Can't We Talk About This?

John Keane, The Death of Theo Van Gogh (2007)

www.johnkeaneart.com

In November 2004, Dutch filmmaker and provocateur Theo Van Gogh was brutally slaughtered on an Amsterdam street for his part in the making of a short film entitled Submission; a film which, primarily, examined the relationship that exists between Muslims and their God and asks how necessary reform of Islam might be possible when Allah demands absolute obedience to his laws, with no room for doubt or critical dissent amongst his worshipers.   

Having shot his victim multiple times, Van Gogh's devout assailant then cut his throat and attempted to decapitate him in front of horrified witnesses, before finally plunging the knife deep into the dead man's chest. Apparently, among the last words spoken by Van Gogh to his killer were: Can't we talk about this?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Van Gogh's friend and collaborator on Submission - writes: 

"It was so Dutch, so sweet and innocent. Theo must have thought there was some kind of misunderstanding that could be worked out. He couldn't see that his killer was caught in a wholly different worldview. Nothing Theo could have said to him would have made any difference."

- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel, (Pocket Books, 2008), p. 321   

I recount this deeply depressing incident by way of a response to a presentation recently given by John Holroyd on the topic of Islam.

Holroyd, a Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens hating crypto-theologian, teaches philosophy and religious studies at a London college and is a man for whom these subjects are perfectly compatible, if not, indeed, one and the same thing. His paper, in essence, called for still greater dialogue between the West and the militant forces of Islamic extremism, thereby strangely echoing Van Gogh's naivety in the face of those who hate us, hate all that we love and hold dear, and mean to do us mortal harm.

Now, whilst I concede that it might be good to talk - and that loving one's enemies might be the Christian thing to do - sometimes, unfortunately, there's really nothing further to discuss and inasmuch as this loving of enemies can lead to a reluctance to actively combat the forces of murderous and reactionary violence, then Jesus's teaching might be said to result in immorality and risk the triumph of evil.   

Thus, rather than listen to Jesus, I'd sooner heed Michel Foucault who argued that fascism - whether it be political or religious in nature and whether found in the hearts and minds of others or, indeed, in our own acts and pleasures - must be vigorously resisted as an essential aspect of living an ethical life.

  

Black Noise (On the Poetry of Francis Ponge)

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square (1915) 

Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

I'm not sure I fully understand what physicists and audio engineers mean by the term black noise - I think it refers to a noise whose frequency is located close to zero (or what is commonly known as silence) on a spectrum of sound - but I like how philosopher Graham Harman uses the same term within his work to describe the background hum of mysteriously muffled objects hovering at the fringes of human intelligibility.  

Perhaps it's this gentle and virtually-inaudible sound of things that the French prose-poet Francis Ponge was able to attune his ear to ...

Known as the poet of things, Ponge explored the fascinating universe of actual entities - from pebbles to cigarettes, and flowers to bars of soap - in the (admittedly anthropocentric) belief that all objects, whilst remaining fundamentally withdrawn, nevertheless yearn to express themselves and await the coming of a speaking-subject who might hear them and find some way to articulate their near-silence, thereby revealing something of their hidden depths and weird, inhuman otherness.

What I love about Ponge - apart from his object-oriented ontology - is the fact that he avoided all the tired conventions of poetry; such as empty symbolism and allegory, self-indulgent lyricism, or obvious appeals to emotion. He declared himself an enemy of both the drabness of the dictionary and the transcendent posturing of poetry and sought to combine description and definition with the power and purity of elementary language.

His principle aim, therefore, was to defeat the Stereotype and to do so with a form of speculative realism and something extremely rare amongst artists - intellectual integrity.  

Notes

Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics, (Open Court Publishing Company, 2005).

Francis Ponge, Le parti pris des choses (1942). This collection of 32 short to medium length prose poems is available in several English translations, including, most notably, those by Lee Fahnestock, Robert Bly, and Beth Archer Brombert. 

