Reading Twilight Through Foucauldian CUTS: Campbell Soup Cans and Andy Warhol - WTF!!!???

Yeh. Far out, eh.

Warhol's Campbell Soup cans on a screen and reproduced - endlessly. Signed of course for limited "original" editions. 


Campbell soup is known for making the Dorrance family very rich, for all the union problems in Camden New Jersey near where Walt Whitman lived at one time. But it is Andy Warhol who made those cans more than a household name.

Was the Campbell Soup Can a beautiful image? Was it a beautiful painting? Uh-uh.



It was a Foucauldian "cut" into the world of art history, which before had been a linear, progressive, historical field of study as artists winked at their ancestors, threw the gauntlet to the up and coming ones and enabled art historians to critique, discuss, favor, interpret psychologically, psychoanalytically, within and without the formalist frame and so on and so on. 

Warhol stopped it all dead and ushered in the era of pop art. More like a hammer and chisel than a cut.

I used to tape John McCoubrey's lectures on the History of Modern Art. Every so often he would stop dead before a painting he knew very well, and just look at it freshly, differently from the way he had previously seen it. One evening he stopped still before Warhol's Campbell Soup can. When he resumed speaking it was to say that he was seeing it differently and more importantly than he had ever seen it before but he wasn't sure why. 

Then he went on to the next image projected on the screen.

This memory kicked in for me when Baudrilard writes about Warhol's major importance to  the simulated reality we are all mostly embracing.

Baudrillard writes or talks about Rothko's complete change in his work, but says it was Warhol who completely changed art history from a linear, continuous progression to a discontinuous, abrupt, "cut" in its world.

And what has this to do with Twilight? 

Twilight is a Foucauldian "cut" in the power/knowledge matrix of sexuality when the tool (no pun intended) of genealogy is brought to bear (still no pun intended) on that field of human behavior. 

Foucault's three volume History of Sexuality spends many pages on boy love in ancient Greece, but not many pages at all on Courtly Love or Cortezia as it is often known. But never mind, Denis de Rougemont spent an entire book on Courtly Love in the Western World, where it is unique. The problem is that the History of Love in the Western World made its debut in 1940 - never out of print since then -  when Foucault was but a lad. Denis de Rougemont spends many pages rationalizing, justifying his thesis because Foucault has not yet brought genealogy into the mainstream of intellectual understanding of human behavior. Precession allows us to look back to see it clearly. 


Courtly Love was a 12th century "cut" into the grid of sexuality as it is enmeshed in the power/knowledge matrix. 

And a very deep cut it was lasting almost 800 years until the 1960's Foucauldian "cut" that we know as the "pill" came to our friendly pharmacy, adding serious "capital" to the power/knowledge matrix. Porno comes a little later and ahem again.


Twilight "cuts" once again into the fold of Courtly Love that had crusted over, formed a scab, been buried into the deep trench so that it had become invisible. Sort of. 

Stephenie Meyer has said fuck it and taken the can opener to open the "cut" up again, so that it is bleeding all over the globe like tomato soup via a beautiful vampire named Edward Cullen/Rob Pattinson. And women are feeling sexual longing,  passion,  heightened erotic feelings. It is working all the way to the bank as Scummit can attest along with Meyer.


Is Twilight a beautiful literary masterpiece? Not anymore than an image of Campbell Soup. 

But it is a fucking "cut" into the sexual matrix of power/knowledge/capital.

A "cut" changes the Dominating Discourse of an era. And it often happens with lightening speed. 

 

Aphorism - Fragment - Discontinuous - Perfect Moments - Say Good-bye to Continuity and Becoming

"I don't really want to try to sell it.

Maybe if I was selling it, I'd talk about it more."

Rob Pattinson said this in an interview on Nightline when he was asked about his romance, reported romance, relationship, whatever,  with his co-star.

To my knowledge he only said it that once, or it was only that once that it was recorded. If he repeated it it could be said that it was a maxim, or maybe even a sound-bite. 

But just once? How about an aphorism? Or a fragment?

