Lesbophobia

There's an astonishing exchange in Chapter XIV of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, in which Mellors reveals to Connie the short and unhappy history of his relationships with women, beginning with a schoolmaster's daughter who was pretty and romantic, but sexless; and ending with Bertha Coutts, his wife, who enjoyed sex, but could only achieve orgasm by grinding her own coffee. 

Mellors is contemptuous of the first type; the idealistic women who love everything about love, except  fucking. But it is the latter type whom he really hates and seems to fear; the active type like Bertha, that like to bring themselves off by wriggling and shouting and clutching at themselves. These women, says Mellors, who dare to seek clitoral stimulation and require more than vaginal penetration by the penis in order to come, are mostly lesbian:

"'And do you mind?' asked Connie.

'I could kill them. When I'm with a woman who's really lesbian, I fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her.'

'But do you think lesbian women are any worse than homosexual men?'  

'I do! Because I've suffered more from them. In the abstract, I've no idea. When I get with a lesbian woman, whether she knows she's one or not, I see red.'"

- D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (CUP, 1993), p. 203. 

This passage - one that has long troubled and rightly angered many female readers and critics of Lawrence - demonstrates why we are justified in using the term lesbophobia as something distinct from the more commonly theorized phenomenon of homophobia. 

Clearly, there is an added component of sexism in lesbophobia and, indeed, a violent element of misogyny. I think the only admirable thing about this passage is that it doesn't seek to disguise the latter. Rather, it explicitly demonstrates how quickly misogyny turns murderous. 

Sadly - shamefully - lesbophobia seems to be something that is increasing in our society; or, at any rate, something that it is increasingly OK to articulate. The fact that many gay men and straight women are also guilty of directing abuse or acting in a prejudicial and discriminatory manner towards lesbians is doubly sad and shameful.

Thankfully, this is not Southern Africa and we do not witness the horror of corrective rape in the UK. But such vile hate crime flourishes when good people do and say nothing. Or when writers and intellectuals who should know better, appear to aggressively enforce heteronormative values and condone the gang rape and murder of women who don't wish to submit to male sexual power and phallic authority (women who want none of that). 

On Intuition

Intuition Card, by Linnea Vedder Shults (2009)

Last night, in discussion with an old musician and a young neuroscientist, the question arose of intuition.

Intuition, of course, is the favourite faculty of those who like to denigrate reason and act in accordance with what they believe to be an unmediated and direct perception of reality. For such people, knowledge is non-inferential and is mysteriously circulated in the blood, or located in the gut. They speak of inner wisdom and the unconscious. Sometimes they speak also of hearing voices and exercising psychic abilities. 

The young neuroscientist, Ms Camargo, whilst not wanting to abandon the idea of intuition as an untenable piece of folk psychology, was nevertheless far more comfortable speaking about the brain and physiological processes rather than soul, spirit, or other spooky stuff.

The old musician, however, Mr Van Hooke, was a convinced believer in spiritual powers and spoke not only of intuition, but also inspiration, originality, and creative genius for good measure. Indeed, such was his conviction that he seemed genuinely shocked and outraged when I mildly suggested that such notions might at the very least be open to interrogation. 

As, unfortunately, I didn't get the opportunity to explain to him my concerns with the superstitious notion of intuition on the night, I'd like to do so now.

  

For me, the common understanding of the mind is profoundly mistaken and once we develop a more accurate and non-metaphysical account, then popular notions like intuition and desire will prove to be as untenable as belief in the promptings of demons. At best, intuition is simply the retrieval of a memory.

Of course, I appreciate that we feel certain things strongly and that introspective or experiential evidence can seem very convincing. But can we trust it or assume it to be true? If it turns out to be as determined by society and culture as we now know our perception of the world to be, then it's likely that what we naturally intuit or instinctively feel to be the case is largely determined by doxa (i.e. received opinion expressed in a language based on agreed rules of grammar, syntax, and stereotype). 

