The Berlin summer is making me feel particularly generous, so rather than just mentioning Charlotte in a post, I’m going to use something she said as the basis for a final reflection to a previous train of thought I had tried to follow on love confessions (Part 1, Part 2). Charlotte writes (and the leap to confessions of love, I suspect, is not such a shift but was perhaps rather latent in the conversation, only some of which would pass the Miller test[!]):
i kind of think that’s how every girl ever has felt about you. [Me: how so?] Charlotte: how so?! exactly how i said! you’re elusive and you like it.
This, of course, is a bit rich coming from a girl who brags about having been the subject of a poem with the promising title of “Elusive Charlotte”. Still, I think that Charlotte is on to something in the perception that elusiveness, or ambiguity (perhaps more broadly defined as the inability to nail down a specific register in which a communication takes place) is an essential characteristic of flirting and perhaps of being a flirt in general; flirtation is the sort of mediating instance between the platonic and the romantic, and perhaps, to briefly invoke Derrida, the kind of arche-writing that makes the difference possible in the first place. Indeed, flirting reveals something quite significant about the structure of language – it’s basically (when done well, at least) a sort of plausible deniability that exposes how difficult it is to pin down what a given speech act really means.
The flirtatious message is always multivalent, double or triple-coded, and in that sense acquires a unique rhetorical structure; it always contains an excess, a something more than what it merely says. This excess is that the content of the specific remark is, in fact, not terribly important – it’s rather the way in which the message draws attention to itself as a flirtatious message. Nearly everyone recognizes when someone is flirting with them, and this recognition offers the possibility to either reject the (implicit) invitation (and respond on the level of content) or to accept it, and respond with something constructed in an equally ambiguous way (and the importance of the content of this response is, at least on a referential level, almost nil). In that sense, flirting forms a sort of dramatic counter-part to the confession/demonstration of affection – while the latter seeks constantly to disavow any potential ambivalence, the former thrives precisely in this element. And this, of course, is what makes it so safe – it offers maximum room for the “slippage of the signified under the signifier”, in the sense that you can always deny that you really were doing anything other than just making conversation.
Confessions, on the other hand? Just for fun:
and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Although a lot of what I’ve read focuses on the bursts of yes’s as an affirmation of life, love, regenerative female sexuality, etc., (and I do not, by any stretch, claim to have anything clever to say about Molly Bloom) I suspect there’s an element that’s interesting for what it says about confessions: the constantly repeated yes is an attempt to hold back, to keep at bay a sort of natural linguistic fall into ambivalence – the constant ejaculation “yes!” is simultaneously a reassurance of the full presence of the speaker to her speech (yes, this is me saying this!) and also works as a sort of guarantee for the authenticity of the emotions conveyed (yes, this is really how i feel!). And, to carry a bad pun farther, the ejaculation attempts to secure a sort of semantic exhaustion for the content it accompanies: don’t puzzle over these sentences, don’t doubt my motives, don’t try and determined what I really meant – just believe.
***
A brief revision, since I wrote the first part of this nearly a week ago, and have since experienced a series of strange interludes all bearing more or less on being elusive – one that kind of nose-dived and then recovered beautifully, one that seems like more or less a write-off (perhaps because I’m not being elusive enough?), one that’s still developing. As Pope opens The Rape of the Lock:
What dire offence from am’rous causes springs, What mighty contests rise from trivial things.
It’s already quite late, so I suspect that a detailed explanation of these events, and their implications for my own long process of self-analysis will have to wait for a later date, so I guess this is basically just a post about Charlotte (which, I think, is exactly what she wanted). With respect to other news in my life, I do feel, somewhat surprisingly, like I’m growing up – I did The Right Thing (meaning the non-narcissistic thing where I put other people’s interests or general principles first) two nights in a row in the last week. Is this what being a grown-up feels like? I also may have kissed a member of Bon Iver last Thursday (well, Friday morning). All in all, not such a bad week.
[...] the confession with the master/disciple discourse of the ars erotica. As I’ve written before, I think this tension between the received language of love (which one is constrained to use) and [...]