Zarathustra and the Nightingale

One has to speak with thunder and heavenly fireworks to feeble and dormant senses, says Zarathustra.

If we interpret this injunction in a generous manner, it can be understood to mean that Nietzsche is interested in constructing a poetic post-metaphysical language that will enable the individual to break free from received conceptual schema and the moral-linguistic conventions of grammar and thereby find new ways of thinking and feeling. 

But, I have to say, it does sound a wee bit fascistic and shouty. Or, in a word, Wagnerian. The sort of thing that Dietrich Eckart might have had in mind when he created the Nazi battle slogan Deutschland Erwache!   

It also anticipates Heidegger, who claims in Being and Time that we must rediscover some form of primordial language from which to assemble a vocabulary of elementary terms that authentically speak Dasein. Philosophy's ultimate task, he says, is to preserve the force of these words and prevent them from being enfeebled and flattened within the common understanding.

I have to confess, there was a time when I found this kind of thing seductive if never entirely convincing: I wanted to believe that there was a universal (though secret) litany of magical words, letters, and phonemes that might somehow tear up the foundations of the soul and shatter eardrums and law tables alike, but I was never quite able to do so.

And what prevented me from embracing this mytho-religious idea of language was the following passage from Lawrence's Sketches of Etruscan Places:

"And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion, the nightingale will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup."

- Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis, (CUP, 1992), p. 36.

Why the Internet is a 21st Century Tower of Babel

Surely one of the more shocking episodes in the Old Testament (from which there are many to choose) is described in Genesis 11 and concerns the building by humanity and destruction by God of the Tower of Babel. For those of you unfamiliar with this passage, but too lazy to Google it, here it is, in full, with some very slight modifications made to the text as it appears in the edition of the Bible cited:

"At this time the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Babylonia and settled there. 

      They said to each other, 'Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly.' They used these bricks instead of stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.  

      But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that men were building. And he said, 'If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us confuse their language so they will not understand each other.'

      So the Lord scattered mankind once more over all the earth and their attempt to build a great city was abandoned. That is why it was called Babel - because the Lord confounded the language of the world."

- The Holy Bible, New International Version, (The Bible Societies in Association with Hodder and Stoughton, 1984).

From this we certainly get a further insight into the psychopathology of the Almighty. Not to make too fine a theological point of this, it's clear that God, like all tyrants, is a cunt: petty, paranoid, violent and vindictive.

His concern here is unambiguous; namely, that a united mankind, speaking and working as one, using materials of their own invention to build a safe and secure home for themselves post-flood, are empowered by their own technological ingenuity and feel an element of pride in their own mortal achievements.

Clearly, God can't have that. That is to say, he can't allow a self-sufficient humanity to threaten his omnipotence, or to realise its full potential as a species. And so, quite deliberately, he sows discord and confusion amongst a people where once there was fraternity and mutual understanding.

Of course, it might be argued that it's a good thing to generate cultural and linguistic difference. Though such an argument, when it comes from the mouths of the faithful who usually insist monomaniacally upon Oneness, seems ironic to say the least. In fact, anyone who reads Genesis 11 and comes to the conclusion that it shows us a God who is pro-difference and plurality is being more than a little disingenuous. For what it really betrays is the ugly and divisive nature of religion as it reinforces tribalism, nationalism, sectarianism; things that have caused immense misery in the modern world.     

Happily, in this digital age, we have decided to defy this judgement of a dead deity and build not a tower of bricks via which we might storm an imaginary heaven, but a global electronic network via which we might instantly connect and communicate with friends, family, and strangers all over the world, exchanging images and ideas, important news and mundane chit-chat.

Ultimately, the Good Book has been defeated by Facebook ...
     

