Starving for Perfection: On the Thinspirational Figure of Karen Carpenter

 Young America at its very best ...

 Karen Carpenter (1950-1983)

 

"Wants to look like a star / but she takes it too far ..." [a]

 

I. 

 

Having recently attended a seminar organised by the Subcultures Interest Group (SIG) at the London College of Communication, where discussion focused on Paul Tornbohm's book on the Carpenters (Sonic Bond Publishing, 2023), I find myself intrigued by the tragic figure of Karen Carpenter. 

 

Not so much her distinctive vocal skills or ability as a drummer, but her will to self-perfection and self-annihilation physically manifested in the form of anorexia; an eating disorder typically found in young women and which, according to Baudrillard, might also be seen as a form of social repulsion; i.e., a means of rejecting a gluttonous and disgusting world of consumption via the ecstasy of emptiness [b]. 

 

George McKay, a professor in media studies at the University of East Anglia, has written on Carpenter, her condition, and its representation in a fascinating 2018 essay which more broadly explores the relation between the anorexic body and popular music, and it's his essay around which I shall centre (a brief) discussion here [c]. 

 

 

II.

 

Drawing on and seeking to develop the work of other commentators concerned with celebrity anorexia, McKay expresses a "critical interest in ways in which the practices and expectations of the music industry set a conformist template of corporeality, particularly for its female stars" [2]. 

 

There's undoubtedly some truth in this idea, though it's not a template that all female artists within the music industry have felt obliged to conform to; one thinks of Big Mama Thornton and Cass Elliot, for example, and I'm pretty sure that even those who set such a template don't expect performers to starve themselves to death; they usually look to protect their investment, even if, in some cases, an untimely death can lead to an increase in record sales [d].  

Whilst it's a little unfair to think of Carpenter as the face of anorexia - she was, after all, one of the great pop voices of the twentieth-century, much admired by her peers and influential on numerous later artists - it was nevertheless her death in 1983 from complications associated with a condition which she began to exhibit symptoms of in 1975 [e], that first brought anorexia into the public arena. 

 

Before then, it was little known outside of showbiz and medical circles and it's for her anorexia that many people remember Karen Carpenter today; particularly those - like me - who are more concerned with matters critical and clinical than (middle of the road) musical.       

 

As McKay notes, anorexia nervosa fascinates because whilst it may be viewed as "a mental health issue leading to or presenting in a diminished corporeality" [4], it can also be regarded as a phenomenon "originating at least in part in the socio-cultural" [4].

 

Its complexity (and ambiguity) doesn't stop there either: as Helen Malson and Jane Ussher have observed, the anorexic body may be "'discursively construed in a multiplicity of often conflicting ways'" [f]. For example, it may "signify both self-production (of idealised body or identity) and self-destruction (symbolically and physically)" [4]. 

 

That's why such a body is often discussed from a political and philosophical perpective; not least of all by feminist authors.

 

 

III.

 

Surprisingly, McKay found fewer than expected mentions or images of Carpenter within the online pro-ana community, where one might have thought she'd have been given special status. He suspects this is because "lyrically there is no obvious mention of eating disorders in the Carpenters' repertoire, not even in song titles" [18]. 

 

Alternatively, it could be because "the music's smoothness is not heard as containing identifiable sonic signifiers of suffering, pain or anger" [18]. In other words, even those who might otherwise acknowledge Karen Carpenter as one of their own find the Carpenters mind numbingly dull.  

Having said that, I think Karen's story is one that should resonate strongly with those who think of anorexia in quasi-religious terms as a spiritual-ascetic practice; those who speak of birds and angels and of the idea that one might take flight if only disciplined enough to achieve purity and perfection in a corrupt and fallen world weighed down by the spirit of gravity [g].

The fact that she died at such a relatively young age - though far too old to join the 27 Club [h] - must surely make Miss Carpenter a martyr-saint in the eyes of those who regard anorexia as a miraculous rather than a nervous condition [i]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Lines from the song 'Never Good Enough' (2006), by Canadian singer-songwriter Rachel Ferguson; a favourite tune with many in the pro-ana community (or subculture): click here. 

 

[b] Long time readers - or those who investigated some of the older posts on TTA - will know that I have previously written with reference to anorexia (at times from a vaguely pro-ana perspective) on several occasions: click here, for example, or here. 

 

[c] George McKay, 'Skinny blues: Karen Carpenter, anorexia nervosa and popular music', Popular Music, Volume 37, Issue 1, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1-21. Page references to this essay will be given directly in the post. Click here to access the essay in the UEA digital repository.

