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...One More Time: Symbolic Castration and Technical Objects

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What Orff can't seem to find are his old flame Luise, a woman who embodies the perpetual lostness of Eurydice; and his own lost inspiration, as Orpheus's tale and Orff's own gradually become intertwined in a heady and poetically potent blend of mythological riffing and daft comedy. -- from this summary of The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban

...a massive No. 1 single, inadvertently started the late '90s teen pop boom, and created a public persona for herself that was simultaneously kid-friendly and pure male fantasy...


Perseus is holding Medusa's head like sort of sceptre, or proof of a mandate from heaven. Equally, in the sculpture-as-story Medusa has been "castrated" in a most extreme way -- ending her life, clearly, but not eliminating the magical power of her gaze.

Perhaps the issue is that her head, back when it was attached to her body, was already a sort of sceptre; and she was so closely aligned with that power as to become, entirely, a "phallus" in the Žižek and Lacan manner.

 What's going on w/ all this weird lingo, you may ask?  Well there's frequent talk in Lacanian circles about how woman, or girl "=" phallus; this can be explained in somewhat more down-to-earth terms if we start again from the top. A king or queen, for example, is a human being. But with their crown and sceptre in hand, their humanness is pushed into the background. This is the so-called symbolic castration, in which the symbols of power "castrate" the powerful person, by partially removing their personhood.


OK, back in the story: Perseus intervenes and says "actually, no it is the head of this woman that is the phallus, and I'll prove it." (Further evidence: her head is covered with snakes.)
All I need to do...

To sum up once more:

(Phase 1) Medusa as magical being, whose vision projects and fixes beings as images. She seems to represent earthiness, femininity, holism, nature -- but all in a "negative" aspect.

(Phase 2) Medusa's head, as a sceptre-like prize -- representing something that organises power -- in this case, no longer natural power but political and commercial power. (Cellini's statue was forged for the Medicis.)

(Phase 3) "Perseus with the Head of Medusa", a real physical statue, which no longer "represents" per se, but *is*. Where's Medusa's head is a sort of prototype ("symbolic") technology, the statue is a bona fide technical object in Simondon's sense. (Further evidence: Berlioz's opera as part of a series of derived works.)
The Medusa Frequency, p. 8

Comments

  1. aridedNovember 6, 2016 at 9:54 PM

    It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Medusa has cropped up repeatedly during this heated election cycle, one that may end with the United States electing its first woman president. One image in particular keeps recurring—the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton as the mythological snake-haired monster. Clinton has been compared to Medusa by conservative writers like Joel B. Pollak at Breitbart News and bloggers like Ron Russell at Right Wing Humor, and in political merchandise sold online. Meanwhile, her opponent Donald Trump has been portrayed as her conqueror, the Greek demigod Perseus. On Zazzle, people can buy products emblazoned with an image of a stoic Trump raising the severed head of a bug-eyed Clinton, her mouth agape in silent protest—an allusion to a sculpture by the Italian Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini. Today, the political references to Medusa only underscore the pervasive misogyny that drives many attacks against Clinton and other so-called “nasty women.” - http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/the-original-nasty-woman-of-classical-myth/506591/?utm_source=atlgp

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