Caged Bear Part One: A Phenomenology of Bearspace Sexual Identity Fraud

Social Construction of Sexuality
Professor Vardalos
Thursday, April 20 2006
This work Copyright (C) 2006 Richard Birch

Note for reading: Prologue: This essay is dual-textual. The reader will see two seperate texts evolving side-by-side simultaneously. The main text which is posted here in normal black and normal font size is a sociological phenomenology of the research data utilized for this project. The secondary text which was originaly an ongoing footnote evolving along the bottom of each page in the essay is posted here in italic font. This secondary text, which can be read seperately has been posted here, starting and ending at exactly the same points along the main text as it was in the original paper. Thus, the italic sections was printed at the bottom of each page and the main text above each italic section was the pre-occuring main text on the same page when this essay was first submitted for academic review. The main text (normal font / black) is a phenomenological account of my research data. The italic text ongoing notation, is textually deconstructing my initial phenomenology. The reader is free to interpret which of the two textual entities constitute the real essay. This style of deconstruction is based on the Derridian format developed by French post-structuralist thinker Jacques Derrida. I have adapted, or in some way, cluster-fucked this format with Ann Game's method of undoing the social. One thing to note for the reader: there are some very strong emotions being expressed in this section which are at times fictive and very critical. However, the expressions of emotions termed as such are to show the feelings one has at times when there is relentless longing, loss of kinship, and incohesiveness in community. I am critical of the gay community and of bearspace, very defnitely, and already there are those who are yet to understand the nature of my criticism. It is not out of hate, or fear, or resentment that I criticize. I criticize I also care about these communities. One can be critical in regards to identity politics, but still have the capacity for hope and for the opinion that change can occur. In essence, in my criticisms, in my personal feelings about these communities I struggle with, I am yet to see the positiveness in it. I am desperately hoping that someone can prove me wrong.

During the first couple of years as an out gay man, my impression of the Gay Bear construct was extremely narrow and linear. However in a short amount of time what became apparent was that the Bear identity construct, what I from time to time I will call the Bear Cage and Bearspace, is as diverse as gay male culture in its entirety. Gay male culture is structured in very systemic patterns of social order. It is also arranged and constructed in a vertical hierarchy based on labels that resonate on mainstream systems of social oppression. Twinks and musclemen are very much situated at the top of such a pyramid of power, and it can be labelled as powerful because these are the typical identity constructs that adhere to technocapitalist commercial ideologies. Early on in my quest to learn a sexual identity as a gay male, it was apparent that certain characteristics which I possess, physical attributes in combination with other aesthetic properties led to a specific type of description I was ascribed to. Overweight, roundish, barrel-chested, goatee, piercings and hair type were systemically and collectively physical codes for my presenting the Bear identity. These specific qualities, though not unknown to me, were certainly independent of my social influence. These also were the basis for any sexual

There really is no denying the fact that the gay male culture makes me completely ill. I really have no problem disclosing that there are many parts of the gay male culture that I sometimes feel like I fucking hate. This feeling is, generated from a real fear of identity malfunction; a malfunction of my sexual identity that resonates sharply to the abuse I was subjected to as a child, as a teenager, and as a socially developmental adolescent trying to make some sense of insane homosexual and homophobic feelings in my own personal subjective white upper class restrictive upbringing. It’s amusing that I actually think that there is some real order to a sexual subculture as the Bear construct, if that can even be said with a straight face. It is questionable there is any real sense to it, anything real that can be measured, or discussed with academic vigour. Yes, it is comprised of gay men, hyper-sexualized men, hairy men who are into other hairy men, fat chubby men who are into other fat chubby men, skinny guys into fat chubby men, chasers, pigs, and all of the types that in many ways shout “Yes, I am another fag stereotype to be the subject of satire in Fab Magazine”. What also is amusing is the status awarded to me in this subculture. Here in the Bear cage I have been told I am sought after, whether it be at fetish events, leather parties, gay bars and sexual establishments which cater to the caged-crowd in both fetishistic and bearish ways. In other words, at Fly, I am the heavy-set queer with his twinkie friends by the bar nobody talks with. At O’Grady’s I’m the musclebear who hot scary looking biker guys buy drinks for in the hopes of being a contestant in my “Would You Like To Enter My Ass Contest!”

identificatory labels of which I soon earned in the culture. The label of Bear was and is still problematic for me. The word provides an emotional landscape that is daunting on two levels.
The first level is simplistic, laden with derogatory subjective meaning, an enabler of feelings reminiscent of schoolyard names such as fat, pig, ugly, fat-ass, fat-head, fag, faggot, queer, and all other descriptive terms associated with the eradication of the social connectivity. These are terms, extremely hurtful terms, little pieces of language that creates the most powerful feeling of remorse and fear. Remorse for my younger self who never had the opportunity to become the gay man who should have been decades ago. Fear for the younger self who was subject to gay bashing, violence, verbal abuse, and the loss of love. For a gay man, sex is not everything as indicated in the popular filmic texts as seen on HBO and Showcase. Polygamous sexual activity for me is merely the underbelly of the recognition of the fact that finding love and connectivity is and will most likely always be one of the most impossible endeavours I will be able to complete as a gay man in techno-capitalist culture.

The sexual messages and meanings in the gay bear social, not unlike other gay male constructs is certainly not a latent phenomena. It is powerful to be made to feel sexual among men who exhibit powerful sexual prowess in extreme measures. It is an exhilarating feeling, and a feeling I have had myself when experiencing the gaze of men in such a subgroup as the Bear cage. It is also a deeply moving feeling for me to all of a sudden realize that there seems to be a community of gay men, like myself, over 30, of varying body types not associated with mainstream glamour and “hotness”, and that I have been socially adopted into such a forum. I also feel uneasy throughout my experiences in the Bear cage, for as like all caged existences imply a meaning of imprisonment and the inability to express ones humanity, I am expressionless in the Bear mise-en-scene, for there really is no such Bear-defined means of expression I am both used to and comfortable with. I recognize the bars like O’Grady’s, Alibi, and Black Eagle, sexualized drinking establishments what cater to this subculture as predominantly cages of the imprisoned and the oppressed. These types of environments are not free standing in the abstract sense. They are also not giving of freedom to the men who harness themselves to them. They are merely concentrations of meanings, of language, and of personal indications of sexual oppression. From the loneliness that resonates among the men I meet, I drink with, and yes have encounters with, there is also a shared sadness amidst the polygamous sexual activity. It is a sharing of the feeling that even among the sexual conversations, the masculine flirtations, the direct propositions for sexual encounters, there is no real connectivity. The Bear Cage is a stage, only ever performative, and the scripts to which we adhere to are ultimately constructed.