The aphorism, the video-clip and the advert seem to share an instantaneity, rapidity and ephemerality, but the aphorism is different. Etymologically, aphorizein contains the idea of separating, isolating. It's a fragment, but a fragment that creates a whole symbolic space around it, a gap, a blank. Whereas our techniques and technologies create the instantaneous ut linked by continuity with the whole network. They are networked fragments, if I can put it that way! It's no longer possible today to establish some form of continuity, wholeness or totalization, because it will be immediately  obliterated by the system itself. You have to set against it something that apparently plays by the same rules, but stands opposed to it formally. It's in the form, then - not abstractly but in a very real way. The form alone attacks the system in its very logic. Our imaginary is evolutionistic, finalistic; everything is taken for a phase or a moment in a process of becoming. If each phase or moment is taken as successive, linked, continuous, always straining towards an ideal end goal, then all phases are subordinated to the final phase.

Still with me?

A teleological process...

A well-directed, neatly programmed evolutionism! We have to break all that down by saying that at each moment each phase is perfect in its incomparable singularity, the fruit is perfect, but no more perfect than the flower.

...You reject the whole work of the negative.

The flower is perfect. It isn't necessary to refer it to any dialectics of nature! It's the same with everything. In its detail, the world is perfect.

 Baudrillard - Fragments (p. 26)

There's more of course, so read him.

Rob Pattinson as Edward Cullen walking into the cafeteria is perfect. Edward Cullen in New Moon and Eclipse is perfect. So is Kristen Stewart in all three films. Rob is no longer a boy now but a man and Kristen has become a woman. The girl and the boy were perfect. The woman and the man are perfect. 

I think Rob Pattinson as Edward and as himself is perfect and he is the embodiment of what Baudrillard is speaking about in this interview. And the recognition of this the fans have, has a great deal to do with Rob worship. He has been willing to be himself, in all his different moods, insecurities, clumsiness, ecstatic, gorgeous, sexy, unshaven, dirty,  furious, depressive moments. And each moment has been perfect, hasn't it. Not a question.

Reading Savage's Hide and Drink Through Twilight

There's more here on Hide and Drink.

Hide and Drink

Edward Cullen Entering the Cafeteria

This is the moment the audience and Bella first see Edward Cullen in Twilight. 

For those who haven't seen the film or read the books,  this is prior to the scene in the biology lab where Edward imagines all the ways he is going to kill Bella and drink her blood. 

All this precedes the opening of Hide and Drink but it is not necessary for reading Hide and Drink, but does add to the horror. Hide and Drink is a fanfic based on Meyer's Twilight.

The resonances with H.P.Lovecraft are inescapable. In Meyer's Twilight Lovecraft is only on the periphery. In Hide and Drink Lovecraft breathes through it. In his book on Lovecraft, Houellebecq has given us a portrait that is loving, respectful and profound. And he has said about Lovecraft, How does he do it! And in fact you cannot know. Lovecraft is all seduction and there is really no way to produce his seductive horror without entering the Order of Seduction and leaving the Order of Production, mimicry,reproduction far behind. I have already said elsewhere that this is what Savage does in Hide and Drink.

Savage has created an Edward from his Double, the monster that emerges and is kept down in the  biology lab scene, but which takes precedence in Hide and Drink. Edward goes to Bella's house, attacks her, drinks from her and instead of draining her and killing her has the idea that if he keeps her he can go on drinking indefinitely until and unless he kills her on purpose or accidentally. So he abducts her and makes her his captive. 

I was taking her blood in gulps. I had to slow down or she would be dead in seconds.And when she dies, this blood will die with her.

There was no other blood like this. Once she was gone, it would no longer be within my grasp. But if I stopped now, she would heal. Her body would make more. The blood would replenish. I could drink again. The promise of more – it was the only incentive that could have caused me to stop.

My tongue slipped over the cut, sealing it. (H&D 1 Bite and Run) And here we have Baudrillard's Impossible Exchange.

He takes her to a remote cabin in Canada. He knows he has to ration her blood, so he decides on every three days. We feel the excessiveness of this and how it weakens her and our anxiety increases with hers. When the three days are up, and she has finished her last meal of the day:

Once she finished her final meal of the day and started to clean up, I decided I had waited long enough.

I inhaled deeply.

There was a difference in the scent from the day before, even if it was slight. It was a little darker, deeper, and more pungent. I watched it flow through the vein in her neck as she reached down into the sudsy water for another supper dish.

I stepped up behind her, my finger drawn there, to that spot just under her ear. I ran my finger along the bluish line and her body stiffened when I touched her.

