Humanities Underground

Darkness & Emancipation: Talking to Juliet Mitchell

    Sunit Singh  On November 23, 2010, Sunit Singh conducted an interview with psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell at Jesus College in Cambridge. Although Professor Mitchell’s rehabilitation of Freud is well chronicled, the attempt in “Women: The Longest Revolution” (1966)[1] to rescue the core content of the Marxist tradition—its emphasis on emancipation—remains unexplored. What follows is an edited version of the interview. Sunit Singh: The sociologist C. Wright Mills, in an open letter to the editors of New Left Review in 1960, exhorted the still inchoate “New Left” to reclaim an ideological space for socialism over the chorus of liberal commentators proclaiming “the end of ideology”—the idea that there are no more antagonistic contradictions within capitalist society. Post-Marxist rhetoric, as Mills identified, was expressive of the disillusionment with the Old Left, which was itself weakest on the historical agencies of structural change or the so-called subjective factor. Yet, if the Old Left was wedded to a Victorian labor metaphysic, Mills forewarned, the New Left threatened to forsake the “utopianism” of the Left in its search for a new revolutionary subject.[2] How sensitive were later members of the editorial board of the New Left Review, after Perry Anderson took over from Stuart Hall in 1962, to such injunctions? And to what extent was the project of socialism implicit in “Women: The Longest Revolution” (hereafter referred to as WLR)? Five decades on, where does that project presently stand? What happened to “socialism”?   Juliet Mitchell: I came into direct contact with the New Left Review earlier than the mid-60s, partly through other work I was involved in. I was also a student in Oxford, where we were the originating group of the New Left. Perry [Anderson] and I married in 1962 and lived in London, although I worked in Leeds. The north of England, with Dorothy and Edward Thompson in nearby Halifax, was a centre for the older New Left.   Back then I was planning to write a book, which never saw the light of day, on women in England. It was a historical sociological treatment of the subject. We were driving to meet up with friends and colleagues who ran Lelio Basso’s new journal in Rome when the manuscript was stolen with everything else from our car. I had a bit of a break before I returned to “women.” WLR came in the mid-60s. The timing of the gap and the reluctance to re-do what I had done led to a considerable change in the way I looked at the issue. This relates to your question about C. Wright Mills and ideology. I think when we took over from Stuart Hall the distinction of what separated us from the preceding group was the conviction of the importance of theory over or out of empiricism.   So was I aware that in my use of “ideology” in WLR I was also picking up on C. Wright Mills’s sense of utopianism? Well, “yes and no” would be my answer. For C. Wright Mills, “ideology” read “theory.” However, it was exactly this shift that opened up the importance of ideology. But while reading and admiring C. Wright Mills, our quest led us directly to Althusser’s work. We were in what Thompson later criticized as Sartrean “treetopism” We met with the equipe of Les Temps Modernes in the early 60s. De Beauvoir, with her brilliant depiction and analysis of the oppression of women, at that stage saw any politics of feminism as a trap. Instead she took the classical Marx/Engels line that the condition of women depends on the future of labor in the world. Together with Gérard Horst, who wrote under the name André Gorz, we had a cultural project in London, which, in addition to the magazine, we hoped to share with them. We didn’t want to be imitative, but nevertheless wanted to be engaged with particularly French New Left struggles. The Algerian War was, of course, terribly important. We were urgent for an end to the British isolationism with which the anti-theoretical stance was associated. Then in 1962 some of us went to the celebrations for Ben Bella in Algiers. With Gisele Halimi and Djamila Boupacha this was a background to the left women’s movement that was shortly to emerge. There was also the issue of our relationship to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. That is the background to WLR. And, “no,” in the sense that when I use Althusser, as I do in WLR, it may seem as though I am also picking up on C. Wright Mills’s assertion of the importance of ideology, but really the stress on ideology had more to do with the search for a new theoretical direction that was linked to contemporary French thought. What Althusser offered me through his re-definition of the nature and place of ideology is the overwhelming and now obvious point that sexual difference is lived in the head.   I have never been a member of a party or a church or sect, growing up as I had in an anarchist environment, but I worked actively within the New Left, and then in the women’s movement, before training and practicing as a psychoanalyst. I have had to be pretty “utopian,” as an underpinning to my “optimism of the will,” first about class antagonism, then about women, then about Marxism as dialectical and historical materialism and, ironically, nowadays with the new versions of empiricism, about the theory of psychoanalysis.   SS: Your answer hints at the ways in which the New Left saw itself as new, as against the Maoists, other feminists, and presumably also in relation to the Trotskyists. You were critical of these other tendencies. A pithy passage from Women’s Estate reads, feminist consciousness is “the equivalent of national chauvinism among Third World nations or economism among working-class organizations,” that on its own it “will not naturally develop into socialism nor should it.”[3] Furthermore: “The gray timelessness of Trotskyism is only to be matched by the eternal chameleonism of Western

