Benevolence

Jean-Michel Zazzi: Friedrich Nietzsche (2019) 

artsper.com

To read what one commentator writes, you'd think that Nietzsche's entire project (assuming it's possible to ascribe such a notion of purity and wholeness to his work) was based on the concept of Schadenfreude and that the greatest thing about his revaluation of values was that it allowed one to revel in the misfortune of others - including malignant ex-girlfriends - in good conscience.*

That would be very much mistaken, however.

For whilst it's true that Nietzsche rejects the Christian virtue of pity [Mitleiden] and speaks of the positive role that cruelty has played in the formation of man (often using Grausamkeit as synonymous with Kultur), so too does he privilege terms such as Wohlwollen in his text - what we in English-speaking countries term benevolence.

For Nietzsche, like the rest of us, doesn't merely 'deal in damage and joy', he also deals in goodwill and affirms the idea of having a cheerful, friendly disposition. This is particularly true in his mid-period writings.

In Human, All Too Human, for example, Nietzsche writes of those little, daily acts of kindness that, although frequent, are often overlooked by those who study morals and manners; those smiling eyes and warm handshakes, etc., that display what D. H. Lawrence terms phallic tenderness, but Nietzsche simply calls politeness of the heart.**  

These things have played a far more important role in the micropolitics of everyday life and the construction of community than those more celebrated virtues such as sympathy, charity, and self-sacrifice.

Of course the power of malice also plays a key role in human relations - and Nietzsche affirms an emotional economy of the whole - but, as I have said, it's profoundly mistaken to read from this that he is some kind of sadistic psychopath.

In other words, moving beyond good and evil does not mean behaving like an unethical little shit and I would remind Dr Solomon that "the state in which we hurt others is rarely as agreeable [...] as that in which we benefit others; it is a sign that we are still lacking power".**

Criminal lunatics who carry out atrocities and seek to justify their actions by calling on Nietzsche's name are invariably bad and/or partial readers; individuals as confused in their thinking as they are unrestrained and immoderate in their actions.  

* See the remarks made by Simon Solomon following my recent post on the subject of schadenfreude: click here.

** Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1996), I. 2. 49.

** Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), I. 13. 

Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude is a form of malicious mirth that takes cruel delight in another's misfortune, failure, or humiliation. Nietzsche describes this complex emotional response as all too human, in contrast to Schopenhauer who assigns it a diabolical origin. Either way, there's no exact English term for it; I've never heard anyone use epicaricacy.

However, this isn't to say that the English, for all their talk of fair play and siding with the underdog, don't also take pleasure in seeing others - particularly successful individuals from a humble origin - lose out or be brought back down to earth with a bump, in order to remind them of who they were and who they essentially remain.

In other words, schadenfreude has an unpleasant moral component wrapped inside its apparent immorality. We laugh and jeer and sneer at others in order to teach them a lesson; schadenfreude is a form of judgement and punishment; i.e. morally corrective justice.

And it's for that reason - rather than the cruelty as such - that I don't like it: torpedo the ark means (amongst other things) to have done with judgement. Further, one's own natural indifference to how others fare means that I never really experience schadenfreude any more than its opposite, compassion or, keeping things in German, Mitgefühl.* I might not feel your pain or suffering - but I won't laugh at it either. 

So - just to be clear on this - I don't have a moral objection to schadenfreude; rather I object to it as a form of moralism. And perhaps also as a form of faint-heartedness and bourgeois compromise. For whilst observing others suffer may well have a tonic effect on the soul of man, as Nietzsche suggests, it's making others suffer which is where the true festival of cruelty begins ...  

*It might be noted that this indifference also extends towards my own welfare or fate. Partly this is punk nihilism and partly it's informed by the ethics of Stoicism. There are also elements of Sade, Masoch, Lawrence and Larry David mixed up in there too (apathy, coldness, insouciance, and the curbing of enthusiasm). None of this says anything whatsoever about my own sense of self-esteem.           

See: Tiffany Watt Smith, Schadenfreude: the Joy of Another’s Misfortune, (Profile Books / Wellcome Collection, 2018). See also her article in The Guardian entitled 'The secret joys of schadenfreude' (14 Oct 2018): click here. 

Thanks to Simon Solomon for provoking this post.

A Character Study from The Plumed Serpent: Cipriano (First Man of Huitzilopochtli)

General Joaquín Amaro (1889-1952)

Mexican revolutionary and military reformer

According to an explanatory note in the Cambridge edition of The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence probably based the character of General Viedma - or Don Cipriano - on several real-life figures from the time, including Emiliano Zapata and Joaquín Amaro.

Like the latter, for example, Cipriano was an officer in the Mexican army, of native Indian origin (Zapotec), who possessed a real talent not only for military strategy but also institutional reform. Unlike Amaro, however, Cipriano also had "a little black beard like an impériale" and was fluent in English (having been educated in London and Oxford), even if the language sounded "a little stiff on his soft tongue" [21].

Lawrence being Lawrence - that is to say, a racial fetishist with a particular penchant for dark-skinned, dark-eyed foreign men who still have something of the goat-footed god Pan about them - he's very keen to emphasise Cipriano's ethnicity and how, underlying his superficial assurance and good manners, lay something fierce and primitive; he was a man who seemed to be "perpetually suspecting an ambush" [22] and had a savage gleam in his black, inhuman eyes.     

