How to be an Idle Cunt

Is the writer Tom Hodgkinson the most despicable human being in the world? Perhaps not. But his book, How to be Idle (Penguin Books, 2005), remains the most offensive publication I have ever read: snobbish, sexist, racist, banal and moralistic, it was of course critically acclaimed by his chums in the media.   

One might have expected far more from a man who openly boasts of his knowledge of the "philosophy, fiction, poetry and history of the last three thousand years" [P] than to be told that the working class are gullible and too stupid to delegate or live life according to their own rules. But that, pretty much, is the central message.

He still loves them of course, for he's a man of the people who, when not hiring nannies for the children or contributing articles to The Daily Telegraph, likes nothing better than to listen to the Clash. Tom might have purchased his idleness at the expense of others - those "office girls with lots of make-up" and "immigrants with hard hats" [14] that he refers to - but he's still a punk revolutionary at heart.

Tom loves the homeless too. And, without wanting to over-romanticize them, he thinks it a real shame that they are seen as unfortunates in need of help, rather than  happy souls who "do not want a job ... do not want to become middle class ... do not want to keep fixed hours and spend their surplus income in department stores and theme parks" [108]. Tom knows this, because it says so in a song by the Monkees. But is it not peculiarly insulting to be told this by a man who, whilst working at The Guardian on the homes-and-interiors supplement, came up with the line 'staying in is the new going out'?

However, next time a homeless young person approaches, rather than mumble about not having any change, I shall take the opportunity to inform them that they "represent an ideal ... of pure living in the moment, of wandering without destination, of freedom from worldly care" [110].

No need then for more temporary accommodation to be made available, or new houses to be built. No need for hospitals either, because, according to Tom, it's a good thing to be sick: "bodily suffering  can improve the mind" [69]. Instead, what we should do is open more pubs and tobacconists: because alcohol makes us into "thinking, feeling, laughing, independent human beings" [113] and smoking "transforms the common man into something more heroic, more complete" [137]. Perhaps the latter is true; but if completion involves developing malignant tumours, I for one would prefer to remain incomplete.

Tom also supports the opening of legalized brothels, because the "quest for liberty" is tied to "the pursuit of sexual freedoms" [194]. In practice, this seems to mean fucking prostitutes, masturbating with pornography, and being raped: "Oh, to lie back and be used and abused! This is surely the secret wish of every sexual slacker" [198].

Not that he advocates too much debauchery as he slips happily towards respectable middle-age. For one thing, he doesn't have enough "energy (or staff!) to get blasted all the time" [222]. And besides, his real pleasure now is getting plenty of sleep in order to "restore body and mind to a comfortable condition" [222]: his bourgeois default setting.

In fact, it was whilst innocently day-dreaming that Tom came up with the idea of starting his own business and forging a successful writing career so that he might have his ideal life. Good for him! But whilst dreaming might be free, one might wonder where he found the capital needed in order to do these things: his professed frugality and thriftiness perhaps? Or was it from his wealthy parents, his famous friends, or his business partner and old school pal, Gavin Pretor-Pinney?

I don't know and I don't really care. But I would like to know why it is Tom Hodgkinson's model of idleness has to involve such naked ambition and colossal conceit. He's not the most despicable human being in the world. But ...  
 

Hand Partialism

There's something deeply affecting about the poster campaign for the new perfume from YSL. It's not the gaze of the actress modelling which transfixes; rather, it's the fact that attention is drawn to her hands which have been dipped in purple paint. 

I suddenly see why Baudrillard insists that the slender and lively hands of women are of greater symbolic and seductive beauty than their eyes or hidden sexual organs. 

I suppose that's why nothing gives greater pleasure than to stroll hand-in-hand, or be gently masturbated by a girl with delicate fingers.     

Life's a Drag

'A woman must not wear men's clothing, nor a man wear women's clothing, 

for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.'

                                                                                           
                                                                                          - Deuteronomy, 22: 5                                             

Really? I mean what's the problem here: why is God so troubled by everything?

I suppose it's because the simple pleasure of cross-dressing creates an element of uncertainty and causes the poles of male and female to vacillate via an abolition of differential opposition. 

Cross-dressing demonstrates how the signs of sex can easily be separated from biology. In other words, it reveals gender and sexual identity to be nothing but a playful and performative game involving clothes, hair and cosmetics; a question of style, rather than a fateful combination of anatomical fact and metaphysical essence.

Personally, I have always found something enchanting about 'men dressed as women' and 'women dressed as men'. Like Wilde, I am of the view that wherever there is loveliness of appearance, then there is no fraudulence. 

And besides, as Judith Butler points out: we are all transvestites. 

The Perfect Shoe

Following a recent post in which I mentioned the importance of  footwear, I have been asked to describe what might constitute - for me at least - the perfect men's shoe. 

Fortunately, thanks to the creative genius of the designers at Prada, this isn't difficult. For the perfect shoe already exists: the Levitate is an insanely beautiful mash-up between the old school formality of the brogue and the urban cool of the Nike Air sports shoe - topped off with a golf fringe as an almost ludicrous addition just for the hell of it.  

Malcolm would always speak of the three things that matter most in fashion: sex, style, and subversion. These shoes possess all these elements. Are they comfortable? Who cares. Are they practical? Again, who cares! Do you imagine Cinderella's sister's were thinking of comfort and practicality when they mutilated their feet in order to squeeze into her magical glass slippers?

