Helmut Newton, dead at 83

Anyway, Newton found a pretty cool way to die and I'm sure he's partying in hell right now with Robert Palmer and lots of suicidal models.

'I’ve always liked the idea of cowboys — the way they look, they way they walk, especially in the movies. Why? A cowboy stands a certain way. He’s got a gun here, a gun there, his hands are always ready to draw. So I make the girls into cowgirls — with their hands ready to reach for the guns. But I don’t tell them, I just show them. I stand for them. I show them exactly what they should be doing.'

John Currin is the same animal for art. Painting two types of women, big breated women and strong (small chested) women. Genius!

In regards to the comment of how he shows his models what he wants, he's not capturing personalities, he's creating an image. Models are supposed to be a blank canvas, they're just tools, big bendy dolls. They are there to assist in the production of his vision. The same can be said of actresses, they are doing what they're told, saying what they're supposed to say. The creation of these kinds of art lends itself to a natural exploitation of its tools, but just because they are created by men using women does not necessarily mean the women are subservient to the men.

Did you eventually see the film, then?

Just my opinion. I don't claim to be an expert.

No problem whatsoever, but everyone has a different fantasy and this big metallic cowboy woman in suspenders is not mine.

You mean, as opposed to Philip Guston? As opposed to William Eggleston? Or is the contrast with the Pirelli calendar?

I'm not criticising Newton or Currin's desires. Or anyone who looks at their work and likes what they see. That's absolutely cool. Absolutely cool.

What bugs me about Currin and Newton's works is how it dovetails so perfectly with stereotypes of pre-liberated feminity. It's not that I can't see the power of these stereotypes for desire and eroticism or that I would prefer to police desire and eroticism so that it is only kind and sweet and good and fair. It's just that when I look at pictures - especially art, which is supposed to be self-reflective on this score - I want to see an attempt to push the conventions into a more interesting territory.

I'm not criticising their - or anybody else's - desire or pleasure; I just want more interesting art. Or maybe what I'm saying is that I've got no interest in telling anyone else what to like or what not to like, but I get pleasure out of seeing artists deal with these issues (its a kind of skill in itself) as well as taking pleasure from the pictures or whatever. Currin and Newton, in a way, don't offer me that pleasure.

I think it's actually a caricature of post-liberated (and somewhat post-human) femininity, a kind of Terminator idea of ultra-tough women. Has anyone ever met someone like that, outside of an SM club?

1. big breated objects of impotent lust, and
2. flat chested strong women (threatening mother-figures)

If this is post-feminist, then its 'post-ness' is uncannily antedeluvian. Don't these 'types' strike you as all-too-familiar?

Newton's women are images of strength on the condition that their strength is sexualised (ie limited to the sphere of sexual play). This is also an antedeluvian trope. The strongest women in pre-feminist literature are sexual predators.

I know these two artists work in very different ways and there are some important differences between them, but comparisons are not that difficult to sustain.

FITE!

Currin, I would say, loves something closer to women as they really are on the Benny Hill Show

http://www.supervert.com/essays/art/images/currin/currin_2.jpg

no, it would be like "learning about something before expressing one's opinion thereof"

Come anticipate my next album, Thomas. Do that? Sorry, you have to buy it now!

My point exactly, Thomas!

No it wasn't!

Compare Manet's "Une Bar aux Folies-Bergère": woman as thinking for herself, resistant to the sexualising gaze, etc etc. Wouldn't do much for the marketing industry, though, admitted.

Newton: 1940s calendar girl reborn tougher, more metallic, 'hard as a man', even naked. As though the pin-up girl on the WWII aircraft had actually fused with the fuselage and come back as a robot.
Currin: By the 1990s we're kind of bored with Angie Dickinson as 'Police Woman', and with this stereotype of the woman 'tough as any man'. So we get the return of the repressed. Women are women after all! The shock of the womb. Transgression! The strangeness! The otherness! There is something here which is different from the world of men! Maybe something valuable!

No problem whatsoever, but everyone has a different fantasy and this big metallic cowboy woman in suspenders is not mine.

*

Momus, I never took you as someone who will only acknowledge and applaud their own fantasia. It seems quite egotistic, dull and conceited to me. And though Kill Bill isn’t exactly a documentary, and so is quite free to play with the conservative notion of woman, I feel it can be easily presumed that there’s a myriad of females out there who could effortlessly kick your emaciated ass. You just happen to encircle yourself with delicate, childlike, vulnerable Nipponese.

