Leonardo Caffo. Is the public a neutral notion? What about the gender audience?

Fourth episode

Transcript of the fourth episode of The Disappearance of the Public, a new podcast in which Castello di Rivoli Philosopher in Residence Leonardo Caffo investigates the notion of the public, its disappearance, its different characteristics and qualities.

Manuela Vasco: Welcome to our weekly podcast with Castello di Rivoli Philosopher-in-Residence Leonardo Caffo, who’s investigating with us the idea of the public, its disappearance, its different characteristics and qualities. I’m your host Manuela Vasco from Castello di Rivoli – Cerruti Collection Communication Office. I welcome Leonardo Caffo and I’d like to ask him: is the public a neutral notion? What about the gender audience?

Leonardo Caffo: Let’s start immediately with the answer: no, the public is not a neutral concept. The idea of the public is full of prejudicial bias, and is somehow gendered and non-neutral in itself, and so I can answer ‘no’ right away. Let’s summarize a little what we covered in the first podcast: we tried to define the audience as something that had in some way disappeared even before its actual disappearance with COVID. Then we said in the digital-audience episode that the audience itself creates the scene while watching it. So it’s never a passive audience. We also talked about monstrous otherness, and that, paradoxically, given the definition of a strong audience, the only real audience is the animal audience. This fourth episode is dedicated to the gendered audience.

Let’s try to understand how the monstrous, as the different, as uncontrollable otherness, isn’t only something within the sphere of the non-human—that is, the animal, mineral, and vegetable, or divinity or death. As we tried to say in the third episode of this podcast, somehow we can find the monstrous even within the human. Even within the definition of humanity there are a number of monstrous othernesses that we can’t consider neutral because of the prejudice of the perfection-centric, phallocentric, white-centric male, which has governed the history of philosophy, the history of art, from the beginning. For millennia, we only had the masculine point of view in the production of European thought, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and then medieval and modern philosophy was a long succession of white males, sometimes heterosexual and sometimes homosexual, but always a male perspective that claimed the point of view of the public as analogous to his own. The definition of love that Plato gives in The Symposium, despite being interpreted as a definition of universal love, of the search for one’s own other half etc., is a definition in which perfect love is always seen from the perspective of the male. Even if we think about the definition of the human, the prototype body, we think of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. This is not a neutral human, but a white man, perfect in his bodily dimensions. And this is the basis of the various modules that have guided architecture, the construction of space and the idea of life. Therefore these are anything but neutral concepts. For millennia, therefore, the public—and we said last time that this includes the animal public as per the definition of Artaud—has been connected to authorship and with the idea that it somehow exists only in the moment of genuine aesthetic experience. It’s an audience in which gender bias is hugely prevalent.

Contemporary art has a complicated relationship with contemporary philosophy. The feminist point of view—and this isn’t something that I say for mere gender-washing—is a reality today. The most interesting philosophies are coming from philosophers like Donna Haraway, Rosi Braydotti, Karen Barad. They’re all authors whom we’ve already mentioned, and along with contemporary art curators and artists, they’re contributing to the deconstruction of the previous millennia that gave us what the so-called continental philosophers have rather obscurely referred to as “carnophallogocentrism,”  that is, the idea of the centrality of the penis, of the masculine, of the carnivorous predator’s flesh.

In short, there’s pandemonium behind the question you asked me this time, Manuela, and today there are artists who are trying to deconstruct all this. I think, for example, of Juliana Huxtable, an artist who challenges Cisgenderism. We’re talking about a total artist because she’s also a DJ, a cultural organizer, a photographer and a performer. And this is an essential point: we’re currently living in the dimension of a shift from m to f, of emphasis on different ethnic groups, and in which gender has become above all a performative element. In philosophy, this idea of performing gender was introduced by Judith Butler, one of the most important living philosophers, who deconstructs Hegel’s legacy. She writes that he was one of the great philosophers, who gave us everything and also the opposite, in the sense that from the tools of Hegelism come the tools of anti-Hegelism. This was also the great contribution of Carla Lonzi, when in 1970 she wrote her fundamental essay “Let’s Spit on Hegel,” which was the result of her work within the feminist collective Rivolta Donne. That text marks the awareness of a whole field of feminism, not just in art, but regarding the condition of women in the world. In “Let’s spit on Hegel” Lonzi proposes a philosophy of art that challenges and distances itself from a society that has been dominated by the masculine model.

