Virtual Scholars
An imagined form of scholarship…Archive for Representation
Of Life and Death: Documentary/Art
Margareta Kern's Julka (Banjica, Bosnia and Herzegovina), 2007 from Clothes for Death.
Visited the Margareta Kern ‘Clothes for Living and Dying’ exhibition today with C. at the Impressions Gallery, Bradford. The exhibition is of two halves, with photographs documenting two ‘rites of passage’: the graduation and the funeral. It is an obvious point, but somehow before really engaging with the images, I looked about the gallery and was struck with the sense that this genre of ‘documentary art’ bears all sorts of dilemmas. I’m not sure who may have written about such a genre (which would include, for example, the work of Nan Goldin, and there are countless others). It is certainly prevalent and very much a product of postmodernity. Perhaps it was a series of simple fly-on-wall videos playing in the corner of the exhibition that showed the making of some of the graduation dresses exhibited, but I couldn’t help thinking instead of a series of photographs in a gallery what would really have been interesting would have been a TV documentary (the sort of thing Channel 4 would show!).
Kern is a London-based artist, and a graduate of Goldsmiths, but the pictures are all taken in her homeland of Croatia/Bosnia-Herzegovina. On one side of the gallery were ‘Clothes for Death’, a series of images of elderly women displaying the clothes they wish to be buried in. On hearing from her mother of the custom among Croatian and Bosnian-Herzegovinian women to prepare clothes for this purpose, Kern sought to meet and photograph these women in their homes with their chosen clothes laid out on display. As the exhibition literature suggests, ‘[h]er photographs offer an insight into the lives of women whose identities have been shaped by turbulent historical, political and cultural currents’. And the work has attracted a range of good reviews (see, for example, ‘Dress Rehearsal: Margareta Kern’s Clothes for Living & Dying‘, Selvedge Magazine, March/April ‘09).
C. and I talked at some length about the images, which relate so closely to her work on memory and cloth. Yet, we felt somewhat disappointed about the images themselves. For me, in terms of content, they echoed something of the work by John Berger and Jean Mohr, yet without any of the contextual processes they attempted. As photographs I found them rather flat, which further created distance, holding back the stories these women surely must hold. Given these were images full of trust and faith, it was such a pity not to feel a greater sense of community and narrative. For C. it was the near absence of the clothes themselves that disappointed. It was true, whilst one might almost want to see these women wear the clothes (to model them?!), which was hardly appropriate, the clothes lacked real presence. Their ‘touching’ stories untold. Instead, these were photographs of women and their bedrooms, not their clothes. C. wondered what the pictures might be like without the subjects, just their possessions. We shall never know.
Standing before these old women C. asked about my life, about ‘things’ right now. I gave some account, but all too soon had to break off, unable to hold it together. So we stood there for a moment – our eyes averted entirely from the pictures on the wall – witnessing my grief, like a simple silk thread deeply woven, yet somehow cut. I returned to discuss the pictures – that gesture again and again to fold up into representations of life (as I do here in writing), to find sanctuary there, whilst haunted by the dichotmy of art and life. Later, however, discussing things over lunch, I mentioned my interests in the Neutral and ever insightfully C. remarked how pertinent and troubling a topic given my circumstances. In full agreement, still I struggle so much to articulate how, just as documentary can be (an) art, so documenting (thinking about) my life can itself be my life. Difficult when it seems only to highlight a life unlived. What is the value of an expanded field of ethics when it seems impossible to live by? …and I hear the spectre of that same old line I trot out in numerous articles, of Derrida’s remark about the letter not arriving, ‘it’s not a misfortune, that’s life, living life’. Despite the rhetoric of fluidity, the poststructuralists offer us a philosophy of loss, of the unattenable, of mourning (epitomised by Barthes’ Camera Lucida). Where is the philosophy of life, living life? …the emphatic YES! …perhaps – in the end – it resides in all our silent stories, including the women on display in the gallery who prepare their clothes for the time they will finally be alone. (I’m reminded of that Billy Joel line again, ‘go ahead, leave me alone’ – the sense of future in ‘go ahead’, yet always at odds with one’s singular time and space. See ‘Circumstance‘)
Kern's Ana (Jennifer Lopez dress), 2006 from Graduation Dresses
Our lives are of course full of promise, often poignantly captured with the moment of graduation. Across on the other side of the gallery were images of graduation dresses ‘designed’ by Kern’s mother, who set up a made-to-measure dress-making business following the civil war. The clients – unlike those women Kern photographs approaching death – are all wealthy and style conscious, all young women recently graduated from secondary schools in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Crucially the designs are based on dresses worn by celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez (see above) and Keira Knightly, and all produced based on images found in fashion magazines (such as Cosmopolitan, see below) and on the internet, which the young women would bring to Kern’s mother.