By wearing these shoes, your life will be instantly transformed for the better; for they make heroic and they make fabulous. As Marilyn Monroe once said: 'Wear the right shoes and you can conquer the world'.  

   

Ants and the Spirit of Christmas

Teeny-tiny little red spider-ants have taken up residence in my electric kettle: which is kind of annoying and a little inconvenient. I should probably kill them. 

But it's Christmas day and I don't have the heart to do it. Peace and goodwill to all mankind - but why not extend this to insects and arachnids? 

It's not that I think Christ the Saviour was born to redeem them of their sins too, but because it seems to me that this is just as much their world as it is mine.

Nevertheless, tomorrow, when I wake up and want a cup of tea, then I know that I'll reach for the poison spray, or squash them under thumb.

And this, in a nutshell, was why Jesus ended up nailed to a cross.

The Case of Jacintha Saldanha

Potlatch is an archaic form of economic exchange, based on the notion of giving a gift of such value that the receiver is thereby humiliated and at the same time obligated. This can include the gift of life.

For it is not only possible to shame and to challenge an enemy via a spectacular display of wealth, but also by a senseless and violent act of sacrifice, including self-sacrifice or suicide.

And so we come to the case of Jacintha Saldanha: the nurse who killed herself after falling victim to a prank telephone call made by two Australian DJs who thought it funny and inconsequential to make a fool of someone. Now they know better.

For what this proud and honourable woman has done is turn the tables on those who would make her look naive and gullible in the eyes of the entire world. She has effectively rendered them speechless and powerless by making of her own life a sacrificial offering that has to be accepted with deep sorrow and regret, but which can never be returned. 

In refusing to be a figure of fun and by making exchange impossible, Jacintha Saldanha has extracted the object's revenge.

So who's laughing now? Certainly not Michael Christian or Mel Greig. 

American Psycho and the Slave Revolt in Morals

Patrick Bateman is one of the great fictional figures within contemporary culture, even though the question of his identity remains ambiguous and his reliability as a narrator suspect. Stylish,  charming, and with a dandy's eye for detail, he's a postmodern Dorian Gray living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.      

However, it's clear that the author of American Psycho doesn't wish for his readers to admire Patrick Bateman. On the contrary, Bateman is someone we should repudiate; a man trapped in a world that lacks depth, meaning, and reality and his story serves as a warning about the dangers of surrendering one's soul to Mammon. This is why Ellis opens the novel with a line from Dante - 'Abandon all hope ye who enter here' - an allusion to the hell that awaits those who choose to lead a life lacking in firm moral foundation and worry more about looking good than being good. 

Thus, for all the protests from various concerned quarters that greeted publication of the book, American Psycho is above all else a moral fable and not a celebration of schizo-psychosis, or a nihilistic advocacy of murder and mayhem. Its central teaching is one subscribed to by all good Christians: love of money is the root of all evil. Ellis even goes so far as to imply there might be a causal connection between serial consumption and serial killing. 

And this is why as much as I admire the work as a piece of writing, I despise it for reinforcing the great conceit of the poor and badly dressed: namely, that whilst the rich and powerful might have money and lead superficially fabulous lives, they are all unhappy and corrupt and heading towards eternal damnation. This resentment-ridden philosophy of secret envy and hatred is what underlies slave moralities everywhere and it ends not merely with contempt for material well-being and good fortune, but with an apocalyptic desire for worldly destruction. For as Lawrence writes:

"It is very nice, if you are poor and not humble - and the poor may be obsequious, but they are almost never truly humble, in the Christian sense - to bring your enemies down to utter destruction ... while you yourself rise up to grandeur." 

- Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, (CUP, 1980), p. 63.

American Psycho is meant to scare us back onto the straight and narrow path that leads to heaven. We are asked to accept that salvation belongs exclusively to those who are honest and hard-working; i.e. those who think their meekness and self-restraint is a voluntary achievement or accomplishment, rather than simply a sign that they lack the power to act.

Sadly, not only do lies turn impotence into virtue, but they make us suspect and despise those things which the heart needs even more than love: splendour, pride, good shoes, and expensive-looking business cards.
   

Fragments of Glass (2006)

Dromeas (1994), glass and iron sculpture by Costas Varotsos, Athens, Greece

Crash!

And suddenly, with a crash, I find myself 
thrown like Alice into another world.

A world in which self, day, and window lie shattered
on the floor in a sparkling chaos of glass, blood and
sunshine.


In the Confrontation with Glass 

In the confrontation with glass,
flesh is rarely the winner.

For whilst the former shatters,
the latter bleeds and knows
pain.

Which is the secret of life's
victory over death.


At the Hospital in Athens 

As my doctor displayed her skill with a needle
on gashed head and wounded knee, I found
comfort in the thought that we are born to
embody our scars.


Poppies

We had only the day before been looking at wild poppies
staining the roadside, admiring their obscenity of colour -
'little hell-flames' indeed.

But shocking all the same to discover how the body too
is capable of producing it's own poppy-redness - look!
as drops of blood flower on shards of broken glass.


The Vengeance of Objects

Glass is so unforgiving,
so cruel, so ... sharp!

It cuts and slices the flesh without
mercy or hesitation, or the warm
softness of sand.

As it shatters one can almost hear laughter
and every blood-stained splinter seems to
smile.


On Which Side is Wonderland?

On one side of the glass lives she who offers
love and the prospect of a life together.

