Activism as fetishism (intro to a forthcoming pamphlet essay)

“The maoism of the French and of western youth in 1968-70 has nothing to do with Mao. It’s a western revision of rebellion and rejection. It’s important to understand that and not take an anachronistic view…These were utopias which had nothing to do with localised Chinese dogmatism. We rapidly came to understand that the Chinese weren’t nearly so revolutionary as we imagined….we were ‘cultural’ maoists. My own maoism consisted of taking a course on Chinese and learning to write Chinese so as to be better equipped to immerse myself in a tradition which, I thought, had more place for women. It was all about trying to acquire some sort of non-European subjectivity that belonged really to our own utopian dissidence from western norms. It was a way of interrogating the West by means of the East”.

- Julia Kristeva 2000, in Edward Scheer, ed., 100 Years of Cruelty: Essays on Artaud

In his analysis of the ideological atmospheres of the ‘new left’ in the Paris of 1968, Scottish political theorist Tom Nairn (then teaching in Paris) remarked that “every idea, in time, acquires a fetish-like rigidity”. Reflecting on the same period over thirty years later, Julia Kristeva – above – sketches the outline of the particular ‘first world’, western, feminist activist fetishes then at work in her imagination.

The quotation from Kristeva exemplifies the many lexicons of fetishism – the term “fetish” can refer to a Christian imperialist name for non-European subjectivity, a psychoanalytic stand-in for repressed dissidence, a commoditisation of the sign of otherness, a postcolonial appropriation of the third world by the first, a queer-ing of the self to acquire another subjectivity, and a radical anthropological force for re-appropriation.

Gentrification*

“If a rising tide was going to lift all boats, in the Mission that tide would not be money, but urine. The most visible example of the “economic revitalisation” was that the people pissing in our garden at night were now wearing more expensive clothes. I’d come home to find giggling drunk girls in those huge shoes with their pants down, peeing away in the driveway while their boyfriends drunkenly tried to pick all of Jim’s flowers to give to them. I saw people mastering the art of pissing with one hand and talking on a cell phone with the other. The Latino working class bars of the Mission had all been systematically closed by the police, ostensibly because the patrons sold crack and got into fights with each other. They’d now all been replaced by hipster bars where the patrons all did coke and then fought each other. I’d see leather-coated, side-burn-wearing yuppie guys scoring heroin on the Sixteenth and I would think, “Damn! It’s like these people can’t wait to move to the ghetto and lose their minds!”

- Erick Lyle, On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City

*To Max. I don’t want you to piss on me again, but if your aggressive golden arc keeps this phenomenon at bay, I’m glad to quietly cross to the other side of the road while you’re at it.

Honest to goodness

Giving to so-called beggars is often problematised as bestowing unearned reward. Folks want to think that their having lived good lives (being polite to others, working hard) is the reason why they are not begging. Or at least that the reason they ‘got where they are today’ is wholly due to their good honest industry and nothing to do with their own unearned privileges. (Ascription and achievement: another wonky bifocal lens).

A neighbour of mine calls giving to this lady “our local road toll”. I suppose that under liberal capitalism this is how ‘giving to beggars’ might be framed – it’s tax for the welfare state, the poor law, a tithe, for the gleaners. Giving is justifiable here, but maybe it wouldn’t be if the welfare state was (considered to be) functioning well. Certainly I want the state to do it for me, in my imagining of the state as a container from which communal resources might be properly distributed. On a frostbitten night I call the outreach service instead of going upstairs and bringing you one of my blankets.

Nunplay

My recently acquired fascination with nuns just won’t go away. Perhaps it’s just one big overly idealised fetish, like one of Sister Wendy’s phalluses. (Allow me to attempt, then, the requisite talking cure).

I’m wondering about the position that “nun” can still play in western language and culture. She has, as Mourão points out, “historically….been a way of thinking of woman apart from society and men.” This comes with all the ambiguity of any seemingly fixed linguistic category: “simultaneous withdrawal from dependence on individual men and submission to the patriarchal institution of the church” (xvi). She marks the existence and the absence of women’s autonomy as human beings and within this, (as Sor Juana’s ‘mulatto slave girl’ suggests), another mechanism through which humanity and autonomy is admitted and dismissed. 