So when we talk about the public as a non-neutral concept of gender bias, we have an infinity of levels that we need to understand. There’s an art, there’s a philosophy that tries to bring out, for example, the classical violence of man against woman. In the conversation with the director of the museum that I have every time I advance with my research and with this podcast, she suggested to me the Italian artist Marzia Migliora, whose very beautiful and delicate work is at this moment in the Castello’s exhibition Espressioni. The work Telefono Rosa takes the form of a phone that we can listen to and hear the complaints of women who are undergoing domestic violence. We become aware of the constant domestic violence of the male against the woman, but also somehow enter this dimension and feel called into question, because as we’re listening to the phone, we want to answer and have our say, to participate in blocking this violence and therefore this public cost that has created the work. This deep and intense work of Migliora catapults us into the idea that some people don’t even have the possibility to rebel against the acts from which they constantly suffer. This is one of the great cases of gender-based violence.

The point is that to talk about “the gendered public” means to understand the complexity of ​​points of view that make up the great conceptual essence of the idea of ​​the public. The audience always has a point of view: the point of view that the actor offers him, but also the point of view from which the public is positioned. It’s one thing to be in the front row, another to be located to one side, or in the stands. It’s always a question of ​​observation of the landscape. The landscape is this wonderful encounter that exists between the eye that looks and the portion of the world that is looked at, which exists only as an aesthetic phenomenon. The landscape exists only in the activation of the perceptual process—in some way, it’s activated by this complex relationship. The points of view of women, the points of view of Black people, of different ethnic groups, the points of view of transgender people, the points of view of transvestites, the points of view of different sexual orientations have been largely neglected and therefore the scenes produced for the public have always been understood as great neutral monoliths. Let’s think for example—and this is an essential theme of the gendered audience—about porn. OK, we know that the most clicked-on site isn’t the Washington Post, but sites like Porn Hub, like YouPorn etc. These sites offer porn videos that in their normal algorithmicity are designed from the point of view of heterosexual male pleasure: the female domination of men, oral sex on men. A director like Erika Lust has tried to build an industry of pornographic cinematography from the point of view of female pleasure. If you look at these videos, if you look at the direction of photography behind her filmography, you’ll see a total deconstruction of the concept of pleasure as we‘ve thought of it for millennia: that it is built on penetration. We see this in the logocentrism with which philosophers such as Jacques Derrida spoke, who were building on the architrave of Freudian psychoanalysis—this idea of ​​the phallus as the undisputed protagonist of the unconscious, subconscious and preconscious dimension of human life.

And speaking of gender information, the essential definition of gender that the philosophy of biology has given us in the last 20 years is the distinction between the sex one belongs to and the gender one belongs to. Sex is a biological dimension—that is, the idea that one is born in a cage of nature with a penis or a vagina, with breasts or not. Gender, on the other hand, is a construct, a cultural dimension, our sense of spiritual, cultural and mental belonging to the female gender, to the male, to the third gender, to a queer gender, to transgenderism. And this difference between biology and culture is also an idea of ​​the victory of one’s point of view over the cage of reality, of ​​its victory against nature. The idea that nature is something neutral can no longer be considered a real point of view within certain philosophies of contemporary art. The human being is always against nature, and gender is something that we choose or that in some way brings us towards the direction in which we tend to go. As Rosi Braidotti says, we are liquid nomadic identities. This is the great feminist riposte to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze that Braidotti calls becoming-human, becoming-animal, becoming-gender—this idea that we’re not static entities, we’re not fixed material entities, but entities in continuous movement and that therefore gender is a landing point that must be performed. So it’s not just about producing art that shows the female point of view, like the work of Migliora; it’s also about performing diversity at the limits of what’s possible.