And on the other is she who dreams of
an elaborate suicide.

And I have crashed through the window not knowing
on which side I've landed.


I Love Everything That Flows

There is nothing more beautiful than blood
when it flows and carries life away with it.

Nothing more disgusting than when it begins
to coagulate; to clot and to curdle.

There's something shameful about scabs.
 

Haemostasis

For Lawrence, who subscribes to a libidinal materialism in which 'touch' is of crucial importance, the physical handling of an object brings us much closer to a true understanding of it than any abstract theory of the thing. Via frequent contact and usage, we gain what he terms 'blood-knowledge' and by which he means an intuitive, sensual, and pre-cognitive way of relating to the material world.

Although he often claims that he is not an opponent of mind and doesn't advocate an acephalic humanity, Lawrence clearly privileges some form of primal consciousness that he locates in the lower-body and which delights in doing the washing-up. One of the reasons he dislikes Kant is because the latter only thought coldly and critically with his head and never darkly and desirously with his blood: and he never did the dishes!

Real thought, says Lawrence, is an experience and requires the establishment of a 'peculiar alien sympathy' with the otherness of things that lie external to our selves and exist mind-independently. Idealism marks the death of all this: it is a negation of the real and of the great affective centres within the body wherein the pristine unconscious is located. If we are to be happy and vital creatures, then we must, says Lawrence, get back into vivid relationship with the cosmos; i.e. get back into touch and know once more not in terms of apartness (which is rational and scientific), but in terms of togetherness (which is religious and poetic).

What are we to make of all this? At one time, I would have subscribed to this vision and affirmed Lawrence's libidinal materialism without hesitation. And, in fact, I still think there is much to be said for the latter and believe it may hold a fundamental key to the development of an object-oriented ontology. Ultimately, Lawrence plays for me much the same role that Heidegger plays for Graham Harman and he remains a major influence on my thinking.

However, I now have some reservations and find much of what Lawrence writes here, as elsewhere, problematic. Thus, the idea that the physical handling of a mundane object such as a tea-pot, or the frequent use of a tool such as a hammer, somehow brings us closer to it than we might ever be to those things of which we have only a theoretical understanding - such as molecules, black holes, or electromagnetic waves - seems dubious.

In fact, it seems to be based on an entirely false (although common) distinction made between theoretical and non-theoretical forms of knowledge, in which the former are presented as artificial, speculative, and parasitic upon the latter which is the warm-blooded body of true human  understanding. As Paul Churchland points out: "That these specious contrasts are wholesale nonsense has not prevented them finding expression and approval" in the writings not only of artists and poets like Lawrence, but also in the work of many philosophers. Churchland continues:

"Upon close inspection the various contrasts thought to fund the distinction are seen to disappear. If viewed warily, the network of principles and assumptions constitutive of our common-sense conceptual framework can be seen to be as speculative and as artificial  as any overtly theoretical system. ... Comprehensive theories, on the other hand, prove not to be essentially parasitic, but to be potentially autonomous frameworks in their own right. In short, it appears that all knowledge ... is theoretical; that there is no such thing as non-theoretical understanding. Our common-sense conceptual framework stands unmasked as being itself a theory, or a battery of theories. And where before we saw a dichotomy between the theoretical and non-theoretical, we are left with little more than a distinction between freshly minted theory and thoroughly thumb-worn theory whose cultural assimilation is complete."

- Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (CUP, 1979), pp. 1-2.

In other words, Lawrence's blood-knowledge is simply another term for doxa - or that which can be passed off as true without question simply because it has already been widely accepted as such in advance. Thus Lawrence, the arch-opponent of the cliche and stereotype, is here exposed as trading in such; just as he panders to prejudice and reinforces reactionary ignorance with his lazy and disappointing dismissal of modern science. 

     

On the Philosophical Importance of Making Lists

Writing in the above work, Ian Bogost suggests that we might use the term ontography to refer to an inscriptive strategy that gives a snapshot of the world and the wealth of objects that constitute it, without necessarily providing a wider context of meaning. At its simplest, this would take the form of a list: "a group of items loosely joined not by logic ... but by the gentle knot of the comma" [38].

Lists are something we regularly come across in the work of object-oriented ontologists. Critics might say they take the place of argument, or are simply a form of bad writing. But that's unfair and it seems to me that lists can and do serve real philosophical importance. Further, at their best, they also have a stylistic charm that borders on being poetic. 

Lists matter because, as Francis Spufford says, they allow the things that compose them to retain their independence and uniqueness by refusing 'the connecting power of language, in favour of a sequence of disconnected elements' [quoted by Bogost, 40]. This idea of things as autonomous things in themselves is crucial to OOO and it offers a welcome alternative to the now tedious idea of Deleuzean becoming with its preference for continuity and underlying monism. 

As Bogost argues, the notion of becoming this, that, or the other,  ultimately suggests "comfort and compatibility in relations between units" [40]. In contrast, his own model of alien phenomenology assumes radical incompatibility and disjunction, instead of harmonious flow. His use of lists, therefore, reminds us that "no matter how fluidly a system may operate, its members nevertheless remain utterly isolated" [40] and alien to one another. 

In other words, lists don't just challenge the connecting power of language, but serve to remind us of the ontological claim that being is not one and undivided, but made up of a multiplicity of objects that may or may not relate to one another, but which never fully reveal or give themselves away.