Thus it's not coincidental that we understand what our inner voice tells us, because it conveniently speaks in sentences with a linguistic compositional structure that we recognise. However, as Patricia Churchland argues, it's extremely unlikely we're going to find anything that even remotely resembles the alphabet inside the structure of actual brains.

Mr Van Hooke, like many other people, passionately wants to defend the folk psychology with which he is so familiar and comfortable. And, to be fair, it has provided a very successful model of mental processes. But, as a philosopher, I'm aware that the success of a theory is no guarantee that it legitimately represents reality. Even attractive theories - of vitalism, for example - have to be laid to rest at some point in the name of intellectual integrity.

Eliminative materialism has unsettling consequences and I'm not pretending otherwise; not just for our conception of the mind, but for many other aspects of human activity. As Jerry Fodor once famously declared: "If commonsense psychology were to collapse, that would be, beyond comparison, the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of our species ..."

True, but so what? This doesn't constitute an argument against the naturalization of the mind, a task which demands and deserves to be accomplished, whatever the consequences. And who knows, perhaps out of such a catastrophe something good will come - that's my hunch anyway.

The Laugh of the Medusa

If you only dare to look at the Medusa face-to-face, you'll see she's not homicidal. 

She's beautiful and she's laughing.

The Laugh of the Medusa still echoes with many sympathetic readers concerned to ensure that the feminine is neither marginalised nor trivialised within the space of literature and the world of politics.

And it continues to resonate with those of us interested in a practice of writing that is above all else joyful. In which, as Roland Barthes says, everything is under assault and begins to come apart; in which language is a powerful flow of words that carries us away from old certainties and habits of thought and speech. 

It's nice to remember that you don't have to angry to be militant and that you don't have to be militant to be radical; that revolution is only ever a smile away and does not necessitate the turning of warm flesh into cold stone, or the hardening of hearts. 

In Defense of Vanilla

I'm so tired of hearing people use the term vanilla to deride those things, those acts, those people they think of as boring, conventional, unimaginative, and unadventurous. Particularly, when, as is usually the case, this is a judgement made within a sexual context. 

It's not merely that this shows a vulgar lack of appreciation for what is actually one of the most precious and sophisticated of spices - lacking in flavour only to those who lack subtlety of taste - but I suspect there's an underlying misogyny here too; in particular, an all-too-common hatred of female genitalia.

For not only does vanilla have a complex and seductive bouquet like the vagina (delicate, yet overpowering), but the word itself is of course the diminutive form of the latter.

Those individuals who enjoy other scents, other tastes, other points of entry to the human body are at perfect liberty to do so as far as I'm concerned - but, seriously, we can all do without kinky condescension and eurotophobia.  

The Bluebird

A bird came down the walk - he did not know I saw - 

he bit a little worm in half and ate the fellow, raw.

I like the colour blue: apart from navy blue, obviously. I also like most birds and yet I've woken up today with an intense dislike for the bluebird. 

Not the actual creature, but the symbol of hope and happiness who flies over rainbows and white cliffs, optimistically promising peace and freedom; a bird whose wings are so laden with schmaltz I'm surprised it can even get off the ground.

As Christopher Hitchens rightly said, any vision of Utopia is not only founded upon spurious moral sentiment, but is futile and dangerous in the long term. Idealistic ornithologists and songwriters might do well to remember that even the bluebird preys on spiders, grubs and other insects.

Film Kills (2): On Images, Objects and Speculative Realism

In a digital age, the making, distribution, and consumption of images is perhaps our most fundamental activity. It deserves, therefore, to be carefully thought about from a philosophical perspective and, for me, Jean Baudrillard does a better job than most at this. 

For Baudrillard, iconography is not innocent. In fact, it plays a complicit role in what he terms the perfect crime and by which he refers to the extermination of singular being via technological and social processes bent on replacing real things and real people with a series of images and empty signs.

Ironically, in this world of simulacra and simulation the image can no longer even imagine the real, because it has itself become the real: "It is as though things had swallowed their own mirrors and had become transparent to themselves ... full in the light and in real time ... forced to register on thousands of screens" [1] in high definition.