"Its time," my voice came out in a hoarse whisper. Her breath caught in her throat. (3 Cry and Consume)

And so we enter into a rhythm. The days after he feeds he is more relaxed, he tries to make her comfortable, gets movies for them to watch, is considerate. Gradually his anxiety builds up as his need increases again. But the reader has entered her horror. We know the feeding time is coming again and we, as does Bella, anticipate it in fear. It is the waiting that permeates everything between them and us also. This is the skill Lovecraft has in his stories. Everything is quiet but completely apprehensive, the terror an awful presence. Worse because it is silent and invisible. We wait for Edward's words,

It's time.

Because this is when Death stands there in the room..                                                                                                              
I absolutely could not read this without thinking and feeling the whole time of Jaycee Dugard. Garrido, like Edward, is predictable. They both perseverate, repeat, and the horror of Jaycee feeling the rhythm of his need, knowing the time is approaching again, and being alone in the meantime as Bella is not, is to experience her feelings in an almost intolerable way. Savage has created a fiction that informs us with a knowing. It is worth far more than all the circulating information, fed us by the media, that we know about her captivity.

Edward takes her into the bedroom, restraining her for the drinking and then holds her and soothes her afterwards telling her how sorry he is over and over and over and he knows he will never stop. In Bella's despair she clings to him because there is no one else there for comfort as she sobs.

And it is so very erotic. The reviews often mention that fact and the reviewers feel perverted for feeling that way. So we enter DeSade's world I think. Because it really is incredibly erotic in the way it affects the reader.

For Savage's Hide and Drink Edward

The blood blossom flowers

At the fragile girl's throat

The vampire leans down

Holding her imprisoned supine form

His mouth open

His lips caressing

Silken skin suckling

Plumbing pulsing each precise

droplet

Throbbing into him

Drinking and calming his frenzy

Then his venom seals her wound.

Saving her for yet

Another day

Another night

Another time

Until...

The novel enters the long slow time of Proust, of primal time, of eating and waiting and sleeping and dreaming and nightmares. The outside world recedes and its demands dissolve. 

Kenzaburo Oe: Every time you stand at a crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you...(A Personal Matter)

Oe on captivity and confinement in Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids: 

Nonetheless, for aliens like captured wild beasts to be safe before others watching them, it is best to lead the will-less existence of a stone, flower or tree:a purely observed existence. (22)

A dissertation of Marguerite Duras's work at the University of Helsinki:

Sirkka Knuuttila

Fictionalising Trauma

The Aesthetics of Marguerite Duras’s India Cycle

Kristen Stewart and Michael Angarano and then Rob Pattinson

I am a fan of William Burroughs cut-up technique. This is a variation on it of Kristen Stewart and Michael Angarano. He is bored with her. People that are bored with you are bored with you because they are boring, not because you are boring. I find these pics sad but very instructive. Many young girls are in a relationship with a guy who is bored with them. The girl will dress differently, try to look hot, do different things with her hair, her make-up, work out, try to get Megan Fox's body, do surgery, even acquire degrees and go to graduate school, all in the hopes of interesting him or the new guy, and on and on and on until you get too old to care anymore. One can look at these pics and interpret for pages and pages, and all that does is make you look smart. Interpretation is about Dominance. Who does it better. When you are good at it it is hard to let it go. Foucault takes you through his thinking on it, as does Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation, and by the time the two of them finish with your head, you have to give it up. So while I can think of dozens of reasons why Angarano looks so bored with Kristen Stewart, I'm just going to flip that kind of thinking off. (God I wish that baggage would stay in the trash for good. I'm getting better though.)

Bored Again

During this time Kristen Stewart films Speak where she meets Angarano when she is thirteen and begins to go with him at fourteen. She films Cake Eaters at sixteen and Into the Wild at sixteen. Stewart has said she does films that her heart chooses. In each of these three films she is longing and yearning and interested in sex. (She gets raped in Speak, but she is hot in the beginning of the film.) she is in Adventureland just before Twilight and while not so yearning in it, she  begins to look for intimacy. She is lovely in all of them, but   Cake Eaters is a performance she may equal in her career but she will not surpass it. She is that perfect in it. She is luminous in Into the Wild and tragic. She secures the lead in Twilight. The rest is history.


To the left is one of the Twilight premieres. This is Stewart's big night.

Cake Eaters to the left and below it Speak. On the
bottom right a still from Cake Eaters.

More Alive with Rob

Kristen Stewart as Tracy in Into the Wild

 

 Rob Pattinson is interested in her. Rob Pattinson is an interesting person. 

Kristen trying to be affectionate and well.....Michael is just bored.

