[Text only; images tba.]
In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule he can't amount to much in his totality.
Herman Melville
This essay is about some changes that have been taking place in the area of male appearance and so necessarily concerns itself with the audience for whom these appearances are designed—heterosexual women. In another place and at another time I have argued that much of what constitutes the generally accepted idea of female erotic appearance is in fact an optical structure or relationship (Carter, 1983). In this structure a male viewer and imaged female are bound together and female clothing is ordered by a particular form of male desire, consisting of a sequence moving through specular attraction, inquisitorial inspection and pleasurable delay. I tried to ground these moments by showing that the knot at the center of this clothing erotic was deeply marked by the processes of the Oedipus, specifically by the inscription into the female vestimentary order of the castration complex which haunts the male subsequent to his emergence from the process of psychic sexing. The next obvious stage in this investigation was to switch positions and look at the nature of male clothing, and it was here that I began to encounter difficulties in using a psychoanalytic framework. Undoubtedly current Lacanian theories of fetishistic looking and signification have interpretive purchase, particularly in the ways in which they have been deployed in the service of feminist theorising, but they also bring in their train a resolute, almost unstoppable theoretical drift towards fixation. Theory becomes fascinated by the structures of fascination it seeks to deconstruct. The effect is not unlike that of the Medusa's head, turning everything it glances at into formalised stone. But what if... what if things are not what they used to be and past processes of psychic sexing are rapidly become redundant? What if power has a playful component which is capable of shifting just when we think we have got to the heart of the matter? What if the ascription of gender does not rest finally upon the occupation of a pre-packaged position, but on positionality? On just being in a named somewhere.
Recently there have been some valiant attempts to hold onto the two ends of the chain represented by Marx and Lacan, but none to
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my mind carry conviction at the level of usage. They remain too strained and idiosyncratic, more theoretical wish-fulfillments than syntheses, and as such are quite unable to still the avalanche of doubts that constantly dog anyone bold enough to attempt such a project. The tension between dialectics and geometry forces the analyst to overlook too many contradictions of a theoretical nature. Perhaps nowhere is this tension so clearly seen than in the study of Human Appearance, where a dense pattern of shifting configurations threatens to overwhelm analysis, but where some type of formal ordering is essential to avoid the sterile, descriptive empiricism so characteristic of much that passes for Fashion History.
Its under these kind of pressures that a number of familiar problems begin to surface. How capable is the Lacanian re-writing of Freud in coping with the dynamic trajectory of neo-capitalism? Does such rewriting in fact commit the primary error of all ideology, that of reading history as science and of mistaking reification for immutability? This problem is particularly acute at the level of everyday life, where evanescence and instability have become massively installed, and through it the pull between specificity and formal consistence can be clearly seen.
In the area of fashion the deployment of Lacanian categories has had the effect of making all cats grey, and the grand, trans-historical, Lacanian optical and representational structures reduce and degrade the patterns of 'the way we look' to the level of 'same as it ever was'. In the face of the recent developments that have been taking place in the sexual spectacle, the published commentaries have been remarkable either for their seeming indifference to these changes, or for the speed with which the developing situation has rendered them obsolete.
For a number of years I have been collecting advertising images of men, particularly those which seemed to carry a fairly overt erotic content. Not surprisingly, the clothing of the males depicted in these images played an important part in the generation of sexual attractivenesses. It was clear that they were part of an increasingly insistent search by commodity producers for a visual key that would unlock the masculine figure to the kinds of work so successfully carried out by female figure. In the decade following the notorious male centerfold in Cosmpolitan in 1972 it is possible to detect a quite distinct shift in the positions occupied by the male figure within the advertising spectacle. This tendency calls into question many of the attempts to theorise the role which ideology plays in securing the conditions of reproduction of patriarchy and capital.
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One problematic area is the simple functionalist binding together of the optical division of labour in the social world of adults (male surveyor/female surveyed) and the Freudian mechanisms of voyeurism and exhibitionism. It is not clear how the connection between these two levels of the social formation are to be thought of—is their relationship causal, homologous or one of vague symmetry? However it is theorised, some awkward implications have to be faced if these two levels of the social formation begin to drift away from one-to-one cohesion. And equally problematic is that theories of ideology —under the influence of Althusserian functionalism —have largely ignored the enormous difference between 'securing the conditions for simple reproduction' and 'securing the conditions for an expanded reproduction'. Again, to theorise commodity production as merely the replication of what is reinforces the tendency to formalise significant change into structural repetition.
