Reading Diary
Dearest Diary,
It seems only fitting that I write to you, a diary - a discreet place for recording my personal, intimate thoughts - to address these readings on the topic of seduction. It is only slightly more ironic that this intimacy and discretion is to take place in this semi-private place of my research website. But then part of the allure of a locked book is that it is locked by a lock easily picked by the hairpin laying in the drawer next to it, allowing the contents to be read by anyone who so desires to know of the intimacies, discretions or indiscretions, recorded on its pages. The password that locks this diary entry from the public view is as easily accessible as that hairpin, not that it matters. As we both know, there is little interest or desire by others to read my rambling notes recorded on the pages of this virtual space, and I am not a skilled seducer, although, at times, I have been known to try my hand at the art of seduction but only when driven by desires sparked by being seduced myself.
‘Seducer or Seduced?’ is the title of this workshop and appears to pose the question is seduction a matter of being either one or the other - the actor or the acted upon - seducer or seduced? Interestingly, the title page of the reader is missing the question mark. I doubt this is a typo, more likely a parapraxis of the typist. Or maybe the beginnings of the reader’s - and its compiler’s - seduction of its readers? Desire is sparked by questions that arise, and what better way to raise a question than with a statement appearing elsewhere as a question?
I must admit, dear Diary, as I read through this reader I felt myself wandering into well-known terrain; recognizing not just the landscape surrounding me but the sound of the wind blowing a familiar tune through the trees. Had I read this somewhere before? In some cases I could definitely recall an earlier encounter with the text; other times I questioned my own memory - was this déjà vu really a case of jamais vu? Again, a question sparking my desire by throwing me slightly off balance, leading me astray by taking me back into my memory to look for the previous encounter.
Seduction can elicit feelings of disequilibrium. Feelings of disequilibrium can, in turn, heighten the experience of seduction. This reader on seduction generates disequilibrium through the frequent changes in page orientation, keeping this reader off balance as she scrolls through the pages having to decide if she should select ‘Rotate clockwise’ or ‘Rotate counterclockwise’ from the drop down menu ‘View’. Usually the choice she made was wrong requiring flipping thru until the words sat on the screen in a readable orientation. In the reading The Ladies Paradise (excerpt) by Émile Zola the master-mind of market, Mouret, uses the sensation of disequilibrium, turning everything upside down at the last minute, to send shoppers through the displays, off the paths they had chosen in advance and getting them lost in the process, to lure them into purchasing items they might not have otherwise encountered or even know they desired. In this way disequilibrium - red balloons, pressing crowds of shoppers, blue umbrellas lining the passageways, “these theatrical effects” - served as the spark to ‘The Ladies Paradise’ seduction by “sucking in”, carrying them along, satisfying desires and inflaming curiosity. As Madame Marty “tried to think of a phrase to express her delight, and could only exclaim: ‘It’s enchanting!’ Then, trying to find her way,”.
Fortunately for Madame Marty and the other ladies as they tried to re-orientate themselves there were always the “Special salesmen, idle Parisians with the gift of gab” to help lead them further down the path after selling them some recently desirable goods. ‘The gift of gab’ also known as the talent associated with the creative practice of talking is vital to the practice of seduction. Unfortunately it is also a talent that I, dearest Diary, lack. It is one thing to be able to seduce another through the words one puts onto a page or screen, or by lubricant colors smeared on a surface, but in those instances the seducer is often at a remover from the one seduced in a way that the talker talking, seducing the listener, is not. When I think of the skilled talkers I know and have known I recall how easily I am seduced as a listener, and I ask myself which of us is taking more pleasure in this seduction, the seducer talking or I, the seduced, eagerly listening? But then I think, if talking is the talker’s art, and all art is a form of seduction generating pleasure for both artist and spectator - or, in this case, listener - then hopefully we are each finding our own unique but equal pleasure in the encounter we have both willingly consented to engage in.
This, dearest Diary, brings me to the collaborative nature of seduction and to seduction as a game. Seducer and seduced can be singular or plural, but for seduction to occur, like a game the players -both seducer and the seduced - must consent in order to play the game. The game of seduction can either an infinite game - and this probably when it is most pleasurable - or a finite game at which point the seduction ends and the hurt begins. [For more on the subject of infinite and finite play please see my reading diary for the workshop ‘Infinite Play’.]