Inevitably, given the voyeuristic nature of Kern’s work, there was something uncomfortable about looking at these images. What kind of ‘offer’ were these women making by offering to have their photograph taken and displayed – or rather what kind of transaction does Kern create by transforming these photographs into gallery exhibits (is it so different to internet pornography)? It is easy to suggest Kern, in deliberating making a choice to photograph women from ‘wore-torn’ Croatia/Bosnia-Herzegovina (rather than say her domicile London), is pasing comment on an aspirant class outside of the wealthy EU nations. But what I found most uncomfortable about these images was the fact that I see them all too often, in the flesh as it were as a norm of our culture. In fact, as I stood in the gallery I had a moment of deja vu – my attempt to be thoughtful in front of these images echoed an embarrassing moment I had recently when I happened to head to my office late one night to complete the writing of an article (woefully overdue). Dressed so clearly for work – a heavy coat despite the warm night and clutching a satchel – I inadvertently walked in on the graduation ball. Desperately trying to find my way pass security to get to my office, I was confronted by a host of beautifully dressed women, all ‘celebrities’ for the night. I heard my name called, some had recognised me. Pretending I hadn’t really been spotted, I wished them an enjoyable evening but they all just smiled knowingly at my being out of place. And I suppose that is it: it is not the photographs in the gallery, nor those at the graduation ball that we need to question, it is me – my place in it all!
…fitting perhaps with a philosophy of life, living life, over in the other gallery space was ‘Born in Bradford’, an exhibition concerned with the social welfare of babies born in Bradford and in particular with the relationship of fathers to babies. The photographer, Ian Beesley, having searched through the photographic archives of the National Media Museum (across the road) was struck by two things: (1) the preponderance of romantic, idealised portraits of mother and child (heavily influenced by Christian iconography); and (2) the lack of representation of fathers in early childcare. Beesley asks: ‘Has the sheer weight of religious representation suffocated the development of an alternative or is it because the majority of painters/photographers were/are men’? Though he notes too, ‘[e]ven when I researched portraits of babies by women photographers this stereotypical/traditional depiction of mother and child was reinforced’.
Bradford has one of the highest rates of single mothers and absentee fathers in the UK. Working with the Bradford Royal Infirmary (with many of the images on display there), Beesley has sought to produce a ’series of portraits of just fathers with their newborn children. Partly as a reflection of changing practices in child care within a 21st century multicultural society … but also to provide positive images of fathering for display within the maternity units of the BRI’. Here again was the documentary art mode – to hang pictures upon the wall that document something and here even seek change. In the end, however, these are simply pictures of new fathers, their newborn child in their hands. It is undoubtedly a happy moment, but it says nothing of the complexity of lives that follow. Laudable though they are, these images are more like mirrors hanging up in the BRI, rather than challenging portraits. In the end it seemed to me both Kern and Beesley’s work lacked a subtle engagement with the preciousness of life and death – though interestingly Kern’s portraits of the reproduction of celebrity spectacle held a wild spectacle all of their own. We’re back where we started: postmodern art.
(…and R. – just before leaving I happened to spot in the gallery bookshop a slim attractive volume, Once More, With Feeling; a catalogue of a prior Impressions Gallery and Photographers’ Gallery exhibition of contemporary Colombian photographers; perhaps the trail has not quite run cold… )
Just Do It!
