What is Modernity?You can’t answer that question without talking about the BlackAmerican experience.

As a not-BlackAmerican, it’s hard to escape myths about what the Black Americanexperience is. I say this even after reading history, even feelingsafer in Black spaces than White spaces. But even if you can’tescape the myths—and the beliefs that frequently follow—thatdoesn’t mean that you don’t intuit that something doesn’t addup.

Which is why I openmy Books In Conversation with this collection. Yes, please, readIbram X. Kendi’s excellent StampedFrom The Beginning, amongothers. That will help explode much of what we’ve been taught. ButI wanted to explore these lesser known titles because they telldifferent aspects of the story. Other volumeswill touch on it later in the series as well.

Bornin Blackness byHoward French traces theorigins of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade from a startingpoint that’s been hiding inplain sight: Portugal. Thatcountry used to be seen as the loser of losers in the global rush forpower, but given their massive and productive holdings in SouthAmerica (Brazil) and Africa (Angola) into the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries, that’s nonsense. And certainly, they brokethrough many technological barriers to initiate sea travel on a scalenot seen before. More sinister is their early pilot of the infamoustransatlantic triangle, which I think is more fitting to see as atransfer of wealth from one continent (Africa) to three others(Europe and North and South America), which enabled the latter threeto continue trading and building wealth among themselves.

Donot let the propaganda fool you: Africa is a continent of abundance,and that’s why itisso attractive. (The immensedisplay of wealth by Mansa Musa of Mali during his pilgrimage toMecca in the fourteenth century might have been an inspiration forinitial voyages there from Portugal.) And while no one should pitythe Portuguese during this time, they came to West Africa toestablish trade relations, not to conquer. They took enslaved people,but they were hoping to trade primarily in gold.

Anyonereading this already knows that, of course, enslaved human beingswere ultimately more profitable, and there’s an irony to this thatFrench underscores at the end of his book. Africa, large as it is,punched below its weight in population even before Europeans andAsians began plundering it, in no small part due to microorganismsmore readily found in the tropics. (InThe Shadow of Slaverydiscusses the means by which West Africa in particular adjusted forthe consequentagricultural conditions.) The sparseness of the population wasexacerbated by the slave raids, which were conducted more by otherAfricans than by Europeans, atleast at first. That this wasweakening polities, even as they traded human beings for commodities,wasn’t lost on African leaders, who recognized that they, asa consequence, would havefewer future allies as they weakened other nations. French does notexcuse the choices these people made to continue, but he does givethe sense that by the time this realization settled, they wereenmeshed in an economic system that was going to be brutal to get outof.

Evenbefore the conquest of the Americas began in earnest, Africa was thefulcrum of two other, early “trade triangles”. Thespice trade, particularly for melegueta pepper from the area that isnow Liberia, drove the exchange for metal and textiles produced innorthern Europe. This trade, surprisingly, integrated northern andsouthern Europe economically in ways that hadn’t been seen before.

Thetrade in textiles drove a triangle of a more “global” character.While Africans were able to produce fine textiles, thosewere more readily available in what is now known as India, and theyfeatured cotton, which was more comfortable in the tropics than thecloth produced in Europe. Portugalwas again the intermediary for this trade, and what they took forcloth was people.

Ibring this up to highlight that African leaders were making economicchoices, even if we find them repugnant—they were not beingpillaged (at least not initially). They were a source of both directand indirect wealth, and when they could leverage for advantage, theydid. That they were a source of significant wealth is something elsethat is also hiding in plain sight. Without the wealth generated byAfrican resources and African bodies, it’s hard to conceive of thepossibilities of the silver mines or tobacco, cotton, and sugarplantations which powered the European colonies in the Americas.

Ithink it should be clear to anyone that Africa and Africans sufferedlosses for their interactions with Europeans. This shouldn’t be amatter of debate, and yet there are those who had argued for decadesthat Africa somehow benefited from enlightened European systems.French slams this at the end of his book with statistics showing thatwhile Africa’s population may have been below the mean for its sizebefore European “trade”, even after the slave trade had ended andmost of Africa was colonized by European powers, the continent*still* hadn’t recovered its population losses, in spite ofallegedly superior public health systems. It wasn’t until afterdecolonization and independence in the middle of the twentiethcentury that Africa began to make up for its population losses inearnest—this in spite of the narrative that Africa is poor andstarving.