I think of an artist to whom I’m extremely attached, whose work was presented at Castello di Rivoli through the curatorship of Carloyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marianna Vecellio: Anna Boghiguian. She’s an artist who, among the infinite things she’s has done in the fields of drawing and visual research, has also dealt to a degree with philosophy. She’s dealt with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. At Castello di Rivoli, she defined Nietzsche in the moment of his alleged madness: when he hugged a dying horse in a moment of maximum lucidity in which he was able to be moved by absolute diversity to take the horse’s point of view. It also comes to mind how, say, Caravaggio’s work, by taking the horse’s point of view and embracing that point of view literally, somehow overturns all the philosophy that has always been thought from the point of view of man. Boghiguian constantly performs the dimension almost of a sorcerer, of different, of alternative views.

To test these gender issues within the notion of the public, they must be understood first and foremost not as strictly connected to feminism. First of all there is no one feminism, but many feminisms—there are different gender discourses. Feminism is not just for women or for human life in general, but has to do with the idea that we do not belong in a category that is precisely human, as opposed to animal, vegetable and mineral, as in the Aristotle’s theory of categories, for example. We are within a human dimension that is itself a polyphonic symphony of voices in which the points of view are multiple. And therefore the public is also multiple. There are other forms of being in the world, other forms of seeing the world, and therefore there are other kinds of audiences.

What could it mean to rewrite the whole history of philosophy from the point of view of the excluded, from the point of view of those who have remained outside it? This is done very well by an exceptional contemporary philosopher, who at this moment has taken up a similar position to my philosopher-in-residence, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. I’m thinking of Paul B. Preciado, who was previously Beatrix Preciado—she was a woman who then chose to become a man. He followed a transgender path that he describes in a majestic book called Manifesto Junkie, in which he talks about how he acted on his biology to level it with his own culture. And Preciado, trying to radically rewrite the history of philosophy not from the point of view of penis penetration, but from the point of view of anal pleasure, writes this wonderful book called Anal Terror, in which he tries to imagine what would have happened if the philosophers who have expressed themselves from the beginning on the meaning of life, on the meaning of death, on the meaning of beauty, on what reality is, etc., instead of orienting themselves in their path of dissemination of knowledge through the desire to penetrate the world had approached it with the idea of ​​being penetrated by the world. And that’s why he speaks of anal pleasure and the knowledge of the world that enters you and not of you who enter the world. It absolutely changes the vision we have of things.

So the answer I give today with respect to the question that was asked of me in the process of my research as a philosopher in residence is that no, let’s repeat, the public is not only not a neutral concept, but we shouldn’t even speak of the public in the singular. We should always talk about the disappearance of the public. We should always complexify it. And what about the gendered public? For millennia, there was no such thing. Over the last few decades, with the great revolutions in art, the great revolutions in philosophy, the great revolutions in fashion, the notion of the genderless etc., the idea has reappeared that there is no ordinary aesthetic production, but there are extraordinary aesthetic uses and productions. And until we manage to put ourselves in the multiple perspectives that characterize human life, we ​​will have no idea what it really means to be looked at. Not what we’ve imposed on the eye, but what the eye has imposed on us. And this is the great discussion that we should constantly try to have. Preciado says one thing that I believe to be essential: what has lain more or less hidden throughout these hundreds of years of male-centred and anthropocentric culture is the seed of the revolution that radically transforms all the categories we’ve used to orient ourselves in the world: the categories of science, the categories of culture, the categories of eros, the categories of art, the categories of curatorship. Making this seed emerge doesn’t mean taking away space from the unique point of view that we’ve had for millennia, but making it one of the many and multiple points of view that can describe us. This is the real revolution of the gender audience. It looks at you, it modifies you, but it also asks you not to be what you thought you were due to the categories or stereotypes that have been imposed on you. It reveals to you what you are beyond the good and evil that you’ve been told is the only category in this society into which we’ve all been thrown.

Manuela Vasco: I thank you all for being with us. I’d also like to thank Regione Piemonte, Fondazione CRT, Città di Torino, Città di Rivoli and our partners Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo and Intesa Sanpaolo/Gallerie d’Italia. Our digital programs are also made possible thanks to Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo. We look forward to welcoming you again next week for this exciting series of podcasts with the philosopher Leonardo Caffo.