The dream has never died … it lives on in those Americans, young and old, rich and poor, black and white, Latino and Asian and Native American, gay and straight, who are tired of a politics that divides us and want to recapture the sense of common purpose that we had when John Kennedy was president of the United States of America – Barack Obama (CNN)
When I look at Barack Obama (through the lens of the British broadcast media and various Internet snippets) I really only see a man in a race with the spectre of his own good looks and charm; epitomised, perhaps, by the I Got a Crush… on Obama viral video, which apparently Obama himself responded to by saying: ’It’s just one more example of the fertile imagination of the Internet. More stuff like this will be popping up all the time’ (more). Of course it is far more complex, and murky too. A recent article in The Guardian, ‘It’s the most vicious election campaign ever: and here’s why’, amply demonstrates the problem for Democrats trying to stage a political campaign against the ‘force of the mighty Republican propaganda machine’. In the UK it is easy to see only the photo-opportunities (the main speeches and press conferences). What is not witnessed are the endless parade of advertisements and internet videos, some authorised, plenty others not. Still with the polls in Obama’s favour and numerous negative headlines for McCain and Palin appearing on the widely-read syndicated news blog service The Huffington Post (see also plaid lemur), there is quiet optimism for a politics that no longer divides…
But aren’t we forgetting something? Polls show that race remains a negative factor. A poll conducted by Stanford University, for example, suggests that ‘the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about two and one-half percentage points’ (Associated Press). The irony, of course, is that with prospects of America’s first ever Black president, race is strictly off the agenda: ‘The black candidate can’t really talk about race without being accused of race baiting, and the Republican candidate can’t indulge in the typical GOP-style coded race baiting because everyone knows what he’s doing’ (Deggans). The question, then, is whether race is being seen, but not voiced, or whether it is finally becoming a non-issue. Sadly, the latter is unlikely, but equally the former is surely more complex.
In Roland Barthes’ oft cited volume Mythologies (1957), the example of a young black solider is used to help unravel the complexities of semiological ’myth’. Whilst at the barber’s, Barthes casually notices the cover of Paris-Match, which shows an image of a young black solider who is saluting, ‘his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour [the French flag]‘. As a photograph it cannot ‘lie’ – ‘All this is the meaning of the picture’, Barthes notes.
But, whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under the flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this [solider] in serving his so-called oppressors (Barthes, Mythologies)
The key lesson of Barthes semiological system is that ‘myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear’. What happens in this case is that the history of the solider (his own personal history and that of colonialism more broadly) is changed into mere gesture. Nothing is removed, or hidden, but everything takes on a different manner.
This is a king of arrest, in both the physical and the legal sense of the term: French imperiality condemns the saluting [solider] to be nothing more than an instrumental signifier, the [solider] suddenly hails me in the name of French imperiality; but at the same moment [his] salute thickens, becomes vitrified, freezes into an eternal reference meant to establish French imperiality. [...] myth is speech stolen and restored. Only, speech which is restored is no longer quite that which was stolen: when it was brought back, it was not put exactly in its place.(Barthes, Mythologies)
Have we finally exorcized this myth? For Barthes, there is one ‘language’ that is not mythical. It is language of the producer, of one who ’speaks in order to transform reality and no longer to preserve it as an image … revolutionary language proper cannot be mythical. Revolution is defined as a cathartic act meant to reveal the political load of the world: it makes the world’ (See also: Michael Johnson’s Barthes and the Politics of Electoral Photography which prompts consideration of imagery from the US Election). In 1983 the UK’s Conservative Party issued the following election poster:
As Paul Gilroy explains: ‘The poster was presumably intended to exploit ambiguities between ‘race’ and nation and to salve the sense of exclusion experienced by the blacks who were its target’. The main caption ‘Labour says he’s black. Tories say he’s British’ set against the image of a young black man in smart dress ’set out to reassure readers that “with Conservatives there are no ‘blacks’, no ‘whites’, just people’. Rhetorically, the attempt was to make nationality colourless, or colour-blind. And of course the suit worn by the man is quite pertient. Obama is well known for his stylish suits (which contrast dramatically with McCain) – is this the manifestation of a revolutionary language? In the 1983 poster, Gilroy sees the suit as a weapon:
…the slightly too large suit worn by the young man, with its unfashionable cut and connotations of a job interview, becomes a key signifier. It conveys what is being asked of the black readers as the price of admission to the colour-blind form of citizenship promised by the text. Blacks are being invited to forsake all that marks them out as culturally distinct before real Britishness can be guaranteed. Isolated and shorn of the mugger’s icons – a tea-cosy hat and the dreadlocks of Rastafari – he is redeemed by his suit, the signifier of British civilization. The image of the black youth as a problem is thus contained and rendered assimilable. The wolf is transformed by his sheep’s clothing (Gilroy, in Images: A Reader, pp.76-78)
Obama carries no such signifier. The language of his suits (to quote Barthes again) ’speaks in order to transform reality and no longer to preserve it as an image’. The Media Critic of the St. Petersburg Times, Eric Deggans, offers a neat phrase: ‘It’s something people of color face every day: you’re a symbol to the world until you get famous enough that you’re not.’
