Factores que intervienen en la construcción colectiva del centro logístico

One afternoon, at a conference on modernism which took place over ten years ago in California, I found myself befriended by Clement Greenberg. During dinner that evening, a woman who had criticized his presentation

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earlier in the conference came to speak to me about my talk, but was visibly taken aback when she saw that Greenberg was my dinner companion. Understanding her surprise, Greenberg said, “Yes, Jo Anna and I are friends but we ceased to agree in 1939.” At first I thought he meant it was historically overdetermined, even before I was born, that I would disagree with his version of modernism. Later I recalled that 1939 was the year Greenberg wrote “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” that last-ditch defense of the high art of modernism against the incursions of mass culture. Unlike

Figure 1.4 Nancy Spero, Dancing Figure (lithograph, 24×19 cm) 1984

many defenders of the purity and standards of high culture, Greenberg avoided ascribing a putative femininity to mass culture; he did not mention women as either consumers of culture or as cultural producers. But he was right: as a woman coming to political consciousness in the era of postmodernism, I was opposed to his notion of the great divide.

Since then, a number of critics have addressed the question of gender in the determinations of the modernism/mass culture dichotomy.5 _{In “Mass}

Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” Andreas Huyssen examines a notion that became commonplace during the nineteenth century—that devalued forms of popular or mass culture have historically been associated with women while real, authentic culture remains the privileged realm of male activity. In the gender inscription of the mass culture debate, women have been thought to be more susceptible to the delusions and pacifications of the institutions of mass culture. Huyssen’s example of the female character caught in the lure of mass cultural consumption (specifically in the thrall of pulp romances) is Emma Bovary. The man of modernism is, of course, Flaubert, active producer, “writer of genuine, authentic literature— objective, ironic, and in control of his aesthetic means” (Huyssen 1986:46). In spite of Flaubert’s famous confession, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” Huyssen argues that Flaubert’s aesthetic is based on the uncompromising repudiation of what Emma Bovary loved to read.

Huyssen sees modernism as the historical culmination of a kind of paranoid view of mass culture and the masses, both of which are associated with women:

Thus Mallarmé’s quip about “reportage universal” (i.e. mass culture), with its not so subtle allusion to “suffrage universal,” is more than just a clever pun. The problem goes far beyond questions of art and literature. In the late 19th century, a specific traditional male image of woman served as a receptacle for all kinds of projections, displaced fears, and anxieties (both personal and political), which were brought about by modernization and the new social conflicts, as well as by specific historical events such as the 1848 revolution, the 1870 Commune, and the rise of reactionary mass movements which, as in Austria, threatened the liberal order. An examination of the magazines and the newspapers of the period will show that the proletarian and petit-bourgeois masses were persistently described in terms of a feminine threat. Images of the raging mob as hysterical, of the engulfing floods of revolt and revolution, of the swamp of big city life, of the spreading ooze of massification, the figure of the red whore at the barricades—all of these pervade the writings of the mainstream media, as well as that of right-wing ideologues of the late 19th and 20th centuries.… The fear of the masses in this age of declining liberalism is always also a fear of woman, a fear of nature

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out of control, a fear of the unconscious, of sexuality, of the loss of identity and stable ego boundaries in the mass.

(1986:52) An odd recurrence of this old gender bias of modernist criticism appears in a recent essay by Rosalind Krauss on the failure of critics, more particularly feminist critics, to properly address the production processes of photographer Cindy Sherman. In Krauss’s essay, Laura Mulvey (used as an example of feminist readers in general) is portrayed as a latter-day Emma Bovary, a victim of what Barthes calls “myth.” To Krauss, Mulvey becomes one of Barthes’s “petit-bourgeois consumers of culture” who are subject to “a naive buying-into the purported signified of a cultural phenomenon without having the distance, the skepticism, or the experience to attend to the signifiers laboring away to produce the mythified meaning” (Krauss 1993:163). Instead, Krauss wants the viewer to assume Flaubert’s position—objective, analytical, repudiating if not what Emma reads, then at least the gullibility with which she reads it. Wanting to focus on the mode of production is understandable, particularly when dealing with work such as Sherman’s. To look anywhere else, to look at the photographs, to look at the character in the photographs is to risk absorption. To begin to construct narratives about the women in the photographs, as Krauss criticizes Mulvey for doing, is to position oneself precariously close to the woman in the photograph. The danger is especially great in Sherman’s work, where from the beginning we are invited to lapse into the subjectivity of a taste like Emma’s, “more sentimental than artistic… full of love and lovers…romantic intrigue, brutal crimes, vows, sobs, embraces and tears” (Flaubert 1856:29–30). What Huyssen describes as “the loss of identity and stable ego boundaries” that results from the immersion in mass culture is only the first step; in her later work Sherman draws the viewer deep into the “spreading ooze of massification.” Appropriately, the exploration is undertaken using the vehicle of her own body, which like Emma’s body is capable of “disappearing in the elaboration of her attire” or materializing as the body of grotesque realism—decomposing, putrefying, emitting “a flood of black liquid…like vomit” (ibid.: 282). The description of Emma’s body after her death would do as well for a description of a number of Sherman’s self-portraits: “The corner of her mouth, which had fallen open, was like a black hole in the lower part of her face; her thumbs still dug into the palms of her hands; a sort of white dust had settled on her eyelashes, and her eyes had begun to disappear behind a pale film, a thin coating not unlike a spider web” (ibid.: 280). Sherman’s body, like Emma’s, seems to be capable of “gradually melting into the surrounding objects” (ibid.: 282–283). In the end it is Sherman, not Flaubert, who can say, “Emma Bovary, c’est moi.”