 

On the Political Importance of Making Lists

The list often acts as a manifesto and call to arms: divided into dialectical categories of things loved and things hated, such lists are exemplified by the early McLaren/Westwood t-shirt design entitled: 'You're gonna wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you've been lying on!'

For Malcolm, punk was a form of blackmail and a type of terrorism. It forced a generation into making a fateful choice: you were either for the Sex Pistols or against them - and if you were for them, then your commitment had to be absolute: there could be no passers-by and no part-timers in this revolution. 

Much the same type of list was drawn up by Roland Barthes. However, unlike McLaren, Barthes didn't want to bully anyone with his list or display his penchant for fanaticism and provocation. In fact, with his list of things liked and things not liked, he was attempting to provide grounds for a model of negative liberalism:

"I like, I don't like: this is of no importance to anyone; this, apparently, has no meaning. And yet all this means: my body is not the same as yours. Hence, in this anarchic foam of tastes and distastes ... gradually appears the figure of a bodily enigma, requiring complicity or irritation. Here begins the intimidation of the body, which obliges others to endure me liberally, to remain silent and polite confronted by pleasures or rejections which they do not share.
      (A fly bothers me, I kill it: you will kill what bothers you. If I had not killed the fly, it would have been out of pure liberalism: I am liberal in order not to be a killer.)"

                    - Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard.

A Short Meditation on an Old School Photograph

An old b&w photograph of two little boys, one of whom has said to the other: 'Pretend to be reading and we'll look clever.'

Could it be then that intellectualism is just a pose?

Well, yes. But to realise that as a five -year-old is pretty smart.

As for the third young boy, completely oblivious to the presence of the photographer - and the two girls at the back of the class - who's to say they're not happy and their parents weren't right to love them?

Under the Sign of the Golden Phallus

Because for a long time I dreamed of being Lady Chatterley's lover, ideas of 'phallic consciousness' and 'phallic tenderness'  had a powerful hold on my youthful imagination: I painted the phallus, wrote poems in celebration of the phallus, and religiously revered the phallus as part of a neo-paganism of my own invention. 

Kate Millet would have been at least partially justified, therefore, in accusing me of doing precisely what she famously accused Lawrence of doing: i.e., transforming an already questionable model of masculinity into a misogynistic mystery religion founded upon homoerotic worship of the penis. 

But this isn't entirely fair. What Millet failed to appreciate is that when Lawrence wrote almost obsessively of the phallus in his later work, he was not referring to the penis-as-organ belonging exclusively to a male agent. On the contrary, the phallus, for Lawrence - as for me back in my golden phallic days - was a sacred symbol that cannot be reduced to being 'a mere member of the physiological body'. 

And it's not, for Lawrence at least, even a symbol of male power or cosmic potency, so much as it's a symbol of the relatedness between bodies. Sneering contempt for the phallus, therefore, betrays a horror of being physically in touch with others: this, writes Lawrence, is the 'root-fear of all mankind' since the Fall into idealism. Hence the often frenzied efforts on behalf of moralists to denigrate the phallus and to nullify it - not least of all by wilfully confusing it with the penis. 

What Nietzsche terms the slave revolt in morals begins, arguably, as a revolt against the phallus; the free man or woman - free, that is to say, from fear and from shame - is more than happy to submit before the phallus and accept it as that which unites them into one flesh, or a single phallic body. When the phallic wonder is dead in us, writes Lawrence, then we become wretched and have no sense of beauty or joy.  

Only when the phallic wonder is strong and healthy can men and women come into direct touch with one another and with the world. By acknowledging the phallus as she does, Connie learns how to respond not only to the naked body of her lover, but also to animals, trees, rain, moonlight, and even inanimate and mundane household objects, such as an old kettle. Phallic wonder makes everything sparkle with fresh glamour and allure and enables the heart to enter the fourth dimensional kingdom of bliss. 

This sounds, I know, like the worst kind of occult-metaphysics and romantic fantasy. But I still think there's something important in this phallic philosophy and that it can be read today as a type of speculative realism that would lend itself rather nicely to an object-oriented ontology. 

Thus, without too much embarrassment, I still - all these years later - continue to write under the sign of the golden phallus. Though these days, like Warhol, I like to decorate the phallus with tiny flowers and hearts and tie it with a pretty ribbon to indicate my recognition of the fact that even art, religion, and sex shouldn't be taken too seriously; that they are all, as Susan Sontag suggests, exercises in failed seriousness - and all the more beautiful for their failure. 

Suicide Note

Photo: Adam Rowney, Suicide Rainbow, 2009

I have always been attracted to the idea of suicide. Not because I feel particularly world-weary, or prone to morbid thoughts, but because the act of suicide seems to me to be one that shows tremendous courage and which, paradoxically, takes away life out of a love of life. That is to say, in choosing to die freely and in a manner of their own devising, the suicidal subject offers a form of vital affirmation.  

I would happily kill myself tomorrow were it not for the fact that a very great deal of time and effort is required to produce an originally stylish suicide and I am, alas, fundamentally lazy. Thus whenever I begin to imagine the meticulous preparation that is required - arranging all the details, finding all the right ingredients, shaping the entire enterprise into a true practice of joy - then too do I think: 'Well, maybe the day after tomorrow ...'