 

[d] McKay notes that by exerting constant pressure to look a certain way and perform in a certain manner, the music industry does bear some responsibility for when its young female stars implode. However, it's worth noting that professional dancers and fashion models have much greater pressure exerted on them to be ultra-thin than pop performers; see David M. Garner and Paul E. Garfinkel, 'Socio-cultural factors in the development of anorexia nervosa', in Psychological Medicine, Vol. 10, Issue 4, (1980), pp. 647-656. Cited by McKay.

 

[e] Carpenter had begun dieting at an early age and weighed around 120 pounds in 1973, when the Carpenters were at the peak of their success. By the autumn of 1975, however, she was below the weight that is popularly branded as that of a weakling - i.e., under 98 pounds - and fans were shocked at her gaunt appearance. Carpenter refused to publicly acknowledge that she was suffering with an eating disorder, however, and dismissed concerns about her health and wellbeing. Some might suggest this indicates anosognosia, but McKay argues (2018, 2):

      "Her lack of public utterance on her anorexia, right up to her death, is understandable, given her lonely and vulnerable position as the global star first and most associated with it. However, it is also problematic, not least since it leaves key male figures [including her brother Richard ...] to shape and control her narrative [...]" 

 

[f] See Helen M. Malson and Jane M. Ussher, 'Beyond this mortal coil: femininity, death and discursive constructions of the anorexic body', in Mortality: Promoting the Interdisciplinary Study of Death and Dying, Vol. 2, Issue 1, (1997), pp. 43- 61. Quoted by McKay.     

 

[g] McKay writes (2018, 12): "Karen seemed to be striving for what she thought of as versions of perfection in voice and in body ..." and he reminds us of the following lyric: 'I know I ask perfection of a quite imperfect world' in the song 'I Need to Be in Love', released as a single from the album A Kind of Hush (A&M Records, 1976). 

 

[h] The 27 Club is made up of popular musicians and other artists who died at the age of 27 and includes, for example, Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse. Karen Carpenter was 32 when she died on 4 February, 1983. 

 

[i] One day, I'll write a post on the holy concept of anorexia mirabilis; an eating disorder common amongst medieval nuns and religiously devoted young women keen to imitate the suffering (and experience the passion) of Christ.  

 

Musical bonus: The Carpenters, '(They Long to Be) Close to You', single release from the studio album Close to You (A&M Records, 1970): click here for the official video on YouTube courtesy of Warner Music Videos. 

 

Odradek

 

"At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colours. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs. "

 

"One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished. In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of."

 

- Kafka, description of Odradek in 'The Cares of a Family Man'

 

 

I. 

 

Many critics and philosophers rank Kafka alongside the greats of modernist literature. But, whilst I wouldn't wish to echo Joseph Epstein's dismissal of him as overrated [1], I have nevertheless often found some of Kafka's short stories a little ... not boring exactly - but disappointing.  

 

That's not the case, however, with 'The Cares of a Family Man' [2], in which the world is introduced to the fantastically strange character called Odradek ...

 

 

II. 

 

As the narrator of the tale confesses, Odradek is a name of uncertain origin; it might be Slavic; it could be German, but it's very possibly neither. Confusion over the etymology of Odradek's name, however, is really the least of it - for it's not even clear what Odradek is ... 

 

For whilst they - and I think it probably best we use the gender-neutral pronoun here in its singular sense - can stand up and speak and even laugh, they're also a non-human object who looks rather like a star-shaped cotton reel with bits of old coloured thread wound round in a tangled manner (see Kafka's own description above).  

 

Odradek, however, is nobody's spool and they have a vital presence in the family home; perhaps more vital even than the narrator's and the latter is concerned not only that Odradek undermines his position as husband and father - despite having no real purpose or role - but that Odradek will ultimately outlive him and thereby have the last laugh, extracting what Baudrillard terms the revenge of the object:   

 

"He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful." [3]

 

 

III.

'The Cares of a Family Man' has, as one might imagine, more interpretations than one can shake a stick at; certainly more than I can possibly discuss here - or would wish to, as all the usual readings - Marxist, Freudian, Existentialist - are predictable enough (often very clever and insightful, but unsurprising). 

I think, if anything, I favour a more occult (and object-oriented) musing on the story over and above a political, psychological, or lazy metaphorical attempt at interpretation; a musing that doesn't seek to identify Odradek in the full-light of day (or by the natural light of reason) and which acknowledges that objects are ultimately mysterious (and alluring) because of their withdrawl from human perception.

