blah-feme

habitus extinct

Hadrianus Junius, Emblemata (1565)

I have often wondered how it might be possible to unsteady the deepest cultural habits, to problematise the stranglehold of what Bourdieu would no doubt have termed the 'habitus', that 'operation of culture onto the body': what are the real prospects for upturning the habitus, for engaging in a kind of scholarship that sets out, in the spirit of an absolute activism, to shake the deeply embedded gender ideologies of Western masculinity to its core? We might even think this as in some sense a hopelessly Foucauldian move, a smart, even witty arse-bearing at faux fiends and make-believe monsters, always shouting as if with the pious zealot's commitment, but really speaking from a mandarin position of loathsome aristocratic detachment.

And here is the key problem - how are we to think this without this loathsome aristocratic detachment, how to make the process simply begin, even start to unsettle without noting something that is at core absurd in the attempt? Maybe humour is the only way, maybe comedy the best chance for an unsettling; the absurd, it seems, might be one way to name that which is dangerous, that which flouts the rules of so-called common sense, which refuses the hegemonic stranglehold on what is acceptable and what ridiculous.

Let's begin at a place I know quite well, and one that draws me back to it over and over (why is this this? perhaps that's a different post). I want to visit late nineteenth-century Vienna and ask these questions about comedy, the absurd, the ridiculous pose of thinking as if no longer inside, no longer implicated in the hegemonic stranglehold of that body, that male, swaggering graphism that haunts every attempt to think it differently, to think as if we were infinitely malleable. Why Vienna and why then? Well it is a place, I suggest, where we come to see, possibly at its most intense, some of the the ways in which the modern habitus is put into place, disciplined and held under the powerful sway of masculine hegemony; this is the moment of Freud, of film, of radio, of phonography, of regimes, of health farms, of endless quirky sanitoria.. the place of the first celebrities, of the first rehab, of the first Priory.

Recourse to the cultural-historical shorthand of taxonomy (from the Greek taxis [‘arrangement’] and nomos [‘law’]) is something of which Michel Foucault was especially fond. At the Viennese fin de siècle, a place Foucault rarely visited, taxonomies proliferate, but, unlike the exotic taxonomies of the Foucauldian archéologie, they do so according to a logic that is seductively close to our own: they proliferate in order to fill out or thicken the empirical texture of the world. Laughter fills Foucault’s response to the exotic taxonomies of distant and strange places, and the purpose of that laughter is quite explicit – to articulate the seductive nature of difference. There is also laughter to be had for us, no doubt, in the face of fin-de-siècle Viennese taxonomies, but this is a laughter which resounds in response to a set of epistemological problems rather too similar to our own: the seductive epistemological closeness of the Viennese fin de siècle, its metropolitan imagination, its fascination for decline and degeneration and its obsession with the inner self, might so easily stand in for our own late modern predicament.

Hegemonic masculinities, those which shore up, enrich and polemicise atavistic claims to men’s a priori right to public discourse, become describable at the fin de siècle by means of a new proliferation of taxonomial adjectives: it becomes possible at last to speak empirically or ‘in detail’ of men, to understand men as objects of scrutiny, to construe them as susceptible to the operation of discourse. In this, the Austro-German fin de siècle marks a ‘thickening’ (a somatising) of the solidity of masculine hegemony by making available to that hegemony a new set of epistemological tools with which to define, circumscribe and construe itself.

This self-discoursing nonetheless brings with it a consequent and paradoxical ‘thinning’ of hegemony, a counter-effect to the thickening, which threatens men’s exclusive access to discourse: characterisation, description and other forms of empirical ‘capture’ are also the very same processes through which man had sought to ‘capture’ the feminine and through which man now becomes the object of his own discourse. This is the double bind of the new empirical man-object: on the one hand it is ‘thickened’ by its detailed taxonomical capture in the empirical discourses; on the other, it thereby loses its invisible, relatively unchallenged, status as silent bearer of discourse.

A ubiquitous response to this double bind was to deliberately appropriate more self-consciously atavistic discursive markers of masculinity – markers which had seemed, until the medicalisation of men that marked the fin de siècle, to operate without impediment, to operate as salient and powerful assurances of man’s power before his constitution as patient and case study. These atavistic markers – amongst which we might include textual authority, physical strength, uprightness, moral and intellectual superiority and a firm grasp of the public arena – seemed, in the fin de siècle imagination, to call up a golden age of Arcadian masculinity: undoubtedly, what characterises the operation of hegemonic masculinity at the fin de siècle is thus a kind of gender nostalgia.