D. H. Lawrence's Becoming-Bat

Lawrence doesn't like bats, but this doesn't stop him writing about them in his poetry in a manner of real philosophical interest. For rather than anticipate Thomas Nagel's question and attempt to say what it's like to be a bat, Lawrence allows a proto-Derridean play of différance to infuse his writing, constructing a dummy creature with a mask-like face which parodies and subverts the very notion of an essential batness.

In the short poem, 'Bat', for example, Lawrence first confuses them for swallows flying late in the Italian twilight and sewing the shadows together. But then he realises his mistake:

Swallows?

Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop ...
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in the flight 
And serrated wings against the sky,
Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,
And falling back.

Never swallows!
Bats!The swallows are gone.

This realisation that he's watching bats and not birds flitting about the Ponte Vecchio and flying overhead, gives Lawrence an uneasy creeping in his scalp. He thinks of them as little clots of darkness with wings like bits of umbrella:

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.
Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!

They may very well be symbols of happiness and good fortune in China, but not so for this former resident of Eastwood.

In the much longer and more amusing poem 'Man and Bat', Lawrence develops his chiroptophobia whilst again doing something of philosophical and literary import. The impure frenzy with which a bat flies round and round his room in mad circles of delirium disgusts and disconcerts him, but it also allows Lawrence to demonstrate not merely how experience might be transfigured into art and given poetic expression, but how writing is inseparable from a process of becoming.

Lawrence, that is to say, establishes what Deleuze terms a zone of proximity with the bat, just as he does elsewhere with various other birds, beasts and flowers. He becomes-bat as the bat in turn becomes-rag or old umbrella. This is not something which is easy to accomplish. But to affect a becoming of this kind is something which all great writers must achieve. Indeed, this is the very mark of literary greatness.  


Notes

For an excellent reading of Lawrence's poetry in terms of différance and intertextuality, see Amit Chaudhuri's study, D H. Lawrence and 'Difference', (Oxford University Press, 2003). I am grateful to Chaudhuri for showing how - contrary to the conventional view - Lawrence is not a simple-minded nature lover concerned with understanding the beauty and essence of real animals, but, rather, in artificially constructing creatures in and on his own terms.

'Bat' and 'Man and Bat' may be found in Volume I of the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence's poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (CUP, 2013), pp. 294-300.  

Baewatch

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKpo0v0wIbE

There invariably comes a point in the development of slang wherein it crosses the threshold that divides urban cool from the mainstream. When suddenly, terms used between a small number of linguistically creative and innovative hipsters are appropriated by unimaginative individuals who can only imitate and follow trends rather than set them - including those dullards in the corporate media and commercial world who try so desperately to be down with it. By way of an example of this, we might consider the brief evolutionary history of the term bae.     

As a term of endearment, bae is simply an abbreviated form of babe or baby and not - as some commentators rather ridiculously suggest - an acronym for before anyone else. It seems to have originated amongst young English speakers in the African-American community sometime in the middle of the last decade. From there, it quickly spread via social media and popular music into general urban usage before, finally, being seized upon by the big brands such as Pizza Hut and Burger King. Bae also found itself nominated in 2014 by the OED as one of the so-called words of the year.

If this marks a sign of its success, so too does it pretty much spell the end of the line for bae; it begins to bleach, as linguists say. In other words, whilst it persists as a term, it is increasingly drained of its colour and its vibrancy is appreciably diminished thanks to widespread usage as a marketing device and the unasked for granting of legitimacy.   

Still, we needn't spend too long mourning the death of bae; there'll always be new slang terms as the young, marginalised and stylish develop their own ways of speaking so as to confuse and confound old ears. 

Anyone Can Be Van Gogh With an iPhone

Sunfuckingflower (2015) by Stephen Alexander

Bored, I decided to take a picture of the one cheerful thing in the room: a sunflower. Still bored, even after taking the picture and looking at it for a second or two and wondering at its heart of darkness, I sent it to a friend who is a lover of all things floral.

She replied: "I suppose this proves anyone can be Van Gogh if they have an iPhone."

