικής ενσωμάτωσης. Η συγκεκριμένη στρατηγική υπηρετεί παράλληλα τη διαφύλαξη της δημόσιας υγείας. Η Γ.Γ.Ι.Φ. διακηρύσσει τέλος, πως «η πορνεία συνιστά μια πολύ προφανή και παντελώς απεχθή παραβίαση της ανθρώπινης αξιοπρέπειας» αναπαράγοντας στερεοτυπικούς χαρακτηρισμούς που πλήττουν τα πρόσωπα που εργάζονται στο σεξ.

Το πόρισμα της Γενικής Γραμματείας Ισότητας εκπονήθηκε κατά πλειοψηφία από μία επιτροπή στην οποία αποκλείστηκαν εκπρόσωποι σωματείων εργαζομένων στο σεξ και οργανώσεων που ασχολούνται με την προάσπιση των δικαιωμάτων τους και την ενδυνάμωσή τους. Επιπλέον, η συγκεκριμένη επιτροπή ήταν από τη σύστασή της προκατειλημμένη υπέρ της ποινικοποίησης της εργασίας στο σεξ, όπως προδήλως αποτυπώνεται στον τίτλο της «Ομάδα Διοίκησης Έργου για την Αντιμετώπιση της Πορνείας». Πέραν τούτων, εξ αρχής η αντιμετώπιση της εργασίας στο σεξ στην χώρα ως ζήτημα που αφορά αποκλειστικά cis γυναίκες και η ίδια η ανάθεση των εργασιών στη Γ.Γ.Ι.Φ. αφενός παραβλέπει την πραγματικότητα, αφετέρου αφήνει ουσιαστικά περιθώριο σε ελλιπή αντιμετώπιση του προβλήματος, αλλά και άνιση -και δη από πλευράς της Πολιτείας- μεταχείριση των cis ανδρών και των διεμφυλικών ατόμων, εργαζόμενων στο σεξ.

Η ανάγκη αναθεώρησης του αναχρονιστικού νομοθετικού πλαισίου για την εργασία στο σεξ στην Ελλάδα καθίσταται επιτακτική, προκειμένου να υπηρετήσει παραμέτρους όπως η εξάλειψη του στίγματος, η καταπολέμηση της βίας και η κοινωνική ενσωμάτωση της συγκεκριμένης ομάδας, καθώς και η διαφύλαξη της δημόσιας υγείας. Ο νομοθέτης από τη μία πλευρά αναγνωρίζει τη νομιμότητα στην εργασία στο σεξ και από την άλλη θέτει υπέρμετρους περιορισμούς που καθιστούν τη νόμιμη εργασία σχεδόν αδύνατη και ουσιαστικά ωθούν τα εργαζόμενα πρόσωπα να ζουν και να εργάζονται σε καθεστώς παρανομίας. Τούτο αναπόφευκτα οδηγεί τα άτομα σε άκρως επισφαλείς εργασιακές συνθήκες που τα εκθέτουν σε άμεσο και διαρκή κίνδυνο άσκησης βίας σε βάρος τους και ασφαλώς τα καθιστά εξαιρετικά ευάλωτα στον ιό HIV, αλλά και στα λοιπά σεξουαλικώς μεταδιδόμενα νοσήματα. Η απάντηση σε αυτή την πραγματικότητα δε μπορεί να είναι η νομοθέτηση της ποινικοποίησης της εργασίας στο σεξ.

Στο παραπάνω πλαίσιο, ο δημόσιος διάλογος για το νομοθετικό πλαίσιο που ρυθμίζει το συγκεκριμένο θέμα θα πρέπει να γίνει χωρίς προειλημμένες αποφάσεις, ιδεολογικά στεγανά και διάθεση άκριτης υιοθέτησης μέτρων που αγνοούν την ελληνική πραγματικότητα. Καλούμε συνεπώς, το Υπουργείο Εσωτερικών που είναι ο αρμόδιος φορέας, να οργανώσει ένα θεσμοθετημένο και ανοιχτό διάλογο, με τη συμμετοχή όλων των εμπλεκόμενων μερών όπως τα ίδια τα άτομα που εργάζονται στο σεξ, τα συναρμόδια υπουργεία, η ακαδημαϊκή κοινότητα και οι οργανώσεις της κοινωνίας των πολιτών.

Οι συνυπογράφουσες οργανώσεις:

Διεθνής Αμνηστία
Ελληνικό Παρατηρητήριο των Συμφωνιών του Ελσίνκι
Κέντρο Ζωής
Ομάδα ΛΟΑΤΚΙ+ Εργασιακής Υποστήριξης – LGBTQI+ Employment Support Group
Ομοφυλοφιλική και Λεσβιακή Κοινότητα Ελλάδας (Ο.Λ.Κ.Ε.)
Σύλλογος Οροθετικών Ελλάδας «Θετική Φωνή»
Σωματείο Υποστήριξης Διεμφυλικών (Σ.Υ.Δ.)
Athens Pride – Φεστιβάλ Υπερηφάνειας Αθήνας.
Colour Youth
Proud Seniors Greece – Ομάδα υποστήριξης ΛΟΑΤΚΙ ατόμων ηλικίας 50+
Thessaloniki Pride – Φεστιβάλ Υπερηφάνειας Θεσσαλονίκης
Οικογένειες Ουράνιο Τόξο

The post ΓΙΑ ΤΗΝ ΕΡΓΑΣΙΑ ΣΤΟ ΣΕΞ ΣΤΗΝ ΕΛΛΑΔΑ- Απάντηση οργανώσεων στο πόρισμα της Γενικής Γραμματείας Ισότητας των Φύλων appeared first on Void Network.

by Pankaj Mishra

On the evening of 30 January 1948, five months after the independence and partition of India, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was walking to a prayer meeting at his temporary home in New Delhi when he was shot three times, at point-blank range. He collapsed and died instantly. His assassin, originally feared to be Muslim, turned out to be Nathuram Godse, a Hindu Brahmin from western India. Godse, who made no attempt to escape, said in court that he felt compelled to kill Gandhi since the leader with his womanly politics was emasculating the Hindu nation – in particular, with his generosity to Muslims. Godse is a hero today in an India utterly transformed by Hindu chauvinists – an India in which Mein Kampf is a bestseller, a political movement inspired by European fascists dominates politics and culture, and Narendra Modi, a Hindu supremacist accused of mass murder, is prime minister. For all his talk of Hindu genius, Godse flagrantly plagiarised the fictions of European ethnic-racial chauvinists and imperialists. For the first years of his life he was raised as a girl, with a nose ring, and later tried to gain a hard-edged masculine identity through Hindu supremacism. Yet for many struggling young Indians today Godse represents, along with Adolf Hitler, a triumphantly realised individual and national manhood.

