Dialectics of Desire and Revolution: Vienét's 'Girls of Kamare'

Unpublished

ABSTRACT

In the Fall 2008 issue of October, Kelly Baum wrote an article entitled The Sex of the Situationist International. In it, she radically reformulates the accepted art historical understanding of a common “leitmotif” in Situationist publications, that of nude or semi-nude women. Previously, critics ignored the usage either by dismissing it as, in the words of Thomas Levin, “problematic depictions of scantily clad women” or by condemning it, as did Susan Suleiman, as the product of a “men’s club.” Baum, however, asserts that the Situationists, while reproducing some of the gender biases of the time, were actually using these images as a way to critique the alienation of desire as present in advanced capitalism. Baum goes even farther, indicating that the images the Situationists used in their publications of women were not actually images of women, but rather images of desire. Relying on work done by Thomas Y. Levin, Giorgio Agamben and Henri Lefebvre, Baum succeeds in developing an analysis that situates the Situationist use of images of desire as gendered politicization of desire to attempt a “revolution in desire.” In this paper, I intend to extend Baum’s analysis of printed images and a curt examination of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle to a film directed by Situationist International member René Viénet called Girls of Kamare, on which there is little to no theorization available, while exploring the revolutionary implications of this detourning of desire through a psychoanalytic and visual studies lens.

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Preface to the Journal of Poignant Living (in progress)

The goal of this record is to record the moments that sometimes, but inevitably do occur within the experience of my lifeRight, my life, why should you care about my life? Well, though I am a fan of a certain conservative solipsistic point of view, I do believe experience, and specifically the communication of personal experience a highly subjective and individual endeavor. However, I do believe experience to be mediated by biological and socio-cultural norms and practices, which is why I am writing this, someone will get it, right? Specifically moments which have been characterized as "Ah ha!" moments, yet further, "ah ha"s that manifest themselves physically, not just psychically. In my experience, the shivers, goose bumps. An understanding, ultimately provoked from outside the self gets worked into a personal narrative of being and the moment in which the newest puzzle piece to be formed out of ethereal reality is fit into the geometric structure of the 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 completed puzzle story, a physical marker of addition, simplification, complexification, abstraction, what we call wisdom, is affected. A shiver of what some may call the divine is felt traveling like lightening through my system. I'm taking special care to find colloquial expressions of this phenomenon, in hopes that what I am communicating is actually understandable and maybe, just maybe, inspires the 'divine' breath of 'shivers' of which I speak.
A chronicle of such is important for a few reasons. On a personal level, it is these moments which mean the most to me, that make me love life almost as much as the existence of the feeling of love does. That's not exactly right, I wish that were completely correct, but it is only a half truth (the part about me loving love). The bastard descendant of Western chivalric loveOcatvio Paz, The Double Flame: Love & Eroticism. between a man and a woman that exists today doesn't hold much significance for me personally, however I am compelled by what people will do for the intense feelings of affection that develop between people as a reaction to an innate condition of loneliness predicated upon the solitary nature of understanding (here we see that conservative solipsism I was speaking of earlier).
A second reason for this transcription of phenomena is its seemingly metaphysical nature. This of course brings up the question of where the body ends and the...spirit, soul, consciousness, personality, identity, Ego and Superego, etc. begins. In my estimation, our culture has been wrong to view linguistically view this problem of metaphysics on a horizontal scale of signification. In other words, to negatively oppose body and mind and this is of course a discussion which has been existent since earliest philosophical meanderings, yet here we are, in a rather advanced state of human cultural production and weYes, even the most scientifically rational person will find themselves falling back on this distinction every now and again cling to this idea that outside of our body, there, we are. As if pointing from within we can see our reflection outside. Perhaps something like Lacan's mirror. Lacan, Metz, Mulvey have wrote that it is, and this is an intense, but I believe correct, abstraction, that it is within the social that we find the reflection of what we call soul. And once again, we've swung back around to understanding between as the ultimate goal. But more on this when need be.
So, for right now, we have an optical illusion of selfhood which has produced the greatest metaphysical question of western philosophy.