In Praise of Small Talk and Social Networking

Christians, who are passionately devoted to the Word, are equally fervent in their opposition to idle gossip and foolish chit-chat. Not only do they condemn blasphemous speech, but also irreverent babble, obscene joking and lighthearted nonsense. For all these forms of small talk are, they say, corrupting and lead people away from the Truth and into ungodliness. Matthew tells us straight: 

On the day of judgement people will be held to account for every careless word they have spoken. By your words you will be acquitted and by your words you will be condemned. [12:36-7]

Heidegger, who believed that the task of philosophy was to preserve the force of the most elementary words in which Dasein expressed itself, also had very little time for what he terms Gerede and by which he refers to the everyday chatter engaged in by average individuals leading alienated lives of relentless mediocrity in which all possibilities of authentic being are flattened.  

Nor was he taken with its written form, which he dismissed as 'scribbling' [Geschriebe]: a conventional and lazy form of writing, found in newspapers and popular fiction; often amusing and distracting, but banal and, like common speech, something which merely 'passed the word along' without import or meaning.

Today, in the digital era of social networking, when hundreds of millions of people around the world are constantly chatting, texting, tweeting, and posting on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (or on blogs such as this one), it's extremely difficult to even imagine what the problem for the above might be.

What those who share an almost phobic dislike for small talk and idle gossip fail to fully appreciate is that people love micro-forms of communication with friends, family, and, indeed, complete strangers all over the world in ever-widening circles of virtual intimacy and peripheral awareness (to borrow a phrase from Danah Boyd, if I may). 

Why? Not because they are sinful or superficial (though they might be both) and not because they are any more self-obsessed or narcissistic than people in the world before the internet and i-Phone revolutionised the way we live. Rather, it's because pointless electronic babble is a technological form of social grooming and bonding. In other words, it's a crucial 21st century skill. But, even more importantly, it's an informal, somewhat addictive pleasure that brings people into touch; abolishing not only interpersonal distance, but prejudice and provincialism. 

Reflections on Photography and Ethnoelephantology

Photo taken at London Zoo (Getty Images, 1971)   

I love this photograph: taken when girls wore hot-pants and were encouraged to pose provocatively with great beasts; when a trip to the Zoo was an opportunity for laughter and excitement rather than learning about conservation projects.

But it might be asked what it is about this photograph that so fascinates and moves me, apart from the obvious elements already mentioned (i.e. the nostalgia for times and fashions gone by and the none-too-subtle suggestion of eroticism as a crucial component of human-animal relations).

Well, firstly, I am struck by the fact that this photograph captures a real and unique moment which it faithfully reproduces to infinity. In other words, whilst the photograph mechanically repeats what can never be repeated existentially, the event itself is "never transcended for the sake of something else" [4].

Secondly, I am charmed by the posed element in the picture; that is to say the manner in which both girl and elephant invent new bodies and voluntarily transform themselves in advance into images, thereby lending themselves to the game of selfhood and representation. Today, in this digital age of smart phones, selfies and social networks, it's no big deal for people to be able to produce, manipulate and circulate their own image. But back in the early-1970s, when this picture was taken, there was still a great deal of nervous joy about having a photo taken and seeing the results (becoming the object of one's own gaze). And I think we see something of this innocence in this picture.
      
But still this isn't what makes me love the photo: there is still something else in it that provokes and seduces; something that Roland Barthes refers to in Camera Lucida as the punctum. For Barthes, the punctum is that element within the photo which produces an agitation of some kind and sends the viewer off on an imaginary adventure. It punctuates the conventional cultural elements that make up the photo's composition and which serve to produce a polite and predictable effect upon those who see it, reinforcing their views and tastes and beliefs about the world. And so, in this way, the punctum also pricks the viewer.

What pricks me then about this photo of an elephant and a girl and ultimately makes me love it so? There has to be some small detail which is there to be seen, but which initially escapes notice. Is it the bird flying overhead? No, it isn't that. Is it the lovely shape of the elephant's trunk as it embraces the young woman? No, it isn't that either. Nor is it the amusing look on her face, the fabric of her shorts, or the manner in which she knowingly grabs the elephant's tusk (described as an ivory reach around by my friend Z who has a talent for this kind of thing - providing apt descriptions that is, not symbolically jerking off elephants).  

No, the punctum is provided by the fact that the photographer has managed to catch the model's left hand at just the right degree of openness and happy abandonment; a few millimetres more or less and her body would no longer have been offered to the viewer, as to the beast, with benevolence and generosity.