In retrospect it's possible to see the Cosmopolitan role-reversal prank as a crafty failure. Despite the editor's protestations to the contrary (private correspondence), the centerfold was an attempt to provide the 'liberated' woman with an equivalent to that bastion of male privilege, a packageable masturbatory landscape. Unfortunately for them, they got it wrong. The centerfold's coy classicism and kitsch-gay overtones had to be softened and rethought. Its isolation from the main task of the magazine, that of selling, drew unnecessary attention to itself and in the process stampeded the audience. The second time around demonstrated that many of these lessons had been learnt (unfortunately for them, in the meantime marketing possibilities had become generally more liberal and more lurid). What they had to do now was to forego the production of images too directly erotic in intent and instead hitch the male figure directly to the advertising of goods. In this way the audience could be placated by the legitimating device of 'it's only an advert'. The stage was now set for a new offensive in the attempt to produce a fully coded erotic male image that was capable of selling commodities as efficiently as the female figure.
In 1978 Horn, producers of expensive underwear for men, began a revamped advertising campaign in the U.K. Their aim was to directly eroticise the male figure and in so doing impart some fetishistic mystery to the mundane topic of male underpants. But it was how they set about doing this that is intriguing for the present argument. They attempted to represent the figure of the male (clad in his Horn accoutrements) as the receiver of the erotic gaze of the women (illus. l).
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The advert was organised in a triadic manner:
Text
Image A Image B
This organisational pattern set in train a number of oppositions and comparisons which the makers of the products wished to highlight:
Portrait of a Man
Underwear - Swimwear
Private - Public
Limited viewing - General viewing
Beneath the common heading, the twin spheres of the public and private are compared and evaluated. In order to do this, of course, they both have to be placed on view. Image B (the public) is represented in such a way that both male and female spectators can be engaged. The face of the male model is averted, thus allowing the image to speak with a double voice. This visual device prevents the image from drifting too far into a reading based heavily on the sectional interests of any its potential viewers. The reclining female figure in the background performs the function of holding the male model firmly within a heterosexual reading. So the possible readings become:
He's the sort of man who gets that sort of woman. He might be on display, but he's not effete. It's clear to all concerned that he's not gay.
Image A (the private) departs somewhat from this multi-vocal articulation and becomes more directed towards a female spectator. The shift can be detected in the change of scenarios from public to restricted viewing and in the connotations of intimacy. The image is organised as if the male figure were the object of the single private look of the indistinct female figure seen in the mirror. But there is still a
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Illustration 1.
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tentativeness about the image, an unease. The crossed arms and the stern features of the male model all speak of a besieged heterosexuality. The imprecision of the female protagonist cuts the male model off from a too definite location within her look. Despite its continuing edginess, the strategy is plain to see. The male is no longer a specific personage —film star, musician, etc.; rather we have an image of an abstracted yet pleasing male form. We can now paraphrase Roland Barthes and state that what we have here is 'a normative individual chosen for [his] canonic generality' (1953/1967). The image is representative and based upon the assumption of an homogeneity of expectations within its proposed audience. The beginnings of a language perhaps?
Since 1978 there has been a proliferation of such images. Certain of the more overt legitimation devices have been eliminated. The move from open advert to fashion spread disperses the 'hard' frame of the former type of imagery, such that the models and their clothing
Illustration 2.
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begin to occupy a half-way house between the 'realism' of everyday life and the exaggeratedly artificial space of the conventional advert (illus. 2). However, the tendency is still there and its aim is to install a sexualized female gaze by standardising and eroticizing the male figure and its attendant commodities. Part and parcel of this process is the construction, through such representations, of a controlled and manipulable female visual pleasure. But it must be remembered that what we are witnessing is still very much a tendency-in-process and it would be unwise to claim that we can already fully grasp it, or confidently predict its eventual destination. There are some quite significant differences between the representation of the male figure (in image and costume) and that of the woman. Clothing on the male does not circle around the penis, constructing it as an object of fascination, nor are there the specific fetish structures in male clothing which are so precisely delineated as in female attire.