This struck me as a rather curious remark. One sensed a degree of hostility beneath the irony, although whether this was for me as an amateur snapper or for the specific tool used to capture and send the image, I'm not entirely certain. The remark did, however, remind me of something that D. H. Lawrence once wrote:

"When Van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as a man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualise the sunflower far more perfectly than Van Gogh can."

Is this what my friend was, in her own rather mocking manner, trying to hint at? Was she, like Lawrence, seeking to defend the fourth dimensional aspect of an artwork; i.e. that magical quality which remains incommensurable with the painter, the object, or the technology involved in creating a visual image?

Perhaps. Otherwise, she's just being sarky ...!


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Morality and the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 171. 

Note: No ears were mutilated in the production of the above image.

 

 

Remarks on Fifty Shades of Grey

This weekend saw the release of the cinematic adaptation of the best-selling novel by E. L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey. 

The book - once described by Salmon Rushdie as the most badly written ever published - traces out the relationship between a 21-year old college student and virgin, Anastasia Steele, and her handsome, slightly older lover, Christian Grey. 

He is an extremely wealthy and successful entrepreneur who knows precisely what he likes in the bedroom and in the boardroom (power and control) and who demands much the same thing from the women in his life as he does from his employees; i.e. total subordination. In Christian Grey's world, everyone is expected to lick his arse and have theirs spanked.

Although she finds Grey intimidating, Ana also finds him irresistible and before long she's happily riding in his helicopter and letting him have his wicked way with her; he might not be a hearts and flowers kind of guy, but he sure knows how to beat, bully and abuse a girl.         

The work thus not surprisingly features explicit scenes of bondage, discipline, and sado-masochism, as well as more conventional - though no less problematic - forms of romantic cliché and is a prime example of a genre known somewhat sneeringly by critics as mummy porn. Despite being atrociously written and promoting a highly suspect form of sexual politics, the work has topped best-seller lists here and in the US, sold over 100 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than fifty languages.

As for the film, directed by Sam Taylor Johnson of all people and starring Dakota Johnson (as Anastasia) and Jamie Dornan (as Christian Grey), it too has provoked a huge amount of media attention, faced significant opposition, and received mostly negative reviews from the critics. But it too has raked in millions of dollars and set opening day records at the box office.

What, then, is there to say at last? Is Fifty Shades simply a contemporary version of Lady Chatterley's Lover; a novel perfectly suited to our pornified and semi-literate culture? 

It's certainly possible that we get the fiction and the authors we deserve. But it's rather depressing to realise this and to accept our own complicity and shameful submission as readers; for multiple shades of grey merge finally into one unpleasant shade of brown ...  

  

Intimacy Issues

After a recent presentation at the 6/20 Club in which I discussed the seductive and disturbing character of Kawabata's sleeping beauties, I was informed by a woman who believes passionately in love, humanity, and her rights as a sexual subject, that my interest in object-oriented ontology and objectum sexuality betrays the fact that I have underlying intimacy issues. 

This has amused me all week: for the fact is that rather than manifesting an all-too-familiar psychological disorder, I'm advancing a far more radical philosophical objection to the very concepts of interiority, depth, and essential being, of which intimacy is but one aspect.

In brief, Vivienne, I don't think we have an authentic inner self in need of discovery, expression, or liberation; I don't think we have a soul to be saved, a sex to be proud of, or a psyche that is mysteriously unconscious and revealed only in dreams and secret desires in need of analytic interpretation by a therapist. 

To put this in even briefer Nietzschean terms, I remain, madam, superficial out of profundity ...

 

Ichthyophilia

Helena Bonham Carter with her fishy Valentine

 Photo copyright Camera Press/John Swannell/Fish Love 

English actress Helena Bonham Carter has apparently exchanged her fish phobia for something of a fish fetish, as evidenced by the above photo in which she poses nakedly embracing a big-eyed tuna. 

