Michel Foucault's Simplest of Pleasures

 

Portrait by Rinaldo Hopf (2004)

Michel Foucault was always deeply attracted to the idea of suicide as one he could darkly caress and think of primarily as an aesthetic question, rather than as a moral problem. He encouraged everyone to carefully choose and prepare their own death: to arrange the details and shape it into a work of art.

Of course, he appreciated the fact that suicide doesn't always result in a beautiful corpse and there are often discouraging traces left behind. It's obviously not very nice to have to hang yourself in the kitchen and leave a blue tongue sticking out of your mouth; or to jump from your eighth floor apartment and leave tiny bits of brain on the pavement for the local dogs to sniff at. Having said that, much of this unpleasantness could be avoided if we revalued suicide and made it easier and acceptable to kill oneself. 

In an interview entitled The Simplest of Pleasures, Foucault envisions a time and a people to come who have accorded suicide the highest status. Such people will hold suicide festivals and suicide orgies and establish places where those planning on suicide can seek out potential partners.

Indeed, Foucault says if he were to win a fortune in the lottery, he would personally open a suicide hotel where people who wanted to die could go and spend a weekend, enjoying themselves as far as possible before happily checking-out, liberated of every identity.

To think of suicide in this manner - as a question of style and as something not only admirable, but chic and playful - dissolves the depressing interiority that those who would make of life and death a tedious psychodrama insist upon. Death should not be another opportunity to pass judgement; nor should it be turned into a banal biological fact with which to smother the imagination. 

And suicide should not be left to a minority of unhappy souls who frequently make a mess of it and thereby bring the entire concept into disrepute. Each one of us needs to address the issue of how best to make an exit from this life - not waste time asking why it has to happen, or praying there's an afterlife.

The Voyeur

 Illustration by Joe Shuster

The voyeur takes the imperial gaze to its erotic conclusion. By watching lovers fuck, he exercises his power to probe and master bodies and assign meaning to otherwise insignificant sexual activity. 

The voyeur is always a solitary figure, watching in private and unbeknown to at least one of the parties observed. Crucially, he has no desire to join in. For his pleasure derives exclusively from the fact that, like a god, he has learnt the art of what Nietzsche terms immaculate perception.

For the voyeur, the greatest thing is to look at life without desire and not stare, as a dog does, with its tongue hanging out. 

Ooh Matron!

The figure of the nurse plays an important role within the pornographic imagination, where she is usually conceived either as a kindly angel who administers some form of erotic relief, or as the cruel representative of strict and punishing authority delighting in needles and cold latex gloves.

But, for the British, reared as they have been within a Carry On culture, the figure of the nurse also plays an important role within the comic imagination. 

And so it's virtually impossible - unless you're as humourless as many perverts are - to take the sexual stereotype seriously for long: fetishistic medical fantasies are invariably undermined by fond memories of Hattie Jacques.

Ecstasy

We should be extremely wary of those attempts to conceive of the overman as corresponding to the possibility of an ecstatic break from humanity. Zarathustra explicitly warns against the thought of a transcendent leap into the future.

In fact, it's arguable that what is most needed today is some form of counter-ecstatic return to the flesh; a stepping back into material life and the rejection of all forms of idealism that would abstract us away from the world of physical objects that we might touch.

For the key to constructing an active and ethical life is to remain, says Lawrence, inside your own skin and not pretend that you're any bigger than you actually are. To overcome ourselves we need not become more hu-man or superhuman, but less so; more animal, complete with teeth and guts and genitals and all those things which our idealists hope to see shrivel away.

And so, like Anna Brangwen, I hold on to the little things that save me from being swept up helplessly into the Abstract and the Universal. I don't want to get outside myself, or go around open-mouthed with a strange, ecstatic grin like a true believer. 

A Transpolitical Afterword

To my surprise, I discovered last night at a wine bar in St James's, that there are still intelligent people in the world prepared to discuss politics as traditionally understood and practised, despite the fact that we have entered a transpolitical era. They might not have been entirely sober when doing so - but they were almost certainly serious.

For one reason or another, they seemed unprepared to accept - or, in some cases, incapable of accepting - what the radical confusion of formerly fixed and distinct political categories, ideologies, and identities might signify. It was as if the last forty years had changed nothing at all. Or as if Baudrillard had never written a word!

However, like it or not, we are rapidly approaching what the latter describes as the zero point of politics; a stage in which everything that formerly held truth and value in the political sphere has been emptied of all sense. Not that this marks the end of history, or the end of man; rather, it simply results in the interminable illusion of the end and the simulation of phantom events on the world stage broadcast in real time on 24-hour news channels.