It is doubtful that the photographer intended to do this. For as Barthes explains, the detail which pricks us is never strictly intentional and probably must not be so; "it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful; it does not necessarily attest to the photographer's art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object" [47].    

The punctum, then, is the unintended and unscripted detail; the off-centre element that disrupts the unary space of the photograph generated by what Barthes terms the studium and transports us as viewers into the realm of bliss (where objective interest gives way to that which is individually affecting).    


See: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, (Vintage, 2000). 
      

Fruity Shit

According to Lawrence, writing in one of his better known verses, it is the secretive fig that tells us most about the mystery of female flesh and the manner in which it too, having over-ripened, bursts apart showing crimson through the purple slit.

For according to Lawrence, the most beautiful women, just like the most beautiful plants, flower inwardly; unseen, and rejoicing in their covert nakedness. And they die only when they wilfully make an obscene display of their sex and sew together fig-leaves not to hide but to adorn their genitalia; affirming their delicious rottenness through moist, scarlet lips that laugh at the Lord's indignation.   

Lawrence thinks that these women have fatally forgotten that ripe figs won't keep. But mayn't it be that they simply don't care any longer about self-preservation, or submitting to models of femininity rooted in moral injunction? Perhaps they wish to make themselves attractive only to those for whom death is the most exquisite of all pleasures; men and women who dare to put their mouths to the crack and take out the flesh in one bite.

To live, that is to say, more as medlars and sorb-apples rather than secretive figs; with a touch of morbidity and sticky with the sweet essence of hell.

See: D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, (Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 280-84. 

 

Venus in Furs

Are you visiting Woman? Don't forget your whip! 

The masochistic lover  will often fall on his knees and passionately kiss the feet of the woman he adores as his mistress: she whose eyes sparkle with cruelty and who by virtue of her greater power is able to place a spiked heel nonchalantly on the neck of all mankind.

Whatever the truth of her actual status is irrelevant: fur transforms any woman wearing it into a superior creature; be she rich and wrapped in mink, or a simple peasant girl in clothes trimmed with rabbit skin (something that is forgotten in this graceless and charmless age of rubber and plastic).

The figure of the dominatrix obsesses, seduces, and captivates the masochist because she corresponds to his own refined tendencies and mirrors his particular nature; in discovering her, he learns how to paradoxically find and abandon himself.

If, initially, many women are reluctant to accept the adoration of a slave - finding the thought of their lover's submission as well as their own placement on a pedestal like a marble statue distasteful and degrading - nevertheless they know in their hearts that there is no equality or justice in the false virtue of love. 

And, having picked up the whip and experienced the grandeur of their own pale power sweeping over them, they are often more than happy to demonstrate precisely what it means to be at the mercy of a young and frivolous woman ... 

  

Reflections After a Visit to London Zoo

Photo of Guy the Gorilla by Wolf Suschitzky (1958)

When Georges Bataille visited London Zoo in the summer of 1927, he was overwhelmed to the point of ecstasy by the naked splendour of an ape's anal protuberance. In this obscene eruption of red raw flesh, smeared with excrement, he saw something that was not merely bestial, but radically opposed to all that is upright and human in a mankind whose own anal opening has secluded itself in a crack between the buttocks and seems destined never to bud or blossom.

As for me, I was delighted in a rather more innocent manner on my first visit to the Zoo as a young child by the sight of chimps taking tea with their keepers and thrilled most of all by the sounds and smells of wild animals caged at close quarters. 

For even in 1970, London Zoo remained a zoo in what is now thought of as the bad sense of the word: a place where big cats paced from side to side in cages with bars that you might stick your fingers through, sea-lions balanced balls on their noses whilst clapping their flippers together and elephants stood about in stone compounds with bales of hay, pissing and shitting, or waiting for a sticky bun to be thrown their way.

In other words, it was still a place where animals were openly on display for human amusement and no one cared too much about their welfare, nutritional needs, or positioning on the list of endangered species. Now, however, everything's very different: London Zoo prides itself as a site of conservation and the whole place feels like a moralizing and sentimental animal rehab rather than an animal madhouse.

