Tits and Beaks

Photo: Dennis van de Water

It is, I suppose, another sign of advancing middle-age when one starts to be more interested in tits and beaks than what the Americans crudely refer to as t and a.

Thus I was intrigued to hear that the British obsession with feeding birds seems to be causing a rapid evolution in the rostrums of certain species, including tits, as they physically adapt to the garden environment.      

In fact, researchers at Oxford who have been studying the great tit population in Wytham Woods for over 70 years, have found that the beaks of UK birds in comparison to their Continental cousins are up to 0.3 mm longer. This may not sound like a big deal, but it's actually an astonishing development and even such a tiny advantage can mean the difference between life and death.  

Further, in conjunction with colleagues in the Netherlands, they have also discovered that, due to natural selection, genes determining beak length are now significantly different in British tits; in other words, Dutch birds not only have shorter beaks, but different DNA sequences. 

Apparently, the British spend about £200 million each year feeding their feathered friends; that's twice as much as the rest of Europe. And they have been doing so for many years now. Thus, whilst researchers can't definitively say that bird feeders are responsible, it certainly seems reasonable to suggest that the longer beaks are a result of this interspecies generosity.

However, whilst it's interesting to note that the number of species of birds that now rely upon supplementary food supplied by householders has risen to around 130 (up from just 18 forty years ago), one does worry about dependency and what would happen if, for whatever reason, people decided to hang up less feeders and more anti-bird spikes in the trees - like those sons of bitches in Bristol worried about protecting their precious BMWs. 

Notes 

For further details, see 'British birds adapt their beaks to birdfeeders' (20 Oct 2017) on the Oxford University News and Events page: click here. Most of the factual information above was gleaned from this source. 

The actual study referred to - 'Recent natural selection causes adaptive evolution of an avian polygenic trait', by Mirte Bosse, Lewis G. Spurgin et al - was published in Science, Vol. 358, Issue 6361, (Oct 2017), pp. 365-68. 

The case of residents in Clifton - the affluent Bristol suburb - fixing spikes to trees in their neighbourhood in an attempt to prevent birds from perching and shitting on the expensive cars parked below, was widely reported in the press earlier this month. I refrained from commenting here on Torpedo the Ark, as I didn't want to be seen to be inciting vandalism in response to this grotesque act of selfish and spiteful stupidity. Click here to read a report in the local paper, the Bristol Post.   

Le Visqueux: Notes on Existential Slime and Ontological Sexism

I've never been a great fan of Jean-Paul Sartre and fully endorse Heidegger's repudiation of the Frenchman's attempt to characterize existentialism as a humanism. Mostly though, my dislike of Sartre is an irrational one. Simply put, I've always found him physically repulsive; one wouldn't want to cruise his body, as Barthes would say.

To me, there's something slimy about him - which is ironic, since Sartre offers a controversial account of slime and the danger of all things gooey (including women) towards the end of his most famous and sustained work of philosophy, Being and Nothingness (1943).

Le visqueux, says Sartre, compromises the masculine, non-sticky, sugar-free nature of consciousness or being-for-itself and threatens to submerge the latter in what Camille Paglia memorably describes as "the fleshy muck of the generative matrix" - just like a wasp drowning in the jam.

Slime, in all its base viscosity, affords us neither the reassuring inertia of the solid, nor the liquid dynamism of a fluid. It sticks to us and it sucks us in: it is the feminine revenge of non-conscious being that exists in itself beyond our knowledge of it.

The gynephobic character of this language - and let's not even get started on what he says about holes and the nature of the obscene - would be shocking, were it not so ludicrous and dated. But one can't help wondering what, privately, Simone made of it ...?

In her own writings, she happily adopted Sartre's ontology and seemed to turn a blind eye to his sexism. But what about in the bedroom? One likes to think she might have had a word in his ear about the nature of embodiment and how, whilst a dry soul is best, a moist cunt is the bestest thing of all.   

See:

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Routledge, 1969), pp. 610-12.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990), p. 93.

See also Margery Collins and Christine Pierce, 'Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre's Psychoanalysis', in Philosophical Forum, (vol. V, 1973), pp. 112-27.

Who's a Pretty Boy Then?

Mexican red-headed parrot 

For some reason, I have developed a sudden affection for parrots; or psittacines, as some people (irritatingly) insist on calling them. 

I don't know why, but it probably has as much to do with their intelligence as with their vivid colours, for I'm also fond of birds that belong to the crow family and they mostly like to rock an all black plumage (at least here in the temperate zone that I inhabit).

The fact that parrots sometimes not only imitate but mock human beings further increases my fondness for them. It's as if they want to remind us that we are, after all, only an unusual type of ape that has, as Nietzsche says, lost its healthy animal reason along with its body hair.  

D. H. Lawrence was also amused with the manner with which these super-smart birds use their language skills to make fun of people - and their pets. In the essay 'Corasmin and the Parrots', he describes how "two tame parrots in the trees" near his house in Mexico are ever-ready to ridicule those who pass below "with that strange penetrating, antediluvian malevolence" and a squawking sound that belongs to an earlier evolutionary period (or sun).

He writes: 

"The parrots, even when I don't listen to them, have an extraordinary effect on me. They make my diaphragm convulse with little laughs, almost mechanically. They are a quite commonplace pair of green birds, with bits of bluey red, and round, disillusioned eyes, and heavy, overhanging noses."

First they mimic the sound of a servant, Rosalino, whistling, as he sweeps the patio with a twig broom: "The parrots whistle exactly like Rosalino, only a little more so. And this little-more-so is extremely sardonically funny. With their sad old long-jowled faces and their flat disillusioned eyes, they reproduce Rosalino and a little-more-so without moving a muscle."

And then they "break off into a cackling chatter, and one knows they are shifting their clumsy legs, perhaps hanging on with their beaks and clutching with their cold, slow claws, to climb to a higher bough, like rather raggedy green buds climbing to the sun", before suddenly imitating the sound of someone calling the dog with "penetrating, demonish mocking voices". 