Henceforth, attempts to do politics, or discuss politics, are increasingly doomed to failure. And if many people don't bother to vote, it's not because they are apathetic or cynical, but, for the most part, indifferent to a system in which it has become impossible to believe. Parliament, I'm afraid, is beginning to resemble a huge HMV store: a place that holds no great interest and serves no real purpose. 

Revenge of the Immortals

One of the more controversial ideas that Baudrillard put forward was the final solution, by which he referred to the extermination of sex and death and the return of humanity to a desexualized, non-individuated state of being prior to our becoming mortal and discontinuous.

Thanks to recent scientific advances, this dream of becoming-amoeba, or, as it is more commonly called, cloning, is no longer simply the stuff of fiction or neo-Platonic fantasy. There seems to be a general acceptance of the fact that we are about to be replaced either by machines, or a new species which will be sexless and immortal. No one seems particularly troubled by the prospect of a transhuman future and, ironically, whilst we speak endlessly about the right to life, it is the right to death that is being taken from us. 

In a crucial passage, Baudrillard notes: 

"Contrary to everything we ordinarily believe, nature first created immortal beings, and it was only by winning the battle for death that we became the living beings that we are. Blindly, we dream of defeating death and achieving immortality, whereas that is our most tragic destiny, a destiny inscribed in the previous life of our cells."

     - Impossible Exchange, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 2001), pp. 27-8

Relating his theories of evolution and cloning not only to the history of Western metaphysics, but also to modern sexual politics, Baudrillard argues that by dissociating erotic activity from procreation and reproduction from sex, fucking is increasingly regarded as a useless function; just as gender differences become irrelevant. 

Death too, it seems, is fated to become a useless function and, in the longer term, something inconceivable. Perhaps the time will come when the beings who come after us will try to understand something of our joys and sorrows by simulating a virtual experience of mortality; perhaps they will long nostalgically for nights shaken with terror and ecstasy and for what Houellebecq terms the possibility of an island.   

Come Not with Kisses: Leda, Lawrence and the Swan

Max Sauco: Leda and Her Swan 

D. H. Lawrence wrote four very lovely and at times very amusing poems based on the Leda myth. Taken together, these verses are significantly more interesting than the more-widely read poem written by Yeats on this same woman and bird coupling, projecting as they do the idea into a transhuman future in which the new Helen is imagined not as some semi-divine beauty, but as a human-animal hybrid or chimera, compete with green webbed-feet made to smite the waters of an unknown world.

Lawrence is not entirely happy with his own vision, however. For within the curious world of Lawrentian zoology the swan has ambiguous status and often features alongside snakes, newts, and beetles as one of the animals he associates with corruption:

"With its reptile feet buried in the ooze ... its beauty white and cold and terrifying ... it is for us a flame of the cold white fire of flux, the phosphorescence of corruption ... This is  the beauty of the swan ... this cold white salty fire of infinite reduction."

       

- 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (CUP, 1988), p. 293 

Thus, for Lawrence, when humanity seeks its fulfilment in avisodomy this is not merely a sign of our perversion, but also indicative of a kind of death drive.

Whether we agree or disagree with Lawrence's analysis of becoming-animal in terms of regression and nostalgie de la boue, at least, to his credit and unlike many pure-minded scholars who refuse to discuss the zoosexual aspects of the Leda myth, he doesn't shy away from the question of why sensitive men and women might desire to fuck with birds and beasts, rather than one another.

And besides, who's to say that the Übermensch won't be born of a swan-princess in a time of corruption?

Why Bataille's Work Remains Crucial

André Breton was not the last to describe and attempt to dismiss Bataille as an excremental philosopher. But such a characterization, whilst not entirely unfair or inaccurate, nevertheless fails to appreciate that it is precisely because the latter obsessively returns us to the idea that life is no more than a moment of temporary stabilization before the collapse back into the filth and chaos from which it arose, that his books say the essential and are essential.  

We need to have our noses rubbed in the fact that there is ultimately no difference between the magnificence and splendour of the sun and a coffin full of shit. Idealists like André Breton may not like it, but flies, dung-beetles, and base matter of every description belongs to the same general economy as all that he finds noble and elevated. 

In the end, what makes us beautiful and keeps us sane as human beings, is not the fact that we are capable of moral and aesthetic grandeur, but that we leave stains upon our underwear. It's the mind's inability to accept this fact and it's sense of disgust when faced with evidence of the body's physicality that is problematic and shameful. 

Like Heidegger, Bataille realised that thinking doesn't overcome metaphysics by attempting to transcend it in some manner; on the contrary, thinking overcomes metaphysics by climbing back down Pisgah and substantiating itself in the touch of bodies and the strangeness of objects. 