Doubtless the resident creatures are better fed, better housed, and better looked after. But in subjecting them to the milk of human kindness and charity, they seem to have lost something which the earlier animals still managed to retain, despite being maltreated and often humiliated for our entertainment: something that I'm tempted to call their bestial authenticity and which Bataille thought of as their divine or sacrificial wonder.

And so, whilst Kumbuka may live the good life and make an excellent 'species ambassador', he's not a patch on Guy the Gorilla. 

Proust Questionnaire

Portrait of the Artist Amongst the Flowers (Athens, 2012)

Whilst I prefer anonymity and the art of discretion to the endless self-promotion indulged in by the Facebook generation who delight in their own digital presence, nevertheless we all like to play games of interrogation and confession such as the one that Marcel Proust famously twice took part in and to which his name is now permanently attached.

And so, for my own amusement and for the instruction of you all torpedophiles out there, here are my answers to the Proust questionnaire. Note that I've amalgamated some of the original 19th century questions with those that appear in the popular Vanity Fair version of the format (available to play on-line). I have also added one or two of my own. 


What is your favourite colour?
Sky-blue.
What is your favourite flower?
Daisy.
What is your favourite bird?
Sparrow.
Where and when were you happiest?
Harold Hill in the early 1970s.
What is your greatest fear?
Suffocating/drowning.
Which historical figure do you most admire?
Oscar Wilde.
Which living person do you most admire?
Larry David.
Who has exerted the most influence over your life?
Malcolm McLaren.
Where would you like to live?
In a hotel suite in New York.
What would you describe as an essential aspect of paradise?
Pinkberry.  
What makes you saddest?
Not being able to hold the petals on to a dying relationship. 
What faults do you find it easiest to forgive?
Those small imperfections that make beautiful.
Who is your favourite philosopher?
Nietzsche.
Who is your favourite novelist?
D. H. Lawrence.
Who is your favourite poet?
Sylvia Plath.
What is your favourite TV show?
Seinfeld.
What quality do you most admire in another person?
Their sense of style.
What is your proudest achievement?
Embracing spectacular failure over benign success.
What is your most marked characteristic?
Ironic detachment (indifference).
What is your principal defect?
Inability to be cruel even when kindness demands it.
What do you dislike most about your appearance?
How a far-away look of remoteness in my eyes has been replaced with a look of ever-present sadness.
What is it you hate the most?
Fundamentalism.
What is one skill you would like to possess?
To be able to play the piano.
How would you like to die?
Unnaturally and in defiance of God's judgement.
What is your motto?
Torpedo the Ark.

Der Schrei der Natur

Edvard Munch, The Scream, (Version I, 1893) 

There are still some who believe that the figure in Edvard Munch's most famous picture is the one doing the screaming, but this is to radically misunderstand the truly terrifying aspect of the work. For rather than being the one who cries, the agonized figure is in fact the one who hears the inhuman shriek that comes from existence itself. Thus the German title for the image, given by the artist, Der Schrei der Natur. 

Munch elaborates upon this idea in a diary entry made shortly before he produced the first of his four compositions with this title in 1893 and a revised, slightly more poetic rendition of this note is hand-painted onto the frame of the 1895 pastel version of the work:

"I was walking along the road with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red. I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence ... my friends walked on, as I stood there trembling with anxiety and sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

I immediately thought of this as news broke that NASA's Voyager I was greeted by a strangely disturbing howl as it entered interstellar space. Scientists tell us that what instruments on board the craft actually detected was the 'sound' of dense plasma waves or ionized gas vibrating and nothing to be concerned about (although they later confessed they found the recordings creepy and somewhat ghostly). 

Anyway, it's nice to once more discover life imitating art. And it's interesting to find out that whilst in space no one can hear you scream, in us, space itself can be heard to shriek. 

The Politics of the Face

The face has long held a privileged and determining place within Western metaphysics – as those who choose to veil, hide, or disguise the face are now beginning to discover. There is, we might say, an entire politics of the face.