As Anya Meksin notes, we are asking the wrong questions if we ask what Odradek symbolises or represents: 

 

"The story stubbornly resists an adequate correlation between Odradek and any existing entities or concepts in our world. It is as if the little text has somehow transcended the very system in which symbolism is possible, just as Odradek has somehow transcended the logic of the physical world. Odradek is a metaphysical rupture in the reality of the family man, and the story is an epistemological rupture in the reality of the reader." [4]

 

Ultimately, Odradek is a messenger from the secret realm of objects; not so much a realm humans deny the existence of, but casually dismiss as less interesting than their own. Such anthropocentric arrogance has no place here, however. I maintain that objects not only exist independently of us upon a democratically flat ontology, but, despite our conceited claims of human exceptionalism, we too ultimately have our being upon this plane.   

 

That's what Odradek reminds us: material reality is essentially meaningless; consciousness is epiphenomenal; life is just a very rare and unusual way of being dead. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Readers of a certain age will doubtless recall the Unigate ads on TV in the 1970s which warned viewers to watch out in case there was a Humphrey about [5]. 

 

Well, an Odradek does more than steal your milk; they negate all the illusions, and lies, and convenient fictions upon which human life is built and once you discover, like Kafka's humble family man, that there's one living in your house there are, says Anya Meksin, only two options: "immediate suicide, or continuing along as best we can, given the circumstances" [6].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Epstein's article 'Is Franz Kafka Overrated?' in The Atlantic (July/August 2013): click here. 

      For those who might be interested, the critic David L Ulin responds to this piece by Epstein in 'Why Kafka Matters', Los Angeles Times (24 June 2013): click here. 

 

[2] Die Sorge des Hausvaters was written between 1914 and 1917 and published in a collection of Kafka's short stories published by Kurt Wolff entitled Ein Landarzt [A Country Doctor] (1919). 

      The English translation - 'The Cares of a Family Man' - can be found in Kafka's Collected Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, (Everyman, 1993), pp. 183-85. The story is also in The Complete Stories, (Schocken Books, 1971) - a book that can be found as a pdf online thanks to Vanderbilt University. The opening quotations at the top of this post are both taken from the latter edition, p. 468. 

 

[3] Kafka, 'The Cares of a Family Man', The Complete Stories, p. 469.

 

[4] Anya Meksin, 'Ragged Bits of Meaning, Wound on a Star-Shaped Spool for Thread', essay on Mauro Nervi's Kafka Project website: click here. Meksin's excellent essay is worth reading in full. 

 

[5] For those readers who are either too young or now too old and forgetful, the British milk company Unigate produced a series of TV ads in the 1970s featuring mysterious characters called Humphreys whose only visible presence was was a red-and-white striped straw. 

      The campaign, devised by John Webster, is best known for the slogan: "Watch out, watch out - there's a Humphrey about!" written and sung by musical genius and creator of the Wombles, Mike Batt. 

[6] Anya Meksin, 'Ragged Bits of Meaning, Wound on a Star-Shaped Spool for Thread' ... click here.

      I don't actually share Meksin's conclusion. Rather, like Camus, I don't see why suicide should be considered in the face of life's absurdity - for there is no more meaning in death than in life. And there's no reason either why a meaningless life should not be a happy and passionate one; the trick is to affirm the void and thereby consummate nihilism, as Nietzsche would say.    

 

 

It's Creepy and It's Kooky, Mysterious and Spooky: Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie (Part 1)

Front cover image from Mark Fisher's 

The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater Books, 2016)

 

 

I. 

 

Let me confess from the outset that one of the main problems I have with Mark Fisher's work is that I'm unfamiliar with many of the books, films, and records that he chooses as points of reference, so often feel unable to comment. Thus, I intend sticking here to his more general remarks on the weird and the eerie, about which I feel better able to discuss.

 

According to Mark Fisher, the weird and the eerie are closely related (but distinct) modes of strangeness, each with their own properties. The former draws our attention to that which does not belong and instills a sense of wrongness; the latter troubles the notion of agency (human and non-human) and makes us question existence and non-existence. 

 

Neither terrifies or deeply distresses, so much as make us feel vaguely apprehensive or uneasy.    

 

And neither has much to do with with Freud's concept of the unheimlich and should not be equated to the latter. The attempt to do so, says Fisher, is "symptomatic of a secular retreat from the outside" [a]; i.e., returning to the safety of a long familiar (if hugely influential) idea that ultimately serves to domesticate and contain the outside "in terms of a modernist family drama" [10]. 