And so it's only when, like a young child, you can happily parade a lump of dog shit on a stick in the knowledge that here too the gods come to presence, that you'll be able to affirm the world as it is; with flowers that fade and corpses that rot.

How Even Witches Lose Their Charm

The Malleus Maleficarum is clear on one point above all others: witchcraft results from insatiable carnal lust and is therefore a form of sexual depravity as well as religious heresy. 

Thus it was widely accepted in the early modern period that witches copulated with demons and that their rituals involved obscene and unnatural acts including masturbation, bestiality, and feasting on the flesh of infants. Via a potent combination of sodomy and sorcery, witches threatened to subvert the very foundations of the moral and political order of society and this made them wicked, dangerous - and fascinating. 

But what of witchcraft today?

Alas, if many practitioners are to be believed, it has become a depressingly tame affair: few covens now insist upon nudity, or practice the more controversial rites involving sex and scourging. And far from providing a rare opportunity to form a perverse relationship with the satanic, pagan witchcraft merely affords the chance to commune with a loving Nature and explore methods of spiritual self-discovery and personal development.

The Dionysian frenzy of the orgy and the blasphemous humour of the black mass has given way to a New Age theology that upholds many of the same stupidities and myths that govern conventional thinking. Wicca, I'm sorry to say, is a humanism. And the witch, far from being a figure who inspires terror, is often now just a Twilight-reading Barbie Goth hardly deserving of the name.  

The Politics of Friendship

Nietzsche has some interesting things to teach us about the concept of friendship; not least of all when he insists on the importance of maintaining a degree of enmity towards those we hold dear. It is never enough, he argues, to learn how to love your enemies - for that is merely Christian - one must also learn how to hate one's friends. 

And so, with that in mind, here are four short fragments of affectionate animosity.

Simon 

Overqualified and overblown he stumbles and tumbles
from wine bar to seminar pissing his promise away.

And those are buttons
that were his eyes.

Thomas

Remote and raptorious you sit

unspeaking at table's end.

Your bald head and bare neck

obscenely suggestive.

Perhaps you were once young,

but now you are old and an

eater of putrescence.

Mark

I know your type: with those finely curved lips

and boyish charms, eyes sparkling with the

conceit of your own corruption.

A narcissist who masturbates in mirrors and

dreams of murdering all those who will not

accept your love.

Laura

From out of the past she came ...

Doodling demons to demonstrate the darkness of her soul
and the two-dimensional depth of her talent.

A gargoyle gurgling about balls of light and how she likes
to come whilst listening to the Cocteau Twins.

California Über Alles

Jake and Dinos Chapman: California Über-alles (2003)

Why do those professional network hippies at LinkedIn feel the need to exercise so much control over whom their members may and may not establish connections with and so build what is effectively a wide but nonetheless gated community?

I know the official LinkedIn policy speaks about the need for establishing trust amongst members and providing security, but it feels like the kind of soft-fascism identified by the Dead Kennedy's: California Über Alles.

And so, whilst I understand the need to have regulations in place to try and stop abusive behaviour, I resent the constant threat of having my account restricted or deleted altogether simply because I might choose to invite a stranger into my world.

There doesn't seem much point in only forming virtual connections with the same people I already know in what remains of and passes for the real world. I want the freedom to cruise on-line and pick up who ever catches my interest in a random, promiscuous and anonymous manner. 

For ultimately, the most creative and most beautiful relations are ones solicited outside the gate and closed communities, no matter how elite the membership, become at best ghettos and, at worst, concentration camps.

Fragments of Remembrance

Gathered here are six little fragments of text written in remembrance of authors who have, at one time or another, meant something special to me. Arguably, they might be read as an attempt to bear witness to the uniqueness of the relationship that one has with the writers and the books that one loves. And, indeed, with the dead.

Not that these somewhat incomplete and unfinished verses constitute anything so grand as a poetry or a politics of mourning. In writing them, I think I simply (and at the risk of banality) wanted to record an affection, rather than produce art or pass judgement.

In Memory of Anaïs Nin 

Many types of flow - of madness and literature, desire and disintegration - 

traversed the queer forest of her body in which gay little birds twittered 

obscenely and dark poppies blossomed.

In Memory of Henry Miller

A boy from Brooklyn: a pornographer: a mystic.

A son-of-a-bitch quoting Nietzsche in an East Coast accent,
whilst parading round Paris with a personal hard-on like the
happiest man alive.