This is such a rare and unusual form of love that the only other celebrity I can think of rumoured to enjoy romancing - rather than merely consuming - denizens of the deep is Troy McClure whom readers may remember from such wildlife films as Earwigs - Eew! and Man Vs Nature: The Road to Victory.

Ms Bonham Carter was persuaded to strip and lend her support to a campaign by the Blue Marine Foundation that calls for the establishment of ocean reserves, in order to protect endangered species of fish and other marine life, by her friend and fellow thespian Greta Scacchi; someone who herself has recently been photographed naked with a large cod [click here].

It's a good thing, I think, to care for fish (and not only so that we might then catch them and eat them). And it's a good thing also to challenge the prejudice and stupidity surrounding human-nonhuman sexual relationships - so well done to all parties involved in the fish love project. 

For more information on the BMF campaign please visit: www.bluemarinefoundation.com  

And for many more pictures of nude celebrities with fish and other sea creatures - including stunning images by Rankin of Lily Loveless with an octopus and Lizzy Jagger astride a yellow-fin tuna - visit: www.fishlove.co.uk

 

Birthday Musings of an Aquarian

It is very easy to sneer at astrology, but perhaps the ancient heavens of the zodiac continue to offer us what D. H. Lawrence describes as a truly imaginative experience and the entry into another world of being; one that is vital and meaningful, even if it is a world of which our astronomers and physicists know nothing. Perhaps.

At any rate, without quite feeling the ecstatic sense of joy that Lawrence experiences when released into this other world of mytho-cosmic splendour, I have always been pleased that I was born under the sign of Aquarius like many of the figures I have at one time or other loved and admired (from Mozart to Malcolm McLaren).

However, although feeling blessed to be a child of the 11th House, I have never been very happy that Aquarius is symbolized by a water-bearer; certainly not when other signs of the zodiac have marvellous starry beasts to call upon and find totemic satisfaction in. Who wants someone with a jug, when there are lions, bulls, goats and even crabs on offer?

It doesn't even help to discover - as I have only recently discovered - that this someone with a jug happens to be the iconic gay figure of Ganymede; i.e. a beautiful boy who, when all's said and done, is but an eternal servant and sexual plaything of the gods, offering not only libation but soft lips, nimble fingers, and strong thighs.

Now, whilst I've no moral objection to the Greek social practice of paiderastía, I don't like the idea of any mortal down on their knees before the divine - particularly when they have been kidnapped, raped and forced into slavery.  

  

D. H. Lawrence's Dendrophilia

DHL sitting under an olive tree in Italy (1926)

Lawrence is very fond of trees and there are many trees in his writings. In fact, at times, he feels there are too many trees crowding round and staring at him, interfering with his attempts to think about subjects other than trees (such as human babies and the complicated story of their unconscious life). 

The trees, he says, seem so much bigger and stronger in life than we are; so overwhelming in their silence and rather sinister arboreal presences. Lawrence writes, for example, of the magnificent cruelty or barbarous nature of the huge fir trees that grow in the Black Forest:

"It almost seems I can hear the slow, powerful sap drumming in their trunks. Great full-bodies trees, with strange tree-blood in them, soundlessly drumming."

He continues:

"Suppose you want to look a tree in the face? You can't. It hasn't got a face. You look at the strong body of a trunk; you look above you into the matted body-hair of twigs and boughs; you see the soft green tips. But there are no eyes to look into, you can't meet its gaze."

Thus it's pointless staring at a tree in an attempt to know it. All you can do is "sit among the roots and nestle against its strong trunk" in a form of insouciant tree worship and fantasise about becoming-tree, full of root-lust but completely mindless. 

If, at one time, he were frightened of the trees and felt them to be primeval enemies, now Lawrence says they are his "only shelter and strength" and that he is happy to lose himself amongst them and to be with them "in their silent, intent passion and great lust", feeding his soul with their non-human life and indomitable energy. He concludes this rather beautiful (and somewhat erotic) meditation on trees by saying:

"One of the few places that my soul will haunt, when I am dead, will be this. Among the trees here near Ebersteinburg ... I can't leave these trees. They have taken some of my soul."

