A pair of Michael Jackson’s underwear sold for a hefty $1,000,000 in 2008. On the face of things, the clean(ish) white cotton was no different than the kind weaving fruit of the loom products across the globe. The king of pop, however, made these tighty whiteys dance with a market value galaxies beyond your run of the mill undergarments. Something of the now dead pop star, so the idea goes, was in the fabric.
Saba Mahmood makes the case that the debate around Muslim outcries following the 2008 publication of Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad hinged on a key assumption around the so-called secular/religious divide in contemporary thinking. Where the defenders of secular reason frame the debate around questions of linguistic structuralism—Muslims, on this account, never learned the irreducible split between signifier and signified—Mahmood makes the case that western juridical practices discriminate against “assimilative models” of signification (76). The difference, she makes clear, is between non-indexical sign systems (the word chair is not a chair) and one where “Muhammad [is] the mark of a relation of similitude [wherein] he is a figure of immanence in his constant exemplariness, and is therefore not a referential sign that stands apart from an essence that it denotes” (76). The claim rests on an understanding of Muslim relationality (here called schesis or the latin habitus) where the sign of the prophet is not so much a sign as it is a recapitulation of a transubstantiated (forgive the Christian diction) relation constituted immanent, rather than transcendent, to community. Parodies of the prophet, Mahmood and her fieldwork suggests, are offensive not just to the idea of Muslim community but to the very essence that holds it together.
This seems like a smart way to frame the debate and to more generally reveal the fallacious (and inconsistent) divisions institutionalized in law across the West (her stuff on ECHR is a prime example of this). My point is simply an addition to Mahmood’s critique of secular reason: there’s nothing secular about insisting Michael Jackson, or any part of him, is in a pair of underwear. And of course the underwear exchange (Christian Aguilera had a pair sell for more a few years ago) is not just about idiots believing celebrity essence can be found in the fabric of undergarments; rather, it’s about the subject-object relation insisted upon (and naturalized through) a system predicated on exchange-value (that is, value determined not by the object but by the totality of relations of production and the exploitation therein). Marx’s example of the wooden table brought to market, of course, reveals that “as soon as [a thing] emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will” (Capital vol. 1 164). Million-dollar underwear sullied with the essence of the Michael Jackson—and the less hyperbolic but equally mystical quality of commodity exchange we experience every single day—index a primary contradiction in secular thinking. Call it capitalism or call it celebrity fetishism, the point here is that the emblem of secular society (the market) takes what is sacred on the level of religious relationality and makes it silly on the level of objects and the people who make them.
But more to the point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG0quz3Gu8g
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