The operation at the moment appears to be much more concerned with laying down the foundations of the male's general iconic status in order to allow the figure to be looked at pleasurably. Here gestural, postural and vestimentary codes are much more important than overt displays of sexual arousal in the figures. There is not, as yet, a male equivalent of the private clothing erotic so characteristic of female fashion, although there is some evidence that the elaboration of certain items of male clothing for purely erotic purposes is beginning. (Male strippers' attire looks like exploding the great myths about the exclusivity of male gay codes and heterosexual women, but as yet these items are still confined to a small-ads section of these magazines.) The male figure is not sited within a highly coded fantasy scenario, although again there is some evidence that in fashion-spread imagery this drift can be detected (see illus. 2, with its inversion of the Great White Sheikh scenario). The images are not yet intended as masturbatory landscapes, although they are beginning to play some edgy games in this direction. So, whatever generic structures there are, they are still embryonic and loose, a multiplicity of those inconspicuous and undramatic events which transform clothing and its visual representation into coded intersubjective texts. The major work at the moment is to legitimise the female erotic gaze and its attendant male sexual exhibitionism, which in turn will entail a loosening of the former pleasurable reading of the man as primarily an indicator of economic and political power. As the text of the Lanvin advertisement (illus. 3) states, the task is to make the male, as a category, 'decidely masculine without being necessarily aggressive'. Repressive desublimation indeed. Bayonet practice may never be the same again.
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Illustration 3
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If Marx was right in constantly drawing our attention to the fact that commodity production is at the same time social production, what precisely is being produced in these images of men culled from the current advertising spectacle? Firstly, what I'm not saying: I don't think, as yet, we can say that these images are a direct reflection of deeper social tendencies; this would be to reduce them to aspects of something elsewhere, absent but effective. But it would be foolish not to register the fact that they tend to occur in publications that profess a more liberal ideology with respect to female emancipation. On the other hand, it is equally absurd to imagine that, on their own, such imagery will independently cause widespread and profound social change. This is to empty the audience and make them simply into an effect of such representations. My own feeling is that at the moment they represent, in visual form, where one element of what might be termed progressive capital imagines itself to be heading. These images engage in a type of work within the frame, in that they play with the possibilities of altering the optical relations that have hitherto been assigned to one or other of the genders. They are a kind of advanced guard of the image loosening up, yet holding the optical positionality of the genders within the rubric of a liberal commodity regime. These apparently minor shifts in the nature of male appearance might at first sight seem rather trivial, but they do raise questions of considerable theoretical import. At stake is just what is commensurable with the processes of the Oedipus and patriarchy. Have we all been caught on the theoretical hop by imagining that the forms of yesterday will always and ever be there and the forms of tomorrow will be happy to move within the boundaries of what, at a deeper level, were thought to be essential features of the social formation?
In Grundrisse Marx made his famous observation on the social implications of the expansive logic at the heart of a system of production based upon capital accumulation. It is worth quoting at length just to remind ourselves of how much of his dynamicist thought has been erased with the Althusserian reading:
Thus, just as production founded on capital creates universal industriousness on one side—i.e. surplus labour, value-creating labour—so does it create on the other side a system of general exploitation of the natural and human qualities, a system of general utility, utilising science itself just as much as all the physical and mental qualities, while there appears nothing higher in itself, nothing legitimate for itself, outside this circle of social production and exchange. Thus capital creates the bourgeois society, and the universal appropriation of nature as well as of the social bond itself by the members of society. Hence the great civilizing influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in
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Carter
comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local development of humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognised as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production. In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces. (1857-8/1973: 409-10; original emphasis, except for final one).
A long line of critical thinkers have attempted to grasp this shift in
Illustration 4.
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the dynamics of neo-capitalism and almost all, in one way or another, have foregrounded consumption as being central in securing the conditions for expanded reproduction. At its best it allowed for a recognition of the shift in balance between Departments I and II — that is, between the production of the means of production and the production of the means of consumption.
One of the most important components to have undergone development in Department II is the capitalization of fantasy. Marginal genres, lurid possibilities, Utopian dreams, all those 'unthinkable experiences' so beloved by poets maudit of the nineteenth century, have become incorporated into a set of gigantic machines which have colonized our hopes and fears:
For sale anarchy for the masses; irrespressible satisfaction for superior amateurs; terrible death for the faithful and lovers.