And I remember also the following verse by Dorothy Parker:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren't lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

Torture Garden

I'm not a great lover of fetish fashion as it has developed within the BDSM community: it's a little too black, too shiny, and too tied to old-fashioned notions of sex and power for my tastes. And, as so often amongst those who pride themselves on being queer and looking extraordinary, there's a surprising conformism and rubbery-sameness amongst the kinky crowd. This became clear after a visit to Torture Garden (TG), the world's leading fetish venue.

The owners and founders of TG, Messrs Pelling & Wood, like to portray it as an achieved utopia wherein people are free to play, perform, and experiment with practices that challenge norms of social and sexual identity - which they are, just so long as they adhere to the club's strict dress code: No jeans! No trainers! No natural fabrics! 

Of course, it's not street wear or casual clothing that really threatens the TG aesthetic. Rather, it's the kind of inexpensive fancy dress worn by fun-loving girls on a hen-night. Pelling & Wood understand how their up-market fetish business risks being made ludicrous by a bawdy counter-aesthetic that delights in exaggerated bad taste and self-mockery. Thus, whilst they insist that TG's dress code strives to avoid narrow limitations and is primarily in place to encourage "individual imagination and diversity", they nevertheless concede that it ultimately serves to protect the club's status as "edgy and avant-garde".

As good capitalists, Pelling & Wood might want to see their business expand and sell as many pairs of latex knickers to as many people as possible, but they also need to protect their brand image. And so they bemoan the fact - without the slightest hint of irony - that as the fetish scene becomes more mainstream "there has been a commercial element creeping into sections of the crowd".

Continuing, in a paragraph that betrays the full extent of their snobbery and moral allegiance to the principle of the Real, they declare:

"This looks shit and makes TG look shit ... If you have the bad taste to wear ... cheap and cheesy fancy dress please go somewhere else, we don't want you at TG! ... We want the diversity and the fun, but we want authentic costumes that are real ... not cheap fancy dress copies."

www.torturegarden.com

They further warn that Dress Code Staff will ensure that everyone inside TG is dressed "appropriately at all times". What this means is forget about wearing whatever might turn you on and just make sure your outfit conforms to the aesthetic and commercial ideal of the owners - or watch out for the fashion police!

Clearly, Pelling & Wood need to lighten up a little: they should, if you like, smile and say cheese. For as long as they remain faithful to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, TG will remain a haven of art school pretension rather than superficial delight.  

Houellebecq Variations

I'm not really a poet, even if I'm interested in the possibilities and limits of language. Nor am I a qualified translator. 

And so the verses that follow should probably best be thought of as idiosyncratic transformations and deformations of the original poems written by Michel Houellebecq and published in the 1996 collection, Le Sens du Combat. 

I post them here only because I wish to bring greater attention to Houellebecq as a poet in the English-speaking world and in the belief that any embarrassment they might cause will be mine alone.

[Untitled]

Whenever she saw me she'd push her pelvis in my direction
And say with suggestive irony: 'It's kind of you to come ...'
I'd glance vaguely at the curve of her breasts
And then leave. My office was bare.

Last thing Friday I would bin the old files only to
Receive an identical work-load on Monday.
And I liked her very much: she was pitiful; as a piece
Of secretarial meat she had passed her use by date.

She lived somewhere or other near Cheptainville
With a red-haired child and some video tapes.
She was unaware of the rumblings of the city
And on Saturday nights she rented porn films.

She typed the mail and I liked her face:
She very much wanted to be down on her knees.
She was thirty-five or maybe fifty,
She journeyed towards death without concern for her age.


Differentiation, Rue d'Avron

Scattered across the table like droppings are all
The usual signs of life: soiled tissues, spare keys,
And elements of despair reminding me that you
Were once desirable.

Sunday shrouded the local chippy and the bars
Full of immigrants with the same stickiness.
We strolled for a while, happy, before returning home
So as not to know, preferring to stare at one another.

You stripped naked in front of the sink and
If your face lacked the taut beauty of Botox,
Still your body remained firm and seemed to
Cry: 'Look at me! I'm still in one piece -

My limbs are still attached and death hasn't yet
Closed my eyes like those of my brother.
You taught me the meaning of prayer,
Look at me, look! Fix your eyes on my flesh!'


[Untitled]

A sun-exposed soul is threatened
By coastal waves that crash and
Reawaken the dull ache of
Underlying pain.

What would we do without the sun?
Grief, nausea, suffering and all of
Life's stupidities vanish beneath it.

The blue of noon purrs with the
Bliss of physical inertia; the joy
Of death and forgetfulness as
Eyes close in sensitive sleep.

Pitiless, the sea stretches
Like a rousing animal; this
Universe has no law.

What would we do without the sun?

The Woman Who Married the Eiffel Tower

"Things are not only structures with closed contours that lend themselves to manipulation and whose consistency constrains us. They lure and threaten us, support and obstruct us, sustain and debilitate us, direct and calm us. They enrapture us with their sensuous substances and also with their luminous surfaces and their phosphorescent facades, their halos, their radiance and their resonances."

          - Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common.

Thus it is that when we encounter the Eiffel Tower, for example, standing so tall and magnificent amidst the city landscape, what we see before us is not just a large metal structure onto which we might hang all kinds of personal attributes like so many Christmas tree baubles. Rather, amidst the urban chaos of Paris and the noise of the traffic, we encounter an object with its own irresistible imperative, "radiating over us like a black sun, holding us in its orbit, demanding our attention", as Graham Harman rather nicely puts it.  

