29 Feb 2020

Notes on Patricia MacCormack's Ahuman Manifesto Pt. 3: Chapters 4-6

Patricia MacCormack: Professor of Continental Philosophy
Anglia Ruskin University: click here for profile


It's always a bit worrying when an author says that the work that follows is experimental, because - sometimes, not always - that means badly thought through and lazy writing. Still, I doubt that's the case here, so let's investigate MacCormack's occultural and thanatological escape routes from anthropocentrism ...


VI.

Occulture, for those who don't know, is "the contemporary world of occult practice which embraces a bricolage of historical, fictional, religious and spiritual trajectories [...] an unlimited world of imagination and creative disrespect for [...] hierarchies of truth based on myth or materiality, law or science" [95-6] and a ritualistic method of catalysing ahuman becomings.

In other words, its a demonic mix of chaos magick, witchcraft, Lovecraft, and Continental philosophy that aligns itself with feminists, minorities, and nonhuman animals and which leads onto a paradoxically vital form of death activism, which we shall discuss below.

Occulture is also, according to MacCormack, a material and secular practice; a kind of atheism that opposes religious fundamentalism (or moral power and authority) in all forms that perpetuate anthropocentrism. It's compassionate too - for even the demons and monsters invoked by MacCormack conveniently share her ethical concerns.*

All that one needs to do to become a practitioner is read and think a little differently from the mainstream. No other experience is necessary and no teachers are required. It's self-inspirational. However, it's not about self-help, so much as loss of identity and refining the ego towards nothingness (what Deleuze and Guattari term becoming-imperceptible).     

That said, the key idea seems to be "remake the self and remake the world" [106] - though I hope that MacCormack is not suggesting that these projects are linked or one and the same, for that would be to fall into the purest idealism, or what Meillassoux terms correlationism. (To be fair, I'm pretty sure MacCormack is not suggesting that - even if she often writes of neural networks, modes of perception, and environmental systems in the same sentence.)  

Despite once spending a good deal of time at Treadwell's, the truth of the matter is I don't really know enough about chaos magick, or Elder Gods, etc. in order to comment on MacCormack's work in this area. Having said that, I have written fairly extensively on the cunt as a site of loss (where flies and philosophers lose their way), so was very interested to see what she had to say on why the cunt has been deemed "antithetical toward anthropocentrism, particularly phallocentrism" [116]

First thing's first, it's important to note that the cunt is not merely a biological organ; the cunt, in other words, is so much more than an obedient vagina. MacCormack likes to think of it as a kind of demon that incarnates as a viscous, fleshly, mucosal entity; "all the features of femininity despised by patriarchy [...] as abject and horrific" [119]

Alternatively, we might think of the cunt as a monstrous nonhuman animal; a "threshold of internal and external" [122] that is crucially composed of folds; a conceptual gate that grants access to unnatural worlds even while belonging itself to the natural order.

Ultimately, however, the cunt can never be fully known or described; can never have its form and function fixed like the rigid phallus. And it "will not come unless it is desired" [125], says MacCormack - and I don't quite know if she's only making a point about demonic evocation or if this is what passes for a saucy double entendre in the world of occulture.    


VII.

And so we come to death. But this is not just death; this is a life-affirming, ecosophical model of death that is about "the death of the human body in its actual existence more than just a pattern of subjective agency" [141]. This is the death of man (as species) understood as "a necessity for all life to flourish and relations to become ethical" [140].

Which, as I indicated in the first part of this post, is certainly not an idea I'm unfamiliar with or unsympathetic towards. As a thanatologist, I'm perfectly happy to curdle the distinction between life and death, or collapse the binary as MacCormack would say, and I'm pleased to see her discuss her project in relation to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and the Church of Euthanasia - something I did in my own work several years ago.

And if I'm not fully persuaded by the arguments in favour of cannibalism, necrophilia and utilising human corpses as a source of fuel, I'm kind of on board with sodomy, antinatalism, and suicide (as a practice of joy before death). Where Patricia and I part company is on the topic of abolitionism, which seeks to "abolish all interactions with animals based on human superiority presumption" [145], thereby ending vivisection and closing circuses, sea parks and zoos.

For although I don't subscribe to human exceptionalism, as a Nietzschean I do accept that life is founded upon a general economy of the whole in which the terrible aspects of reality - cruelty, violence, suffering, hatred, and exploitation, for example - are indispensable. MacCormack may address this elsewhere in her work, but, as far as I can see, she entirely fails to do so in The Ahuman Manifesto.

Instead, she adopts a fixed, unexamined and, ironically, all too human moral standpoint throughout the book from which to pass judgement (on men, on meat-eaters, on breeders et al). She may push her work in a queer ahuman direction beyond the "constraining systems of capital, signification and normativity" [155], but it's certainly not, alas, beyond good and evil.

Even when she does get a bit Nietzschean, celebrating death as an absolute Dionysian frenzy, for example, she quickly adds a proviso: "the celebration of the corpse and of death here is entirely mutual and consensual" [158]. Ultimately, as she later admits: "I want to create an ahuman thanaterotics based on love, not aggression" [158].

And by that she means free of misogyny, racism, and the angst-ridden pessimism of the typical white male who can only imagine necrophilia and cannibalism in savage, sensational, and pornographic terms - and we don't want that, for this form of "serial-killer necro-cannibalism is a microcosm of normative anthropocentric practice" [160] of the kind that objectifies the world.

In the thanaterotics of love, the corpse can be fucked or served with fava beans and a nice bottle of Chianti, but only if the corpse has not been produced against its own agency via anthropocentric violence. Necro-cannibalism can thus be made perfectly natural and politically correct - and if it is still against the law, that doesn't matter because the law is a white, male Western phallocentric ass that seeks to deny the liberating potential and beauty of death for a variety of reasons (none of them good).

So Patricia says it loud and says it proud: "Go forth and love the dead!" [164]

And if you must eat meat - eat human corpses: "Our world is groaning under the weight of the parasitic pestilence of human life and yet our excessive resource is the human dead [...] a phenomenally cheap, if not free, resource." [162] 

Is this nihilism? No - this is the "only available creative outlet in an impossible situation" [165] and a form of ethical affirmation; it's fun too - and a form of freedom (the freedom to be eaten or become a necrophile's object of desire). After all, even Jesus - whom MacCormack regards as an activist - offered up his flesh for human consumption.   


