Dasha Zhukova sitting on the offending art work
A hundred years ago, the outbreak of the Great War caused a
split in the social democratic movement - while initially most of the Second
International’s sections supported their own states, with only two outliers
(most famously the Bolsheviks) taking an anti-war line, by the end of the war
the movement was cleaved in two. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that
the whole bloody history of the short 20th century stems from the response of
the workers’ movement to what was plainly an existential choice of indisputable
importance.
To mark the anniversary, the International Socialist Network
has itself split ... over a photograph. It shows Dasha Zhukova, the fashion
designer, art collector and young girlfriend of Russian oligarch Roman
Abramovich, sitting on a chair that is also a sculpture of a prone black woman.
A football blog, of all things, described the picture like this: “The black
woman depicted as an inanimate object used to service the white, dominant
female is unarguably demeaning, disgraceful and reminiscent of the degradation
black women have endured over decades.”
The ISN ended up embroiled in a bitter slanging match - not
so much over the above assessment itself as whether that was all there was to
it. A certain professor of European studies at Kings College London will, no
doubt, be sadistically pleased to see his former bêtes noires fall out on a
Facebook thread, started by Magpie Corvid, then an ISN steering committee
member - and also a professional dominatrix.
“I wish there were hot BDSM pics in the daily fail every
day,” she wrote, “and that vile racist incidents were not their occasion. I
looooooooove using people as furniture!”2 The venom that followed was
tiresomely predictable, but - it is also worth noting - a highly disturbing
glimpse into the perverse authoritarianism of modern ‘intersectional’ identity
politics. Most of the ISN piled in to argue, in effect, that comrade Magpie’s
sexual predilections were an expression of her white privilege. Richard
Seymour, defending Magpie’s position, caught a barrage of abuse himself.
As always in such cases, the Zhukova picture affair is only
half of the split issue. It looks like the final straw for Seymour, Magpie and
their section of the ISN, which we have characterised as its right wing. The
comrades have already complained about “anathematisation” in ISN debates. By
the time the ISN’s steering committee circulated a statement3 condemning
Seymour and Magpie, Charlotte Bence - one of the original ‘Facebook Four’ - had
already decamped to Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (RS21), the
most recent split from the Socialist Workers Party.
A resignation letter,4 signed by Seymour, Magpie and allies
such as China Miéville, appeared on January 27, almost simultaneously with the
ISN’s discussion bulletin5 ... in which the same comrades, including comrade
Bence, announce the formation of a platform and argue that the ISN should
dissolve itself into RS21. Perhaps Seymour and co will be paid-up RS21 members
by the time you read this.
Death spiral
That they should be so keen to jump ship is hardly
remarkable. The Seymourites have been a minority in the organisation, and
increasingly the subject of vituperation from factional opponents (some of
which, no doubt, is deserved). The latest Facebook farce is merely a
particularly shabby example of the genre.
So there are two stories here. First of all, barely nine
months after its foundation, the ISN appears for all the world to be in an
irreversible death-spiral. Its comrades imagined the ISN’s heterodox,
heterogeneous political make-up to be an advantage, given that their purpose
was to rethink the politics that had animated their SWP lives. It is not an
unreasonable assumption, but it was nevertheless false.
The Seymourites’ main interest was playing at big politics:
grand realignments, mass organisations and such. Their model was Syriza. The
ISN left looks, rather, to the SWP’s rank-and-filist heritage, and broadly
argues for recomposition from the ‘bottom up’. The latter often resented
‘regroupment’ talks with other organisations such as Socialist Resistance,
since such affairs are invariably discussions among leaders, and thus top-down
in nature.
RS21 is an attractive proposition more or less due to its
being at the beginning of what is likely to be a similarly truncated
life-cycle. Its debates are still, as the ISN’s were for a time, ‘comradely’.
While wounds of the SWP factional struggle still fester (many in the ISN still
resent the hopeless softness displayed by those now in RS21 in the run-up to
the SWP’s March ‘special conference’ on the Delta scandal), now that all
concerned are outside the mother ship, the practical differences seem to be
smaller. Many of the RS21 comrades, in any case, were ‘radicalised’ during
2013, and arrived in December at more or less the same level of anger and
disillusionment that Seymour had exhibited last January.
Indeed, the CPGB wrote to RS21 suggesting talks, to which
the answer was, unsurprisingly, ‘no’. The reason? “As you are aware, we are in
the very early stages of beginning to work together outside the SWP. We have a
temporary structure aimed at facilitating collective work and beginning a
process of political discussion. As such we have no mandate or basis to engage
in talks with any group at this time.” In other words, exactly the self-description
of the ISN circa spring 2013; we shall see when the centrifugal forces take
hold. We cannot imagine the result will be any more dignified.
Art and fetishism
Indeed, the other story here suggests that it will be less
so. It may only be the final straw for the Seymourites, rather than the
substantive reason for their split, but we cannot blind ourselves to the
appalling standard of argument directed against Seymour and Magpie over the
Zhukova photograph. Zhukova sits on a work of art by Bjarne Melgaard -
Melgaard’s sculpture is obviously an homage to Allen Jones’s Chair, part of a
1969 triptych by the British pop-artist of women repurposed as items of
furniture.