In Memory of Friedrich Nietzsche

Bones, a few biographical details, the odd photograph,

and a small number of books: the remains of a dead

philosopher.

And yet he is more alive now, in death,
than he was in life, having become that
posthumous individual he said he would.

And this childless man is today father to us all.


In Memory of Sylvia Plath

I do not like the English summer, unfolded
into green completion and the smugness of
strawberries and cream.

Intolerable the seasonal stupidity of the natives;
one yearns for the first breath of autumn and
the fresh reassurance of rain.

Even, like a spinster, I long for winter,
so scrupulously austere.

In Memory of Marinetti

When I think of Marinetti
hurling defiance at the stars
beneath a violent electric moon,

I think of a bald-headed little man
in a bow-tie masturbating whilst
erect on the summit of the world.

Instinctively, one can't help but smile
at how quickly this ludicrous lover
of the machine and the manifesto
became passé.


In Memory of the Marquis de Sade

A monster, say his jailers.
Perhaps.

But, if so, then a monster of generosity
and good will, in whose name sex and
death entwine to produce a singular
form of love.

Philosophy on the Catwalk

Nunzia Garoffolo: fashionbeyondfashion.wordpress.com

Six reasons why fashion is fabulous and the question of style is philosophically crucial:

1) Because Professor Teufelsdröckh, despite being a typical German Idealist in many respects, is right to suggest that in the "one pregnant subject of clothes, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been" [Sartor Resartus].

2) With its obsessive desire for the New as a value in and of itself, the logic of fashion is the determining principle of modernity. To his credit, Kant, who was often mocked by his friends for his fine silk shirts and  silver-buckled shoes, was one of the first to identify this irrational principle and note that fashion therefore has nothing to do with aesthetic criteria (i.e. it's not a striving after beauty, but novelty, innovation, and constant change). Designers seek to make their own creations as superfluous as quickly as possible; they don't seek to improve on anything and there is no progress, purpose, or ultimate goal within the world of fashion (a short skirt is not an advance on a long dress). If it can be said to have any aim at all, it is to be a potentially endless proliferation of forms and colours.

3) It's true that many philosophers regard fashion as something trivial and beneath their attention. Doubtless this is why the most interesting work written on the subject has tended to come from the pens of our poets and novelists including Baudelaire, Wilde, Mallarmé, Edgar Allan Poe, Proust, and D. H. Lawrence. But there are notable exceptions to this: Nietzsche, Barthes, and Baudrillard, for example, all concerned themselves with the language of fashion and the question of style. And they did so because they understood that once the playful and promiscuous indeterminacy of fashion begins to affect the 'heavy sphere of signs' then the liquidation of values associated with the order of referential reason is accelerated to a point of rupture. Fashion, in other words, is a method for the consummation of nihilism. 

4) Closely associated with fashion is the practice of dandyism: whilst primarily thought of as a late eighteenth and early nineteenth century phenomenon, dandyism can in fact be traced back as an ethos or way of living to the Classical world of ancient Greece, where techniques of the self and arts of existence were accorded singular importance amongst all those who wished to give style to their lives (i.e. that one needful thing which, in all matters, is the essential thing rather than sincerity).

5) The world of fashion also understands and perpetuates ideas of camp and queer. The first of these things, thought of somewhat problematically as a sensibility by Susan Sontag, taught us how to place quotation marks around certain artefacts and actions and thereby magically transform things with previously little or no worth into things with ironic value and perversely sophisticated appeal. Camp thus challenges conventional notions of good taste and high art and also comes to the defence of those forms and, indeed, those individuals, traditionally marginalized and despised.

As for queer, it's never easy or advisable to try and summarize this notion; it's a necessarily mobile and ambiguous concept that resists any fixed definition. Indeed, it's technically impossible to say what queerness 'is' as isness is precisely what's at issue in its rejection of all forms of onto-essentialism: it refers to nothing in particular and demarcates a transpositional positionality in relation to the normative. In other words, queer is a critical movement of resistance at odds with the legitimate and the dominant; it challenges the authority of those who would keep us all on the straight and narrow and wearing sensible shoes.

6) Finally, fashion matters because, without it, figures such as Nunzia Garoffolo would not exist and without women such as this in the world, clothed in the colours of the rainbow, life would be as ugly and as dull as it would be without flowers. We do not need priests all in black, or politicians all in grey. But we do need those individuals who bring a little splendour and gorgeousness into the world, otherwise there is only boredom and uniformity. 