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For sale dwellings and migrations, sports, fantasies and perfect comfort, with the noise, movement and future they create! (Rimbaud, 1886/1967: 253)
If anything, the subversive side of capital—what Marx described as a tendency to move beyond all traditional satisfactions of present needs and all reproductions of old ways —has not been stressed enough. It is in the rise to prominence of Department II that we need to locate the modern advertising spectacle, because it is here that it truly assumed its modern dual function—the subversion of the old ways of life and the containment of the new within an administered promesse de bonheur (or even, these days, beatific alienation). It was always a dangerous process (and still is) because of the massive transformations that have to be executed psychically, emotionally and culturally in order to produce the new markets/audiences. The role of advertising as the leading edge of this transformatory process was recognised as far back as the thirties!
Advertising helps to keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode of life, discontented with ugly things around them. Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones. (Dickinson, 1930/1976: 39)
This shift was matched by the transformation of advertising from description into promise, from denotation into connotation, and the creation of commodities as desired object and objects of desire as commodities. It became the discourse of capital where everything now appeared to be possible and where appearances became organised as the subversion of the present for the sake of an apparently different future. It is this which underlies my whole wariness with that drift within the Lacano-Freudian set—a drift which closes down on potentiality in the name of transhistorical form, which attempts to foreclose on what can be realised under the present regime.
So what is happening in these images of men and what do they signify in terms of possibilities? They are not straightforward props for patriarchy or simple reinforcements for the current regime of sexual difference. After all there is no reason to suppose that patriarchy is any less labile in its responses than capitalism has proved to be. They are, I think, that infinitely more interesting phenomena—subversions of the present for the sake of an apparently different future. One of the problems that analysts constantly fall foul of—especially Anglo-Saxon ones—is that they tend too willingly to accept a set of de-historicized social categories and thus hypostatise temporally specific social processes into universal structures. In the area of sexuality and of gender representation the overall category of patriarchal capitalism has been assumed to have a set of neces-
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sary and fixed linkages with such things as: a particular mode of sexual repression/oppression; the nuclear, monogamous family; and a constant and gross inequality in the status of women vis a vis men.
Such equations are assumed to be fixed and constant—bottom line requirements of reproduction. This is particularly the case in analysing the imaging of men and women, where the 'great ideological hunt' interprets the gender representations as being in a directly functional relationship to such negative elements. What I'm suggesting is that these assumed equations between capital and sexuality are breaking up, at least on the level of the commodity spectacle. When this happens, then the meanings of such images, both with respect to the totality of signs which are in circulation at any one moment and the reality or referential domain they engage with will begin to alter. They shift from being reassuring affirmations of the here and now and instead become images of the possibly real.
Illustration 5.
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Marx pointed out ad nauseam that the expansive side of capital aimed at constantly increasing the sphere of circulation, of inexorably transforming both nature and culture into objects that could be brought to the market place and exchanged—that is, made equivalent and computable. Part of this process entailed the stripping objects, needs, emotions and ideas of their archaic relationships and reforming them as calculable and comparable units (putting a price on them). To do this they had to be pumped into a veritable flaying machine in order to strip away their 'sentimental value'. We too are part of this process in that we are constantly being formed and reformed in a General Motors of the Soul. In the domain of sexual representation these tendencies have begun to manifest themselves in a number of ways. Firstly, there is the project of breaking up the 'irrational' barriers which limit the expansion of exchange, of deprogramming the previous constructions of sexuality and gender (illus. 3). Then there is the active encouragement of a more labile and polymorphous set of sexual exchanges (illus. 2), followed by an increasing equality beneath the promiscuous emblem of consumption (illus. 4). And finally, there is the construction of gender signs as units of equivalent value (illus. 5).
Spin out the lines of force and the contours of the reformation that is under way are clearer: an increasing legitimation of male sexual exhibitionism at the level of costume and visual representation as the female erotic gaze becomes elaborated and institutionalised. So remember, 'If a women can dress for a man, why can't a man dress for a women?'.
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References
Barthes, R. (1967) Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology. Trans. A. Lavers & C. Smith. Boston: Beacon Press. (First published, 1953.)
Carter, M. (1983) The Strip Laid Bare: Unevenly'. Art and Text, no. 10: 48-60.
Dickinson, R. (1930) 'Freshen Up Your Product'. Quoted in Ewen, S. (1976) Captains of Consciousness. New York: McGraw Hill.
Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse. Trans. M. Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Original publication of 1857-8 manuscript, 1953.)
Rimbaud, A. (1967) 'Sale'. In his Complete Works with Selected Letters. Trans. W. Fowlie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (First published in Illuminations, 1886.)
Mick Carter teaches at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education.
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