Born in Blacknessproved, to me, the case that Africa was a net contributor to ourglobal economic history (and that they deserve reparations, even ifnothing will ever be enough). One narrative exploded. Therewere times that I felt outraged and shook my head, but it was anunderstandable story because it dealt with history and economics.Much more difficult was Slaveryand The Culture of Taste.That is a book about psychology and sociology—and a level of sadismI both can’t comprehend and see everyday.

Slavery and TheCulture of Taste by SimonGikandi was the most difficult book I have ever read, no contest.(More difficult to read than Orientalismby Edward Said, and I don’t speak French.) The concepts were easyto understand, and that made it more painful.

Icame to the book because I finally noticed how much I had beenhearing the word “taste”. What, exactly, did that mean? Whywere people like Austin Kleon and IraGlass talking about how their tastes “improved” even as theirart didn’t while they were in the formative stages of figuring outwhat their artistic orientationwas? We judge people by itall the time—but why? What is taste, and what does it signal?

Ifinally did a search for it in my fantastic library system, and assoon as I saw this title, I knew I had to read it. While the titlemay seem a mashup, it’s not.

Gikandistarts with the problem of modernity, and this is something Frenchgets at, too: for all of our enlightened associations with modernity,it doesn’t begin in earnest until the explosion of enslavement. TheModernPersonis an independent contributor to a society that values, among otherthings, humanity and the values of The Enlightenment (rationalityand independent judgment being chief among them) and seesthemself in opposition to the hidebound traditions thatcharacterized, roughly, the medieval era, particularly religiousdeference and socially proscribed conduct. It is the original era ofoptimism, an OG Everything Is Awesome.

Whereasthe Middle Ages might have demanded, through its deference to God andChurch, the presentation and internal embodiment of Goodness so thatwe could be seen to Heaven, the Age of Modernity demanded theperformanceof Happiness, which spoke to our Success, so that we could be trustedwith future Opportunity. TheModern Era is the Age of Possibility and more than a little Awe overhow far we have come.

Butwhat these early modern specimens knew in a way that they could notdeny was that all of the Progress was underwritten by the enslavementof people who were not invited into the benefits of modernity in anyway. The modern subject saw the slave and knew that their age wasbuilt on a foundation of clouds.

Sowhat is taste in this context? It’s the set of aesthetic practicesand habits of mind that is supposed to limn the difference betweenwhat is supposed to be the idealistic magic of modernity and the rootof slavery beneath it. The Culture of Taste flowers in eighteenthcentury England, and it’s possibly where the British first learn tosublimate what they can’t make peace with (or control).

(Isthis a successful strategy? That tastes change so frequently wouldtend to indicate that it’s not.) 

Itcan’t be overlooked that the practices include politeness, andhere it’s hard not to think of the rule to avoid discussions ofreligion, politics, and sex. It is also, at its deeper root, anadmonition to make sure everyone is comfortable by making sureeveryone has a pleasant experience in which they can allexperience—wait for it—Happiness.

It’swhen you contemplate politeness that you start to realize Marx had itwrong: the opiate of the modern masses is Happiness, and like alladdictive drugs, we chase it most especially when we don’t have it.I would argue that our quest to always live in a state of perpetualhappiness is the cause of much of our sociological, if notpsychological, ills. As Ryder Carroll, the creator of the BulletJournal, pointed out, being in one emotional or psychological stateall of the time is generally considered a sign of mental illness. Iwould argue that it also retards our growth as a civilization—andthat just might be the point.

Gikandiis not the first to note that the presence of enslaved people andtheir importance to the economy built up around them is not an ironicbut a logical cause of the heightened calls for “liberty” amongthe people who aren’t enslaved. (We’ll talk about that more whenwe get to Sunny Auyang's The Dragon and the The Eagle.)