 

 

II.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, Fisher begins his study of the weird by turning to H. P. Lovecraft - a writer whom Graham Harman predicts will one day displace Hölderlin as the philosopher's favourite [b] and someone who intuitively grasped that nothing is weirder than reality (i.e., the natural-material cosmos).

 

As Fisher rightly says, when you really stop to think about it, a black hole is weirder than a vampire or werewolf. 

 

Lovecraft is the daddy of weird fiction; the man who long before George Michael encouraged characters and readers alike to venture outside - even if doing so "often ends in breakdown and psychosis" [16] for the former and fascination "mixed with a certain trepidation" [17] for the latter.

 

There is nothing surprising or suspensful or even truly terrible in Lovecraft's weird tales. And yet they compel our attention, even as they repel us at the same time with their inhuman quality; i.e., their insistence that "human concerns, perspectives and concepts have only a local reference" [18].    

Fisher is spot-on to insist that Lovecraft is neither a horror writer nor a fantasy author; that his weird realism is something very different from either of these genres and that his tales "depend for their power on the difference between the terrestrial-empirical and the outside" [20][c] and on their sheer originality.

 

 

III.

 

Like Lovecraft, H. G. Wells also understood something of the weird, even if his work is, in many respects, very different from the former's. 

 

One thing both writers shared is a concern with thresholds and the fatal possibility of "contact between incommensurable worlds" [28], an idea best illustrated in an episode of Seinfeld when George's independence (and sanity) are threatened by the transcendental shock of worlds colliding [d].   

 

It's probably always best (if not always possible) to keep worlds apart, although the weird, as a phenomenon, is that which unfolds in the space between them. 

 

 

IV.  

 

Moving on, Fisher introduces a notion of the grotesque, which, like the weird, "evokes something which is out of place" [32] - although unlike the latter it often evokes laughter (the only humour in Lovecraft, says Fisher, is accidental).

 

And the "confluence of the weird and the grotesque is no better exemplified than in the work of the post-punk group The Fall" [33], particularly in the period 1980-82. 

Unfortunately, my knowledge of Mark E. Smith's combo is limited. In fact, I can only name one of their songs; the 1980 single 'How I Wrote Elastic Man' (and that's only because I often heard it on John Peel, not because I went out and bought it). 

 

So I'll just have to take Fisher's word for it when he insists The Fall "are remarkabe for the way in which they draw out a cultural politics of the weird and the grotesque" [33] and produced "what could be called a popular modernist weird [...] with all the difficulties and compulsions of post-punk sound" [33] [e].

 

In the same period Fisher was getting worked up over The Fall, I was listening to Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow and had more interest in post-punk piracy than the weird and grotesque; indeed, I seem to remember finding groups like The Fall too depressing (perhaps even too Northern) for my tastes; even their laughter issues "from a psychotic outside" [35] and that didn't sound very funny to me at the time.           

 

However, if what Fisher says is true, I would probably find The Fall more amusing now (although I suspect I would still find them a band more interesting to read about, than fun to listen to).   

 

 

V.

 

Is there not an intrinsically weird dimension to the time travel story? 

Mark Fisher thinks so:

 

"By its very nature, the time travel story [...] combines entities and objects that do not belong together. Here the threshold between worlds is the apparatus that allows travel between different time periods [...] and the weird effect typically manifests as a sense of achronism." [40]

 

Again, that's one of those true-but-kind-of-obvious statements that Fisher seems to specialise in. Here's another: time-paradoxes also trigger a feeling weirdness. Indeed - who would argue with that?  

 

 

VI.

 

"There is another type of weird effect that is generated by strange loops [...] not just tangles in cause and effect [...] but confusions of ontological level." [45]

 

These confusions particularly play out at the level of simulacra and simulation, putting the nature of being and reality into question - just ask Thomas (Neo) Anderson. Or Baudrillard. Is there anything weirder than living in a world one knows to be a cleverly constructed simulation but which still feels real?      

 

 

VII.

 

If it wasn't in the least surprising that Fisher should open his study of the weird with Lovecraft, it's equally unsurprising that he should close it with the director of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, David Lynch.

 

For in many ways Fisher seems weirdly trapped in the 1980s and '90s; a man still gripped by the same philosophical ideas (and postmodern obsessions) that shaped his thinking when writing his Ph.D. on cybernetic fiction-theory [f]. Indeed, Fisher readily admits that his fascination with the weird and eerie goes back as far as he can remember. 

