Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post

roachboy · 10-23-2006, 08:40 AM

wow, what a strange thread.

i only have a couple things to say here:
like many have pointed out before, it seems that much of the rancor that keeps appearing here is tripped by the word "chivalry"---so one direction of response has already been done several times above and i'll just do it again--being polite, particularly to folk that you do not know, seems an indication of respect. in this, i like to think i am pretty consistent, tho sometimes doors do slam in the face of the person behind me and i feel a twinge of embarrassment about having been such a fucktard in that moment--but it really is not about whether the person behind me is a man or a woman, it is more that there is a person behind me who probably enjoyed having the door slam shut in front of them about as much as i would. so there it is, for me at least. this has nothing AT ALL to do with "chivalry"...

2. on the word chivalry: jesus christ, why on earth is ANYTHING about the high middle ages an object of ANY kind of nostalgia, seen in any way productive of habits of mind or practice that are worth repeating?

chivalry was mostly about social power.
it was about the fetishization of ARISTOCRATIC women--commoners were just that--so you can find in "the knight of the cart" (from chretien de troyes,12th century i think) a bizarre rehearsal of some kind of sexualized repeat of the martyrdom of jesus on the part of lancelot of the lake, the predictable dynamic of fetishism/elevation to unlimited power and objectification/reduction to sexualized thing of the IMAGE of the lady carried out via the narrator's rehearsal of lancelots adventures in abjection (the journey) and subsequent engagement in yet another tiresome jousting tournament (battle of the penises)....but all of this is directed at the image of an ARISTOCRATIC woman...if you read de troyes text, you also find that good sir lancelot of the lake rapes a "common" woman along the way and that neither the character OR THE NARRATOR give this a second thought.
this because common folk were regarded as PROPERTY like a horse or the bridle you'd tie it up with---like the lackey that would wipe the shit off your shoes---they were not quite human beings----of course they were also not so other than human that you couldn't rape them----but they were not human enough to really worry about.

chivalry was a dick thing through and through.
the ordeal is about the dick: subjecting yourself to mortifications on behalf of an aristo woman who is not yet your property was about giving the dick a legend, increasing its size and value through stories. the idea was to get more property through the process of getting a more heavily ornamented penis. and getting the aristocratic woman was about getting status--if she was married, it was about getting status through patronage---if she was not, it was about getting the woman in order to get the property she represented.

all of this functioned within a system of property relations and assumptions that derive from that system of property relations that from any modern viewpoint was truly foul.

i have long been vaguely confused about how this flinstone notion migrated over time to mean something vague like being nice to women. i suspect it owes something to virginia cavalier society made up of the second sons of the british artistocracy each and every last one of whom was well and truly fucked within the system they aped here simply because they were born in the wrong sequence--primogenitur was a problem for second sons, you see. so cavalier society was in part a land of make-believe, of compensation within which certain aspects of aristo-life were reworked into markers of social distinction that functioned in the surreal little world of 18th century virginia.

the notion of "being protected" is at best a derivative of the logic of chivalry--a kind of late-period twisting around of the notion, which was not at all about protecting you from the world--on the contrary, it positioned you within the world, made you as aristo-woman an object within the world. it didnt even really involve you as a human being--it was about your image and the separate life of your image--which itself acquired its value as a function of the legnths to which various cretin aristo boys were willing to go to ornament their image-penises for you.

if by chivalry one is referring to the kind of stuff that the aristocracy did at the interpersonal level at a later phase of european history, then the situation is not much different or better--but the situation had changed and the aristocracy was largely defuntionalized (by the time you get to louis xiv in france at least, the kind of military organization that was being has left the feudal system far behind)--and even in that context, none of these rituals had to do with protecting women, with elevating women, not really. read some stuff from the period of louis 14--read "the princess of cleves," the letters of madame de sevigne, or even or the duc de saint simon's memoirs...geez....it seems to me that if you think chivalry was a good thing, you really dont know what you are talking about.