Itwas difficult reading about performance, for reasons that I’m suremany people will understand. I grew up with a parent who frequentlydidn’t seem to have emotions but performed them. I might not beputting that the best way, but it’s something that left me havingtrouble trying to distinguish between genuine displays of emotion andemotional manipulation. Part of why I’m having trouble putting itinto words is that it’s an extreme version of an acceptedphenomenon, which has led me to question the validity of thepractice. Gikandi’s analysis doesn’t do anything to affirmconfidence.

Itis harder still to read about the twisted psychic underpinnings ofour civilization. To the extent you suspected something was wrong,his explanation proves you’re correct. It should no longer be aquestion of what replaces this abusive system, but why haven’t westopped it already? Because even if you deny the humanity of theexploited people who make the system, it’s difficult to deny thetoll that living with the contradictions of it has done to even thosewho aren’t exploited by it—or, perhaps better to say, areexploited differently. (I think now of the psychological case studiesat the end of Frantz Fanon’s TheWretched of the Earth; a subject for another day, but for nowit’s clear after reading that the culture of violence does its owndamage to those who perpetrate it.)

Thesequestions are at the heart of the first part of the book. They’rethe easy part. The second half is devastating. As much aspeople have pretzeled their arguments to deny that enslaved, capturedpeople were just that, theircaptors understood perfectlythat they were dealing with fellow human beings. And they proceededwith that informed understanding to break and destroy their captives’previous identities.

Thisis part of what makes this particular flavor of slavery extra-specialcruel and evil. Yes, slavery and captivity existed before thePortuguese dropped down into West Africa, but the system that wasexported to the European colonies took on far more degradation thanwhat had been seen before. The people who were enslaved were nowintended to exist only for their service to someone else.

Therecognition of the humanity of these people is implicit in thecruelty of the methods thatwere employed, and yes, dear reader, this is where I cried. Imaginingthe psychological disruption of being removed from family, friends,community, and home, and being taken to a strange environment bypeople who were known to be brutal and violent was terrifying. Thefact that many of them did not speak the language of their captorswas even more disorienting.

Ican’t stress enough that this was known and obvious, if onlythrough the continued resistance to capture, captivity, andenslavement at every step of the way. And even if we look at themiddle-men of slavery and excuse them for not having power, they madechoices within that system. They did not learn the names of theircaptives; they renamed them. While some artifacts of their formerlives miraculously made the journey, for the most part, everythingthat had bound them to their previous identity was taken from them.Please imagine what it must have been like to have had theiridentities stripped from them, particularly as adults, but even forchildren. It made not only for loss but a certain kind of madness.

Thebarbaric cruelty of slave owners and their overseers is infamous.What may be less appreciated is that it was intentional. It wasn’tjust sadism—although that can’t be discounted—buta calculated strategy to keep enslaved people from asserting theirhumanity. When we consider the elaborate means of torture manyhouseholds with enslaved people employed, it’s clearthat the violence was plannedand strategic.Gikandi makes the point that the tools, preparation, and execution ofthe violence borders on sexual fetishism, and it’s hard to look atthe pictures of the idealized violence and not see sexual undertones.I would argue that this is a continuing, perverse, and unwillingrecognition that the people who are being subjugated anddehumanized are stillpeople.

Thispart was painfulto read, butit’s not all about dehumanization.Perhaps you’ve noticed—Black Americans are real people, and theirancestors fought for their humanity every step of the way, and inevery way. They went beyond mere survival. Foras much as enslavers tried to deny the humanity of their captives, inmany places they had to make concessions to them. (I would argue thatthe combination of these concessions and the inconsistently appliedviolence actually made conditions in some ways more terrifying.)

Enslavedpeople got precious little time off, but during those times manycommunities gathered to remember and reconstruct their identitiesfrom their original communities, including songs, music, and dancing,as well as sharing their original language. (Even this sometimesproved to be too much for their captors, some of whom reportedfeeling haunted by the sounds of that music.) In some places, theyalso had the “right” to grow their own food on small parcels ofland adjacent to their homes. While thismight stretch the definition ofa concession—thearrangement was frequently analternative to a captor providing food—many enslavedpeople used these plots to assert their identities, growing a mix ofsubsistence items from their nation of origin and their new settings.(If you’re wondering how they had seeds from their homes, InThe Shadow of Slavery touches onthat as well.)