When this happens, we pass beyond representation towards obscenity; a state wherein everything and everyone is "uselessly, needlessly visible, without desire and without effect" [2]. People who indecently expose themselves in this game of cyber-exhibitionism are left without secrets, without shadows, without charm. They become, if you like, ghosts in the machine, forced to confront the possibility that life can no longer be experienced except within the emotional parameters of Facebook. 

But maybe, when everything has finally been put on view, we'll realise that there was nothing to be seen after all. Maybe, those who live by the image will die by the image. And maybe we'll find a way to overcome our own narcissistic and voyeuristic image-fetishism; to smash a great hole in the Universal Screen and experience the wild chaos that lies beyond in the world of objects and actual entities.

Doubtless, this will require a certain innocence on our part and the development of what has been termed speculative realism. That is to say, a philosophy that insists there is more to the world than a play of appearances and that objects have a mind-independent reality; i.e. they exist regardless of whether we are thinking or observing them.

Iconographers and idealists believe there is a permanent correlation between reality and its representation. They become sceptical about anything outside the world of their own making - it is unthinkable, they say, that the unfilmable might exist! And yet, things-in-themselves do exist and there's a mysterious, partly invisible or withdrawn world of such things that constitute a reality that is completely indifferent to our existence and vain attempts to conceptualize it.

Why vain? Because the attempt to visualise and transcendentally guarantee the world in a manner entirely for our own convenience, is fundamentally an attempt to deny reality in all its inhuman and malevolent reality. An image is thus always a kind of anthropocentric conceit, or caricature. That's why a photograph of a horse, for example, is not the same as an actual horse that we might feed sugar lumps to, or be kicked in the head by: "the camera can neither feel the heat of the horse ... nor smell his horsiness", it merely captures "one dreary bit of ... his static external form" [3].

Even at its best, cinema never really encounters the world; it just puts a filmy-imaginative veneer over reality, or what might be described as a "luminous but impoverished plane of explicit awareness" [4].

The good thing is that herein lies hope: for what we learn from this is that the world is inexhaustible and objects virtually indestructible, because essentially unknowable. The image kills - but only partly; it deadens, but does not make dead. And so for all the attempts to dissolve the world and rid it of substance, objects (including human beings) stubbornly refuse to be abstracted away or transmuted into pure light and colour. 

Ultimately, matter returns in all its solidity and menace and the object extracts its revenge.

Notes:

[1] Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 1996), p. 4.

[2] Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner, (Berg, 2005), p. 94.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, (CUP, 1992), pp. 127, 128.

[4] Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, (Zero Books, 2010), p. 112.

Film Kills (1): At the Pictures with D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence: Close-Up (Kiss), 1928

Cinema is the production of icons and the proliferation of moving images. From a biblical perspective, it is clearly sinful. 

But if the authors of Exodus are primarily concerned with the making of graven images of God and the worship of pagan idols, there seems to be something else, something deeper, troubling them too; namely, a genuine concern with the very notion of representation as it relates to questions of reality, truth, and appearance. 

We find the same concern amongst the ancient Greeks - Plato providing an obvious example. His insistence on presence and authenticity makes him suspicious of most art forms and his critique of writing as a pharmakon can easily be made also of film. Indeed, it's central  to D. H. Lawrence's criticism of cinema: because the actors on-screen are not physically present before us, this invalidates both their performance and our response to it. 

As a matter of fact, Lawrence says very little about the cinema, but when he does it's uniformly negative and hostile. In the poem 'When I Went to the Film', for example, Lawrence suggests that cinema is essentially - in its very form and function - an obscene and pornographic medium and that the content of the film is, therefore, in large part irrelevant. 

This is because, for Lawrence, film sensationally stimulates false feeling and counterfeit emotion. It is both ideal and ecstatic; projecting shadows of people as if onto the wall of Plato's cave on the one hand, whilst provoking masturbatory thrills on the other. It is the art form par excellence of what he refers to as sex-in-the-head: i.e., a desire on the part of hyper-conscious, visually-fixated individuals to experience everything in their minds and to exchange the sheer physical intensity of life lived in the flesh for a new piece of knowledge and a bucket of popcorn. 