VIII.

The closing chapter of The Ahuman Manifesto is a kind of apocalyptic conclusion that reminds readers that whilst they are right to have fears about the future, they can still act in the present with "tears of love and joy" [191] streaming down their faces - which is a bit too ecstatic for my tastes; I would rather people showed a little self-discipline and curbed their enthusiasm.    

For MacCormack, there are multiple apocalypses, large and small; the sexist apocalypse that women are born into and where "assault from a young age is expected" [172]; the speciesist apocalypse in which nonhuman animals - especially those that are farmed or enslaved for entertainment - are condemned to lives of abject misery; and even the Brexit apocalypse that shows "fascism can and does win" [174]. (I wish I were making that last example up, but unfortunately I'm not.)

None of these minor apocalypses really interest MacCormack though; she longs for something a bit bigger and regrets that plagues and wars in the past didn't do a better job of finishing off humanity: "For me personally, I am deeply saddened that there has never managed to be an annihilation of the human species ..." [176]. A sentence that seems a long way removed from her preface promise that this is not a misanthropic manifesto. 

Ultimately, there's not much left for us to do now, she says, but manage our extinction and act as kindly caretakers for the planet. Which is all a bit Letzter Mensch sounding, is it not? The last man being the one who is tired of life and seeks only a slow and gentle way out ...

Oddly enough, MacCormack quotes from Zarathustra towards the end of the chapter and suggests that her compassionate model of apocalypse is in tune with his message of creating beyond the self. But, for me, it's hard to see anything very Nietzschean about her ahumanism. Indeed, it's arguably no more than another unfolding of the slave revolt in morals; one that speaks of love and joy, but is shot through with ressentiment and a refusal to accept that nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.


* Note: Zarathustra says that if you take the hump from the hunchback, you take away his soul. I do feel MacCormack does something similar to the demons and monsters she invokes; robbing the former of their horns and the latter of their very monstrousness. I simply can't see why she is so sure that creatures of the underworld and hidden realms also read The Guardian - especially as she is keen to point out that "this cosmos is not [a] happy hippy cosmos but a terrifying one" [122].

See: Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto, (Bloomsbury, 2020). All page numbers given in the text refer to this work.

To read part 1 of this post - notes on the preface and introduction - click here.

To read part 2 of this post - notes on chapters 1 and 2 - click here.


Notes on Patricia MacCormack's Ahuman Manifesto Pt. 2: Chapters 1-2

Cover design by Charlotte Daniels
(Bloomsbury, 2020)


IV.

As Poly Styrene once said: Identity / Is the crisis, can't you see?

And it remains so, even in a world that likes to pretend to be posthuman and fantasises about becoming transhuman. So MacCormack is probably right to start with this question as it whirlpools within contemporary politics and to argue: "It is time for humans to stop being human. All of them." [65]

But that's easier said than done; you can't tell someone who has the flu to just get over it and neither can we just shake off our humanity. What's more, the demand is controversial because there are many who are still waiting for their humanity to be fully recognised and are keen to assert themselves as subjects. As MacCormack notes:

"Identity politics has long been critical of posthuman philosophy's forsaking of identity for metamorphic becomings and transformative post-subjectivity, while posthuman philosophy's many critiques of identity [...] still struggles with how to acknowledge dark histories of oppression without perpetuating the identities to which they were victims." [36]

This conflict, between those who champion identity politics and those who subscribe to poststructuralist philosophy, is a dilemma alright. Though MacCormack claims it's actually a false conflict and to see "no impasse at all" [36]. For we can all move forward (into darkness) and ahumanity as long as we all agree to abandon our anthropocentric conceit and exit the phallo-carnivorous realm of the malzoan. And look! Here's Sistah Vegan to show us the way ...

Ultimately, MacCormack doesn't care about "arguments humans have between themselves" [51] over identity, social justice, or even animal rights; she cares about the "reduction in individual consumption of the nonhuman dead" [51]. If she retains a notion of equality, for example, she acknowledges that it is "as much of a myth as the humanist transcendental subject" [51].   

But better even this myth of equality than structured inequality; hierarchy is always a life-denying form of categorisation that restricts freedom and the potential of the individual to develop. Having said that, MacCormack is contemptuous of the idea that inanimate and inorganic objects might also be accorded a degree of agency; "a tedious inclination in certain areas of posthuman philosophy, where a chair is no different to a cow or a human" [56].

Now, I'm no objected-oriented ontologist, but I'm pretty sure that's an unfair characterisation of their work. Contrary to what MacCormack says, I think those working in this area argue not that all objects are equal, but that they are all equally objects upon a flat ontological field, or what Levi Bryant terms a democracy of objects.

And, as a Nietzschean, I'm very tempted to remind Patricia that being alive is only a very rare and unusual way of being dead and that to discriminate between living beings (cows) and inanimate objects (chairs) is, therefore, a form of prejudice. She'll betray her species (particularly the white male members of such) for the sake of all other organisms, but she'll not go to the wall for objects.

And I can't help seeing that as the point at which her moral vitalism triumphs over her own model of queerness; triumphs over and, indeed, infiltrates: "Queer in my use is [...] about the death of the human in order for the liberation of all life ..." [60] That's one definition, I suppose. And, in as much as queer means rare and unusual, then yes, life is queer - but that surely then includes human life; hasn't she heard that there's nowt so queer as folk?

MacCormack closes her opening chapter with a rather lovely paean to the philosopher and their vulnerability, which, she says, is as crucial as care of the world in its fragility is central to philosophical activism and creativity. The philosopher is also defined by their ever-changing and becoming-other:

"Enhancing or preserving our identities, no matter how minoritarian, may be useful and tactical, but if they are our goal then we are not philosophers. We are anthropocentric humanists ..." [62]

You've got to love sentences like that ...


V.

"This chapter explores ways in which art can be redefined to enhance the ethical nature of all action as expressive, affective, from personal actions to larger-scale activisms." [67]

I have to admit, whenever I hear the word art whilst I don't quickly reach for a gun, I do roll my eyes. Baudrillard was right; at best, all we can do in this era of transaesthetics is act out the comedy of art, just as we keep acting out the comedy of sex after the orgy.