The second level is far more latent in personal expression and experiential definition, yet far more complex in self-constructive terminology. The label Bear connotes something more expressive than I would have traditionally wanted to have as an indicator of my own personal identity. The label Bear is a word that I never felt would be a subjective account of who I am as a gay male, or more importantly, as who I wish to be or become in gay male culture. The label Bear is a name that initially provided feelings allied with self-destruction, physical decay, social rejection, and the loss of youth and beauty. The label Bear was a lonely word that held no ground or basis for finding connectivity whether emotionally or sexually with prospective partners or dates akin to my rational sense of desirability. The label Bear for me was not to be the grown up version of the young boy from heteronormative Barrie, Ontario who was subjected to the terms fat, pig, ugly, fat-ass, fat-head, fag, faggot, and queer. The label Bear was also the hardcore leatherbear who was overweight, hairy, unkept, ungroomed, strapped in black leather harnesses, black cap and black boots; highly sexualized in objective symbolic codification. All of these ideas and objects provided feelings of uneasiness and a loss of impropriety. To be labelled a Bear also resonates with the idea of a caged bear.

To be labelled a Bear is one thing. However, to actually self-recognize, and in some ways, self-diagnose is another. In truth, I haven’t decided if the term fits with me. I haven’t decided if I feel ready to call myself a Bear. The word doesn’t seem to be able to break through the cliché meanings and emotions I have in association with other bearish men I have met and have known. Yes, the Bear Cage as a construct as diverse as I have stated in the above text. However this statement and description should not necessarily be read as appropriative or positive. I feel critical of the subculture, as critical of it as I am of gay male culture in general. In some ways, I do feel I have hid behind the terms fat, pig, ugly, fat-ass, fat-head, fag, faggot, and queer, because maybe it’s safe there. Could it be possible to find refuge in such derogatory meanings? Is that why I am so resistant to identity (self-diagnose as if it were pathological) as a happy prisoner of the Bear Cage? And why would I be happy about it? Do I feel happy about it? There are some aspects of Bearspace that provides happy-like emotions. The sexual attention, the play, the ability to find a myriad of men into kink, the ability to locate submissives in an alternative sexual environment who can appeal to my somewhat cruel and dominant darker side. Bearspace is hardcore, it is violent in some regards and in the emotional sense. It is subjectively violent as oppression is violent. Heterosexism is violent in the social. I have the clearest senses and knowledge of that reality in comparison to many who are gay, who do self-diagnose/identify with being a member of a sexual subculture, and with men like me who have sometimes no fucking clue who they are. The only sure thing I know I feel in Bearspace, is that of an object.

The identity forcibly placed into my existence is both liberating in some regard, but also makes me feel very disturbed, confused, and scared of my own power. It is here where I have seen a side to myself that is indicative of the type of gay male I think in some way I am running away from away from in other gay subcultural groups. It’s disturbing because I am starting to see the same social-narcissistic character traits I criticize in other gay men in myself in the Bear Cage. It is not surprising to me that I am critical of the Bear subculture, as I am by virtue extremely critical of gay male culture in general. I do not feel it is self-appropriative, positive, enlightening, or in any abstract sense – crucial. As a gay man, I could definitely dream of doing without the gay male culture altogether. The Bear Cage environment, or Bearspace as it can be called from this point on, is easily diminishable. I, in reality do not feel adequately drawn to it as a community member. I am still gay, as a gay male, as a gay male searching for everything real and epistemologically truthful in this phenomenology, void of any real connectivity to the men who comprise it’s confines and definitions. In many ways I feel I am a fraud in Bearspace. I feel like an intruder, not with any true bearish identity, or real intention of being part of the subculture long-term. For the most part, when I socialize in these Bearspace clubs, it is not the bearish men I am attracted to. It is younger looking, smoother, cub-like chasers who resonate beauty for me.

I am objectified in Bearspace. I in these types of environments attract the gaze of men included in the bear construct such as the bears, chasers, and cubs. At fetish events bears constantly hit on me on. Yet I never knew for the longest time that the reason why I was targeted was because it was assumed I was one of the “cub-club” purely by my body type. Though at these events I never dress like a Bear or a leatherman. My taste in fetish fashion is much along the lines of Techno-Goth. Long black pleather coats, leather pants, high boots, black sunglasses, black eyeliner, grey eye shadow, and a very long stemmed cocktail glass in my hand embracing a very dry vodka martini with two olives penetrated by a very phallic plastic toothpick. I’ve been told that at these fetish events, for a somewhat non-twinkie man (which makes me feel good to learn that I am not a twinkie) that I am a very phallic-acting man, dark, tall, broodish, and energetic on the dance floor. Those are not my words, but another’s. This description, though detailed, is not akin to specific Bearspace language and meaning. Techno-Goth is not a Bearspace identity. It is very much however and identity that I personally encapsulate and at times endeavour to do so with style. Yet, I

In my mind, I have already made choices. I have constructed assumptions about gay men that generalize what gay men are to me as objects. I construct these generalizations because ultimately I fear gay men as much as I fear myself. I fear gay men because of the sometimes impossibility of finding love and recognition in any sort of community. I fear the seemingly impenetrable gay iconographic template of hyper-beauty and archetypical gay power in the gay social. I fear that which I seem to not be and that which I possibly deep down inside wish to exemplify, still in my critically charged knowing of my sexual oppression and status as a sexual minority in a Marcusean one-dimensional society. I fear myself because I am always so close to becoming someone I do not want to be, someone who is easily rejected in and outside of the subculture. This is why I have in recent months since writing my ethnography on the BDSM construct I have started to engage as an actual player in this D/s world. It seemed to me to be the next logical step in my research. (The reason why I feel the need to temporarily conflate masochistic sexuality and Bearspace sexuality will become apparent.) In the alt world where the D/s construct is played out, this fear is gone.

now find myself, at 35, at 220 pounds, at an age where more and more lines appear on my face, around my eyes, my forehead, my brow, that I for some reason personify a member of Bearspace. It is not always a comfortable feeling to have to deal with this. In bars like O’Grady’s, Alibi, and Black Eagle, I have an identity to which its realization is fraudulent. Is it any real question why for example I have adopted the dominant side of the BDSM construct? Why it is almost always me who is holding the crop? Pushing someone down over a bench when he wants it, in a private or public space? Just recently a man, around my age approximately, who I met at a specialized fetish party has propositioned me with a very intriguing offer. He is a submissive. A hardcore one. He is not what one would call a conventional sub (like the capacity for those two terms can be placed together in the same sentence like this is debatable). He also would be one I could easily label as a musclebear. Extremely handsome, very sure of what he wants, and very mature. These are qualities that I tend to recognize in Bearspace men. He also is very dominant looking and acting. Hyper-sexualized in both his vanilla-gay world as well as in his alternative sexual realm. Which is why I was extremely surprised to learn that he identifies as a Bottom both sexually and in the D/s construct. (The reason why I feel the need to temporarily conflate masochistic sexuality and Bearspace sexuality will become apparent, even though this individual does not personally identify with Bearspace. He does not link himself to any bear-like qualities or social constructs. ) He has approached me with the request of me being a trampling and stomping facilitator. In other words, he gets off on someone kicking him, particularly in the face. He receives a sexual charge from this seemingly violent form of physical abuse and humiliation. He craves to be humiliated in the extreme sense.