On the Philosophical Importance of Zombies

The zombie long ago shuffled out of the West African religious imagination and into popular global culture, where it has been feasting on brains and fucking with the categorical certainties of oppositional thinking ever since. For by inhabiting that indeterminable realm that is also home to queers, vampires, and cyborgs, the zombie occupies the non-space between binaries and is neither dead nor alive, but, paradoxically, both at once, without taking on the full sense of either term. 

Thus the zombie cannot have its status determined within a system of metaphysical dualism. This makes the zombie the stuff of modern nightmare; for we depend for our security and conceptual coherence in a chaotic and threatening universe upon being able to make clear and unambiguous distinctions between either this or that: true or false, good or evil, friend or foe ...etc. 

It's true that within such binaries there is always a privileged term set over and against its inferior opposite and that whilst each term depends upon the other for its meaning and value the nature of their relationship is therefore one of violent inequality. But, nevertheless, these pairings by enabling us to firmly organize people, things, and relations, do make human society possible. 

By disrupting this operational logic, the zombie makes it difficult for us to think straight or think clearly, indicating, if you will, the very limits of our world as ultimately the distinction between life and death is dissolved and the lines between other crucial oppositions are also blurred. 

Obviously, if good order is to be preserved, then the zombie needs to be defeated: but how? It isn't easy to terminate something that is already dead (whilst alive). Addressing this problem, one critic writes:

"You can't kill a zombie, you have to resolve it. It has to be 'killed' categorically, by removing its undecidability. A magic agent or superior power will have to decide the zombie, returning it to one side of the opposition or the other. It has to become a proper corpse or a true living being. At that point the familiar concepts of life and death can rule again, untroubled." 

- Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida, (Icon Books, 2000), p. 23

But of course, we know in our hearts that the zombie can never really be resolved in this manner; that it is always out there somewhere in the shadows or at the margins of this world, ready and waiting to return after dark. Or, as Derrida would say, undecidability is ever present. 

Further - and finally - inasmuch as we too are made from inanimate matter, it might be argued that there's something of the zombie in all of us.

The Masked Philosopher

Illustration by Shorri on deviantart.com

Those who know me well know that I hate the human face. Well, hate is perhaps too strong a word to use; let us simply say that I have a strong philosophical aversion towards the face and a mistrust of all those familiar facial features that so conveniently express emotion and display our conformity to the dominant reality (not least of all the smile). 

For the face is not some kind of natural formation, nor is it uniquely individual as many people like to believe. It is rather a type of social machine that eventually envelops and codifies not just the front of the head, but the entire body, thereby ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance. 

The fact that most people love their own white, grinning faces with the same passion that slaves love their oppression and take every opportunity to shamelessly promote their own profile - not least on Facebook, for example - is a source of no little disappointment and irritation I have to admit. 

On the other hand, I'm full of admiration and respect for those who counter the privileging of the face within Western metaphysics by choosing to veil, mask, hide, or disguise the face in some manner. It takes courage, I think, to willingly lose face or seek to escape the face. I will always love Lady Chatterley not merely for her sexual frolics with her lover in the woods, but for daring to stand naked before a full-length mirror and place a "thick veil over her face, like a Mohammedan woman" in order that she might better know her body "apart from the face with all its complexities and frustrations and vulgarity!" [DHL]

And I will always love Michel Foucault for daring to become a masked philosopher, surrendering both name and face and instructing people: 'Do not ask me who I am and do not expect me to remain the same.' In celebrating anonymity in this manner, Foucault reminds us of something that Nietzsche taught: Every profound spirit loves a mask - and the profoundest of all despise even their own image.   

    

Heidegger and the Thing

To his credit, Heidegger went out of his way to develop a highly singular understanding of the thing in contradistinction to the modern concept which invariably places the latter-as-object in a subordinate relationship vis-à-vis a human subject who represents and determines its nature.

I like it, for example, when he tells us that there is something solid in a work of architecture, coloured in a painting, or sonorous in a musical composition. Such statements may seem trite, or pseudo-profound, but it's important to be reminded of the self-evidently (but nonetheless frequently overlooked) thingly element in art works.

However, I don't like it when Heidegger begins to discriminate between things and mere things; with the latter described somewhat pejoratively as the lifeless beings of nature. He might mean to simply suggest that clods of earth and pieces of rotten wood are things in their purest state, but you can sense the contempt (just as when he tells us the stone is without world).

And when he hesitates to call God a thing, or to consider man as a thing, it profoundly disappoints.

Ultimately, Heidegger is a correlationist. And so, whilst not anthropocentric in the traditional sense, he continues to assign Dasein a special role and insist that it be taken as the final standard of reference. Thus, for all his talk of hammers, jugs, bridges, and shoes etc, Heidegger fails to provide the thingly-oriented ontology that he teases us with.