But we should note, however, that Lawrence's trees - here, and most certainly in his poetry - are not simply natural phenomena; they are also ornamental figures of Gothic resistance forming part of an allegorical landscape that, as Amit Chaudhuri points out, "brings together the natural and the unnatural". 

Ultimately, Lawrence's thinking on trees (and flowers) owes more to Ruskin than to Wordsworth ...

Notes:

The quotations from Lawrence are from Chapter IV of Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). pp. 85-88.

The quote from Amit Chaudhuri is from D. H. Lawrence and 'Difference', (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 208.

Just Saying Something on Subjects and Objects

 

Cambridge Professor of Philosophy, Rae Langton, makes it very clear why she values people over objects. For whilst conceding that the former are a part of the phenomenal world of things, she insists that human beings (as subjects) have a uniquely rich inner life and a moral-rational capacity to make choices. To be an object, she writes, is to be something which isn't free; something that is stabilized and whose movements are all-too-predictable. She continues: 

"It is to be something incapable of the activities of knowledge, communication, love, respect. It is to be something that is merely a sensory appearance, something whose qualities are exhausted by how it can look, feel, sound, and taste to a perceiver. It is to be merely a body, something solid and extended in space. It is to be a tool, something whose value is merely instrumental, something which is a potential possession."

Obviously, as an object-oriented philosopher, I don't agree with this. For me, it's an anthropocentric conceit to believe that we belong to a superior ontological order to all other entities; be they organic or inorganic, natural or artificial, real or virtual objects. For me, our subjectivity is really just a peculiar way of being an object - much as life is simply a rare and unusual way of being dead (to paraphrase Nietzsche if I may). 

The question, I suppose, is why do so many thinkers like Rae Langton continue with this conceit? That is to ask, why do they continue to think of the object with such contempt and dogmatically privilege the position of the human subject?

Baudrillard, who has a far more interesting and philosophically provocative view of the object, provides us with a convincing explanation. Those who continue to support the fiction of an autonomous subject do so because it has "an economy and a history which is quite reassuring; it is the equilibrium between a will and a world ... the balancing principle of the universe". 

If we are more than mere objects, then we are not delivered up helplessly to a monstrous and chaotic universe of chance. Nor are we simply the unfortunate victims of surrounding forms or fascinating and fateful events that exist beyond our control.

In other words, to believe in ourselves as free-wheeling and free-willing subjects makes us feel safe and secure, as well as significant. That's comforting, but it's a lie. Perhaps a necessary lie that allows us to live and which it would be nihilistic to expose as such, but a lie nonetheless.

I'm just saying ...

Notes

Lines quoted from Rae Langton and Jean Baudrillard can be found in:

Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism, (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 329. 

Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski, (Pluto Press, 1999), p. 112.

Sleep and Dreams

D. H. Lawrence says some very amusing things about sleep and dreams in his brilliantly crackpot work of 1922, Fantasia of the Unconscious, which - following another sleepless night - I thought it might be interesting to re-examine here.

For Lawrence, sleep is a phenomenon that relates both to his cosmology and his thanatology; the moon being not only the centre of our individuality and the pole that governs nighttime activities, but a meeting place for cold, dead, angry souls. Each time we lie down to sleep, says Lawrence, we constitute within ourselves a body of death and this body of death is laid in line by the activities of the earth's magnetism or gravitation - what he terms the circuit of the earth's centrality: "It is this circuit which is busy in all our tissue removing or arranging the dead body of our past day."

In other words, for Lawrence, there is a kind of cleansing and terrestrial current moving its way through our nerves and our blood as we sleep; "sweeping away the ash of our days' spent consciousness towards one form or other of excretion". This earth-current, however, whilst an active force, is not strictly speaking a vital one; rather it is death busy in the service of life and which, as it sweeps, stimulates in the primary centres of consciousness "vibrations which flash images upon the mind". 