PS – what about… you know? Last week, my rectum! Fantasias are cool.

http://www.faheykleingallery.com/images/photographs/bourdin_g/bourdin_01_bg.jpg

But isn't this paleo-feminist idea of the strong woman who is 'just as hard as a man' actually tremendously conservative? Doesn't it go a long way towards erasing the difference of women altogether? You know, when they switched from abled to disabled police series in the 70s (Ironside) and from male to female (Police Woman), that was a way of saying 'They may be female / disabled, but they are still men! Well, that's great if all your emotional investment is in the penis, and you want all difference to be erased. Otherwise, it's a step backwards, not forwards.

You forgot 'submissive'! Aren't you post-feminist, post-stereotype types always meant to add that?

The conservative suggestion is that of “man” and “woman” at all, in terms of generalization. There are weak men and strong women, dumb women and smart men, emotional men and emotionless women. Kill Bill represents a number of women as strong (to a fantastic extreme), yes, but it still has the odd lady screaming in the corner… and the odd man being castrated.

You forgot 'submissive'! Aren't you post-feminist, post-stereotype types always meant to add that?

And what is it you post-modernist types call a spade these days?

or your persecutors turn out to be (are turned into) exactly what you desire.

I hate to disappoint you, but men and women exist, and differ. They exist -- and differ -- on a basic biological level, and on the level of cultural identities. Let's not try to re-invent the wheel, otherwise we'll be here all millenium.

Your position is contradictory. You are saying that there are no gender essences, but that you applaud those who challenge the essences there... are.

The problem is how do we understand those differences, and I'm afraid, Momus, that you often don't seem to understand those differences at all well. I mean, when you say that Currin paints women as women again (after representations of women as men) you're going way beyond recognising men and women as different, you're fixing those differences on very stereotypical terms.

Woman as womb is woman as woman, for instance. Jesus! As if the idea of woman as woman isn't bad enough.

I’m not disappointed at all by this fact. I celebrate it, though the biological differences are generally do with reproduction -- e.g. intercourse being more to do with emotion in women than in men coming from the female’s desire for the male to remain and help with their child’s upbringing –- and most of the rest, from tradition and culture. But you don’t seem to appreciate that the difference between certain women dwarves the difference between “man” and “woman”. Sure, these women are not generally celebrated as “ordinary,” but then not all music is pop.

Your position is contradictory. You are saying that there are no gender essences, but that you applaud those who challenge the essences there... are.

I didn’t say that there are no gender essences, I just said that conservative thinking prescribes these should be taken as unambiguous and genetic, neither of which is true. I applaud Uma Thurman in Kill Bill in the same way that I applaud Chung Li in Street Fighter.

I don't think that's true, although it's a subjective call. Watching my sister's children, I can see that they have different personalities and different genders. But it seems to me that gender is more likely to determine what they think about stuff than personality. Robbie wants to design computer games. Now, is that because he's an introvert or because he's male? Ellie doesn't seem very interested in the computer. Is that because she's extravert, or because she's female?

That he does comes probably comes from his biology – computer game = violence = male. Whether he actually does will be determined more by his personality within his sex.

But when you read the journal, you quickly get a sense of whether someone is male of female. Within a few lines, in fact.

What about when you read Middlemarch?

Momus is the Chief of the Gender Police!

In fact, he can't look at a man or a woman without seeing man-as-man, man-as-woman, woman-as-woman and woman-as-man. This is perfect for his compulsive gender policing, because even cases that do not fit the biological determinsm (such as a feminine man) he simply re-categorises according to the fixed gender categories (man-as-woman). Sorted!

Gender is biologically determined, you silly!

and that the exact cultural outcomes of biology fall within a pretty limited field.

Now you're misrepresenting what I said. 'Exact outcomes' and 'limited field' don't really represent my statement about the relationship between the biological signified and the cultural signifier being arbitrary, do they?

Momus is the Chief of the Gender Police!

Everyone knows that Angie Dickinson is Chief of the Gender Police.

even cases that do not fit the biological determinsm (such as a feminine man) he simply re-categorises according to the fixed gender categories (man-as-woman)

I like how your words 'a feminine man' are blameless and neutral, apparently, while mine 'man-as-women' are tremendously guilty. I mean, we're saying such different things with those words, aren't we?