Thiscontrol over their spaces, social as well as physical, is one wayenslaved people subverted their captors’ admonition that “thereshall be a place for everything and everything shall have a place.”(Boy, does housekeeping take on a significantly more sinister tone inthat light.) These are just some of the ways that African slaves wereable to not only maintain their humanity but forge an identity in theface of psychological oppression.

Gikandicites Freud to highlight theimportance of play as a psychological device to limitthe damage of oppression—but notes that is not a substitute forfreedom itself. Still, at times, it must have been brieflysatisfying, especially in the festivals popular in the West Indies,in which slaves openly copied the culture of taste in order toridicule it. Surprisingly, some of these, particularly the “JohnCanoe” festivals, actually included their aristocratizingcaptors. (Perhapsa contemporarycomparison would be a mashup of a drag ball and a roast.)

BothFrench and Gikandi make clear that Africa—and Africanenslavement—are the basis for modernity, in all its ugliness. Butlet’s admit that economicand psychological repercussions may require some thought andanalysis, because theyaren’t all immediately obvious. That’s alright—SabrinaStrings’ Fearingthe Black Body coversterritory that everyone will immediately, viscerally understand.

Icame across Strings’ book first when I heard Brooke Gladstone’sOnThe Mediaepisode about the moralpanic around body size. I would be remiss if I didn’t point outthat the study mentioned in that episode—and briefly in Strings’book—paints a different picture when smokers and people who havebeen diagnosed with serious illnesses—peoplewho are thin for reasons that no one wants to emulate—areremoved. Beingin the BMI category considered healthy weight is, in fact, healthierand encourages greater longevity. However, even though a lowerBMI is healthier, that doesn’t excuse, condone, or license bullyingof people with higher BMIs.

But what does all of this haveto do with modernity?

KidnappedAfricans were beginning to be seen in European cities in theseventeenth centuries, and the ambivalence people felt about thebenefits versus the material origins of modernity is reflected in theway they perceived those people. WhileEuropean artistic standards did not consider stereotypical Africanfaces to fit with the conventions of the time (pointed noses and“fine” lips were held to be more attractive), their bodies fitwith the European ideal of a “well-formed, proportionate figure”.Initially, there was even artistic admiration for these bodies.

Thisdoes not last, though sexual objectification and exploitation ofBlack bodies endures to this day. Strings makes clear that it is inperceptions of the Black body that we can see the twisted and uglyways Europeanstriedto justify the contradictions of modernity: If an enslaved person isbeing treated as a beast by someone else known to be rational, itmust be because they are, in fact, a beast. Like all other animals,they don’t control theirdesires for food or sex, which both explains and is explained by thedifferences in the average body types of Europeans and Africans. (Oneis tempted here to remind early and contemporaryobservers that members of both groups have never had a unified bodytype, but I suspect this would fall on deaf ears.)

Nowthe special, modern twist: Make sure you prove yourability to control your baser impulses, particularly around food,lest you be revealed as a beast. Ludicrous as this sounds, it seems anumber of Europeans were in danger of being revealed to be just that.

Theslave trade made the sugar trade possible, as French discusses inBorn in Blackness.While Europeans had used sweeteners before, the explosion of theavailability of sugar in the eighteenth century was a new paradigm.What came right along with it was the availability of coffee (andtea—but we’ll let Raj Patel talk about that in Stuffedand Starved).There’s some debate about whether sugar is addictive, but there isno debate about coffee, tea, and caffeine in general. Evenmore importantly, coffee had a prestige we in the twenty-firstcentury have trouble appreciating. Consuming it, at least initially,was a signal of sophistication and even erudition, and in thebeginning of the Age of Performance, coffee was the perfect prop. Andif consumed in the new cafes that were popping up all over Europeancities thatbecame a stage for intellectual activity,so much the better.

I don’t think I need to explain why sugar consumption made coffeedrinking more palatable (confession: I hate coffee), and I probablydon’t need to explain that consuming large amounts of sweeteneddrinks—many times with milk—in combination with the sedentarylifestyle of the cafe dweller led not only to health problems likegout but also weight gain. This phenomenon was a subject of deep,almost existential concern, and part of their response was thedevelopment of the “standards of taste” Gikandi refers to. Politeindividuals are also admonished to practice table etiquette and showrestraint when dining.