 It is no doubt the case that men have consistently made (and continue to make) recourse to the operation of coercive discourse in order to articulate their masculinity as inevitably hegemonic, but at the fin de siècle this habit takes on a particularly intense quality. By figuring authority, reputation and/or professional competence as contiguous with virility, men take flight into hyperbolic phallic discourse: this discourse finds expression in body-discoursing through an emphasis on bodily well-being and a normalised physical masculinity on the one hand, and in the aestheticisation of political life and a withdrawal into the intellect (a flight from the body) on the other. The Danish pedagogue Jens Peter Müller’s exaggerated Hellenic poses in his exercise system Mein System (1905) demonstrate how the nostalgic masculinity of the fin de siècle finds expression also in a rage against the new:

A portion of the authors of our belles-lettres have done incalculable harm to the young people in our society by systematically championing, through personal example as well as through their writings, a mixture of exclusively intellectual culture, physical weakness and moral sickness…. The typical office worker in big cities is often a sad sight. Hunched over in early years, his shoulders and hips made crooked by the awkward position at his desk, his face pale, pimply, and powdered, his thin neck sticking out of a collar that a normal could use as a cuff, his foppish, fashionable suit rotating around pipe-cleaners that are supposed to be arms.

Müller’s emphasis on physicality underlines the nostalgic quality of masculinity at the fin de siècle and shows how that nostalgia can find expression in exaggerated binarisms: sickly modern urban (false) man versus the healthy physicality of the (true) Arcadian, intellectuals versus the ‘normal’, moral weakness versus moral health. It is also evident here that the metonymic juxtaposition of physical and moral weakness is meant to dramatise the moral malaise of metropolitan culture, a malaise which is written onto the bodies of its weak and sickly men.

The Körperkult or body cult of the Viennese hegemon thus always finds its counterpart in the dreamy aestheticism of groups like the Secessionists and their emphasis on ornament and, in its popular reception, on the consumption of objets d’art. Hence, the ‘virility’ of which I speak above is neither fully ‘physical’ nor completely figurative, but held at the level of discourse, having a vividly affective and effective cultural life – it functions at the level of the habitus, the discursive imagination of the body.

As we see from Müller’s System, images of exemplary male bodies, of exemplary masculine physical attitudes, undoubtedly touch the discursive operation of hegemonic masculinity, but it is also in the invisibility of the male body, its trussing and wrapping in the anonymous garb of institutional misogyny that masculinity continues to try to operate its silent monopoly: this is the other side of gender nostalgia, its yearning for the discursive silence of Arcadian masculinity.

The ‘strong’ gender thus attempts to sustain its operative power by engaging a dichotomous strategy: a refusal of physical objectification – resisting its reconstitution by the new sciences and continuing to insist on physicality as a privileged site of the feminine – on the one hand, and an embracing of exaggerated images of physical masculinity on the other.

Characteristics, typologies, nomenclatures – the stuff of taxonomy – operate as shorthand for the messy operation of cultural fields. The characteristics of masculinity which proliferate in the new fin-de-siècle ‘sciences’ of gender and sexuality are too numerous to name, but those of the hegemon centre on an anxious overarticulation of physical and figurative solidity – Festigkeit, Standhaftigkeit, Geradheit, Rechtschaffenheit, Zuverlässigkeit, Tapferkeit, Aufrichtigkeit, Virilität, Zeugungskraft. The typologies are fewer – soldier, monarch, entrepreneur, worker, artist, author, intellectual; its nomenclatures are fewer still – man, and in the new medicalised discourse of sexuality, heterosexual.

In this taxonomy, the logic of masculine ‘solidity’ or Festigkeit is assured by a double-edged refusal of and simultaneous recourse to the new medicine in sexology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In 1886, Richard Krafft-Ebing published his Psychopathia Sexualis in which he outlined the prospect for a science of sexual pathology and in which hegemonic masculinity (‘the divine image of the poet’) is juxtaposed with its shadowy counterparts (‘horrid caricatures’):

Whosoever proposes psychopathology as [the object of] scholarly study confronts there the dark sides of human existence and the sufferings of man in whose shadow the glistening divine image of the poet is turned into horrid caricatures and the aesthetic and the moral lose faith in the eternal image of God. It is the sad privilege of medicine, and especially of psychiatry, to have to witness the reverse side of life, human weaknesses and wretchedness.

What is interesting here for our purposes is the almost melodramatic (even ‘Gothic’) characterisation of counter-hegemonic masculinity. Just as the ‘glistening divine image of the poet’ [‘das glänzende Götterbild des Dichters’] finds its counterpart in his ‘dark sides of human existence’ [‘einer Nachtseite menschlichen Lebens’], so fin-de-siècle gender and sexuality, as medicalised discourses of personality, work with asymmetrical binarisms that place a certain amount of pressure on undersides, hidden worlds, dark mirror images, others, to reflect back the glistening hegemony of the bourgeois male: distorted mirror images, pale reflections, creatures of the night that stalk the haunted psyche of the bourgeois male all figure as proliferating viral others to the singularity of the hegemonic male.