I fear that poor Patricia is going to be disappointed if she pins her hopes on art as something that occupies a "privileged space of knowing/unknowing that separates it from science and philosophy" [69], no matter how she redefines it. I also think she'll ultimately be disappointed by activism - which she believes to be "the most urgently needed action in the world" [69].  

Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe the ahuman will encourage new forms of art and activism, with the latter becoming increasingly creative and thus an art in its own right; maybe the two will collapse into a vital symbiosis and engage with power, without object or aim, "ephemerally remaking [and unmaking] the world to cause beneficial territorial shifts" [75].

Maybe. But probably not. And - for the record - I'm appalled to see this described in the religious terms of hope, faith, and belief - what MacCormack calls non-secular intensities. I mean, c'mon ... I can accept an ethics of care, compassion and even grace (defined by Serres as a letting be and a stepping aside), but I'm not about to embrace the virtue of hope - and it's ironic to see MacCormack affirming something that only serves to prolong human existence.

As for faith, MacCormack writes:

"Like hope, which is never explicitly a set hope 'for' something, faith is not a faith 'in' something but rather a faith that there can be a world that does not behave this way forever [... that] there is more than the anthropocene and anthropocentrism." [77-78]

In other words, MacCormack's ahumanism demands trust in the possibility of an alternative future of which we have no knowledge and for which she cannot provide any persuasive arguments or evidence. That's fine for some, but I'm afraid I'd need a bit more than this sketchy promise before pledging myself to her cause and becoming a believer (or even giving up my sausage and egg McMuffin for breakfast).

But perhaps I just lack imagination (a key term for MacCormack), or the necessary courage to dream and "rise up against the anthropocene and its malignant destructive expressions of political violence and apathetic semiocapitalism which deny the materiality of the organisms who suffer" [86] ...


See: Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto, (Bloomsbury, 2020). All page numbers given in the text refer to this work. 

To read part 1 of this post (notes on the preface and introduction), click here.

To read part 3 of this post (notes on chapters 4-6), click here


Notes on Patricia MacCormack's Ahuman Manifesto Pt. 1: Preface / Introduction

Patricia MacCormack at the launch of  
The Ahuman Manifesto (Bloomsbury, 2020) 
Photo by Keith Keppell

I.

In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that Patricia MacCormack - a Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University and the author of several books, including Cinesexuality (2008) and Posthuman Ethics (2012) - was formerly an acquaintance of mine and that she remains someone I hold in high esteem (even if, as someone who repudiates hierarchy and refuses to accept that some humans are superior to others, she'd probably find such value-laden language objectionable).     

In a sense, then, I regard The Ahuman Manifesto as a friend's book; even if - as I indicate below - there are things in it I find problematic and even if MacCormack probably regards me as just another posturing white male philosopher of whom nothing much can be expected.


II.

According to the Preface, The Ahuman Manifesto is a book that calls for direct and immediate action, rather than thinking, although, surely the latter is a form of such action, is it not? Indeed, MacCormack will later write of her inherent disdain for "any kind of bifurcating system where action is separated from criticism, word is separated from material reality" [5].
 
Still, this call for action does enable readers who have grown impatient with career academics posing as revolutionaries to throw the text across the room in good conscience.

However, if one resists the urge to do so, one discovers that the book is intended to be an optimistic work of joy and radical compassion, with the latter being interpreted as a form of grace to be extended to all life on earth; a counternihilism that affirms (amongst other things) queer feminism, atheist occultism, deep ecology, and human extinction.

In other words, it's ethics, Jim, but not as we know it ...  


III.

"The end of the anthropocene is the opening of the world." [1]

I don't know if that's true, but it's a nice opening sentence and slogan; though obviously not as catchy as Go vegan! Don't breed! which really should've been the subtitle of The Ahuman Manifesto (I can't help feeling the marketing department at Bloomsbury missed a trick there). 

MacCormack is right to suspect that, for many readers, the idea of the death of humanity will be an absurd and troubling proposition. Personally, however, I don't have any problem with it. What nicer thought is there than the Birkinesque vision of a world without people; just uninterrupted grass and a few rabbits sitting around? Having said that, I'm just as happy to imagine a world entirely devoid of all life and don't share MacCormack's insistent vitalism.

She wants an ahuman future, but she also wants to (a) avoid posthuman despair and (b) retain her political commitment to something that seems rather like old fashioned humanism and its values. Thus, cannibalism might be okay, if some people insist on the right to eat meat, but any form of discrimination, such as racism, for example, remains abhorrent (presumably on the grounds that it lacks compassion).             

At the same time, MacCormack rejects any form of identity politics; a peculiarly anthropocentric obsession as she describes it and it's brave of her to differentiate her thinking from some of her most influential contemporaries:

"Yes, I am an anti-racist, pro-queer, anti-ableist feminist while also wanting to rid the world of human subjective schemas altogether in favour of the individuation of life based not on groups, tribes, nations, genders, races and species, while actively critiquing any fetishization of alterity so beloved of much posthuman theory." [21]

I kind of admire this perversity of wanting to challenge everyone and everything even at the risk of being marginalised or branded a traitor to the human race. Not that such a charge would much bother MacCormack, who sees the concept of treachery as an active negation of the negative (our species having allegedly "betrayed the very concept and value of life at its most basic definition" [4]).

Ironically, however, for a woman who makes a virtue out of disloyalty, she stays philosophically faithful to certain privileged thinkers, including Spinoza, Deleuze, and Guattari, drawing upon familiar terms and concepts from these authors; potentia, desire, ecosophy, etc. This is the same kind of language that I formerly subscribed to and there are themes and sentences in The Ahuman Manifesto that made me nostalgic for my own past, rather than excited about the present or particularly hopeful for the future.

Indeed, MacCormack's ahumanism and my own philosophical musings share a good bit in common; cunt-awareness, gothic queerness, thanaterotics ... etc. However, whilst our obsessions and references may be similar, we view things from very different perspectives and come to very different conclusions; I'm not a vegan abolitionist and I don't, for example, share MacCormack's rejection of reason or regard all truth-claims as a form of (male) violence.

I hope, however, to provide the compassionate reading of her text that she asks for and in the same (inconsistent) tone.  


See: Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the end of the anthropocene (Bloomsbury, 2020). All page numbers given in the text refer to this work. 

