SPECTACLE RECONSIDERED: JOYCEAN SYNAESTHETICS AND THE DIALECTIC OF THE MUTOSCOPE

The correlation of the spectacle of the commodity and of the spectacle of woman, the presence of femininity as necessarily spectacular in modern commodity culture, has been now widely studied, and constitutes the cornerstone of a whole branch of feminist analysis concerned with visuality and the gaze. Already in the nineteenth century the foolproof system of gender production in which women decorate themselves into spectacles for the male gaze, to become marketable for, and exchangeable among, men like commodities, shows some snags: see for example the "aberration" of the Countess of Castiglione's one thousand or so photographic portraits that, between 1856 and 1865, she had taken of herself, in different poses and costumes, by the famous Mayer and Pierson studio in Paris, and whose excess of spectacularity is quite difficult to interpret.1 But it is in the twentieth century that such aberrations become more frequent and less extraordinary - and imbricated in historical and cultural contexts that make it impossible to read exclusively as inscriptions of an internalized and policing male gaze. In this perspective fashion stands as a particular mode of the performance of the object, capable of rewriting the logic of the spectacle and its production of gender.I turn to "Nausicaa" to examine the relationship of materiality and the spectacle, both of the commodity and of femininity, in the context of early twentieth century visual culture (post-photographic and early cinematic) to offer a different reading of the male gaze, made unstable and insecure by a spectacle that has become ontologically and epistemologically ambivalent and unsteady when staged through modern technologies of vision (here the Mutoscope). In this context the image of femininity as commodity on sale, exactly because of its sexiness and artificiality, does not simply perpetuate the relationship between subject-observer and the passive observed object, but rather turns this relationship on its head, and as such it marks a particular moment in the history of Western visuality, when the relationship between subject and object, always predicated upon the anaesthetic distance of the viewer from the scene observed, is upset and overturned.In the spectacle, from the nineteenth-century displays of commodities in the arcades to Guy Debord's analysis of postwar consumer culture, materiality becomes abstracted (objects and the body) and experience loses its tactility to become anaesthetic. At the center of this process of abstraction stands the autotelic subject, whose claim to autonomy is predicated upon his narcissistic illusion of self-control. The "idealized observer-voyeur", as Jonathan Crary defines him,2 establishes himself as a disembodied eye watching the world at a distance. His disembodied looking is always at the expense of a synthetic, tactile relationship to the object."Nausicaa" portrays the moment when this system of visuality reaches a point of rupture, exactly through the spectacle of femininity Gerty stages: more precisely through the shift from nineteenth century portraiture, whether painterly or photographic, to its "degradation" in the spectacular anonymity of the fashion plate, to the mobility of the cinematic image which the Mutoscope Girls anticipate. The figure of Gerty marks the point of rupture for this succession of spectacles of femininity. Here the erotic image does not produce distance and power for the male viewer, but actually becomes a way to reaffirm the sensuousness and materiality of perception both for the subject and the object. This synaesthetic relationship to the object is established through Gerty's accouterments, what I term here her "unnatural", ornamental and antiutilitarian use of clothes, and through the iconoclastic, desublimating power of her body, which is presented not as natural, but as a cultural object, as Gerty's striptease and identity as fashion plate shows. Shopping for clothes is one of the designated activities for women in Western cultures of abundance, and fashion stands as the cultural terrain where they are interpellated into femininity and consumption. …