It’s during this period that we begin to see women being encouragedto be the smallest people they can be, as well as the beginnings ofthe diet craze (or is that crazy diets?). Once colonization of theAmericas begins in earnest, new women’s magazines begin toencourage their readers to take responsibility for their own dietsand the diets of their families to make sure that they are thehealthiest specimens possible. This projection of a perfect body is acrucial part of the performance of morality as well as an assertionof their Anglo-Saxon superiority.

As ideals of European and then White American bodies developed, Blackbodies continued to be denigrated. But while the definition of“Black” has contracted and expanded—how people feel about mixedrace children has changed repeatedly—the definition of “White”is even more amorphous. One of the things that perked my ears upabout this book was during Strings’ interview with Gladstone, whenshe saw how frequently *Irish* bodies were denigrated in similar, attimes identical language as that used for Black people.

I continue to take exception to comparisons between the indenturedservitude of White Europeans and the enslavement of Africans andtheir descendants—one was not permanent, nor was it passed down tochildren—but when Edward Said in Cultureand Imperialism points out that the English took theirfirst stab at colonialism in Ireland, it’s difficult to deny thatthe Irish were treated as little better than property. (And not justthe Irish: per Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning,African enslavement didn’t take off in earnest until the Slavs ofEastern Europe built fortifications to protect themselves from slaveraids.) As bizarre as it may seem to us today, the Irish were notseen as White, and in fact many tried to argue that they must havehad “Asiatic” or African roots because they were darker skinnedand smaller in stature. English writers and philosophers like ThomasCarlyle went so far as to use the Irish Famine, which brought so manyof the Irish to the United States, as proof of their animal nature,because surely it was their “gluttony and poor self-control” thatled to them not being able to control their food sources.

It was, of course, not only the English who held a poor view of theIrish. Proud American Anglo-Saxons like Ralph Waldo Emerson agreedthat the Irish were deficient specimens, as well as being short,dark, and of Asian origin. However, Emerson didn’t confine hiscritiques to the Irish. He, like many other Americans, held that the“Anglo-Saxon” combined the best of Western and Northern Europeanpopulations and were the “Ultra-Caucasians”. Not surprisingly,part of the proof of this superiority was in the (ideally) taller andthinner bodies of these Anglo-Saxons. Heaviness was a sign that maybeyou—and the rest of your “race”—really weren’t ultraanything, so the pressure increased to be thin. (Please don’t namecheck Emerson to me again.)

It should go without saying that the penalties were stiffer forAnglo-Saxon/White/European/Whatever women who were heavy. Andyet...don’t be too thin. Per Harper’s Bazaar in the latenineteenth century:

 “...a woman must have some fat to avoid the scrawniness ofthe Reform years, and...beauty [is] to be found only in women whosedelicacy and littleness cause emotions of tenderness and protectiontaking them to be admiration of beauty.”

There’s a discussion to behad about how the Victorian abhorrence of adult sexuality led toinstitutionalized pedophilia, but that’s anothersubject for another day. For our purposes now, it’s self-evidentthat most adult women are going to have a very hard time fitting intoan ideal of “delicacy and littleness” that’s more appropriateto a child. As the majority of American women (and men) know, it’sakin to being thrust into a game with rules stacked against almosteveryone forced to play. That, in part, goes some way towardexplaining the rise of Diet Culture in the late nineteenth century. 

Onething we can say about the likes of Graham, Kellogg, and the SeventhDay Adventists is that they beginto emphasize the consumption of “good” foods over the prohibitionof “bad” foods. We might also thank Kellogg for his emphasis on“hydrotherapy” and vegetarianism, which may have had genuinepublic health benefits (even if you’re a committed omnivore, youprobably wouldn’t have felt safe eating the mass-produced meat ofthat age). But that is all.

Kellogg, perhaps surprisingly,didn’t want to see (White) women too thin—because that might makeit difficult for them to bear children, and that was abhorrent to aeugenicist like him. (Also, he was not alone in the belief that Blackpeople were so constitutionally inferior that they were eventuallygoing to die out as a “race”. We can only assume that it didn’toccur to him that health problems Black Americans experienced couldbe ameliorated by not having to live in a racist system.) Thisshould sound familiar to anyone who has had to listen to any fascistrhetoric—please think of that next time you buy breakfast cereal.