Perhaps that's why Kate, the 40-year-old Irishwoman at the cente of this peculiar work, is both drawn to him and repulsed: Cipriano could appear to be awfully nice and kind, but he also had a "heavy, black Mexican fatality about him" [24] that made her want to get away from him. Like Michael Howard, Cipriano has something of the night about him. His eyes were not merely dark-coloured, they were as black as jewels "into which one could not look without a sensation of fear" [67].    

Kate observes him at the dinner table:

"His face was changeless and intensely serious, serious almost with a touch of childishness. But the curious blackness of his eyelashes lifted so strangely, with such intense unconscious maleness from his eyes, the movement of his hand was so odd, quick, light [...] and his dark-coloured lips were so helplessly savage [...] that her heart stood still. There was something undeveloped and intense in him, the intensity and the crudity of the semi-savage. She could well understand the potency of the snake upon the Aztec and Maya imagination. Something smooth, undeveloped, yet vital in this man suggested the heavy-ebbing blood of reptiles in his veins." [67]

And this is despite the fact his god-father was an English bishop who oversaw his education and welfare and wanted him to become a priest. Still, Kate is also alert to what she imagines to be the "dark, surging passion of tenderness" [71] that Cipriano is capable of. She puts this down to his being an Indian. However, as Lawrence suggests in his next novel that even English gamekeepers can feel such tenderness, perhaps it's rooted more in phallic masculinity than race. 

One day, Kate and Cipriano have tea together. Again, Lawrence can't resist the opportunity to write of the latter's eyelashes and the way that his eyebrows tilted "with a barbarian conceit, above his full, almost insolent black eyes" and it's clear with whom his erotic fascination lies. Indeed, poor Kate is dismissed as "one of the rather plump Irishwomen, with soft brown hair and hazel eyes" [81] - i.e., of no real sexual interest.   

She may have her own feminine charms and mystery, but, for Lawrence, Cipriano is the main attraction; "he had a good deal of magnetic power", undiminished by his years spent in England. Indeed, his education "lay like a film of white oil on the black lake of his barbarian consciousness." Despite his diminutive stature, Cipriano also has real presence and substantial being: "He made the air around him seem darker, but richer and fuller" [82].

For Kate this makes Cipriano curious, but it quickly has the potential to become suffocating. And malevolent - even satanisch.

Although, clearly, his real love is for Ramón (whom he finds both compelling and incomprehensible), Cipriano decides he wants to marry Kate. He looks at her with "a strange lingering desire in his black eyes" [187] and sees her as a fresh-faced flower, despite her age. He doesn't merely want Kate to become his wife, however, he wants her to become the incarnation of a goddess by his side - just as he is the incarnation of the Aztec deity Huitzilopochtli, armed with a serpent of fire.

The absurdity of this idea makes Kate laugh. Kate informs Cipriano that it is her intention never to remarry and that she doesn't much feel like a goddess in a Mexican pantheon. But still she can't help admiring his body: "How dark he was, and how primitively physical, beautiful and deep-breasted, with soft, full flesh!" [201]

For all that, it's Ramón who really tickles her fancy and touches her inside. Cipriano seems only to offer her submission and horror. But then, as he says, why not accept a bit of horror in life; horror is real and belongs to an economy of the whole. He feels a bit of horror for her too; her light-coloured eyes and white hands. Horror is what adds spice to life; it gives the "'sharp, wild flavour'" [236].

Kate is not entirely convinced by Cipriano's uncanny logic, however. In fact, she think's he's simply trying to exert his will and get one over on her: "Really, he seemed sinister to her, almost repellant [...] how could she marry Cipriano, and give her body to [...] death?" [236, 246]    

Ramón sometimes sees something of this deathliness in Cipriano too; he knows him to be a man who thrills at the thought of power and longs for a holy war fought with the entire world if need be. (The German hotel manager who describes their neopagan revolution as just another expression of national socialism isn't far wrong.) If he can appear comical, ultimately the demonical little figure of Don Cipriano is not to be laughed at. 

When next they meet, Kate again notices the physical presence of Cipriano:

"Cipriano  made her a little uneasy, sitting beside him. He made her physicaly aware of him, of his small but strong and assertive body, with its black currents and storms of desire. The range of him was very limited, really. The great part of his nature was just inert and heavy, unresponsive, limited as a snake or lizard is limited. But within his own heavy, dark range he had a curious power. Almost she could see the black fume of power which he emitted, the dark, heavy vibration of his blood, which cast a spell over her." [310] 

Once Kate has tuned into the ancient phallic Pan mystery, she can conceive of marrying Cipriano, with his small hands, slanting eyes, and the "tuft of black goat's beard hanging light from his chin" [311] ... Not to mention his huge erection that rises suddenly in the twilight when the power of his blood is up and to which Kate is obliged to submit with supreme passivity, as beneath an over-arching absolute.

This, for all its highfalutin religio-literary language, is Lawrence (as narrator) simply indulging his BBC fantasies. He uses the character of Kate as a kind of sexual go-between between himself and the figure of Cipriano. It's odd to say the least, but something he often does in his fiction.      

Eventually, Cipriano achieves his deification and becomes-Huitzilopochtli. Even his soldiers can see the change in him; as if he has grown wings with dark feathers, like an eagle. And how does he exercise his second strength? Again, strangely - but not surprisingly, knowing Lawrence - he makes all his men cook and clean and do their own laundry, grow vegetables and paint the barracks. 

