PLEASURE, PAIN, AND ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY:
A FELT-SITUATED READING OF
MENACE II SOCIETY
Hilary E. Davis
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
As a feminist who avidly consumes both films and literature, and
as one who desires textual pleasure but also wants to “do
the right thing,” I have been challenged by questions such
as the following: How might it be possible for me to (re)read
and enjoy novels by male authors without disowning my anger and
pain? Will it be possible for me to reclaim a textual pleasure
of my own, one rejecting androcentric aesthetics predicated on
power imbalances (for example, the sublime)? How can I best respond
to texts written by people who are situated (in both discourse
and their lived reality) in positions “marginal” to
my experience as a European-American, able-bodied, middle-class,
heterosexual woman?
With these questions in mind, I have constructed “re-captivation,” a feminist aesthetic of reading which is distinguished by its introspective and ethical characteristics. This paper begins with a theoretical explanation of the four primary features of re-captivation — self-subversive self-reflection, shared anotherness, misrecognition, and strategic embodiment — and then analyzes my experience reading/viewing the film Menace II Society within the context of my search for a reading response which is both pleasurable and ethically responsible.
As re-captivated, I oscillate between rapturous engagement and the detachment of what Shoshana Felman calls “self-subversive self-reflection.”1 This is to say that re-captivated reading is self-reflexive, the pleasure I experience when “retelling” and analysing the text, my delight in “reading my own reading.” It involves the pleasure of re-telling the text from my own perspective, the joy of sharing as well as the self-empowerment of feeling my viewpoint has legitimacy and importance. However, re-captivation is not simply narcissistic self-absorption (for example, fascination with the cleverness of my interpretations and impressions); it is inherently self-critical. As re-captivated, I constantly question the consequences of my reading pleasure and its place within the feminist community. This retelling is not merely confessional, a series of self-disclosures aimed toward self-validation; rather, it is an examination of my reading subjectivity as it is situated in the text and the tangible world. Re-captivation is the product of dialogue within self and among self and text. Its subversion is also a result of my self-reflection upon the “shared anotherness”2 between myself and the text.
The re-captivated reader experiences both empowerment and ecstasis,3 characteristics which are also found in the Romantic sublime. The sublime, however, is a masculine mode both imperialistic and individualistic, an aesthetic in which the individual’s empowerment is achieved through the domination and consumption of some “Other.”4 Being “Other” myself, I do not desire to “Other” others in my search for textual pleasure. Thus re-captivated reading rejects the ecstasis achieved by the Romantic sublime — my empowerment as a reader does not rest upon the negation and absorption of any other represented in the fiction I read. Rather, like Patricia Yaeger’s description of a possible “horizontal sublime,” re-captivation depends upon a new self/other dialectic — one which seeks communication and communion rather than domination and appropriation. Discussing the poet Elizabeth Bishop, Yaeger writes that Bishop’s poem “The Fish” allows “the object…to remain something other than the perceiving subject’s conception of it, and allows that perceiving subject, in turn, to become something other than a unified ego.”5 Likewise, re-captivation rejects the imperialism of “the ontological subject which seeks to reduce everything to itself” in favour of “an ethical subject defined in relation to the other.”6 A new dialectic exists between the re-captivated subject and the aesthetic object, one emphasizing co-existence and “mutual recognition.”7
This “mutual recognition” is described by Jessica Benjamin as an intersubjective dialectic characterized by “the necessity of recognizing as well as being recognized by the other” and the acknowledgement of “the other as a separate person who is like us yet distinct.”8 I believe this paradigm can be extended to the relationship between reader and text, the text being, essentially, the voice of an other. Thus, re-captivation involves an intersubjective communication between text and reader.