There is no fear in leatherspace for I sense what the community is about. It is about an attempt to subvert oppression. It is about an attempt to create dark beauty from inside a darkened society. There is beauty in humiliation. There is art in punitive expression. There is respect and rapture in mercilessness. Sex is truly only as revealing to the actors about their true places in the social, as that sex which can undo what stops them from revealing themselves to each other. It is through the D/s role-play that binds people to the collective connectivity that frees us all from the burden of individuality.
Bearspace is ultimately very one-dimensional. It lacks beauty. It lacks humility. It lacks expression other than what it borrows from other subcultures like leatherspace. In Bearspace respect is culturally created for we think we need it and rapture does not exist where true respect is null. There is no mercy in Bearspace as mercy is a currency not traded there. Sex only reveals what men in Bearspace want to see and believe to be true. Bearspace connectivity is all about being an individual and free in the identity which is “natural” or “normal” to the actors, however only that which is labelled normal is dependent on the “other”, the “abnormal” which neither exists or prevails otherwise.

His orgasm both physically and mentally derives from an ever permeating, overpowering, and dangerously gorgeous need to be someone’s doormat. He is beautiful when he is humiliated. He is artistic when he is being punished. He feels his humanity when one shows him no mercy. It is here he becomes someone at peace with his vanilla existence as a pawn of social injustice as a gay man. It is when he is engaged in being a doormat on which his Dom wipes his muddy boots on and stomps on his face, he is able to free his dominant nature and himself from the terror of sexual / social malaise. Maybe if Bearspace weren’t so caged like it would be more appealing to me. If Bearspace weren’t so caught up on believing that it is something original and new, then maybe it would be far more interesting for me and would inspire me to identify as a Bear. But I am not inspired by it. Thus, I feel no real need to believe the words I utter, or the words I type when signing up for an online profile when I create the words: bear, admirer, and musclebear. The fetishistic identity that makes me joyful, which relieves me though temporarily from my cultural oppression in techno-capitalism, is Techno-Goth. If one were to create a Bearspace label and identity that is immersed in the aesthetic and performativity, because in essence it is only in performance where we are our real selves, then maybe I would be comfortable and happy to socialize more freely in the Bearspace institution. Like leatherspace is a bdsm matrix, and to recognize one’s place in a social matrix structure, one has to perform a role. For example, I could be the first, the one and only, new and improved, brand new model, from a new line called: Glamourbear. Yes, I fucking love it! I could be a trend starter. The first face-trampling, doormat stomping, submissive kicking musclebear, complete with

It is paradoxical to me. Here I am suppose to be free to let my gut hang, my facial hair grow, my age to show, my wrinkles to curve and deepen, my looks to become rough and hard. Yet, it does not seem like a place where freedom is contingent on being “natural”, for what if I feel the need to be different than the rest of the men in Bearspace? No one has asked me what type of bear I would like to be identified. It is always arbitrary. It is always predefined like a club membership, or an election, or a high school popularity contest. It is the same Church and Wellesley Street gay male culture pyramidal structure of oppression. Even as a Bear I have to try to look pretty. Because even in Bearspace, the so-called universe of the free let-it-all-hang-out so we can be ourselves utopia, it’s just the same shit, different martini. As both a subjective and researcher it is very confusing to me. I know nothing of what being a Bear is supposed to do. I initially signed onto a Bear website, basically from the suggestion of a friend of mine who met the man of his dreams on it. Since coming out most of the men I have dated, slept with, or fell for were of a specific, pretty run-of-the mill crowd. Very young, sometimes too young for me, between the ages of 24 and 30 is too young for me as they make me feel way too old…and sometimes too young. I was getting nowhere in my love life as a gay male trying to negotiate through the Church Street (Toronto) / Collier Street (Barrie) culture.
So I signed on. Then boom! Then everything built itself up, and then crumbled.

Maybelline New York black eyeliner, mascara, Australian Gold indoor tan lotion with hemp bronzers, cellutox anti-wrinkle cream, my long black pleather coat I designed for fetish events, black leather bondage high top boots, with a maintenance package for bi-annual Botox injection service appointments. (Is it just me, or is the ghost of Hebert Marcuse channelling me during this automobile personification moment?) Yes, as Glamourbear, I could successfully subvert hegemonic heteronormativity! I could feel like the Bear I truly wish to be! I could be happy in my designer Mecca jeans from International Clothiers, the Italian one-stop fashion boutique where no Bear has shopped before! Yes, just because I am a Bear, doesn’t mean I can’t look pretty! It’s a culture, no better, no worse, no more or less energetic, no different in structure than

Gay male subcultures are strange phenomenon. They have the capacity for an incredible amount of socialization with an infinite amount of possible outcomes; sex, friendship, networking, commerce, crime, love, art, cruelty, oppression, resignation, role-playing, and violence to name just a few randomly chosen outcomes which occur in the Church and Wellesley district any day of the week. What I expected in my land of infinite expectations, was to find a playground. The Bear website that my friend enlightened me about, www.bear411.com, was certainly that. There certainly is an abundance of play to be had. At any time when I found myself logging onto this new environment, seemingly random and strange instant message boxes appear on my screen with messages like, “Hey Handsome. Are all of the cubs in Barrie like you?” or “When do I get to fuck you.” The dates were fun. The men were interesting for the most part. They were revealing themselves as the sexual commodities ascribed to them in society. Gay men socially commodity themselves and each other, for in gay culture sexual commodification is how we produce social networks and knowledge. It is that clear to me as a newly constructed insider our purpose as gay commodities is very real, and the pain that I feel from it is also very real. It’s not painful because I am aware of my sexual commodification, or because I sense how oppressive and dangerous it is for me. It is painful because for some reason, even with the social knowledge I possess and the ability to be aware of my destructive environments and relationships I develop, I not only accept it, I aid in its functionality.

any of the cultural phenomenon I have encountered and been effected by in my 35 years. Except for in this one, I fell in love. I really don’t know what I was expecting to find throughout my flirtations in Bearspace. However one thing I did learn was my sharp ability to get what I want out of these men. It seems I am a chronic flirt. A fucking good one too. Not just online, but in live Bearspace clubs. It is a new discovery for me because it is not the norm for me to “put myself out there” so to speak. I rarely in my life have considered myself to be a player, exceptionally attractive, or sought after. However, since deciding some time ago to officially place myself in the gay dating scene, men of both Bear and non-Bear status have told me I have the ability to turn heads. I have been told I have the capacity to break hearts. With some, I also have learned I have the ability to be cruel. The affectionate and passionate queer in me is