The moral prestige of Gandhi’s murderer is only one sign among many of what seems to be a global crisis of masculinity. Luridly retro ideas of what it means to be a strong man have gone mainstream even in so-called advanced nations. In January Jordan B Peterson, a Canadian self-help writer who laments that “the west has lost faith in masculinity” and denounces the “murderous equity doctrine” espoused by women, was hailed in the New York Times as “the most influential public intellectual in the western world right now”.

This is, hopefully, an exaggeration. It is arguable, however, that a frenetic pursuit of masculinity has characterised public life in the west since 9/11; and it presaged the serial-groping president who boasts of his big penis and nuclear button. “From the ashes of September 11,” the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan exulted a few weeks after the attack, “arise the manly virtues.” Noonan, who today admires Peterson’s “tough” talk, hailed the re-emergence of “masculine men, men who push things and pull things”, such as George W Bush, who she half expected to “tear open his shirt and reveal the big ‘S’ on his chest”. Such gush, commonplace at the time, helped Bush, who had initially gone missing in action on 11 September, reinvent himself as a dashing commander-in-chief (and grow cocky enough to dress up as a fighter pilot and compliment Tony Blair’s “cojones”).

Amid this rush of testosterone in the Anglo-American establishment, many deskbound journalists fancied themselves as unflinching warriors. “We will,” David Brooks, another of Peterson’s fans, vowed, “destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders and continue fighting.”

As manly virtues arose, attacks on women, and feminists in particular, in the west became nearly as fierce as the wars waged abroad to rescue Muslim damsels in distress. In Manliness (2006) Harvey Mansfield, a political philosopher at Harvard, denounced working women for undermining the protective role of men. The historian Niall Ferguson, a self-declared neo-imperialist, bemoaned that “girls no longer play with dolls” and that feminists have forced Europe into demographic decline. More revealingly, the few women publicly critical of the bellicosity, such as Katha Pollitt, Susan Sontag and Arundhati Roy, were “mounted on poles for public whipping” and flogged, Barbara Kingsolver wrote, with “words like bitch and airhead and moron and silly”. At the same time, Vanity Fair’s photo essay on the Bush administration at war commended the president for his masculine sangfroid and hailed his deputy, Dick Cheney, as “The Rock”.

“Psychotic masculinity can be seen everywhere from ISIS to mass-murderer Anders Breivik, who claimed Viking ancestry. Some of this post-9/11 cocksmanship was no doubt provoked by Osama bin Laden’s slurs about American manhood: that the free and the brave had gone “soft” and “weak”. Humiliation in Vietnam similarly brought forth such cartoon visions of masculinity as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is also true that historically privileged men tend to be profoundly disturbed by perceived competition from women, gay people and diverse ethnic and religious groups. In Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990) Elaine Showalter described the great terror induced among many men by the very modest gains of feminists in the late 19th century: “fears of regression and degeneration, the longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender, as well as race, class and nationality”.

In the 1950s, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr was already warning of the “expanding, aggressive force” of women, “seizing new domains like a conquering army”. Exasperated by the “castrated” American male and his “feminine fascination for the downtrodden”, Schlesinger, the original exponent of muscular liberalism, longed for the “frontiersmen” of American history who “were men, and it did not occur to them to think twice about it”.

These majestically male makers of the modern west are being forced to think twice about a lot today. Gay men and women are freer than before to love whom they love, and to marry them. Women expect greater self-fulfilment in the workplace, at home and in bed. Trump may have the biggest nuclear button, but China leads in artificial intelligence as well as old-style mass manufacturing. And technology and automation threaten to render obsolete the men who push and pull things – most damagingly in the west.

Many straight white men feel besieged by “uppity” Chinese and Indian people, by Muslims and feminists, not to mention gay bodybuilders, butch women and trans people. Not surprisingly they are susceptible to Peterson’s notion that the ostensible destruction of “the traditional household division of labour” has led to “chaos”. This fear and insecurity of a male minority has spiralled into a politics of hysteria in the two dominant imperial powers of the modern era. In Britain, the aloof and stiff upper-lipped English gentleman, that epitome of controlled imperial power, has given way to such verbally incontinent Brexiters as Boris Johnson. The rightwing journalist Douglas Murray, among many elegists of English manhood, deplores “emasculated Italians, Europeans and westerners in general” and esteems Trump for “reminding the west of what is great about ourselves”. And, indeed, whether threatening North Korea with nuclear incineration, belittling people with disabilities or groping women, the American president confirms that some winners of modern history will do anything to shore up their sense of entitlement.

But gaudy displays of brute manliness in the west, and frenzied loathing of what the alt-rightists call “cucks” and “cultural Marxists”, are not merely a reaction to insolent former weaklings. Such manic assertions of hyper-masculinity have recurred in modern history. They have also profoundly shaped politics and culture in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Osama bin Laden believed that Muslims “have been deprived of their manhood” and could recover it by obliterating the phallic symbols of American power. Beheading and raping innocent captives in the name of the caliphate, the black-hooded young volunteers of Islamic State were as obviously a case of psychotic masculinity as the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who claimed Viking warriors as his ancestors. Last month, the Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte told female rebels in his country that “We will not kill you. We will just shoot you in the vagina.” Tormenting hapless minorities, India’s Hindu supremacist chieftains seem obsessed with proving, as one asserted after India’s nuclear tests in 1998, “we are not eunuchs any more”.

Morbid visions of castration and emasculation, civilisational decline and decay, connect Godse and Schlesinger to Bin Laden and Trump, and many other exponents of a rear-guard machismo today. They are susceptible to cliched metaphors of “soft” and “passive” femininity, “hard” and “active” masculinity; they are nostalgic for a time when men did not have to think twice about being men. And whether Hindu chauvinist, radical Islamist or white nationalist, their self-image depends on despising and excluding women. It is as though the fantasy of male strength measures itself most gratifyingly against the fantasy of female weakness. Equating women with impotence and seized by panic about becoming cucks, these rancorously angry men are symptoms of an endemic and seemingly unresolvable crisis of masculinity.

When did this crisis begin? And why does it seem so inescapably global? Writing Age of Anger: A History of the Present, I began to think that a perpetual crisis stalks the modern world. It began in the 19th century, with the most radical shift in human history: the replacement of agrarian and rural societies by a volatile socio-economic order, which, defined by industrial capitalism, came to be rigidly organised through new sexual and racial divisions of labour. And the crisis seems universal today because a web of restrictive gender norms, spun in modernising western Europe and America, has come to cover the remotest corners of the earth as they undergo their own socio-economic revolutions.