In her article, “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading,” Patrocinio Schweickart notes that such an intersubjective dialectic contains three moments. In the first, the reader recognizes the subjectivity of the author of the text. In the second, this duality of subjects is threatened by the author’s absence. In the third and synthesizing moment of this dialectic, the reader becomes sensitive to the context in which the author wrote so that “[r]eading becomes a mediation between author and reader, between the context of writings and the context of reading.”9 Thus, mutual recognition and intersubjective communication are achieved via the re-captivated reader’s awareness of the context of her reading, which I have previously identified as “self-subversive self-reflection,” and her recognition that the context in which the author wrote is independent from her reading context, which I will now refer to as “shared anotherness.”10
Re-captivation involves a new dialectic between self and “Other”; it is an alternative sublime in which the terms “master” and “slave” have no legitimacy. Likewise, the term “Other” has no place in such an intersubjective dialectic. As Lucy Lippard states, “the heart of the matter is not about any Other, but about a shared anotherness that affects all the races.”11 Re-captivation is not about “Others” and “Otherness” but about the “shared anotherness” between the reader and the voice of the text. Like Bakhtin’s “dialogism,” shared anotherness involves the co-existence of two voices within the same discourse. This is when the reader “encases his [sic] own thought in the image of another’s language without doing violence to the freedom of that language or to its own distinctive uniqueness.”12 “Anotherness” becomes my position, but it is not a sign of my oppression, for my silence is voluntary, not enforced as I listen to voices other than my own, voices which are equally legitimate and important. My “anotherness” or “outsider” status is not a position where I am non-essential, but one where I am no longer central and dominant.13
As a re-captivated reader, I exercise what Uma Narayan calls “methodological humility” and “methodological caution”14 when reading texts authored by an other. Narayan’s definitions of these terms emphasize a redistribution of power between self and other, but not an inverted repetition of oppression.
By the requirement of “methodological humility” I mean that the “outsider” must always sincerly [sic] conduct herself under the assumption that, as an outsider, she may be missing something, and that what appears to her to be a “mistake” on the part of the insider may make more sense if she had a fuller understanding of the context.In accepting my position as outsider and other to an author’s text and culture, by de-centering myself and my perceptions, I become something different from the “unified ego”16 of the Romantic sublime. As a reader who is an outsider, I acknowledge the “epistemic privilege,” as well as the context, of the author of the text — I realize that as a member of an oppressed group, the author may have a “more immediate, subtle and critical knowledge about the nature of [his/her] oppression” than I, for I do not experience this oppression.17 By exercising both “methodological humility” and “methodological caution,” I “let the other be Other”18 by respecting the “Other’s” existence as a Self autonomous from my perception of it.By the requirement of “methodological caution,” I mean that the outsider should sincerely attempt to carry out her attempted criticism of the insider’s perceptions in such a way that it does not amount to, or even seem to amount to, an attempt to denigrate or dismiss entirely the validity of the insider’s point of view.15
Perhaps reading which requires “methodological caution” and “methodological humility” does not sound very pleasurable. Perhaps it gives the impression that as a reader I am always wary of my responses and am tyrannized by the requirement that I respond to other-authored fiction in a “politically correct” fashion. My position as outsider, however, neither alienates me from these texts nor from my own “genuine” responses. For as Benjamin states, I am “compensated for [my] loss of sovereignty by the pleasure of sharing, the communion with another subject.”19 The ecstasis of my re-captivation as a reader comes from those moments of communication with these texts, the voices of those who are different from me. This is a double-focused “aha!” experience — I am empowered as I see myself reflected in the experiences of others and simultaneously humbled by the differences which make others autonomous and unique from myself. Re-captivation resembles a dialogue in which power oscillates freely between my response and the voice of the text, between the context of my reading and the context of the writing.20
Reading with an awareness of shared anotherness and with self-subversive self-reflection necessarily involves a shift in my perspective as a feminist reader. When I emerged as a feminist reader, I experienced an “ontological shock”21 and perceived the world around me as an alien force which marginalized and misrepresented me; I saw that I was “Othered” by the dominant androcentric discourse. Now, as a re-captivated feminist reader, I realize that I, too, am guilty of “Othering.” I experience a double-take where I misrecognize myself. First, I realize that I am not who I thought I was (that is, solely a victim of oppression); and second I realize that I can be two seemingly contradictory things simultaneously — both “Other” and “Otherer”; the object and the agent of oppression. This “misrecognition”22 goes beyond the “good will” of a naïve hope for shared anotherness; it is the acceptance of my own complicity in systems of oppression as a white, heterosexual, middle-class woman; it is my acceptance of responsibility to those I have unwittingly “Othered.”
As such, misrecognition is a moment of re-captivated reading which involves painful introspection — feelings of shame, guilt, and anger. It is the pain I experience when reading a novel written by an African-American woman author, when I see myself in the role of the Black heroine’s white oppressors. It is the shame that accompanies my realization that my straightforward identification with either lesbian or Black heroines serves to erase the differences and imbalances of power and privilege between us. It is a moment of ethical insight which enriches but also problematizes my aesthetic experience.
Combined with the characteristics of self-subversive self-reflection and mutual recognition, misrecognition stresses that re-captivated reading is “situated reading.”23 This is reading which involves my awareness of my limited “vision” of the text. As re-captivated, I recognize myself as situated within a community of shared anotherness — mine is but one of a multiplicity of partial perspectives. From the contradictory position of “Other”/“Otherer,” I realize that as a self I am neither ideal nor unified and that my reading practices are likewise partial and ethically imperfect.