Obama’s style and affect might better be understood in terms of Celia Lury’s analysis of the advertising of Benetton clothing, which has a purposefully ‘global’ definition of race. The company’s slogan subtly, but significantly changed from ‘All the Colours of the World’ to ‘United Colours of Benetton’. The ir advertising imagery frequently accentuates racial characteristics and national codes. On the one hand:
The overpowering reference point in their imagery is that race is real: racial archetypes provide the vehicle for their message, and racial common sense is overbearingly present in the ‘United Colors’ myth, such that the reality of race is legitimated in Benetton’s discourse (Back and Quaade, in Images: A Reader, p.262)
Yet, there is a more complex and contemporary reading, which Lury explains:
…the novel productivity of these images is missed if it is argued that racial difference is naturalised here, if by that is meant that race is presented as an unchanging and eternal biological essence. ‘Race’, in this imagery, is not a matter of skin colour, of physical characteristics as the expression of a biological or natural essence, but rather of style, of the colour of skin, of colour itself as the medium of what might be called a second nature or, more provocatively, a cultural essentialism (Lury, in Images: A Reader, p.262)
Keeping in mind something of Lury’s logic of race as a style and medium, Eric Deggan’s article, One Reason Race May Not Derail Obama: The ‘Do the Right Thing’ Effect, provides a set of three scenarios that foreground the manner in which Obama’s ‘race’ is not easily understood a simple biological category, but as something far more complex, tactical and arguably with very little to do with Obama himself – but instead the complex history of signification that we are all placed within.
The Do the Right Thing effect – I named this for the moment in Spike Lee’s legendary film where he confronts a racist pizzeria operator with the observation that the guy makes awful comments about black people but loves Prince, Eddie Murphy and Magic Johnson.
“It’s different,” John Turturro’s Pino Frangione insists. “Magic, Eddie, Prince are not niggers…They’re not really black. They’re black but they’re not really black. They’re more than black. To me, it’s different.”
And that’s a dynamic no one can measure. It’s been my experience as the occasional object of racism that there are some folks who feel badly about the idea of black people, but those attitudes can change for specific black people they feel they know.
So there are probably some Democratic voters who don’t see Obama as a typical black person, and don’t transfer those negative, generic feelings onto him – particularly because he doesn’t fit the easy stereotypes, even of black politicians. And as long as Obama has been running for president, there are many voters who didn’t really get to know him until he clinched the Democratic nomination in July.
[...]
The Reverse Bradley Effect – Okay, this one is a little less likely, I admit. But the Bradley effect is a dynamic named for Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, a black politician who went into a tough election for governor doing well in the polls but lost when the votes were counted.
The lesson some learned: people told pollsters they were voting Bradley just so they wouldn’t look racist.
But as today’s presidential race has taken on a new dynamic, I wonder if a different impulse won’t emerge. We are, after all, in an election season where Republicans and even Democrats like Geraldine Ferraro insist Obama is getting widespread support mostly because of his race.