So, the set of attitudes etc ascribed culturally to women (the feminine) can be exhibited as much by men as by women. This is why it is perfectly possible to have a feminine man (or a feminine woman!) without this in any way equating with man-as-woman or woman-as-woman. Simple.

Gender is both biological and cultural. A gene, and a meme. (Or if you prefer, there is the noun female, a denotation, and the adjective feminine, a connotation.) Now, I'm happy to accept that the relationship between the gene and the meme is somewhat arbitrary, and flexible. But there is a relationship between denotation and connotation, between gene and meme. You are depending on that when you say:

a feminine man.

You are depending on a reliable link existing in my mind between female and a certain set of qualities we think of as related to that biological fact. You are using the stereotypes just as much as I am, even if you may wish to subvert established meanings (and you haven't really made clear where that's going, if it's just going towards erasure of the feminine, or erasure of the masculine as well. I'd like to know!).

I quite accept that females may, in time, attach what we now think of as male memes to their female biological template. I think it would be a pity if this meant merely the erasure of what we have thought of as feminine. And I have to feel suspicious of people who want some erasures and not others.

and now who's calling whom "conservative," hahahahahahaha

I'm not at all saying that when gender is re-assigned on the level of memes, 'mere anarchy is loosed on the world'. What I'm saying is, what happens to pluralism, what happens to difference? I'm particularly interested in this because I consider the idea that there is one right way of doing things the biggest misconception in the world right now, one that is destroying ways of life as it is destroying species, languages, ways of thinking and being. And I fear that, to many, being feminine is now simply seen as wrong. Being 'feminine' is like being a speaker of gaelic or any other endangered language. That's why I applaud John Currin for looking at what's 'feminine' and not Helmut Newton, who seems to want to erase it in his pictures.

I'm particularly interested in this because I consider the idea that there is one right way of doing things the biggest misconception in the world right now, one that is destroying ways of life as it is destroying species, languages, ways of thinking and being. And I fear that, to many, being feminine is now simply seen as wrong. Being 'feminine' is like being a speaker of gaelic or any other endangered language.

I’m sorry Momus, but you really are unsurpassed at lumping groups together. Whether it’s categorising by gender (women), race (Japanese) or location (Britain), you make sweeping comments that are frankly, unacceptable and misrepresentative, particularly in the way your generalisations are inherently subjective (for example Britain vs. Japan). You say that your approve of pluralism, but then you tell us that “the car” is bad, everyone should strive to be thin and that the BBC should be changed so that our television can be more like America’s… there is a strong whiff of homogeny coming from the majority of your beliefs.

Fine, if this was 1960, that would be the stereotype. But there has been a new stereotype since then, the Newton-Angie Dickinson-Madonna-Lisa Lyons etc etc stereotype, the hard woman. And Currin is subverting that. He is transgressing against the very mentality you still hold dear, a mentality which, I put it to you, is erasing feminine values in the name of a spurious 'feminism'.

it does things you're not comfortable with, it seems! but that doesn't of-itself mean they're not infinitely ludic, potentially revolutionary, etc. it sounds as though there are a lot of other cultural issues at play in your anti-Newtonianisms. physician, heal thyself, etc.

xpost "Currin is subverting by being an old-school reactionary!" Jesus, Momus, give that schtick a rest, would you?

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0348/levin.php

http://www.sensualism.com/beauty/

As for the feminine, I'm not consigning the feminine to the past, conservatism or nostalgia; I am arguing that a certain restricted version of the feminine (one that assumes it is the only legitimate or proper version of the feminine) is not full enough to match the variety and potential of the feminine.

If there are versions of the feminine that are suppressed by the dominant (1940-50s) ideology of the feminine, then you could argue that anyone who restricts feminity to that model is actually the one that hates feminity (or hates unfamiliar versions of feminity).

If you want another example look at how Sam Taylor-Wood's early work http://212.91.251.238/artwork_images/706/664.jpg

is first received as brutal, punkish and philistine, but ends up being described in terms of its contraposto and references to the Fine Art tradition.