To read part 2 of this post (notes on chapters 1-2), click here.

To read part 3 of this post (notes on chapters 4-6), click here


23 Feb 2020

Forever Dead and Lovely: Notes on Melanie Pullen's High Fashion Crime Scenes

Melanie Pullen: Untitled (ELLE), 2014 
From the series High Fashion Crime Scenes (2003-17)
If, like me, you love Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse for their drop dead gorgeousness and thanatological interest, then you're also gonna love the work of Melanie Pullen in her photographic series High Fashion Crime Scenes ...


Born in 1975, in New York, but currently living and working in Los Angeles, Pullen grew up in the West Village in a family home regularly visited by poets and painters, including Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. She acquired her first camera as a teen and began shooting images of rock bands for various publications and record labels.     

Pullen is most noted, however, for her extensive series of  pictures based on vintage crime scene images taken from the files of the NY and LAPD. Inspired by cinematic images and photojournalism, she employed not only well-known actresses and models, but the services of a huge technical crew so that her photo shoots often resembled elaborate movie sets. Each of her pictures could take up to a month to create and the High Fashion Crime Scenes series used millions of dollars worth of designer clothing and accessories. 

Surprisingly - or perhaps not - Pullen claims to dislike violence. She is curious, however, about the role that violence plays within the arts and wider culture, as well as the response that people have to violent images. Her work might therefore be described not as an attempt to make violent crime seem glamorous or stylish by dressing up bodies in haute couture, but a critical examination of the way in which the horror and traumatic effect of murder, rape and suicide can be diminished via its aesthetic interpretation and/or portrayal in the media.  
 
Pullen herself has expressed concern with the way that images and descriptions of female corpses - often naked or semi-naked - are used to titilate or add sleazy sensational interest to a narrative; be it a film, a play, a news story, a coroners report ... or even a blog post.




See: Melanie Pullen, High Fashion Crime Scenes, with an introduction by Luke Crissell and essays by Robert Enright and Colin Westerbech, (Nazraelie Press, 2005), 128 pages.  

To read a sister post to this one - Notes on Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse - please click here.


22 Feb 2020

Forever Dead and Lovely: Notes on Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse

Izima Kaoru: Kimura Yoshino wears Alexander McQueen #484 (2007)
Part of the Landscapes with a Corpse series
Galerie Andreas Binder (Munich)
 
No matter how we die, we will travel up to the world 
beyond the sky without regretting how we lived


The phrase drop dead gorgeous, popular with necrophiles and thanatologists alike, also inspired the Japanese fashion photographer Izima Kaoru to stage elaborate death scenes featuring attractive models and well-known actresses dressed in expensive designer outfits that oblige viewers to consider the cultural fascination with the beautiful female corpse.

The sequence of images begin with wide-angle shots and gradually narrow to close-ups of the model. The resulting pictures look rather like film stills and remind us that there's nothing more cinematic than the death of a beautiful woman (to paraphrase Poe), although Kaoru's work demands to be contextualised within a wider art history; one that includes traditional Japanese woodcuts [Ukiyo-e].

It's also important to understand the influence of the Buddhist practice of maranasati - a musing on one's own mortality using various visualisation techniques - upon Kaoru's photography. Thus it is that, prior to taking any pictures, Kaoru asks his models to imagine the circumstances surrounding their deaths (where, when, how, etc.) and to consider also what would constitute the most sightly way of exiting this world (leaving behind a beautiful corpse is never an easy task). 

In sum, Kaoru's pictures are a highly stylised and aesthetically pleasing form of what we in the West term memento mori and not merely images to do with fashion, sex, and cinema born of the floating world (though even if they were that alone, they'd still appeal to me). 


Izima Kaoru: Kimura Yoshino wears Alexander McQueen #483 (2007)
Part of the Landscapes with a Corpse series
Galerie Andreas Binder (Munich)


See: Izima Kaoru, Landscapes with a Corpse, German and English text by Roy Exley, Yuko Hasegawa and Peter Weiermair, (Hatje Kantz, 2008), 192 pages, 171 colour illustrations.

See also the documentary film by Chad Fahs, Landscapes with a Corpse (2014), which follows Izima Kaoru on a journey to create new work and perhaps find the answer to the question of what best constitutes a beautiful death. 

Readers interested in a sister post to this one - on Melanie Pullen's High Fashion Crime Scenes - should click here.


21 Feb 2020

Cover Girl Killer (1959)

Sex and horror are the new gods 
in this polluted world of so-called entertainment


I.

There are many reasons to love the black and white British film Cover Girl Killer (dir. Terry Bishop, 1959).

For one thing, it stars Harry H. Corbett in a pre-Steptoe role that demonstrates what a fine dramatic actor he was; one trained in Stanislavski's system (famously developed as method acting in the US). He may never have become England's Marlon Brando, as some critics predicted, but he coulda been a contender, could've been somebody, instead of a rag-and-bone man ...

      
II.

The film is set in the seedy but seductive world of post-War Soho; a world of strip-clubs, brothels, and dirty bookshops, where it was de rigeur to wear a raincoat whatever the weather.

Corbett plays a psychopath who hopes that, by killing the young models who appear on the cover of a notorious glamour magazine, he may free himself from his unsavoury obsessions and the lustful images that corrupt his thought.  

(It's always shocking to be reminded that murder and misogyny are often regarded as less shameful than masturbation by puritans who, as a matter of fact, have been driven insane by their own moralism, rather than corrupted by pornography.)

Having killed several young women - including Gloria, the showgirl with the most on show - Corbett's creepy character is lured into a trap set by the police and the publisher of Wow magazine, with the very lovely Felicity Young (as June) providing the bait. This results in a pervylicious climax to the movie, as the latter is chased around backstage at the Kasbar theatre in her underwear ...  

Cover Girl Killer may not be a great film - it's no Peeping Tom, Michael Powell's masterpiece that was released a year later - but it is, arguably, a seminal one that anticipates the direction that cinema (and popular entertainment in general) was moving: sexually explicit and ultra-violent; two decades later and the slasher movie was a staple of the horror genre and Mary Millington was starring in The Playbirds (1978).  

Well done to Talking Pictures TV (Sky 343, Freeview 81, Freesat 306) for deciding to broadcast it as part of their superb archive of films.