     

Now, whilst some might suggest he move on and find new interests, I rather admire the manner in which he has stayed true to the authors, singers, and filmmakers, he loves best. But David Lynch isn't a particular favourite of mine, I'm afraid; there are certainly films by the other two Davids - Fisher and Cronenberg - I like more than Mulholland Drive (2001), though they're perhaps not as weird in the sense that Fisher uses the term.   

 

As for Inland Empire (2006), not only have I not seen it, I've not even heard of it - how weird is that?

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, (Repeater Books, 2016), p. 10. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the main text. 

 

[b] See Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Zero Books, 2012).

 

[c] Just to be clear: "The outside is not 'empirically' exterior; it is transcendentally exterior; i.e. it is not just a matter of something being distant in space and time, but of something which is beyond our ordinary experience and conception of space and time itself." - Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, p. 22. 

 

[d] Seinfeld, 'The Pool Guy' [S7/E8], dir. Andy Ackerman, written by David Mandel (1995). Click here to observe the devastating effect it has upon George's mental health when he experiences the colliding of worlds: George is getting upset! Nevertheless, it's interesting to note that this tale unfolds within a weirdly comic universe, rather than a weirdly tragic or melancholic one.

 

[e] Perhaps the only author who writes with such intense conviction about the pop music they love is poet and playwright Síomón Solomon; see his 2020 text Hölderlin's Poltergeists in which he celebrates that other critically-acclaimed post-punk band from Manchester, Joy Division.     

 

[f] Fisher's Ph.D. thesis was entitled: Flatline constructs: Gothic materialism and cybernetic theory-fiction. It was completed in the Philosophy Dept. at the University of Warwick and submitted in July 1999. A PDF of this work is available via the University of Warwick publications service website: click here. The first line opens with the words "Isn't it strange [...]". 

      Fisher was a founding member of the interdisciplinary collective inspired by the work of Nick Land and Sadie Plant known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Although I was also in the Philosophy Dept. at Warwick at this time and initially had Land as my Graduate Progress Committee member overseeing my own doctoral research project, I never crossed paths with Fisher, which, looking back, I now rather regret.  

 

 

Part two of this post - on the eerie - can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

B is for ... Baudelaire, Bataille, Barthes, and Baudrillard

B is for ... 

Baudelaire, Bataille, Barthes, and Baudrillard

 

 

There are many French things that I love beginning with the letter B - from a big bowl of bouillabaisse served with crusty baguette slices, to Brigitte Bardot on the beach in her bikini [1]. 

 

Even four of my favourite French writers have surnames beginning with the letter B - Messrs. Baudelaire, Bataille, Barthes and Baudrillard - and this perhaps explains why it is that I can never think of one without also thinking of the others [2].  

Obviously, as a 19th century poet and critic, Baudelaire knew nothing of those who came a century after him. But it might be interesting to briefly recall what Bataille, Barthes, and Baudrillard said about the author of Les Fleurs du mal ... 

 

 

Bataille on Baudelaire (Désirer l'impossible) 

 

In his essay on Baudelaire in La Littérature et la Mal (1957), Bataille says that the former desired the impossible as a response to the utilitarian demand that we be reasonable as well as make ourselves useful. It is in this desire for the impossible and a useless expenditure of energy, that man discovers his authenticity and poetry locates its task. 

 

This, of course, is a Romantic vision; but it is one that Bataille in his own quest for the impossible - i.e., a simultaneity of contrary experiences - continues and yet exceeds. 

 

 

Barthes on Baudelaire (La Vérité emphatique du geste)

 

Whilst it's true that he only produced one sustained piece of writing on Baudelaire - and this on a relatively marginal aspect of the latter's work, namely, his failed theatrical projects - Baudelaire nevertheless remains a point of reference throughout Barthes's oeuvre. 

 

Indeed, as one commentator has recently pointed out, the phrase quoted from Baudelaire's Exposition Universelle (1855) concerning 'the emphatic truth of the gesture in the important moments of life' is one that "punctuates Barthes's published work throughout, from one of his earliest essays to his very last book on photography, and is closely associated with another persistently recurring motif: the concept of numen, a term used to designate a static gesture expressing divine authority" [3]. 

 

Baudrillard on Baudelaire (L'Objectivation absolue de l'art)

 

By his own admission, Baudrillard's relationship with the world of art has always been one marked by a certain ambivalence: "I come from a moralist, metaphysical tradition, a political and ideological tradition that has always been wary of art and culture in general [...]" [4]

Nevertheless, he is obviously interested in how art from Baudelaire to Warhol has been involved in staging its own disappearance and meeting the challenge posed to it not only by an age of mechanical reproduction, but by consumer capitalism which turns everything into merchandise (i.e., objectifying everything in terms of market value).

