Queer Theory & Futurism

[Ian Livingston]

> Jean Baudrillard's take on that appears to be that "Women have always tried
> to look attractive for men and have been for years but Mcluhan is trying to
> say that the modern woman, polishes every part to perfection, from the way
> we look and present our selves. We have been taught through the bombardments
> of advertising that every thing can be enhanced to perfection."

But, surely, even a Gallic academic like Baudrilliard was aware of the
ancient understanding that women's fascination with fashion and style
is, as Van Morrison noted, girls dressing up "for each other." Men are
easy to please, women see fashions. Very broad generalization, not
without abundant leakage, but, nevertheless, generally true.

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com> wrote:
> alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 10:43 PM, Richard Fiero
>>
>> > Both Duchamp and McLuhan are getting short shrift in this ongoing Grand
>> > Unified Theory of Everything.
>> > The actors mentioned so far are Hegelians and Sauserreans, not Marxians.
>>
>>
>> What?
>
> This line of reasoning started with the promise of Marxists and Feminists
> yet none have appeared and continues in a McLuhanesque fashion by raping the
> reader rather than seducing her. We are doing semiotics which is the main
> trunk from Saussure through Barthes with Marx off to the Hegel or Spinoza
> side.
> Regarding the McLuhan/Duchamp post "The Mechanical Bride" was published 1951
> before McLuhan's project was fully formulated. It's early McLuhan and is
> unconnected short remarks about magazine advertising.
>
> alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>> Note:
>>
>> Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man is a
>> pioneering study in the field now known as popular culture. His
>> interest in the critical study of popular culture was influenced by
>> the 1933 book Culture and Environment by F.R. Leavis and Denys
>> Thompson, and the title The Mechanical Bride is derived from a piece
>> by the Dadaist artist, Marcel Duchamp.
>
> That's taken directly from wikipedia but who put it there? I'd guess Ginko
> Press, the publisher of the Mechanical Bride who on their site state "Both
> the title and McLuhan's concerns reflect Marcel Duchamp's large painting on
> glass, "The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even." Like Duchamp,
> McLuhan was able to observe his society from an outsider's viewpoint and
> became troubled by unchecked forces shaping people's lives."
> Really? The Large Glass has notes and they are the Green Box and the White
> Box but they detail only how the parts of the Large Glass work.  The blurb
> repeated in wikipedia is itself a piece of advertising.
>
> alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>> . . .To the mind of the modern girl, legs, like busts, are power points,
>> which she has been taught to tailor, but as parts of the success kit
>> rather than erotically or sensuously. She swings her legs from the hip
>> . . . she knows that a "long-legged girl can go places." As such, her
>> legs are not intimately associated with her taste or with her unique
>> self but are merely display objects like the grille on a car. They are
>> date-bated power levers for the management of the male audience.
>
> Jean Baudrillard's take on that appears to be that "Women have always tried
> to look attractive for men and have been for years but Mcluhan is trying to
> say that the modern woman, polishes every part to perfection, from the way
> we look and present our selves. We have been taught through the bombardments
> of advertising that every thing can be enhanced to perfection."
>
> =====
> We constantly distinguish--right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and
> dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead--and in every case
> trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction.... There are also
> cases in which trickster creates a boundary, or brings to the surface a
> distinction previously hidden from sight.
> --Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."