By destructive relationships, I do mean ones that are seemingly romantic on the surface, but sordid and dark on the inside. Once in Bearspace, once meeting the men who intrigue me, once engaging in social and sexual activity with them, once dating them and learning about who they are and how I relate thon them, I have realized I have little or no relation at all. Here, I find rejection as well. Here, I find a template of physical codes to which I resemble in very minute ways. In Bearspace, I feel as much the outsider as I do in other gay-male groups I have encountered since coming out. Here I am too thin. Here I am not muscular enough. Here I don’t wear the same types of biker-style leather chaps and garments normalized in Bearspace. Here I have been labelled not a bear, but more so a metrosexual in identity, another stereotype to which permits me little access to community and connectivity. In essence, I perform my oppressive nature in Bearspace. I am the one who commodifies himself in more typical homosexual and metrosexual methods through my self-representation of the man who wears designer jeans or leather pants to O’Gradys, who wears clothing he purchased on Queen Street West instead of Priape or Mark’s World Warehouse, who will from time to time apply eyeliner to accentuate his Techno-Goth sensibilities, and who will not change for any reason. Most importantly through all of this performativity, I therefore reify the oppression of the men surrounding me in Bearspace because I represent the society from where they came, the roles they left behind, and the men they never fit with.

disturbed by that side of me. However the sexually masochistic side to me is very aroused by that aspect of my nature. What makes this more significant for me, is that I also through this sort of phenomenon, have the ability to be damaged and destroyed, to be subject to cruelty, and even more importantly, the cruelty of complacency. I met a man. A beautiful man. A man who I initially expected in him to find a recreational sex partner. I didn’t expect to find the man of my dreams. What clinched it for me, was the rejection I soon felt from him after a few weeks. Not that I haven’t been rejected before, I certainly have, and I have felt deep pain because of it. However, this specific situation made me feel something profoundly real about my existence in Bearspace, something that makes it significantly fallible like other gay subcultural groups. I was made to feel like the commodity I am. That in all of this experimentation in a new and

I feel insecure about my masculinity in Bearspace. I have become feminized as a result of falling in love with a Bear. I have emasculated through connectivity and social interaction in Bearspace. I learned what it is to be a fatalistic femme in a world where all I thought existed are the male counterparts in the film-noir text. I have been feminized by my experiences, and made to feel that my feminine side is negative. That is also what makes me angry and critical about Bearspace. That femininity is socially derogatory here, and that to be one of the “other”, the one who is not so hairy, not so muscular, not so chubby, not so identifiable with a standard of bearness is as such, disposable. How dare they deem femininity to be subordinate? At bars like C’est La Vie, Woody’s, and Fly, I feel lonely, sordid and sad for the men around me. At O’Gradys, I feel played with, toyed with, like I have been someone’s amusing submissive exercise.
If I were to state that I hold out for hope for the Bear cage, it would be false hope. My critical opinions of what I have learned in this interactional experiment have produced more doubt in my mind of there ever being any real solidarity between gay men in postmodernity. Bearspace resembles all other forms of socially oppressive pyramidal structures of power and oppression. It fails to subvert all identifications to narrower patterns of any expressions of humanity and love. It is possible that

exciting sexual gay-centric subculture, I am still nothing more than an object expected to be fucked and to fuck for symbolic connectivity. I am an object who swam into an ocean of cowardly men who are afraid who they are, of why their gay identities, afraid of their Bear identities because it gives them a fall sense of power and self-love and appreciation not awarded or supplied in most Church Street environments. This man was incredible for he was the first and only individual ever to bring me closer to the masochistic sides I not only have denied, but was too afraid to experience. As a post-gay-bashed individual, Bearspace is both a safe and dangerous place for me to exist in. I find other men, beaten, shamed, devalued in the various sexual arenas around them, thus they perform precise engendered formulations of masculine desirabilities. I can recognize this for I am one who lives with the knowledge of what engendered performativity means, and more importantly what the cost is for performing a false engendered sexual orientation and social identity. Yet in Bearspace the sense of balance and solidarity is finite, relentlessly surreal, and emotionally derogatory. To have fallen in love with someone who resides in Bearspace was a crucial moment of realization for me, for it resulted in extreme naiveté, anger, sadness, and a realization that I am as gay, as a queer, as a fag, as a outsider in my own adopted subcultural groups am completely

there may be a key that can open the lock to this cage. It is possible this key may be found through more extensive qualitative research as to the nature of why Bearspace exists in the falsehood state it does, and why it merely maintains the same pyramidal structures of heteronormative, patriarchal, gender oppression other sexually charged institutions maintain. Or, could it be that, my own personal Dasein is now too damaged, too thwarted to realize any real hope or potential for this subculture? Could it be that my most recent realization of my own potentiality for social-narcissism overpowers any real understanding of what Bearspace is and what it could really be about? Maybe as a gay man, still newly finding his place in what I guess I could fairly now call Gayspace, am yet to have the skill to do. I find it difficult to get past my own aspirations and dreams of finding love, real love, real connectivity, the same powerful aspirations that make my social-narcissism and my being attracted to the same type of men, very destructive and real. For now, the cage is not for me. Nor is most of Church Street. I feel the most important thing I have learned in this research project at a personal level of subjectivity, is that I should possibly find it best to take a break from “vanilla” relationships, for a while.

alone. This is what I have to embrace and it makes me very uneasy. What also makes me feel uneasy is that, I brought this all on myself. I initially pursued him. I saw him online, and the very image of him I found arousing. After a few weeks of instant messaging and phone romps, our live in person meetings were to me extraordinary in ways, he will never know. He twisted my identity around until I was fucking purple. He in a matter of moments found both the emotional and physical buttons which brought the most acidic tears to my eyes. The ways he spoke to me and kissed me instantly made realize that in all the research I have done in queer and queered subculture, with all the assumed understanding I think I possess about the men I am part of, that I know absolutely fuck-all about these men. Because as soon as he entered my life and played me like the game I am, he ended it. As a gay male, a hypersexual one as well, I am not without my own experiences as a seducer, as a player, and a manipulator. Remember, I am also a social-narcissist. So in essence, I understand his behaviour as a social being. I understand that my feelings were real love, though as impossible as it seemed to be that real in a short amount of time, it is certainly a love I won’t soon forget, a love I tend to think and pretend not to be able to have the capacity for at the best of times. He told me in classic social-narcissist ways that it wasn’t me, it’s him, that he’s not ready to be in a relationship because a previous boyfriend fucked him over, and the same cliché bullshit we get from people who are scared to feel. I accepted and moved on. What else can a Bear do? Then I recently found out another aspect to his nature, and more importantly, the reason for my rejection. I am not his type physically. Apparently, I am too thin. Too thin. Too thin? Wow. I never knew the severity of my problem and the pathology I have to deal with everyday. I have a serious problem. I am a malnourished Bear. I am a Bear -waif. I HAVE BEAREXIA!!!!! Quick, someone pass me a burrito before it’s to late and I never get laid again! That was a whole new level of gay social-narcissism I had never encountered before. Lucky fucking me!