There were always many ways of being a man or a woman. Anthropologists and historians of the world’s astonishingly diverse pre-industrial societies have consistently revealed that there is no clear link between biological makeup and behaviour, no connection between masculinity and vigorous men, or femininity and passive women. Indians, British colonialists were disgusted to find, revered belligerent and sexually voracious goddesses, such as Kali; their heroes were flute-playing idlers such as Krishna. A vast Indian literature attests to mutably gendered men and women, elite as well as folk traditions of androgyny and same-sex eroticism.

These unselfconscious traditions began to come under unprecedented assault in the 19th century, when societies constituted by exploitation and exclusion, and stratified along gender and racial lines, emerged as the world’s most powerful; and when such profound shocks of modernity as nation-building, rural-urban migration, imperial expansion and industrialisation drastically changed all modes of human perception. A hierarchy of manly and unmanly human beings had long existed in many societies without being central in them. During the 19th century, it came to be universally imposed, with men and women straitjacketed into specific roles.

The modern west appears, in the western supremacist version of history, as the guarantor of equality and liberty to all. In actuality, a notion of gender (and racial) inequality, grounded in biological difference, was, as Joan Wallach Scott demonstrates in her recent book Sex and Secularism, nothing less than “the social foundation of modern western nation-states”. Immanuel Kant dismissed women as incapable of practical reason, individual autonomy, objectivity, courage and strength. Napoleon, the child of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, believed women ought to stay at home and procreate; his Napoleonic Code, which inspired state laws across the world, notoriously subordinated women to their fathers and husbands. Thomas Jefferson, America’s founding father, commended women, “who have the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other” and who are “too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics”. Such prejudices helped replace traditional patriarchy with the exclusionary ideals of masculinity as the modern world came into being.

On such grounds, women were denied political participation and forced into subordinate roles in the family and the labour market. Pop psychologists periodically insist that men are from Mars and women from Venus, lamenting the loss of what Peterson calls “traditional” divisions of labour, without acknowledging that capitalist, industrial and expansionist societies required a fresh division of labour, or that the straight white men who supervised them deemed women unfit, due to their physical or intellectual inferiority, to undertake territorial aggrandisement, nation-building, industrial production, international trade, and scientific innovation. Women’s bodies were meant to reproduce and safeguard the future of the family, race and nation; men’s were supposed to labour and fight. To be a “mature” man was to adjust oneself to society and fulfil one’s responsibility as breadwinner, father and soldier. “When men fear work or fear righteous war,” as Theodore Roosevelt put it, “when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom.” As the 19th century progressed, many such cultural assumptions about male and female identity morphed into timeless truths. They are, as Peterson’s rowdy fan club reveals, more vigorously upheld today than the “truths” of racial inequality, which were also simultaneously grounded in “nature”, or pseudo-biology.

Scott points out that the modes of sexual difference defined in the modernising west actually helped secure, “the racial superiority of western nations to their ‘others’ – in Africa, Asia, and Latin America”. “White skin was associated with ‘normal’ gender systems, dark skin with immaturity and perversity.” Thus, the British judged their Kali-worshipping Indian subjects to be an unmanly and childish people who ought not to wrinkle their foreheads with ideas of self-rule. The Chinese were widely seen, including in western Chinatowns, as pigtailed cowards. Even Muslims, Christendom’s formidable old rivals, came to be derided as pitiably “feminine” during the high noon of imperialism.

Gandhi explicitly subverted these gendered prejudices of European imperialists (and their Hindu imitators): that femininity was the absence of masculinity. Rejecting the western identification of rulers with male supremacy and subjecthood with feminine submissiveness, he offered an activist politics based on rigorous self-examination and maternal tenderness. This rejection eventually cost him his life. But he could see how much the male will to power was fed by a fantasy of the female other as a regressive being – someone to be subdued and dominated – and how much this pathology had infected modern politics and culture.

As Hindu nationalisation got into gear, formerly chubby Bollywood stars began to flaunt bulging biceps.  Its most insidious expression was the conquest and exploitation of people deemed feminine, and, therefore, less than human – a violence that became normalised in the 19th century. For many Europeans and Americans, to be a true man was to be an ardent imperialist and nationalist. Even so clear-sighted a figure as Alexis de Tocqueville longed for his French male compatriots to realise their “warlike” and “virile” nature in crushing Arabs in north Africa, leaving women to deal with the petty concerns of domestic life.

As the century progressed, the quest for virility distilled a widespread response among men psychically battered by such uncontrollable and emasculating phenomena as industrialisation, urbanisation and mechanisation. The ideal of a strong, fearless manhood came to be embodied in muscular selves, nations, empires and races. Living up to this daunting ideal required eradicating all traces of feminine timidity and childishness. Failure incited self-loathing – and a craving for regenerative violence. Mocked with such unmanly epithets as “weakling” and “Oscar Wilde”, Roosevelt tried to overcome, Gore Vidal once pointed out, “his physical fragility through ‘manly’ activities of which the most exciting and ennobling was war”. It is no coincidence that the loathing of homosexuals, and the hunt for sacrificial victims such as Wilde, was never more vicious and organized than during this most intense phase of European imperialism.

One image came to be central to all attempts to recuperate the lost manhood of self and nation: the invincible body, represented in our own age of extremes by steroid-juiced, knobbly musculature. Actually, size matters today much less than it ever did; not many muscles are required for increasingly sedentary work habits and lifestyles. Nevertheless, an obsession with raw brawn and sheer mass still shapes political cultures. Trump’s boasts about the size of his body parts were preceded by Vladimir Putin’s displays of his pectorals – advertisements for a Russia re-masculinised after its emasculation by Boris Yeltsin, a flabby drunk. But shirtless hunks are also a striking recent phenomenon in Godse’s “rising” India. In the 90s, just as India’s Hindu nationalisation got into gear, formerly scrawny or chubby Bollywood stars began to flaunt glisteningly hard abs and bulging biceps; Rama, the lean-limbed hero of the Ramayana, started to resemble Rambo in calendar art and political posters. These buffed-up bodies of popular culture foreshadowed Modi, who rose to power boasting of his 56-inch chest, and promising true national potency to young unemployed stragglers.

This vengeful masculinist nationalism was the original creation of Germans in the early 19th century, who first outlined a vision of creating a superbly fit people or master race and fervently embraced such typically modern forms of physical exercise as gymnastics, callisthenics and yoga and fads like nudism. But pumped-up anatomy emerged as a “natural” embodiment of the evidently exclusive male virtue of strength only as the century ended. As societies across the west became more industrial, urban and bureaucratic, property-owning farmers and self-employed artisans rapidly turned into faceless office workers and professionals. With “rational calculation” installed as the new deity, “each man”, Max Weber warned in 1909, “becomes a little cog in the machine”, pathetically obsessed with becoming “a bigger cog”. Increasingly deprived of their old skills and autonomy in the iron cage of modernity, working class men tried to secure their dignity by embodying it in bulky brawn.