That a bird - or any creature - should be able to pour such acidic sarcasm over the voice of a human being calling a dog, strikes Lawrence as truly incredible. It makes him chuckle and it makes him ask himself: "Is it possible that we are so absolutely, so innocently, so ab ovo ridiculous?"

And of course, he's honest enough to acknowledge the answer that comes back from an older dimension of being: "not only is it possible, it is patent". Ultimately, man is the joke of all creation who should cover his head in shame. 

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Corasmin and the Parrots', Mornings in Mexico, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press), 2009. 

Note that the original 1927 version of Mornings in Mexico can be read online thanks to Project Gutenberg Australia: click here.  

Fresh Air Contra Central Heating

I remember being introduced from an early age to something my mother called fresh air and which she seemed to hold in the highest possible regard, as if, for her, a cold draught signified the veritable presence of the Holy Spirit. She would fling open the bedroom windows and the back door - whatever the weather, whatever the temperature - as if fulfilling a daily religious duty. 

In this way, I learnt to equate being healthy and being righteous with exposure to a cool breeze blowing down the back of my neck and quickly grew to hate warm, stuffy rooms with windows closed and the radiators turned up high.  

Later, this obsession with ventilation was reinforced by a neo-primitive form of pagan vitalism. Like Lawrence, I resented all those things - such as central heating and double glazing - that intervened between me and what I thought of as life; the naked forces of the latter being something that had to be experienced directly in order to be authentic. 

This meant, for example, that when a large hole appeared in the roof of the house in which I was living in Leeds, I saw it as an opportunity to admire the stars in the night sky and allow in a little more fresh air, rather than as something in need of urgent repair. Eventually, the bathroom ceiling fell through and I remember sitting in a tub amused as snowflakes fell upon the soap suds.             

But this, of course, was a long time ago and I've since tempered my ascetic idealism and learned to accept many of the conveniences provided by the modern world. It turns out that having frozen fingers doesn't make you a better writer after all and the demand for fresh air can itself become a stale obsession.  

Indeed, even Lawrence discovered during his final days spent living in the South of France that there's something to be said for indoor plumbing after all. For as his biographer David Ellis reminds us, Lawrence was obliged due to ill health to make a number of compromises:

"Central heating was a major concession on his part. Only a few years before, he had been sarcastic about those who turned up the radiator [...] For them, he had felt, there was no vivid relationship with the living universe; they had allowed technology to intervene between themselves and physical reality, numbing and atrophying their senses."       

The son of a miner, Lawrence loved the magical glow of a coal fire; but not the suffocating false heat provided by pipes.

Not, that is, until failing health eroded such long held principles and prejudices, just as mild-mannered middle-age destroyed such in my case (although, in my heart, I still maintain a degree of kontempt for those who happily conform to an easy life founded upon those words beginning with the letter C ... Comfort ... Convenience ... and yes, even Christmas). 

See: David Ellis, Death and the Author, (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 6. 

Should Sade be Saved?

Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage (1785) 
Photo of the original manuscript: Benoit Tessier / Reuters

It was amusing to read that the Marquis de Sade's eighteenth century masterpiece, The 120 Days of Sodom, has been awarded official status as a trésor national and withdrawn from sale at auction in Paris - along with André Breton's Surrealist Manifestos - thereby ensuring that the novel doesn't fall into foreign hands.    

The work, which Sade famously composed in just 37 days on a roll of paper 39 feet in length made from bits of parchment glued together that he had smuggled into his cell whilst imprisoned in the Bastille, tells the story of four wealthy male libertines in search of the ultimate form of sexual gratification achieved via the rape, torture, and murder of mostly teenage victims.

When the prison was stormed and looted at the beginning of the French Revolution in July 1789, Sade was freed but his manuscript was lost (and believed destroyed) - much to his distress. However, after his death (1814), the unfinished work turned up and was finally published in 1904 by the German psychiatrist and sexologist, Iwan Bloch.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it was banned in the UK until the 1950s. Indeed, even in post-War France the work remained highly controversial due to its pornographic nature and disturbing themes to do with power, violence and sexual abuse. Government authorities considered destroying it along with other major works by Sade, prompting the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir to write an essay provocatively entitled Must We Burn Sade? (1951-52).

The essay protests the destruction of The 120 Days of Sodom and celebrates freedom and the flesh, whilst also calling for an authentic ethics of responsibility. Beauvoir not only argues that, ultimately, Sade must be thought of as a great moralist, but she also admits to being sympathetic to his utopian politics of rebellion and credits him with being one of the first writers to expose the despotic (and obscene) workings of patriarchy.

Where he falls short - apart from being a technically poor writer - is that he doesn't examine the manner in which cruelty destroys the intersubjective bonds of humanity and ultimately compromises the naked liberty that he most desires. In the end, Beauvoir concludes, Sade was misguided and his work misleads. But his failure still has much to teach us and it would be folly to consign his work to the flames.

Sadly, one suspects that today - in this new age of puritanism known as political correctness, with its safe spaces, trigger warnings, and all-round snowflakery - Beauvoir's philosophical arguments would fail to convince and there would be rather more voices prepared to answer Yes to the question she posed in relation to the Divine Marquis ...      

See:

Simone de Beauvoir, 'Must We Burn Sade?', Political Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, (University of Illinois Press, 2014).

Marquis de Sade, The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver, (Arrow Books, 1990). Note that this edition also contains other writings by Sade, the above essay by Simone de Beauvoir, and an essay by Pierre Klossowski, 'Nature as Destructive Principle' (1965). 

This post was suggested by Simon Solomon, to whom I'm grateful. 

On the Designers Who Dressed Ziggy Stardust

Photo of David Bowie by Masayoshi Sukita 

wearing a striped bodysuit by Kansai Yamamoto 
designed for the Aladdin Sane Tour (1973)

Bowie always had a thing for Japan. And it's difficult to think of his alien pop persona Ziggy Stardust without also thinking of the traditional form of Japanese musical theatre known as kabuki and the celebrated Japanese fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto who created many of the iconic outfits worn during this period of Bowie's career (and, apparently, inspired the flaming-red hair style).