 

It was Baudelaire, says Baudrillard, who first came up with a radical solution to this problem. Instead of offering a defence of the traditional status of the work of art based on aesthetic value and seeking art's salvation in and on its own terms - art for art's sake - Baudelaire calls for an acceleration of the processes unfolding within modernity and for art's absolue objectification:

 

"Since aes­thetic value risks alienation from commodity, instead of avoiding alienation, art had to go farther in alienation and fight commodity with its own weapons. Art had to follow the inescapable paths of commodity indifference and equivalence to make the work of art an absolute commodity." [5]

      

This, says Baudrillard, is what a work of art should be; "it should take on the characteristics of shock, strangeness, surprise, anxiety, liquidity and even self-destruction, instantaneity and unreality that are found in commodities" [6]. 

 

The reason Baudelaire still interests and seems so relevant today is not because of his poetry, but because via his ironic logic the work of art was able to sparkle in its own venality and become "a pure object of marvellous commutability" [7].   

 

 

Notes

[1] Readers may recall that I wrote about the history and politics of the bikini in a post published in August 2016, which was illustrated with a photo of 19-year-old Bardot wearing her two-piece swimsuit on the beach at Cannes in 1953: click here.

[2] Of course, there are other reasons apart from an onomatological coincidence as to why these four writers are closely related and it would make for an interesting philosophical and literary study to trace out their shared ideas and concerns.   

 

[3] Douglas Smith, '"La Vérité emphatique du geste dans les grandes circonstances de la vie": Baudelaire, Barthes and the Hysterical Gesture', Irish Journal of French Studies, Vol. 21 (2021), pp. 99-121.  

      In this essay, Smith examines the significance of Baudelaire for Barthes and attempts to answer the question of what that might tell us in turn about the former. He does this by tracing out the manner in which Barthes deploys the quotation from Exposition Universelle and by paying particular attention "on the value to be attributed to exaggeration or excess in the communication of meaning through gesture and language, a phenomenon that both Barthes and Baudelaire associate with hysteria, as either something to be ironically assumed (Baudelaire) or ambivalently exorcized (Barthes)". 

 

[4-6] Jean Baudrillard, 'Simulation and Transaesthetics: Towards the Vanishing Point of Art', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 5, Number 2 (July, 2008): click here to read online. 

      This paper was given as a lecture at the Whitney Museum (New York) in 1987. It also appears in Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, (Semiotext(e) / MIT Press, 2005), pp. 98-110.

 

Reflections on The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han (Part 1: From Melancholia to Bare Life)

The MIT Press (2017)

 

 

I. 

 

Neue deutsche Denke are a bit like buses; you wait ages for one to come along, then two or three arrive on the scene. Byung-Chul Han is one such thinker; part of a generation that also includes, for example, Markus Gabriel [a] and Armen Avanessian [b]. 

 

Han is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin and is (according to his publishers) one of the most widely read theorists writing today, both inside and outside the Academy; the author of over twenty books, including (in English) The Burnout Society (2015), Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (2017), and The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering (2017).

 

But the text I wish to discuss here is an essay on love entitled The Agony of Eros (2017), in which he argues that to be dead to love is to be dead to thought itself ...

II. 

 

The Agony of Eros comes with a foreword by Alain Badiou, whom, readers will recall, published his own little book on love - Éloge de l'amour - in 2009, in which he argued (after Rimbaud) that love needs re-inventing as an opportunity - not for pleasure, so much as for a new form of self and (communist) society; for love provides one possible source of resistance to the obscenity of the market. [c]   

 

I have to say, for me, attaching this foreword is mistaken. Han doesn't need a formal blessing from Badiou, the old man of French philosophy, and doesn't need his text to be vouched for by someone who uses the phrase true love three times in the space of a single page and insists that this authentic form of experience is an affirmation of alterity and a radical refusal of the norms of globalised capitalism. 

 

I mean, come on ...! Reading this almost makes me immediately put the book down. I'm sure Badiou sincerely clings to such fantasy, but I'm hoping Han is going to offer a slightly more sophisticated take on the topic - though I already have my doubts, if, indeed, it's true that he essentially offers a strong reading of the former's own political thesis concerning the revolutionary potential of love.  

 

Anyway, let's find out ... Note that the chapter titles given in bold are Han's own.

 

 

III.

 

Melancholia

 

The crisis of love - taken as a given - is not due, argues Han, to greater freedom and unlimited possibilities, but to an "erosion of the Other [...] occurring in all spheres of life", along with its corollary, the increasing "narcissification of the Self" [d].