Misrecognition dislocates and decentres me both emotionally and intellectually. This is what Teresa de Lauretis describes as a “genuine epistemological shift,”
a dis-placement and a self-displacement: leaving or giving up a place that is safe, that is “home” — physically, emotionally, linguistically, epistemologically — for another place that is unknown and risky, that is not only emotionally but conceptually other; a place of discourse from which speaking and thinking are at best tentative, uncertain, unguaranteed.24This shift in consciousness forces me to adopt a reading aesthetic which is risky and open-ended. Like self-subversive self-reflection and shared anotherness, it emphasizes process over product, suggesting that my reading never rests at a totalized position.
This leave-taking, however, is not a return to the sublime’s idealization of dis-embodied knowledge. Instead, the genuine epistemological shift of misrecognition allows me to read through my body as it is situated in both discourse and the environment of my world. Re-captivated reading is both tangible and particular, grounded in the “felt situatedness” of my “strategic embodiment.” As re-captivated, I appreciate difference through the pleasure derived from moments of genuine intersubjective communication, which I call “shared anotherness,” combined with the pain of misrecognition and the acknowledgement of my own complicity as a European-American woman in systems of oppression.
Strategic embodiment is characterized by the self-awareness resulting from misrecognition and shared anotherness. As re-captivated, my reading is aware of my situatedness in discourse and the tangible world. Reading which is strategically embodied involves the realization that my “embodiment,” as well as my “identity” (as a self, reader, feminist, woman), is constructed by the interdependence between my discursive context and my tangible existence. However, this heightened awareness is not disembodied; it is a situatedness which is felt (through misrecognition and shared anotherness) so that I experience the “felt situatedness” of my location (as “Other”/”Otherer”) as I read through my strategic embodiment.
Thus, re-captivation, as I have defined it, is a feminist aesthetic of reading involving both the felt realization and the interrogation of the limitations of my reading position. In that it entails the self-examination of the ethics of my location within the feminist collective, it is an aesthetic in which personal, self-subversive self-reflection is intrinsically political.
Re-Captivated Response
The story I am about to tell is about Menace II Society, one of the most recent Black urban drama to be courted by Hollywood distributors and acclaimed by mainstream critics. This independent film has been declared unique because of the age of its co-directors — Albert and Allen Hughs, brothers who were only twenty-one when the film was made — and because of its bleak, deaestheticized vision. The protagonist of Menace II Society is not the typical message-movie good kid in a bad situation but a young man who is completely amoral, having been desensitized by his peers and the futility of his situatedness as a Black man in an environment dominated by violence, poverty, and racism.
Menace II Society opened in New York and was being raved about and reviewed just as I was finishing my construction of re-captivation. I was eager to see this film for I felt that my theoretical work had given me the tools with which I could “read” this film by and about “another” in a manner which would be both aesthetically rich and ethically responsible. While I expected that, like other movies in the “hood” genre, Menace II Society would be excessively violent, perhaps misogynist, and maybe even painful to watch, I felt that re-captivation provided me with the means to appreciate this film’s aesthetic innovations without requiring that I disown my anger or discomfort. That is to say, I expected that watching this film would involve an aesthetic experience of felt-situated shared anotherness.
In June of last year, I spent a five-day holiday in New York City with my partner Zeinul. On Saturday afternoon, while we were attending a matinee performance of Will Roger’s Follies with my family, I noticed that Menace II Society was playing in a cinema on the same block on Broadway, conveniently within walking distance of my sister’s apartment. After convincing Zeinul that this was the movie to see (as I remember, I was quite pushy, justifying my choice with a critical write-up from The New York Times) and that now was the time to see it (for when the film opened in Toronto, I argued, it would inevitably be ghettoized in the Eaton Centre multiplex), we decided to see the 10 o’clock p.m. show.
When we arrived, I noticed that the theatre was crowded and that we were among only a few non-African-American members of the audience and as an inter-racial couple (Zeinul is of South Asian descent), a very visible minority. The atmosphere of the cinema was one of unsettling lawlessness — the credits for the previous showing of the film were rolling as we walked in and people were entering and leaving in a haphazard fashion, a marked contrast to the tight control of tickets and patrons we usually experienced in Toronto. However, I chastised myself for over-reacting when I could see that many of the spectators were couples and groups of young women, people who appeared well-dressed and well-behaved. Being the only white person was not something I was accustomed to, but I reminded myself that this was not in itself threatening; in fact, it was merely the inverse of what many African-Americans experience on a day-to-day basis. And so I rationalized that seeing this particular film from the physical, as well as felt-situated, perspective of a racial minority would be a good exercise in shared anotherness.