But, if I'm honest, Yamamoto's designs are just a little too theatrical for my tastes. I don't mind elaborate outfits and outlandish makeup, but don't like fancy dress or things that are made to be worn on stage by performers only. And that's why I much prefer the fabulous ice-blue Life on Mars satin suit designed by Freddie Burretti (1973):

For me, Bowie looks perfect wearing this suit in the video directed by Mick Rock [click here]. A little less alien and androgynous than when dressed by Yamamoto, but far more heroic and dandyish.

It's a shame that Burretti doesn't get more recognition for helping shape Ziggy's sartorial aesthetic - for not only did he make this outfit, he also designed the colourful quilted jumpsuit Bowie wore for his seminal appearance on Top of the Pops in July 1972, singing Starman [click here].*             

To be fair, when news broke of Burretti's death in 2001, Bowie generously paid tribute to the young Londoner whom he'd first met at a gay club (El Sombrero) in the late 1960s, saying that Freddie was not only one of the nicest, but also one of the most talented spirits that he'd worked with.     

Notes 

*Although the broadcast date for this performance on TOTP is sometimes mistakenly given as April 14th 1972, it was actually shown on July 6th, having been recorded the day before. 

Readers interested in knowing more about Freddie Burretti might like to watch the documentary by Lee Scriven: Starman: Freddie Burretti - The Man Who Sewed the World (2015). 

To See a World in a Grain of Sand and Being in the Infinite Density of a Dot

Photo: Gary Greenberg 

sandgrains.com

Everyone knows - and everyone seems to love - the opening line from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence concerning a grain of sand and the manner in which, if you look closely enough, it seems to reveal an entire world.

Indeed, when viewed at a magnification of over 250 times, grains of sand are shown to be delicate, colourful structures of great beauty; tiny fragments of crystal, shell and volcanic rock, many thousands of years old and each one as unique as a snowflake.

Viewing the amazing photographs taken by Gary Greenberg reminded me not only of Blake, however, but also of Ian Bogost, author of Alien Phenomenology (2012), who puts forward the interesting idea that rather than conceive of a flat ontological field or network, it's easier to think of a one-dimensional point or what he terms a tiny ontology:

"If any one being exists no less than any other, then instead of scattering such beings all across the two-dimensional surface of flat ontology, we might also collapse them into the infinite density of a dot."

This is being made simple and singular rather than small in size and it places a black hole at the centre of every object, just waiting to expand or explode with the ontological equivalent of the Big Bang.

See: 

Gary Greenberg, A Grain of  Sand: Nature's Secret Wonder, (Voyageur Press, 2008). 

Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), pp. 21, 26.  

Note: William Blake's poem, 'Auguries of Innocence', is from a notebook known as the Pickering Manuscript. It was probably written in 1803, but remained unpublished until 1863. It can be read on the Poetry Foundation website by clicking here.  

Kissing Hitler 2: Notes on the Führer's Love Life

Heil honey, I'm home!

Hitler's love life has long been subject to critical and clinical analysis, as well as sensational speculation and obscene rumour. We know that he had relationships with a number of young women during his life and seemed to enjoy their company. The most famous and long-lasting of these relationships was with Eva Braun, whom he married in a civil ceremony on April 29, 1945, shortly before they committed suicide. (Is there anything more Romantic than a honeymoon in Hell?)

Although this relationship was kept secret from the public so as to protect Hitler's image as a man dedicated entirely to his political mission and the German people, there is no reason to think it was in any way an abnormal affair and Braun's biographer, the respected historian Heike Görtemaker, notes that the couple enjoyed a normal sex life (whatever that is).

There is also no real evidence that Hitler ever had any homosexual encounters, or desired such. The 1943 report by Walter C. Langer for the American Office of Strategic Services and the separate psychoanalytical study for the OSS by Henry Murray written in the same year that describe Hitler as having repressed homosexual tendencies and speculate that he was a shit-loving, sado-masochist with only one testicle who had trouble getting it up can, I think, be safely dismissed as shameful wartime propaganda that, actually, relies upon homophobia and encourages queer bashing.

Even if true, there's nothing wrong with being a kinky monorchid and coprophile; certainly in Hitler's case, this wasn't the most troubling aspect of his character and doesn't explain the genocidal nature of National Socialism. It's a shame, ultimately, that Hitler wasn't more of a libertine and less of a Nazi. For without wanting to sound like an old hippie, it's always better to make love rather than war, no matter how perversely one may choose to do so - though we shouldn't, of course, mistakenly posit these things as mutually exclusive terms, or binary opposites.

Note: readers interested in the idea of kissing Hitler should go to part one of this post: click here. 

Kissing Hitler 1: Some Like It Hot

Boop-boop-a-doo!

Whilst working on the Billy Wilder film Some Like It Hot in the summer of 1958, Tony Curtis was asked what it was like to share an on-screen smooch with his (often difficult) co-star Marilyn Monroe; a question to which he famously replied that it was like kissing Hitler.

Curtis later explained that this was meant as a humorous rather than a malicious remark. One that whilst seemingly made at Monroe's expense, was also intended to poke fun at the absurdity of the question - for how could pressing your lips against Marilyn's be anything other than pleasurable? 

What really interests me, however, is the further underlying assumption that Hitler would have made an unattractive recipient of one's affection and was probably not only a monstrous human being, but also a terrible lover. This may, in fact, have been the case, although there's little real evidence to support such a belief and there's no way that Curtis would have been able to know this for sure.    

What it tells us is that for a Jewish-American heterosexual male of Curtis's generation (he served with the US Navy during the Second World War), Hitler was just about the very last person one might imagine kissing ...

Note: those interested in knowing more about the Führer's love life should go to part two of this post: click here.

Object-Oriented Ontology and the Joy of Washing Up (With Reference to the Work of D. H. Lawrence)

Einai gar kei entautha theous

One of the reasons that D. H. Lawrence continues to fascinate is because his work is an attempt to construct a queer form of philosophical realism that is very much object-oriented. Even when, as a novelist, he writes of human subjects, he clearly cares more about their impersonal and, indeed, inhuman elements and how they interact within an ontological network made up of all kinds of other things; be they dead or alive, actual or virtual. For Lawrence, art is primarily an attempt to help us understand how all things – including ourselves – exist within this dynamic network of relations.