Somewhat surprisingly, these dream-images should not be a matter of any great concern to us. Indeed, Lawrence views them as purely arbitrary; "as disconnected and as unmeaning as the pieces of paper which the street-cleaners sweep into a bin fro the city gutters at night". They are not prophetic of the future, even if pregnant with the past. Dreams are merely "heterogeneous odds and ends of images swept together accidentally by the besom of the night-current, and it is beneath our dignity to attach any real importance to them". Lawrence continues:

"It is always beneath our dignity to go degrading the integrity of the individual soul by cringing and scraping among the rag-tag of accident  and of the inferior, mechanic coincidence and automatic event. Only those events are significant which derive from or apply to the soul in its full integrity. To go kow-towing before the facts of change, as ... fortune-readers and fatalists do, is merely a perverting of the soul's proud integral priority, a rearing up of idiotic idols and fetishes."

Having said that, Lawrence then concedes that there are in fact some dreams that matter. But this is only when something threatens us from the material world of death: "When anything threatens us from the world of death, then a dream becomes so vivid that it arouses the actual soul. And when a dream is so intense that it arouses the soul - then we must attend to it."

The knack is to distinguish these death-dreams that stimulate and haunt the soul, from the purely mechanical images that often result from some temporary material obstruction in the physical body; perhaps because we have eaten cheese before bedtime, or too many pancakes. 

Finally, Lawrence ends his short meditation on sleep and dreams with a warning against staying up late at night and not rising early enough in the mornings; the twin dangers that threaten us today, for we have, we moderns, "made the mistake of turning life inside out: of dragging the day-self into night, and spreading the night-self over into the day." This is a self-destructive form of evil; an impoverishment of the blood. Unless it's an afternoon nap - Lawrence speaks positively about a quick snooze after lunch; for this is just a necessary readjustment in the blood's chemical constitution and vibration.

But the long hours of morning sleep are very harmful and result in inertia and automatism; we get up feeling shattered before we have even done anything. Thus it is that:

"Every man and woman should be forced out of bed soon after the sun has risen: particularly the nervous ones. And forced into physical activity. Soon after dawn the vast majority of people should be hard at work. If not, they will soon be nervously diseased."

This may or may not be true. Either way, it's disappointing to observe how Lawrence ultimately uses his madly imaginative metaphysics to simply justify a conventional work ethic.      

See: D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (CUP, 2004).  

In an Age of Courtship Disorder

Kurt Freund (1914-1996)

Courtship disorder is a theory first put forward in the 1980s by Kurt Freund; a sexologist who, until then, was best known for his pioneering work in the field of phallometry or PPG.

According to the theory, certain paraphilias are best understood when viewed as related forms of aberrant courtship behaviour in human males. In other words, they should not be examined independently of one another as conditions in their own right, but rather as symptomatic of a single underlying syndrome. These paraphilias are voyeurism, exhibitionism, frotteurism, and biastophilia (or what Freund terms preferential rape) and they can be seen as anomalous expressions of the following species-typical courtship phases: 

(i) looking to find someone to love and making an initial appraisal of their suitability as a partner 

(ii) attempting to catch the eye of the one you fancy via pre-tactile interaction (smiling, flirting, etc.)    

(iii) becoming physically intimate (kissing, cuddling, petting, etc.) 

(iv) engaging, finally, in full sexual intercourse. 

Now, whether perverts with a penchant for the above paraphilias lack the skills to participate in what is often a long and sophisticated game of seduction played between would-be lovers - or simply lack the patience - I don't know.

It might even be that they regard conventional courtship rituals as a form of dishonesty and deceit and therefore see their own behaviour as an attempt to openly bypass social hypocrisy; cutting to the chase by, ironically, cutting out the chase. Again, I don't know.

However, it should be pointed out that their activities are not merely forms of impatience and anti-social behaviour, but also illicit and lacking in any consideration of those whom they perv upon non-consensually and - in the case of the paraphilic rapist - violently.

Having said that, it might be argued that within our pornified culture of Tinder, twerking, and Chatroulette, courtship disorder is now the new norm ...