Harry H. Corbett and Felicity Young in Cover Girl Killer (1959)


To watch the trailer to Cover Girl Killer (1959): click here.


18 Feb 2020

Reflections on Madam Butterfly 2: Puccini's Influence on Pop and Fashion

Galliano for Dior: Japanese New Look (S/S 2007)
Model: Ai Tominaga


I. Hip-Hopera

Taken from the album Fans (1984), the single 'Madam Butterfly' is a perfect fusion of opera and electronic beats, performed by Betty Anne White and Debbie Cole, with the added bonus of having Malcolm McLaren in the role of Lt. Pinkerton.

It's a kind of punk version of Hooked on Classics, which sounds as if it really shouldn't work, yet somehow does work - and works in a way that even Puccini would have approved of, belonging as it does to the post-Romantic tradition of verismo that he favoured (a form of realism that often deals with violent and sexual themes, but in a seductively beautiful manner).   

I once conducted an informal interview with Malcolm in which I asked him about his fascination with opera and particularly the work of Puccini. He explained that, for him, what appealed most was the intensity of feeling and the authenticity of emotion expressed. Opera was the very opposite of what he later termed karaoke culture. It was this sincerity of expression that opera and punk rock shared that made them so powerful.   


II. Cio-Cio San on the Catwalk

John Galliano may say terrible things when drunk, but he remains one of the undisputed geniuses of British fashion who, during a fourteen year period as artistic director at Dior, ruled Paris and the world. In 2007, celebrating his tenth year at the company, he presented a spring/summer couture collection called Japanese New Look, inspired by Puccini's legendary opera, Madama Butterfly.

The collection featured an elegant, yet bold use of colour that mixed and matched gentle cream tones with bright yellows, lime greens, and hot pinks. The tailoring, of course, was impeccable (as was the geometric detailing). Stephen Jones designed the extraordinary headpieces (think bonsai trees and cherry blossom), whilst Pat McGrath produced showstopping makeup that suggested a contemporary geisha look (or a rather punkish Cio-Cio San).   

I mentioned in a sister post to this one discussing Puccini's musical masterpiece, that there are some people now who find the opera problematic on woke political grounds ...

Doubtless, these same people would also object to Galliano's 2007 collection due to its cultural appropriation and his use of mostly white models, although it should be noted that the Japanese model Ai Tominaga, pictured above, happily participated in the Paris show, as did the Chinese model Emma Pei (below), who took to the catwalk to the sound of Malcolm McLaren's unique take on Madam Butterfly ...   




Notes

My taped interview with McLaren has been transcribed, edited, and posted on Torpedo the Ark: click here.

To read the sister post to this one on Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly (1904): click here.

Play: Malcolm Mclaren, 'Madam Butterfly', single from the album Fans (Charisma Records, 1984): click here.

Or click here for the promotional video to the above, directed by Terence Donovan. Set in a Turkish bath and featuring a languid parade of beautiful young women, the video was banned by Top of the Pops on the grounds that the artist - McLaren - fails to appear in it.  

Watch: Galliano's Japanese New Look couture show for Dior (S/S 2007): click here.


17 Feb 2020

Reflections on Madam Butterfly 1: The Opera

Poster for Madama Butterfly (1904) 
by Adolfo Hohenstein


Puccini's Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala 116 years ago today ...

Based on a short story by the American author John Luther Long, the work has become a firm favourite with opera goers the world over, although, in its original two act version, it was poorly received, obliging Puccini to significantly revise it; dividing the second act in two, for example, and inserting the Humming Chorus as a bridge to what became Act III.

These and other changes did the trick, although Puccini continued to revise the work, producing a fifth and final version in 1907 - the composer's cut - which has become the one most often performed today.

And, rather surprisingly perhaps, Madama Butterfly is still frequently staged, despite our living in a politically woke era obsessively concerned with racism and sexual abuse, things that are central to this tragic tale of an American naval officer's exploitation and betrayal of a 15-year-old Japanese girl and her subsequent suicide.   

I suppose this shows that whilst some contemporary audience members - as well as some members of the cast and production team - may struggle to reconcile their enjoyment of this musical masterpiece with the fact that it was written by a dead white European male indulging in Orientalism of the first degree, most members of the paying public don't give a shit as long as they get to hear one of the most famous (and beautiful) of arias, Un bel dì vedremo.

The fact is, when most people pop along to the theatre, they do so hoping to be entertained; they don't buy tickets for Madama Butterfly because they are concerned about white male privilege or the sexual exploitation of vulnerable young women in the developing world, any more than when buying tickets to The Phantom of the Opera it's because they care about facial disfigurement or the condition of the sewers in 19th century Paris ...


Play: Maria Callas, 'Un bel dì vedremo', from The Very Best of Maria Callas, (EMI, 2002): click here

To read a sister post to this one, on Puccini's influence on pop and fashion - with reference to the work of Malcolm McLaren and John Galliano - please click here

 

16 Feb 2020

The Shamrock and the Swastika: Notes on Irish Republicanism and National Socialism

Statue of Seán Russell
Fairview Park, Dublin

Oh here’s to Adolph Hitler / Who made the Britons squeal
Sure before the fight is ended / They will dance an Irish reel


I.

Whilst my knowledge of Irish history and politcs is rather limited, I was surprised to hear that Sinn Féin had polled almost a quarter of all votes cast in the recent general election; more than any other party, gaining them 37 of the 160 available seats.

A left-leaning republican party, Sinn Féin emerged in its current form during the Troubles, when it was linked to the IRA. Since the Good Friday Agreement (1998), however, they've successfully rebranded themselves as a populist movement and in 2018 they completed their transformation by announcing Mary Lou McDonald as party leader, succeeding the far more sinister figure of Gerry Adams.

However, whilst Ms McDonald might not carry the same paramilitary baggage as Adams, it might be noted that the other two main political parties in Ireland - Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil - continue to regard Sinn Féin as beyond the pale and have so far refused to consider any form of coalition with the latter.

We might also recall that Ms McDonald has also attracted criticism herself in the past; for example, for allowing her campaign office to sell IRA souvenirs and memorabilia and for speaking at a rally in Dublin in 2003 to commemorate Seán Russell -  an IRA leader with links to Nazi Germany.           


II.