Human being, we might say, has its belonging in this network and although Lawrence often suggests that the most important of all relations is that between man and woman, there is of course no such hierarchy in reality. All things may not be equal, but they are all equally things and all relations are established, developed and dissolved on a flat ontological playing field. For a man to be rich in world requires more than the love of a good woman. He has to have also a quick relationship to "snow, bed-bugs, sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food, diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightning, and toilet-paper" [SoTH 183].

Thus it is that so many of Lawrence’s characters only really blossom when they enter into strange and startling new relationships with nonhuman objects; objects which, for Lawrence, even if composed of inert matter as opposed to living tissue, nevertheless exist "in some subtle and complicated tension of vibration which makes them sensitive to external influence and causes them to have an influence on other external objects" [SCAL 77].

This is true irrespective of actual physical contact, although Lawrence encourages his readers to establish joyful small contacts with objects, even offering a philosophical justification for doing the washing up:

"If I wash the dishes I learn a quick, light touch of china and earthenware, the feel of it, the weight and roll and poise of it, the peculiar hotness, the quickness or slowness of its surface. I am at the middle of an infinite complexity of motions and adjustments and quick, apprehensive contacts ... the primal consciousness is alert in me ... which is a pure satisfaction." [RDP 151]

When Lawrence advocates climbing down Pisgah, this is an important aspect of what he means; discovering the sacred in daily life. It's not a new idea, obviously. Even Heraclitus standing before his kitchen stove was keen to impress upon visitors that the gods were present everywhere and in all activities. But it remains an important idea that counters all forms of ascetic idealism that advocate separation from the world of things and devotion to a spiritual life of prayer and meditation.   

Critics have often accused Lawrence of contemptuously dismissing modern life as inauthentic. However, in order to make this charge stick they have to glide over passages such as the above which demonstrate that he was eager to relate his ontological vision to everyday existence and those things that lie closest to hand (such as a bowl of soapy water). 

For Lawrence, no chore was too humble that it didn't warrant being done well and he happily absorbed himself in cooking, cleaning, chopping wood, and milking the cow, whilst his wife lay in bed smoking cigarettes. Indeed, far from washing the dishes, Frieda was prone to breaking them over Lawrence's head - though I suppose this too is a way of demonstrating that matter actually exists and that violence can also give pleasure ...      

Notes:

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985). 

In the first version of ‘Morality and the Novel’, Lawrence offers a different – no less surprising – list of things with which it is crucial to have relations. This includes "children, creatures, cities, skies, trees, flowers, mud, microbes, motor-cars, guns, [and] sewers". See Appendix III of the above text, p. 242.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allen Poe' (Final Version, 1923), in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). 

Holy Cow

Kamadhenu (aka Surabhi)

A bovine-goddess described in Hinduism as the Mother of all Cows 

I've been ruminating recently on the bovine figure of the cow; the most common type of large domesticated ungulate - it's estimated that there are almost one-and-half billion of them - in the world today.

Most are raised as livestock for meat, farmed as dairy cattle, or slaughtered for their hides within a multibillion dollar global industry. And many are kept in truly appalling conditions, suffering constant cruelty and abuse before they eventually meet their violent end at the hands of men who often have zero concern for their welfare and even, it seems, regard these poor beasts with udder contempt.

And this is true even in countries such as India, where cows are venerated and their urine (gomutra) used for (crackpot) medical purposes. It may be a religious belief within Hinduism, for example, that life in all its forms is interconnected and that non-violence (ahimsa) towards all creatures is therefore an ethical obligation, but the fact is even the sacred cow is not fully protected and respect for cattle, whilst widespread, is far from universal.   

Thus, whilst most Indian states have some form of regulation prohibiting the sale and slaughter of cows, these laws vary greatly from state to state and the country still produces and exports a lot of beef and a lot of leather. There are also numerous illegal abattoirs operating across the country. In addition, hundreds of thousands of (often stolen) cows are smuggled by criminal gangs across the border each year into Bangladesh, where they are then brutally dispatched and dismembered (not always in that order).  

Europeans like to believe that their expensive leather goods are made in Italy and that the cows who supplied their skins were killed in a humane manner after leading relatively comfortable lives. But this is a mixture of bad faith and bullshit. For a lot of 'Italian leather' originates from the backstreets of Dhaka, where it's processed in makeshift tanneries in which workers, including children, are subject to atrocious conditions.

Unfortunately, that luxurious leather handbag that you're so proud of and paid so much for, is invariably the result of animal cruelty and human exploitation. And, if that weren't bad enough, the unregulated tanneries located not only in Bangladesh, but all over the developing world - from Brazil to Ethopia and Vietnam - produce eye-watering levels of pollution.

At this point, one feels like sighing with despair. But then one remembers Baudrillard's fabulous essay in which he suggests that Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease - the human variant of BSE or mad cow disease - is the suicidal revenge of a sacred animal whom, in our carnophallogocentric arrogance, we have transformed into a meat-milk-and-leather producing machine, and I start to smile again.

However, if it's true that all the gods reside in the body of Kamadhenu, the Mother of all Cows, as Hindu scripture suggests, then perhaps CJD is less an example of bovine terrorism and more a case of divine retribution: whom the gods wish to destroy, must first have their brains softened ...     

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'Ruminations for Spongiform Encephala', Screened Out, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 2002), pp. 171-75. 

For further reflections on human-cow relations, please click here.

Reflections on the Death of a Cow (with Reference to the Work of Damien Hirst)

Figure 1

Along with sharks, skulls and flies, the artist Damien Hirst obviously has a thing for cows ...

One of the iconic works with which he made his name back in the 1990s, for example, Mother and Child (Divided), is a sculpture comprising four glass tanks supported by signature-style thick white frames, containing a cow and a calf, each cut in two and preserved in a translucent turquiose solution of formaldehyde.

