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Erotic Capital

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Erotic Capital.  Beautiful people not only get more (romantic and sexual) attention but make more money.  A new concept (in April 2010) to join the lexicon of emotional capital, cultural capital etc.  Derived from the work of Dr Catherine Hakim, a sociologist at the London School of Economics. Applied not just to the world of celebrity but public relations, marketing, television, the law and banking too.  April 2010 newspaper feature from UK.

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Snake in hand

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

X-ray and infra-red technology revealed, beneath roses held by Queen Elizabeth I in anonymous sixteenth-century painting displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2010 for the first time in 90 years, an earlier depiction of her right hand clutching what appears to be a black snake with blue-green highlights. ;What’s going on here we wonder. Artistic subversion of royal iconography? A Tudor Dan Brown moment of some kind? Clearly an enigma to set the popular semiotics machine in motion.

Snake in hand

Some possible explanations:

• Historian David Starkey identified the serpent as being a symbol of wisdom at that time, and an apparent favourite of Elizabeth’s from the evidence of a discrete green serpents on an orange taffeta dress in another portrait.

• Why then the revision and painting out? The posy replacing the snake may have expressed second thoughts, at the time or later, around the serpent being an ambiguous image also strongly associated in Christian iconography with evil and original sin. 

• Roses, in contrast, would have been an unproblematic icon of the Tudor dynasty, as well as the posy being a conventional female prop in portraiture.  

With Freud and by now a decade or two of graphic online porn between us and the occluded serpent it’s hard to overlook the phallic connotation noted by art history blogs and press coverage of a snake “coiled suggestively around her right hand” (Arifa Akbar in The Independent). But donning our semiotic hats and trying to look at all human beings (including us in our own times and places) as aliens it can be salutary to look at the hand and snake trying to think ‘wisdom’ or ‘evil’ rather than the sense that might strike us first as obvious, natural and universal. 

Imagine a future time when the cultural orthodoxy shares with Jorge Luis Borges this view of our psychoanalytic received wisdom today: “I have read Jung with great interest but with no conviction. At best he was an imaginative, exploratory writer. More than one can say for Freud: such rubbish!” Then we would look at the symbol interpreted as a phallic suggestively uncoiling snake and, with Foucault responding to the classification of animals in Borges’s Chinese Encyclopaedia, wonder at “the exotic charm of another system of thought” and “the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

© Malcolm Evans 2010

NOTES
Arifa Akbar, “The Virgin Queen, the serpent and the doctored portrait”, The Independent, 5 March 2010, p.3

Posted in Art & Design, Culture, Europe, Fuzzy Sets, Making Sense | 1 Comment »

Chinese Encyclopaedia

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

If you gave someone a paragraph to complete, starting with the words “Animals are divided into…” various types of creature might immediately leap to mind – cats, dogs, elephants, male, female, tame, wild, edible, inedible, cold blooded, warm blooded, etc. A further refinement to this exercise might be to specify the number of divisions your contestant has to play with: just 2 (likely answers might include male/female perhaps or wild/domesticated, or vertebrate/invertebrate), 6 (mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, amphibians, insects). And so on. This is an interesting one to try out with young children. Human beings and cultures are always dividing things – animals, objects, people – into groups and sub-groups. The need to segment your market (“Consumers are divided into…”, or product/service offers, occasions, distribution channels) and target your offer to the appropriate segment(s) is a fundamental rule of marketing – just as understanding the time, place and kind of people you were talking to was the basis of classical rhetoric.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote of a Chinese encyclopaedia, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which animals are divided into:

a.    belonging to the Emperor,
b.    embalmed,
c.    tame,
d.    suckling pigs,
e.    sirens,
f.     fabulous,
g.    stray dogs,
h.    included in the present classification,
i.      frenzied,
j.     innumerable,
k.    drawn with a fine camelhair brush,
l.      etc.,
m.   having just broken the water pitcher,
n.    that from a long way off look like flies.

This is an excellent text for flipping us out of the familiar daze in which the cut on reality our cultures and ideologies present us with seem simply given, natural, true. A great moment of defamiliarisation which gives us a glimpse into culture’s constructedness and relativity. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault describes the effect this passage can have – of shattering “all the familiar landmarks of thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography”, “breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old definitions”, while evoking “the exotic charm of another system of thought” and “the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

The passage on animal types comes from Borges’s “Essay on the Analytical Language of John Wilkins”. Wilkins was the author of Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language (1688), an attempt to impose a mathematical certainty and objective scientific transparency on language and writing systems – in effect abolishing the distance and (often) cultural arbitariness in the divides between ‘things’, ‘thoughts’, ‘words’, and ‘characters’ or writing systems. Something akin to the Wilkins view of representation as strictly secondary to a world of concepts, reason and empirical reality became a Western cultural norm lasting well into the Twentieth Century. Borges’s response graphically summarises the turn from this to acknowledging the role of language and culture in producing meaning – and signals the re-emergence of semiotics in academic and cultural life from the 1950s and 60s on.   With the application of semiotics to understanding and guiding the development of brands, the master methodology emerging from this “turn to language” engages with some of its most characteristic cultural expressions – in the new emotional, metaphorical and totemic meanings of contemporary consumer culture.

© Malcolm Evans 2010

NOTES
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, Tavistock, 1970, p.xv
J.L. Borges, Selected Nonfictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger, Penguin, 1999

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