Posts filed under 'Week 1 - Carnival'
Here are some of the images that I referenced in our discussion of the carnivalesque:
September 9th, 2006
I only have a minute, but I’ve been thinking about the ideas we were talking about in relation to Grotesque Realism. The connection the class made to the grotesque and the idea that, as individuals, we struggle with the notions of entry/exit, orifices, fluids, etc. seemed to ring particularly true.
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However, in thinking about it more, I really wonder if maybe that particular connection seems to fit the particular discussion because of its limited scope. After all, is it really the spit’s exit from our body that effects the desire to replace it and swallow? Or is it the consequences of its exit that make it undesirable? Doesn’t it really become undesirable once the spit exits, because different senses replace the senses that made swallowing it in the mouth acceptable? In other words, when the spit is in your mouth, you can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t really hear it; the only two senses heavily involved are touch and taste. These are the only two senses that dictate the spit’s identity. It’s that created identity that allows one to make the effortless decision to swallow the spit that has not left the mouth; however, once that spit leaves its home, the other senses become heavily involved. The senses once irrelevant to spit’s identity now become decision-makers; spit doesn’t look or smell pretty and the sound of spitting isn’t necessarily pleasant. In addition, now the senses that had been previously involved in creating spit identity are suddenly shocked into a new awareness; the taste of the spit and the feel of the spit dramatically shift or change. While in our mouth we know that the spit tastes warm, but once it exits, hits molecules of air, the temperature and consistency dramatically changes. Similarly, the spit, in bulk, never touches our lips (very sensitive areas of touch) before it leaves our mouth; once it exits, to embrace it as part of our body again, would involve a new sensation of touch that is foreign. So, really, isn’t it possible that yes, the spit, once it has left our body becomes undesirable, but it’s rejection is actually based on what happens to our senses/perceptions of things as they leave our body?
Grotesque Realism relies on the idea that an image/concept/art/etc. shows both life and death (to ridiculously over simplify for the sake of time). But, I really just wonder, based on this example of the spit, if humans are enslaved to, not by, our senses. And if it is nothing more than our senses that help us determine identity, then how does intellect come into play? And more relevant to the class, if we are enslaved to these senses, on some level, then wouldn’t every image’s depiction, including art, pictures of Angelina and Brad, and conceptual Spit-Aid be subject to these senses in an undefinable sort of way? I also wondered in what ways this dependence effects our reaction (or lack of reaction) to spectacle……
September 7th, 2006
I too am curious as to how carnival and festival work, or fail, as forms of resistance. I agree to an extent with the previous post that carnival and the state should be considered within the same discourse. By allowing space for such acts of “transgression” the state allows for a sort of faux subversion that dampens the desire for more subversive and spontaneous resistance. In many cases, I think, carnival, like modern political protest in the US, is undercut by the state of permissiveness which it is allowed. Thus the truly subversive nature of carnival that Bakhtin repeatedly celebrates is conveniently stripped from the process. And in allowing carnival to become accepted, even “licensed” by those in power, celebrants of the carnival are allowed the illusion of resistance and subversiveness without having to truly break from dominant social constraints: one can break from tradition and norm while still remaining part of it.
While reading, I began to think a lot about how modern carnival might take on the shape of resistance that Bakhtin celebrates, or at least, what keeps it from doing so. Again, like protest, carnival seems to lose much of its subversive intentions when it becomes an accepted or even simply tolerated, part of society. Once part of the popular discourse, such spectacles, whether blatantly political or simply celebratory (and I’d argue there is not always a difference) are easily excused as pastime or diversion. I think it might be carnivals’ form as a type of ritual that works to undercut it. Ritual then, as something repeated, accepted, and celebrated as a sort of tradition, discards the spontaneity that might allow it to embrace and retain more elements of resistance.
Think about it: political protest, when done within the confines of the system (permitted marches, planned ‘civil disobedience’, etc) is often easily ignored or overlooked. The state accepts this form of protest because it allows dissent to be controlled. Protest that exists outside the realm of what is permitted, often more spontaneous in nature, is more likely to be immediately squelched in the name of maintaining order. Carnival or festival exists in the same way. Like protest, celebration and ritual are accepted and encouraged when they fit into the confines created for it: i.e. Mardi gras, holiday parades, etc. But when celebration takes on more spontaneous forms, such as street celebrations/rioting after sporting events, they too are immediately subdued. Not that celebrating, for example, the Red Sox winning the World Series, is at all revolutionary, but there is at least some resistance inherent in the fact that such celebration dares to exist outside of the parameters for what is accepted.