Whatever one may think of the work - whatever may one think of Hirst himself - there's no denying it has a certain devastating beauty coupled with a terrible sense of sadness and loss. For not only is the calf fatally isolated from its mother, but both animals are also bisected and thus self-divided as well as separated from one another. 

Hirst seems to suggest that just as individual integrity is rendered impossible by death, so too is the hope of some kind of heavenly reunion or renconciliation between the generations. Further, Hirst wants the viewer to question why it is that corpses seem to often have a greater fascination and mystery than living beings - and even, once you overcome your initial horror, a greater beauty.

Cattle standing around in a field, he once said, lack the aesthetic interest of his cows suspended in formaldehyde. For the former are little more than soon-to-be beef burgers; dead beasts walking, chewing the cud whilst waiting for slaughter. In other words, they are organic components within an industrial food system that Heidegger describes as essentially genocidal in character and which Derrida brands as carno-phallogocentric.

The violence and injustice of our treatment of nonhuman life, particularly those animals reared on farms exclusively for food and for profit, is powerfully brought home in another of Hirst's works, The Promise of Money (2003):

Figure 2

Now, I'm not sure what Hirst is protesting with this work (if anything). But, to me, it speaks powerfully about the ongoing animal holocaust that many vegetarians, vegans, animal rights activists, and even ethically concerned carnivores are rightly sickened by. Eating well, may involve the sacrifice of animals, but it needn't involve appalling systematic cruelty, nor the symbolic cannibalistic sacrifice of other human beings (due to the voracious greed of those who thrive on such).     

I think Derrida is right to argue the crucial importance of determining a more caring and respectful (almost reverential) way of relating to the living animal in its otherness. If Hirst's sensational strategy of shock and awe can help provoke this, then that's great. Personally, however, I prefer the attempt by D. H. Lawrence to equilibrate with a black-eyed cow called Susan in all her cowy wonder:

"She knows my touch and she goes very still and peaceful, being milked. I, too, I know her smell and her warmth and her feel. And I share some of her cowy silence, when I milk her. [...] And this relation is part of the mystery of love: the individuality on each side, mine and Susan's, suspended in the relationship."

Notes

Figure 1: Damien Hirst, Mother and Child (Divided). This is a photo of the exhibition copy that Hirst created for the Turner Prize retrospective at Tate Britain in 2007. The original work (1993), is in the Astrup Fernley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. For more details, click here.

Figure 2: Damien Hirst: The Promise of Money (2003), Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates  / © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. For more details, click here.  
 
D. H. Lawrence, '...... Love Was Once a Little Boy', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 329-46.

To read more on Lawrence's relationship with Susan the cow, click here.

This post is dedicated to David Brock and Thomas Bonneville.

D. H. Lawrence and Susan, the Black-Eyed Cow

Alexandra Klimas: Susan the Cow (2016)

Oil on canvas (70 x 120 cm)
plusonegallery.com 

As David Brock reminds us in his most recent column in the Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser, whilst living on his ranch in New Mexico, Lawrence acquired a cow which he named Susan.

He happily milked her twice a day and was able to produce a couple of pounds of butter each week. But he was also obliged to spend a good deal of time chasing after her on horseback, as Susan was prone to wandering off into the surrounding hills; something he was less pleased about.
 
For the American James Joyce scholar, William York Tindall, Susan is best thought of as a symbol rather than as an actual cow. For it is as a symbol that she provides the critic with a key to Lawrence's philosophy and art. Indeed, symbolic Susan might even help us, says Tindall, come to a better understanding of some of the wider problems within literature and society. Thus it is that in his 1939 study of Lawrence and Susan, Tindall has very little to say about the latter.

This is disappointing - and also, I think, mistaken. For Lawrence himself makes it very clear in his own writings on Susan that she is not to be thought of as a symbol, or metaphor, or a piece of livestock whose function is simply to produce milk like a machine, but as a living creature with her own non-human reality.

For Lawrence, the fact that birds, beasts and flowers - indeed, all things - exist independently of man is the essential point to make. And the great challenge, this being the case, is to find a way to come into touch with things without compromising their integrity or falling into anthropomorphism and projecting one's own characteristics and values onto them.

Thus it is that Lawrence is desperate to discover how, as a man, he can equilibrate himself with black-eyed Susan in all her cowy mystery. It isn't easy. For although there's a sort of relation between them, neither can ever really know the other (certainly not in full). But still they can sense one another and she can swing her tail in his face when he sits behind her, making him mad.

And this physical relationship hinges, like all relationships, on a form of desire:

"She knows my touch and she goes very still and peaceful, being milked. I, too, I know her smell and her warmth and her feel. And I share some of her cowy silence, when I milk her. [...] And this relation is part of the mystery of love: the individuality on each side, mine and Susan's, suspended in the relationship."

Tindall refers to these lines from '... Love Was Once a Little Boy' in the preface to his study, but seems more than a little embarrassed by them; explaining that whilst "it cannot be denied that [Lawrence] sounds foolish", he was a genius and genius "is not always reasonable".  

Well, I don't think Lawrence sounds foolish here; in fact, I think he's being perfectly reasonable and that the lines quoted are not only very beautiful, but also philosophically of great interest. It's Tindall, I'm afraid, who is being crass and displaying a remarkable non-affinity with his subject.  


See:

David Brock, 'D. H. Lawrence and his well-loved pet cow named Susan', Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser, (1 Dec 2017). 

D. H. Lawrence, '...... Love Was Once a Little Boy', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 329-46.

William York Tindall, D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow, (Columbia University Press, 1939).

For a related post to this one, click here.

Lipstick Traces: Lessons for Lucia

Lucia Pica photographed by Daniel Jackson 

Vogue (Sept 2015)

Like many people, when I heard a couple of years ago that Italian-born, London-based Lucia Pica had been appointed creative director at Chanel cosmetics, I was very happy for her and very hopeful of what we might expect; for she is undoubtedly a makeup artist with a bold and brilliant understanding of colour and unafraid of taking risks.

Expectations were further raised when it was revealed that her first collection for the label would in part be inspired by the work of Jean Baudrillard; that we could finally delight in nail polish and lipstick that pops with hyperreal playfulness.  