Whether his somewhat unorthodox disciple Graham Harman will succeed in this - or whether he'll become entangled in his own fourfold project and polypsychism - remains to be seen.

On the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dickon Edwards, by Sarah Watson

In a brilliant and typically gnostic manner, Baudrillard observes: 

"In the end, all figures of otherness boil down to just one: that of the Object. In the end, all that is left is the inexorability of the Object, the irredeemability of the Object."

                           - The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 1996), p. 172

And so, at the close of Dorian Gray, all that remains is the picture. Having fulfilled its symbolic destiny and  taken its revenge, the portrait hangs upon the wall in immaculate triumph. Dorian lies dead because he mistakenly surrendered up all his secrets. But the picture-as-object remains an insoluble enigma outside of human reflection. 

Stare long enough at any image and it is not you who looks at it, but it which looks into you. Such is the abysmal nature of art: it exposes the illusory and superficial nature of subjectivity. Ultimately, despite all his crimes, passions, and perversities, Dorian bores us. The truth of the matter is that after many centuries of tedious and often painful self-confession and analysis, we know all that there is to know about the soul of man. There are no more mysteries of the human heart left to explore.

So it is that only the object excites our interest, as it leads us away from psychology towards a speculative materialism concerned not with feelings and desires, but the alien world of things, forces, and strange phenomena. We can forget human being and being human - or forms of literary analysis that talk endlessly about character and agency. 

It was - to reiterate - the picture of Dorian Gray that was the source of all that was most curious in Wilde's book. Only in the picture and in the actual events of the novel as events, were elements of genuine queerness assembled; not in the bi-curious world of Dorian, Basil and Lord Henry. 

And so, next time you take a picture of a friend or loved one, be honest enough to admit that what really excites you is the resolution of the image rather than their stupid smiling face. Dare to acknowledge that today, for us, identity is not something divided against itself as it was for the Victorians who worried endlessly about the beast or the queer within, but something to be produced, multiplied, circulated, broadcast, and consumed. 

For this is not an age of full-length portraits, or even mirrors. It is, rather, an age of screens and photoshopped personas encountered on-line. And so, if you really want to know all about someone, don't bother looking into their souls, or fingering their sex, just check out their Facebook profile and there they are in all their obscenity. 

Dogging

 Illustration by Captain Shame: redlionstreet.blogspot.co.uk 

The County of Essex, we are told, is a hot spot  for dogging; that peculiarly British pastime in which strangers meet up - often randomly and in masked anonymity - in fields, woodlands and lay-bys, in order to casually exchange sexual favours whilst observed by voyeurs happy to derive their own delight from the car shaking activities on display.

I'd perhaps not quite go so far as to describe dogging as idyllic, but, nevertheless, there is something romantic about such semi-pastoral (and semi-illicit) pleasures. 

Others, however, quickly resort to the language of moral outrage and tabloid journalism which, for some reason, has a particular penchant for words beginning with the letter 'd' - such as disgusting, degrading, and depraved, for example. 

And Lawrence too - for all his enthusiasm for alfresco eroticism - would also have been quick to condemn dogging I'm sure. One has only to recall what he wrote in his extraordinary essay on John Galsworthy to find evidence for this. Here, he vehemently attacks 'doggish amorousness' as something profoundly shameful and as a sign of social decadence. He writes:

"When the individual remains real and unfallen, sex remains a vital and supremely important thing. But once you have the fall into social beings, sex becomes disgusting, like dogs on heat. Dogs are social beings, with no true canine individuality. Wolves and foxes don't copulate on the pavement. Their sex is wild, and in act, utterly private. Howls you may hear. But you will never see anything. But the dog is tame. And he makes excrement and he copulates on the pavement ...

      The same with human beings. Once they become tame, they become, in a measure, exhibitionists ... They have no real feelings of their own. Unless somebody 'catches them at it', they don't really feel they've felt anything at all."

- D. H. Lawrence, 'John Galsworthy', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, CUP, 1985, p. 217 

How Bridges Love the Gap Between Objects

For many objectophiles, as for many Heideggereans, bridges remain privileged structures. Whilst they are not dwelling places, nevertheless they exist in the domain of our dwelling and we have great admiration and affection for them as buildings: buildings that are determined by dwelling and retain dwelling as a goal. Which means the following:

"The bridge ... does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. ... It brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighbourhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream."

- Heidegger, 'Building Dwelling Thinking', Basic Writings, (Routledge, 1993), p. 354

More than this, the bridge allows the waters that flow beneath it to do so beneath the heavens and for the men who cross it to do so before the gods; whether we explicitly think of their presence and give thanks, or whether we care only about crossing from A-B. The bridge, as Heidegger writes, "gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals" [355].