Of Wafers, Lozenges, Essence & Magnetic Powders

 Dr Velpeau’s Magnetic Love Powders WANTED! An industrious and strictly honest man in each County in the State to take orders by samples for Velpeau’s Magnetic Agents. Salary first year $800, and small commission, payable monthly. For full particulars address Dr. M. Velpeau, 422½ Broadway, N. Y., sending stamp. Source: The Sauk County Standard, (Baraboo, Wisconsin) 18 July 1855 —————————————————————————————– This advert might not leap out from the thousands of similar mid-19th-century US ads seeking salesmen for books, farming equipment, store goods etc., but the product behind it is quite unusual. If the industrious and strictly honest man wrote for particulars, the reply wouldn’t tell him much about the job. Instead, it would ask him to send $2 for a sample of the product. Only on the arrival of the sample would he discover that he was expected to sell Dr Velpeau’s Magnetic Love Powders. At this point, most industrious and strictly honest men probably put the episode down to experience and went to look for a more reputable and less embarrassing business opportunity. The particulars sent with the sample claimed: These powders, properly administered, are warranted irrespective of age, circumstances or personal appearance, to win them the love or unchanging affections of any one they may desire of the opposite sex. The enamoured person had to work out a way of getting the object of their affections to eat the powder, and then wait in anxious lovelorn anticipation until absolutely nothing happened. As one newspaper joked: Only think of it! For two dollars, any enterprising young man – no matter if he is as poor as an editor, and as ugly as a baboon, can through the instrumentality of these powders, make himself “lord” of the most charming lass of “sweet sixteen” to be found within the limits of our friend’s agency, which comprises four counties! Velpeau’s real name was J C Merrill – perhaps the pseudonym was an attempt to associate the powders with famous French surgeon Alfred Velpeau – and according to the New York Times, his scheme attracted up to 40 letters per day. In late 1855, angry (and still single) customers began writing to the Mayor of New York to complain about ‘Velpeau’. Merrill was arrested for fraud but released when he promised to discontinue business and return the complainants’ money. Six weeks later, however, he was still selling the powders and pocketing the cash, so he was arrested again, charged with defrauding a variety of people, and locked up. As for the spurned lovers, they presumably had to find another way of attaining their goal – the obvious solution being to become richer and better looking. **************************************** Mr. Crucifix  Goss & Co. According to a correspondent of the Monthly Gazette of Health (vol 5 1825), the proprietor of Goss & Co was a former shop assistant going by the unlikely name of Mr Crucifix. While Mr Crucifix insisted that his company had genuine surgical credentials, it had a terrible reputation among the medical profession. The Medical Adviser and Guide to Health and Long Life, edited by Alexander Burnett, particularly had it in for him, mounting a sustained campaign against Goss & Co in 1824: Goss and Company! “Good God! Was there ever such a heap of filth and infamy as this swindling firm of straw! Was there ever such a cancer upon society – such an adroit and plausible system of rapacious plundering! ” The Adviser also remarked that the letters M R C did not stand for Member of the Royal College, but for MURDERING, ROBBING CHARLATAN. ”Domus et placens uxor.”—HOR. Thy house, and (in the cup of life, That honey-drop) thy pleasing wife. H A P P I N E S S “the gay to-morrow of the mind,” is ensured by marriage; ”the strictest tie of perpetual Friendship” is a gift from Heaven, cementing pleasure with reason, by which, says Johnson, we approach in some degree of association with celestial intelligence.” Previous, however, to entering into the hallowed obligation of marriage, it becomes an impressive duty not only to regulate the passions, but to cleanse the grosser nature from those impurities which the freedom of unrestricted pleasure may have entailed upon it. To the neglect of such attention, are attributable many of those hapless instances, which while they excite the commiseration of the beholder, should also impress him with the fear of self-reproach. Luxurious habits will effeminate the body—a residence in the tropics will too much relax the elastic fibre—but more especially does the premature infatuation of youth too frequently reduce the natural dignity into a state of inanition, from whence the agonized sufferer more than doubts the chance of relief. To all such, then, we address ourselves, offering hope–energy–muscular strength–facility; nor ought our advances to appear questionable, sanctioned as they are by the multiplied proofs of twenty-five years successful experience. The easy cares of married life are sometimes disturbed by the want of those blessings which twine the nuptial wreath—for the female habit is often constitutionally weak —yet it can be strengthened, and deficient energy improved into functional power.  In every case of syphilitic intrusion, as well as in every relaxation of the generative economy, we pledge our reputation to cure speedily and permanently. Earnestly solicitous to expel the unfeeling empyric from the position so presumptuously taken by him, we deviate from general principles with less hesitation; and confident in our own honourable integrity as Members of the College of Surgeons, we invite sufferers of either sex, (especially those entering into matrimonial life) at once to our house, where daily attendance is given for personal consultation; and immediate answers are returned to country letters, which must minutely describe the case, and contain a remittance for advice and Medicine, which can be forwarded to any part of the world, however distant. No difficulty can occur, as the Medicine will be securely packed, and carefully protected from observation. GOSS & Co., (M.R.C. Surgeons). 7, Lancaster Place, Waterloo Bridge, Strand, London. *** Just