Unfortunately, however, if you take time to read interviews with Ms Pica, you discover that she subscribes to a disappointing model of aesthetic idealism, in which beauty is something essential and makeup merely a method of enhancement that should never be allowed to mask the natural character of a face, so that the real woman can shine through.

In other words, the ultimate personal expression is that of your own true self.   

Having resisted the urge to vomit, I'd like - at the risk of repeating what I've said elsewhere on this blog - to provide some lessons for Lucia on artifice and nature (and the nature of artifice), in relation to the question of Woman conceived in terms of style and seduction ...  

1. Woman is a myth activated through a system of signs encoded, for example, in art and fashion.

2. Those things which serve to construct her femininity, such as her shoes, her makeup and her lingerie, matter more than her biology. For whilst the latter determines her as a female belonging to a species of domestic animal, it does not determine her as a woman. In other words, her being is not naturally given; she is not born a woman, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, but becomes such via culture.

3. Because of this, woman fully understands the need for illusion and defends the right to lie. She uses cosmetics not because she wishes to conceal an essence or a hidden reality beneath appearance, but because she has no inner self and only wants to make us think she does. To mistake the exceeding of nature for a crude camouflaging of the truth, is to commit a cardinal error. Makeup isn't false - it's the falser than false and so recuperates a kind of superior innocence.       

4. Further, via a confident and sophisticated use of clothes and cosmetics, a woman can strike a blow against the puritanical drabness of the world with its neutral tones and sensible footwear, rediscovering the power of witchcraft known as glamour. As Baudelaire writes:

"Woman is quite within her rights, indeed she is even accomplishing a kind of duty, when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural; she has to astonish and charm us; as an idol, she is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored. [...] It matters but little that [her] artifice and trickery are known to all, so long as their success is assured and their effect always irresistible."

5. If this means that woman risks surrendering to emptiness and reification on the one hand, whilst becoming commodified and fetishized on the other, this need not necessarily be such a bad thing; models, actresses and prostitutes, for example, have all cleverly turned their object status and vacancy into an art, exploiting what Walter Benjamin termed the sex appeal of the inorganic (i.e. that pale power of seduction and stillness founded upon the ecstasy of a blank gaze and a Pan Am smile).   

6. Finally, Lucia, you might like to consider how it is only at the symbolic level of appearances that systems become fragile and only via enchantment that the power and meaning of these systems becomes vulnerable. In other words, the idiosyncratic feminism of Coco Chanel - in which you profess an interest - needs to be understood as a politics of style that is all about a light manipulation of appearances, rather than a politics of desire and identity that still concerns itself with libidinal and psychological depths.

Why become fixated on true feelings and ontological foundations, when you can just add more lipstick and attack?

See:

Stephen Alexander, Philosophy on the Catwalk (Blind Cupid Press, 2011).

Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life' in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne, (Phaidon Press, 2006).

Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer, (St. Martin's Press, 1990).

Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow, (University of Chicago Press, 1979).

Lipstick Traces (with Reference to the Case of Cleopatra)

Zabrena: Historically Accurate: Ancient Egypt / Cleopatra Makeup Tutorial

YouTube (8 Oct 2014): click here. 

One of the questions I find endlessly fascinating is that of nature and artifice and the nature of artifice in relation to femininity.

It's a question that invariably takes us back to Baudelaire who suggests that without makeup Woman - as a figment of the pornographic imagination and not merely as a lump of flesh with distinct reproductive organs from the male - not only fails to excite or interest, but is less than human. It is only as a cultural-cosmetic effect that she elevates herself above her animal biology and captures the hearts and minds of men who would otherwise happily make do with other pleasures.      

For as Baudelaire admits, woman is not an animal whose component parts - even when pleasingly assembled and proportioned - provide a perfect example of harmony; "she is not even that type of pure beauty which the sculptor can mentally evoke in the course of his sternest meditations". In order to cast her complex spell of enchantment, she needs to adorn and thus enhance her physical attributes. 

Take the mouth, for example: who in their right mind would ever have dreamt of kissing the lips of a mucous-lined orifice with two rows of sharp teeth - and, indeed, exploring such with their own tongue or virile member - were those lips not first painted in an irresistible shade?

For whilst a smile, betraying as it does a certain vulnerability, may attract the attention of a man, I doubt that alone would be enough to persuade to perversion. And, let's be clear about this, oral sex - which includes French kissing - is an obvious abberation, involving as it does a form of what Freud terms anatomical transgression.

Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, Isis Reborn, and a skilled fellatrix, knew exactly what she was doing when she applied crushed beetle juice in a beeswax base to her lips in order to stain them deep carmine red.

As Adam Ant once put it: She was a wide-mouthed girl ...    

See: 

Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life' in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. by Jonathan Mayne, (Phaidon Press, 1995): click here to read online. 

Sigmund Freud, 'The Sexual Aberrations', in Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory, trans. A. A. Brill (NY, 1910): click here to read online.

Play:

Adam and the Ants, 'Cleopatra', Dirk Wears White Sox, (Do It Records, 1979): click here to listen on YouTube.

Reflections on Wittgenstein's Rhino

Albrecht Dürer: The Rhinoceros (1515)

Even many non-philosophers know two stories concerning Wittgenstein's time at Cambridge: the first, an amusing confrontation with Karl Popper in October 1946 involving a poker, was the subject of a best-selling book by David Edmonds and John Eidinow; the second, an encounter between Bertrand Russell and his young Austrian student thirty-five years earlier, involving a discussion that centred on the question of whether or not there was a rhinoceros in the room ...

In brief, Russell wanted Wittgenstein to concede that we can have empirical knowledge of the world by admitting that there was, in fact, no rhino present. But the latter refused to do so - even after Russell amusingly began looking for the beast under the desk to no avail. Whilst Wittgenstein may have had a point, one can't help thinking he was, in this instance (as in others), being a bit of a dick.