In spite of Huyssen’s concluding assurances that such notions as “mass culture and the masses as feminine threat…belong to another age” (1986:62), the masculinist bias of Krauss’s criticism repeats exactly the hidden subtext of the modernist project, both in its construction of a deluded, easily victimized, feminine (in this case feminist) reader and in its valorization of production over consumption in order to differentiate between progressive and regressive responses to cultural phenomena. While the historical specificity of Huyssen’s essay is important to our understanding of modernism, I would argue that the assumptions upon which he bases his argument rest on powerful stereotypes concerning the masses, mass culture, and women: unconscious psychic associations that were in place long before the development of modernism and have not vanished with the advent of postmodernism.

Huyssen, like every critic since Adorno and Horkheimer, is careful to distinguish between modern mass culture administered and imposed from above, and working-class culture or residual forms of older popular or folk cultures. I would like to raise some doubts about these neat divisions. Although contemporary mass culture may be a long way away from the popular culture of Rabelais’s day, what is apparent even in the context of Huyssen’s short references to the history of the perception of mass culture as feminine is the degree to which these perceptions are a continuation of associations surrounding that older popular culture. Both mass and popular culture derive their identity in part from the pejorative characteristics attributed to them. The real or imagined threat they represent conies from the way in which those negative characteristics may be turned critically against the dominant culture. Huyssen notes that “the kitchen has been described metaphorically as the site of mass cultural production” (1986:50), so we are not only in the domain of the feminine, we are in the realm of Rabelaisian folk traditions. “Culinary images…were widely used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; they were frequent precisely in the sphere where literature was connected with folk tradition of humor” (Bakhtin 1968:194). Similarly, in the contemporary critical concern about rabid consumerism, we are dealing not just with consumption, but with consumption conceived as a threat, particularly the unlicensed appetites of women, for it is women who are placed in the role of preeminent consumers. This is the modern-day equivalent of the gargantuan appetites described by Rabelais—the unlicensed, potentially engulfing appetites of the material bodily principle. Baudrillard uses the term “engulfment” in describing what he sees as the radical potential of rabid consumerism. Since “a system is abolished only by pushing it into the hyperlogic.… You want us to consume—O.K. let’s consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose” (1983:46).6

The line that divides high art and mass culture can no longer be confidently drawn, for as Huyssen puts it, “both mass culture and women’s

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(feminist) art are emphatically implicated in any attempt to map the specificity of contemporary culture and thus to gauge this culture’s distance from high modernism…where modernism’s great wall once kept the barbarians out and safeguarded the culture within, there is now only slippery ground which may prove fertile for some and treacherous for others” (1986:59). Ironically, the metaphors Huyssen chooses for his account of the demise of high culture sound like the fulfilment of warnings of the early Christian ascetics against feminine seduction and the unruliness of the masses. They were right to worry; we are now sliding about on this fertile, treacherous ground of postmodernism principally as a result of the disruptive excess of feminist interventions in the production and consumption of art. While pop art brought mass culture “up” into the realm of high art, feminist art of the 1980s trafficked in a two-way street that enabled intercourse with the politically as well as aesthetically marginalized. This has occurred as a function of what anthropologist Victor Turner rather deliriously describes as “the subversive potential of the carnivalized feminine principle,” which by its very marginalized condition inevitably opens out onto the political arena:

The danger here is not simply that of female “unruliness.” This unruliness itself is the mark of the ultraliminal, of the perilous realm of possibility of “anything may go” which threatens any social order and seems the more threatening, the more that order seems rigorous and secure…. The subversive potential of the carnivalized feminine principle becomes evident in times of social change when its manifestations move out of the liminal world of Mardi Gras into the political arena itself.

(1977:41–42)

GRAMMATICA JOCOSA