If you have seen Kristen Stewart in Catch That Kid (can't find the pic I want) she climbs a wall. In this film she has beautifully molded shoulders, strong, lovely, straight.

Now look at her shoulders in the pic with M and K playing at musical instruments, and the rest of the pics with Michael. Her shoulders are slumping, her body is slumping. The Inscription of the Body in adolescence is beginning. Her shoulders turn inward, protecting her, just like Bella Swan's do.

You will see that she is thinking of herself as boring. The subject/object dyad cannot be separated. They are not independent. She is being slowly shaped, her body and her mind into thinking of herself as boring.  Just after Twilight she said that acting was the only thing she could do. This is the secret meaning of Country Strong. When Kelly Canter is not on stage performing, she BORES her husband to numbness. When she realizes that she is only a simulacrum, there is no original Kelly anymore because she is in fact boring when she is not performing, there are only flashes of who she once was, she kills herself. A beautiful beautiful way under appreciated film and a performance by Paltrow unequaled by even herself.


Kristen's Stewart's salvation lay in her marvelous films, and the recognition she received by other actors for her excellent performances: Sean Penn; Robert deNiro; Donald Sutherland; William Hurt; Maria Bello; The cast in Objects of Safety; Jody Foster; and so on. 

Fanfic Review: Soulmates, Feelings, Belonging By CaraNo

Soulmates, Feelings, Belonging by CaraNo

The Dominating Discourse in all of this genre of fanfic is sex, graphic hard porn sex in thousands of  stories based on Meyer's characters of Bella and Edward and the rest from Twilight. Although the names are the same, the characters are drawn with different attributes and qualities, different selves elaborated, changed, and different plots but always the true everlasting hot love between Edward and Bella.


People know what they do. They frequently know why they do what they do. But what they don't know is what they do does. Or: People know what they say. They frequently know why they say what they say. But what they don't know is what they say does. - Michel Foucault


You must change the way you think.   

The theme  of Twilight is Time as in Proust. Without this slow time, an earlier time, and the leisure time that goes along with it, we cannot have the story of gazing, seduction, imagination, contemplation and growing feelings. Most of the authors do not know where to go when this has run its course and sexual penetration has taken place. Time then accelerates, plot enters, and the soap opera, mystery, excitement and denouement begins and ends.  As soon as time accelerates, they all fall apart. So they go for the normal HE, usually with marriage, house and children. Car too. Even Meyer could not sustain the internal dialogue for her entire series, but the uneven saga is still absorbing and addictive.

Foucault has given us a toolbox to use to change our thinking. The toolbox is genealogy. He got it from Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals but so reviled is Nietzsch from the poison of Hitler's admiration during the Third Reich that even the brave Foucault said he did not fully acknowledge him earlier and wished he had done so.

But once Foucault has convinced you, and if you read him seriously and thoroughly, you will be convinced, because his exquisite powerful prose leaves you no place to hide from his devastating logic. So linear time, history, progress, Marxism and Freud's developmental theory go down into the  dirt. To think differently requires you stop thinking in the dialectic ( Vija Kinski in Cosmopolis) and think genealogically. Until you find Baudrillard and his Forget Foucault, but don't find him too fast. Stay with Foucault until you are saturated. Or until your panties are soaked.

In CaraNo's Soulmates, Feeling,  Belonging a Foucauldian eye  trains you to see within the folds (pun intended), the words, thoughts, feelings, nuances, subtleties that pass quickly and don't return. The parts you are barely going to notice which quickly get submerged. This is the part of history that hides in the archives and reveals the Dominating Discourse of an era, the part that was censored. All that was so hidden invisibly, it was smothered or not allowed to be heard or seen. When an irruption occurs, it appears as a 'cut' in the DD, but while you are in the DD you will not become aware of the cut until much much later. I assert that Twilight is just such a cut. bringing with it an entire change in thinking for many women concerning their sexual feelings and practices and their choices in men.

Back to Soulmates and CaraNo. Hidden within the folds of this story are rather amazing treasures that few are going to notice. Put on your Foucaudian glasses if you don't have Fouauldian eyes, and look with me.

It opens with Bella in a boring unhappy marriage with Jacob. They have been childhood friends, married after high school, go away to NYU to university and come back to Forks. Bella is in a kind of zombie state as in New Moon and decides to see a therapist. So her relationship with Jacob has progressed in linear time, developing, with no transgression.