So maybe there are some folks planning to vote for Obama who don’t want to admit it.
[...]
The George Wallace Effect – Like Hillary Clinton before him, Republican John McCain has tried to reference Obama’s difference without mentioning race, emphasizing his loose connections to “domestic terrorist” William Ayers and repeatedly asking “Who is the real Barack Obama?” as if two years on the campaign trail hadn’t provided the public a few answers.
But McCain is discovering what Clinton also learned the hard way – the real point of those kinds of attacks is obvious in the post-Willie Horton-era, and it hurts in two ways. It makes people who are not racist but uneasy about Obama feel as if they are falling in league with racists, and it brings enough racists out of the woodwork that those making the attacks start looking like the famously pro-segregation governor (doubt my words, check the footage of McCain correcting a supporter who worried he was an Arab – the kind of thinking his campaign seemed to be encouraging just days before).
[...]
These are odd positions for me to argue, I admit. Back when Obama first announced his candidacy, I along with many other black folks, had a hard time believing a black candidate for president could be much more than a trivia question.
But white friends who were much less cynical about racism argued me down, and seem to be proven right.
Now that the worsening economy is hobbling Republican electoral hopes everywhere, I’m ready to believe that America might be ready to elect its first black president.
The only real question left, is whether enough white folks feel the same.
…in keeping with the ‘Do The Right Thing’ effect, and reminding ourselves of the presence of sports wear and its associated, global slogans which appear as parody in Spike Lee’s film, we might now most usefully take Nike’s mantra – JUST DO IT! – and get on with that dream which never died…
Along it came…
I bundled everything into my bag and soon it was heavy again. As ever it was a race against the clock. I checked to see I had picked up everything (the usual feeling, in such a hurry, of having forgotten something crucial lingered). But, I had all the bits and pieces I needed to read in preparation for teaching and of course Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude (the title set by R. in preparation for my trip to Bogota, the page quotas by our reading group of two!)… There was just enough time, I thought, to get to the library to get that book about blogging (again for teaching), which I’d not been able to get last week because of such early closing times.
I hurried up to the first floor and headed straight to the shelf location 301.231. I spotted it finally down on the bottom shelf and swiftly plucked it from its position. I was all but away again when I noticed a title along the thin tall spine of a neighbouring book: The Digital Film Event. Interesting, I thought and shifted the weight of my bag slightly to be on my way again. Yet, no I couldn’t quite leave it there for a ‘next time’ (and so allow it to be lost to those spaces of lost volumes that ever haunt me). I let my bag down to the floor to free myself to collect up this second book. The pages are glossy I thought. Pictures, some in colour. And what is this, a filmscript in the middle? Could not compute. I was definitely intrigued. Could be a red herring, maybe a little self indulgent (though who am I to talk!). But the back cover did it, ever aware of the ticking clock, my eyes skated over the top few lines:
FILM / VISUAL STUDIES / POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
Endless travel in cyberspace, virtual reality, and the dream of limitless speed: technology changes our sense of self. In her new book, Trinh Minh-ha explores the way technology transforms our perception of reality.
Yes the word travel appeared I thought, a good omen and cyberspace, which would seem to help knit together our wandering plans and the insistence with which I write this blog. Suddenly the book became such precious cargo. Still with little sense of what it actually contained (and what does it really matter when set against the inspiration it offered), I hurried down to the library desk as if someone might reach out of the shadows and take it from me before I had the chance to have it issued to my name… As I ran the book’s barcode through the machine I became aware of a whole host of new possibilities (if only I could write them down here as quickly as I thought of them). Only yesterday as I half described the plans (or at least their moods/modes) R. and I have dreamt up for my visit, you said to me (as you sat perfectly, cross-legged upon that massive bed) ‘…and you could do more films’. The suggestion startled me for a moment (but that is hardly new) and I think I gave a non-commital reply, but it went quick and direct to my other mind (the one that can’t function in real-time).