10-23-2006, 08:40 AM	#89 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	wow, what a strange thread. i only have a couple things to say here: like many have pointed out before, it seems that much of the rancor that keeps appearing here is tripped by the word "chivalry"---so one direction of response has already been done several times above and i'll just do it again--being polite, particularly to folk that you do not know, seems an indication of respect. in this, i like to think i am pretty consistent, tho sometimes doors do slam in the face of the person behind me and i feel a twinge of embarrassment about having been such a fucktard in that moment--but it really is not about whether the person behind me is a man or a woman, it is more that there is a person behind me who probably enjoyed having the door slam shut in front of them about as much as i would. so there it is, for me at least. this has nothing AT ALL to do with "chivalry"... 2. on the word chivalry: jesus christ, why on earth is ANYTHING about the high middle ages an object of ANY kind of nostalgia, seen in any way productive of habits of mind or practice that are worth repeating? chivalry was mostly about social power. it was about the fetishization of ARISTOCRATIC women--commoners were just that--so you can find in "the knight of the cart" (from chretien de troyes,12th century i think) a bizarre rehearsal of some kind of sexualized repeat of the martyrdom of jesus on the part of lancelot of the lake, the predictable dynamic of fetishism/elevation to unlimited power and objectification/reduction to sexualized thing of the IMAGE of the lady carried out via the narrator's rehearsal of lancelots adventures in abjection (the journey) and subsequent engagement in yet another tiresome jousting tournament (battle of the penises)....but all of this is directed at the image of an ARISTOCRATIC woman...if you read de troyes text, you also find that good sir lancelot of the lake rapes a "common" woman along the way and that neither the character OR THE NARRATOR give this a second thought. this because common folk were regarded as PROPERTY like a horse or the bridle you'd tie it up with---like the lackey that would wipe the shit off your shoes---they were not quite human beings----of course they were also not so other than human that you couldn't rape them----but they were not human enough to really worry about. chivalry was a dick thing through and through. the ordeal is about the dick: subjecting yourself to mortifications on behalf of an aristo woman who is not yet your property was about giving the dick a legend, increasing its size and value through stories. the idea was to get more property through the process of getting a more heavily ornamented penis. and getting the aristocratic woman was about getting status--if she was married, it was about getting status through patronage---if she was not, it was about getting the woman in order to get the property she represented. all of this functioned within a system of property relations and assumptions that derive from that system of property relations that from any modern viewpoint was truly foul. i have long been vaguely confused about how this flinstone notion migrated over time to mean something vague like being nice to women. i suspect it owes something to virginia cavalier society made up of the second sons of the british artistocracy each and every last one of whom was well and truly fucked within the system they aped here simply because they were born in the wrong sequence--primogenitur was a problem for second sons, you see. so cavalier society was in part a land of make-believe, of compensation within which certain aspects of aristo-life were reworked into markers of social distinction that functioned in the surreal little world of 18th century virginia. the notion of "being protected" is at best a derivative of the logic of chivalry--a kind of late-period twisting around of the notion, which was not at all about protecting you from the world--on the contrary, it positioned you within the world, made you as aristo-woman an object within the world. it didnt even really involve you as a human being--it was about your image and the separate life of your image--which itself acquired its value as a function of the legnths to which various cretin aristo boys were willing to go to ornament their image-penises for you. if by chivalry one is referring to the kind of stuff that the aristocracy did at the interpersonal level at a later phase of european history, then the situation is not much different or better--but the situation had changed and the aristocracy was largely defuntionalized (by the time you get to louis xiv in france at least, the kind of military organization that was being has left the feudal system far behind)--and even in that context, none of these rituals had to do with protecting women, with elevating women, not really. read some stuff from the period of louis 14--read "the princess of cleves," the letters of madame de sevigne, or even or the duc de saint simon's memoirs...geez....it seems to me that if you think chivalry was a good thing, you really dont know what you are talking about. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 10-23-2006 at 09:01 AM..