Ok, I’m basically just thinking out loud at this point, so I’ll stop here. I think a veered a bit from where I wanted to go with this, but I hope the ideas are somewhat coherent. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around much of what we read, all of which raises numerous questions and possibilities. I’m excited to continue these discussions in class.
Wade
September 6th, 2006
Reading Bakhtin’s description of the grotesque body brought to mind the historical stereotypical images of the black body with big lips and mouths, women squatting, women with large hips, protruding bellies, and of course the ever popular extra-large penises. I’m trying to reconcile the cosmic and “body as a whole” (Bakhtin 315) or larger social body positives he attributes to grotesque realism with these negative surrounding the black body.
Even when I think about the contemporary period and especially hip hop culture, which is often touted as a great example of inversion and subversion, I can see the grotesque in the carnivalesque performances, e.g. how the grilled mouths are exhibited. Trying to make sense of this re Bakhtin’s positives makes me think of Kara Walker’s Seeing the Unspeakable. Like Walker, hip hop artists often speak what’s perceived as unspeakable; their images and financial success in many ways break ground on the hierarchical place of black images and art as low-brow, and they often mix low with high. However, whenever I ponder such issues, I think about and ask, upon what imaginary are the audiences and performers basing their actions and interpreting? I also always come back to the very significant problem of audience interpretation and meaning, especially if - and Luce Irigaray may suggest since - both the performers and the audience are operating under or within one symbolic understanding within which the images are produced. Whether we see our carnivalesque performance vis-à-vis classical, inversion or subversion, there is an over riding hierarchy that significantly influences what we see and do. Strallybrass and White (13-14) explore this when they present different critiques of Bakhtin stressing how much carnival is a “licensed release” (13) and therefore not as transgressive as Bakhtin suggests.
Fan’s last question, “how are we to analyze post industrial cultural spectacles without denouncing the transgressive power of their mobile, hybrid, and ever becoming qualities” seems appropriate to repeat here. I find myself returning to this question in my own work, and I’m often stuck between theoretical answers that point to some futility in prescribing too much transgression to such spectacles and practical answers that see significant resistance and change resulting from them (Is this a pattern of the high/low binary?) I’m not sure if we have to choose between these two. Where does midcult fit in these configurations?
I find myself thinking of Fan’s question with Kara Walker in mind, and I think Walker does more than bring the high low opposites together. Her silhouette medium blurs many of the distinction between the racial imagery and thus high low identity that can be attributed to each, leaving the audiences to read themselves within not only the silhouette but also the grotesque imagery it contains.
Hope to talk more about Fan’s question.
Stacey
September 6th, 2006
As I was wading through the reading this past Labor Day weekend I happened to stumble upon the hundredth re-airing of the VMA’s (Video Music Awards) on MTV. Now that is a public spectacle. I think it was Rachel in her earlier post who asked where the notion of the carnival and grotesque fit into our contemporary society, and she came up with example of gender representations in hip-hop videos.
Not to get too off topic here, but I want to continue the VMA thread for a second longer and how it relates to Bakhtin’s notions of carnival and spectacle and then Stallybrass and White’s critique of said theory.
The VMA’s are presented as the anti-award show (a rebellion against the more traditional Grammy’s) and billed as wild party of true excess that would fit in perfectly with Bakhtin’s criteria. The outrageous fashions, partial nudity, bad behavior—all these things are all permissible. And yet, as Stallybrass and White write, in retrospect, the VMA’s are a ‘licensed affair’, and perhaps “simply a form of social control of the low by the high…that serves the interests of that very official culture which it apparently opposes”. (13)
The “temporary liberation” that the VMA’s offers not only its participants but, by extension, viewers serves the same purpose. Is it enough for younger viewers to live vicariously through the sexualized and rowdy behavior they see represented on television? Can that mediated experience substitue for the real notion of carnival? Outside of the rituals and traditional festivals we have and observe in this country, it feels like the VMA’s are the one of the few remaining notions of carnivale in our society. The other examples that come to mind are Mardi Gras and the senior tradition of taking a Beach Week.
Of course the VMA’s are what Stallybrass and White would call a state/corporate supported affair, one that looses almost all credibility when interpreted according to Bakhtin’s purist notion of carnival. That point I agree with. The awards are “a permissible rupture of hegemony, a constrained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art”, yet they do allow millions of people to join together in modern and mediated celebration of the id.