We need only look to the game of seduction played by the Viscomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liasons a film directed by Stephen Frears [based on the play by Christopher Hampton who in turn based it on the 18th-century French novel Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos] for an example of a game seduction that became finite. In the psychological study of seduction the type of short term seduction played as a finite game is identified as often resulting from the “dark triad” of personality traits - narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism - of the seducer. Even if in the beginning of the seduction the seduced is consenting the traits of the seducer can cause him or her to shift the seduction to a point where consent of the seduced is no longer possible; the seducer is no longer seducing but exploiting. In this finite game of seduction it is questionable if the role of seducer and the seduced are ever reciprocal as the seducer possesses a power over the seduced obvious in the ability to change the rules and end the game. In an infinite game of seduction consent is maintained in part by agreeing continually to any changes in rules as the players together find ways to extend their play. The dark traits associated with the short term, finite game of seduction - traits of only the seducer - are replaced in the long term, infinite game of seduction by the traits of agreeableness, empathy and reciprocation shared by all parties who vacillate throughout the endless game between seducer and seduced.
Personally, my dearest Diary, having been greatly injured when I unwittingly fallen into such games in the past, I am not interested in playing finite games of seduction. I prefer the pleasure to be found in an infinite game of seduction. This does not mean that I do not think or understand that sometimes what begins as an infinite game necessitates a change of rules and in doing so becomes finite, and this is not always because of the dark triad of traits and an unequal, non-reciprocal relationship between the players but can be due to outside forces, including other players who enter into the game and possibly do not understand it or have ulterior motives. In those cases it is still up to the original players of the game as both seducer and seduced to come to mutual agreement on the change of rules that could end the game or it will continue - or end - in a way that is more exploitative than seductive. For instance, if the terms are dictated by one player to the other, then the game is not only no longer one of seduction but also one lacking in pleasure. By openly communicating, discussing the rule changes and reaching a mutual understanding agreed upon by both players rather than dictated by one the game can continue as an infinite game, ensuring both players that if not necessarily the same form of seductions are still occurring at least the pleasure associated with playing the game may continue.
As I wrote early, dear Diary, art is a form of seduction; and like seduction art is collaborative and an infinite game involving consent, reciprocity, empathy - if not always agreeableness. Art can also have the dark traits of short term seduction, but I don’t want to get into that here or now. Art as a form of seduction tells us that seduction is not exclusive to the realm of the sexual and the psychological but is also part of the sensual - the visual, the auditory, the olfactory, the palate and the sense of touch. Seduction can happen in the actual, the virtual and the conceptual; it has no spatial boundaries, no boundaries of time. [Google search of ‘seduction’ as well as what has been taken in across these readings.]
We can be and are more easily seduced via beauty as explained in Survival of the Prettiest (excerpt) by Nancy Etcoff; beauty is the bait that reels us in so that even in situations, such as coming to the aid of a good looking person, if we do not like the more attractive person we come to his or her aid more readily than a person of lesser or average looks. The sentence “...,people are less likely to ask good-looking people for help.” As a person who is constantly stopped on the street - even in places I have never lived, been before, or even speak the language - and asked directions knowing this ‘fact’ has made even more insecure about my physical appearance and ability to seduce or potentially be seduced, Dear Diary. Finally, I want to bring to your attention here the header Etcoff gave the section of her text ‘The Injustice of the Given’ as later I will write more to the relation of the word ‘Given’ to seduction. For now I will just say that our ability and willingness to be seduced - by beauty or other factors - is a ‘given’ in that it is a natural inclination to which we are all disposed in a way analogous to the way beauty and all it brings with it is given to the beautiful.
But beauty is not the only sensation that seduces us. It is possible to be seduced repulsive sensations such as the description of the stank of Parisian streets in Perfume (excerpt) by Patrick Süskind. Or returning to Dangerous Liaisons and the sexual side of seduction, there are times when emotions, feelings such as jealousy or even hate can seduce us and lead to seductive encounters that are either infinitely good (although I wonder about this having never experienced such) or finitely bad. In Lolita (excerpt) by Vladimir Nabokov the fluctuation between pleasure and repulsion in the layers of seduction embedded in “that book by Nabokov” keeps us as readers returning to it again and again to try to come to terms for ourselves the discomfort we feel at being seduced by this seducer.
I will add a brief aside here to you, dear Diary, to acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. Nabokov and the podium he gave his protagonist, Humbert Humbert, from which to tell his side of the tale in my own approach to the format of this workshop’s reading diary. While I am not pleading to you my case as Humbert did to a jury - the readers - for my own personal understanding of seduction, or my role in life as seducer or seduced, I am like him just stating the truth of seduction as I have found and experienced it.