What Strings showed is that much as we try to run away from thecontradictions and hypocrisies of our modern system, there is noescape, because they are baked into the systems that govern—literallyand figuratively—our very bodies. Of all of the books in thisgroup, I saw hers as the one with the strongest, if unstated, call toaction to dismantle the systems that are destroying our health andpsyches. It just works out, as far as I’m concerned, that doing sowill dismantle the rot of modernity as well.

The books above explain the economic, social, psychological, moral,and even physical origins and consequences of our pervasive systemsof modernity. While these are paradigms that we should be activelychanging, they are total. There is no one who lives in thiscivilization who isn’t in some way a party to these modes ofexisting. So it is always, but we should be forgiven if we’re leftunable to *see* it for what it is even if we *know* it for what itis. It is here, perhaps, that we can use our visual media as a clue,or at least a partial glimpse in the mirror.

Catherine McCormack’s Womenin the Picture is light reading compared to the other threetitles. But her subject matter—systemic sexism as reflected in ourmedia—is just as serious as the systematized racism that makesmodernity possible. And if the other three titles made me cringe inhorror, this one made me wince in recognition.

McCormack is concerned with European and American art, and she openswith an acknowledgment of how privileged and rarefied the world ofart history and criticism is. As with so many other professions, it’sself-selecting: you must already come into the field with deepknowledge of history, Greco-Roman mythology, and religious imagery,as well as familiarity with classical works. If art history is itsown language, you need to be privy to the syntax before you start, atthe very least so you can get all of the in-jokes. In and of itself,these prerequisites limit participation to those who come from means,and until a few generations ago, to men. 

Which is all tosay that a critical feminist perspective of art was lacking untilrelatively recently. While McCormack isn’t the first to attack theproblem, she’s still going into relatively uncharted ground.

Women in the Picture dividesits subjects into four categories: Venus,The Mother, Maidens and Dead Damsels, and The Monstrous Woman. Theyare all classical archetypes, but we see reflections of them to thisday.

Part of my admiration for McCormackstems from her analysis of the myth of Venus (Aphrodite). Proud mythnerd thoughI am, I had never heard the goddess’ origin story in quite thisway. My understanding was that Cronus colluded with his mother Gaeato take down his father Uranus. (Gaea, you may recall, was outragedbecause Uranushad imprisoned their younger, uglier children within the bowels ofthe earth after they were born. He couldn’t stand to see themwalking on their mother, the earth—so he kept her pregnant withthem.) Cronus, youngest of the Titans, was the only one willing totake on his all-powerful father, and he did it when he was at hismost vulnerable: coupling with Gaea. Cronus emasculated Uranus withhis famous sickle. Uranus fled, and from the drops of his wound’sblood sprung up the Furies. His genitals were tossed into the sea,and from that foam arose Venus/Aphrodite.

Only maybe itwasn’t the foam, but the genitals themselves that the goddessformed from. Maybe she is infact Uranus’ genitals—his penis, in particular—reborn as anobject of desire...to stimulate other male genitals. She is, in thisinterpretation, male sexuality,re-presented to itself infemale form. Perhaps thismight explain why representations of Aphrodite/Venus are sounrelatablefor so many women,because she was never intended to be a woman but a proxy for maledesires—the perfect object of the Male Gaze. (We’ll pick this upwhen we talk about Narcissus, Echo, and the rest of the gang inRoberto Calassso’s TheMarriage of Cadmus and Harmony.)

Inmany ways, the archetype of The Mother is just as limiting as theunattainable goddess because it was created to be. McCormack takespains to make clear that this is not the same as the maternal figuresof older religions and mythologies which were so closely intertwinedwith nature, in all its glory and terror. This mother is a walledgarden, her fertility channeled in the most contrived ways, to servethe ends of the civilization that stands in opposition to nature. The“virgin mother” is perhaps the perfect starting point for ourunderstanding: she is production that isn’t preceded by personalsexuality or even desire. She ultimately exists to serve.