Doing chores and jobs about the place was Lawrence's idea of fun - and Cipriano's method of instilling some discipline in his men. For that was what was needed; not machine discipline, of course, imposed by outside authority, but sacred inner discipline. He also encourages them to dance the old dances to the beat of the drum, so that they might gain power over the living forces of the earth. This they do semi-naked, smeared with oil and red earth-powder, their limbs glistening with sweat.  

 

Cipriano loved to dance and loved also to watch his men dancing by firelight. He also enjoyed making long marches across the wild Mexican country and camping out beneath the stars. If he and his soldiers captured any bandits, Cipriano would strip them and tie them up. Those he judged to be beyond redemption he would stab with a knife to the heart, saying "'I am the red Huitzilopochtli'" [366].

Work - Dance - March - Camp - Kill: this, then, was the life of a soldier under the command of General Viedma. His was an elite force who threw off the drab uniform of regular troops and "dressed in white with the scarlet sash and the scarlet ankle cords, and carrying the good, red and black sarape" [366] (when not naked and displaying their dark and ruddy bodies).   

If all this sounds a little insane - like something from Apocalypse Now - that's because it is. Things don't get any less disturbing when Cipriano as the Living Huitzilopochtli has his coming out ceremony. To the sound of drums and brightly-coloured fireworks, he emerges from the church in his black and scarlet sarape carrying a torch and with "three green parrot feathers erect on his brow" [372].

Meanwhile, the semi-naked Men of Huitzilopochtli dance around like demons. After a song or two, the ceremony climaxes with an execution of prisoners, two of whom have their necks broken by guards and three of whom are stripped and blindfolded before Cipriano personally stabs each of them in the chest - once, twice, and three times for luck! This is followed by acts of blood play within the church (no women allowed) that make, if I'm honest, pretty uncomfortable reading.

No doubt Kate is right and Ramón and Cipriano act in good faith and all sincerity - but that's the problem, isn't it? Fascists and religious fanatics always believe in the rightness of their own deeds and their eyes always sparkle with conviction. And Kate is surely mistaken to believe that it's okay if Cipriano kills people and commits numerous other atrocities because his "flame is young and clean" [394] and he is of the gods.    

Inevitably, the novel ends with a kind of war. This releases a certain thrilling energy into the air, but "there was a sense of violence and crudity in it all, a touch of horror" [420], which rather made Cipriano happy "in his curious Indian way" [421]. Strangely, denying his wife Kate clitoral orgasm - or "the white ecstasy of frictional satisfaction" [422] - in the name of the greater sex also makes him happy.   

In sum, then, what are we to think of Don Cipriano, the First Man of Huitzilopochtli and fascist religious fanatic who loves dancing and dressing up almost as much as he loves killing helpless prisoners with a knife?

I said at the beginning he's a kind of composite character made up of various figures, and these surely include fictional psychopaths like Colonel Kurtz, as I hinted earlier. Indeed, it's interesting that Lawrence uses the phrase heart of darkness at one point, as if remembering Conrad's magnificent short novel and anticipating Francis Ford Coppola's movie 55 years later.   

The following, said by Kurtz, could quite as easily have been said by Cipriano discussing his own followers, or, indeed, Heinrich Himmler referring to members of his beloved SS: "You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling ..."

It's a little depressing to think that, for a while at least, Lawrence was to insist The Plumed Serpent was his greatest achievement and that he meant every word of it ... 

See: D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. 

Note: readers who liked this post might find an earlier one, on the queer love affair between Ramón and Cipriano that lies at the heart of Quetzalcoatl (the early version of The Plumed Serpent), also of interest: click here.

  

On the Desecration of Altars and the Return of Strange Idols

Image: CNS / Paul Haring 

angelusnews.com

News of the removal and destruction of South American pagan idols from a church in Rome by a group of ultra-conservative Catholic militants obviously caught my attention ...

To be fair, whilst the police are treating this as a theft (and possible hate crime), I think those responsible for throwing the figurines into the River Tiber have a religiously valid case for so doing.

For what might appear to the innocent eye to simply be a wooden statue of a pregnant indigenous woman, is, of course, a representation of Pachamama, the fertility goddess who, in Inca mythology, presides over planting and harvesting and sustains life (even if she also has the power to cause earthquakes).

Placing it alongside other pagan artefacts inside a church just round the corner from St. Peter's is, therefore, a provocative and sacreligious act. There's even a commandment covering the matter and, if I'm not mistaken, members of all three Abrahamic religions, take idolatry or the worship of false gods extremely seriously.

So, whilst I'm not a Catholic, I can sympathise. And, if I were a Catholic, I'd find the presence of an Amazonian Earth Mother squatting in the place where one might reasonably expect to find the Virgin Mary kneeling at prayer, pretty outrageous too. The fact that the Vatican approves of this kind of thing would only serve to infuriate me still further.   

However, as I say, I'm not a Catholic. In fact, as a Nietzschean, my love and loyalty very much lies elsewhere. So the above story made me smile rather than gnash my teeth in rage. It also made me think of a scene in Lawrence's novel The Plumed Serpent, in which Ramón and the men of Quetzalcoatl remove the holy images from the church at Sayula and replace them with their own neopagan bits and pieces as part of their coup d'état and revaluation of all values.