Lawrence's concern is not that this results in a loss of soul, but in a denial of the body and corporeal reality: "The amazing move into abstraction on the part of the whole of humanity", he argues, "means we loathe the physical element ... We don't want to look at flesh-and-blood people ... We don't want to hear their actual voices" [1]. Rather, we wish only to interact with them mediated via technology.

In his novel of 1920, The Lost Girl, Lawrence privileges the dying art of the music hall over that of the newly emergent cinema, prioritizing live speech and presence over celluloid sensation. It's much the same argument as he makes in his poetry: film is cheap and easy and it costs the audience nothing apart from the price of a ticket: no feeling of the heart, no appreciation of the spirit is necessary - just wide open eyes and a desire to be titillated.

Whatever we might think of this critique - and it's far from convincing - there is no denying that our curiosity towards images is always erotically charged. Sex might not be the origin of the world as Courbet suggested, but it's certainly the origin of cinema and our insatiable will to knowledge. The faces of Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino "plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy ... one literally lost oneself in the human image" [2].

This cinematic jouissance - brilliantly theorized by Patricia MacCormack [3] - is a major concern for some people. For others, what matters is the violence that is done to the real; i.e. the fact that the production of images results in the murder of objects, not that it causes audience to moan from close-up kisses and simulated sex. I'll say more about this in part two of this post.

Notes: 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Men Must Work and Women as Well', Late Essays and Articles, (CUP, 2004), p. 283.
[2] Roland Barthes, 'The Face of Garbo', Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, (Paladin Books, 1973), p. 62.

[3] See Patricia MacCormack, Cinesexuality, (Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2008).

 

Zena (Written in the Manner of Michel Houellebecq)

Scattered across her bedside table like elements of despair

are the usual signs of life: soiled tissues and rabbit-headed

rings.

Texts from lovers old and new remind her that she's

desirable and her flesh remains firm: that it hadn't

passed its use by date.

Whenever she saw me she'd push her pelvis in my direction

with suggestive irony. I'd glance vaguely at the curve of her

breasts and the bareness of her arms.

On trips abroad she'd visit sex museums and marvel at the

polyamorous exploits of chimpanzees and the prospect of

being pleasured by robots.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

It's true that we learn from failure. But we don't learn how to succeed in the future, no matter what feeble-minded optimists like to believe. At most, we learn how to fail better, as Samuel Beckett informs us in a prose piece amusingly entitled Worstward Ho (1983).

Beckett is absolutely not telling us that if at first we don't succeed, we should try, try again in the hope and expectation that such endurance is bound to pay off. Rather, he's saying that no matter how hard you try, no matter how many times you fail, you will never succeed: that success is not even an option.

For we are fated to fail. We are destined to fail. We are doomed to fail. Such is the tragic character of our mortal being. The fact that Beckett affirms this and finds in it a source of darkly comic satisfaction, demonstrates that his is what Nietzsche would term a pessimism of strength (or, if you prefer, a Dionysian philosophy).

The fact that his words are to be found on a wide variety of motivational posters, mugs, and fridge magnets is also something that should cause laughter amongst Beckett enthusiasts, rather than despair and irritation. For as one commentator notes, observing corporate executives and New Age hippies draw comfort and inspiration from lines they have naively misunderstood is like watching someone innocently throw a stick for their dog, not realising that it is in fact a human shin bone they've just picked up in the park. 

  

On Poetry, Chaos and the Great Umbrella

Like Heidegger, Lawrence understands the essential task of poetry as safeguarding the mortal being of man in relation to the fourfold and, indeed, to all of those birds, beasts, flowers and silent objects which exist and unfold into being alongside us. 

Thus, like Heidegger, Lawrence crucially relates the duty to safeguard Dasein to the question of language and thought, with the latter understood not merely as the manipulation of already existent ideas, but the welling up of unknown life into consciousness. Poetry might thus be defined as an act of attention and the attempt to discover a new world within the known world.

