Awkwardness, as Adam Kotsko demonstrates in his forthcoming Zer0 book, is generated when we find that we have to rely on a social or linguistic convention that is, by its nature, intrinsically unreliable. A familiar figure in British and American comedy is the (usually male) character who is always trying in some way to compensate for this unreliability. By attempting on his own initiative to stabilise meanings, to obtain some control over the way he is perceived or understood, this character invariably sets off a cascade of misunderstandings with the result that he finds himself falling ever more damningly on the wrong side of the line. Larry David is a virtuoso of this mode, his character in Curb Your Enthusiasm escalating the awkwardness of his position with every gesture he makes to avert it.

The use/mention distinction is a potent generator of awkwardness. We rely on it particularly when discussing objectionable things that other people have said or done, but often run the risk of repeating or retransmitting the very outrage we’re trying to denounce. A very common error in reading is to mistake a writer’s paraphrase of another’s argument for a statement of the writer’s own position. But this sort of error of attribution can also be committed on purpose, as a polemical gesture intended to discredit an opponent. If I hold you to everything you say, without respect to the distinction between the utterances you are using (to say what you really mean) and those you are mentioning (i.e. holding up as examplary of the other’s language), I can severely hamper your ability to make public sense of the discourses surrounding you. This can be an effective form of symbolic bullying, a persecutory enforcement of the maxim that “he that toucheth pitch shall be defiled therewith”.

The use/mention distinction is blurred in the other direction by trolling, when I assume the language of the other as a mask and say in apparent earnestness things that I will later deny ever having “meant”. The troll has given himself permission to say obscene and provocative things, but will disavow his own enjoyment in saying them: I who am trolling remain perfectly calm behind the mask; you who are offended are the one who is “reacting”, and must assume responsibility for your own emotional response (apparently I have “touched a nerve”…). Here again there is a kind of deliberate cruelty, an instrumentalisation of awkwardness in order to discover and exploit a vulnerability that does not even belong, properly, to the victim, but to the victim’s language.

In his piece offered for sale in an art auction to raise funds for the feminist campaigning group Object, David Rusbatch uses/mentions a familiar genre of internet discourse: ironic image captioning. The piece presents three captioned headshots, in the following sequence: self-portrait of Frida Kahlo, pre-feminism; Germaine Greer raising her voice, feminism; young woman with her face covered in semen, post-feminism. The immediate effect is one of bathos: this isn’t art, it’s 4chan humour, with more than a touch of the troll about it. But bathos, as it happens, is also the ostensible theme of Rusbatch’s postcard, which travesties the “post-” of feminism as the farcical demise of a political project.

The sequence of portraits could be recaptioned: dysphoria, militancy, capitulation. In the first, Frida Kahlo suffers beautifully, exhibiting her capacity for endurance. It is a “pre-feminist” image of woman because it indexes the artist’s strength or force of being to her ability to shoulder, proudly if tearfully, the physical burden of femininity. To be a woman here is to suffer what only women can endure, staunchly but mutely maintaining a silent integrity amidst the trials of womanhood. It is a kind of sainthood, familiar from sentimental Victorian portraits of the “angel in the house”, in which passivity and moral witness are yoked together. No doubt Kahlo’s self-portraits already challenge this ideological image of woman, are already actively involved in exposing and complicating it - this is part of what makes them art. But the “pre-feminist” situation is one in which femininity (so constituted) starts to recognise itself as dysphoric, dysfunctional: as a site of acute discomfort.

The “feminist” moment is one of militancy, of active and often angry articulation: the pre-feminist image of femininity is cast off, subjected to searing analysis, even violently derided. It is a moment of iconoclasm, and it’s entirely appropriate to illustrate this with a pointedly “unfeminine” portrait of Greer. Her force of being is expressed here in confrontation, in the public face of a speaker who besieges the authority of sexism with questions and accusations. Greer herself has always had an ambivalent relationship to femininity, being concerned to occupy and transform it as a place of thought: in this she’s quite different from Andrea Dworkin, for whom femininity was simply an infamy that had to be erased. (It’s interesting that, of the two, Dworkin was the more sympathetic to male-to-female transsexuals, whom she saw as brave defaulters from the immoral logic of the gender system; Greer still seems to regard them as imposters making a mockery of the feminist project, insofar as the latter seeks to place control over the meanings of femininity in the hands of - specifically - women).