The object, therefore, is primarily and above all else a force and our love for the object is an effect of this force and not something freely entered into and determined by the amorous subject. And so, when Erika Eiffel speaks of her love for the Tower she indicates she has submitted directly to the sensual power of the latter. For just like living organisms, inanimate objects also have something commanding about them which compels us to acknowledge their uniquely seductive presence and understand them for what they are: actual entities, or real things-in-themselves that exist independently of us.

For this is what the world is: an inhuman arena of innumerable objects that encounter and affect one another in a violent and immoral orgy of existence. To believe that we play a decisive role in this is, of course, merely anthropocentric conceit. Dasein might possess unique ontological insight and so be 'richer in world' than a lizard or a rock, but all objects exist equally within what Lawrence might term a democracy of touch.

To be clear, I've nothing against experiencing the world through the eyes: it's lovely to look at the Eiffel Tower glittering in the sunlight. And it's wonderful to write about the Tower in the manner of Roland Barthes, as sign and symbol. But it's fatally mistaken to think of it as something that exists only as an effect of photons on retinal cells, or within language.

Graham Harman is on the money once more when he writes that the essential being of an object is a "capital X that forever recedes from all contact with human meaningfulness". It cannot, therefore, be seen, or snapped with a camera, or known in full - not even if you love the object dearly and have a  long-term romantic relationship with it.

All objects - including our human lovers - withdraw into the darkness of their own primal reality and even our most brilliant thoughts, intimate fantasies, or tender kisses can ever fully reveal their truth or exhaust their being. The desire for total transparency and the dream of ultimate union with those we love is futile and mistaken.

Even Erika Eiffel seems to me a little greedy in her love. It would be nice if she could just learn to let the Tower be and show a little more respect for the pathos of distance that separates her and the object of her affection, rather than seek some kind of pan-psychic identification or merger into matrimonial oneness.

That said, I sincerely wish her and the Tower all the love and luck in the world.  

Sexy Eiffel Towers

Photo by Petter Hegre: Anna S Eiffel Tower Park (2009)

I'm on the top, with the jump,  jumping to my death,

It's Paris - La Tour Eiffel - the sexiest building left.

Located on the Champ de Mars, La Tour Eiffel is a 320-metre puddle iron construction, weighing some 10,000 tonnes. Erected in 1889, it was named after the engineer, Gustave Eiffel, who oversaw the design and construction.

Initially, many critics - including artists and intellectuals - opposed the building of the Tower. Some feared it would dominate the Parisian skyline and overshadow other much-loved monuments; others derided the proposed structure on the grounds that it lacked any serious purpose or function. Indeed, the Tower's uselessness and frivolity was felt by many to be something of a scandal in an age which prided itself on its utility and seriousness. However, once built it proved an immediate success with the French public and quickly became a global attraction. 

As one of the most recognisable objects on earth, this empty monument has received millions of visitors, served as the architectural inspiration for at least thirty similar towers around the world and featured in numerous films and photographs as an iconic and romantic symbol of the city in which it stands.

Indeed, in a very real sense, La Tour Eiffel is Paris and Paris is La Tour Eiffel and wherever you are in the city you must, as Roland Barthes points out, take endless precautions if you don't wish to see the Tower: whatever time of day, whatever season of the year, whatever might obscure your view and isolate you from it, the Tower is always there. Silently persisting, "it is as literal as a phenomenon of Nature whose meaning can be questioned to infinity but whose existence is incontestable."

                              

But just as every Parisian is obliged to encounter and acknowledge the Tower, so are we all: for it has become present to the entire world, in our dreams and fantasies. Almost the question arises not why some individuals are sexually attracted to the Tower, but why isn't everyone aroused by this virtually pure signifier that paradoxically means everything? 

For La Tour Eiffel excites like no other structure on earth. It is the supreme object and it affords us a multiplicity of pleasures: we can fall in love beneath it and we can fall to our deaths from the top of it. One way or another, it thus promises bliss and stands in all its mysterious thingliness forever beyond human reason. 

In Memory of St Sebastian

The artist and punk-dandy Sebastian Horsley may no longer cruise the streets of Soho, but he continues to haunt my imagination and memory. I miss seeing him sat outside a cafe on Old Compton Street, or strolling along the Charing Cross Road in one of his lurid and ludicrous suits, stovepipe hat, and wide-collared Turnbull & Asser shirts. He was one of the most beautiful and courageous men alive. And he remains so in death. 

For whilst Sebastian never quite mastered the art of painting, he certainly mastered the far more difficult art of dying at the right time. Some die too soon: most die too late. Or so Zarathustra says. But the individual of genius always times their exit to perfection. Thus at the very moment his life became dramatized on stage, Horsely took his leave. He knew that once his persona had become a pure piece of fiction - a role that could be performed just as well, if not better, by actors other than himself - then there was really no need to hang around. It was time to get his coat.

To scorn the thought of one's mortality in this manner - to insist, as Sebastian always insisted, that death doesn't really matter (that it's not the end of the world) - is also to refuse to take seriously all those other judgements of God that weigh down and make gloomy.

And it is precisely this refusal of moral seriousness which so irritates the ascetic idealists who hate dandyism and have no patience with characters such as Horsley. For as long as fashion is concerned only with clothes, bodies, and hairstyles, then there's no problem. But once its playful and perverse indeterminacy begins to affect (and infect) the essential world of values, then there's panic on behalf of those who take these things and themselves very seriously indeed.  