But this discovery of a new world involves an act of violence; the slitting of what he terms the 'Umbrella' and by which he refers to all that is erected between ourselves and the forever surging chaos of existence (our ideals, our conventions, and fixed forms of every description). 

The poet is thus also a kind of terrorist; an enemy of human security and comfort.

But we needn't worry: for no matter how many times a poet manages to make a tiny hole in the painted underside of the Umbrella, the emergency services are on hand to ensure things are speedily repaired. The majority of us, if we're honest, prefer a patched-up reality and virtual chaos to the sheer intensity of lived experience.

And we prefer that poetry is annotated with notes that insist on the importance of form and technique, but discreetly remain silent about acts of vandalism and the mad desire for inhuman chaos.

Why I Love the Poetry of Paul Celan

In his essay 'The Hollow Miracle' (1959), George Steiner argues that the Nazis killed the German language. Or, at any rate, they murdered the poetry of the language. Post-war German, says Steiner, still makes a sound and it still allows for communication, but it creates no sense of communion.

This is a terrible indictment - and, clearly, it's meant to be. But is it strictly fair, or even accurate? For without wishing to dispute that something immensely damaging was done to German during the Nazi period, it might be argued that a process that had been underway for some time was simply taken to its fatal conclusion.

In fact, Steiner concedes that the death of the German language has a long and complicated history. Thus, even during the Second Reich, for example, there were worrying signs that German was in a bad shape, including an over-reliance on fixed metaphors, stock similes, and ready-made slogans. And as words and sentences started growing clumsy and bloated, it became ever more difficult to express new thoughts or feelings in a concise and cheerful manner (even Nietzsche struggles at times).  

It was the Prussians, therefore, not the Nazis, who replaced the genius of the language with cliché, vulgarity, and a fatal taste for sickly romantic pathos beneath which to conceal their own ressentiment; and it was the Prussians who showed a peculiar liking for the loud voice barking threats and commands, rather than that which spoke softly and with good humour.

Thus it was that the voices of Heine, Rilke, Kafka, and others were all drowned out by the those who knew how to turn the German tongue into a weapon of mass destruction and rob human speech of its integrity and tenderness. Steiner writes:

"Let us keep one fact clearly in mind: the German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism. It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Himmler happened to speak German. Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery. Hitler heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance."

- 'The Hollow Miracle', essay in Language and Silence, (Penguin Books, 1969), p.140.

Of course, all languages contain toxic reservoirs of hatred, but only in German did they bubble so closely to the surface of legitimate and everyday speech. Thus it was that German supplied evil with a tongue. And if under Bismarck it became the language of the modern state, under Hitler it became the language with which to administer Hell. 

Steiner concludes his essay on a pessimistic note, arguing that when a language has been used to conceive, organize, and justify genocide, then it has been fatally compromised; that something of the malevolence and malignancy sinks into the language and prevents it from ever being able to renew itself. Is there then no hope for German? Was Adorno right to assert there could be no poetry after Auschwitz? 

For me, Paul Celan provides this hope and proves Adorno wrong. Celan knew exactly what was needed of poetry after the Holocaust: first, it had to articulate the silence without breaking it; secondly, it had to find a way to 'bear witness from the inside of death'. Those critics who accused him of aestheticizing genocide were profoundly stupid and shamefully mistaken. Celan is the greatest post-War poet writing in German and those who love the language have him to thank for reinvesting it with Geist and freeing it from its congealment in blood and soil.

Say No to Female Genital Mutilation

 
Although some aspects of Mary Daly's work are problematic, I think she's fully justified in identifying female genital mutilation (along with other practices which serve to inscribe patriarchal values upon the body) as a re-enactment of goddess murder, or a symbolic form of gynocide.

This deeply depressing form of religious and cultural cruelty is still inflicted on large numbers of girls and young women throughout the world and, whilst it can take several forms, it's essentially a violent attempt to construct a model of passive female sexuality founded upon the deadening or destruction of the clitoris.

