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

The Most Beautiful Streets of Paris (Notes on Surrealist Mannequin Fetish)

André Masson: Mannequin (1938)

Photo by Raoul Ubac (gelatin silver print)

The Cleveland Museum of Art

 

If you love Love, you'll love Surrealism ...

Unfortunately, however, I don't love Love - certainly not as some kind of moral absolute - and so have never really much cared for Surrealism as conceived by André Breton, whom, despite his admirable anti-theism ("Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!") remained an idealist and a dogmatist at heart.

However, there are some aspects - the darker, pervier aspects - of Surrealism that do excite my interest. And one of these aspects is the erotic fetishization of mannequins; agalmatophilia being a major component of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, held in Paris at the beginning of 1938.

The exhibition, organised by Breton and the poet Paul Éluard, pretty much involved everyone who was anyone in the world of Surrealism at the time, including Duchamp, Dalí, Max Ernst, and Man Ray. It was staged in two main sections and a lobby area, displaying paintings and objects as well as unusually decorated rooms which had been redesigned so as to create what would today be called an immersive environment or experience.

It was the first section - Les plus belles rues de Paris - in which a parade of surrealist mannequins was located, including, most dramatically, the one by André Masson pictured above.

The mannequin, or lay figure, has a long if relatively humble history within the world of art; as a tool it's pretty much on a par with an easel, a brush, or a palette knife, even though it served several purposes; from helping fix perspective and understand the fall of light and shadow, to acting as a support for drapery and costume.

Perhaps, in their loneliest moments, some artists looked affectionately - even longingly - at their mannequins as silent companions. But it was only from the 19th century, however, that the latter became the subject of the painting and, ultimately, an objet d'art in its own right. For the Surrealists, however, the mannequin became something else too: a sex object.

Upon entering the most beautiful streets of Paris, visitors encountered sixteen artificial female figures provocatively designed, dressed and posed by Masson and friends. These kinky mannequins were deliberately intended to disturb and to arouse strange (often illicit) desires.

Duchamp, for example, dressed the upper-half of his model in male clothing, but left the lower-half naked, thereby playing with notions of androgyny and obscene exposure. Max Ernst, meanwhile, had intended to place a glowing red light bulb in the underwear of his 'Black Widow' mannequin (revealed by looking up her conveniently raised skirt), but - ever the prude and policeman - André Breton prevented this. 

It was, as indicated, Masson's mannequin that attracted the greatest attention, however,  with its pretty head squeezed into a bird cage covered with red celluloid fish. The mannequin was gagged with a velvet ribbon and had a pansy placed in its mouth.

What this all means, I'm not entirely certain. But it surely isn't just about female objectification and misogyny masquerading as art, or the pornographic violence inherent in male sexuality. Those critics and commentators who exclusively discuss these works in such reductive terms are mistaken and being intellectually lazy, I think. 

This isn't to say that these things aren't realities or worthy of serious discussion. But simply that there are other considerations here; for example, the way in which objects became central within consumer culture - the mannequin in particular being the very embodiment of urban modernity, as Hans Richter pointed out. Or the manner in which fetishization can elevate an object from base utility, transforming it into something magical and seductive, with its own strange allure.         

For me, as a perverse materialist, mannequins, statues and sex-dolls need to be considered as things in themselves and not as mere substitutes for real women. And the men who choose to erotically privilege such over biological entities are deserving neither of ridicule nor condemnation.

The adult imperative to grow-up, stop touching yourself and get a steady girlfriend (i.e. one who is actual, rather than imaginary; human, rather than synthetic; alive, rather than dead) is one that at least some of the Surrealists dared to challenge and for that I admire and respect them.  

Besides, maybe Proust is right to argue that we are all forever isolate at some level; that reciprocity is an illusion and the objects of our affection - whatever their ontological status - simply allow for the projection of our own ideas, fantasies and feelings ... 


Note: those interested in knowing more about the role and rise of the mannequin in Western art should see Jane Munro, Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish, (Yale University Press, 2014). 

Why I Love H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) 

 Photo c.1934 from the Archives of 

Brown University / Associated Press

There are several good reasons to love master of weird fiction H. P. Lovecraft, many of which are presented by Michel Houellebecq in his highly recommended study entitled Against the World, Against Life (2006). 