I understand that, sometimes, it's strategically necessary and politically expedient to enter into alliances with the Devil himself. And the ancient proverb about the enemy of one's enemy being one's friend provides philosophical justification for such pact-making. But, even so, it's a bit shocking to discover just how far along a very slippery and dangerous slope Seán Russell was prepared to tread ...

In the summer of 1940, Russell occupied a villa outside Berlin where he was accorded every privilege possible by his Nazi hosts, including a chauffer driven car and the services of an interpreter. He was also, more significantly, given access to the Brandenberg military camp in order to study the latest techniques in sabotage and guerilla warfare. His liaison at this time was the SS officer Edmund Veesenmayer, who would later become an architect of the Final Solution in Hungary and Croatia.

It was Russell's hope that the German high command would enlist the services of the IRA to strike at British forces in Northern Ireland and on the UK mainland and that, following the planned invasion of Britain, he and his comrades would be duly rewarded. Unfortunately for him, on his return to Ireland aboard a U-boat, he suffered the rupturing of a gastric ulcer and this proved fatal. 

None of this, of course, proves that Russell was sympathetic to or in agreement with Nazi doctrine. But it should surely give us all pause for thought about the way in which romantic nationalism and political idealism can easily collapse into the black hole of fascism. At best, Russell was outrageously naive - though whether that excuses him of his active collaboration with the Nazis (who were busy at that time occupying Western Europe) is debatable.

It might also be noted that Russell wasn't the only one within the IRA supporting the Third Reich. In July of 1940 the leadership issued a joint statement declaring that German forces would be welcomed as friends and liberators should they land in Ireland. The public was assured that the Nazis had no interest in occupying the country or further frustrating the dream of independence, but merely wished to see Ireland play an active role in the new Europe.  

Worse still was the fact that the IRA's main publication - War News - began to adopt openly anti-Semitic language and expressed their satisfaction at what was happening on the Continent, as the cleansing fires of the Wehrmacht drove the Jews from Europe. Shamefully, the leaders of Sinn Féin at this time also indulged in such rhetoric, repeatedly attacking the alleged Jewish influence in Ireland.

One dreads to imagine what would have happened to Ireland's tiny Jewish community (numbering only a few thousand) had the Nazis chosen to invade the Emerald Isle and paint it black. As the Irish historian Brian Hanley notes:

"Across Europe a variety of ethnic and political groups collaborated with the Nazis in order to further their own agendas. Inevitably this meant active involvement in Nazi persecution of Jews and political opponents. It also meant becoming a part of the Nazi governmental machine. Does anyone seriously believe that the IRA would have avoided playing this role?"   

Ultimately, I don't like nationalisms of any variety: Irish, German, Scottish, Catalan ... even English. As Nietzsche pointed out, subscribing to such a politics in its vulgar modern form, is, for free spirits, profoundly mistaken; a deliberate deadening of our higher natures.    


See: Brian Hanley, "'Oh here's to Adolph Hitler" ... The IRA and the Nazis', History Ireland, Vol. 13, Issue 3 (May/June 2005): click here to read online.


13 Feb 2020

Repress Nothing! In Memory of Otto Gross

Otto Gross (1877 - 1920)


Otto Gross - the maverick psychoanalyst and utopian anarchist whom radicals and exponents of free love continue to revere - died 100 years ago today: from pneumonia; aged 42; in a Berlin hospital, having been found lying in the street, starving, penniless, and half-frozen to death.

A sad and premature (arguably all-too-predictable) end to the life of a charismatic drug-addict who spent much of his adult life in and out of psychiatric institutions and who rejected all caution and restraint; a man who was even evicted from the community of bohemians at Ascona for trying to instigate orgies at which participants could openly explore their bisexual desires. [1]    

Inspired by his readings of Max Stirner, Nietzsche and Kropotkin, it's said that Gross influenced in turn many artists and writers with his neo-pagan (and proto-feminist) attempt to revalue all values, including D. H. Lawrence - which, of course, is where my interest in him comes from, rather than his relationship to Freud and Jung, who basically thought him a hopeless madman about whom the less said the better.

Lawrence, of course, never met Gross and doesn't directly refer to him in his writings. [2] But his wife, Frieda, had had an affair with the latter in 1908 (at the same time that Gross was also involved with Frieda's sister, Else) and so a lot of his revolutionary ideas to do with politics, culture, the unconscious and human sexuality, were transmitted via her. It's almost certain that Lawrence also read Gross's letters to Frieda (which she treasured throughout her life):

"They affirmed the idea of the saving sexual relationship outside the bonds of society: they stressed how a sexually liberated woman could escape the trammels of the ordinary and be an inspiration for intellectual and striving men; they showed a passionately thinking man struggling to come to terms with the new and to escape the past. In many ways, they offered Lawrence the themes for his next eight years of writing; and (above all) they offered a way of thinking about Frieda [whom Gross regarded as the woman of the future]." [3]

Having said that, it's important to stress that Lawrence would have mistrusted (and disliked) Gross in person and to note that he soon saw through his idealism - including his sexual and political idealism.

And for us, living here in 2020, does Gross's thinking still trouble, still challenge? Or does it only bore and depress? Unfortunately, that's a question that some also ask of Lawrence ...


Notes

[1] Perhaps more interesting from a thanatological perspective, is the fact that Gross affirmed the sovereign freedom of the individual not merely in sexual terms, but also as the right to be ill and to die in a manner (and at a time) of their own choosing. He regarded neurosis and suicide as legitimate expressions of protest against a repressive social order.    

[2] Lawrence gives us a fictionalised representation of Otto Gross in his unfinished novel Mr Noon (written 1921-22); the character of Eberhard appears in Part II of the work. 

[3] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 443-44.

See also: John Turner, Cornelia Rumpf-Worthen and Ruth Jenkins, 'The Otto Gross - Frieda Weekley Correspondence: Transcribed, Translated, and Annotated', in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, (Summer, 1990), pp. 137-227. Click here to read online. 


On This Day I Complete My Fifty-Sixth Year

Richard Westall: Lord Byron (1813)
Oil on canvas (36" x 28")
National Portrait Gallery (NPG 4243)


I would describe my character as more ironic than Byronic. However, there are many things I admire about the Romantic English poet and traits which we might be said to have in common, including, for example, a fondness for animals.* 

We are also, Byron and I, astrological kin; each blessed by being born beneath the sign of Aquarius. But, like him, I'm also prone to a certain melancholy whenever another birthday rolls around and another step taken towards the Abyss: 


My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of Love are gone;
The worm - the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!**


That just about sums up how I'm feeling today ...