Why? Because the clitoris is understood to be an impure organ that not only lacks any reproductive function, but doesn't serve male purposes either. In fact, the clitoris exists exclusively as an organ of female pleasure and empowerment and so might be regarded as a challenge to the authority of the phallus. And clearly, that can't be allowed. 

Daly quotes from an African tribal leader explaining to a Western anthropologist why clitoridectomy is a good thing for young women about to be married: when it has been removed, he says, they no longer feel the childish desire to masturbate and they discover that true happiness comes from vaginal penetration by a husband. Daly describes this piece of tribal wisdom as brutish and one-dimensional. 

But before we congratulate ourselves in the West for our more sophisticated thinking on the subject, we should remember that psychoanalysis also views female sexuality as infantile and polymorphously perverse; i.e., as something that refuses to circulate within designated coordinates and so remains disconcerting, if not actually threatening. Freud too - like the witch doctor - wanted to centre everything in the vagina, regarded as an absence awaiting to be filled by any available prick.    

And we might also mention the contemporary phenomenon of plastic surgery, which offers labia trimming, vaginal reshaping, and even hymen reconstruction. The clinics carrying out such procedures may speak about improving the look, feel, and function of female genitalia and pretend that such procedures are all about boosting a woman's confidence and self-esteem, but everyone knows that this manifestation of pornographic idealism is all about enhancing male pleasure, making money, and making women feel ashamed of their own bodies.

Ultimately, whether it's done with a rusty razor blade, or the latest laser technology, female genital mutilation is a form of sex abuse. 

I Love Everything That Flows

 Sarah Maple: Menstruate With Pride (2010-11)

Vaginal lubrication and menstrual blood; saliva, semen, and tears ... these bodily fluids all belong to love, even though such secretions are often subject to severe prohibition and taboo. It is feared that they possess magical properties which threaten to dissolve the solidity and rigidity upon which Man prides himself and bases his integrity. 

For the bone-dry moralists of patriarchal society, that which is soft, formless, and liquid is intrinsically evil: to be male is to be hard and firm of body and misogynists everywhere repeat after Heraclitus that, above all things, a dry soul is best. 

But for those of us fascinated by decadence and the corruption of the flesh, the moist cunt that waits like a carnivorous plant in the boggy marsh where insects and philosophers lose their way, is both a site of strange truths and the dissolution of all Truth with a phallic-capital T.

Feminism begins when one decides to reject the petrified and well-organized bodies produced by molecular fascism (bodies that daren't leak, or sweat, or even cry) and when one finds the courage to declare like Henry Miller: 'Yes, I too love everything that flows.'

Towards a Queer Democracy

Thomas Eakins: The Swimming Hole (1884-85)

If the great American poet Walt Whitman set out to chronicle one subject above all others, it was the flowering of democracy within the United States. But his vision of democracy passes far beyond conventional models of liberalism and is curiously eroticized.

The inherent queerness within Whitman's political thinking is now generally accepted by critics. But many still choose to quickly pass over this with a mixture of embarrassment and homophobic distaste. They tell us, for example, that Eros is to function as the glue within Whitman's democracy to come, but fail to specify the particular nature of this adhesive love. Whether they like it or not, however, physical tenderness between men remained crucial for Whitman and his thinking was not based on a purely abstract ideal of comradeship and solidarity. 

This flooding of the political sphere with manly love is something that Lawrence finds irresistible, although he is troubled by the exclusion of women from such a world. Thus, in his own model of democracy, Lawrence is keen to include both sexes and reinstate the male-female relationship as primary. That said, he continues to insist that vaginal intercourse isn't the great be-all and end-all that many people believe it to be:

"The vagina, as we know, is the orifice of the hypogastric plexus ... It is the advent to the great source of being ... But beyond all this is the cocygeal centre. ... Here, at the root of the spine, is the last clue to the lower body and being ... Here is the dark node which relates us to the centre of the earth, the plumb-centre of substantial being. Here is our last and extremest reality." 