Historians have emphasised how male workers, humiliated by such repressive industrial practices as automation and time management, also began to assert their manhood by swearing, drinking and sexually harassing the few women in the workforce – the beginning of an aggressive hardhat culture that has reached deep into blue-collar workplaces during the decades-long reign of neoliberalism. Towards the end of the 19th century large numbers of men embraced sports and physical fitness, and launched fan clubs of pugnacious footballers and boxers.

It wasn’t just working men. Upper-class parents in America and Britain had begun to send their sons to boarding schools in the hope that their bodies and moral characters would be suitably toughened up in the absence of corrupting feminine influences. Competitive sports, which were first organised in the second half of the 19th century, became a much-favoured means of pre-empting sissiness – and of mass-producing virile imperialists. It was widely believed that putative empire-builders would be too exhausted by their exertions on the playing fields of Eton and Harrow to masturbate.

But masculinity, a dream of power, tends to get more elusive the more intensely it is pursued; and the dread of emasculation by opaque economic, political and social forces continued to deepen. It drove many fin de siècle writers as well as politicians in Europe and the US into hyper-masculine trances of racial nationalism – and, eventually, the calamity of the first world war. Nations and races as well as individuals were conceptualised as biological entities, which could be honed into unassailable organisms. Fear of “race suicide”, cults of physical education and daydreams of a “New Man” went global, along with strictures against masturbation, as the inflexible modern ideology of gender difference reached non-western societies.

European colonialists went on to impose laws that enshrined their virulent homophobia and promoted heterosexual conjugality and patrilineal orders. Their prejudices were also entrenched outside the west by the victims of what the Indian critic Ashis Nandy calls “internal colonialism”: those subjects of European empires who pleaded guilty to the accusation that they were effeminate, and who decided to man up in order to catch up with their white overlords.

This accounts for a startling and still little explored phenomenon: how men within all major religious communities – Buddhist, Hindu and Jewish as well as Christian and Islamic – started in the late 19th century to simultaneously bemoan their lost virility and urge the creation of hard, inviolable bodies, whether of individual men, the nation or the umma. These included early Zionists (Max Nordau, who dreamed of Muskeljudentum, “Jewry of Muscle”), Asian anti-imperialists (Swami Vivekananda, Modi’s hero, who exhorted Hindus to build “biceps”, and Anagarika Dharmapala, who helped develop the muscular Buddhism being horribly flexed by Myanmar’s ethnic-cleansers these days) as well as fanatical imperialists such as Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement.

The most lethal consequences of this mimic machismo unfolded in the first decades of the 20th century. “Never before and never afterwards”, as historian George Mosse, the pioneering historian of masculinity, wrote, “has masculinity been elevated to such heights as during fascism”. Mussolini, like Roosevelt, transformed himself from a sissy into a fire-breathing imperialist. “The weak must be hammered away,” declared Hitler, another physically ill-favoured fascist. Such wannabe members of the Aryan master race accordingly defined themselves against the cowardly Jew and discovered themselves as men of steel in acts of mass murder.

This hunt for manliness continues to contaminate politics and culture across the world in the 21st century. Rapid economic, social and technological change in our own time has plunged an exponentially larger number of uprooted and bewildered men into a doomed quest for masculine certainties. The scope for old-style imperialist aggrandisement and forging a master race may have diminished. But there are, in the age of neoliberal individualism, infinitely more unrealised claims to masculine identity in grotesquely unequal societies around the world. Myths of the self-made man have forced men everywhere into a relentless and often futile hunt for individual power and wealth, in which they imagine women and members of minorities as competitors. Many more men try to degrade and exclude women in their attempt to show some mastery that is supposed to inhere in their biological nature.

The post The crisis in modern masculinity- by Pankaj Mishra appeared first on Void Network.

Ένας χλωμός ήλιος ξεπροβάλλει πίσω από τη λέξη ντεκαυλέ, η οποία ριμάρει με το ντεφορμέ και το ντεπασέ και όλους τους επιθετικούς προσδιορισμούς αρνητικής χροιάς. Το ερωτικό ξενέρωμα είναι εδώ και είναι παντού. Απλώνεται σαν τον μύκητα στο κεφίρ. Σαν το μέλι στην κερήθρα. Επιπλέει στον αφρό των ημερών σαν αβαρές πλαστικό καπάκι από μπουκάλι αναψυκτικού.

Δεν είναι η οικονομική κρίση που αναστέλλει την επιθυμία. Δε φταίει ο επιμερισμός της προσοχής μας στην αδιάλειπτη εναλλαγή εικόνων από το κινητό μας στο τάμπλετ και στον υπολογιστή και πάλι πίσω. Δεν κακίζουμε καν τα γνωστά-άγνωστα σόσιαλ μίντια, ούτε φυσικά την αποσπασματική μας μνήμη, η οποία έχει αναφορές πλέον μόνο από ποσταρίσματα και αναρτήσεις. Ενοχοποιούνται σαφώς όλα τα παραπάνω, συν κάτι ακόμα, πιο σοβαρό: Η λίμνη του νεοπουριτανισμού, μέσα στην οποία όλοι κολυμπάμε. Άλλος με σωσίβιο, άλλος με μπρατσάκια και άλλος με μακροβούτια και απλωτές. Κάποιοι πάλι έχουν μείνει στην όχθη και κοιτούν. Μαζί με εκείνους που πολεμούν την πρωτοπορία απ’ όπου κι αν προέρχεται και τους παραδίπλα που μάχονται τη βιοποικιλότητα της όποιας διαφορετικότητας.

Κι ενώ η τεχνολογία χορεύει γύρω μας διονυσιακούς χορούς, εμείς κλεινόμαστε ακόμα πιο βαθιά στο υπόγειο της ανηδονίας.

Η ντεκαυλέ εποχή έχει έρθει να ντύσει τα ντεκολτέ, να σιδερώσει τους τρόπους, να στεγνώσει την έκφραση, να καλύψει τα ρωμαϊκά γυμνά αγάλματα, να ακονίσει την απορριπτική διάθεση, να καταγγείλει τις προκλητικές φωτό των φεισμπουκικών προφίλ, να παύσει τα τσίτσιδα του Playboy, να στρώσει τα κρεβάτια αντί να τα χαλάσει, να μείνει στο σκοτάδι κοιτώντας μέσα από την κλειδαρότρυπα, να φέρει στο φως τον sapiosexual, τον νοοσεξουαλικό, αυτόν που το πνεύμα τον ερεθίζει περισσότερο από τη σάρκα.