Still, as Byron also noted, the great object of life is to feel something, even if that something is pain or existential angst. Only when the heart is completely unmoved by anything should one consider seeking out a soldier's grave.


Notes

* Byron loved his dog, Boatswain, so much that when the latter contracted rabies, he nursed him without any thought or fear of infection and, although deep in debt at the time, he commissioned a large marble monument for Boatswain at Newstead Abbey when the dog succumbed to the disease. Byron also kept a tame bear whilst a student at Cambridge, thereby amusingly circumventing rules forbidding the keeping of pet dogs. At one point he even considered applying for a fellowship on the creature's behalf. 

** Byron, 'On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year', written on 22 January, 1824: click here to read in full on the Poetry Foundation website.  


9 Feb 2020

Bad Boys (With Reference to the Cases of Johnny Strabler and George Costanza)

Two Bad Boys: Marlon Brando as Johnny Strabler 
and Jason Alexander as George Costanza



I.

Last night, on TV, they showed The Wild One (1953) - László Benedek's classic biker movie starring the impossibly beautiful Marlon Brando in an iconic role as Johnny Strabler, leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club.

When Johnny meets good-girl Kathie Bleeker (played by Mary Murphy) working at the local café-bar, he asks her out to a dance. Although she politely (somewhat coyly) turns him down, she's clearly intrigued (and excited) by Johnny's brooding personality.

In other words, Kathie digs the bad boy ...


II.

I don't know if we should classify the bad boy as a cultural archetype, stereotype or trope, but I do know that there's something in the idea that at least some women - who probably should know better - find the rebellious rogue male or romantic outlaw figure irresistibly attractive.

These women might claim to want caring, sharing boyfriends who are in touch with their feminine side and happy to help with the housework, but the evidence suggests otherwise; namely, that self-obsessed psychopaths with a cool persona and striking good looks always triumph over  the former when it comes to getting the girl.

There are many types of bad boy - including the punk, the pirate, the gangster, and the mad, bad and dangerous poet in all his Byronic splendour - but they all share a dark triad of personality traits: narcissism, thrill-seeking, and deceitfulness. I don't know if these traits have a genetic component - or if the women who find them attractive are genetically predisposed to do so - but it wouldn't suprise me if that were the case.


III.

The female susceptibility to bastards was very amusingly spoofed in a season eight episode of Seinfeld, when George suddenly finds himself playing the role of bad boy (which mostly consists of chewing gum). 

Elaine warns her colleague Anna (Rebecca McFarland) to keep her distance from her friend George, even though he seems harmless: "He's a bad seed. He's a horrible seed. He's one of the worst seeds I've ever seen." Of course, this immediately makes Anna interested in him.

Jerry, of course, is familiar with the syndrome and so when George expresses his surprise at being contacted out of the blue by Anna - after she has previously rebuffed his advances with extreme prejudice - he knows exactly what's going on: "Anna digs the bad boy" - much to George's bemusement ...

For George has never been the bad boy before. He likes the role, however, and intends to exploit his new (unfounded) reputation for badness, setting up a rendezvous with Anna in the park. Elaine's attempt to put an immediate stop to their relationship only makes Anna more attracted to George and soon she's wearing his Yankees jacket. 

Things only cool off when Elaine persuades Anna that, actually, George is a good and decent soul - a fine seed. Desperate to prove his bad boy credentials, George attempts to bootleg a movie. Of course, George being George, he bungles the operation and is arrested.

Worse, when the police officer shouts at him, George begins to cry and has to be comforted by Anna. Now, of course, it's really over; for girls hate cry babies as much as they love bad boys.


Watch: Seinfeld, 'The Little Kicks' (S8/E4), written by Spike Feresten, directed by Andy Ackerman (NBC, 10 October, 1996): the bad boy scenes between George and Anna can be viewed by clicking here


7 Feb 2020

In Memory of Dollie Radford

Robert Bryden: Dollie Radford 
Woodcut (1902)


The English poet and playwright Caroline Maitland - better known as Dollie Radford - died 100 years ago today. 

I know this not because I'm a great fan of her work, which combines a conservative aesthetic with radical politics - Radford was a close friend of Eleanor Marx - but because of the D. H. Lawrence connection.

She first met the latter in the spring of 1915 and, unusually, found him to be rather sweet; "so simple and kind, touchingly childlike, and brim full of sensibility and perception".*

Responding to her warmth and generosity, Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, became firm friends with Radford. In a letter written to Dollie in January 1916, Lawrence told her that whilst her poems were exquisite, they made him feel rather sad:

"They make me think of the small birds in the twilight, whistling brief little tunes, but so clear, they seem almost like little lights in the twilight, such clear, vivid sounds."** 

Which is just about as nice a thing as Lawrence ever said to anyone ... 


Notes

* Quoted in Edward Nehls, ed. D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography (3 Vols.), (University of Wisconsin Press, 1957-59), Vol. I., p. 292.

** The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 515.


6 Feb 2020

Mila is a Punk Rocker

Je ne regrette rien ...


I.

Does anyone else remember the Dead Kennedys hardcore classic 'Religious Vomit'?

It was the first track on the eight-track EP In God We Trust, Inc. and I believe it opened with the lines:

All religions make me want to throw up 
All religions make me sick
All religions make me want to throw up 
All religions suck

It's a succinct but nonetheless powerful critique of all nausea-inducing systems of belief that claim to possess a divine form of Truth and to act in the name of God.    


II.

I immediately thought of this song when reading about the case of a French teen who has been forced into hiding after remarks she made online sparked rape and death threats.

The pretty 16-year-old, known as Mila, who described Islam as a religion of hate and claimed all organised creeds made her sick, has been warned by the police not to attend her school in Southeast France and to keep a low public profile - even though, according to French law, she has done nothing wrong and so shouldn't have to restrict her freedom of movement due to the disgusting threats made by religious lunatics.  

Nor, of course, should she apologise for her remarks: freedom of speech is the freedom to offend and to blaspheme; the freedom enjoyed by Jello Biafra and the boys back in the day and which we should all cherish, protect, and insist upon as infinitely more important than the false right of hypersensitive believers not to be offended.