'For all his provocations and contrarian tendencies, Currin is oddly risk-averse as an artist—or maybe he's just well-defended. It's not that he doesn't take risks—he paints what he likes to paint, even if it means weathering accusations of misogyny, sexism, ageism, and homophobia. But he also injects just enough irony into his work to inoculate it against the possibility of debilitating failure. Because when a figurative painting goes wrong, the result can be really embarrassingly bad. When one of Currin's paintings goes wrong, his sly humor, perversity, and bad-is-good sensibility come running to the rescue. All of which makes Currin's work easy to like, but hard to love.'

What I find exasperating in that is the idea that because Currin paints women in an ambiguous way, he is a misogynist. And because he paints a gay couple in their kitchen, he might be a homophobe. This seems to me typical American stuff. Leaving the viewer in a place which contains contradictions arouses extraordinary anxiety and resentment. Yet this is precisely where Currin wants the viewer to be:

"paintings of old women at the end of their cycle of sexual potential … between the object of desire and the object of loathing" is how he described an early exhibition. It's that 'between' which is so troublesome and so important about his work, which might otherwise be banal.

(I really thought I was going to avoid this discussion. Ooops.)

Then why is Leonardo DiCaprio considered the pinnacle of male beauty when he's not particularly mannish, why is Bill Gates the richest person in America -- a "nerd," why are shaggy men frowned upon by women? Even Bush isn't principally masculine. Dominance is the dominant value in American culture, but dominance alone does not masculinity make.

Yeah, sure, under the guise of discussing art. After all, female bodies are just art, aren't they?

I, like Jeanne, love Newton's work. I think it's incredibly sexy; the use of black and white, the shapes, the women, their stance, their clothes. But, even after reading interviews with him, even after the cowboy quote Momus has given to the thread, I don't think of the women in his photographs as anything but women. Very sexy women, but still- just women.

This is certainly a better analysis than “a perception of ‘woman’”?

Is it observation or projection?

Does it matter?

An element to it is definitely fantasy, which I'd think stems in part from observation and in part from projection - I'm a bit leery of saying there's only one cause, or even of trying to speculate about what Newton is trying to get from the photograph, but the high levels of physical beauty in the models he chooses pushes it very much into a hyperrealised, slightly overimagined, world.

Helmut Newton's photographs are stills from an elegant and erotic movie, perhaps entitled Midnight at the Villa d'Este or Afternoons in Super-Cannes, a virtual film that has never played at any theater but has screened itself inside our heads for the last forty years. Newton, of course, is far too sophisticated to lumber his extraordinary oeuvre with anything so limiting as an overall title, let alone the prosaic ones I suggest. The magic of his art is its complete elusiveness, its cunning refusal to admit the true nature of its subject matter: the failure of reality and the triumph of desire.

By now Newton's world is as recognizable as that of Delvaux or Magritte. The familiar backdrops of Europe's grandest hotels, Hollywood apartments, and Riviera swimming pools are the settings for a series of mysterious dramas, whose sources are never exposed and whose conflicts are never resolved. A company of beautiful women moves through the palatial corridors or gazes into the opaque depths of ornate mirrors, waiting for a last act that will never unfold. Even those women who are naked seem scarcely aware of themselves, as if their sexuality is defused by the strange bedrooms where they wait for the rich and powerful men stepping from their limousines in the courtyards below.

The realm that Newton creates for us has the calm light of a lucid dream, glimpsed through a connecting door that links it to the interior space of the Surrealists, to Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and the films of Luis Bu¤uel. That a fashion photographer with a limited set of props and players could set out an arena so psychologically charged is a remarkable achievement, well beyond the powers of any figurative artist at work today.

As one leafs through Vogue, Elle, Queen, and Paris Match one is struck by how fresh his photographs seem. The editorial captions, with all their arch tropes, are mercilessly awful, but Newton's photography is as vivid as tomorrow's news, which in one way it always has been. Though his clients and their advertising agencies would be appalled by the thought, I imagine that few people coming fresh to Newton's work would suspect that the nominal purpose of these striking images was to sell a collection of high-priced frocks.