Social Critical Analysis of First Peoples Television Media in Canada

First Nations in Historical Perspective HIST 3216
Professor Wesley-Esquimaux
Wednesday, April 19 2006
This work Copyright (C) 2006 Richard Birch

Abstract
This paper conceptually frames the historical event of the construction and realization of aboriginal televisual media entities in Canada, as it relates to the impact of social change, cultural epistemological shifts, and historically mediated perspectives of First Peoples in hegemonic mainstream Canadian society with Marcusean critical thought. Where most research articles in review on the history of the creation of the first aboriginal television media organizations in Canada, this paper posits the notion of the existence of such televisual media as reifying the ethnic subordination aboriginals have been subjected to in both historical and contemporary contextualities. The licensing of a First People’s television network, though initially not without a positive impact as for it’s potential for the transmission of language, ideas, artistic and cultural ideologies intra-regionally between First People communities is important, this paper looks at the potential argument that the social cost of such an endeavour is not serving the permeation of distinction of the people it’s programming is designed for, but more so it serves techno-capitalist hegemonic principles of ethnic and social minority oppression built on the basis of signifying and social “other”, as opposed to the culturally distinct. As First Peoples television is licensable by the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to broadcast throughout the North, the underside of such action maintains the social positionality measurable by sociocultural, political, and economic marginalization of First Peoples in Canada. Visibility of minorities has a two-fold symbolic interactional outcome. It can build conceptual bridges between subcultural groups and tie subjective meanings together to strengthen distinctiveness and cultural hegemony. In further qualitative abstraction, it also reifies the stereotypes and misrepresentations the initial purpose of aboriginal media was intended to eradicate. Through the utilization of both, the positionality of organizations such as the APTN, serves to reify social minority status in measurement of cultural oppressive one- dimensional perspectives.

Culture is a social construct. Culture as a constructivist phenomenon permeates in varying forms around the globe, yet patterns of institutional hegemonic socialization posit the basis for cultural creation and meaning. Culture can be explained, subjected to critical analysis, and measured through epistemological methods of subjective discursive accountability. To look at ancient cultures with the intent of measuring such construction and permeation is difficult to examine in such symbolic ways because the nature of such civilizations are older than any methodology known to the social and historical sciences. However to examine the emergence of a culture, or specifically the emerging cultural shift from ancient ways of living to a newer sense of modernity is much more reasonable, for the concepts of method and social institution are jointly accessible. One can examine the growth, the change, and the meanings within a culture through an examination of not only it’s relationship to various forms of social institutions, but also in it’s involvement in the development, ownership, and regulation of such institutional hegemony. A specific conceptual model of cultural analysis, as a primary unit of qualitative measurement such as First Nations television media is useful in examining the development and migration from historical hegemony to significant postmodern social meaning. Arguably the execution of a First Nations television media in Canada, the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) did the very act of developing a bridge of different cultural groups in both the symbolic and sociological sense. Yet there is a different perspective to take into account, that the very existence of an aboriginal-centric television station reifies quite possibly the cultural oppression and subordination First Nations people have been subjected to for centuries under techno-capitalism. In a one-dimensional postmodern society, the existence of Aboriginal-centric media is limited in it’s effect to construct a cultural ideology outside that of it’s being a social minority for the social institutional infrastructure of television media reifies racial oppression. In the process of attempting to create a Canadian Consciousness of the North, it is a challenge to argue that a real social consciousness in mainstream society has been successful in developing an acceptance of a nationwide service “reflecting their diverse cultural perspectives and multiple languages” (Roth, 252).

It is not fair to state however that the creation of a First Nations television media has not had a place in formulating accurate cultural representations of the peoples it was designed to showcase and program for. As Lorna Roth calls it, “Pre-Northern Television” was a period in Canada saturated with “southern produced imagery of First Peoples…characterized by stereotypical misrepresentations, when and if they were present at all in the visual domain” (Roth, 253). It was a period where corporate owned and legislated media policy had no intention of initiating a task of positive and historically accurate aboriginal cultural representation, nor a task of consolidating accurate socio-historical context with modern social institutions (254). It was a period where there was potential to create inclusive epistemology and mediated language of First Peoples ideologies into a budding Canadian multicultural landscape, but it was as such unrecognizable to the upper echelons of media regulatory bodies such that would later become the CRTC and Telefilm. However, in all advanced industrial societies, to construct anything other than the paralysis of cultural existence and power, is to not formulate that which is the “other”. In other words, to recognize the importance of First Nations heritage and social knowledge in Canadian media, and to thus facilitate the usefulness of an aboriginal people’s mediated institution, would be to offset the imbalance maintained in a one-dimensional society. To announce the permissive nature of an industrial society built on exploitation of social minorities would be to demonstrate that there was an absence of agents of social change historically in Canada. This positioning of early middle twentieth century Canadian ideology can be taken to a further abstraction. In modernity, where a classist construct positioned around a Eurocentric hierarchy is paramount, the “degree to which technical progress assures the growth and cohesion of [communal and inclusive] society…recedes before the realistic notions of a non-explosive evolution” (Marcuse, xiii).

Unilateral cultural media and design is systematically promoted by the merchants of politics and their purveyors of mass information and epistemology. Language constructs a universality of national idealism, realization, and purpose, and thus a universe of discourse is only ever maintained in terms of social-historical perspectives to be occupied by the language that serves monopolistic dictations (Marcuse, 14). To include First Peoples perspectives and interest in mass mediated programming and media ownership, would be to open up Canadian society to multi-dimensional thought. For many years, this served only First Nations peoples theoretically, until of course, until the passing of the Telesat Act (1968) in 1969 in the Canadian Parliament which kick-started discussions around the development of aboriginal northern television (Roth, 254). As Roth calls it, a “Romancing of the North” gave insight to the very true interest of intra-regional and experimental northern-centric telemedia programming (Roth 254). Significantly, in 1969, it also became apparent for First Peoples to devise and initiate a telemedia entity as a formulaic response to the White Paper first read in Parliament that same year (Comeau and Santin, 161). To remove significant status from aboriginal society in Canada as a result of the dismantling of institutional Indian Affairs and the Indian Act of 1867 was parallel to the thinking of oppressive reification. In this act, to remove the status, you remove significance. But this does not remove the fact that First Peoples are the “other” in opposition to mainstream Canada. The White Paper was potentially one of the most problematic documents ever to be subjected towards First People in Canada, not only for the functionality of status eradication, but for it’s capacity to hinder further development of aboriginal heritage and cultural progression outside the assimilation impulses of mainstream legislation and policy.

Could it be defined as a measure of protest or retaliation that from a First Peoples’ perspective an aboriginal telemedia entity could offset the potential cultural dangers of such documentation? Could it also be explained that there was the potential for the creation of such a aboriginal-centric telemedia institution to be successful? Was there to be the existence of rationality and development synergy in place which would benefit all policy makers and forms of cultural regulation whether it be federal or first nations? There had to be a convergence of interests from both mainstream and First Peoples in order for the funding to solidify. It came about in the late 1970’s that in order for the production of aboriginal telemedia, the acquisition of jointly beneficial work projects had to be executed for the federal government to invest money in field tests and in obtaining access to Anik B satellite technology (Roth, 255). But all protest is a product of rationality and reification both socially and historically. In a very Western mode of thought, that which is real in a world of immediate experience must be understood and subverted in order to become that which it really is (Marcuse, 123). In other words in a social-historical context, any forms of protest, whether it be in the form of marches against powers that oppress, or the creation of subverting social institutions like the APTN, reify that which makes their existence deemed necessary. In a totalitarian place like multicultural Canada, a county of technological and cultural rationality, the purest form of transmutation is Reason.