Returning to Humbert and Lo and the seduction of knowledge imparted by systems of education addressed in Happy Birthday, Dolores Haze! Still a Nymphet 50 Years Later by David Thomson as you know me well by now, dear Diary, you can probably anticipate my position on Thomson’s positioning of ‘Lolita’ as a novel about education. First, I agree that from the position we find ourselves today, and where Thomson found himself 13 years ago when he wrote this essay (longer than the years Lolita had lived when she found herself in the hands of Humbert) it is easy to read the relationship between Humbert and Dolores as analogous to the situation in education resulting from “Our new resolve to preserve the callowness of our young” and for which Lolita “is a landmark … as a gesture toward the way in which learning has yielded to knowingness.” It is a passive acceptance by all - even those who deny the acceptance in words tend to still accept in deed, one only need to look in our immediate surroundings to see this - that people are not just unable but more so unwilling to speak up, add their voice to the conversation, question and to do so not just with words but with feelings … to communicate openly and honestly so that we might seduce with and be seduced by knowledge of the infinite variety and not shut off all discourse out of fear or discomfort for the possibility of the finite variety. That fear, hiding behind imaginary structures, walls, protocols are what enable the short term, hurtful, power-driven, hierarchical variety of seduction and hinder the pleasurable, heterarchal, egalitarian, infinite variety. Don’t misunderstand me, dear Diary, I am not implying that we must learn something from everyone we meet, every child or less experienced person, only that we should remain open to the possibility to learn by not engaging in short term seduction which is itself simply another form of power-play. Dearest Diary, it is not just a question of what you can teach me but your openness to what I might be able to teach me; this is what seduces me into playing this infinite game of seduction with you and I hope you are seduced by my invitation to you to join me in it, determining our rules for the game together and not simply and unquestionably accepting those rules dictated to us by others outside the game.
I realize, dear Diary, that I am rambling on and have still not arrived at the end of this entry. But I do not want to bore you because I know I can and do. Boredom can be seductive, but as all seduction only when mutually consented to by the seducer and seduced. So, I ask you to give your consent to this brief boredom as I have yet to write of Hidden Women by Judith Thurman, Reading Lolita in Tehran (excerpt) by Azar Nafisi, and A Lover’s Discourse (excerpt) by Roland Barthes. To keep this on the shorter side of long I will simply say what I found seductive in all three of these texts was how they each exemplify the vocabulary of seduction - the words that describe seduction as an act and the actors who perform seduction each in his or her own way. In Hidden Women Judith Thurman’s use of adjectives to describe the Paris of today and of the mid-1950s when Avedon redefined fashion photography by developing in collaboration with the models, technicians and editors additional vocabulary for visual seduction is in itself quite seductive. This application of showing what is meant by the language that you use makes the experience of reading not only more interesting reinforcing what is being imparted, but also more pleasurable. I am seduced by the descriptions without looking directly at the photos - although I know them well. In Reading Lolita in Tehran (excerpt) by Azar Nafisi there is a seduction not in the forbidness of the text being read but in the description the author provides of the readers, the contrasts of the photos of the group covered and uncovered, and how in their uncovered states of dress their identities are revealed to us. This is the dichotomy between fiction and reality, and seduction. Yes, I know, dear Diary, those are three words but what I mean is by a seduction that is fictitious - again, it might be best to think here of short term, power-oppressive seduction - and a seduction that is real - infinite, long term. Finally, A Lover’s Discourse (excerpt) by Roland Barthes adds itself to this reader not as a philosophical seduction as the average academic (see Happy Birthday, Dolores Haze! Still a Nymphet 50 Years Later by David Thomson above) might be seduced by, but a seduction through the affect of words. The discourse of the lover seduces through these words and the memories of past and thoughts of future experiences they impart. I have been engulfed. I have succumbed. I have been annihilated. I have vacillated. I have felt death. I have felt your absence. I languor. I hemorrhage. I seduce. I am seduced.