Και για να μην παρεξηγηθώ, ως προς το τελευταίο, φυσικά το οξυμένο πνεύμα λειτουργεί διεγερτικά ενώ ο μπρουτάλ, στερεοτυπικός αντρικός σεξισμός απωθητικά. Μόνο που ο διαχωρισμός σάρκας και πνεύματος είναι σαν το διαχωρισμό εκκλησίας και κράτους: απόλυτα ουτοπικός. Στην προσπάθεια να περιχαρακώσουμε τη γυναικεία ελευθερία μας και το κοίταγμα στα ίσια με τον άντρα, γίναμε αυτό που γιουχάραμε. Σοβινίστριες γκάουλαϊτερ για το ίδιο μας το φύλο. Πως αλλιώς εξηγείται το μένος των γυναικείων σχολίων για την πρόσφατη αποκαλυπτική εμφάνιση της ηθοποιού Σούζαν Σάραντον στο κόκκινο χαλί; Πως αλλιώς μεταφράζεται, παρά ως χάσιμο στη μετάφραση, η δυσπιστία για το υψηλό IQ όποιας τηρεί ισορροπημένες σωματικές αναλογίες και κάλλος; Και πως αλλιώς ερμηνεύεται η ηθελημένη στάση «ατσαλάκωτη Barbie» από όποια τηρεί ισορροπημένες σωματικές αναλογίες και κάλλος;

Κι ενώ η τεχνολογία χορεύει γύρω μας διονυσιακούς χορούς, εμείς κλεινόμαστε ακόμα πιο βαθιά στο υπόγειο της ανηδονίας. Από τη μία εκθέτουμε με προθυμία τη ζωή μας και τα απόκρυφα του σπιτιού μας στο Instagram, από την άλλη συνεχίζουμε να κοιτάμε σκανδαλοθηρικά τις ζωές και τα απόκρυφα των σπιτιών των άλλων. Από τη μία διατυμπανίζουμε τη δημοκρατία της διαδικτυακής επικοινωνίας και από τη άλλη αυτοφιμωνόμαστε εις ένδειξη πολιτικής ορθότητας.

Η ντεκαυλέ εποχή πανηγυρίζει με απόλυτη σοβαροφάνεια για το παντοτινό, που όμως -φευ- είναι εφήμερο. Σε πλήρη αντίθεση με την προηγούμενη φάση, την καπάτσα εξαδέλφη της, η οποία γιόρταζε το εφήμερο που έμοιαζε παντοτινό.

Επιμύθιο: Οι underground, οι μποέμ, οι περιπλανώμενοι αναζητητές της ζωής νοσούν. Και οι followers τους δεν αισθάνονται, κι αυτοί, καθόλου καλά.

Πηγή: http://www.womantoc.gr/psychology/article/i-epoxi-einai-dekavle-kai-den-milame-gia-to-seks

The post “Η εποχή είναι ντεκαυλέ. Και δεν μιλάμε για το σεξ” – Έφη Αλεβίζου appeared first on Void Network.

In his “Cool Memories” on America, the French writer Jean Baudrillard discusses through his anectodes some of the problems that contemporary societies of mass consumption are facing: In an endless schema of frustration/gratification, is human desire kidnapped and turned into a hostage without exchange? Aren’t we sacrificing something through the model of affluent society in which we are trapped in a vicious cycle of coping up with the others? Isn’t our obsession to compare our desires with those of the others reducing the ambivalent character of it to a “natural” and “naked” state so that our only pleasure resides in the act of watching? Isn’t this commensurate spectacle leading to the impoverishment of the ambivalent character of human desire? Or better, is ambivalent symbolism itself becoming a parody through the system of signs of social standing as an only way of existing in the society? Are the orgies, feasts, potlatches, in short, ecstatic states of mind where the people could forget their self consciousness and transgress the limits of reason in order to be a part of the other, becoming a simple pornography, a simulacrum, a hyperreality, a reality more real than real? Are our irrational passions continously captured and programmed into a hyperrational order? Are we living in a permanent state of surveilled dream?

The first aim of this presentation is to try to investigate the philosophical origins of our obssession to “discover” the human desire and to “colonize” it by turning it into “needs” and “wants”. Secondly, I will try to discuss how these “discoveries” and their utilization in their attempt to “educate” people are implicated in the modern societies. Last but not least, I will try to question the “success” of these implications in the process of disciplining the behavior of the consumer and shape the discipline of “consumer behavior”. Can we get a “well behaving” function of consumer behavior and does the consumer behave “well” as presupposed by the consumer researchers and mass-media?

PHILOSOPHICAL ORIGINS OF SUBJUGATED DESIRE

The colonization of passion by reason finds its philosophical origins in Socrates and Plato. Pre-Socratic mythological thought is a game of passions, emotions, imaginations, as well as a system of measured reason. Aesthetics and Ethics are not universalized in mythological Pantheon: each of the Gods and demi-Gods represent a part of the excellence and the weakness of human existence trying to find its way through the misty aura of the cosmos. Mythology is a magical dramatization of everyday events, it represents the imaginative appeal of instantenous, miraculous and capricious rythm and harmony of the cosmos (Beckman 1979; Richard 1982).

According to Socrates and his succesors, virtue is obedience to reason considered as the right use of the mind. Passion distorts reasoning; it is evil. The mind free from passions is a citadel- a refuge for men who desire. Desire must be subjected to reason:

“Wipe out imagination; check desire; extinguish appetite; keep the ruling faculty in its own power” (Marcus Aurelius in Dawson 1924, pp: 86)

Good man puts himself under the control of intellectual reasoning. The source of all the evil is ignorance. Whoever commits error in the choice of pleasure and pain -that is, good and evil- commits it through the lack of knowledge; knowledge of what eternally exists: science. Science is the basic of ethics because it searches for the divine order of what really exists. The opinions are immoral because they deal with the changing facts, appearances. Facts are not true in themselves, they must be refered to the harmony, which is the mathesis, the order of orders. We can reach scientific knowledge by the education of desire; by the subjugation of desire to the disinterested,and sublimated knowledge in search of eternal truth (Cristaudo 1991).

The real object of science is knowing the necessities which are indexed in the universal order. Logical intelligence is the faculty of thinking the necessities in terms of universal harmony. It is the guide which illuminates our everyday life distorted by passions. The right and duty of the citizens is to know the necessities of every day life, production and consumption, that is, the universal law and order of existence. And one should always keep in mind the “real” necessities during the consumption act (Ostenfeld 1987, Dawson 1924):

“In things that concern the body accept only so far as the bare need -as in food, drink, clothing, habitation, servants (!). But all that makes for glory or luxury thou must utterly proscribe” (Socrates, Encheiridon xxxiii, in Dawson 1924, pp: 64)

In his famous trial, Socrates was accused, by Alcibiades, of being hypocrite by means of an excellent mastering of words in order to justify his passions. Maybe he was right when we consider Socrates’ interest in “servants” as a bare need !