This underworld is peopled by the pale and the emaciated, a derivative world of mockery, mimicry, false gods and vicious dandies. Perhaps most crucially, this underworld, or perhaps better ‘world of the others,’ is also a world of the rabble, of the mindless collective, Nietzsche’s ‘valley’. This is the logical extension of gender nostalgia at the fin de siècle – homophobia, misogyny, misanthropy, and an aristocratic disdain for the collective.

To return to the opening out of the beginning of this post, then, this place holds sway of its citizens by holding up to scrutiny, by displaying, demonstrating, what horrors befall the counter-hegemon - he is lost to a world of heartless vicious and cruel monsters that will not leave him until he is broken, limp with opium, emptied out, sucked dry. The operation of gender hegemony thus operates here like this: the fear of what lies outside is what holds men inside, keeps them safely at bay and insists on their allegiance to a simple but powerful creed: stand upright, be steadfast to the principles of inscrutable masculinity, hold onto your Herrschaft for dear life and watch out for those deadly sirens that will turn you any moment, calling calling, calling.

To refuse that hegemony, it seems, is to painfully twist and turn in the way of the underworld: come down with me, into the depths, into that place where Freud saw Lüger, in the darkest and most terrifying underplaces where we can tarry with the  monsters.

Marx and Beethoven: a fragmentary hagiography

To begin with, we must look for ruptures, gaps and mismatches since they are the markers of a certain kind of cultural work: the ego, according to both Freud and Lacan, papers over epistemological and ideological gaps, tries to hide them, rushes to fill them and this is the main mechanism of its ‘psychosis’:

In the ‘emancipated’ man of modern society, this splitting reveals, right down to the depths of his being, a neurosis of self-punishment, with the hysterico-hypochondriac symptoms of its functional inhibitions, with the psychasthenic forms of its derealizations of others and of the world, with its social consequences in failure and crime. (Lacan: 'Aggresivity in psychoanalysis')

This historicity of the ego, then, is our starting point. Its general function is to maintain the fantasy of a containment, a wholeness, a uniformity of the self; its various specificities are to be located in the ways in which that fantasy is held in place at the local level. What, then, are the cultural materials that the ego utilises to underpin the fantasy of its wholeness at the historical moment of Adolph Bernhard Marx’s Beethoven in his 1859 biography of the composer?

Certainly, the ego will encounter quite specific threats to its putative cohesion and in such cases must find a way of maintaining its strategic sense of wholeness: in this sense it functions as a balm or defensive suture. The gap, or ‘split’, we have encountered in this understanding of the ego, then, does a cultural work that I will henceforward term ‘ego work’.

In writings on music from the middle of the nineteenth century, discursive gaps can be read as markers of a certain anxiety about personality formation and are present either only by surreptitious intimation, as having already been papered over (and thus as traces of the ego’s healing work), or as cautionary, invoking the need for ego-work to be set in motion. Scott Burnham has shown how Marx was able to draw on the Beethovenian ‘heroic style’ as a resource in constructing a certain moral personality:

Like the great myths, the Beethovenian heroic-style sonata form assumes a place as one of Western culture’s master plots … The attachment of this particular musical-formal procedure to an ethical position severely alters the way in which other forms are viewed. As a particularly telling example of this, remember the way in which the Beethovenian sonata form acts as the crowning form in A. B. Marx’s Formenlehre: it is the motivating telos of his derivation of all other available forms … Marx’s pedagogical program enlists Beethoven’s music (and thus music in general) in the all-important agenda of Bildung, a process concerned primarily with the aesthetic and ethical development of self.

Burnham is undoubtedly right to draw attention to the centrality of the Beethoven style in Marx’s pedagogical agenda, but there is something missing here, I would like to suggest. The specificity of Marx’s reading of Beethoven, especially if one concentrates one’s scrutiny on the 1859 Beethoven monograph, is to be found as much in its construction of the Beethovenian figure at large as in the (anonymised, generalised) Beethovenian style.

The shift in my reading from style to figure might seem a conservative move, a nostalgic return, perhaps, to an heroic biography, or even a neo-liberal celebration of the individual as some kind of privileged site of cultural work: certainly, Burnham’s delicately drawn historiography points to some of the ways in which Beethoven’s style comes to be held at the level of a certain mentalité, a collective and anonymous discursive modality (‘Marx treats Beethoven’, so Burnham would have us believe, ‘as a Hegelian telos: only from the vantage point of the end of history can History begin’ ); yet what this reading misses here, it seems to me, is the prodigious materiality of the Beethoven figure itself, as avatar of a certain moment in the development of what Bourdieu has termed the modern habitus, the enacting of culture onto the body: this is a crucial moment in the sealing of the modern personality into that habitus when, crucially for our purposes here, the ego emerges as a kind of body-sense, functioning rather as a field that is folded onto the space occupied by the body – in this sense, the ego and the habitus are crucial agents in this moment of the history of Western bourgeois masculinity. Marx seems to grasp as much in his narrative of Beethoven’s ‘breaking out’ into the world, as a newly formed and powerful agent in it:

His build had become stocky, though not tall, thick set, full of vitality, a picture of strength; at that point illness did not yet seem to be an issue. His head was covered in bushy dark hair, that lay unkempt, more mane-like than curly; his forehead was broader and protruded all the more for being mounted above the darkness of his cagily receding eyes; his nose was strong and had developed a broadness rather than protruding, in German profile rather than the Roman profile of most artists’ noses. His mouth was well formed.