Which is why the granting of a broadcasting licence on October 28, 1991 by the CRTC was inevitable.

There has been an absence of true liberal tolerance in Canada, as there still is in many ways in regards to racial minority issues. To manifest an electronic environment where the viewpoints of aboriginal peoples is important and positive, certainly. The existence of such a network is ultimately intended to promote diversity and aboriginal language to First People’s across five time-zones, and throughout a uniquely Canadian multicultural landscape. Most of APTN’s programming originates from First People’s production companies and approximately 70% of it originates from Canadian production companies. In regards to broadcasted languages, the APTN broadcasts 60% English, 15% French, and 25% various Aboriginal languages (Baltruschat, 47). Multilingualism and multilingual programming has been a keystone of the APTN since inception. As First Nations seek to obtain and increase official status of their languages in Canada, programming that revolves around the diversity of aboriginal language has been important in the promotion of the preservation of language in Canada. Aboriginal traditions have also been important components of APTN programming as so far being able to utilize the powerful storytelling abilities native Canadian cultures possess (47).

But it is through the Marcusean notion of social distinction where one can argue that the nature of the APTN serves not those who it’s programming is designed for. As all technocapitalist structures of knowledge are typically and hegemonically viewed in the social as “progressive” and “cooperative” by rights of the virtue of resource utilization, the causality involved in the creation of the APTN can arguably be derived from the extent Canadian history, and how Canadian policy, governmental affairs, and of course documentation such as the White Paper constructs experiential antagonism, thus “guides the development of the philosophical categories of truth and untruth in postmodern oppressive thinking” (Marcuse, 125). In further comparison to conceptual practices of power like those posited by the White Paper, the perception of an organization such as the APTN by the Canadian Cable Television Association (CCTA, Canada’s largest cable television industry lobby group) was profoundly negative at the onset of a proposal of such a station, and that any regard of the APTN would not be of any cultural significance. In other words, yes the ATPN could be transmitted and distributed as a specialty channel at the expense of Canadian consumers, but not with any further or different significance than any other specialty channel according to the CCTA. Thus to the CCTA and it’s corporate members, the APTN as something offered in any of the normal basic cable product line packages was ultimately out of the question (Roth, 262). Though there is great irony on the meek perception held by the CCTA, a déchirement ontologique as it were; appearance and reality; untruth and truth; and as history clearly now sees, unfreedom and freedom, are ontological conditions attributable to the creation of culturally significant media (Marcuse, 125). One can find it easy to think that the CCTA’s response to the licensing of the APTN as unsavoury to the social causality of the network’s programming agenda on generating cross-cultural sensitivity is not based on the fair distribution of media products to the peoples of the North as it was clearly for the CRTC. In some way, could it be said that the CCTA in their objective protesting of ascribing distinctiveness to the APTN is in some way relevant to arguments against removing the native status of First Peoples and their cultural ideologies? Possibly, but it is probably not an intentional occurrence.

Is the construction of an aboriginal mediaspace a helpful way for cross-cultural opportunity and healing? Is the construction of aboriginal mediaspace and organizations like the APTN another way for First Peoples to fight the challenges placed on them in a one-dimensional racially charged society still yet to displace itself from centuries of cultural assimilation practices? Or, is the existence of the APTN another new example of cultural replacement and assimilation First Peoples are being subjected to in postmodernity? What ideas do the Canadian airwaves reflect in postmodernity? If the CRTC, by mandate wishes to be the merchants of multicultural and “multiracial” constituency via technological telemedia, it is logical to question what parties does this action serve? The notion that the APTN is being served by this phenomenon is yet to be ascertained for it is clear “the APTN still has a way to go before it can effectively compete for cross-cultural audiences with central and powerful networks such as those of the Quebecois and the English/American broadcasting services” (Roth, 267). Yes, that the APTN now exists after years of struggle to become one the players in the telemedia arena in Canada is a profound accomplishment. However, the struggle with takes place to constantly value and consolidate the power relationships with Canadian media institutions and distribution organizations reifies the constant struggle First Peoples deal with in the preservation and maintenance of Aboriginal cultural ideology.

As aboriginal telemedia is powerful as a means to project the powerful storytelling abilities of native cultures to its viewers, based in traditions that originate through centuries of oral history, and cultural heritage construction, it’s relevant limited ability to create vast understanding is yet to be measured and examined. Though the APTN is available through Canada, there is an (in)visible and (in)audible presence, or absence of aboriginal impact as a telemedia market competitor. As Roth points out, “it is easy to pretend liberal tolerance when there is an absence of a subject/person/community from one’s visible and conscious world. What is outside of the purview of our senses can be faded out of our world of social relations” (Roth, 264). In other words, how can it be correct to deduce that a telemedia company, owned, operated, and programmed by aboriginal peoples, has the ability to construct deep and real liberal tolerance in an industrial postmodernity where all actions as a social minority in political and economic venues reify their oppression? In technocapitalism the emphasis and focal purveyor of all progression and mediated development of ideas and language is tension, which of course fuelled by the means of racial and social unrest, to posit a clearly “other” –centric form of programming is strictly that in the social, the social externality. The unfortunate danger and risk to the development of First Nations television in Canada is again, attributed to the distribution and acknowledgment of language and epistemology that competes with mainstream white, Eurocentric, Anglocentric hegemony. “Knowledge of a mandatory new presence on the airwaves of a constituency group whose values and programming qualities are significantly different from those of ‘mainstream’ Canadian television might very strongly challenge the silences of racists sitting quietly in their living rooms” (Roth, 263). Yet, one can only hope that someday Canada in it’s image and constant quest for multicultural synergy can rise above such social reification, to go beyond the technocapitalist rationalization that makes us see the need to signify that which is different and yet do no more about it, and finally value First Nations telemedia programming as important, culturally expressive, equal, embracing, and revolutionary. For it to be revolutionary will mean it is integral to the people of Canada in its entirety, a quality the APTN, by virtue of the CRTC, the CCTA, and the means to which media ownership parameters are commercially constructed, has limited from the very start. As Canadians we are all with the same rights to this quality of programming, to the quality of information, and to the valuable means of social expression such as that of First Peoples. Yet, the same systems at place that are set up to regulate the APTN as other channels of importance in Canada, serve to maintain formalized systems of expression. In this regard, a concern exists among critics of the APTN about that messages that are expressed, ideas and representations of the true Aboriginal experience. “Canada urgently needs to develop the talent base to support the creation of television drama productions that are written, produced, and directed by Aboriginal people” (Baltruschat, 47).