But then Newton has always been very much more than a fashion photographer. I think of him as a figurative artist who uses the medium of photography - and his access to gorgeous women, expensive gowns, and exotic locations - to create a unique imaginative world. I firmly believe that since the death of Francis Bacon in 1992, Helmut Newton has been our greatest visual artist. Sadly, he has very little competition, either in the wilderness of the New York art scene, bravely exposed by Robert Hughes in his magisterial book American Visions, or London, dominated by the eerie homoerotic smut of Gilbert and George and the Young British Art force-fed into fleeting notoriety by Charles Saatchi, who unfailingly transforms his adman's gold into the dross of third-rate Conceptual art.

By contrast, Newton's photography has endured for decades, as poetic and mysterious as when it first appeared in the 60s. The images of his photographic contemporary, Andy Warhol, already seem dated, their newsprint topicality left behind by the new visual codes of music videos, TV ads, and Internet graphics.

A sure measure of achievement in the arts is the degree to which the latent content of a work continues to resonate long after our first exposure to its surface charms. For too many people, unfortunately, it is those surface charms that prevent them from looking deeper into Newton's photographs. His naked models still trigger accusations of sexual voyeurism. Nudity in photography, whether involving adults or children, is a subject sinking under a freight of political and moral disapproval it could never hope to support, and this is not the place for me to get out the bilge pump.

I will only say that critics who tremble so fiercely at the thought of the voyeuristic male gaze miss the point that distance generates mystery and enchantment, and expresses the awe with which the male imagination regards all women, as we see so clearly in Newton's photographs. Far from debasing his models (most of whom are not naked), Newton places them at the heart of a deep and complex drama where they rule like errant queens, blissfully indifferent to the few men who dare to approach them.

Much more interesting about Newton is the way in which he desexualizes his subject matter. His photographs drain the libido from the once charged spaces of the late 20th Century, from hotel bedrooms and luxury bathrooms, and from those penthouse apartments where unwatched porn films play behind the heads of people with more pressing concerns than pleasure or pain.

In Newton's work we see a new race of urban beings, living on a new human frontier, where all passion is spent and all ambition long satisfied, where the deepest emotions seem to be relocating themselves, moving into a terrain more mysterious than Marienbad.

On a personal note: When I last saw Newton, I told him that he ought to make a film. 'Oh, I've had hundreds of offers,' he said. Of course, he's been making his film all his career. He loved Cronenberg's Crash (1996), but one thing bothered him. 'The dresses,' he whispered. 'They were so awful.' Unfair, but then he is only the director and screenwriter of his film. Another credit runs: 'Costumes by Dior, Chanel, Saint Laurent...'

JG Ballard is the author of Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, and A User's Guide to the Millennium. His latest novel is Cocaine Nights.

This article was originally published in Bookforum, 1999.

We’ve one intrinsic discrepancy -- I would have put Hendrix to shame.

Far from debasing his models (most of whom are not naked), Newton places them at the heart of a deep and complex drama where they rule like errant queens, blissfully indifferent to the few men who dare to approach them.

I agree that they're not debased. But not that they are 'queens' (except in the gay sense). They are kings. In order to achieve power, they have made a pact with masculinity. The models are not debased, but 'the feminine' is put in parenthesis, ironised.

Much more interesting about Newton is the way in which he desexualizes his subject matter. His photographs drain the libido from the once charged spaces of the late 20th Century

Agree on this too. These are not arousing images. He desexualises nakedness.

So you're saying women should leave power to the men?

*

Momus is ICQ. I am MSN.

The Revolution, part II of The Amazon Series

OTM

... and this, Momus, is why your attitudes to women/gender are mostly conservative attitudes. Go on, embrace your conservatism and tell us you just like women to behave like they did in the movies before they all burnt their bras!

You’re not fooling me! It’s a trick question – it was written by an androgyne, right?

I'm saying 'For what shall it profit a (wo)man, if (s)he shall gain the whole world, and lose his (her) own soul?'

What good would it do me if I got a number one hit single with a song that just rejigged every other number one hit single? What would that achieve?

What if I were a Democrat or a Labour Party politician, would getting power really be worth giving up every last principle that distinguished me from the GOP or the Tories?

And if I were a woman, would it really be an achievement for women everywhere if I basically became a man without a penis?

Seriously, Momus - this is outrageously conservative stuff, even from you. Womanhood does not equal "conforming to Momus's concept of womanhood," nor "conforming the historical expectations of womanhood," nor anything along these lines.