Marx constructed this description of the 25-year-old Beethoven as a pointed and deliberate contrast to the famous silhouette of Beethoven at 16 included in the Wegeler-Ries Biographical Notes.  Marx’s description of the younger Beethoven from that silhouette emphasises his ‘open profile’ with an ‘upturned nose’ and a light and ‘still undeveloped’ forehead.  What is at work here is a pointed exercise in the narrating of body-Bildung,  education through physical development, an enacting of the narrative of Bildung onto the habitus. A peculiarly German conception of personal development (although it finds many analogues in other cultures), Bildung has been characterised by Norbert Elias as ‘the inner enrichment, the intellectual formation of the individual, primarily through the medium of books, in the personality.’

This Bildung-narrative, as we shall see, is a crucial driver of Marx’s Beethoven fantasy; what is particularly interesting in this driver is the way in which Marx seeks, at certain isolated moments in the monograph, to shore up its effectiveness by making recourse specifically to the male body.

The pointed contrast between the two figures (the silhouette of Beethoven at 16 and Marx’s projected Beethoven figure at 25) is a material one, the difference between two technologies of representation: the earlier figure is referenced in relief, the silhouette tracing the outer markers of Beethoven’s personality; the later figure is imagined not in relief, but as an image available to the close scrutiny of the observer, such that the composer’s eyes give up their meanings under the protruding forehead, the mouth, well-formed, seems to work as a sign of health, and there is, as Marx stresses, no sign here of Beethoven’s coming illness.

This second image, at least, is fully legible. The technologies of nineteenth-century seeing, as Jonathan Crary has shown, were already under radical transformation by the late 1850s. Gustav Fechner’s Elemente der Psychophysik  published one year after Marx’s Beethoven monograph, had gone some way to, as Crary puts it, ‘[formalise] perception’ and ‘render the specific contents of vision irrelevant’.  Marx’s manner of ‘seeing’ here is in line with this formalisation, despite its heady romantic overtones and its commitment to ‘specific content’: in Beethoven’s forehead, the way in which it hides the eyes, in the well-formed mouth, and the racialisation of the artist’s German nose,  Marx’s image promotes a manner of seeing that draws on the logic of the modernisation of optics that Fechner seeks to achieve.

What Crary terms the ‘human sensorium’ here finds a parallel in the intensification of Beethoven’s subject-status, not as Subjekt, but as Versuchsperson, as one subjected to intense scrutiny.  There is thus a certain intensification of the look accompanied, paradoxically, by its disengagement; Marx’s ‘eye’ retreats from the scene of looking and the figure of Beethoven dominates, breaking into the narrative with a rude muscularity.  Beethoven’s physicality dominates, and yet that physicality marks Beethoven’s susceptibility as one being-looked-at, his objectification.

The two figurations of Beethoven at 16 and 25 also tell us something about the specifics of Marx’s engagement of the Bildung-narrative: the story of Beethoven’s stepping out, ‘into the world’ [‘in die Welt’] as Marx calls this second chapter of his monograph, is told through recourse to a conception of Beethoven’s personality development as proceeding along a predetermined trajectory. Indeed, throughout this section, Marx draws prodigiously on the well-trodden clichés of Beethoven’s complex and difficult character and is particularly keen to tie these traits and his physical attributes into the musical works as if all this should add up to a self-consistent narrative:

This contradiction of an apparent closedness combined with an openness of the mind to all true sentiments and inclinations is a predominant element of Beethoven’s character [that remained] from his boyhood, a sign of the deeply invested powerful and serious nature at work within him, which should be evident from the first works onwards.

Suzanne R. Kirschner has termed this tendency to oscillate between the local-personal and the longer-term conjoncture of the Lebenslauf or life trajectory the ‘romantic spiral’, drawing explicitly on older German narrative traditions that outline man’s estrangement from and higher reintegration back into nature.  In this sense, as Kirschner seems to suggest implicitly, the Bildung-narrative is a secularisation of the narrative of the fall from grace, rounded off with a neat reintegration, a kind of secular redemption. That secular narrative, in its most hegemonic form, calls into being fantasy figures whose progress is made to stand in for the progress of man at his most general towards that redemption.