R. … I think we have been thinking too small. Let’s not just look to the films and books of Robinsonesque adventures (and other associated Species of Spaces), let’s make our own. In our ever best attempts to refashion Bovard and Pecuchet for the 21st Century, I think we ought to turn our hand to being media artists. We’ll go the whole hog and invent a globalised installation.
I have been writing this, trying to archive my thoughts, as I travel back on the train. As I step off at the station and enter the usual commotion of commuters, I sense all the connections in my head dissipate (a desparate feeling under the circumstances). Still, I hang on to these words saved. It could be a real turning point. I really sense it could be a turning point (something we must discuss during our next skype call). Of course in previous literatures, this remark, which issues as if literally ensconced in the hurlyburly of modern life, might seem to reveal a contrived attempt, or re-presentation, of the transient. Yet, since I am able to type and transmit these words upon my mobile phone, we can’t so easily judge one’s verisimilitude.
…and this simply all feeds into the ideas of the author of The Digital Film Event, Trinh T. Minh-ha. As the backpage blurb continues:
“We are all engaged in social rituals in our daily activities,” she writes, ” and by remaining unaware of their artistic ritutal propensity, we remain ‘in conformity.’” Her goal, as a thinker and an artist, is to transform our understanding of technology and speed so that we are able to “turn an instrument into a creative tool and to step out of the one dimensional, technologically servile mind.”
The paradoz that “stillness contains speed within it” is central to Trinh’s concept of the digital apparatus. With her signature amalgam of feminism, postcolonial theory, Eastern philosophy, and practical understanding of filmmaking, Trinh Minh-ha presents a much-needed advance in our understanding of the real in a technological age.
R. … welcome to The Letters in Red 2.0…
In Search of Darkest Peru
“I’m not a foreigner,” exclaimed Paddington hotly. “I’m from Darkest Peru.”
This is a line from the first chapter of the new Paddington book (written to mark the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the bear), which neatly encapsulates the delightful paradox of Paddington: utterly ‘exotic’, yet thoroughly home-grown. As Stephen Fry is oft quoted as saying, ‘He is a British institution’. It makes complete sense that Paddington can be both from Darkest Peru, yet also not a foreigner. ‘Darkest Peru’ is an entirely ‘home-made’ concept, coined by the author of the books, Michael Bond (who at 83 has written Paddington Here and Now, which is purposely given a more contemporary setting and foregrounds Paddington’s immigrant status). The phrase might well be thought to cause offence, but that is perhaps too easy a thing to say. It seems much more interesting to consider how Paddington represents a more subtle representation, how he seems to suggest a whole ‘other’ kind of subjectivity. A review in the New Statesman (12 June 2008) offers one alternative reading of his status:
But what do Peruvians think about the fact that their representative in the UK – the only one of their countrymen considered worthy of a monument here – is a hapless refugee who ignores Peru’s feted national cuisine in favour of marmalade sandwiches and cocoa? Are they upset by the description “Darkest Peru” – particularly as Bond, who coined the phrase, has never visited the country? More than 35 million Paddington books have been sold globally in the 50 years since they first appeared, but the bear is not so famous in Latin America. Has Paddington caused offence at home?
Apparently not. The Peruvian embassy was insistent: “Paddington Bear is very important to British people, so the name Peru has a positive association for them from childhood. And I think ‘Darkest Peru’ is a great phrase. It has come to represent exoticism, so it’s very cool.” Peruvians represent less than 0.1 per cent of immigrants in the UK, but Paddington’s refugee status is no cause for concern. “People have been moving around for centuries,” says the embassy spokesman.
In fact, the Peruvian attitude towards Lima’s most famous bear is so warm that when HarperCollins, which publishes the Paddington stories, held a reception at the embassy recently, officials helped him out with his immigration woes. “In the book, there is a problem with Paddington’s papers, so the Peruvian ambassador gave Michael Bond a passport for him,” explains the spokesman. “He will not have those difficulties again.”
Of course the spokesman was also careful to point out: ‘It’s not a real passport. He is a fictional bear.’ Nonetheless, the quandaries which circle around Paddington’s status are revealing and I think - like the bear’s own nature – suggest a certain optimism.