Solicit

A youthful chugger from Wesley Mission (we’re over 200 years old!) mines my affect meticulously, brutally. Children are on the streets. You could help them for less than a dollar a month.

Begging might be banned in Alice Springs.

Withdrawal

“Julian eventually became a recluse, or anchoress. Her choice of this vocation, highly esteemed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in England, meant that she formally withdrew from the world and lived in a cell attached to a church, in her case, St. Julian’s, belonging to the Benedictine nuns of Carrow; the solemn service for enclosure was comparable to the mass for the dead, and meant that henceforth the anchoress would be committed to an arduous life of solitary prayer and meditation. Still, Julian seems to have been considered an important part of her commuity, being remembered, as we have seen, in local wills, and sought out as a spiritual advisor….”

- Frances Beer, Julian of Norwich, 1998 pp. 3-4

Image: Church of St Julian, from Anamchara

Autohabituation

“[T]he patrol that pulled over a Ford Fiesta on Friday doing 112mph was surprised to find at the wheel a 56-year-old nun who claimed she needed to be at the pope’s side after the pontiff lost his balance in the bathroom and broke his wrist.”

- The Guardian, 19 July 2009

“My veil was also in the glove compartment. I kept it there for emergencies, like getting stopped for speeding.”

- Sister Karol Jackowski, Forever and Ever Amen: Becoming a nun in the sixties, 2005, p. 271

“Sister Gloria Petri says she was on a mission of mercy for her injured dog when she refused to stop for the police during a 10-mile car chase….”

- New York Times, February 2, 1994, referenced in Manuela Mourão, Altered Habits: Reconsidering the nun in fiction, 2002, p.xiv

A slave of one’s own

“Since all education was the prerogative of the Church, the path of an exceptional woman who had the temerity to value cultivation of her mind above all else, including marriage, inevitably led to the convent….

 In entering a convent, she must have accounted the obligations of communal life (which she clearly took into consideration) less distracting and less in conflict with her deepest values than the worldliness of the court.

 [At Santa Paula convent of the Hieronymite order], the nuns had private living quarters, usually occupying two floors, with their own kitchens, baths, sleeping quarters, and parlors. They brought servants with them – in Sor Juana’s case, a mulatto slave girl given to her by her mother. Juana’s parlor became her study, where she amassed her own library and spent hours reading, studying, reflecting and writing.”

- A Sor Juana Anthology, translated by Alan S. Trueblood, Harvard University Press, 1988, p.5

 

The host

“I don’t want to be a friend, and I don’t want to be a stranger”, an acquaintance explains. “I’ll give you twenty dollars, but I am – ultimately and uncomfortably – unwilling to take you into my home.”

Local economy

I see, speak to and touch some people in the street more often than my neighbours. I see one particular person at least once every day and have done for almost a year. She calls me ‘babe’ and ’sis’. She often looks really, really unwell. I sometimes give her money when she asks for it, but not always. Then there’s the man who sells The Big Issue outside the bank. He gives me dirty looks and sometimes yells insults because I haven’t bought it from him for a few years now. He’s otherwise very sweet.

One day I watch a couple of kids grabbing the money from a busker’s guitar case. They run down a lane and hand it to an older woman and they all take off. Outside the supermarket, an aging man asks me if I’ll buy him a meat pie. He’s skinny and sick and I can hear his lungs whistling. I buy it and give it to him. A smiley woman walks over, says she lives in the same squat (not this kind of squat) as the man, says she’s starving too. I give her a few dollars. We tell each other our names and she shakes my hand. Outside the pub, a younger man asks me if I can spare any change, but I don’t have any left. I could go and withdraw some more money from the ATM. I start walking home instead. I pass a man lying on the footpath who is muttering to himself under a dreadlocked beard and urine-soaked clothes.

My neighbour knocks on the door and asks if she can borrow ten dollars til payday. I give her my bus ticket instead. I check my email and delete one that asks me to donate money to a children’s hospital in The Philippines, via my bank account details.