 

Now, that might be so, but it's hardly a new or original observation. D. H. Lawrence was saying much the same thing a hundred years ago [e]. And, without referring directly to his work, Han acknowledges his indebtedness to Jean Baudrillard by adopting the phrase l'enfer du même to describe the situation we now find ourselves in [f].        

 

We need to escape from this hell of the same and encounter the atopic Other in all their negativity, otherwise we are are heading for depression, says Han. But this escape might not be a particularly pleasant experience; for it seems that "only an apocalypse can liberate - indeed, redeem - us from the hell of the same, and lead us toward the Other." [3] 

 

To which one might ask: Is it really worth it?  

 

All this talk of healing and cleansing via a disastrous event, a terrible experience, or a sacrifice of the self, makes one wonder whether Han's been watching too many films by Lars von Trier and listening to too many operas by Richard Wagner [g].

 

Do we really want to reinvoke "the proximity of eros and death" [5] in order to liberate ourselves from narcissistic captivity? Does it really require courage to dream of the lovely Ophelia, surrounded by fallen flowers, "drifting in the water with her mouth half open - her gaze lost in the beyond, like a saint or a lover" [6], or is it not simply plunging back into the same old Romantic (and Christian moral) idealism whose formula reads: salvation via catastrophic fatality ...? 

 

Over to you on this one Síomón ... 

 

   

Being Able Not to Be Able

 

Han says we are living in a neoliberal achievement society dominated by the can-do frame of mind; one in which citizens are self-motivated and self-exploiting. Foucault thought this an improvement upon disciplinary society and in his later work adopted a sympathetic attitude towards neoliberalism and the civil liberty it allows. 

 

But Han disagrees and thinks Foucault naive in his uncritical assumptions and failure to notice "the structure of violence and coercion underwriting the neoliberal dictum of freedom" [10]. Neoliberal freedom is the freedom of auto-exploitation and the will to achieve ends with the subject wearing themselves out.     

 

Han wants people to recognise their limitations; to see that love is a relationship "situated beyond achievement, performance, and ability" and ultimately finds expression "as a kind of failure" [11] and certainly not as sexual success. Indeed, Han seems to look to a time that is after the orgy when we revalue "dignity, decency, and propriety" [13] as methods of maintaining distance and thus preserving otherness. 

 

A time that is also post social media. For by means of social media, "we seek to bring the Other as near as possible, to close any distance [...] to create proximity" [13]. But this simply results in "making the Other disappear" [13]. In other words - and in words that Heidegger might have approved of - the total abolition of remoteness "does not produce nearness so much as it abolishes it" [13] [h]. 

 

So, the best thing lovers can do is keep apart - in every sense - and realise that love is not about enjoyment or the generation of pleasant feelings; nor is it about "inconsequential emotion and arousal" [13]. It is, rather,  "something that wounds or incites passion" [14] and often ends with injury.

 

I have to admit, I rather admire this model of love with built in negativity; "nourished by what doesn't yet exist" [16]. I'm all for secrecy, silence, and seduction rather than the guarateed satisfaction of needs. Indeed, I've been writing in favour of delayed gratification and the deferral of pleasure for years: click here, for example.        

 

Bare Life

 

The negative model of love, conceived in terms of injury and transformation, is, says Han, in danger of disappearing completely thanks to love's "increasing positivization and domestication" [18]. We no longer fall in love and risk madness, but enter into a relationship of mutual consent in which we are allowed to stay the same and seek only "the confirmation of oneself in the Other" [18].

 

Love has become a mixture of hedonistic calculation and stress relief; lacking all transcendence and transgression, there is nothing fatal (or even dangerous) in it. The modern day lover prefers bourgeois good health over "sovereignty and freedom" [19]. For Han, this is not the good life as the ancient Greeks conceived of it, but threadbare existence; life of comfort and convenience; the sort of life longed for by the Letzter Mensch who invented happiness. 

 

Again, I smile at all this as it reminds me of what I was writing a decade ago - in the essays collected in Erotomania (2010), for example. But I don't believe I ever arrived at the (neo-Hegelian) conclusion that "Love is an absolute end unto itself." [22] Probably that's because I always remember Lawrence saying that whilst in love one must give, one must never give oneself away and that it was all too easy to die for love - the hard thing being to live for it. 