Indeed, I'm not sure I understand the point he's trying to make or why he can't simply accept the factual non-presence of the rhino, given that in his early work he maintains that only such propositions can legitimately be asserted. But then, my understanding of Wittgenstein's thinking is limited (and probably inaccurate) due to its having been shaped primarily by drunken discussions in the Barley Mow pub many years ago.        

At this very early stage in their relationship, Russell worried that Wittgenstein was a crank, rather than a philosophical genius. I can imagine how he felt, for I experience the same concern whenever I correspond with a friend of mine, let's call him Mr X, who also likes to deny - or at least contest - the propositions of natural science and refuse to accept that there is a mind-independent reality about which we can speak with confidence.

For Mr X, the world consists neither of facts nor of things, but only of interpretations and all descriptions are essentially metaphorical. He thus posits a daemonic ontology that is mytho-poetic rather than material-scientific in character. Rather than agree there was no rhino in the room, Mr X would sooner insist on its invisibility, or point out that imaginary objects are also real even if physically not present as actual entities; thus his (psycho) logical belief also in supernatural beings.

For Mr X, as for Wittgenstein (though for different reasons), Russell's seemingly commonsensical proposition is questionable on the grounds that it doesn't meaningfully assert anything about the world - certainly nothing upon which we can ever be completely certain - and is, therefore, what Wittgenstein terms in the Tractatus a 'nonsensical pseudo-proposition' [4.1272] (i.e. one that refers us only to the logic of language by which we talk about the world and not to things in themselves). 

And so, perhaps Wittgenstein wasn't being a dick after all ... Perhaps, as J. F. Macdonald argues, it was Russell who profoundly misunderstood matters and who, by attempting to ridicule the younger man, was the one acting like a dick. Wittgenstein, says MacDonald, wasn't rejecting empirical propositions; rather, he was rejecting propositions that posed as such, but were not, and discreetly "making a point about what can be meaningfully said, not about what we don't know".

And perhaps I too should learn to listen more carefully to what it is Mr X is saying and not be so quick to dismiss it as absurd, or him as foolish ... For I fear this reveals merely my own philosophical arrogance and limitations. 


Notes

Details of the conversation between Russell and Wittgenstein on the rhinoceros can be found in Russell's letters from the period to Lady Ottoline Morell (reprinted in Ray Monk's biography, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, (Vintage, 1990), pp. 38-40), and in Russell's article in Mind Vol. 60, issue 239 (July 1951), pp. 297-98, which served as an obituary notice for Wittgenstein who died in April of that year.

Click here to read the above article online, noting how Russell misremembers the conversation concerning a hippo, not a rhino.

The essay by J. F. MacDonald from which I quote, 'Russell, Wittgenstein and the problem of the rhinoceros', is in the Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 31 (4), (1993), pp. 409-24, but can also be found in full online at the Rhino Resource Center (the world's largest rhino information website): click here.   

The book by Edmonds and Eidinow that I mention at the beginning of the post - Wittgenstein's Poker: the story of a 10-minute argument between two great philosophers - was published by Faber in 2001.

Finally, readers interested in directly engaging with the early Wittgenstein should either get hold of a copy of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), or click here to read the original 1922 edition as an ebook trans. C. K. Ogden, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

This post is for Mr X and Andy G.

Cut the Crap: In Praise of Occam's Razor

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem

Occam's razor is a convenient problem-solving principle attributed to a 14th-century English monk, scholastic philosopher and theologian, William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347), which states that among competing theories, the simplest (i.e., the one with fewest underlying assumptions) is, more often that not, likely to be correct and that complexity should not be valued for its own sake or unnecessarily fetishised.

Obviously, all events are open to interpretation and for any accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there will be a large number of alternative (often ad hoc) hypotheses. Thus we need something that helps us cut the crap and cut to the chase and Occam's razor does the job - although it should be noted that it functions more as a heuristic guide, rather than an irrefutable method for determining what's right.

It does, however, encourage and enable us to choose between competing truth-claims by opening them up to falsification and for that I'm grateful; just as I'm also grateful that it serves as a weapon in the fight against occultists, conspiracy theorists, and crackpots of every description for whom nothing is ever easy or as it appears and there's always a darker, deeper, more diabolical level of meaning to be uncovered. 

When hearing the sound of hooves on cobblestone outside your window, it's reasonable to assume it's someone on horseback and not that there's a unicorn passing by, or that a member of a sinister cult or secret government agency must have released a zebra from the local zoo in order to spread panic and confusion amongst members of the general public.

The law of parsimony helps us understand and appreciate this by taming the wildness of our imagination and curbing our enthusiasm for the elaborate and fanciful. As Bertrand Russell put it in his own reworking of Occam's razor: "Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities."         

Having said that, I realise that Occam's razor is itself a metaphysical assumption; that there's little empirical evidence that the world is actually straightforward and transparent, or that simple accounts are more inherently true than weirdly complex ones. 

I also concede that Occam's razor is an inherently conservative device that tends to reinforce the general consensus of opinion and cut out opportunities to speculate, fantasise, and poetically re-imagine events. Artists, and those who like to daydream and listen to the (irrational) murmurs of their unconscious, as well as pataphysicists for whom knowledge is not only complex, but ambiguous, paradoxical and radically inconsistent, will naturally have an instinctive dislike for it.    

But, nevertheless, I think the scientific method and the axioms upon which it's based - there's an objective reality that is subject to natural laws which we can understand - is something worth defending, particularly in this present time of resurgent religiosity. And Occam's razor generally lends support to these axioms (although, of course, it doesn't prove them).

Afternote

An article by Chris Chatham that shows the limitations (or bluntness) of Occam's razor - particularly within a scientific context - has been brought to my attention by Simon Solomon: click here. It seems that Whitehead offers us the best perspective on this topic: "The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.'" 

Unravelling the Mystery of the Sweater Girls 2: The Strange Case of Francine Gottfried

Francine Gottfried being escorted by two plainclothes police officers

through crowds of men on the way to work in September 1968

Photo: New York Daily News / Getty Images

Francine Gottfried, a former clerical worker in New York City's financial district, isn't remembered by many people today. But, for a fortnight in September 1968, she was the talk of the town and dubbed by the press as Wall Street's Sweater Girl after increasing numbers of men began watching and following her as she walked to work, dressed in a manner that emphasised her curvaceous figure.