Anyway, I’m most interested in how this notion of carnival is now subverted, presented and consumed by a youth culture practically illiterate when it comes to reading mass media messages. Are they (and us also, I suppose) being bought and sold on Beyonce and Herbal Essences? Are we at the point where the pure aspect of Carnival has no place in our society? Where the true nature of Bakhtin’s ideal is no longer possible due to the convergence of consumer, corporate and government forces in our lives? I don’t know.
One last thing…another aspect of the VMA’s that caught my eye and that relates to Rachel’s idea was the segment on Hype Williams, the music video director now famous for using the fish-eye camera lens technique. The picture at left, from Missy Elliott’s “The Rain” video directed by Hype Williams, is a great example of the idea of a mediated notion of grotesque realism. Hype Williams also shows “the body in the act of becoming…never finished, never completed” (Bakhtin, 317). In his videos that use the technique facial and body features are distored out of proportion, as you can see in the Missy Elliott video here.
September 6th, 2006
Upon completion of this week’s readings, I can honestly say that I found Mikhail Bakhtin’s perspective on grotesque human imagery to be a fascinating if, self aggrandizing one. Like Rachel, I thought Bakhtin’s assertion that grotesque imagery was somehow the “cosmic” link of humanity, “directly related to the sun” and “contain[ing] the signs of the zodiac,” to be more than a little hokey. (Bakhtin, 318) Also, while I understand the base and phallic nature of many commonly used grotesque images, I believe Bakhtin’s contention that the bestial exaggeration of the human nose “always symbolizes the phallus” to be a little overblown. (Bakhtin, 316) I do not mean to imply that such exaggeration couldn’t be used for this purpose occasionally, (even frequently,) but, if we overanalyze enough, couldn’t any protruding extremity represent the phallus? (At least while we have our minds in the gutter?)
As Bakhtin illustrates, grotesque realism is a vein of humor as honest as it is critical. Reveling in the imperfections of humanity even as it mocks them, grotesque humorists are unafraid to explore the vulgar, dark and “socially improper” aspects of human nature. “The body that figures in all the expressions of unofficial speech of the people is a body that fecundates and is fecundated, that gives birth and is born, devours, drinks, defecates, is sick and dying.” (Bakhtin, 319) This body in transition, or, “body in the act of becoming,” is the crux of being alive. (Bakhtin, 317) Sometimes life experiences are ugly or painful, but there is value even in pain. Unattractive bodily processes or tragic life events deserve to be discussed because what give humanity the kinship of shared experience. Without the painful inevitability of our own mortality, for example, we would never come to appreciate life.
If grotesque humor is the “id” of human nature made manifest, then the reactionary “new bodily cannon” is it’s tattletale, older brother “the superego.” (Bakhtin, 320) Focusing on morality and order, rather than human imperfections, (and the holistic body rather than bodily transition,) this movement was a return to social norms. It focused much more on the path of “the individual” than on a shared human experience. (Bakhtin, 320) As Sallybrass and White explain “After the renaissance, according to Bakhtin, the principals of grotesque realism were… stigmatized as the vulgar practices of a superstitious and crude populace.” (The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 9)
Assuming that the stifling social (and body image) conformity imposed by the “new bodily cannon” would put a stop to humor of the grotesque for a while, I was very surprised to read Sallybrass and White’s assertion in their work that the two modes of expression are, and will always be, coexistent. “A recurrent pattern emerges: the ‘top’ attempts to eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status. Only to discover that it is dependent on the low-other. The top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life.” (The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 5) This is to say that the ‘high’ mode of expression can’t exist without the low because the low encompasses all of the secret desires that the ‘high’ does not dare to express. Which goes to show that denying the dark or unattractive side of human nature does not extinguish it, but merely delays it for a while.
I very much enjoyed the reading and look forward to discussing it further in class.
-Courtney Riley
September 6th, 2006
As I contemplated what to post to this blog (which I must admit I am still slightly uncomfortable with for various reasons) and thought over what I had read for the week, I kept coming back to the apparent discussion over whether or not festivals and spectacles are in fact a force of resistance. The authors seem to be arguing whether or not festivals have the quality of resistance to hegemonic forces, or whether they are merely a tool of the state, sanctioned by the powers that be, to maintain and enforce control upon the people throughout the rest of the non-festival time. However, the more I thought, I began to wonder if it must be understood as one or the other OR if the discourse or resistance and repression that the festivals, carnivals and spectacles abide within are all part of the same discourse, making them inseparable from one another, making them not a dichotomy of the dominant versus the dominated, but integral parts of one another.