- D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman' (Intermediate Version, 1919), Studies in Classic American Literature, (CUP, 2003), 365-66.

Thus it is that anal sex assumes vital importance within Lawrence's philosophy and throughout his fiction. If this is invariably heterosexual in character, the opportunity to discuss Whitman's work allows Lawrence to concede that homosexual coition is an equally valid form of interchange and establishes "the same perfection in fulfilled consciousness and being" [ibid., 366], as an act of heterosexual intercourse.

To conclude, then, both Whitman and Lawrence encourage us on an open road towards a queer model of democracy founded upon many forms of touch, including sodomy and the interpenetration of passionate love. That is to say, a democracy born from a new economy of bodies and their pleasures and not merely the inhuman flow of capital.

Better a Spectacular Failure ...

Malcolm was very fond of saying: Better to be a spectacular failure, than a benign success.

I always agreed with him on this, because, what it means in effect, is that it is as right to rebel, take risks, and show courage as it is admirable to resist doxa, stereotype, and convention. In Nietzschean terms, it means: love fate and live dangerously.

For what is success, ultimately, if not the reward for conformity: a form of patronage? There's nothing noble in it, nor creative. And nothing particularly inspiring about being a winner, despite what our athletes like to think. Just as it is the small imperfections of a face that make it beautiful, so too it is the losers who really capture our imagination and our hearts.

The British have always understood this, even if the Americans never will. But today, sadly, within a culture largely determined by Simon Cowell, the fear of failure has never been greater and, in a wonderful phrase, Laurie Penny speaks of the 'desperate tyranny of aspiration' that results from the bullying and humiliation of the less able, less talented, and less successful which is now the key component of both Saturday Night television and government policy.

When an entire nation can only dream of having the X-factor or winning the lottery - and despises anyone who refuses to share this final hope - then you know things have got pretty grim.    

Better Penny Red than Dead

Let me say from the outset: I like Laurie Penny.

Anyone who can cheerfully provoke such astonishing levels of vitriol from left, right, and centre deserves not just begrudging respect and admiration, but genuine affection. Thus, although this post was originally intended as a critical commentary upon her Notes from the New Age of Dissent, it might in fact be better read as a passionate appreciation of both book and author.

Ultimately, it doesn't really matter if Ms Penny is right or wrong, or whether her work makes good sense or no sense. If, sometimes, she's spectacularly mistaken and naive in her assessment of what's unfolding within contemporary culture, I prefer her wrongness to all the orthodox banality and cowardice that usually passes for rightness in this world. The point, surely, of Penny Red is to accept the challenge that is being thrown down and engage - not nit-pick.

For a work concerned with politics and feminism, however, the nature of this challenge is rather unusual. Lacking as it does any kind of theoretical framework or point of reference, it's not so much a challenge to think, as to care - which, for those of us who philosophically affirm insouciance and irony (terms that will make Ms Penny splutter on her cup of tea) is quite a big ask.

However, such is the quality of the writing and the personality of the author, that one feels almost charmed into dropping the simulated apathy and indifference of my generation, for a while at least, in order to share her anger and enthusiasm. Even, at a push, I might also concede the importance of retaining a little hope.

That said, I'm certainly not about to scrabble around amongst the ruins looking for old values and ideals and something to believe in once more - not even for Ms Penny! Revolution should never be a question of faith: or, if it is, then you can be sure a time of terror and inquisition will follow.

Besides, as Nietzsche pointed out: No one is free to be a crab. Which means you can't just reterritorialize on models of self or society which you imagine as more authentic or more real. (Ms Penny does tend to fetishize these notions and there's a powerful sense of nostalgia throughout her writings which she might do well to interrogate at some stage, as it undermines her radicalism.)  

Anyway, I'll stop here, for fear of starting to sound like one of those pompous and patronising middle-aged men who always talk over women at dinner parties; or, worse, one of those academic dinosaurs who rudely like to jab fingers in the face of the young.