Ramón has assured the local bishop that this is an act of reverence; as is the destruction of the Christian relics. But the fact that it's carried out by armed soldiers led by the demoniacal little fellow Cipriano with his black inhuman eyes and goatee surely gives us pause for thought ... Even the Nazi book burning was regarded by those responsible as an auto-da-fé and a necessary cleansing of the spirit.   

See: D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Chapters XVII and XVIII. 

Synthetic Aesthetics: Notes on the Genius of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

Illustration of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg from Dezeen 

the online architecture, interiors, and design magazine

dezeen.com

Is Daisy Ginsberg the most interesting artist working in the world today? She's certainly a strong contender for the title and would probably get my vote.

For the past decade she has explored and experimented with the possibilities of synthetic biology, creating works and curating exhibitions that critically examine the relationship between art, science and nature, whilst researching the human desire to enhance the world (her Ph.D. completed in 2017 was on how our dream of a better, brighter future materially shapes the present).

Curently resident at Somerset House Studios, Ginsberg's recent projects have included one on the possibility of wilding Mars for the benefit of new plant species (rather than terraforming it to the advantage of man); one on recreating the scent of extinct flowers from remnants of their DNA (whilst simutaneously resurrecting a notion of the sublime); and - opening at the end of this month - an installation entitled Machine Auguries that highlights the silencing of the natural world via the use of deepfake birdsong to create a synthetic dawn chorus.

Working with the sound designer Chris Timpson, Ginsberg has combined recordings of real birds with machine generated responses - the latter only being distinguishable from the former due to a deliberately inbuilt distortion. It's both a very beautiful and heartbreakingly depressing work that raises awareness of the fact that we have lost 40 million birds in the UK in just 50 years and that many once-familiar and much-loved species continue to be in decline.

There's no doubting that artificially intelligent machines can generate many fantastic images and sounds - things that are more real than real -  but, personally, I would hate to live in a virtual world without actual flowers, birdsong, or the sound of children playing.   

Notes

'Machine Auguries', by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, is part of the exhibition 24/7: A Wake-Up Call for Our Non-Stop World, at the Embankment Galleries, Somerset House, London, 31 October 2019 - 23 February 2020. Click here for more details.

Readers interested in knowing more about Ginsberg and her astonishing body of work, should visit her website: daisyginsberg.com

Deepfake and the Triumph of Lying

Deepfakes generated from a single image by researchers at Samsung's AI lab in Moscow: 
Egor Zakharov / Aliaksandra Shysheya / Egor Burkov / Victor Lempitsky

For those who don't know, deepfake is a technique using artificial intelligence to synthesise reality.

Pre-existing sounds and images are combined or superimposed on one another in often humorous, sometimes malicious, always slightly uncanny new ways, creating extremely convincing new sounds and images that are, as Baudrillard would say, hyperreal (i.e., more real than real).

The technology that enables this, developed over the last twenty years or so, is increasingly sophisticated and the game has moved way beyond a few pervy nerds swapping homemade videos online in which the faces of celebrities such as Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, or Emma Watson are placed on the bodies of porn actresses.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there are calls in the UK and US to criminalise the making and distribution of deepfake material; the real concern being fake news, rather than fake nudes, as politicians have also been subject to deepfake trickery. Some commentators fear this could have damaging (even dangerous) consequences, technology making it impossible for us to determine the truth of what we see and hear.*

On the other hand, fears about new technology have a long history and are often overstated. Perhaps deepfake will oblige us all to think a little more artistically and critically and not just assume the real as a pregiven or something fixed. And besides, hasn't life always unfolded within some kind of generative adversarial network and aren't the only real people ones who have never existed?

*Note: anyone who wants to give deepfake technology a go before it's banned, can download FakeApp, which allows for the creation of photorealistic face swapping videos, or open-source alternatives such as Faceswap.

Heide and the Naked Snail (Was ist das Deutsche Genie?)

Enjoying lunch with the artist Heide Hatry, I am reminded of the so-called German genius; that gewisse Etwas which makes German art, music, literature and philosophy not only so powerful and seductive, but also so queer. 

But what is the deutsche Genie?

A few years ago, the intellectual historian Peter Watson published a huge book on this topic - almost a 1000 pages in length - and yet he never quite managed to put his finger on what's so unique about the German spirit.

It seems a little silly, therefore, for me to try and say what it is in a short post like this (written in between courses and whilst Heide has gone to powder her nose). But I think the answer has something to do with the fact that the German word for slug is Nacktschnecke. 

There's a beautiful but slightly mad and misleading logic to this compound noun that seems essentially German ...

See: Peter Watson, The German Genius (Simon and Schuster, 2010).

They're in the Trees! (In Praise of Risky Play)

Two Blonde Beasts in a Tree 

 (SA/2019)

It's conker season - a time of the year that brings back fond memories of childhood, throwing bricks and sticks at the horse chestnut trees lining Chatteris Avenue and, if feeling particularly brave, attempting to clamber up them in order to better access their treasures.    

Today, children don't bother collecting conkers; nor do they seem to climb trees, or even go outdoors very much. We live in an increasingly risk-averse culture of health and safety in which unsupervised activity - or what used to simply be called play - is socially unacceptable.