Passing through canonical monotheistic religions, subjugation of passion to reason finds its ultimate expression in Cartesian thought. According to Descartes, nature is a pre-set divine order and god gave us the reason as an instrument of understanding it for the general interest of the mankind. Freedom is the understanding of the divine order of things; the will must follow this order. The more one is inclined toward natural order, the more free he is (Cristaudo 1991).

Nevertheless, man is not only a rationally thinking being; he is an animal machine who lives without the permission of thought. Our passions are generated not from our opinions but from the involuntary movements of human body. They are not good or bad in themselves, but a part of human nature. Hence, desire must be recognized as need in order to be under the control of the reason to promote the general welfare of the mankind.

Another tendency of modern rationalism is represented by Friedrich Hegel (Grumley 1989). According to Hegel, nature itself is a self-realizing consciousness. It is a moment in the accomplishment of the absolute reason- Spirit. In this sense, consciousness of the individual can not realize itself through the knowledge of existing natural facts which themselves are the alienated singular moments of Universal Spirit. Freedom is not only knowing the necessities but also changing them toward the self-realization of the finality of the History.

Hegel (Richard 1980) considers desire as the motivation for passion; the opposite of Spirit. Passion is the particular, multiple, it does not envisage the unity but diversity. Desire ties the man to his body by detouring him from the search of absolute knowledge which should be his real aim. Desire opposes the will to realize the universal reason because it is determined by particular needs. Passion is a “pathos”, a sufferance which turns life into destiny instead of driving the subject to the quest of freedom.

THE SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE RATIONAL MODERNITY

The extension of these two tendencies of modernity in terms of social and economic explanations of human behavior manifests itself in utilitarian (Cartesian) and Marxist (Hegelian) theories. For the first one, human being is a rational being with unlimited needs and wants who has to act in an environment determined by scarce resources. Although needs and wants are unlimited, they are not ambivalent: they are commensurate according to the different levels of utility gained from their satisfaction.

Thus, freedom is full information of what is available; at what cost; and the ability to compare different levels of utility which would be obtained from the satisfaction of wants. Individual has a preference, he knows what he wants; he is capable of consistently ordering his wants from most prefered to less preferred; and he will choose from within this ordering in such a way to maximize his satisfaction (Bohm-Bawerk 1949, McKenzie 1976).

Talcott Parsons (Parsons 1964) extends the utilitarian theory to a social system basis. According to Parsons, the motivation for human behavior is not the pure self-interest. Economic rationality is not a psychological generalization but a value system appropriate to the social system. The goal of the economy is not simply the production of income of an aggregate of individuals. Besides, the reproduction of the social system as a complex whole of institutionalized value patterns is the essential mechanism of the social system. The first functional imperative of the social system is to maintain the integrity of that value system and its institutionalization. In this sense, households, universities, units of government, churches etc., are in the economy (Parsons 1956).

Freud introduces a new dimension to the concept of desire as a motivating force of human activities: the satisfaction of primary needs such as food, shelter, clothing, etc., is more or less immediate. Desire realizes itself and consumes its realization spontaneously. Nevertheless, this is not true for sexual instinct (libido). Desire stays latent in the unconscious because of the repression of the immediate consumption. This causes a state of frustration and the missing object of desire is replaced by symbolic objects. Desire, which is sexual in nature, transforms itself into a need for these objects. The “pleasure principle” replaces itself with the reality principle: man learns to give up momentary, uncertain, frustrating pleasure for delayed, restrained but “assured” pleasure (Marcuse 1966, Freud 1970).

The discourse on consumption shifts its axis from the principle of “lack” to the principle of “abundance” during the post-second world war period: The organization of the society becomes so complex that the “homo economicus” can no more decide on what is “good” and what is “bad” without the help of educators. This is a dangerous affair however: who would decide about the “realness”, “essentiality” of the needs which the consumer is not aware of? There comes our old friend “science” who is accustommed to operate always together with the morality since Socrates. It seems that science and morality are not satisfied by the colonization of the nature outside the “human subject”, now they are here for the discovery of what is inside the man. Motivation research was their first galley in their conquest of the dark waters of the non-rational and they are finding more and more complex vehicles. “Conquistodares” continue to colonize the world and their missionary is the mass media.

Of course some old fashioned moralists did not wait to criticize this situation: the motivational analyst and symbol manipulator pooling their talents and millions of dollars at their disposal, were making a fascinating and at times disturbing team. They were shaping the minds by using the occult influences (Packard 1957).

Ernest Dichter comforts: there is nothing to be afraid of. Motivation research is only in the quest of human behavior. Human desire is the raw material it is working with. Human progress is a conquest of the animal within us. The strategy of human desire is the tool of shaping the human factor. No conquest is possible without strategy !

Human behavior can not be explained merely by the rational, conscious acts. Our daily decisions are governed by motivations over which we have no control and of which we are often quite unaware. Modern communication makes the use of emotional appeals in addition to rational ones in order to sway people. Very few products have purely utilitarian aspects. Motivation research only helps us to achieve a number of deeper psychological goals. Why should we try to repress them? What we need is a new freedom – the freedom to think in new channels. Motivational research is the application of social science techniques to the problems of human motivation (Dichter 1960).

The Hegelian extension of modernity as a socio-economic system manifests itself in Marxism. According to Marxism, classical and neo-classical economic theories reflect an alienated reality. The concepts of utility and exchange value which are taken for granted by these economists are in fact historically determined and socio-economic processes. The scientific method can not restrict itself only to the understanding of the immediate reality but has to operate in order to change it towards the laws of motion of the history.

According to Marxists (Mandel 1969), man is estranged to nature through his act of production. In primitive societies where the division of labor is not developed, men produce use values for their immediate satisfaction. Nevertheless, with the development of division of labor, men begin to produce commodities for exchange. Exchange value becomes a mediator between man and man whereas use value is the mediator between man and nature. This process of objectification turns into a process of alienation; man becomes alienated to the product of his labor.

