Before the consummation what? On the role of the semiotic economy of seduction

Abstract

The cultural practice of flirtation has been multifariously scrutinized in various disciplines including sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis and literary studies. This paper frames the field of flirtation in Bourdieuian terms, while focusing narrowly on the semiotic economy that is defining of this cultural field. Moreover, seduction, as a uniquely varied form of discourse that is responsible for producing the cultural field of flirtation, is posited as the missing link for understanding why flirtation may be a peculiar case of non-habitus, contrary to the received notion of cultural field as set of goal-oriented practices and actionable habituses. This argument is pursued by highlighting the endemic traits of ambivalence and constant reversibility of signs or multimodal semiotic constellations in the discourse of seduction, while seeking to demonstrate that seduction, and by implication the cultural field of flirtation, does not necessarily partake of a teleological framework that is geared towards the consummation of sexual desire. This thesis is illustrated by recourse to a scene from the blockbuster ‘Hitch’.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of Continuum for their stimulating comments.

Notes

1. For a focused study on the erotic habitus, see Green (2008).

2. ‘Bourdieu lists as the main forms of capital symbolic capital (i.e. status); social capital (i.e. useful contacts and networks); cultural capital (e.g. educational qualifications)’ (Crossley 2001, 87). ‘To speak of specific capital is to say what capital is worth in relation to a specific field, within the limits of this field, and that it is convertible into another species of capital under certain conditions’ (Savage and Silva 2013, 113).

3. Also see Vaughan (2010) for more filmic examples in terms of film aesthetics and narrative structure (Once Upon a Time in the West, Vertigo) and McQueen (2013; with regard to Crash).

4. Despite his earlier repudiation of especially Lacanian psychoanalysis (a scientific attitude that was reversed during the last decade of his life), there are striking similarities between central concepts in Bourdieu’s sociological theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, but also considerable influences from Freudian psychoanalysis, with the common orientation between symbolic power and Lacan’s Symbolic Order ranking prominently among them (see Steinmetz 2006 for a thorough analysis of parallels between Bourdieuian sociology and psychoanalytic concepts).

5. The scene may be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyT5UHDi4a0. It lasts, in total, for 3 min and 10 s.