No, it would impress us all a great deal more if you got back to the housework. Shame on you, Momus! At any rate, women are biologically more prone to altruism, forgiving, neutrality and pacifism -- I, personally, imagine giving them “the” power would seem the wisest idea.

Nice to know, Momus, that you feel free to judge the life of this holocaust escapee by phenomena not strictly found in his religion. Very "interesting."

Such as the masculine desire for the subordinate, “feminine” female?

The trouble with the idea of liberation is that it is based on a metaphysics of absence. It implies that it is enough to remove yourself from the source of the difficulty or pain. It implies that somewhere beyond there is respite, neutrality, safe haven, whatever. It doesn't work so well when you say 'But what if there is no place outside gender, what if there is only presence, what if there is no escape from roles, just the chance to exchange one role for another?'

And if that's the case, you start looking at the role from which you having 'liberated' yourself and thinking, well, that was a mask, but one that may fit me better than these other ones that evolved to fit other people.'

But your attitude on this I just fail to understand.

I'd like to know what you think of, say, Gackt, or any other 'feminised' male idol. Is he symptomatic of a social evil, enacting a betrayal of his innate masculinity and taking on himself a femininity he was not born into? Is he part of something bad because he's a man (therefore with power) who chooses to steal from women that which is their birthright - and then to sell it back to them as an idealised, less threatening imaginary lover? Or is he 'good', because he throws aside his role as male-inheritor-to-power in order to champion the underdog feminine?

Also: 'what women have been throughout history'? We don't know what women have been throughout history - we only know what the information remaining to us claims, and who wrote the vast majority of that?

But you seem to be claiming that the only mask that a powerful woman can wear *is* the mask of the Man!

I like them. I've had sex with one, as a matter of fact (the latter). Nothing against the invention of new genders. Same goes for Gakt. But I would be worried if the traffic were all in one direction, towards various approximations of masculinity as we know it. That would be like originality being, finally, just the way film-makers all over the world almost manage to make Hollywood films.

Yes. But I don't see that vast range of other genderings. I see a world in which there is 'the norm' and 'the alternative', which is just a simple inversion of 'the norm'. Why, for instance, when you look in gay personals, does nobody admit to being a 'femme'? Everyone is claiming to be 'macho'.

I think we should ask what right we have to that femininity. Have we earned it? And if our possession of it comes at the price of women having to become more like men, are we really helping ourselves or women by laying claim to it?

(Isn't it funny how that story makes Salmacis the aggressor and Hermaphroditus the beautiful, demure, aloof one?)

I think everyone on this thread is Momus. Including you!

But the idea that 'everybody can be whatever they want to be' does not come without a price, which may be that nobody can be anything any more, or that it no longer matters what you say you are, or that a whole habitus has been thrown away. And there are pleasures in difference as well as pleasures in similarity and freedom.

I don't think it's so much a question of 'everybody can be whatever they want to be': that's a little too idealistic for me, most of the time. But the idea that everybody can be what they are - that someone can be define themself as that which they know themself to be, that they are not defined by someone else's definition of their [gender/race/nationality]? Surely only a woman would know what makes her, specifically, female?

There are indeed pleasures in difference - but I can find those pleasures in the differences between woman and woman, whereas you only seem to be able to find them in the differences between women and men.

This is just ludicrous –- and tells us more about you than women; either you’re gender myopic, or unbelievably discriminating in selecting women acquaintances.

I vetted them and sifted them and then I drilled and buffed them to sheer perfection, all 29 of them, and now I'm damned if I can tell which is Sheila and which is Mika. Not that it matters.

This makes me sad in my heart.

Nonsense, only commies sleep well at night and you know it.

No, this is not what a reactionary is. Reactionary has three meanings

i. opposed to reforms
ii. wishing to go back to a previous condition
iii. right-wing

If you'd allowed me my slightly creative definition of 'reactionary' I might have been more inclined to allow this very creative definition of misogyny as 'philogyny with strict conditions'. It makes no sense to say love and hate are marginal qualifications of each other, unless you want one term to dominate the other; to say, for instance, that women can only ever be hated, even when they are loved. But why would you want that built into words you have to use about your own feelings too?