We like to think that our face is individual and unique. But it isn’t. It’s essentially a type of social machine that overcodes not just the head, but the entire body, ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance. The smile and all our other familiar facial expressions are merely types of conformity with the dominant reality. It might be said that we love our faces with the same passion that slaves love their chains; who, after all, likes to lose face?

And yet Deleuze and Guattari insist that if men and women still have a destiny, it is to escape the face, becoming-imperceptible or clandestine in the process; something explored by D. H. Lawrence in the first version of his Lady Chatterley novel via the use of an item of clothing that has been made the focus of great concern in countries with a significant Muslim minority. One evening, Connie retires to her bedroom and places "a thick veil over her face, like a Mohammedan woman, leaving only her eyes" as she stands naked before her mirror, looking at her "slow, golden-skinned, silent body".

What is interesting is not merely that she is seeking out an impersonal self that might exist "apart from the face with all its complexities and frustrations and vulgarity!", but that Connie is prepared to become-minoritarian (non-White, non-Western, non-Christian) in order to do so. In other words, she is prepared to sacrifice her social status, her class and her ethnic and cultural identity, so that she might be effaced in some manner.

In the final version of the novel, however, Connie is no longer prepared to be quite so reckless. Wishing to retain her independence, she fears that effacement will result in becoming subservient. It is precisely this point that troubles those European politicians and commentators who have allowed themselves to become increasingly exercised over the wearing of a piece of cloth. Obviously, the debate relates not only to religion, but also to class, gender, and, perhaps most importantly, race. For as Deleuze and Guattari point out:

"The face is not universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks ... The face is Christ ... he invented the facialization of the entire body and spread it everywhere ..."

Thus the face is a culturally specific idea: it arises at the zero point of Western history, i.e. at the beginning of the Christian era. As Western moral culture has spread and exerted its power over the rest of the world, so too have other non-white, non-Christian, peoples been given faces and inscribed a place within the universal system. No one is allowed to deviate or to go unidentified, unsubjectified. No one is allowed the luxury of anonymity. In an important passage, Deleuze and Guattari write: 

"European racism ... has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation of someone else as Other ... Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavours to integrate nonconforming traits ... sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions ... sometimes erasing them ... From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime is not to be. ... Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out ..."

What this passage allows us to appreciate is that the issue over the veil is by no means a trivial one within white European culture: it might be articulated in the language of ‘women’s liberation’ and ‘human rights’, but what’s really at stake is the hegemony of a system that accords those freedoms, subjective identities, and happy white faces in the first place.

- D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (CUP, 1999), p. 18.
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996), pp. 176, 178.

Some Dark Solar Reflections on a Grey Morning in September

UV image of the sun taken by NASA

Everything starts with the sun. And everything will end with the sun. The sun is our alpha and omega. And God, we might say, is nothing other than a typical main sequence yellow dwarf star, approximately 93,000,000 miles away, composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Essentially a thermonuclear machine, the sun generates vast quantities of electromagnetic energy which is discharged into space without aim or design, providing the earth with all the light and heat needed to create and sustain that "feverish obscenity we call ‘life’".

Above all, the sun is big. In fact, the sun accounts for 99.8% of all mass in the solar system and, were it hollow, you could easily fit over a million earth-sized planets inside it. It’s the ultimate object and yet, ironically we can’t look at it without going blind or mad, or both. It’s like a woman’s cleavage: one peek and look away – that’s the rule; no staring. It’s different for flowers: they open to face the sun. But we must avert our eyes, for we are not flowers.

The sun is also pretty bright as stars go and has been shining brilliantly for around 4.6 billion years. And as it gets older, it gets hotter. In a billion years from now, it’ll be so bright and so hot that there’ll be no water left on the surface of the earth and life as we know it will be compromised. Eventually, the sun will enter its red giant phase and the earth will be engulfed entirely. It will then shrink back down in size to live out its days as a white dwarf. At such a time, as Nietzsche says, the clever animals who invented knowledge will be no more.