And when I say increasing numbers of men, I mean a lot of men; crowds of men forming spontaneously, like bees round a honey pot, in what we would today term flash mob fashion, all hoping for the chance to perversely gaze upon Francine's ample bosom.

Miss Gottfried had started work at a data processing centre of a large bank in May of '68. By late August, a small group of voyeurs had noticed her and the fact that she always passed them at the same time each day. Word soon spread amongst their friends and colleagues and the number of men who came to observe her grew exponentially larger. By mid-September, an estimated 2,000 men were waiting to catch a glimpse of the 21-year-old Jewish girl.

By this point, the crowd itself had become the phenomenon, drawing more and more people to it. On September 19, it was estimated that a crowd of over 5,000 financial district employees spent their lunchtime waiting for a 5' 3" brunette to exit the BMT station dressed in a tight yellow sweater and a miniskirt. Such was the chaos, that the police were obliged to close the streets and escort Francine to work. Trading on Wall Street was virtually suspended and the press reported that dignified brokers had seemingly lost their minds.

The following day, the crowd had doubled in size and over 10,000 spectators waited for Miss Gottfried. Unfortunately, their wait was in vain, as her boss had called her and requested she stay home until the mania passed. Publicists attempted to find a suitable replacement for Francine, including the stripper, Ronnie Bell, who worked at a local burlesque house. But the magic spell was broken and the fuss died down as quickly as it had arisen.

Sadly, Francine's hopes of landing a modelling contract and possible movie career came to nothing and she faded back into obscurity; though not before she got to have dinner with the Apollo 10 astronauts and Esquire magazine presented her with a Dubious Achievement award. Accounts of the crowd-gathering phenomenon she triggered also appeared in a number of sociological studies.

What this tells us about sexual politics - and male sexual behaviour in particular - I'll leave for readers to decide. Instead, I'll close, if I may, with a line from Bob Hope, who, when asked to comment on the mysterious appeal of the Sweater Girl, replied: "I don't know, but that's one mystery I'd sure like to unravel."

To read part one of this post, please click here.

Unravelling the Mystery of the Sweater Girls

Lana Turner as Mary Clay in They Won't Forget 

(dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1937): the original Sweater Girl

When fondly recalling those busty beauties of the 1940s and 50s, in their tight cashmere sweaters worn over highly structured, conically shaped bullet-bras designed to lift and separate, we often think of movie stars such as Jayne Mansfield, Jane Russell, and - of course - Lana Turner (described by one critic as the most glamorous woman in the history of cinema).

But the Sweater Girl was by no means merely a figment of the Hollywood imagination.

In fact, the above actresses were merely adopting what was already a popular look amongst bobby-soxers who desired maximum projection; a youthful fashion trend viewed with alarm by those who saw aggressively pointed breasts as a sure sign of moral decline. As a concerned police chief famously asked: What kind of wives and mothers would these girls become? 

Of course, no one thought to ask at the time what kind of husbands and fathers breast fetishizing men might make; they were allowed and encouraged to indulge their culturally sanctioned mazophilia and carry on ogling young women in the streets, in the pages of pin-up magazines, and on screen.

Indeed, this all-American obsession and national pastime wasn't to peak until the autumn of 1968, when a young office worker named Francine Gottfried briefly achieved celebrity status as Wall Street's Sweater Girl ...


Click here to go to part two of this post on the strange case of Francine Gottfried.

Notes on Identity Politics and Intersectionality

Marc-Édouard Nabe: Lawrence assis (2007)

Ink and watercolour (24 x 32 cm)

marcedouardnabe.com

The ideal man! And which is he, if you please? 

There are other men in me, besides this patient ass who sits here in a tweed jacket. 

I'm not a fan of identity politics whose adherents, it seems to me, start off by affirming their difference, only to end by reinforcing a narrow, narcissistic and needy conception of self based upon a reactive morality that fetishizes victimhood and reinforces the very marginalization that they complain about via a process of auto-segregation. Thus, whenever I turn on the TV and hear some politician or activist begin a sentence with the words 'Speaking as ...' X, Y, or Z, I immediately want to throw something at the screen.

It's not that I demand people think of themselves as impersonal abstractions founded upon some fantasy of a universal subject. But I don't want them to speak either as if they were not only defined but determined by some piece of bio-cultural fate and had entirely forgotten the strategic (and ironic) nature of their essentialism. 

What, then, do I want?

I suppose it's a kind of ontological intersectionality. That is to say, I want individuals to acknowledge that the self is a crossroads amidst a dark forest; that the grammatical unity of the 'I' disguises a vibrant plurality of often competing forces. Of course, this is something that many poets, philosophers, and theorists have acknowledged, including D. H. Lawrence in his astonishing Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) ...

From the opening line of his chapter on Benjamin Franklin, Lawrence makes it clear what his theme is going to be: I am many men. And because his self is multiple (and non-ideal) in nature, he can never be perfected. At the very least, we are all of us double and the self we like to think we are and present to the world is twinned with "a strange and fugitive self shut out and howling like a wolf".

This, I think, calls for a queer politics; but it problematizes any naive (single-issue) identity politics. Those who would speak as if they were destined only by their race, gender, or sexuality, for example, deny their own complexity and, in so doing, restrict their own freedom; for how can anyone be free, without an illimitable background? 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Benjamin Franklin', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 

The original 1923 text is available online thanks to the University of Virginia and can be accessed by clicking here.

Readers interested in the theory of intersectionality as conceived by Kimberlé Crenshaw and in how it's currently used - and misused - within contemporary debate, might like to read Eleanor Robertson's article 'Intersectional-what? Feminism's problem with jargon is that any idiot can pick it up and have a go', in The Guardian, (30 Sept 2017): click here. 

I realise, of course, that I would probably be one of the idiots that Robertson refers to; i.e. one who has appropriated a term without really caring about its origin, or showing due fidelity to its original meaning.