Total alienation occurs with the generalized commodity production, where the private property of means of production deprives the laborer from his direct labor act. Concrete labor becomes subjugated to the exchange value, the abstract quantity of social labor. This subjugation implies the commodification of labor as labor power. Alienated labor becomes the only mediator for social exchange. Society loses the control of social relations created by itself. Commodity fetishism occults the market relations as a product of human activities and makes people believe that the laws of market are natural laws. During this process of production for pure exchange, the capitalist speculates on creating a new need in another so as to drive him to a fresh sacrifice, to place new independence:

“Subjectively, the extension of products and needs becomes a contriving and overcalculating subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites”.(Marx cited in Mandel 1973 pp: 36)

The only possibility of overcoming this distorted reality is the action of historical subject armed with critique.

Criticism has its origins in Post-Socratic philosophy as its cousin positivism. It is the art of explaining the phenomena which are “veiled” by images, appearances. Considered as one of the essential activities of reason, critique opens the way for the rational subject through all spheres of life to make them accessible. In monotheistic religions, it is a way of interpreting the “signs” in order to justify the supremacy of the “word”, “scripture”, “the holy book”.

In this context, critique is the instrument of reason to reflect on the “objectivity” of the objects of experience. On the other hand, dialectical critique distinguishes itself from the metaphysical critique in the sense that it aims to change the conditions of what is considered to be false or distorted consciousness. It claims to render transparent what had been previously hidden in order to initiate a process of self-reflection to achieve a liberation from the dominations of past constraints.

In its vulgar forms, marxist critique observes the liberation from the alienation in ex-socialist countries (alas !). In these countries working class is not alienated to its labor because the private property of the means of production is abolished. Socialist state takes care of the “essential needs” (i.e. use value) and socialist man does not have “inhuman”, “sophisticated”, “unnatural”, and “imaginary” appetites. Working individual in socialist countries is not alienated to his products; he constructs socialism through his production act: he is a “labor hero”, a new man, who realizes his “unalienated desire” in making of history. Each magnificient dam built, each sputnik sent to space, each olympic medal won by an athlete belongs to the victory of the socialism in which each individual is involved as an organic member.

More subtle approaches of critical theory are represented by the Frankfurt School. Adorno and Horkheimer claim the replacement of practical reason by instrumental reason as a result of the developments in culture industry. The alienation caused by the commodity fetishism infiltrates into the consciousness of the working class through the commodification of culture by the leisure market. Since then the self realization of working class through its “praxis”, its practice of labor to transform the world becomes a part of instrumental reason. Although the classes exist, there is no more possibility for class consciousness for working class. Public invades private, private invades public. It becomes difficult to make a distinction between the external suggestion and internal desire. The main principle of domination becomes manipulation of desire instead of repression. Hence, instrumental reason forms an impersonal system which becomes independent from all the members of the society, including those in the ruling positions. Either bourgeoisie or working class lose their position as subjects but turn into objects dominated by the technical rationality. Adorno and Horkheimer try to recover rational subject by means of a “negative dialectics”, a criticism of commodified objects according to a sublimated art (Bottomore 1984).

Even in this subtle approach of Adorno and Horkheimer, reason as the realization of the universal ideals continues to colonize everyday life. Furthermore, they seem to share the same ideals with the “consumer researchers”, in the sense of “educating” and “informing” people about their “true needs”. They form a harmonious couple after all, where human boredom needs exigently self-cannibalizing novelties: critique and interpretation revolutionizes, consumer research rationalizes.

TOWARD A PROGRAMMED SOCIETY?

One of the first resistances to the reason oriented universalist modernity comes from Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche accuses Socrates of reducing philosophy to a discourse which tries to regulate passion for will to live into a unique, universal reality. Philosophy becomes serious , logical, clear and demonstrative with Socrates. Reason analyzes, dissects, systematizes, makes rigid what is hidden in deep. Nevertheless, interior life of man is an act of ambivalent passion rather than being an act of cold objective rationality. Desire is rooted in the life which gives us the will to live. It is the passion to exist. In this sense, it is not possible to rigidize it into the tracks of rationality. To live in harmony with cosmos does not mean to follow the tracks of an assumed universe but to feel the rythmes and pulses of the life. Thus, desire opposes knowledge when it does not accord with life. Desire is pathetique; in the sense of both suffering and sharing. It is the aspiration to deepen the life in our singularity and to be in accord with the flow of the cosmos (Deleuze 1983, Richard 1980).

Georges Bataille (Bataille 1985) pushes further Nietzsche’s arguments. Bataille claims that rationalistic realism invades all domains of life with the development of modernity. Endless quest of reson to appropriate external forms into an organized system of words causes the impoverishment of human imagination: words order,but images evoke symbols. What strikes human eyes determines not only the knowledge of relations between various objects, but also a given and decisive state of mind. Therefore, it is not the rational signification of the symbols which make them important for human existence, but their irrational ambivalence.

Following this reasoning, Bataille points out that the rationalization of the human desire as necessities and regulating it in terms of a rational utility frame would be repressing it in order to maintain a certain order which is hypocritical and unjust. How can material utility be the main task of life, Bataille asks, since it is limited to the reproduction and conservation of whatever exists? Man is not only a calculating machine whose goal is to realize benefits, but also an emotional being which realizes itself in the symbolic sacrifice. Sacrifice is a mythical delirium from all selfish calculation and reserve. It signifies an ecstatic exit from the self, a desire to put one’s body and mind entirely in a more or less violent state of expulsion. Sacrificial consumption is the elementary form of orgy, which has no other goal than the incorporation of irreducibly heterogenous elements (Bataille 1985).

Jean Baudrillard (Baudrillard 1970; 1983; 1990) develops similar arguments concerning symbolic exchange. In today’s consumption societies symbolic exchange becomes a parody under system of signs of social standing. What we consume in consumption societies is the meaning of the signs. The signs transmitted by the mass media do not signify a meaning in themselves, but mobilize the collective imaginary to give them a signification. When everybody agrees on the meaning of the sign then it is consumed (consumated). Mass media is an infinite generator of signs without signification. Thus, the main principle of consumer society becomes non- difference through difference, normality through competition.

Mass psychology provokes the people to have what others do not have, but since everybody is doing the same thing, there begins a competition for the “ultimate model”. When everybody has it then it is no more “ultimate” but “obsolete”. Contrary to the puritan rationalism where the “model” is more or less stable, today’s hyperrationalism has to consume its “model” in order to maintain its operation. Planned motivation takes the place of moral responsibility and extends the puritan morality to a hedonistic morality of self-fulfilment. The feeling of guilt after transgression replaces itself with the rationalization: in order to be normal, you have to change- you have to cope with others.