Horsley recognised that what most alarms about dandyism is the fact that it repudiates models of depth. That it is, as he once wrote, a lie which reveals the truth and the truth is we are what we pretend to be. He also knew he was a preposterous and vulgar figure with no social status or role whatsoever: just a futile blast of colour, in a futile colourless world. One of the damned, if you like: but it's better to go to hell well-tailored, than to heaven in rags.

   

Revolt into Style

In an age of terror and impending global catastrophe, there is nothing for it but irony, indifference, and insouciance. What we really don't need right now is a greater degree of earnestness. For fanaticism is always marked by its moral sincerity and is, as Wilde pointed out, the world's original sin: 'If only the caveman had known how to laugh, history might have been different'.

The central argument of any philosophy on the catwalk must surely be that what matters most is that we look good, live dangerously, and love fate; pouring scorn upon all those who fail to recognise their own dullness. D. H. Lawrence provides us with our manifesto:

"It is time we treated life as a joke again, as they did in the really great periods like the Renaissance. Then the young men swaggered down the street with one leg bright red, one leg bright yellow, doublet of puce velvet, and yellow feather in silk cap. 

      Now that is the line to take. Start with externals, and proceed to internals, and treat life as a good joke. If a dozen men would stroll down the Strand and Piccadilly tomorrow, wearing tight scarlet trousers fitting the leg, gay little orange-brown jackets and bright green hats, then the revolution against dullness which we need so much would have begun. ... But it takes a lot of courage to sail gaily, in brave feathers, in the teeth of a dreary convention."  

                                        - 'Red Trousers', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (CUP, 2004), p. 138.

This sailing gaily in brave feathers and the refusal to care is what I understand by the phrase 'revolt into style' - a transpolitical revolt that teaches us to become superficial out of profundity and to appreciate how both society and self are ultimately founded upon cloth, not nature.

Fashion, above all else, is a passion for artifice. This, coupled to its love of empty signs and cycles, is what most alarms the puritan in his grey suit and sensible shoes and not so much its overtly erotic element. For in our culture, tethered as it is to a principle of utility and meaning, the fact that fashion is futile and pointless - and prides itself on such - means that those who like to dress up and mess up are always going to be branded immoral. 

Thus the young man cruising through Soho in brightly coloured clothes for no reason in the middle of the afternoon may well be sexually disconcerting to some people, but this is secondary in comparison to the outrage he causes because of his perceived flippancy, flamboyance, and aristocratic disdain for the world of work.

Ah Sebastian, I miss you!

The Treadwell's Papers

There's an independent bookshop in London called Treadwell's, owned by a very dear friend of mine, Christina. It used to be based in Covent Garden, but is now in Bloomsbury. Over the last eight years I have presented a variety of papers there and I was recently asked if I could compile an index of titles with dates. 

So, for those who might also be interested, here is a list of the 'Treadwell's Papers', beginning with the first series of essays entitled Visions of Excess: A Secret History of Philosophy, from 2004:

I: Sade: The Impossible One (23-02-04)

II: Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ (01-03-04)

III: Bataille: The Accursed One (08-03-04)

IV: Foucault: The Masked Philosopher (15-03-04)

V: Deleuze and Guattari: The Schizonomads (22-03-04)

VI: Among the Ruins: Nihilism, Culture, Art and Technology (29-03-04)

Sex/Magic: Essays on the Erotic and the Esoteric, the Pornographic and the Pagan (2005):

I: Re-dreaming the Dark: Sex, Magic, and Politics (14-02-05)

II: Masturbation: An Invocation of Pan or Sex-in-the-Head? (21-02-05)

III: Cunt Awareness, or Supposing Truth to be a Woman ... (28-02-05)

IV: Anal Sex and the Recovery of Paradise (07-03-05)

V: Ye Shall be Naked in Your Rites: Nature, Truth, and the Quest for Authenticity (14-03-05)

VI: The Whip and the Wand: Fetishistic Aspects of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (21-03-05)

Thanatology: Essays on Death, Sex, Suicide and Sacrifice (2006)

I: On Dissolving the Distinction between Life and Death (14-02-06)
II: All Being is a Being Towards Death (21-02-06)
III: Eros and Thanatos: Love and Death (28-02-06)
IV: Suicide and the Practice of Joy before Death (07-03-06)
V: Solar Economy and Human Sacrifice (14-03-06)
VI: The Death of God  and the Resurrection of the Man Who Died (21-03-06)

Zoophilia: the Bodil Joensen Memorial Lectures (2007)

I: On Dissolving the Distinction between Human and Animal (13-02-07)
II: Ophidicism: Eve and the Serpent (20-02-07)
III: Come Not With Kisses: Leda and the Swan (27-02-07)
IV: Equus Eroticus: Why Do Girls Love Horses? (13-03-07)
V: In the Company of Wolves: Animal Transformation Fantasies (20-03-07)
VI: Becoming-Animal: On Molecular Bestiality (27-03-07)

Reflections beneath a Black Sun: Myth, History, Politics and Paganism (2008)

I: Crackpot History and the Politics of Cultural Despair (11-03-08)
II: From Ariosophy to National Socialism (18-03-08)
III: Only a God Can Save Us Now (25-03-08)
IV: Blood and Soil (01-04-08)
V: Neo-Nazi Mysteries (08-04-08)
VI: On the Spirit of Terrorism (15-04-08)