And this, dearest Diary, brings me to the final reading of this reader, Make Me Yours (excerpt) by Laura González. I could quickly conclude this by writing ‘what is out of our reach entices us even more’ or ‘I can’t have you so I want you even more and will do anything - including taking off my shoes and standing on them doubled with one leg - to have you” but this would be too simple; and this is afterall about the work of Marcel Duchamp - the seducer par excellence. Besides, I mentioned earlier I would write about the word ‘Given’ and here I am. ‘Given’ as used here by Duchamp is to me synonymous with his use of ‘Even’ at the end of the full title of The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even). Both I understand as expressions of the obvious - colloquially 'duh' or ‘matter of fact’ - that is happening in front of our very eyes yet we remain somehow oblivious to what we are seeing. It is the double meaning that escapes us; the Readymade, the pun. Duchamp has ‘Given’ to us again what he gave us all along. Duchamp played finite games of chess but the game of art he played was an infinite game. His seduction was of the long term variety. When we are seducing or being seduced, seduction itself is apparent in this way, a ‘Given’ to mutually consenting players.
With Étannt donnés we consent to play Duchamp’s game of seduction when we approach the door that cannot be open and peer through the two small holes. Perhaps the height of the holes is meant to prevent those who cannot readily consent from inadvertently peeping through the holes, dear Diary? I recall on one visit to Gallery 183 observing one nervous guard/assistant warning fathers with young daughters from entering the space and looking through the holes - on numerous other occasions I have witnessed young children being held us to have a look. Oddly, on that visit I was accompanied by friends, husband and our two sons, who are all well informed on the works of Monsieur Duchamp. My teenage son was not warned by the guard and his only comment on the work to me, his mother, I suspect stems more from the embarrassment of a teen than from any intellectual or aesthetic contemplation “Duchamp musta been a psychopath.” (I don’t think so.) My younger son, eight years old at the time, was taken into 183 by his father - the guard again said nothing, maybe because the child was a boy? - and his only response was to expound on the beauty of the sparkly waterfall! But back to the seduction, Duchamp is teasing us but it is a form of tease, seduction, we are familiar with. It is the hidden, unattainable but hinted at, the slow reveal that ends not in a reveal but in a sudden exit from the stage or a darkening of the lights. And this is all so evident, it is a ‘Given’ and it is right in front of us. Are we blinded by seduction or by our willingness to be seduced? The author is also aware of this and more so of the role Duchamp has asked her to play in his infinite game of seduction - that of the looker who is seduced by looking and by her looking seduces others to look too.
I will admit to you, dearest Diary, I have read more than just this chapter of Make Me Yours and I am aware of where the author is going with this. Before I end I will jump ahead to a sentenced that was highlighted by the compiler in this reader at the end of this reading where Laura González writes about the change in the writing of this book changes - the rules of the game of seduction that she is playing with her readers - to one in which the writing reverses and mirrors itself, with this “reversibility” being “a key characteristic of seduction”. As I have written throughout this diary entry, in an infinite game of seduction the roles of seducer and seduced are reciprocal at times making the seducer the seduced and vice versa. The players mirror themselves, reversing their roles in the infinite game of seduction. In art, and this particular to my own research, I relate this to Richard Wollheim’s what makes ‘painting as art’ in which the painter assumes the role of spectator before the painting so that in looking the painter looks as the spectator. In reversing this role it enables the painter to be seduced not by the painting she painted but by the painting as art. If this reversal of roles applies also to the spectator then stepping into the role of the painter (artist) the spectator continues to create the painting via looking, in turn making the painting more seductive in the way the spectator makes Étannt donnés more seductive to others entering the gallery by standing in front of a dark wooden door and looking thru two tiny holes.
And now, dearest Diary, to end this entry on seduction I return to beginning of the next to last paragraph in Make Me Yours in which the author describes the seductive encounter occurring between seducer and seduced as a relationship “governed by conflict”. I can affirm this is the case based on my own experiences with “the seductive encounter”. It is a question for me, and perhaps for you, dear Diary, if conflict need be a part of this relationship? To answer this question necessitates exploring the source of the conflict. Is it in the short term versus long term variety of seduction described earlier? Is it something or someone outside who has entered into the game and changed the rules without consent of all the players? Maybe it comes from something inside the relationship that remains unclarified between the players? For instance, I have been told by observers outside of a seductive relationship I have that at times has been very conflicted, that this relationship appears from the outside to contain or maybe even be based on mutual frustration. Could unaddressed frustration in both our seducing and our being seduced stemming from the rules we agreed upon for our game be causing our conflict, dearest Diary? I guess it remains to be slowly revealed - after all, I have not mentioned here but have been frequently reminded that slowness is a key characteristic of seduction or whatever this is …
Seduction can be an infinite game but this diary entry is finite.
till soon, dear Diary!
Robyn