Anal Capitalism

[Dave Monroe]

>From Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, Speaking about
Godard (New York: NYU Press, 1998, Ch. 4, "Anal
Capitalism: Weekend/Le Week-End (1967)," pp. 83-111
...

"KS: ... the thematics of the story she tells work to
decenter the key term upon which gender rests: the
phallus.  At a key moment, Godard punctuates the
secene with the title 'Anal Ysis,' threby underscoring
what is by then fully evident.... virtually every
significant erotic transaction in that fantasy centers
on the anus....  As Guy Hocquenghem has argued, the
anus is the one sexual organ which does not recognize
gender.  Where the penis nad vagina affirm difference,
it asserts similitude...." (p. 87)

"KS: I think he's also suggesting that late capitalism
has effected a reduction in the number of terms which
can function as standards of value.  The phallus has
traditionally enjoyed an analogous status within the
erotic domain of commodities: it was the 'general
equivalent' to which the particularity of all other
bodily parts was subsumed.  But if we are to take
Weekend at its word, the phallus has lost its
privileged status....

"HF: Ironically, then, it seems as if capital is
unconsciously accomplishing what all of the conscious
strategies of feminism have been unable to achieve: it
is bringing patriarchy to an end.

"KS: So Godard would have us believe.  But we should
not be too hasty in celebrating the dethronement of
the phallic signifier.  Weekend makes clear that the
gain within the domain of gender which capitalsm
effects is more than offset by the ever greater
semantic reduction to which it subjects the social
field." (pp. 88-9)

"KS: ... sexuality is as resistant as late capitalism
to the priority of the phallus.  It is inirially
polymorphous or 'anarchic.'  The phallic phase implies
the ruthless subordination of thi anarchy to a kind of
central government, and many subjects simply efuse
this erotic colonization.  Even in the most normative
psyche, according to Freud, the unconscious treats
shit, money, gift, penis, an child as interchnageable
terms.  Capital has only tipped the balance in favor
of the first of these terms.

"HF: It seems to me that there is more at issue ...
even than sexual perversity, or the reign of money....
It would seem that at the very moment in which the
rule of equivalence most fully triumphs, the desire
for magic will inevitably resurface.

"KS: Human beings cannot manage for very long without
some recourse to the sacred .... the human commodity
is perhaps the quickest to lose its value .... Where
economic value reigns supreme, the human being cannot
hold its own against the humblest object.  Perhaps the
only kind of value such a being can have is absolute
value." (pp. 90-1)

"KS: ... ritual consumption of human flesh might
appear to be the very antithesis of the kinds of
consumption dramatized elsewhere in Weekend.  However,
commodification has not always and in all places
implied desacralization.  Marx argues in perhaps the
most famous passage of Capital that the commodity is
sometimes capable of assuming an auratic value, of
becoming 'suprasensible,' an 'autonomous' figure
endowed with a life of its own.  Marx himslef compares
this process of commodity fetishism to what happens in
'the misty realm of religion.'" (p. 107)

"KS: ... The subordination of more and more people and
things to the general equivalent of gold has effected
a profound leveling out of value.  At the end of
Weekend, Godrad dramatizes the perhaps inevitable
reactive gesture: the attempt to restore auratic value
to that commodity which has ben most thoroughly
divested of its value, the human being.  But because
it is conducted within the parameters of capitalsim,
which ineluctabley decress equivalent value, this is a
doomed undertaking.

"HF: Interestingly, it is only women whom the hippies
seek to refetishize this way.  No religious rituals
suround the ingestion of men.  The hippies laos at one
point effect an exchange of women with a rival
cannibal group.  In both ways, they could be said to
hyperbolize traditional gender divisions.

"KS: Godard perhaps ritualizes the eating of female
flesh not to reassert gender difference, but rather to
distinguish Weeeknd from Freud's Totem and Taboo.  In
the latter text, to which the closing minutes of
Weekend make several references, it is male rather
than female flesh which is ceremonially eaten, and
this action inaugurates patriarchy.  A primal horde of
brothers murder the father who rules over them and
keeps all the women for himself.  Adterwards, they
cannibalize him, and vow never to repeat this act of
patricide.  They incorporate the father not only
literally, but also symbolically, which is to say that
they identify with him as law, consitute him as the
genral equivalent of subjects.  Crucially, they then
decree that this action is never to be repeated.  If
the father had been murdered and eaten a second time,
he would have been denied this privileged status.  He
would have become merely on in a potentially infinite
series of 'meals.'" (p. 108)

"KS: ... the world of absolute values for which they
are nostalgic can only be produced through the
acceptance of loss.  Only that which costs us
everything can be infinitely valuable." (p. 109)

Works cited ...

Hocquenghem, Guy.  Homosexual Desire.
   Trans. Daniela Dangoor.  London: Allison
   and Busby, 1978.

Goux, Jean-Joseph.  Symbolic Economies:
   After Marx and Freud.  Trans. Jennifer Curtiss
   Gage.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990.

Freud, Sigmund.  "On Transformations of Instinct
   as Exemplified in Anal Eroticism."  Standard
   Edition, Vol. 17.  London: Hogarth, 1953.

__________.  Three Essays on the Theory of
   Sexuality.  Standard Edition, Vol. 7.  Trans.
   James Strachey.  London: Hogarth, 1953.  179-206.

__________.  Totem and Taboo.  Standard Edition,
    Vol. 13.  London: Hogarth, 1953.  1-161.

http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/study/xfre1913.htm

Marx, Karl.  Capital, Vol. 1.  Trans. Ben Bowles.
   New York: Randon House, 1977.

__________.  A Contribution to the Critique of
   Political Economy.  Trans. N.I. Stone.
   New York: Inetrnational Library, 1904.

Just reading up for the JLG film fest at the local
university, is all ...

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