Tram-Traveller

  Utpal Kumar Basu (translated by HUG) Some of the days my office would start early. Used to sit with work pretty much  in the morning. By noon I would usually take a tram-car back home. Often I used to detect the wan, unwell but steadfast Samar Sen returning home too. He’s also a morning worker. I would spot a dank rexine bag that he carried along. Must be the papers of the Frontier magazine? Proofs, manuscripts, reams of letters? What else might he be carrying? Are there no poems—one or two surely? A scribbled draft, some acolyte seeking wisdom?—my imagination knew no bounds. Because Samar Sen is a poet. Though for the past 40 years he had not written any poetry. His interest in literature had thinned, but flowed underneath. A streak. He had chosen the genre of the political commentator to write and reflect. And his English prose style is vintage. Ah—a classical romantic—am I confusing tendencies? It won’t be an exaggeration to say that his Frontier was nurtured mostly by a readership that was not Bengali. I used to often encounter a walking myth in that second class tram-car. Those were times when it was not difficult to summon awe. My day would go well. When he counted the change while buying tickets—the many ashoka-stambhs, portraits of national leaders, an India robust and bustling with agricultural and industrial wealth—ah, how each of those coins would dance and dazzle. Every single one of those icons the poet had tirelessly pulled down, scorned, ridiculed all these years. I almost began to contemplate and hope fervently, that those coins would slip quietly through his fingers. But they didn’t—how surprising! Samarbabu lives in a rented place in South Calcutta. Last monsoon his ground floor apartment was awash—with water and flotsam. Since then he has gone upstairs, at the behest of the kind landlord. He has, don’t we know, refused all governmental aid, apartments and houses with no hesitancy. In his later life, sundry biochemical medicines would be his sole, faithful mates. Perhaps he didn’t have the wherewithal or didn’t opt for a costly treatment. It is an intractable pride that only a revolutionary can summon. Someone who engineered history and was a part of it. Not an academic. Not an activist. Had Samarbabu bowed down his head a little, smiled a wee bit—there would have been no dearth of garlands for him. Had he not raised that wan finger of his and cursed passionately, logically and incessantly–the many ills that irk and bother our social fabric—surely his finger would have exhibited some diamond-studded ring by now. But all he wanted, my poet, was to “Suffuse my dreams with the fragrance of the mahua-flower.” Utpal Kumar Basu is one of the leading poets of  Bengal.   adminhumanitiesunderground.org