Language of the consumption society is the most impoverished of languages: full of signification and empty of meaning. This empty space is filled by the consumer researchers who always find and operationalize new motivations to replace the obsolete ones. There is no more fixed “human nature” or a referent for marketing. Unlike the modern establishment, there is no more a discourse of reality which serves as a fixed referent in the post- modernity; it is replaced by its simulacra. Social sciences invent new realities when the old ones are obsolete and diffuse them through mass- media: the invented reality becomes real through simulation; a reality more real than real; a hyperreality. In the simulative church where the researchers are the priests and the “deep motives” diffused by the media are the preachings, the masses depend on the mood of the consumer: they do not repress, they do not manipulate, but simply seduce the desire in order to turn it into new tracks of sign.

Thus, the system of consumption society does not reproduce itself according to total order and to the principle of production. Programmed chaos and “catastrophe” becomes the main principle of the system: the system must destroy its order in order to maintain the order. The main principle of this system cannot be power, because power produces the real, it perceives itself as real, immortal, eternal (with the aid of the theories which analyze it, even to criticize it.) Seduction is stronger than power: because it does not need a fixed reference; it is a reversible and mortal process.

Every body is not as pessimist as Baudrillard. According to Michel de Certeau (de Certeau 1984), most of the analyses of the consumer culture are concerned with the representations produced by an ordered system on the one hand, and the modes of consumer behavior adapting to these representations on the other hand. However, these analyses do not take into account what cultural consumer “makes” or “does” during this process of consumption and with the images represented to him/her.

Although de Certeau agrees with the theories of colonization of every aspect of life by systems of production, he goes further and observes a silent, non-violent resistance which survives in the domain of consumption. As the indigenous indians of South America under Spanish colonizers, who did not resist Christian missionaries but simply adopted the signs of Christianity and subverted them according to their own culture, today’s consumers use and transform the meanings of the “products” which are imposed to them. The preachers, educators, popularizers of production may present and diffuse the “technologies” of “how to use” the signs- that is all they can do. They can not control the users since they do not resist and seem to accept these rules. They can act as engineers of the social mind, but this does not necessarily mean that they can fragment and construct it. The masses follow a different way of thinking which is too fugitive and ambivalent to be shaped by the strategies of the managers of the mind (de Certeau 1984).

Michel Maffesoli observes the renaissance of the mythological ecology in the post-modern object. Post-modern ethos does not constitute itself according to a historical project, but in a reappropriated nature, within a shared space, collective participation to the world of objects. We are witnessing a naturalization of culture and culturization of nature through post-modernity. Objects invade spirituality and spirituality invades the world of objects. Our megalopoles become jungles where different objects flow imprevisibly. Post-modern object becomes the “fetish”, the “totem” where social body remembers itself. The invasion of the natural and social by the “reified” objects makes any attempt of a planned control by a manipulating subject very difficult. We begin to live in an aura weaved by mystical objects. The world of objects is no more mastered by anybody; post-modern object revenges by returning to ambivalent symbolism. It reenchants the world disenchanted by modernity.

Hence, Maffesoli does not observe a programmed system of objects in commodity fetishism. The order of post-modern object is rather like a kaleidescope which is a programmed uncertainty. It is a diffraction to the infinity. The nature of the post-modern object is not evolutionary, objects revolt against their programmed finality (either in the form of invisible hand or history); they re-evolutionize (in the sense of revolving) their order in order to subvert it. In each order, the “system of objects” has a different logic. It is a nature in a state of permanent creation through its degeneration, instead of an evolutionary nature where the strongest survives.

The masses do not converge toward a “standard package” through consumption but they diverge toward multiplicity. This gives rise to a more complex society which is fragmented and disseminated with a multiplicity of contradictory values instead of homogeneous and linear order of modernity. Post-modernity, like the Baroque, degenerates and regenerates different styles harmoniously through small details (Maffesoli 1990, 1988).

Gilles Lipovetsky (Lipovetsky 1987) criticizes the critiques of consumption society and mass culture and concludes that fashion is not a form of “soft neo-totalitarianism”, “repressive tolerance” but on the contrary, the expansion of the public questioning, autonomization of public thought and the agent of individualist dynamic in its divers manifestations. In this sense, fashion is the ultimate phase in today’s democratical societies. Lipovetsky also observes a “ruse of reason”, a popular wisdom in the crazy orgy of mass culture: collective reason advances by the help of its opposite, the irrational heteronomy of the seduction. As in the rational city of the antiquity whose rationality was formed by a network of egoist passions, autonomous subjectivities develop themselves through seduction and ephemere, critical, realist consciousness develops itself through frivolousness in today’s consumption societies.

Hence, with its ambivalent structure, today’s individual constitutes and reconstitutes itself in the unordered order of generalized fashion. On the other hand, this unordered does not represent an ideal system, a best of the worlds but a possibility toward a more free, better informed society. Generalized fashion lives in paradoxes: its consciousness favors unconsciousness, its craziness the spirit of tolerance, its mimetism individuality, and its frivolity the respect of human rights.

CONCLUSION

We are living an explosion of the universalist reason and post-modern consumer does not behave totally reasonably. He/she lives in an emotional aura where the borders between the real and imaginary are blurred; maybe in a hyperreality where the ordered reality is replaced by its simulacra. The closed systems of thought which refer to economics, sexuality, politics etc., as the content of reality deconstruct themselves. The referentials come and go like comets in the sky making a general theory of consumer behavior ridiculous. Not only does the consumer behave according to the caprices of fashion; but also its “science”. They interactively transform each other towards new fashions in a reversible, baroque cycle of seduction. In the 1950s consumer was “homo economicus; in the 60s he was “homo sexualis”; in the 70s he was “homo politicus”; in the 80s he was “Rambo”- “homo survivalis” with a manager’s suit at the top and naked as a savage at the bottom- with an American Indian mother and a German father. In the 90s there is no reason for not to presuppose that he is becoming a “homo ecologicus”. However, these cycles are not “trends”. They do not assume a linear development which exclude one another. Rather, each cycle collapses onto and into the other squeezing the other layers to form colorful pieces of quartz.

Last but not least I would like to comment on our position as a social scientist, citizen and consumer in this changing world.Post-modernity gives an end to the the dichotomy of order and chaos. We are living in a jungle where order of chaos generates its colorfulness and its peril. It may turn into a joyful spectacle where different species enjoy to share the same ecosystem or a carnage where the stronger cannibalizes the other. Although we have renounced all “grand responsibilities” implied by a rational puritan morality; we need to develop “little respons-abilities”, (ability to respond), responsibilities of cohabitation in everyday life depending on ethics of existence, a manner of being which would turn post-modern life into communion rather than cannibalism. Since we are con-damned to live in this jungle; since “we may have come with different boats or canoes, but today we are in the same boat” (Martin Luther King), we have to learn live together.. (After all ?) Hence, what are you doing after the orgy?

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source: http://www.acrwebsite.org/search/view-conference-proceedings.aspx?Id=7298

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