And that, surely, can't be good ...?

In fact, the eradication of genuine play - understood as an inherently joyous but sometimes risky form of freedom - has had a profoundly crippling and depressing effect on children.

Modern parents, teachers, and other childminders may not like it, but children like to climb trees, swing on ropes, ride bikes, handle knives, jump in water, play with fire, throw stones, wrestle, explore abandoned buildings, and generally get up to mischief. And they like to do so without wearing crash helmets and other protective forms of clothing - for even cuts and bruises and grazed knees are an important part of having fun and growing up.          

In other words, forms of risky play have developmental and evolutionary value and can therefore be observed in other young mammals, not just human youngsters. Sometimes, rarely, it can result in serious injury and - very rarely - even have tragic consequences. But the benefits of allowing children to play outdoors and unsupervised far outweigh the dangers; as experiments with rats have clearly demonstrated.     

Children - like rodents - that are deprived of play during a critical phase of their development tend to grow up overly fearful and less adaptive when placed in an unfamiliar environment. Their ability to interact socially with strangers is also not what it might be; they can, for example, be sullen and withdrawn, or quick to anger (i.e., they have trouble regulating their emotions).

Again, that's not good - and surely it's not what anyone wants. Perhaps if children still played conkers and climbed trees, there wouldn't be so many teens stabbing one another, dealing drugs, committing suicide, etc. Such neurotic and psychopathological behaviour surely isn't unconnected to the dramatic decline in childhood play (and the equally dramatic rise of social media).   

The irony of the situation today isn't lost on one researcher in this area:

"We deprive children of free, risky play, ostensibly to protect them from danger, but in the process we set them up for mental breakdowns. Children are designed by nature to teach themselves emotional resilience by playing in risky, emotion-inducing ways. In the long run, we endanger them far more by preventing such play than by allowing it. And, we deprive them of fun."*

* See: Peter Gray, 'Risky Play: Why Children Love It and Need It', Psychology Today (April 07 2014): click here.

Douglas Murray: The Madness of Crowds

Bloomsbury (2019)

Douglas Murray's new book is conveniently divided into four main sections headed by a single term (dramatically printed in bold even on the contents page): Gay - Women - Race - Trans

Each of these terms plays a foundational role within contemporary culture; they are the four pillars of postmodernity; the terms to which all paths lead and all other signifiers refer. Whilst they provide meaning and allow individuals to forge identities, they are also the true causes of the collective insanity that lies at the root of what is happening today.

That - in brief - is Murray's central argument; one with cultural and socio-political aspects, but which essentially remains a philosophical argument to do with the collapse of old values in an age after God, when even the secular narratives that initially promised to fill the void no longer retain our belief.     

The problem is, Murray is not a philosopher; he's a journalist and public intellectual. And so his analysis tends to be common sensical rather than conceptually challenging and when he does mention philosophers by name, it's only ever in passing and nearly always in a dismissive manner - never once does he engage with their ideas or even think it might be worthwhile to do so.

And that's a real problem for me - even if, broadly speaking, I agree with Murray on many points and share some of his concerns. Perhaps if he did read the work of thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze with serious critical attention he might understand a little better why we are where we are and avoid the anglophonic arrogance that he and others of his ilk (Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro) are prone to.          


Gay

According to Murray, Foucault's views on homosexuality are deeply confused. I don't think that's true: I think, rather, that Murray dislikes any degree of ambiguity and, in the end, Foucault is a little too radical and a little too queer for his liking. For whereas gays, such as himself, want social acceptance and pride themselves on their respectability, "queers want to be recognized as fundamentally different to everyone else and to use that difference to tear down the kind of order that gays are working to get into" [37]. 

For Murray, irresponsible queers - along with radical feminists, black militants and trans activists - take things too far; instead of seeking liberal consensus and some form of historical resolution, they just keep banging on about power and politics, identity and intersectionality:

"Such rhetoric exacerbates any existing divisions and each time creates a number of new ones. And for what purpose? Rather than showing  how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren't very good at living with each other." [4]

Murray's fear is that this risks a backlash that would threaten some of the advances made in civil rights and sexual freedoms that he supports: "After all it is not clear that majority populations will continue to accept the claims they are being told to accept and continue to be cowed by the names that are thrown at them if they do not." [232]

That's a very reasonable concern, but, ironically, some critics would argue that his moral conservatism is part of that reaction.    


Women

Murray's wish that we might all just get along is developed in his chapter on women and the relations between the sexes. But he seems to think that we'll never get along until everyone acknowledges the innate biological differences between men and women (including aptitude differences) and accepts these as a basis for ordering society, rather than the "political falsehoods pushed by activists in the social sciences" [65]. 

The problem is, of course, that even biological facts are subject to cultural and socio-political interpretation. And even if we could identify biological facts concerning sexual difference in and of themselves, Murray doesn't provide any reason why they should be inscribed within society and its institutions as natural law; why biology should become not only a determining factor but a destiny.  

Murray also worries far too much about silly slogans, hashtags, and memes on social media that betray an apparent war on men being fought by man-hating fourth-wave feminists: things such as 'men are trash', 'kill all men', and references to 'toxic masculinity', etc.