However, it seems the success of the APTN lies in the huge step of acquiring the “full legal enshrinement of Northern First People’s broadcasting transmission rights” in 1991 (Roth, 169). Though in a one-dimensional society such as Canada, where the unilateral focus of all cultural epistemology and presentation is for the purpose of rationalizing all social existence, a television network, even one charged with the purpose and drive to stand out as something culturally significant and positive, reifies that which made it necessary. Governmental apparatuses of power and master narratives based on ruling relations are not homogenous, unified, or subject to clear definitions of communal harmony. They are institutors that structure political factions, classist thinking, and thus institutionalize that which maintain subordination. To think that that any form of media ownership or control, even that in the hands of cultural significant groups, defines real externality to oppressive processes that keep them as the social “other”. We reify our existence as minorities, whether be it in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or religiosity. However, one must keep watch on this entity to discover how able it will be to realize true social and institutional self-development outside the confines of techno-capitalist doctrine.


References:
Baltruschat, D. (2004) Television and Canada’s Aboriginal communities: Seeking opportunities through traditional storytelling and digital technologies. Canadian Journal of Communication. (29) 1, 47

Comeau, P., and Santin, A. (1990) The White Paper. The First Canadians: A Profile of Canada’s Native People Today. Pp. 5-23, Toronto ON: James Lorimer and Company.

Marcuse, H. (1964). One-Dimensional Man. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press

Roth, L. (2000). Bypassing of Borders and Building of Bridges: Steps in the Construction of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network in Canada. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Roth, L. (2005). Something new in the air. Montreal, PQ: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Marcuse and Bourdieu on The Sociology of Art - 2006 Competition Version

Richard Birch
Modern Sociological Theories SOCI 3016
Professor Vardalos
Monday, April 10 2006

When considering the meaning of cultural creativity in the social, the meanings and their conceptual connotations of art, the meanings of creative expression, and the identity of the artist as both an objectified fragment and distinctive subject, it is interesting to examine the very tragic nature of the artist as perceived in sociology. What is an artist in the social? Is an artist a fragmentary entity disconnected to culture in order to create new cultural productions? Is artistic expression truly a freely constructed thing immune to the confines and restraints of technocapitalism and social hegemonic ideologies? Is an artist immune from the rationality of postmodern production and consumerist demand that in turn influences the evolution and direction of artistic freedom and expression? These are questions the sociology of art never answers. These are question that ring as most profound and subjectively important for a artist to have, an entity within the social. These are questions ignored by the very nature of sociology itself in its empirically quantitative character. These represent the tragedy of sociology of art. Yet there are two important theorists who have attempted, though not as the primary thrust of their research, to engage critical thought with explicating art in the social. By conflating artistic production with technological production, Herbert Marcuse and Pierre Bourdieu transcend the typical in social thinking on the sociology of art. In Marcuse’s book One-Dimensional Man (1964), he engages in critical analysis of art as an extension of technology and technocapital ethos, constructing connectivity to artistic alienation with the rationalization of labour and oppression. Artists are producers he argues, labourers essentially chained to having to sell their labour as artists in order to continue artistic production, not artistic expression. Bourdieu in his book Sociology in Question (1993) depicts artists as components of the social constrained by the commonality of what art is mediated from. The artist eventually breaks from the everyday socially constructed symbolic representation of the artist as a creator, and adopts immediate complicities the term artist must bring forth from creator to the consumer.

If we are to embark on a discourse of the meaning of art in the social, one has to define the identity of art and artistic creation as a form of production. The very term production is used in all forms of artistic technical definitions, from music, film, literature, architecture, dance, and dramatics. Without production there would be no art in the sense of either a humanist form of expression, or as a commodified institutional enterprise, that is if there really is any distinction to be made between these two. The question is, can art be separated from those aspects of human technocapitalist existence that are rationalized? Is art in essence, essential in true artistic form? Is there really any true artistic subjectivity for the artist and for those who experience it as consumers? In other words, is art essentially one-dimensional and can it be applied to strategies of distinction if artists are extensions of technology and postmodern capitalism?
For purposes of constructing connectivity between art and production, it is useful to conflate the impact of technology on artistic creativity in human existence with rationalization. Herbert Marcus’s book One-Dimensional Man defines people as extensions of technology. It could also be argued in analysis that people are not merely extensions of technology, but we are also subsequent to the relationship between technology and labour. We are as thus extensions of corporations, especially corporations that own and control the means of commercial and non-commercial artistic production in society. Therefore in this thinking we are also products of the relationship between corporate culture and labour culture, not precursors to either one of them. Artists do not live individual human lives as subjective entities. Artists live as objects as constructed by the corporatization of human existence. In this way artists are controlled as objects, made to believe they are subjects of their own creation and postmodern design. “Indeed, what could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the mechanization of socially necessary but painful performances” Marcuse asks (Marcuse, 1964). This phenomenon is what Marcuse calls the Freedom of Enterprise, where non-conformity to technocapitalism is essentially socially useless especially “when it entails tangible economic and political disadvantages and threatens the smooth operation of the whole” (1964). This Freedom of Enterprise is about a bilateral choice universal to economic and political socialization. One can choose the liberty of selling one’s labour, or the liberty and inevitability of starving to death (1964). Marcuse claims in his book that if people were allowed to exist without having to be subject to the mechanization and technological processes involved in the marketing of their labour, then they would become free economic agents, essentially free from this form of freedom. But freedom of enterprise is contingent on alienation according to Marcuse. For without the alienation of the labour force it can be argued that the rationalization of human existence could not be achieved to serve technocapitalism. In analysis the risk for the established processes of global oppression and the relationship between labour and the ownership of production is not the eradication of labour and of the necessity for one to sell his or her labour in order to consume, but the potential creation of nonalienated labour as the foundation of society.

Pierre Bourdieu saw this relationship of labour to human existence in a somewhat different fashion in his book Sociology in Question. He does not believe that rationalization of human existence was a product of alienation from labour and production, but more so an ethos of what he calls “distanciation” (Bourdieu1993). Distanciation is a result of strategies of distinction, where cultural practices are “always strategies for distancing oneself from what is ‘common’ and ‘easy’” (1993). Strategies for distinction are typically active in non-dominant classes for dominant classes by definition are already distinct to political economical structures as in control of that which is common epistemology. Distinction for Bourdieu is about distinguishing knowledge, institutions, and social behaviour from that which is socially constructed as vulgar or deviant. Microsocially people distinguish themselves in their interactions from that which is not consistent with what has to be loved (1993). The yield of such distinction strategies is to produce a distinction from themselves, that which is common. In one such example of this form of existential production is the utilization of technology for the creation of art and the harnessing of human creativity. For Bourdieu states,

I have myself shared in the illusion of ‘cultural (or linguistic) communism. Intellectuals spontaneously understand the relationship to a work of art as mystical participation in a common good, without rarity. My whole book argues that access to a work of art requires instruments that are not universally distributed. And consequently that the possessors of those instruments secure profits of distinction for themselves, and the rarer these instruments are (such as those needed to appropriate avant-garde works), the greater the profits. (1993)

In analysis of this idea of distinguishing that which is common and meaningless in the social, a correlation can be drawn to Marcuse’s notion that our technological relationship reifies our existence as alienated. For Marcuse, technology is accessed for all productive purposes. For Bourdieu art and creativity, even microsocially is meaningless if it is produced for all who exist in the social. For Marcuse nonalienation is the activity of labour utilized for the organization of very different relations and moral structures than for profit and commercial productivity (Marcuse, 1964). To alienate labour from that which it produces, reifies the redundancy of human existence and the power of political economic hegemony. If labour and human existence connect under a different set of goals that intend for technology to return to being extensions of creativity and artistic expression, then only the liberating alternative will ever be produced.