Beginning with Bakhtin, we are presented with this notion of the carnival and its “turnabouts” of the dominant forces. Carnival life gave its participants a release from the presiding laws of the time and abided within “the laws of its own freedom” (Bakhtin 7), marking “the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (Bakhtin 10). The people’s desire for this carnival, this release from oppression was so great that “it had to be tolerated and even legalized outside the official sphere and had to be turned over to the popular sphere of the marketplace” (Bakhtin 9). Because the carnival, anti-hegemonic spirit could not be denied, according to Bakhtin, it possessed a discourse of resistance and the power to turn the world in which it existed upside down, if only for a moment.
However, Stallybrass and White seem counter Bakhtin’s claim of resistance in the very fact that “carnival, after all, is a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony, a constrained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art. …The release of emotions and grievances [felt through the participation in carnival life] made [the people] easier to police in the long term” (Stallybrass and White 13). These authors say that because the affair is accepted by the state, rather adopted and encouraged by the state, not merely tolerated, it retains little to no effective resistive power. At the same time Stallybrass and White recognize the ability of carnival to display the interlocking nature of of becoming and that of its antithesis: “birth-death, youth-age, top-bottom, face-lower bodily stratum, praise-abuse” (Bakhtin 238, quoted in Stallybrass and White 17). They accept carnival’s ability to turn the relations of top-bottom upside down. Stallybrass and White, along with Bakhtin, seem to see in carnival the capacity to disrupt binary oppositions, uniting them, interlocking them, revealing them as not so much binary opposites, but part of an interlocked relation of forces.
It is in this vein of revealing other binaries and dichotomies as interrelated that I began to therefore question why carnival’s resistance to hegemony or repressive nature must still be understood as one or the other. Carnival and the official state, whatever it may be at the time in either Rabelais time or in current Brazil, should be understood as part of a singular discourse. And because all discourse originates from the same field of force, discourse possesses the ability to change political alliances: discourse is polymorphous. In this way, discourse of resistance transmute to become discourses of repression (which is what I think Stallybrass and White argue); however, the opposite must also be true then. The language of oppression, one imagines, becomes the language of liberation. According to Foucault, “Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are. We must make allowances for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be BOTH an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategies” (Foucault 100-101). Carnival then acts a neither solely ’subservient to power” nor solely forms of resistance to power: like language itself, carnival’s discourse is fluid and malleable. In this way, carnival, festival, and spectacle cannot be reduced to good or evil - a means of resistance or a tool of oppression - but exist beyond this binary.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1980.
September 6th, 2006
After thinking about the discussion of how prolific American carnival is, I am reminded of a section a book by Joseph Roach called Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (unfortunately, I was unable to re-find the specific article). Roach is mainly concerned with theatrical performance, but he at one point discusses the parades of the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Apparently, what was once considered the primary, “ethnic” parade, which used to take main stage, has now become the second, more underground performance that comes after the “white” parade (although looking at the official breakdown shows that there are several Krewes in charge of many individual performances throughout Mardi Gras day). The pessimistic view is that Anglo-American (un-theatrical) tradition has pushed out the original performances in lieu of a much more generic one that is only an echo of the spirit of these originals, and the fear is that the ethnic tradition will be lost. However, Roach notes that the very continuance of the original parade strengthens the traditions of these “Black Atlantic” traditions, perhaps moreso because of its underground nature, which must rely on oral performance and unwritten, unofficial continuation (Professor Sample will have to forgive me for a very much over-simplified reference to this excellent book). Roach refers to the arguments of Bahktin and Victor Turner, among others, and his connection to the continuance of carnival in America is clear. To set aside the politics of race for a moment, Mardi Gras is certainly a fierce continuation of carnival behavior in America (as defined by Bahktin in both the positive and negative aspects of it). But this inversion of primary/secondary celebrations in terms of race in itself represents a kind of carnival behavior, the “topsy turvy” of class, authenticity, and hierarchy, depending on which perspective you come from and what your “primary” celebration is.
This led me to wonder about the politics of Turner’s article “Carnival in Rio de Janeiro.” Turner certainly points to a multitude of celebrations and carnival behaviors still at work today in Brazil. Not to invalidate his arguments, however, I nonetheless wonder about the differing experiences that very different spectators will have—what are the possibly complex politics that Turner and his wife become involved in when they experience the parade, unlike the majority, “with Da Matta’s help in the mayor’s box or cabin” (83), which they choose to ignore while providing a seemingly representative, albeit truly enthusiastic description of the events? And how might this effect Turner’s analysis? So our questions of whether carnival, with its circle of definitions, exists in America is confounded by the question of whether everyone is able to experience it. Of course, the very idea of medieval carnival according to our readings is the exploitation and participation of different classes, whose varying experiences of the carnival are perhaps what create the overall unique experience. But does this hold true in our “modern world?” Does the inversion of Mardi Gras celebrations over the years point to a kind of unfortunate over-control of the festivities, or can Roach’s optimism extend not just to “Black Atlantic” preservation, but all degrees of ethnicity? These are issues posted by several of the entries today in some form or another, but I thought it would be interesting to consider Roach’s comments and the politics of some of the readings (not just Turner’s, but our poor Falassi and Stallybrass too), and perhaps find my own way of asking the same questions : ).