We now come to the third “mention” in the series, Rusbatch’s visual quotation of a pornographic image of a young woman with her face covered in semen. It’s an upsetting image, emotionally charged, and its “mention” here is also a “use” insofar as its emotional potency carries over into the context in which it’s reproduced. What’s upsetting about it is that it’s an image of sexual humiliation: one person spattered with the ejaculate of (by the looks of things) several others, and exhibited to the pornographic spectator as a kind of abject trophy. It’s important to understand here that the image functions as an image of humiliation irrespective of whether the young woman in the picture found it humiliating to take part in making it. In particular, it has commercial value as an image of humiliation: humiliation is what the seller is selling and the buyer is buying. The person in the picture is not in control of the meaning of the picture itself: it is someone else’s speech (the seller’s to the buyer, the buyer’s to the seller) about her, and more generally about young women like her.

As such, it repeats what sexist and misogynist discourse has always said about women, which is that (sexually) they are dirty and slimy, and have a natural affinity with dirt and slime: making them dirty, exhibiting their dirtiness, reveals the truth about what women are as sexual beings and what sex is for women. Sexist statements about gender have an ontological import: they say that a man is this, and a woman is that, and there is a fundamental non-identity between the masculine this and the feminine that. Sexual humiliation is what women want: humiliation is a woman’s self-realisation in sex. But also - turning the mirror of ideology about - humiliation of women is what men want, the humiliation of a woman is a man’s self-realisation in sex. These are the invariants of the universe of discourse in which the image in question circulates and signifies; they are what it assumes, and what it affirms.

Now, in reproducing this image within another, within a postcard bought and sold as a work of art, Rusbatch makes it signify in a different context; ostensibly a context in which it is “mentioned” rather than “used”, but also a context in which it is once again used to say something about young women. By captioning the picture “post-feminist”, Rusbatch is asserting that “post-feminism” means the abandonment of the feminist confrontation with sexist imagery and ideology. After all, the putative post-feminist might say, the woman in the picture chose to be involved in making it, and was paid for doing so, and perhaps not irrevocably traumatised in the process: this, then, was an expression of choice. To participate in sexual commerce, provided that one participates freely and on acceptable terms, is to act as an economic agent in accordance with the rules of the market; and this is no less true of “sex workers” than of artists. “Post-feminism”, then, means accommodation to the law of the market: considerations of ideology should not be allowed to get in the way of any individual’s access to and exercise of purchasing power, be they the woman who gets paid for being filmed having men ejaculate on her face, or the man who spends his discretionary income on the resulting product.

The implication here is not, I think, that the young woman in question is a disgusting, thoughtless whore, a traitor to feminism and therefore to her own (unrecognised) best interests. It is rather that, where feminism once sought to intervene at the level of public ideological expression, shattering and interrogating sexist gender ontology, post-feminism now accedes to the unchallengeable common sense of “market ontology”, valorising above all the economic choices of individuals. What this means, simply put, is that if sexual humiliation is what the buyer wants, the seller should be free to enact it for him: post-feminism can find no ideological justification for restraining the commercial freedom of the sex industry. For the post-feminist, the image of a woman drenched in slime represents a valid form of sexual self-expression (valid because validated by money) - rather than an instance of an increasingly ubiquitous form of sexist hate speech.

It’s certainly the ambition of Object to revive and continue the feminist polemic against “pornography” (always misnomer, since what was meant was the speech of those for whom women were prostituted, rather than that of prostitutes themselves); and I think Rusbatch’s postcard effectively endorses this ambition. If I read him right (and Sady Doyle, for example, reads him wrong), then the “message” of his piece is that post-feminism’s accommodation to capitalist realism amounts to an abject, bathetic defeat on the field of ideological struggle. I basically agree with the message, but wonder about the medium. In a certain sense, Rusbatch’s “quotation” of pornography repeats the silencing gesture of the original image: it does nothing to return control over the meanings of “femininity” to women (or transwomen) themselves. The pornographic image is instrumentalised by a male artist (and now, here, a male blogger) with something to say about the person appearing in it - but how, where and when is she to be included in the conversation?