Primarily, however, it's because of passages such as the following, written in a letter to a friend, in which Lovecraft amusingly sets out his case against religion:

"So far I have seen nothing which could possibly give me the notion that cosmic force is the manifestation of a mind and will like my own infinitely magnified; a potent and purposeful consciousness which deals individually and directly with the miserable denizens of a wretched little flyspeck ... and which singles this putrid excrescence out as the one spot where to send an onlie-begotten Son, whose mission is to redeem those accursed fly-speck inhabiting lice which we call human beings ... It is all so very childish. I cannot help taking exception to a philosophy that would force this rubbish down my throat. 'What have I against religion?' That is what I have against it!"

- H. P. Lovecraft, A Letter on Religion, written to Maurice W. Moe (1918). 

On the Need for a New Enlightenment

"One should never miss an opportunity to celebrate the Enlightenment ..." 

Christopher Hitchens

 

What is Enlightenment? For over two centuries this has been a question central to modernity; one which philosophy has, according to Foucault, never quite been able to answer, but never quite able to ignore either. From Kant and Hegel, through Nietzsche to Habermas and, indeed, Foucault himself, hardly any serious thinker has failed to confront this question, directly or indirectly.

And still today, the question was ist Aufklärung continues to resonate; in fact, it might even be said to have renewed urgency in a world that some describe (either with triumphant glee or horrified concern) as not only postmodern, but post-secular; i.e. a world that seems to be creeping at pace towards a new age of fundamentalist stupidity, having rejected the exit from superstition and prejudice offered by reason.

Having, briefly, dared to think and to question, we are once more asked in all seriousness to place faith in those who claim spiritual authority and would rule by divine right. All that social, cultural, and political upheaval and transformation in Europe and the New World - all that great work by men of science and men of letters to liberate themselves from the moral absurdities and disgusting bigotries of religion - and we end up in 2014 having to worry about offending the sensibilities of those who call for the implementation of sharia law.

It's deeply depressing to say the least. But it's also why one is obliged, as an atheist and anti-theist, to fight once more on all the old grounds: Marx was right, criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism and they key to all freedom. To have done with the judgement of God is always the ultimate goal.

But, in order to achieve this objective, we need a new way of thinking and feeling, of acting and behaving - i.e. what the Greeks called an ethos - that in some manner refers back to the complex historical events that took place in the 18th century and which became known as the Enlightenment. 

This is not, as Foucault points out, a matter of subscribing slavishly to some kind of doctrine, or resurrecting a facile model of humanism; rather, it's the permanent reactivation of a philosophically critical and experimental attitude that interrogates everything and allows nothing to pass as self-evidently true (not even the Rights of Man).               

    

A Short Sermon on Anti-theism

The creeping religiosity of everyday life here in the UK - not to mention the appalling acts of violent atrocity carried out by the faithful all over the world - means that it unfortunately becomes necessary to voice a view on the subject. 

And so, for the record, my view is this:

(1) All the world's major religions wholly and often wilfully misrepresent the origins of the cosmos and of life on earth. Where they don't get things wrong due to the ignorance of their founders and prophets, they lie due to the desire of their priests and spiritual leaders to keep everyone else ignorant. 

(2) All the world's major religions are based upon anthropomorphic conceit and human arrogance and yet they all aim to make men, women and children subservient and fearful.

(3) All the world's major religions are forms of cruelty that exercise power over the mind by punishing and torturing the flesh via practices that include sexual repression, blood sacrifice, and genital mutilation.   

(4) All the world's major religions are nihilistic death cults that fantasise and call for the end of the world so that they might then establish a reign of saints and zombies afterlife, or achieve a state of total non-being. 

(5) Inasmuch as points 1-4 are true - and it seems to me that they are irrefutable - then we might legitimately conclude that all the world's major religions (and not just the monotheisms of Abrahamic origin) are forms of violent psychosis, or a hatred of the real. 

Thus, in my view, it is not sufficient to declare oneself agnostic on the question of religion, although, obviously, it is always preferable that an individual honestly admits their ignorance, rather than absurdly claim to know God's will. Nor is it enough, today, to simply call oneself an atheist: one has to actively declare an interest and take up the challenge by affirming nothing short of anti-theism in the courageous manner of Christopher Hitchens, for example, who wrote:

"I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effects of religious belief, is positively harmful."

- Letters to a Young Contrarian, (2001)

Like Hitchens, I think religion poisons everything and has been the one great curse upon mankind. If I could, I'd happily tear down every church, mosque, synagogue, temple, shrine or holy place and build schools, science museums, libraries, observatories, art galleries, theatres, gymnasia, dance academies and botanical gardens on the sites.  

As I am unable to do so, however, I simply encourage everyone to keep reading, keep thinking, keep laughing, and keep challenging all those who would establish earthly authority in the name of heavenly power.