The 'we' I'm articulating here is a male, anglo-saxon 'we'. This is not the case in France or Japan, cultures much more open to the idea of 'good differences'. To the idea that there may be differences we may want to value for their differences, and not for their similarities. For me it's very clear that French women and Japanese women are much more comfortable with the kind of femininity their culture acknowledges in them than British or American women are. The French and Japanese also have an attitude towards foreign cultures which is more UNESCO than NATO; which seeks to preserve 'good differences' rather than bomb them towards some 'inevitable' convergence.

Valuing 'good differences' is not incompatible with 'feeling guilty', possibly for having an imperial past, possibly for having a dominant gender. But I'd say that a much more important component than guilt is aesthetics: the culture or the individual who values good differences must have an idea of beauty. It must be a concept of beauty which goes beyond the narcissistic. They, not we, are beautiful.

One example of this is the difference in the conception of the word 'friends' that emerged in the run-up to the Iraq war. The US said to Europe 'Friends support one another. Support our war. We will reward our friends and punish our enemies.' Europe replied: 'Friends can disagree and still be friends.' In other words, difference can be good.

People calling me a gender reactionary on this thread for expressing the opinion that the idea of femininity should be valued as a 'good other' is like Rumsfeld calling France and Germany 'old Europe' because they refuse to go along with the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq.

Now, I realise that what disturbs people is the charge of 'essentialism'. Why should femininity, as it's been constructed throughout history, a history containing many humiliations at the hands of men, be a fixed essence? A woman can be anything, right? Iraq can be anything, right? Why should we respect some vision of Iraq as fixed, when in fact our idea of its difference, looked at more closely, is the sum of our interventions in its history, alternating with its desperate, failed attempts to consolidate some kind of identity in the face of our domination?

I think the answer is, we have to choose the lesser of two evils. We can disregard history and essence, but if we do that we trash good difference, memory, culture and identity. And we don't have the right to do that, even if we had a lot to do with making that identity. Also, we cannot be so proud of treating the identities of others as fluid ('A woman can be anything!' 'Iraq can be anything!') when we merely mean that they have the right to resemble us more closely (the 'free to be more like me' syndrome). And we cannot be so proud of treating the identities of others as fluid when we treat our own identities as fixed.

But I manage to dovetail those very cleverly with the idea that by allowing the different to remain different -- by allowing the secondary term of the binary opposition to remain secondary -- we allow for its eventual and future reconstruction of the dominant term. The Christians, by accepting martyrdom rather than pretending to be Romans, take over the Roman Empire in the end. The working class, by becoming a class-for-itself, in other words accepting its secondary role, triumphs over its oppressors. The secondary term in the binary opposition gives the primary term its definition.

Marxism and deconstruction are not incompatible with Romanticism.

It is, however, 'trickledown' when a former Republican still uses Republican catchphrases even when he's supposedly a Democrat.

This is the opposite of what you want to argue about gender and the opposite of what you're calling 'good difference'. The whole point about becoming a class-for-itself is that it escapes the definitions and organisation principles of the bourgoisie - under which it is a class but not a class-for-itself. Your idea of 'good difference' is of femininity-for-the-other not femininity-for-itself. Or femininities for themselves.

'Good difference' is a perfect example of what I said about your conditional love of femininity. (Not a definition, btw, just an analysis of what you were saying.) You like to think that its good and different, but my analysis of what you are saying is that it is conditional: it remains good only as long as it is fixed in the mould of the other.

No, that analysis is ahistorical and un-dialectical. The working class, in becoming a class-for-itself, takes a historical perspective and realises its 'victimhood' at the hands of the dominant classes. It is not a matter of escaping bourgeois ways of thinking, but of using them against the bourgeois system. You study, you analyze. You use the British Library and the statistics produced by capitalism itself and by the government of the day to establish that abuse exists, that lives are shortened by foul conditions, that the working class is oppressed and exploited for someone else's profit.

What is the Communist Manifesto but a call for workers to realise that they are 'in chains' and 'in a struggle'? In a sense, it is a call for workers to know their place -- but not accept it. You cannot 'escape' into class consciousness. But you can 'awaken' into it.

Your idea of 'good difference' is of femininity-for-the-other not femininity-for-itself. Or femininities for themselves.

Those things cannot be separated, because they are part of the long dialectic between genders. There is no place outside history where there could be 'femininity-for-itself'. Most fictional attempts to imagine such a thing show only the moment when these societies encounter maleness: when Amazons castrate captured males, when Circe lures Odysseus and his crew, when Mastoianni enters the City of Women.