“Cringe” doesn’t appropriatelydescribe my reaction to McCormack’s descriptions of theaspirational Dutch paintings of the perfect wife and mother, cuddlingher children in a chair or managing their studies while getting onwith her own work.These paintings were made for the husbands who were making theirfortunes overseas, an assurance that everything was as it should beand would be waiting for him in a perfect state when he returned. Theaesthetic of those paintings is surprisingly similar to modernInstagram and magazine spreads, wherein TheMotheris presented in an open but luxurious space, using the latesttechnology, and surrounded by her always clean, happy, and beautifulchildren. And it reminds of nothing so much as how we imagine MarieKondo’s advice come to life, right down to “everything beingin its place”. Here is where I wished I could sink into my chair,as I uncritically love Kondo’s advice and genuinely feel betterfollowing it, but it’s impossible to deny what it legitimizes.(More, I promise, when we discuss Marie Kondo and TheCultures of Collecting.)

There is another side to the modernarchetype of the perfect mother, and that is one who is noble in herloss, particularly of her child. This trope is repeated and veneratedad infinitum in our modern media—how we love to watch a Blackmother in particular mourn the loss of her child, usually her son, toviolence, addiction, or other wickedness of our civilization. Someonecould mount a collection of photos of the Mourning Mother—whetherin the initial throes of grief or the numbed shock of theaftermath—and fill a museum. 

It goes without saying that peoplehave been calling BS on these narratives for centuries. McCormackhighlights the struggle to recognize mothers’ (and women’s)unpaid work as exactly that. Moderncapitalism has demanded divisions of labor, necessitated by the siteof work, and that translated for centuries into a sexual division oflabor. The rise of capitalismis arguably intertwined with the rise of sexism,and because of the extreme violence against women during thecenturies’ long persecution of witches (though, as Carl Sagan notesin TheDemon Haunted World, not allof the victims were women), women lost much of the power they neededto challenge their confinement to domesticity and the devaluation oftheir work. 

The artistMireleLaderman Ukeles created a photography project in 1969 thathighlighted women’s work, documenting her everyday tasks ofcooking, cleaning, and child-rearing, as well as participation inreligiousceremonies. She saw that workin solidarity with other “maintenance” work, particularly ofpublic structures, that was only slightly more valued andcompensated. Ukeles’ work is of interest to McCormack because thiswas, in one way, an answer to the question of how a woman could existas an artist—or vice versa—and still fulfill her“roles”. Work as an artistic statement was part of Ukeles’answer.

It isn’t lost on historians ofwork and feminist activists that women who function as homemakershave better tools to do their jobs. However, they turn the marketingnarrative on its head: instead of seeing vacuum cleaners, washingmachines, dryers, and dishwashers as devices to make their workeasier, those machines have made work harder because they have raisedthe standard of expectation of cleanliness. I would argue that theyhave also worsened the class-divide, as those standards apply even tothose households that can’t afford to make those purchases.Further, they make women’swork even more devalued, after a fashion, as expensive gadgets arenow seen as something essential to work that isn’t compensated.

All of the archetypes McCormack discusses suffer from a form ofviolence, but violence is baked into the definition of the Maiden andthe Damsel in Distress. The violence, or at least the threat of it,*is* the distress. The Maiden or Damsel is frequently raped or aboutto be, and if she isn’t, likely dead. (If the reader immediatelythought “...a fate worse than death” after the word “rape”,that might be the best demonstration of the archetype.)

TheRape of Europa by Titian isperhaps the most famousexample of this archetype. In the myth, Europa is a princess in AsiaMinor, little more than a child, when she’s kidnapped by Zeus as abull. One of the first things I noticed when I saw the painting washow *womanly*, how adult, Titian’s Europa was. However, she is justas helpless as a child,and in fact the painting features on-lookers who don’t seemmotivated to protect the princess from what must look to them like awild animal. They are bystanders, as casually observing a kidnappingas many do acts of violence now.