D.H. Lawrence, whose cosmology is idiosyncratic to say the least, is right in at least one respect; the sun is not simply a ball of blazing gas with a few spots. For it also has a dark and complex internal structure. And the visible surface, known as the photosphere, is by no means where the real action is taking place. It’s at the core where things really heat up and molecules of hydrogen are fused into helium at a rate of 620 million tons per second.

If you like, it is this invisible sun, this dark sun, that philosophically most interests. We are bored of Plato’s Ideal sun that serves only to empower and enlighten mankind; “a sun which is the very essence of purity, the metaphor of beauty, truth and goodness”. It’s the black sun of Lawrence, or the rotten sun of Bataille that induces solar delirium and acts of sacrificial madness, that most interests and disconcerts:

"From this second sun – the sun of malediction – we receive not illumination but disease ... The sensations we drink from the black sun afflict us as ruinous passion, skewering our senses upon the drive to waste ourselves."

- Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992).

This is the sun the Aztecs knew. And we might ask of Lawrence’s sun-women what they might demand in the end of those men who dared to love them: semen or blood? Would they bring forth children from their sun-opened wombs, or obsidian knives? For in belonging to the sun, they ultimately belong to death.

Lady Chatterley's Postmodern Lover

Contrary to Lawrence, to whose writings he makes direct reference, Foucault argues that the metaphysical notion of sex as the great clue to being cannot be allowed to pass without close critical examination.

For rather than simply being an ideal anchorage point that supports the various manifestations of what we term sexuality, sex, says Foucault, is a complex and tyrannical type of agency formed by regimes of power. The belief that it somehow eludes and resists power and resides deep within us over and above the material reality of bodies and possessing its own intrinsic properties and laws, is simply a piece of modern romance. 

Of course, this isn't to deny that the convenient fiction of sex hasn't proved to be extremely useful; or that it will cease to function in the immediate future. As Nietzsche pointed out, God's shadow is still to be seen long after his death. Thus, likewise, sex will continue to be thought of as a great causal principle long after novelists and lovers have abandoned older ideas of the soul as mere superstition.

For the fact is, a very great number of men and women have made their very intelligibility dependent upon their sex and it provides them with their most precious forms of identity. To such people, sex is something sacred and worthy of sacrifice. We find this form of sex worship in Lawrence; not least in his final novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover.

But it gets tedious, does it not? One is tired of having to treat sex with reverence and bored of the austere monarchy of sex ruling over all our thoughts and actions. Even Lawrence admits in an essay written shortly after the above novel, that there has been so much repetitious sexual activity that he longs for the peace that comes of fucking and the accomplishment of chastity.

And yet, having said that, he still can't help insisting that the vital task for a people to come is to realize sex in full consciousness. But what would that mean other than an acceleration of one of the most effective operating principles established by the deployment of sexuality; namely, the great desire for sex-in-the-head: "to have access to it, to discover it, to liberate it, to articulate it, to formulate it in truth" [156].

Despite the popular belief that there have been centuries of repressive silence and shame surrounding the subject, sex has in fact been the most obsessively talked about thing of all. What is peculiar about modern societies, suggests Foucault, is not that they kept sex locked away in darkness, "but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret" [35]. 

In other words, what really distinguishes the world we live in is a polymorphous and increasingly pornographic incitement to discourse about sex. Those who are genuinely interested in libidinal pleasures might do best not to naively call for freedom or vainly attempt to extract further confessions from a shadow, but show how sex is - and has always been - a purely speculative element within the historical process of human subjectification.  

In a postmodern future - that is to say, in a time after the orgy - people will be unable to fathom our sex mania. And they will smile, says Foucault, when they recall that there were once a people who believed that in sex resided a truth "every bit as precious as the one they had already demanded from the earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought" [159].


See Michel Foucault; The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 1998).
       

The Plumed Serpent

The Plumed Serpent (1926) was the third novel in Lawrence's so-called power trilogy (Aaron's Rod and Kangaroo being the other two works grouped in this manner). 

It's the story of an attempted neo-pagan revolution in modern Mexico, based upon the contentious premise that only a god can save us. Lawrence mixes Aztec mythology, theosophy, and his own brand of fascism into a potent but poisonous combination that allows us to momentarily step out of the categories and conventions of the present as shaped by rationalism, liberalism, and moral humanism.