As the lights dimmed, an announcement prohibiting smoking appeared on-screen, prompting one audience member to light a cigarette. I noted this person with “attitude” and felt slightly uneasy. Then, when the audience laughed at the non-stylized violence in the opening scene, I began to feel afraid, certain that I had placed us in a dangerous situation by suggesting that we see this movie, on this weekend, in this city. (Of course, it is possible that my horror, shock, and fear, were the responses intended by Menace II Society’s directors.) Even though the audience cheered the violence indiscriminately throughout the film with no notice of the race or gender of the victims, I felt that this callous response was aimed directly toward Zeinul and myself, reminding us that we were “out of place,” “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” displaced, and on display. I felt dangerously visible, illuminated by the light of the projector and the events on the screen. The audience laughter reminded us that we were outsiders, despite being in the same “neighbourhood” where my sister lived. The borders of her “neighbourhood,” after all, were Times Square/42nd St. and Central Park; we were not in Toronto any more.
While the audience’s response to the opening scene triggered my horror and fear, I simultaneously felt ashamed and disgusted by my racist assumptions about the audience. I misrecognized myself and saw my own complicity in systems of racist oppression during the opening scene when an Asian shopkeeper declares “I don’t want any trouble” as two Black youths enter his store. The shopkeeper’s announcement left unspoken his (and my) racist assumption that all young Black men are dangerous. His wife’s fear manifested itself in disrespect as she hovered around the young men eyeing them suspiciously as they chose their purchases. Yet, how different was her response from my sizing up the audience based on their appearance? Later in the film, a Black character mocked a white man who fears coming into his neighbourhood after dark to pick up a stolen vehicle. This white character was particularly odious, representing, to me, those in the white middle and upper classes who profit from Black crime but never dirty their hands themselves. Dressed in a shirt and tie, this man still managed to look unkempt, appearing cowardly as he tripped over his words and trembled. I despised this character yet noted with bitter irony that my fear of the people in this darkened theatre linked me inevitably to this man and that we were more similar than I cared to admit.
Even as I felt humiliated by my cowardice and racism, the events on the screen approximated my real life situation too closely, so that I was unable to see beyond my fear in order to really appreciate the movie. As I followed the events on-screen, I was preoccupied with my response. I wondered if I was missing the “gallows humour” that the rest of the audience saw. Were they laughing, not at the video-taped murder which the character O-Dog stole from the store and replayed for his friends repeatedly, but at some bantering interaction among these young men which I could not see? Even now, I wonder if I do not mis-remember both the film and the audience response — the laughter and cheering could not have been continuous. Were not there moments of shocked silence, especially after the tragic ending? As the audience left the theatre without incident, I noticed that the crowd was much larger than I had realized, and I felt particularly ashamed knowing that the laughter I heard must have been the response of only a few of the patrons. As we filed out, I remember hearing a woman behind me telling her friend that this was a terrible movie, low-budget and trashy — was it she who did not get it, or me, I asked myself.
The next day when I learned second-hand from my sister that there had been shootings reported at Menace II Society in other parts of New York, I felt terrified (because something could have happened), relieved (because my fears had some basis in reality), and disgusted with myself for accepting uncritically what was most likely a rumour and at best the media’s distortion of the truth. Months later, at the Toronto International Film Festival, I discovered other European-Americans who also experienced fear and shame when viewing this film with African-American audiences — a realization which is simultaneously comforting and troubling. Today, my reaction/response to this situation continues to disturb me.
Some undoubtedly will argue that I have needlessly problematized my response and that my automatic self-subversive, self-reflexive scrutiny has caused me to over-analyze my feelings and to question emotions which can neither be changed nor explained. They will say that I rob myself of the immediacy of aesthetic experience and the joy of simple pleasures. These critics will say that I should “lighten up” and “go with the flow.” Others will argue that as a self-declared, anti-racist feminist, I am needlessly preoccupied with “white guilt”; confessing to sins which do not exist. And, yet, others will argue that such endless self-criticism is futile; it produces only remorse but no positive social change. And, there will undoubtedly be some who will say, “It is only a representation.”