I’ll take a brief detour toCalasso’s Marriage of Cadmus and Harmonybecause he does a very good job explaining some of the tension inthis myth, which I’m sure McCormack would nod along to. Beforethere was Europa in Asia Minor, there was Io in Greece, the nymph whowas the daughter of a powerful river god who did not want hisdaughter consorting with Zeus. He as well was married to Hera, whowas famously jealous (as one might expect the goddess of marriage tobe when monogamous marriage was being dishonored). His solution wasto turn Io into a cow, whom he then let Hera torment, first with thegiant Argus, then with a gadfly that chased Io all the way to Egypt,where she finally found relief.

There, Io became a queen and then agoddess, and had Zeus’ son Ephaphus. He and Memphis, anotherdaughter of a river god, had a daughter named Libya, and from herrelationship with Poseidon (which we can only imagine was slightlyless dramatic than one would have been with Zeus), she became themother of, among others,Agenor, who was the father of...Europa.

That is the myth,and while we may have much to say about what it means to be thedaughter of a river god, thesymmetry of the story was enough to make me raise my eyebrows even atthe age of ten. Calasso’s theory is that both myths are a record oftit-for-tat kidnapping, or perhaps a trade in human bounty. It isalso impossible to ignore the imperialism and nativism of the story.Io and her descendant/mirrorEuropa are the transmissions of empire, but they are also haplessvictims whose only solace are their children. The best hope for theDamsel in Distress is to survive long enough to become the mother ofsomeone who might avenge them. By my reckoning, that is cold comfort.

McCormack’s final archetype is TheMonstrous Woman, and part of her monstrosity is that at times sheembodies or rejects the other three archetypes all at once. She isthe ultimate “mess” of a woman because she is her own person. Sheis Lilith, who refuses to allow Adam the privileges in marriage heassumes should be his. She is the Sphinx, the woman who not onlytalks back to men, but tests their comprehension. (And, boy, wouldOedipus have been well-served to figure out what her presence infront of him was warning him of.) She is Medusa, the snake-headedmonster who freezes men in fear...But before that, she was the Libyanserpent goddess Anatha, and before that the triple goddess Neith, whocombined the attributes of Medusa, her foe Athena, and Athena’smother, Metis. She is, ofcourse, The Witch, so threatening to the patriarchy that she embodiesthe temptress and the crone. 

If a monster is a creaturethat combinescharacteristics in ways that don’t hew to an easy performance ofgender roles, maybe we are all monsters. Patriarchy’s answer is todivide us up into the other three archetypes and, because they are soartificial, demand that we stick to those proscribed roles, or else.

The most chilling thing McCormackpoints out about art criticism and criticism in general is that it isthe culmination of the attempt to understand, know, and own. It iscommon to discuss analysis of a work of art—or a person—as a“dissection” of its meaning, and especially if we find it worthy,to “absorb” it. There is an inherent violence in that language,and McCormack questionswhether the act of knowing can itself be a violation at times. Thiswould especially be the case when that act is extended to people. Asa woman who isn’t white, I have many memories of people peering tooclosely to try to “understand” what I am; as much as I and otherslike me want to be “seen”, we don’t want to be taken apart, andmany of us have had the same instinctive defensive mechanism to pullback when someone tries to push too far in.

We come full circle back to the contradictions of modernity and thespecial madness of those who live in it, particularly those firstgenerations. Perhaps it wasn’t just that they couldn’t escape thecognitive disconnect of the hypocrisies of Enlightenment alongsidethe material advantages only slave labor could provide; perhaps itwas because they were regularly confronted with the exercises ofviolence on the Other, something that artists’ consciences inparticular were unable to ignore.

The madness persists until it is confronted and the source of it isdestroyed. I write this as my country is in the middle of aslow-rolling coup, and people who learned about the Holocaust andagreed it was wrong are justifying why Trump and his lieutenants aredifferent from the dictators who came before. We see what we want tosee, we ignore or disregard facts that are inconvenient, and weemploy a laser-focus on what we want to see to avoid beinguncomfortable.

To answer the question I posed in the beginning, Modernity is acomfortable lie that those of us who deserve material comforts canhave them without the suffering of anyone who doesn’t deserve it.It is a magic wand that makes possible the belief that our idealsalone can make possible our prosperity. It is a fairy tale foradults. It is a special kind of madness, and it is in a constantstate of unraveling.

Deb in the City