It is this gathering of the fourfold that constitutes the thingness of the bridge and which stops it from simply being a human construction serving a purely mundane purpose. Now, obviously, most people continue to think of the bridge primarily as something with functional convenience; and, after that, perhaps as some kind of symbol. I know that and have to accept it. However, to those rare men and women who are attuned to objects as things (and who perhaps take them as their lovers), the bridge is never just a mere bridge and it is always more than just a symbol: it's a gathering - and it's also a location. 

For just as the banks of the river do not exist prior to the bridge, neither does the location. As Heidegger notes:

"Before the bridge stands, there are of course many spots along the stream that can be occupied by something. One of them proves to be a locale, and does so because of the bridge. Thus the bridge does not first come to a locale to stand in it; rather, a locale comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge." [356] 

Similarly, the bridge doesn't take up space; on the contrary, just as it determines locales, so too does it allow for spaces. Building is the creation and joining of spaces and just as love bridges the gap between objects, so do bridges love the space between things.   

How Love Bridges the Gap Between Objects

Even when, in a gesture of democratic ontological realism, you accept that all objects can be posited on the same plane of existence, with no one object determining the being of any other object, still the problem remains of the essential gulf that exists between things.

Which is why the forming of relationships in a world of withdrawn and autonomous objects, each with their own unique powers and capacities, is not easy; it requires that all things discover a way in which to translate one another across the void that separates them. 

But translation is not the same as representation. Human subjects qua subjects might metaphysically relate to the world by attempting to form truthful representations of reality, but this all-too-human way of knowing things doesn't really interest me; even if it has been the central concern of philosophy since Descartes. I tend to agree with Levi Bryant that questions concerning objects are misconceived if they are turned into purely epistemological ones of how we might know them. 

In other words, philosophy must be more than a type of anthropocentric conceit and posthumanism, if there is ever to be such a thing, must begin with the admission that subjects are objects and that human being is not a privileged category to which everything can and must be referred. Further, it must be acknowledged that the gulf between us and other objects is not something uniquely significant; that there is equally such a gap between, for example, a pineapple and a knife, as there is between us and items of cutlery.

Thus, as I say above, all things need to find a way to translate one another, or relate across the ontological divide - which is something of an art, something of a science, and something of a mystery. How do objects translate other objects, especially when all objects remain constitutively withdrawn not only from one another but from themselves? 

The answer, perhaps, is via a form of onto-erotics, or what Baudrillard terms in an somewhat different context, the seductiveness of things. For withdrawal is never total and entities as entities always manifest and expose themselves to a greater or lesser degree; they like to tease one another with the staging of their appearance-as-disappearance. Objects, if you will, are like those lovers who know how to delight us with their presence and then torment us with their absence. Timothy Morton describes them as 'strange strangers' whose existence we can never anticipate and being we can never fully know.

Philosophical theories of ontological immanence and weird realism might help us to better translate these strange strangers by remaining open to the possibilities of seduction and surprise, but so too do we need our poets and our objectophiles to help us proliferate unnatural alliances and establish a democracy of touch between entities of all kinds (be they dead or alive, natural or artificial, actual or virtual). Ultimately, existence is fucked into being.

Behind the Red Fence

Objectum-Sexuality Internationale

Objectum Sexuality continues to fascinate me. In no small part, this is because I find human subjects ever-more boring and tiresome. One increasingly realises that happiness is to be found in the love that transcends humanity; the love of things that sparkle with their own thingly glamour. This might include objects that belong to the natural world, such as flowers and heavenly bodies, but it also includes the manufactured objects of everyday life, such as tables, chairs, and the red brick floor upon which they stand.

For love (should we choose to continue using the term) is fundamentally a question of forming ever-changing relationships; not just with people or other living beings such as next door's cat, but with objects of all kinds, be they inorganic, artificial, or virtual. And the duty of art, philosophy, or science is ultimately one and the same; to reveal the relation between us and the world of which we are an intrinsic part - but not a determining factor. For the relationship between us and the universe is not based upon some form of correlation between consciousness and being; the world exists as a mind-independent reality with or without Man or God as witness. 

Whether this relationship needs to be erotic in character, as objectophiles seem to believe, is debatable. But I can't see why it shouldn't be conceived of as such within the framework of a perverse materialism. Certainly it's a form of touch first and foremost and not an abstract or ideal relation. Love allows us to feel the world and not just think it - to know it in a carnal sense via what Lawrence would term 'direct vibrational contact'. 