The article quoted above also notes how ‘[n]ew versions of popular children’s books generally introduce a token ethnic character or two to reflect the diversity of Britain today.’ Examples are given of an Asian couple, Ajay and Nisha Bains, who run the railway station in Postman Pat; and the introduction of George’s Anglo-Indian daughter, Jyoti, in the new Famous Five books. Numerous other examples could be cited.
Yet, writing back in the late 1950s, Michael Bond ‘had immigrants in his tales from the start. Not only is the duffel-coat-wearing protagonist a stowaway from “Darkest Peru”, but one of his closest friends is also an incomer: Mr Gruber, the antiques dealer who shares elevenses with the bear every morning, is Hungarian’. The Browns who ’take in’ Paddington are of course a model ‘liberal’, forward-thinking family, against which all sorts of post-colonial (and gendered) arguments can be raised (not least the fact that they impose a name upon the bear, because – by his own admission – his ‘real’ name is difficult to pronounce). Yet, the ease with which Paddington is able to assert an alternative category within the dominant order is, I think, of real significance. Looking back, I can see how Paddington was for me a very genuine (anti-)hero of the symbolic order in which I grew up. He was able to foreground his difference, yet simultaneously walk entirely free of any kind of categorisation. To apply Barthes’ term of the Neutral, which is an ‘idea of a structural creation that would defeat, annul, or contradict the implacable binarism of the paradigm by means of a third term’, Paddington represents an unprejudiced other. Importantly, Barthes’ term of the Neutral is not about blandness or a process of levelling things out. Quite the contrary, he suggests it refers to ‘intense, strong, unprecedented states. “To outplay the paradigm” is an ardent, burning activity’, it is everything ‘that baffles the paradigm’. The exploits of the duffle-coated bear are surely of this order and, particular to the concept of the Neutral, there is an optimistic sense of a happy, peaceful untying of meaning and representation. It is about ‘looking for [our] own style of being present to the struggles of [our] time’ – something Paddington does with such affable charm.
Yet, the need for Paddington to exclaim ‘hotly’ in the new book that he is both ’not a foreigner’ and yet equally ‘from Darkest Peru’ does capture something more contemporary and less optimistic. I am led to think of Rageh Omaar’s book, Only Half of Me, in which he writes about growing up a Muslim in Britain. Like the invention of ‘Darkest Peru’, Omaar describes Edgware Road (which was round the corner from where he lived as a child) as London’s ‘Little Arabia’. It is both not foreign, yet equally of a quite different order. The saddening thing is that this other space, rather than having been a means to free up the categories by which we live, has become contested and caricatured. Prejudice and ignorance is nothing new, but what is different, Omaar suggests, ‘is that these caricatures are no longer a matter of prejudice, they are now a matter of life and death for all of us’. And he adds: ‘The call has been for a dialogue within Islam to try to find the answers … But there is no point in pretending that the responsibility rests only with British Muslims … Where are the equally prominent calls for a dialogue with Islam and Muslims?’. There are a number of potentially shifting categories here, because at the heart of the book – as given in the title – is the crucial point that even within ourselves there can be the need for cross-cultural dialogue. ‘Only half of me is the person you think I am’. We need more stories that reveal the complexities of identity and their dialogues. We need to continually reacquaint ourselves with the very heart of ‘Darkest Peru’.
My Dad, whose history I know I still do not know, came to the UK around about the time of Paddington’s own arrival (the pre-history of which is similarly vague). Of course I never saw the connections growing up, but it intrigues me now that of all the various interests I had as a child we both shared an affection for the bear. Perhaps this ‘final’ instalment of the Paddington stories offers a chance for me to reclaim something of my past, my ‘roots’. I will forever remember being picked up early from school by my dad (perhaps it is my ‘Rosebud‘ moment, as we get at the end of Citizen Kane). He rarely if ever came to collect me. This was a special occasion (of course today being taken out of school early would no doubt be frowned upon!). He had found in the paper an advertisement for a Paddington Grotto in Selfridges, in London. It was an evening out, just for the two of us. Ironically, I do not recall anything of the actual grotto, just the fact we went up there together. We used public transport all the way. I still remember fidgeting at the bus stop, in the cold, waiting for the first part of the journey to begin and to officially get away from having been at school.