September 6th, 2006
For the record, I was not citing my resource (S,W smiley face with glasses). For some reason, a numerical ‘eight’ registered to the site as what you see on the page. Sorry about that.
September 5th, 2006
It occurs to me that completing this week’s assignment for this class progressively had me feeling as if I may have shape shifted into one of the “clowns and fools” discussed in Bakhtin’s discussion of the carnival; I was, in my own way, I think, trying to bring to life “folk carnival humor” (Bakhtin 4-5). Though I will not continue this week’s tradition by applying myself too much to this response paper/blog, I will say that this week’s “comic verbal compositions” included handing out/reading a page of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s “The Politics and Poetics of Transgression” (accidentally stapled to an essay I had prepared) to a group of high school students I was tutoring (Bakhtin 5). The festivities continued as I inadvertently managed to “abuse” and “demonize” via telephone an arguably, “weaker…social group,” before I learned that she was recently displaced due to a disaster that had taken her home in Mexico; needless to say, I took advantage, though unintentionally, of someone who feels as if “don’t belong” (S,W 19).
So, I wondered, after I had performed these and a variety of other misguided, unintentional experiments relating to the concepts surrounding the spectacle of the carnival, why I didn’t feel as if I had experienced “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order” (S,W 7). The preceding is actually Stallybrass and White quoting Bakhtin, and their argument that “carnival in its widest, most general sense embraced ritual spectacles” seems reminiscent of reality television. Now, I might be slightly off base here, but after consistently making a fool of myself in my real, every day life in the past week, and subsequently reading these articles on “folk festivities of the carnival type,” I couldn’t get away from the concept that carnival isn’t actually a “ritual virtually eliminated from most of the popular culture,” but that it may have been temporarily absent while it evolved and once again became relevant with modern technology. Granted reality TV and carnival are not identical; reality TV does not necessarily always fulfill any of three distinct forms described by Bakhtin on page 5, and the particular folk culture does seem to require a live spectacle, but the similarities seemed striking. “Carnival laughter, then, has a vulgar…quality to it” and “while it humiliated and mortified it also revived and renewed” (S, W 8). Television programs like The Simple Life seem to thrive on such “mocking words” to invite “vulgar” laughter (S, W 8). Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, depending on the season, make it their mission to humiliate strange, poor, uneducated, intellectually inferior individuals in order to illicit viewers’ pleasure and laughter; this program is supposed to be a comedy, but it tends to border on tragedy as two wealthy young, attractive females “gain the authority to designate what is to be taken as high and low in the society” (S,W 4). Though these girls themselves, members of a marginalized gender, are not, themselves, reciting poetry or teaching courses on the rise and fall of an egalitarian society, their economic status somehow balancing their level of authority for the average spectator; Stallybrass and White discuss this concept on page 4, saying “we already have two ‘highs and two ‘lows’” in the “question of hierarchy” (4). It seems incredible how many connections can be made to the spectacle of carnival and the spectacle of reality television, but I’ll stop there to quickly raise an additional question/observation.
I wasn’t sure how women fit into all of the articles; sure, there is mention and even some detailed discussion regarding women and their roles, but no real discussion that makes a connection between the marginalization of women during this time and their voluntary/involuntary role in this spectacle. Not that I necessarily expected there to be, but much of what I was reading left me wondering about the feminist perspective of carnival. Stallybrass and White discuss women’s roles as “gypsies,” “the encampment of women protesters,” as well as other details that seemed to fuel a curiosity to learn more about the gender roles of carnival. S, W quote Rhutven saying “all the women arouse a degree of hostility far in excess of any inconvenient they may cause to soldiers…[so much so that] publicans refuse to serve them” (S,W 23). I thought that was fascinating that it was the women that would arouse this degree of hostility and cause economic and social disturbances. A particularly interesting line, also found on page 23 of Stallybrass offers “What is socially peripheral may be symbolically central” (23). If there were more time, or if I had this response to do over again, I might spend it writing about nothing else but the implications of this statement…
September 5th, 2006
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