Nonetheless, I believe that this anecdote justifies my belief that there is a need for a feminist aesthetic of reading such as re-captivation which strives toward shared anotherness. My response was, in some sense, ethically responsible, even though I did not feel comfortable with Drucilla Cornell’s notion of “letting the other be Other.”25 My self-subversive, self-reflexive double-takes, misrecognition of myself as reflected on the screen, and my overall felt-situatedness of my strategic embodiment were the best I could do under the circumstances. Although my reading ego regressed, I was aware of my fears and prejudices and this self-awareness of oneself as ethically imperfect is, as I have argued previously, a prerequisite to true shared anotherness.
Overall, my felt-situated reading of Menace II Society reveals several things about my aesthetic response. First, it shows that my response is inseparable from what Deanne Bogdan refers to as my “feeling, power, and location, problems,”26 or my situatedness as it is defined both geographically and discursively. I believe that if I had seen this film at the Toronto International Film Festival or in a women’s studies classroom composed of predominantly all white students, I might not have experienced the pain of misrecognition. In such locations, my sameness with the rest of the audience, whether fellow film buffs or other European-American feminists committed to anti-racism, would have generated an atmosphere of safety and comfort. In contrast, dislocation and dissonance characterized my actual viewing of Menace II Society. The sound of the audience’s laughter clashed with my cinematic expectations, and my subsequent response proved that good intentions are inconsequential. My situatedness engendered emotions which challenged the ethical ideals of my aesthetic, and my motives in choosing to view this text. I discovered that I cannot “plan my passions”27 and that, at best, I will recognize that my response is partial and imperfect.
Neither the anecdote recounted here nor re-captivation purports to give definitive answers; rather, both are examples of working through the problematic of constructing an ethically responsible as well as pleasurable aesthetic of reading. My reading of Menace II Society illustrates the complexities and ambiguities of personal response and suggests the need to problematize, but not reject, reading pleasure, in order to balance individual desire with ethical responsibility. And while this anecdote questions the impossibility and insufficiency of isolated readings in social contexts which are constantly changing, it also signals for feminists and other literary critics, the importance of holding in tension the personal and political when reading for pleasure.
For a
response to this essay, see Thompson.
1. Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 90.
2. Lucy R. Lippard, “Showing the Right Thing for a Change,” Z Magazine 2, no. 11 (1989): 81.
3. I use the term ecstasis as defined by Deanne Bogdan. Bogdan reclaims ecstasis from Longinus advocating a “feminization of total form.” Here the true ecstasy of response is the “creative dialectical interplay between text and reader,” total form as “moveable feast.” See Bogdan, “Reading and ‘the Fate of Beauty’: Reclaiming Total Form,” in Beyond Communication: Reading Comprehension and Criticism, ed. Deanne Bogdan and Stanley B. Straw (Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook Publishers Heinemann, 1990).
4. Patricia Yaeger, “Toward a Female Sublime,” in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 191-92.
5. Yaeger, “Toward a Female Sublime,” 196.
6. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 16.
7. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 23.
8. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 23.
9. Patrocinio P. Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading,” in Gender and Reading: Essays and Readers, Texts and Content, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 53-54.
10. Lippard, “Showing the Right Thing for a Change,” 81.
11. Ibid.
12. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1981), 409.
13. This relinquishment of my aesthetic sovereignty is specific to my location as a white, heterosexual, middle-class, able-bodied academic feminist. Those women readers who feel they have never experienced aesthetic sovereignty and who feel that they have always read from an “outsider” position might approach shared anotherness in a different way.
14. Uma Narayan, “Working Together Across Difference: Some Considerations on Emotions and Political Practice,” Hypatia 3, no. 2 (1988): 37.
15. Narayan, “Working Together Across Difference,” 38.
16. Yaeger, “Toward a Female Sublime,” 196.
17. Narayan, “Working Together Across Difference,” 35.
18. Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 203.
19. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 53.
20. Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves,” 54.
21. Sandra Lee Bartky, “Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness,” in Philosophy and Women, ed. S. Bishop and M. Weinzweig (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1979), 256.
22. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987), 124.
23. This phrase is influenced by Donna Haraway’s term “situated knowledges.” See Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988).
24. Teresa de Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness,” Feminist Studies 16, no. 1 (1990): 138.
25. Cornell, Beyond Accommodation, 203.
26. Deanne Bogdan, Re-Educating the Imagination: Toward a Poetics, Politics, and Pedagogy of Literary Engagement (Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook Publishers Heinemann, 1992), chap. 6.
27. This phrase was suggested to me in conversation by Prof. Roger Simon, Department of Curriculum, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.