JOSEPH GELFER

Australian Creative offers an interesting report on the new Berger paving paint campaign:

In a world where homes and inside spaces are seen to be the traditional domain of women, the campaign sets up the new men’s movement with an experiential pitstop outside the country’s busiest shopping centre in Chadstone.
The spot portrays over-the-top feminine interior rooms and groups of men for whom creating a patch of painted concrete in the backyard is a “manspace” to which they all aspire.

The write-up correctly notes the “considerable albeit stereotypical humour” of the advert which is “filled to the brim with items that apparently attract men –  short skirted promo girls, cold beer, deckchairs, girly and hunting magazines, tv sport and manapes from the barbecue”:

But more than this I think the ad is a lament for masculine existential isolation. While gliding through normatively feminine-coloured interiors, the ad speaks of the “war for personal space, it’s a war that many men are losing”. It then asks, “is there any place left that blokes can actually call there own?”

The answer, it seems, is the back yard patio. But while it is suggested this is “the ultimate space for men” it is clear that we are being presented with a vacuum of meaning outside of the home, a literally blank domain stripped of cultural references that Berger mistakenly wishes to populate with what it perceives to be authentic masculine signifiers: hunting mags, girls with big tits.

But there is a further, more transgressive reading of the back yard patio, residing as it does not fully in the feminine domestic sphere, nor the masculine public domain: In essence, the patio is a queer or liminal space. Further still, I believe the director has been reading his Deleuze. What else could the flat expanse of the patio be but Deleuze’s smooth space—the ultimate site of sexual becoming—that has “no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo”?

Who would have thought that the Berger paving paint ad campaign was not actually put together by a bunch of dumb-asses, rather a posse of continental philosophers?

Chapter 3 (Sexuality) of The Masculinity Conspiracy is now online.

This chapter examines how the theme of sexuality is mobilized in the conspiracy via two books: Earth Honoring: The New Male Sexuality by Robert Lawlor and The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work and Sexual Desire by David Deida.

It shows how these books promote a masculine sexuality of fixed characteristics.

It then offers some different ways of thinking about masculine sexuality in order to counter the conspiracy.

Dear Bracha

I have enjoyed dipping into your writing. I like that fact that your Flickr photos show you hanging out with groovy people like Jean-Francois Lyotard, Judith Butler, Emmanuel Levinas and a bunch of other people I’ve mostly never heard of, but who are no doubt very interesting as you bother to take their photos. I found your take on sexual difference via matrixial borderspace interesting, and a useful complement to spatial metaphors such as Anzaldua’s borderlands and Deleuze’s rhizome. I like the fact that your lack of fame relative to, say, Butler or Irigaray, means that citing you gives my readers the impression I am far better read in these areas than I actually am.

But sometimes, Bracha, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what you’re talking about. Take your recent article, Fragilization and Resistance in Studies in the Maternal. You state, for example:

The human capacity for inspiration revealed in artworking begins with an archaic transconnectedness by psychic strings, that bounds each I, as presubject, to its particular non-I(s), and first of all to its pre-maternal transubject – its archaic m/Other. Desire, born out of the kind of transmission that the string allows, doesn’t seek for objects. It languishes for specific almost-lost links. In jointness, I and non-I differently feel-know in-and-by inspiration-transpiriting by which they are differently transformed. In each jointness that succeeds to tremble a borderlinking string, different I(s) and non-I(s) will start, restart and continue to feel-know with-in one another and with-in forms, images and encounter-events, by way of sharing with-in new and older psychic webs while also imprinting and engraving their traces in them in shareable threads. Traces are cross-inscribed and transinscribed between transubjects and between transubject and transject. (pp. 11-12)

That’s easy for you to say.

In Fragilization and Resistance you use the prefix “trans” 216 times, which is over double the usage in Weaving a Woman Artist With-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event, published five years previously; you refer in some way to “spirit” 78 times in the new paper, and only 5 times in the older (the pdf reader counted those, not me: that would be a bit odd, wouldn’t it?).

Here’s my theory, which I allude to in Numen, Old Men, which was revealed to me via Griselda Pollock’s vision of your matrixial borderspace:

of madness, of psychosis, with no signifiers to relieve phantasms and hallucinations that bleakly register both the trauma and the solace of what we now come to recognise as the matrixial dimension

To which I wrote:

Is this not another, darker weaving of a place we have heard of before? Of sacramental mystery? Ātman? Non-dual awareness? The “thresholds of I and non-I emerging in co-existence”?

Bracha, I believe through all this you want to speak freely about spirituality, but feel embarrassed by it; but it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of people eventually get tired with a secular-Leftist and psychoanalytically-informed worldview and make this turn: just read Irigaray’s work of recent years.

But I think the spiritual (as opposed to the psychoanalytic) dimension of your matrixial borderspace is better served by your painting than theory: it is, after all, pre-verbal (via the Real or, more accurately, trans-verbal). I think you could make a great living among the intelligentsia of Paris and Tel Aviv painting matrixial auras around them: oceans of bruised purple, brown and black. I’d seek you out if you did this.

Just my two cents,

Joseph.