Games for the Mind

I meant to post this a lot closer to the first, but c’est la vie.  This is the part where I try to elaborate the virtues I see in the “oh, you are all just taking these pictures way too seriously” response.  My loyalties lie more in the serious camp, but I think there is an implicit point in the opposite response that sets a healthy limit on that seriousness.

When my wife looked at some of the discussion, she was concerned with how certain positions of the female body were so quickly coded as sexual.  She does fine art drawing, has a definite preference for naked ladies.  In her mind, some of those positions seen as sexual were just technically interesting.  Others, less interesting technically, were still not immediately sexual but simply suggested strength and power.

What often happens is that two camps erupt at this point: those who argue that there is something essentially sexual in the social context of the images, regardless of viewers like my wife who don’t see it, and those who argue that the ’social context’ is really just in the head of a few neurotic sorts who make a big deal of it.  I think we have another option.  It’s going to take some unpacking, though.

It’s a truism to say we are meaning-making animals.  We make meaning, though, by establishing associations between ideas, images, sensations, and so on.  There are all kinds of associations that we can make.  There is a temptation to say that some associations are better than others, but I think all such claims only make sense in some serious context. 

What happens in most debates, though, is that we preference a very rigid, logical, if-then, sort of association.  This is *either* objectification or it isn’t, it’s *either* sexual or it isn’t.  In truth, though, social interactions depend upon a more flexible system of making associations. 

In part, this is because there is so much history behind any term or image that is contradictory from the perspective of ’strict’ logic (yeah, I’m just not going to detail what that means, it would take forever).  Its meaning can literally go both ways.  Its meaning actually rests on its capacity to go both ways, it’s what gives it scope and force.  Scope in that the flexibility allows it to be re-used, force because the trail of associations and its tensions means it ‘registers’ more vividly for those who share them.

Here’s an example: imagine an image of a naked woman, kneeling with her legs folded under her, thighs open, hands palm-up on her knees.  Heck, have her looking up, smiling.  Now, some people will jump right on board and attack how this sexualizes female submission, etc., etc.  But what if the image were being used by a woman trying to explore meditation, if the submission she were emulating was not sexual but spiritual?

The cynics will say they are the same thing, that the spiritual is just displaced sex.  However, that doesn’t do the image justice.  The sexual connotations are there, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean the spiritual ones aren’t as well.  The two enter into an uneasy communion through that image, each garnering force from the other. 

The sexual dimension gets intensified by the spiritual, and the spiritual by the sexual.  To miss either dimension is to experience only part of the image’s force.  It also shuts down some of the image’s ability to open up communication.  When it operates in multiple registers, it allows someone operating in one register to access the other, to move toward the structures entailed therein.

None of this, of course, undoes the critical things said about many images.  It does, however, point out an alternative avenue to simply not using images like the ones in question.  It raises a challenge: find new ways of presenting the images alongside other images, alongside text, that foregrounds their multiple associations.