Affect, Rhetoric, & The Body | Prof. Bay | Paper #3 |November 21, 2019
Virginity has long been conceptualized as holding exchange value, the kind of thing (or concept) that has worth, not for itself, but rather for the ways in which it can be changed. This view is, undoubtedly, a perverted and objectifying “reflection of masculine value,” one that Irigaray interrogates on those materialist terms before shifting to a different understanding of virginity as “a woman’s possession, a natural and spiritual possession,” a kind of being and becoming marked by “woman’s conquest of the spiritual” (in Salamon, 158-160). Change and transformation run through this examples in many ways. Virginity is a property predicated on the ability to change, but more importantly, Irigaray theorizes a change in conception first by arguing within the established discourse and then transforming the discourse about virginity into something more humane and existentially empowering.
Sometimes change in concepts doesn’t mean giving up one view for another. Simultaneously holding or considering different understandings of the same notion can give rise to insight, such as when Thompson acknowledges, “that tenderness can mean both tender, as in hurt to the touch, and open, as in vulnerable” (98). Here, change can be found in holding up both meanings and, tenderly (one might say), considering how these different understandings of tenderness play out in experience. How might the capacity of tenderness, as being vulnerable, arise from having been made tender through being hurt? Can one be tender in both ways at the same time? What are our ethical responsibilities toward people who treat us with tenderness? Change in perspective opens the simplicity of ordinariness into the complexities of the ordinary.
The ordinary, as Stewart theorizes it, is change, the possibility for change, and the place where change happens: “The ordinary is a moving target” (93). Movement has been a hallmark of (and in some cases a synonym for) change, at least since Heraclitus said we can’t cross the same river twice. This points to kinetic and dynamic metaphors for change. But change in the ordinary shows up in other ways: “The ordinary can turn on you. Lodged in habits, conceits, and the loving and deadly contacts of everyday sociality, it can catch you in something bad. Or good” (160). Paradoxically, the change arising in flipping or turning or inverting comes not from instability, but rather “practices, understood as material bodies of work or styles that have gained enough stability over time, through, for example, the establishment of corporeal routines and specialized devices, to reproduce themselves” (Thrift, 8). Codification through repetition allows change to appear as flipping or turning the normal.
Turning the normal can also be a way of tuning to the abnormal. “What is most surprising about the book is its focus on domestic scenes and the ordinary details of everyday life,” Stewart explains of The Turner Diaries, a racist and fascist novel (56-57). The severity of the mundane infiltrates not by making changes to stand out, but by what it makes palpable and easier to fit in. The mundane can be severe, but sever the extra-ordinary and you’ll find the ordinary.
The ordinary is “not a challenge to be achieved or an ideal to be realized, but a mode of attunement, a continuous responding to something not quite already given and yet somehow happening” (127). Change is both a splitting and the work of reconciliation.
Thompson works to reconcile many experiences and bases of knowledge in Teaching with Tenderness, but perhaps most interesting is her effort to reconcile her position as a “newly minted PhD” with the work of designing courses while being true to her yogic and contemplative practices (40). Finding balance and points of integration between personal and academic-professional training is surly a challenge for most teachers, but the specific identity of a “newly minted PhD” is striking in its monetary metaphor. Money is minted. Money is the archetype of exchange value. Imbuing the PhD degree with this kind of value understood alongside training in other traditions raises another question about change: how does a change in identity or position entail or permit a change in the ways that we reconcile ourselves with the ordinary? The PhD is unique with respect to this question, not only because it does serve as license to practice in particular ways, but also because “it is verification that you have been willing to be out of your body for an extended period of time. You get that status by being out of your body” (62). Thompson explains the work of completing a PhD as this reconciliation and dissociation to her friend and fellow professor, Tyrone, “a six-foot-one Black man with dreadlocks” (61). While Thompson’s comment makes clear that Tyrone had to change himself in order to earn his PhD, we might wonder what changes this suggests for the institution of higher education—sites were chief administrators refer to talented Black students as “the rarest creatures in America” (Mitch Daniels, quoted in Purdue Exponent, 11/21/19).
Material changes; bodily changes; changes in identity, position, and perspective all soak in the ordinary. This metaphysical malleability is a characteristic of non-representational theory as it ” has always given equal weight to the vast spillage of things” (Thrift, 9). Non-representational theory also posits that “the performing arts may help us to inject a note of wonder back into a social science which, too often, assumes that it must explain everything” (Thrift, 12). Perhaps an example from the world of art is particularly felicitous to consider understandings and experiences of change?
In 2018, a canvas print of Banksy’s Girl With Balloon appeared in Sotheby’s art auction house in London, selling for the equivalent of $1.3 million. Girl With Balloon depicts a girl, stenciled in black ink, wearing a skirt, standing with an upward gaze toward a red heart-shaped balloon floating just beyond her outstretched hand. The girl’s flowing skirt and hair suggest that the balloon has been blown away by the wind and in this fleeting moment she yearns for it before it floats away forever—or perhaps she let it go on purpose.
The artist, Banksy, is a well-known British graffiti artist and vandal who has been producing street graffiti in England and around the globe since the 1990s. His work is stylistically stenciled and usually laden with political commentary and criticism of consumer culture. Interestingly, his personal identity (his legal name) is unknown. Banksy goes to great lengths to maintain his anonymity, primarily because most of his street graffiti is technically illegal. Like the postmodern death of the author, Banksy’s art embodies the notion that “non-representational theory is resolutely anti-biographical and pre-individual” (Thrift, 7).
Most remarkably, the auction of Girl With a Balloon was unlike any other art auction. Moments after the final bid was secured and the auction closed, the crowd heard the hum of a small motor. Inside the frame of the painting, Banksy hid a paper shredder which was controlled remotely. Before everyone’s eyes, Girl With a Balloon was grabbed up by the shredders’ teeth and cut into thin strips. The crowd in the auction house was aghast and the remnants were briskly moved to a secure location. Astoundingly, the purchaser of the painting agreed to go through with the deal, speculating that the shredded painting might increase in value. Following the performance, Banksy changed the piece’s name from Girl With a Balloon to Love is in the Bin. Sotheby’s claims this is “the first work in history ever created [and simultaneously destroyed] during a live auction.”
Just as Irigrary reclaims and reconstructs the notion of virginity, Banksy extends his [anonymous] artistry one moment further than his audience anticipates. Perception of completion is just a play on the ordinary; a setup for change; a pregnant pause. How does site determine what kinds of transformations will be absorbed into the ordinary and which ones will be met with resistance or ignored altogether? How do you experience the wonder (of art)? How do you appreciate when others wonder? David Bowie says it best: “I watch the ripples change their size // But never leave the stream // Of warm impermanence” (Changes, 1971).