I'm surprised Mr. Murray has the the time or patience to read the latest tweets from Laurie Penny et al and would suggest he spend less time on social media (which, in an interlude following this chapter, he describes as a massively disruptive force that dissolves the public/private distinction and ultimately leads to group think and mass hysteria).*     

Race

It's not only queers, feminists, and the tech giants of Silicon Valley who are foisting us off with "things [we] didn't ask for, in line with a project [we] didn't sign up for, in pursuit of a goal [we] may not want" [120], it's also those anti-racists who "turn race from one of many important issues into something which is more important than anything else" [122], writes Murray.  

Just when black and white people were learning to live together in the same perfect harmony as the keys on Paul and Stevie's piano, along came critical race theory and black studies to fuck things up with "a newly fervent rhetoric and set of ideas" [122] that don't simply celebrate blackness, but problematise (and even demonise) whiteness.

Why, it's almost as if race were a political issue to do with power and privilege ... things which, as we have noted, Murray wishes to turn a blind eye to; just as he wants us all to be colour-blind: "the idea of which Martin Luther King was dreaming in 1963" [126]. To get beyond race is such a beautiful thought, says Murray. But, obviously, it's not going to happen: not least of all because race isn't simply a question of skin colour, as Murray acknowledges; it's a time bomb.  
 

Trans

Murray writes:

"Among all the subjects in this book and all the complex issues of our age, none is so radical in the confusion and assumptions it elicits, and so virulent in the demands it makes, as the subject of trans [...] trans has become something close to a dogma in record time." [186]

That, unfortunately, seems to be the case: and whilst I have no problem with trans individuals, dogma and/or doxa, should always be challenged - even genderqueer dogma.

Anyway, moving on ... I was fascinated to discover that:

"One of the most striking trends as the trans debate has picked up in recent years is that autogynephilia has come to be severely out of favour. Or to put it another way, the suggestion that people who identify as trans are in actual fact merely going through the ultimate extreme of sexual kink has become so hateful to many trans individuals that it is one of a number of things now decried as hate speech." [196]

This surprised (and disappointed) me as someone who has written positively about autogynephilia and eonism in the past on Torpedo the Ark: click here, for example. Why must everything - even changing sex - be presented as a spiritual journey and an issue to do with human rights?**

Call me old-fashioned, but I'd rather think in terms of desire and seduction, perversion and pathology. And if I were a transwoman, the last thing I'd want to be is some kind of sexless figure like a nun whose newly constructed vagina is a sign of sacrifice and suffering rather than a site of potential pleasure.    

To conclude: The Madness of Crowds is an informative and interesting book, rather than an important and inspired one; a piece of intelligent journalism, rather than a work of philosophy. A book that ends with a call to love, as if it weren't precisely such idealism that got us into the mess we're in today.

Notes

* Murray will later go on to say: "The arrival of the age of social media has done things we still have barely begun to understand and presented problems with which we have hardly started to grapple. The collapse of the barrier between private and public language is one. But bigger even than that [...] is the deepest problem of all: that we have allowed ourselves no mechanisms for getting out of the situation technology has landed us in. It appears able to cause catastrophes but not to heal them, to wound but not to remedy." [174]

One suggests Murray read (or re-read) Heidegger's classic 1954 essay The Question Concerning Technology, which might deepen his thinking on this point and also provide him with a wider perspective. I suspect, however, that Heidegger would be another of those philosophers that he'd dismiss for lacking clarity (though he could hardly accuse the latter of being a crypto-Marxist).  

** Murray provides the answer to this question:

"If people have a particular sexual kink then [...] it is hard to persuade society that it should change nearly all of its social and linguistic norms in order to accommodate those sexual kinks.  [...]
      If trans were largely, mainly or solely about erotc stimulation then it should no more be a cause to change any societal fundamentals than it would be to change them for people who get a sexual thrill from wearing rubber. Autogynephilia risks presenting trans as a softwear [i.e. non-biological] issue. And that is the cause of the turn against it. For - as with homosexuals - there is a drive to prove that trans people are 'born this way'." [198-99] 

Readers might be interested in a post on Douglas Murray's previous book, The Strange Death of Europe (2017): click here.        

Genki: Reflections on the Work of Daikichi Amano

Photo from Human Nature (2012) by Daikichi Amano

daikichiamano.com

Torpedophiles with a good memory might recall that I have previously written about a form of pornography known as tentacle erotica which originated with a famous design by Hokusai called The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (1814): click here. 

Two-centuries on and this dream has been obscenely realised in the work of the photographer and video artist Daikichi Amano - described wittily (if not entirely accurately) by Marilyn Manson as a combination of Jean Cocteau and Jacques Cousteau. 

Other fans of Amano's imagery include the recently appointed chief creative officer at Burberry, Riccardo Tisci, who previously spent a dozen years at Givenchy, unfolding his sensual, romantic, sometimes rather gothic vision, and, perhaps less surprisingly, the filmmaker Gaspar Noé, whose work is often associated with the New French Extremity and analysed in terms of a particularly visceral and sexually violent cinéma du corps.

It might be noted that Michel Houellebecq also refers to Amano in his latest novel, Serotonin (2019). However, as the narrator-protagonist, Labrouste, describes one video of a Japanese girl holding the tentacles of an octopus coming out of a toilet bowl with her teeth as the most disgusting thing he's ever seen, it's uncertain as to whether Houellebecq's a fan of naked girls covered in eels, worms, and insects, or fucking the denizens of the deep. 