The main thrust of Jones’s sculptures is a playful reference
to the fetish and BDSM scene, which fascinated him; the pieces are bound up, so
to speak, with the contemporaneous ‘sexual revolution’, and the combination of
obvious kitsch and sexual directness is perfectly representative of the art of
the time. The use of humans as furniture, by the by, is - as Magpie’s
unfortunate status update implies - a documented sexual fetish, known as
forniphilia.
Exactly what Melgaard is up to here is another matter.
Changing only the race of the ‘chair’ is obviously a provocation. The
Guardian’s Jonathan Jones suggests that “in making this woman black he means to
retoxify the art of Allen Jones, to offend people with an image long since
accepted. The intention is therefore the opposite of racist: it is to question
power and representation. Are you offended by this black woman’s abuse? Then
why is it OK for white women to be similarly humiliated in a respected pop art
icon in the Tate collection?”6
On the other hand, we might play up the fetish angle further
here. In the era of Fifty shades of grey, it can hardly be suggested that kinky
sex as such is as shocking to the public mind as it was half a century ago.
‘Race play’, however - blacking up, or indeed whiting up, for sexual purposes -
is still incendiary, the echoes of blackface and minstrel shows all too immediate.
Melgaard is a provocateur: he is not interested in toxifying Jones’s art, but
his own.
The point of all this is that any interpretation of
Melgaard’s sculpture hinges on the question of sexual fetishism. The same, in
fact, is true of the photo of Zhukova, whose meaning surely relies on her
position in relation to a sexually dominated body.
It is hardly the case, moreover, that controversy over
fetishistic art is new. Jones’s Chair most recently went on public display in
the Tate gallery as part of its ‘Art under attack’ exhibition, of works that
had been vandalised, in honour of its having been the victim of a feminist
paint stripper attack.
Perhaps more relevant in this connection is Robert
Mapplethorpe, whose nude photographs of black men were and are hotly debated.
The issue is put nicely in an essay on Mapplethorpe’s earlier BDSM pictures:
“The sheer diversity of the erotic props and paraphernalia on display in the
s/m project asserts that Mapplethorpe is cataloguing a collective subculture,
not merely his own desires or favoured practices as part of that subculture.
But in Mapplethorpe’s images of black male nudes … the model’s body is stripped
of any marker of sexual identity or subjectivity - no traces here of the black
man’s own erotic investments or fetish objects.”7
The blackness itself is the fetish, which is somehow more
troubling than the enjoyment of inflicting and receiving pain. Mapplethorpe’s
black nudes - which are both technically impeccable and, yes, hot - trouble our
complicated consciousness of race because they make explicit its link to the
murky imperatives of human sexuality. Melgaard’s sculpture crudely beats one
over the head with this problem, and its relationship to racism is problematic
(in the way that Ku Klux Klan propaganda is not).
Back to Mao
Short-circuiting that discussion in order to declare
Melgaard’s Chair “just racist” is reactionary philistinism, no different in
substance to the moral panics of Mary Whitehouse. It may perfectly well be ‘bad
art’ (it certainly is not original), but bad responses to bad art are hardly a
corrective.
Indeed, things are worse than that. If the sculpture (or
photo) is racist in itself, then the concrete individuals who engage in
race-play as part of consensual pleasure must also be beyond the pale, as they
no less mobilise fetishised images of race; their fantasies become equivalent
to minstrel shows. Moreover, the concomitant image of domination must
necessarily map onto a desire to degrade and dominate outside the fantasy of
the sexual fetish - which more or less rules out BDSM, practised and enjoyed by
a significant fraction of the human population, altogether. As much as it is
precisely such accusations that degrade debate on this issue, I cannot describe
this attitude as other than ignorant, sexually conservative bigotry, worthy of
a Ukip councillor, but not a socialist.
Yet what other consequence than ignorance can possibly
follow from the privilege-baiting that now substitutes wholly for rational
debate on the question of oppression? What greater understanding can possibly
emerge from a mindset that only repeats, in ever louder terms, the first twitch
of prejudice? Those who harangued Magpie and Seymour would only have been happy
if they had immediately capitulated and repented. When a position is criticised
as being an expression of ‘white privilege’, the hidden payload - ever more
obviously - is ‘Everyone who does not agree with me exactly is complicit in the
oppression of black people’.
It should not surprise us, of course, as privilege theory is
every inch a product of American Maoism, and all its basic discursive features
- Manichean presentations of minor disputes, strident moralism and the idea
that the privileged need to be ‘educated’ by the oppressed - are deflected
products of the worship of the Cultural Revolution. That it has made its way
into official ‘radical liberalism’ is to be expected - after all, so did most
of the Maoists.
It has been suggested that, so far as Seymour is concerned,
all this is a matter of chickens coming home to roost. Indeed, he vocally
supported the ideological opening up of the ISN comrades to intersectionality
and related conceptual alibis for the aforementioned irrationalism; to him (and
to most others who left the SWP with him), engagement with these ideas would
allow the ISN to be more broad and inclusive. The fatal flaw of this view is
that the feminists (and the queer activists, and everyone else) are just as
divided as the rest of us; and their theoretical commitments are incipiently
irrationalist and (thanks to the Maoism) even more fissile than those of the
traditional far left.
If he needs proof of this, he need only check his Facebook
notifications.
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