Finally, and most recently, there have been four one-off presentations (although the three papers given in 2012 have all spun out of a wider on-going project, entitled Sex/Object and so betray a certain sense of continuity and cross-over of materials):

Elements of Gothic Queerness in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' (18-05-11)
Sun-Fucked: On the Dangers and Pleasures of Solar Sexuality (18-01-12)
Floraphilia: The Revenge of the Flowers (19-06-12)
The Pygmalion Syndrome: Sex-Dolls, Solipsism, and The Love of Statues (24-10-12)

Revenge of the Object

And so to Baudrillard's devastatingly cruel story of the woman who asks her lover what part of her he finds the most attractive, thereby seducing him into platitude and towards his own annihilation as a desiring subject. Having replied that it's her eyes that he loves best, the next day he receives in the post a little package tied with a ribbon and containing an eye-ball gauged from its socket by her own fair hand. 

The violence of the act leaves him shocked and speechless. Never again will he cast his objectifying male gaze over the body of a woman with imperious self-assurance. This act of sacrifice has cost her dearly, but it has cost him far more: she loses an eye - but he loses face. 

It is in this manner that the object takes its revenge: via fatal provocation and a senseless act that belongs to the same order of events as a natural catastrophe or terrorist atrocity. 

How then to respond to the gift of the above ring? Doubtless sent with love, but also a certain knowing irony on behalf of Miss McKeown. 

Why I Love Mauro Perucchetti's Jelly Baby Family

There are doubtless many reasons to love Mauro Perucchetti's Jelly Baby Family which, until recently, stood close to Speaker's Corner, challenging and subverting the arrogance and pomposity of John Nash's hateful Marble Arch. Indeed, it was the fact that these colourful resin figures showed such playful indifference to the history of the area in which they stood and seemed to mock said Arch with their post-Pop aesthetic that primarily appealed to me.

It's difficult to convey just how much I loathe Marble Arch. For one thing, it's intimately connected to the British Royal Family and is an open celebration of the violent power of the State. Secondly, it's made of a material which I don't much care for. The fact that marble retains its high-ranking status within a hierarchy of substances and continues to be a privileged medium amongst sculptors and architects keen to produce works within a Classical tradition, means nothing to me: I prefer plastic.

For plastic has none of the cultural pretension of marble and is, in its essence, not only the very stuff of alchemy, as Roland Barthes long-ago pointed out, but it also abolishes the above-mentioned hierarchy of substances, opening the way to a more democratic era. Plastic, if you like, makes free as well as joyful. For plastic affords us the euphoric experience of being able to reshape the world and endlessly create new forms and objects, limited only by our own ingenuity and imagination. It doesn't necessarily allow us to live more beautifully or more truthfully, but that's ok. We are so tired of these things posited as supreme values and of being bullied by our grand idealists who mistakenly equate them with the Good. Today, I prefer the cheap and cheerful over the eternal; the Top Shop mannequin over the Venus de Milo; and the Jelly Baby Family over the House of Windsor.

Torpedo the Ark

Arrange for a flood to the high-tide mark,

And I'll gladly, myself, torpedo the ark.

The lines were written by Ibsen for a revolutionary friend. Whilst troubled by how such violent political fantasies came to fruition within modernity, nevertheless the final phrase continues to appeal to the nihilist in me. And this is so even when the concept of nihilism now has a rather hackneyed quality, as Ray Brassier concedes in his excellent study Nihil Unbound (2007).

In this text, Brassier argues persuasively that, as a philosopher, one remains obliged to affirm the essential truth of nihilism. This, of course, is the truth of extinction: a truth with which philosophy has long struggled to come to terms. Even Nietzsche, whilst boasting of his being the 'first perfect nihilist', wasted a good deal of his intellectual energies trying to find a way to revalue values and thus overcome his own fatal conclusion that life is not only without any meaning at all, but is purely epiphenomenal; i.e., just a very rare and unusual way of being dead.

If only he hadn't been so determined to make philosophy into a medium of life's affirmation and eternal return, then Nietzsche might have seen that, ultimately, it serves best as what Brassier terms the 'organon of extinction'. He might also have agreed that torpedoing the ark is necessitated not only because the sentimental notion of salvation for the righteous deserves to be sunk without trace, but because intellectual honesty requires it. 

For what nihilism teaches us is that even without Noah and his floating zoo - and even without a perverse and pathological deity first causing destructive floods and then gently placing rainbows in the sky - there remains an independent reality which is completely indifferent to our existence and oblivious to our vain attempts to make it more hospitable. Nature is not our home and we should forget about any covenant made with a dead God. 

Brassier is right: philosophy should do more than simply further human conceit. Its duty and, indeed, its destiny is to acknowledge the fact that "thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of the living" [2007: xi].

Reflections on the Loss of UR6

Photo: Georgie Cooper BDS (Hons) MFDS RCS Eng. MSC

Extraction is dental-speak for an act of extreme violence,
carried out in the name of oral hygiene: a final solution to the
question of what to do about those teeth that cannot be
coordinated into a Colgate-clean utopia.

Afterwards, your mouth feels like a crime scene;
a bloody site of trauma and violation rinsed with
a saline solution.

The sense of loss is palpable: it makes me think of her
and the manner in which I too was extracted like UR6.

Yet Bataille insists that a rotten tooth - even after removal -
continues to function as a sign and provocation, just like an
abandoned shoe within the sphere of love.