Good difference in terms of the Hegelian dialectic is allowing the Other to be -- and to think of itself as -- the antithesis to one's own thesis. To be different enough to have an identity, a series of distinctions which give it a shape, but not different enough so that it's unrecognisable, unconnected, meaningless, alien, beyond all negotiation in some notional autistic state. Women would really have to be from Venus to be for-themselves in that sense.

I think Good Difference as I'm describing it is best understood as an etiquette, a series of behaviours by which we have learned to negotiate our relationship with a defined difference (like 'the female') whose real contours are merely acknowledged metonymically by the codes of the etiquette. For instance, gender relations in France to this day reflect some of the etiquette codes of Courtly Love:

Courtly Love: The... system of love and adoration developed in Northern France during the late 12th century. Under this system, the lover, who pursued his illicit and passionate love relentlessly, was ennobled by the experience. Some writers claimed that the search itself was enough to improve the character of the lover, while others maintained that he would be a fool to pursue such a venture without recompense, be it a smile or a look or perhaps more intimate conclusion. In general courtly love took place outside the boundaries of marriage, which is one of the reasons that the medieval church took such strong objections to it.

He's not so sanguine about courtly love as you are, Momus. Love (courtly love and forms of love that follow it) has a ticklish history and the emergence of love as a code of behaviour is not stripped of the sort of asymmetry I was trying to describe in your normative idea of femininity. Stalkers are an extreme example of how love is imposed and need not be reciprocal, but all love has some of this character: you don't love someone only by having a contract with them that they will love you too!

In Luhmann, and in Barthes for that matter, love is at its most delicate (and most utopian) when it is inflected with masochism - that is, when love is a form of surrender, to be subjected to something for which the lover cannot be held accountable. This kind of love does not reify the beloved (this is not my term, its Barthes') but in fact gives himself over to the beloved. In other words, good difference is not what love is about. Losing yourself in the beloved is what love is about.

Here's something worth considering from Luhmann:

In the Middle Ages the notion, derived from Antiquity, that the passion of love was a type of disease was still understood in completely medical terms, a symptomology had been developed and forms of therapy (such as coitus) were suggested as treatment. Sexuality was looked upon as normal physical behaviour, whereas passion was considered a disease. By the seventeenth century all that remained of this view was the metaphor.

Modernity's problem with sincerity and its incommunicability only arises once the relation between the author and what he communicates is no longer conceived as natural or as technically produced, but rather as a forgery of existence. At this point, declarations of love are no longer possible.

There is no basis for love

His final thought is this:

Every attempt to see-through the other person ends up in empty space, in the unity of true and false, of sincere and insincere, a vacuum for which there are no criteria of judgement. Therefore, it is not possilbe to say everything. Transparency only exists in the relationship of system and and system, and by virtue, so to speak, of the difference of system and environment, which constitutes the system in the first place. Love and love alone can be such transparency

But you said 'emerging with Romanticism' and associated it with capitalism! Whereas in the feudal 12th century the kind of separations you talk about are more associated with monks and nuns than the separation of work spheres (presumably you mean 'the division of labour'). Different time zones indeed!

I think the courtly troubadour serenading a dame was perfectly aware that the way his lady 'produced herself' and the way he presented his courtship were 'forgeries' too. It was, as I say, an etiquette of 'plaisanterie', perfectly aware of, and untroubled by, its own theatricality.

This is why your second point is misguided - its the revival of courtly love in Romanticism that we've inherited as romantic love, not the actual historical practices of courtly love. Too much has changed for those codes to function.

But it is not entirely true. You have to remember that codes are not masks (one of your terms, I believe); codes are the way that we get access to the world and to each other. Actually, codes are the way we get access to ourselves. Just because you have a code doesn't mean you are dealing in forgeries. It is only when modernity suspends its codes - like modernist art putting pictorial space in suspension or in inverted commas, so to speak - that forgery becomes conspicuous.

I think actually the "we" you continue to articulate is "Momus."

that's exoticism isn't it?

That's the meta-amswer. But I would say that his work isn't good art at all. It might be good fashion photography or good something else, but in terms of contemporary art, his work is technically, culturally and socially conservative. Of course, those people who love art to be a beacon of anachronistic values might love his work for the same reasons that I find it irrelevant.