Personally, I'm more than happy for Amano to explore his own dark fears and fantasies, fusing the human body with the natural world and finding new grotesque forms of beauty rooted in the mythology of traditional Japanese culture and the iconography of contemporary Japanese eroticism.

The problem is, thanks to I'm a Celebrity ... I find it difficult to take the work very seriously (the thought of Ant and Dec sniggering in the background is fatal to one's amorous interest).  

Michel Houellebecq: Serotonin

Front cover of the English hardback edition

William Heinemann (2019)

In the end, even your favourite writers let you down. And so Michel Houellebecq and his new novel Serotonin ...

Maybe he's tired of producing fiction; maybe success makes lazy. Or maybe his porno-nihilistic schtick is prone to some kind of law of diminishing returns. I don't know. But I do know this is a pretty feeble addition to what remains an impressive body of work and whilst the narrator-protagonist, Labrouste, needed his small, white anti-depressant pills to prevent him from dying of sadness, I felt in need of something to stop me from drifting off with boredom at times as a reader.

Ultimately, the problem with creating unsympathetic characters is that they're, well, unsympathetic - so they had better have something interesting to tell us and I'm really not sure that Labrouste does; unless, that is, one is interested in the commercial availability of hummus in French supermarkets (pretty good); the fate of French dairy farming in a globalised economy (pretty dire); the condition of his cock (mostly flaccid, which is unfortunate as this seems to be the core of his being).     

Having said that, there are plenty of things to enjoy in the novel. For example, I like the casual references to Heidegger, Bataille, and Blanchot, as if everyone will be familiar with these names dropped as easily as the names of high-end fashion brands and types of French cheese. 

I also like the fact that the Japanese photograper and video artist Daikichi Amano is given a mention and can imagine many readers quickly googling the name to see if he's real or just a fictional character made up by Houellebecq (in the context of the novel, of course, he's both). Considering Yuzu's fascination with Amano's work, it's surprising that her zoosexual adventures were confined to canines.

Fascinating too the central conceit of one day just walking away from one's old life; of severing all connections with family and friends and voluntarily going missing. A transgressive act - but not a criminal one (in either France or the UK) and Houellebecq / Labrouste is right to register his surprise:

"It was startling that, in a country where individual liberties had tended to shrink, legislation was preserving this one, which was fundamental - in my eyes even more fundamental, and philosopically more troubling, than suicide." [47]

If only for sentences like this, Serotonin is worth reading and it's always nice to be reminded that in less than a day one can erase or reconfigure one's entire life. Nice, too, to discover that two people can be buried in the same coffin.  
 

As for Labrouste's observations on love and sexual politics as played out between men and women, these didn't much interest - despite being placed within a Platonic-Kantian context to do with human perfection via the loving fusion of two into one and the attainment of mutual respect. That said, this passage is one that caught my attention as a xenophile:

"I had carnal knowledge of girls from different countries, and had come to the conclusion that love can only develop on the basis of a certain difference, that like never falls in love with like, and in practice many  differences may come into play: an extreme difference in age, as we know, can give rise to unimaginably violent passions; racial difference remains effective; and even mere national and linguistic difference should not be scorned." [81-2] 

This is true, I think, and is a truth long recognised and exploited within the pornographic imagination. I'm not sure that the lines that follow are also true, but they are certainly worthy of consideration:

"It is bad for those who love each other to speak the same language, it is bad for them to truly understand one another, to be able to communicate through words, because the vocation of the word is not to create love but to engender division and hatred, the word separates as it produces, while a semi-formless, semi-linguistic babble [...] creates the basis for unconditional and enduring love." [82]

When not reminiscing about lost loves and slowly coming to the realisation that it's the past and not the future that engulfs and eventually kills us, Labrouste likes to express his affection for cows and spy with binoculars on a German paedophile; "basically I think I would have liked to be a cop, insinuating myself into people's lives, penetrating their secrets" [184] ... A cop, or a novelist.  

He also tries (unsuccessfully) to counsel an old college friend, Aymeric, a farmer who, like many others, has fallen on hard times and is angry about it to the point of taking up arms. It's at this point in the novel that Houellebecq once again shows his uncanny ability to tap into the spirit of the times; anticipating the gilets jaunes movement and its rage against free trade, liberal elitism, and their own feelings of impotence and loss.

Suddenly, as James Lasdun notes in his review, "the book's seemingly haphazard elements begin working together" and Houellebecq no longer disappoints ...

He could (perhaps should) have ended the novel with Aymeric's violent suicide and the fatal confrontation between farmers and the security police (CRS). But Houellebecq writes on for another 75 pages or so, as Labrouste stalks an old girlfriend (Camille) in the hope that he and she might get back together and find the happiness they deserve.

First, however, he plans to murder her four-year-old son: "the first action of a male mammal when he conquers a female is to destroy all her previous offspring to ensure the pre-eminence of his genotype" [265]. Of course, not being a stag or a Brazillian macaque - or even an early human - Labrouste can't go through with it; instead, he collapses into terminal sorrow and self-pity (though, to be fair, his cortisol levels are as high as his testosterone levels are low).           