I should feel frustrated. I should miss writing. I should be sad for not caring. But I'm a robot. I feel nothing. Chapt 1

Here she is mirroring Eric Packer in Cosmopolis: He didn't know what he wanted. And of course Packer indulges in some hot sex with different partners during the day. But DeLillo is going to break this open for you.

On her way in to her first appointment she meets Jasper, whom she knew in high school, had a crush on, and who has returned to Forks, and her therapist is Edward who lives in a loving homosexual relationship with Jasper.

I decided to tease him to relieve the tension, "So, how was lunch? Did you enjoy him- I mean it… I mean, was it mindblowing… the food, that is," I smirked.

 "Wow, good looks and a smooth talker. Jasper never stood a chance, did he?"

"Okay, Bella," he chuckled with a shake of his head, "How about we start, huh? I need to prove myself now that I am in fact a professional."

"Oh, I'm sure you are," I smiled innocently. Chapt 1

So far its not bad. The therapy sessions are handled well. It's basically pop psychology but decently done. Edward asks questions and Bella talks with her eyes closed. This Bella is funny and assertive and witty when she occasionally comes out of her torpor during the therapy hour. When they get to discussing sex these amazing vignettes come out.

I continued, "I've never been satisfied by him, and I wanted us to try new things. He didn't want that. I gave up trying. Chapt. 1

"That's when I first realized that I didn't just want more, but I needed it. I recognized myself in what they were doing. So, I started reading about some stuff online that I wanted to try, and I would also talk to Alice. I would bring it up with Jake, or sometimes surprise him, but he never responded well."

"Well, yeah, I brought it up. The first time it wasn't really anything special. Just some sexy lingerie, a vibrator, the suggestion of trying more positions. That was Alice's advice – to start off slow – and I agreed.

"I think it was the third year in college, and Alice was once again the inspiration. She wasn't with Alec anymore. She was with Tanya. And I found it very erotic. That was my trigger to bring it up with Jake again. I thought that maybe what I suggested wasn't enough… maybe he wanted more. So, I suggested more toys, and also a threesome."

"The last time I approached Jake was when I was writing my fourth book. It was about a man and a woman this time, and my hopes were to involve Jake a little. There was one thing in particular that I really wanted to try – and because I was writing the book from the female character's point of view, I wanted to be thorough, and explain the feelings in detail. But when I brought anal sex up with Jake, he was repulsed."

.... "Yeah, so he didn't want that. But I didn't want my book to suffer, so I did extensive research on the subject instead. I interviewed Alice, Tanya, and a few of their friends – both male and female – I read books, and Tanya also hooked me up with a bunch of toys I didn't even know existed.

"Since she and Alice had agreed on not seeing men together – but still wanted to feel something more than fingers – they had a fucking room full of toys." I grinned at the memory of them showing me. "So, in order to get as close as I could without cheating, I used the toys Tanya gave me… on myself. It wasn't easy but still very pleasurable, and I really wish Jake would've been there… but he wasn't. I gave up after that. Chapt 5

Bella is longing for intimacy, and feels sex is the doorway to it.
But what if?
Suppose Jacob was really a good guy, didn't cheat, compatible with Bella, worked every day, reliable, nice but there was no hot loving feelings between them, which is the case in Soulmates. You know like all the married couples you see at the mall and the supermarket. The guy you look across the room at while watching TV. What you are craving is intimacy, lustful affection and sex, those feelings Rob Pattinson gives you. But you're never going to get that from DH, a contemptuous term, the initials these fangirls give their hubby.

So you go out and buy sex toys. Maybe you even plan a threesome or foursome. Something to add spice to the conjugal sex, married or not. Buy magazines at the supermarket checkout counter. They always have articles on bringing back the passion in your marriage or relationship. Have an affair. Get a divorce. Remarry and find the same-old, same-old. Shop until you drop. Consume not cum but toys.

And folks that's what most people do. That's the sad dirty little secret. And there it is hidden in this fanfic with its hard core porno sex.  Hyper-sex is porn and there's no sex in it, just the production of seduction and sex. Just go shopping for sexy stuff, get a facial, get a makeover, do some surgery, read some fanfic, change partners, shop, have another kid, whatever, to produce seduction. But you can't. Seduction cannot be produced. 

Twilight Premiere

Patti Smith - Because the Night

This is what CaraNo's Bella wants, so go to youtube and watch and listen to it