My Dad never read any of the Paddington stories. He may well have seen some of the TV programmes, but essentially – as far as I can tell – his affection for Paddington was entirely intuitive. And he still keeps my Paddington Bear (the best Christmas present I ever had, which came with real little Wellington boots!). Bizarrely, he stands, somewhat battered and forlorn, in the kitchen by the backdoor. Occasionally, if we talk about him, I sense a little dismay, as if my Dad feels I have abandoned my bear. Yet, equally there is ever that note of optimism. My Dad is and will always be his custodian. I know where to find him. It is, then, perhaps not so strange that everyday I seem to be searching for an equivalent phrase to Paddington’s: “I’m not a foreigner, I’m from Darkest Peru.” I’m not a foreigner (that much I can, must say), but as yet I’m not sure what ‘Darkest’ place I might suggest I’m from. When I work it out I look forward to the occasion I might state it ‘hotly’.
V is for Vogue
A letter arrived just the other day – written in red, an addition to the alphabet, in this case an alternative for the letter ‘v’ (see the Letters in Red). Its intimate meaning exists no doubt only between its sender and receiver, but for the general reader there is a delicate lesson in, or revision of, the semiotics of shopping (though like the best kind of lesson it occurs by a creative accident).
What do we see? A stylish, though traditional basket by a window (of solid, old fashioned quality and in good decoration). The contents are of two red peppers, a bunch of tomatoes and appearing from under them, the latest addition of Vogue magazine (its lettering echoing in red, with the words ‘HERO PIECES’ and ‘The allure … soft’ just discernable). The vegetables, like the magazine, appear to have been collected ‘just now’ from the marketplace. They jostle freely in the basket. They conjure an image of freshness and cosmopolitan living. But there is also a certain patience or is it perhaps knowingness? These items, which speak of a readiness to be touched, are held within this high-sided basket and given an exact light for their picture. What could this mean?
The image is in many respects a worthy update on that well known advertisement for Panazni that Roland Barthes wrote about in the early 1970s, and which is still rolled out to this day when teaching aspects of semiotics. The ‘idea’ we have in this scene is, as Barthes writes, ‘a return from the market’ – just as I have suggested for the first picture. This is what Barthes further explains:
…the idea … we have in the scene represented is a return from the market. A signified which itself implies two euphoric values: that of the freshness of the products and that of the essentially domestic preparation for which they are destined. Its signifier is the half-open bag which lets the provisions spill out over the table, ‘unpacked’. To read this first sign requires only a knowledge which is in some sort implanted as part of the habits of a very widespread culture where ‘shopping around for oneself’ is opposed to the hasty stocking up (preserves, refrigerators) of a more ‘mechanical’ civilization.
However, if we take the ‘mechanical’ to also include Warhol’s images of consumer items, we can perhaps come back to the first image and begin to see the greater relevance of the copy of Vogue magazine (which I must stress was not purposely placed for this analytical reason, it was, I have on good authority, genuinely purchased – as a basic need – along with the vegetables). Today’s basket not only finds its way into marketing media (to become an advertised object of desire), but it also contains media forms and not just as a supplementary item, but as an equivalent to the basic food stuffs surrounding it. We don’t need the signifier of the half-open bag to alert us to euphoric values, nor are we necessarily unaware of the ideology of ‘shopping around for oneself’ – instead we are ourselves capable of constructing (and deconstructing) euphoric values; not just to shop for ourselves, but also to communicate, to share with others. As the systems theorist, Niklas Luhmann, suggests, society can be treated as ‘a social system that consists solely of communications and therefore as a system that can only reproduce communications by means of communications’. We deny a great deal if we attend only to the view that it is Mass Media which makes society meaningful. A monolithic view that is – if only in a humble fashion - dispelled by this simple example of a basket with vegetables and Vogue; a worthy, flirtatious addition to the those letters in red.
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