In the end, there's nothing for him to do but get fat and watch TV: "I was now at the stage where the ageing animal, wounded and aware of being fatally injured, seeks a den in which to end its life." [291]

What worries me - after 1,285 days in Essex exile and already being ten years older than Labrouste - is the thought that I'm also at this stage; will I too suddenly have a desire to read The Magic Mountain and reach the Proustian conclusion that what matters most in this life is not social or cultural activity, nor intellectual stimulation, but young wet pussies?
 

Notes

Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin, trans. Shaun Whiteside, (William Heinemann, 2019).

James Lasdun, 'Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq review - a vision of degraded masculinity', The Guardian (20 Sept 2019): click here to read online.

Pansies: Brief Notes on D. H. Lawrence's Excremental Aesthetic

Georgia O'Keeffe: Detail from  

Black Pansy and Forget-Me-Nots (1926)

brooklynmuseum.org

'The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure; and in the perfume there hovers still the faint strange scent of earth, the under-earth in all its heavy humidity and darkness. Certainly it is so in pansy-scent, and in violet-scent; mingled with the blue of the morning the black of corrosive humus. Else the scent would be just sickly sweet.'

- D. H. Lawrence

Pansies were one of Lawrence's favourite flowers and I can understand why; they're lovely little things, that turn their faces to the sun and backs to the wind.

And their name, of course, is the anglicised version of the French term pensées, meaning thoughts; particularly gay little thoughts, that bloom and fade without care or system.

An excellent name then, as Lawrence realised, for a collection of poems that fill the page "like so many separate creatures, each with a small head and a tail of its own, trotting its own little way".

But thoughts, like flowers, only stay fresh, if they keep their roots "in good moist humus and the dung that roots love". This is true also of objects made by hand, such as a Greek vase:

"If you can smell the dung of earthly sensual life from the potter who made [it], you can still see the vase as a dark, pansily-winking pansy, very much alive. But if you can only see an 'urn' or a 'still unravished bride of quietness', you are just assisting at the beautiful funeral [...] of all pansies."

Alas, many modern people want cut and dried forms of beauty. But a pansy that has been carefully plucked and pressed, which has no faint scent of shit and can no longer make you sneeze, is but a corpse-blossom.

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Draft Introduction to Pansies', The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Appendix 4, pp. 657-58. The opening quotation below the image is from Appendix 6, 'Introduction to Pansies', pp. 663-64.

In using the title Pansies for his 1929 collection of verse, Lawrence was, of course, displaying his own Romantic roots as a poet; Wordsworth references them in his work, for example, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's last published work was an unfinished piece entitled Pansie, a Fragment (1864). 

RoadKill

In the UK, there are over 38 million vehicles, mostly cars, driving along an extensive road network that stretches for about 246,700 miles (i.e., all the way to the moon and a bit beyond).

It's unsurprising, therefore, that each year an estimated one million wild mammals, including badgers, deer, foxes, hedgehogs, rabbits, and squirrels, are slaughtered on UK roads, with many millions more suffering fatal injuries, but managing to leave the scene of the accident and thus evade capture within the official statistics.

As well as the above, as many as ten million birds are also annually sacrificed on the roads; mostly pheasants, but also increasingly rare and endangered species, such as barn owls. Even domestic animals, including beloved pets, aren't safe; around 230,000 cats, for example are killed by cars each year. Sadly, I doubt that anyone even bothers to keep numbers for reptiles and amphibians, as if frogs, newts, and slow worms aren't even worth counting.  

As for human beings - and we too, of course, are not immune to becoming roadkill - there were 1,782 fatalities on UK roads last year and 25,484 serious injuries; numbers that admittedly pale into insignificance when compared to the previous figures given and it's hard to feel much sympathy for car owners who are complicit with the destruction not only of wildlife and the rural landscape, but who have also turned many urban areas into virtual no go zones for pedestrians and severely restricted the outdoor play of children. 

Hopefully, we'll one day reach the conclusion two legs good, four wheels bad and learn how to journey naked and light along the open road, exposed to full contact on two slow feet, as D. H. Lawrence would say.*  


Notes 

* I'm aware Lawrence is speaking figuratively here - about the condition of souls, etc. - but he was obviously no fan of the car, writing elsewhere of the mocking triumph of the motor engine and of traffic flowing through rigid grey city streets in terms of a sinister underworld.

Despite the name being in extremely poor taste, readers might be interested in Project Splatter, coordinated by researchers at Cardiff University, that attempts to quantify and map wildlife roadkill across the UK: click here for details.  

Reflections on a Crane Fly

Tipulidae

I.

There's a higher than usual number of crane flies coming into the house this autumn.

But that's ok with me, because, after dragonflies and butterflies, daddy longlegs are my favourite flies; even though, in reminding me of my childhood, these harmless creatures remind me also of the acts of wanton cruelty carried out against their number of which I'm now a little ashamed. 

Who knows, perhaps in some future hell, demons will pull my limbs off and throw me into a giant web for some enormous spider to devour.

II.

There are over 15,000 different species of crane flies, making them the largest family of all flies. Amazingly, the majority of these were identified by just one man - Charles P. Alexander (no relation).

Clearly, here was someone in love with these long-legged, slender-bodied insects which seem to have such trouble navigating when in flight and often just bump along as if a bit tipsy. 

To describe these alien beings - as one poet describes them - as tiny non-sentient biological automatons, is profoundly objectionable; one might have hoped that this anthropocentrically conceited notion of the bête machine (famously found in Descartes) was long discredited.