And so, as I said in an earlier post, whilst I have problems with some of the statements made by  those within the OS community, still I feel they have something important to teach  any one hoping to develop an object-oriented ontology and a find a new form of happiness. For just as the American author Dana learnt how to attune himself to a non-human reality during his two years before the mast, so too has Erika Eiffel achieved something similar. Thus we might paraphrase what Lawrence writes of the former in order to say this of the latter (in tribute):

Erika's soul is not human in the ordinary sense. She is not looking for human things, nor listening to human sounds. Her adventure is not an adventure of a being among beings: it is an adventure into the material universe. In this twilightly place where integral being ceases, she stares lovingly at the Tower and encounters it in all its reality, abandoning her personal self in order to experience the joy of loving a non-living yet amazingly potent object.

Sexual Solipsism

Clive Barker, The Happy Masturbator, (1997)

Recently, I attended a very interesting research seminar at Senate House. The paper, presented by Professor Marco Wan of Hong Kong University, examined the obscenity trial that resulted from publication of Paul Bonnetain's novel Charlot s'amuse in 1883 - the story of a serial masturbator told in a naturalist style much influenced by Zola. 

Despite causing a huge scandal at the time, the work is little read today outside of French literary circles and the author, who died in 1899 aged just forty-one, is mostly a forgotten figure. Interestingly, however, 130 years after Charlot s'amuse, the subject of masturbation is one that still attracts moral condemnation from philosophers who place themselves in a feminist Kantian tradition in order to critique pornography; philosophers such as Rae Langton, for example.

Langton has two main concerns, which she relates to the question of pornography: the first is the sexual objectification of women (pre-given as a bad thing per se in her work); the second is the sexual solipsism that men, as the primary consumers of pornography, fall into via the solitary vice of masturbation. In brief, Langton argues that in a pornified world of objectified women, men too pay a heavy price; i.e. by mistaking women for things and substituting things for real women, they ultimately isolate and dehumanise themselves.

Now it could be that there is something in this argument. But Langton overlooks the fact that men are not quite alone in a world of objectified women. For not only do they still have one another to form relations with of a social, fraternal, and, indeed, sexual nature if they so desire, but they also have their animal companions and, as everybody knows, a man's best friend is his dog. 

Further, as Simone de Beauvoir was obliged to concede, not all men would regard an isolated and solipsistic existence as problematic. Indeed, for many it would be a more attractive option than a supposedly authentic relationship with another human being. The world of the masturbator may not be deeply fulfilling, but it's by no means unhappy and perhaps a little superficial physical pleasure means more today than vague promises of spiritual satisfaction and the soul's consummation via union with another.  

Langton, however, insists - and this is never a good sign in someone who claims to be a philosopher - that there has to be an escape from solipsism, as if it were the worst kind of trap to fall into. And she insists that in order to make this escape "some of the beings with whom one interacts must be people (not things); and one must treat them as people (not as things)" [Sexual Solipsism, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 312]. 

Ultimately, for Langton, this is a matter of moral duty: one must not fuck dolls, or jerk off over on-line images. Rather, one must seek out a real lover to hold in one's arms. For when sex is something you do with a thing, you reduce your own ontological status and become self-objectified. Kant has no sympathy for those 'worms' who violate themselves in this manner. And neither does Langton much care for those who remain shut up inside their own heads, alone with their own fantasies, when they could (and should) be sharing with others in a paradise of love and total transparency.

And here, we arrive at the crux of the matter: for Langton, there is a fundamental human need to unburden the heart and communicate the self. To articulate the body, she says, rather than masturbate it, "enables us better to learn what we think and feel and desire" [361].

This, in my view, is not only optimistic and naive, it is also highly sinister. For we know now how confession serves ultimately to better enable correction; that we have been encouraged to speak the self  historically in order that our thoughts and feelings may be judged and corrected by others. Humanists like Kant and Langton always promise to lead us out of our solipsistic and fallen condition into communal bliss, but they just as invariably end up marching us into drab social conformity and ugly moral convention.

And so there is, I think, something to be said for those who want to keep themselves to themselves and indulge private fantasies behind closed doors; better the solipsist and the solitary masturbator than the fascist who compels speech, or the moral exhibitionist exposing themselves in the name of Love.  

Raise the Scarlet Standard High

Sartre declared that anyone who isn't a communist is a filthy swine. 

I don't think that's true. However, it's undeniably the case that there is shit in the hearts of all Tories, extending from members of parliament to those who vote for them or offer financial support.

And it also includes those useful idiots in the Liberal Democrats who collaborate with and, indeed, maintain the present government and its shameful policies.