The middle-aged Irishwoman at the heart of the novel, Kate Leslie, is initially skeptical about the attempt by Ramon and his generals to introduce the gods back into history and rediscover the grandeur of their own being via an awakening of racial mysteries. She experiences the same weariness in regard to religion that many of us share and tells Ramon that his quest to reconnect with the divine is sentimental and reactionary; a creeping back into empty shells.

Ramon - who is not stupid, even if he is clearly insane - concedes that Kate may have a point. But he continues to insist that only religion can serve to bring about fundamental change and argues that even if he cannot resurrect a dead god, he can nevertheless locate what is god-given within himself and on the basis of this fulfill his destiny (or manhood). 

It might be suggested at this point that Ramon suffers from what Nietzsche terms a psychology of error; a form of delusion in which a leader mistakes their heightened sense of power to be the result of divine inspiration, rather than acknowledging that their belief in the supernatural is itself an effect of their elevated well-being. But it's difficult to tell with Ramon; for on other occasions he appears to be more of a political shyster than a genuine holy fool. 

So it is that for all the apparent sincerity of his belief, Ramon is nevertheless prepared to admit when pressed (and in private) that his talk of the gods is simply intended for popular consumption. In other words, he cynically utilizes religious imagery and language in order to garner support amongst a people prone to superstition. Like all cult leaders, Ramon has no doubt about his absolute right to tell lies and to make use of whatever methods work in order to achieve his aims. Thus Ramon acts with good faith as he sets about dissolving politics into a religion that is in turn to be inscribed into the daily fabric of civil society. 

The problem that he eventually has to face is this: faith and authority are no longer fully possible in a modern world in which the lie of religion has been repeatedly exposed as such. And so there is always a need for tyranny and military muscle. Ramon can't accomplish his plumed serpent revolution on a wing and a prayer; he also requires manipulative controls and coercive regulations exercised over all those who might otherwise resist or evade his rule. 

Thus, just as all totalitarian states require an ever-greater number of secret police and an ever-more extensive system of prison camps, so too does Ramon's dreamed of utopia rest ultimately on violence and an element of horror. And whilst Ramon's concerns are largely religious and his affinities artistic, his practical alliances are from necessity with the army.

To his credit, Lawrence recognizes this and eventually acknowledges that even his own attempt within a fictional space to mix politics with religion into a revolutionary form of racial-nationalism, ends in bloodshed and terror. And so, whilst many critics label The Plumed Serpent a failure, it remains an immensely important and instructive failure I think. If only more people prone to idolatry were to read this work and learn from it, then they might be better able to resist the temptation to surrender to those archaic and malevolent forces that are prone to infiltrate our thoughts and feelings.

Those who invoke the gods and dream of unleashing religious mania into the world in order to give men back their pride and sense of self-importance, invariably succeed only in empowering ayatollahs, war-mongers, and political psychopaths. And surely we're all sick of this by now ...

The Gospel of Cool Hand Luke

Cool Hand Luke (1967), directed by Stuart Rosenberg and starring Paul Newman, has been widely embraced by a Christian audience keen to equate the character of Lucas Jackson with Jesus. And they are certainly helped in this by the fact that the filmmakers were neither shy nor subtle in their use of overtly Christian themes, songs and imagery.  

However, we mustn't forget the storm scene wherein Luke explicitly identifies God as merely a mythological authority: he laughs at Dragline and his fellow prisoners for still believing in that "big-bearded Boss up there". And, after God fails to give any sign of his existence and power - despite Luke's daring him to do so - the latter looks round with a smile and declares: "That's what I figured; I'm just standin' in the rain, talkin' to myself."

This, for me at least, is the crucial line of the film: a brave man's honest resignation to the fact that he's alone in the world with no Heavenly Father either to look after him, or judge him; that it's not simply a failure to communicate.

This, of course - what we might refer to as the truth of the void - is precisely what Christians cannot and will not accept. They stare with horror and fear at the prospect of a world without supernatural significance or the hope of salvation and a life which, for them, is therefore without value or meaning and is just a kind of empty nothingness.