Fair’s Unfair

  Anisha Datta Against the backdrop of a globalized capitalist economy and postcolonial modernity, contemporary Indian metropolises are sites of prolific production and consumption. Since the mid-1980s an intensified and highly visible consumer culture has emerged in urban spaces and there has been an unprecedented proliferation of media and mediated images in everyday life. Advertisements are the symbols of India’s globalized and deregulated economy and its main consumers are the upwardly mobile middle class. India has a huge middle-class population of approximately 250–350 million with growing purchasing power, reflected by the remarkable increase in purchase of consumer durables in the last decade. Recently, the global real-estate consulting group Knight Frank ranked India fifth in the list of 30 emerging retail markets. In this essay, I will undertake a feminist and postcolonial deconstruction of one of the ‘Fair & Lovely’ face cream advertisements in order to unpack how this particular advertisement appeals to a set of dominant gender and aesthetic prejudices by seducing the careerist and consumerist desires of educated young Indian women. [2] (For a video version of the ad–please visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yET6dTSYsSA ) Baudrillardian Moments At the outset, I would like to point out two classic Baudrillardian moments that I experienced while I was surfing the website (www.agencyfaqs.com) from where I accessed this advertisement. The ‘agencyfaqs’ website aptly reflects how production and consumption intersect with and reconstitute each other in the new media of the World Wide Web, and that too on a global scale. It is a website where the advertising agencies are advertising their products, primarily targeting potential client corporations; and at the same time it is a site for pure entertainment and leisure for a casual Internet surfer. And in the role of a casual surfer I chanced upon this website and this particular advertisement. Secondly, this website represents the extreme ephemeral and episodic nature of form that characterizes the postmodern world. The site uploads any new ad’s audio/visual form, which they call the streaming version, as well as the still image-frames which are termed the storyboard. But the streaming version can be accessed only in the first few days, when the new ad is being  beamed over the television channels and hence still ‘live’. After which it is withdrawn from the website, and then one can only find the storyboard version of the same advertisement – which by now has been reduced to the status of ‘file picture’. This reflects the transient existence of any mass-circulated sign today, be it fashion, news item or advertisement. Its only recently that one discovers the adverstisement on sites like youtube for another kind of consumption. The Narrative Unpacked The narrative of the advertisement revolves around an educated young woman with a passion for cricket, the most popular sport in India, who aspires to be a TV cricket  commentator. The advertisement also depicts the hyperreal  journey of an ‘ordinary’ young woman from an unknown city neighbourhood to the globalized information highways of satellite television and ‘live’ cricket matches. The story of Indian cricket, which begins with the first mention of a cricket match played by British sailors in Cambay in 1721, is a story of its gradual indigenization. Since India’s victory in the World Cup Cricket tournament in England in 1983, cricket has emerged as a huge corporate business in India in terms of match sponsorship, product endorsement by cricket players and the revenue generated through telecast rights and advertisements shown during telecast cricket matches. [3] As we know, cricket in India is popularly portrayed in chaste terms, as being a social unifier cutting across class and regional boundaries, a civilizing agent and a national cultural bond striving to overcome religious, caste and language divisions. Since the mid-1980s, there was a significant change in the nature of cricket consumption with the spread of viewership through television, which has taken cricket out of its urban confines to the villages and small towns. During the last World Cup Cricket tournament in February 2003, 79.9 million Indians tuned into live cricket telecasts, of which 36.5 million – that is close to 50 per cent – were female viewers. [4] In the words of cricket historian Ramachandra Guha, cricket has become a vehicle for the playing out of nationalist feeling. [5] India’s success in the game can also be viewed as the reappropriation of cricket by a former British colony, a typical phenomenon of the ‘Empire striking back’. The indigenous adoption of cricket also reflects certain ideas of self-cultivation, manliness and self-worth. The game became a mirror through which a (middle class) [6] Indian identity assessed itself. However, it is to be noted that even today, cricket commentary in India is overwhelmingly a male domain, as is the case with all other televised sports. Therefore, the aspiration of the girl in the advertisement indicates a definite breaking of new ground, a detraditionalizing move, as she wants to make a foray into a traditionally male occupation. Commentators have always been men and often these days one finds images of former (male) cricketers wielding the microphone on TV instead of the willow and the ball. Thus the advertisement projects a hyperreal world in which gendered occupational barriers have apparently withered away, courtesy of commodity consumption. Let us now look into the initial images in some detail: the woman is walking into an expansive cricket field dressed in a three-piece suit, salwar kurta, which is a typical dress of young working women in urban India. The shot of the woman walking into the huge field in the image is quite significant, as it can be read as the allegorical representation of the woman’s entry into the juggernaut world of a high-profile career and conspicuous consumption.  Moving on to a later images in frame five, she is seen to be practising mock commentary while watching a cricket match on the TV. Keeping in mind the present status of cricket in India, the advertisement simulates the fusion of commerce and leisure/entertainment by representing the woman watching cricket on TV, commentating and