Play: Dead Kennedys, 'Religious Vomit', In God We Trust, Inc., (Alternative Tentacles, 1981): click here

Note: The DK logo is by Winston Smith


5 Feb 2020

Why I Don't Like Fishnet Stockings (Or The Rocky Horror Picture Show)

Let's do the time warp again 
[No thanks]


Black fishnet stockings and tights, with their open, diamond-shaped knit, continue to be very popular with all types of women - not just goths and showgirls. They are one of those things that never quite go in or out of fashion. We might, therefore, describe them as a perennial favourite within the world of hoisery.  

Personally, however, I'm not a fan.

And that's because fishnets always remind me of Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania: nice face, shame about the legs (too chunky for my tastes). 

I've tried to break this visual association - to picture instead Marilyn Monroe wearing her fishnets in the famous 1956 photo by Milton H. Greene - but, alas, whenever I see anyone wearing them, I invariably think back to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) - a charmless vision of camp outrageousness and gothic queerness that succeeds only in making one nostalgic for the world of fixed gender roles and heteronormativity that Brad and Janet belong to.

As someone once said, Rocky is ultimately an excuse for straight people to cross dress and pretend to be a little bit queer for the night: they don't want to be it, just dream it ...


Play: 'Sweet Transvestite' from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, (dir. Jim Sharman, 1975), performed by Tim Curry: click here.


4 Feb 2020

Birkin's Cat (Notes on Sexual Politics and Feline Philosophy in Women in Love)

Portrait Gray Tabby Cat
Photograph by Maika 777


I.

I wasn't surprised to discover that Rupert Birkin owned a grey tabby cat. Is there anything more noble, after all, than a young male cat with long legs and a slim back?

What was surprising, however, was to discover that Birkin based his sexual politics and philosophical thinking on star equilibrium as much upon observations of Mino the cat as upon his (mis)reading of Nietzsche.

Thus, when watching Mino amorously interact with a stray she-cat that has wandered into the garden from the woods, Birkin can't help metaphysically musing on gender relations and the need for superfine stability, even if this requires cruelty and, ultimately, the submission of the female to the male ... 


II.  

"The young cat trotted lordly down the path, waving his tail. He was an ordinary tabby with white paws, a slender young gentleman. A crouching, fluffy, brownish-grey cat was stealing up the side of the fence. The Mino walked statelily up to her, with manly nonchalance. She crouched before him and pressed herself on the ground in humility, a fluffy soft outcast, looking up at him with wild eyes that were green and lovely as great jewels. He looked casually down on her. So she crept a few inches further, proceeding on her way to the back door, crouching in a wonderful soft, self-obliterating manner, and moving like a shadow.
      He, going statlily on his slim legs, walked after her, then suddenly, for pure excess, he gave her a light cuff with his paw on the side of the face. She ran off a few steps, like a blown leaf along the ground, then crouched unobtrusively, in submissive, wild patience. The Mino pretended to take no notice of her. He blinked his eyes superbly at the landscape. In a minute she drew herself together and moved softly, a fleecy brown-grey shadow, a few paces forward. She began to quicken her pace, in a moment she would be gone like a dream, when the young grey lord sprang before her, and gave her a light handsome cuff. She subsided at once, submissively."    

"The eyes of the stray cat flared round for a moment, like great green fires staring at Birkin. Then she had rushed in a soft swift rush, half way down the garden. There she paused to look round. The Mino turned his face in pure superiority to his master, and slowly closed his eyes, standing in statuesque young perfection. The wild cat's round, green, wondering eyes were staring all the while like uncanny fires. Then again, like a shadow, she slid towards the kitchen.
      In a lovely springing leap, like a wind, the Mino was upon her, and had boxed her twice, very definitely, with a white, delicate fist. She sank and slid back, unquestioning. He walked after her, and cuffed her once or twice, leisurely, with sudden little blows of his magic white paws."

- D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love


III.

Ursula, who happens to be watching this alongside Birkin, is angry and upset at the male cat's use of violence to bully the female, as she perceives it. Birkin, amused by her indignation, tries to explain that this is a normal part of feline intimacy and, it's true of course, that feline sexual behaviour does involve a certain amount of unpleasantness (spraying, fighting, biting, etc.).*

Ursula, however, is unconvinced and continues to insist that Mino is a bully - like all males. This clearly irritates Birkin, who replies:

"'He is not a bully. He is only insisting to the poor stray that she shall acknowledge him as a sort of fate, her own fate: because you can see she is fluffy and promiscuous as the wind. I am with him entirely. He wants superfine stability."  

Which, I suppose, is one way of putting it and one possible explanation. Though it could just be that Mino wants to penetrate the she-cat and that his male dignity and higher understanding are but fanciful notions belonging to Birkin. That's certainly what Ursula thinks: "'Oh it makes me so cross, this assumption of male superiority! And it is such a lie! One wouldn't mind if there were any justification for it.'"

Clearly, Birkin thinks there is some justification for it - and that it is neither a sadistic lust for cruelty nor a naked will to power, describing the latter as base and petty, even though, clearly, his reading of Nietzsche - like Lawrence's own - is a poor and selective one at best.

For Birkin, Mino's behaviour - and, presumably, male sexual behaviour in general - can best be thought of as a desire to impose upon female chaos masculine order and thus bring about a state of "transcendent and abiding rapport" between the sexes that benefits them both. Paradise is a state of pure equilibrium in which each party is a star balanced in conjunction.

And that, for Birkin, is what love is all about - fulfilment, not individual or personal freedom: "'Love is a direction which excludes all other directions. It's a freedom together, if you like." Ideal love and ideal freedom, he says, ultimately result in chaos and nihilism.

But, again, Ursula isn't having any of it: "'I don't trust you when you drag the stars in,' she said."


Notes

* Things probably aren't helped - speaking from the female cat's point of view - by the fact that the male has a barbed penis and that penetration therefore causes a certain amount of discomfort (although I'm not sure it's fair to describe the male cat's penis as a horrifying engine of pain, as one feminist commentator described it). Upon withdrawl, these keratinised penile spines rake the walls of the she-cats vagina, removing the semen of love rivals and helping to trigger ovulation. 

See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Ch. XIII, pp. 148-152.