But as Luke also pointed out: Sometimes nothin' is a real cool hand.

Story of the Eye

Illustration by Jules Julien: julesjulientumblr.com 

The small whitish eyeball that has been gauged from its bloody socket remains in all its soft luminosity one of the most fascinating and disturbing of all objects. And when Simone playfully inserts such into her vagina and invites us to look between her thighs, she knows exactly what she's doing.

(Stare long enough into the abyss, says Nietzsche, and it will eventually stare into you ...)

Floratopia

To stare unblinking into the face of the sun, 

like a daisy, will require a new unfolding in 

human evolution.

Only when we become perfectly soulless

will we become perfectly beautiful and 

perfectly free.

Sandals

Young girls in strappy Greco-Roman style sandals: what excites the most; the bareness of the feet, or the tightness of the binding?

Or perhaps it's the fantasy of owning slaves. For desire can quickly negate liberalism and every erection makes despotic.  

On the Death and Attempted Resurrection of the Author

The School of Postmodernism by Vittorio Pelosi (2009)

The conflict between traditional forms of literary criticism and postmodern approaches to the text is best captured in a work by Roland Barthes entitled Critique et Vérité (1966). In this short but brilliant book, Barthes responds with style to an aggressive and vulgar attack upon his reading of Racine by the classical literary scholar Raymond Picard. 

For Picard and his supporters, it was crucial to uphold not only their own interpretation of the 17th century dramatist, but to defend the wider truth and glory of French culture from a perceived philosophical assault by a number of new critics of whom Barthes was the best known. Contrary to Barthes, Picard argued that there are objective truths about an author and indisputable facts about a work of art on which everyone who has attained a certain level of education can manage to agree: thanks to the inherent certainties of language, critical consensus is both possible and desirable. To deny this and to contest the author's consciously exercised control over their own work (thereby dissolving the issue of intent), is to threaten this consensus of meaning.

Further, it brings into question the subject's ability to understand themselves and their world with any real confidence or certainty: things are simply no longer as clear cut as they used to be. And for traditionalists and positivists like Picard who value clarity above all else, this cannot be: not only should language strive for transparency, but sentences should be as concise and precise as possible; free from any difficult or unnecessary jargon. In this way, language reflects and furthers common sense - i.e. a form of knowledge that its adherents claim to be perfectly neutral and perfectly natural; free from all prejudice or ideology.  

Obviously, Barthes finds all this absurd. He points out how bourgeois ideology is characterized by its refusal to accept itself as an ideology and by its claims that its values and truths are universal (even whilst conveniently coinciding not only with common sense, but also a traditional middle-class model of good taste). For Barthes, those critics who believe that certain things can pass unquestioned (or go without saying) are simply upholding the status quo and the orthodox certainties not of language, but of the Academy.

Ultimately, such critics read badly because they fail to think either in a material manner (in terms of objects) or in an abstract and symbolic manner (in terms of ideas). Thus they are unable to comprehend how language might move beyond being merely communicative in a narrow, functional manner and become a medium in which people can construct new thoughts and images. Picard and friends, who devote themselves to defending the self-evidently Good, True and Beautiful - not to mention what they term the specificity of literature - succeed only in condemning life to an empty, sterile silence and reducing art to sheer banality.

Still, you might be thinking, this is all a long time ago and the new critics eventually won the day. Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, et al all had their work fully assimilated into intellectual culture and the death of the author was widely celebrated across the critical landscape - so why go over all this again?

Well, unfortunately, there are those working today to resurrect the author, or at least dig up and dress up the corpse. Vittorio Pelosi and his fellow Intentists have decided in the name of a new idealism and a new humanism that the reader's interpretation must again give way to authorial intention; that this is what determines the genuine value and meaning of a work. Thus it is that the war against stupidity continues and although Pelosi's poorly executed canvas entitled The School of Postmodernism (2009) reproduced above is "intended" to ridicule and belittle the figures depicted (including Barthes), it only makes me love them (and dislike him) more.