Consider Bourdieu’s thoughts on popular culture as correlative to his ‘cultural communism’ idea. He addresses the question of whether popular culture exists, particularly if dominant classes are passive to strategies of distinction. That which in reality resembles what people discursively explicate as popular culture and thus popularize artistic products through linguistic means, is questionable. Popular culture is common culture. Popular culture serves the dominant classes under the lens of cultural communistic thinking. Commonality in culture only reifies commonality. For Bourdieu, popular culture is incongruent with art. Popular culture is produced for commonality and common access. The relationship between the artist and that which he or she produces becomes problematic. Art and cultural capital is created. ‘Creation’ for Bourdieu is the convergence of that which makes one an artist and that which makes possible the division of labour for cultural production (1993).

The labour through which the artist makes his work and, inseparably from this, makes himself as an artist…can be described as the dialectical relationship between his ‘post’…and [that] which more or less predisposes him to occupy that post or…more or less completely to transform it. (1993).

This explanation in essence defines the artist’s ‘post’ as determined by the social conditions of his or her creative production, and as being subject to the social demands and constraints inscribed in the position he or she occupies in production (1993).

To bring connectivity to the concept of Bourdieu’s cultural communism and Marcuse’s rationality is possible. For Marcuse, art and culture is unilateral in concept; a realm of one-dimensional thought systemically regulated by the purveyors of knowledge and mass information (Marcuse, 1964).

Reason,in its application to society, has thus far been opposed to art, while art [is] granted the privilege of being rather irrational – not subject to scientific, technological, and operational Reason. The rationality of domination has separated the Reason of science and the Reason of art into the universe of domination. (1964)

Therein lies the tragedy of rationalization when thinking about the artist and artistic production. Reason converges with the function of art, as technology is itself “the instrumentality of pacification” (1964). The artist possesses insight, vision, creative wisdom, love, desire, sensuality, expressive ethos, access to technology, potential access to the public and the social, and a need to create art. All of these guide the artist to conceive and create the vision of technology and thus the construction of the machinery of art and expression. In this thinking, the essential relationship between technology and art and the conceptual practices of the two points to an explicit “rationality of art” (1964).

It seems in Marcuse’s book, art creates a universe of thought which he posits against the existing hegemonic principles of art and technology. That art, as convergent and connected to human existence, is also rationalized and alienated in a technical universe. In contrast to a technical universe, the artistic universe is one of illusion and resembles “a reality which exists as the threat and promise of the established one” (1964). As Bourdieu intends for the artist to distinguish himself or herself from the commonality of the social and from what is culturally constructed as artistic, he also calls for sociology to shift from measuring and giving account of cultural consumption to measuring and examining cultural production. Sociology accepts this distinction, but does not favour it when empirically analysing what art means to the social in regards to cultural communism. Sociology and it’s bedfellow statistics, “belittle and crushes, flattens and trivializes artistic creation: that is sets the great and the small on the same footing, at all events fails to grasp what makes the genius of the greatest artists” (Bourdieu, 1993). Malraux philosophically implied that art imitates art. Sociology only then imitates and thus reifies it’s own limits as sociology. Sociology of art fails tragically to account for what is important in art, that artistic creation cannot be nor should it be explained wholly in conditions and language of demand. Art is not merely an aesthetic, just as artists in the social are not simply fragments in the social they wish to express about. Artists, as sociologists are also subjective texts, struggling to strategize their own critical distinction from the commonality of postmodern human reality (1993). Yet, in reality when measuring the meaning of art in the social, Bourdieu posits an important explanation of the nature of the artist’s identity within the social.

In the encounter between a work of art and the consumer, there is an absent third party, the person who produced the work, who has made something to his taste through his capacity to transform his taste into an object, to transform it from a state of mind, or rather, a state of body, into something visible corresponding to his taste. The artist is the professional practitioner of the transformation of the implicit into the explicit, the objectification that transforms taste into an object, who realizes the potential, in other words a practical sense of beauty that can know itself only be realizing itself (1993).

Yet for Bourdieu, it is seemingly impossible for sociology to separate this conceptual utopian image of the artist with that objectification he or she is ascribed to reify. For art cannot ever realize itself. Art is not subjective in cultural communism. Art is fashioned to be common. Only through strategies of distinction can the rationality of art be dismissed or halted, and thus art as an institutional construct is therefore only ever objectified.

In comparison, for Marcuse the artist must negotiate his or her identity with the Hegelian notion that the “technological rationality of art seems to be characterized by an aesthetic ‘reduction’” (Marcuse, 1964). Marcuse aligns the rationality of the artist to the reduction of art to an object, or a “totality of objects” as he calls it, to a state in which,

The object [art] takes on the form and quality of freedom. Such transformation is reduction because the contingent situation suffers requirements which are external, and which stand in the way of its free realization…thus, the artistic transformation violates the natural object, but the violated is itself oppressive; thus the aesthetic transformation is liberation (1964).

This reduction of the aesthetic pacifies the artist into believing he or she truly engages in real artistic expression and creativity. However this reduction signifies their oppression of which the artist as an extension of technocapitalism and technology is blind to. The developing one-dimensional society changes the association between rational and irrational thought. In relation to what Marcuse claims is the insanity of rationality, that which is rational becomes the place on which irrationality exists. As for the artist, the ideas that promote love, creation, expression, and desire – the art of life, is reduced to the irrational. This Hegelian reduction of the aesthetic according to Marcuse makes the imagination of the artist an instrument of progress (1964). Through rationalization in a one-dimensional society, like all other established societies, art as methodologically progressive is subject to social and corporate abuse. The power of imagination when used for the productive purposes and function of art far exceeds any political voice that may stand up to this form of oppression. For thinking of technology on the basis of imagination, technological advancement accompanies progressive rationalization, or even more so, the realization of the imaginary (1964).

Art has not been impervious to the process of reification. All art reifies all other art in a one-dimensional, socially common society. All art reifies its own existence but only as much to a reduction of something less than itself. The tragedy of reification is that it simply portrays art, as the very essence of human existence, love, and desire as confined to one-dimensional thought. For both Marcuse and Bourdieu, to liberate the imagination from those institutions that pacify it is a political activity. The dialectical representation of art in sociology pronounces it’s own hopelessness. This very resignation is what makes the conflict productive. For this reason, tension fuels the artist for both Marcuse and Bourdieu. The artist’s greatest struggle is to deal with the social fact that freedom of thought, the freedom of creativity, and the freedom of expression in the symbolic sense can only be free in the administered material world. Without the material forces that shape the drive for resources and production, even the most profound artistic awareness and consciousness in the social will remain incapable and immobile.


References:
Bourdieu, P. (1993). Sociology in Question. (R. Nice, Trans.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Marcuse, H. (1964). One-Dimensional Man. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press.