 

Of course, Han is talking of death in a psycho-symbolic rather than a biological sense and he is thinking of Bataille when he insists that "The negativity of death is essential to erotic experience" [25]. Which, again, might be the case, but it all seems so overblown and old hat - as Houellebecq would say: "We're a long way from Wuthering Heights ..." [i]  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Markus Gabriel is a German philosopher and writer based at the University of Bonn. He regards himself as a thinker in the post-Kantian tradition concerned with metaontology and metametaphysics. Gabriel has spoken out against government measures taken in Europe during the coronavirus pandemic, believing them to be unjustified and a step on the road towards a cyber dictatorship (or virocracy). 

      See: Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism, (Bloomsbury, 2013).

 

[b] Armen Avanessian is an Austrian philosopher, artist, and theorist who has held fellowships in the German departments of Columbia and Yale University. His work on speculative realism and accelerationism in art and philosophy has found a wide audience beyond academia. His concept of hyperstition also designates a method for the actualization in the present of ideas or fictions from the future. 

      See: Hyperstition (2015) a documentary film on time, narrative, philosophy and theory by Christopher Roth in collaboration with Armen Avanessian: click here for a trailer on Vimeo.   

 

[c] See In Praise of Love, by Alain Badiou (with Nicholas Truong), trans. Peter Bush, (Serpent's Tail, 2012). 

[d] Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Love, trans. Erik Butler, (The MIT Press, 2017), p. 3. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the main text. 

[e] See for example what Lawrence writes in his 'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 329-336. 

      These lines give a good idea of how Lawrence anticipates Byung-Chul Han and the French theory he relies upon:

      "Humanity, society has a picture of itself, and lives accordingly. The individual likewise has a private picture of himself, which fits into the big picture. In this picture he is a little absolute [...]

      Even sex, today, is only part of the picture. Men and women alike, when they are being sexual, are only acting up. They are living according to the picture. If there is any dynamic, it is that of self-interest. [...] It is inevitable  when you live according to the picture, that you seek only yourself in sex. Because the picture is your own image of yourself: your idea of yourself. [...] The true self, in sex, would seek a meeting, would seek to meet the other. This would be the true flow [...] what I would call the human consciousness, in contrast to the social, or image consciousness. 

      But today, all is image consciousness. Sex does not exist, there is only sexuality. And sexuality is merely a greedy, blind self-seeking. Self-seeking is the real motive of sexuality. And therefore, since the thing sought is the same, the self, the mode of seeking is not very important. Heterosexual, homosexual, narcistic, normal, or incest, it is all the same thing." [335]     

 

[f] L'enfer du même is poorly translated by Erik Butler as 'inferno of the same', which - apart from sounding like some cheesy disco - thereby misses the fact that Baudrillard was explicitly playing on Sartre's famous phrase L'enfer, c'est les autres, commonly translated into English as 'Hell is other people'. I have therefore modified Butler's translation in this post. 

      Those interested to know more, should see Baudrillard's essay 'The Hell of the Same', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993).  

[g] Han's first chapter is essentially an interpretation of von Trier's Melancholia (2011); a film inspired by a depressive episode which prominently features music from the prelude to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.  

[h] See my post of 22 September, 2021: On the Question of Distance and Proximity. 

[i] Michel Houellebecq, Whatever, trans. Paul Hammond, (Serpent's Tail, 1998). 

      With this brilliant line, from his debut novel, Houellebecq refers to the progressive effacement of human relationships and a kind of vital exhaustion which characterizes the early 21st century. And he does so twenty years before Byung-Chul Han picks up the idea and runs with it. 

 

This post continues in part two - from Porn to The End of Theory - which can be read by clicking here. 

Notes on the Case of Caterina Sforza

Lorenzo di Credi: Portrait of Caterina Sforza 

 (c. 1481-83)

 
Se io potessi scrivere tutto, farei stupire il mondo!

 

 

I. 

 

Nietzsche's critique of nineteenth-century feminism is a simple one: it marks a loss of style and a surrender of intelligence:

 

"There is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a real woman - who is always a clever woman - would have to be ashamed from the very heart." [1]  

 

Often mistakenly thought of as a misogynist, Nietzsche seemed to have a thing for strong, smart, stylish, women who do not aspire to become more like men or demand equality, but affirm themselves as singular beings in their own right. 

 

Women, for example, like Lou Andreas-Salomé, who not only charmed Nietzsche to the extent that he asked for her hand in marriage, but also captivated Rilke and Freud. And women like Caterina Sforza, about whom I wish to speak here, with particular reference to an astonishing incident mentioned by commentators including Machiavelli and Valentine de Saint-Point ...

 

 

II. 

 

Caterina Sforza (1463-1509) was an Italian noblewoman, raised in the refined Milanese court who, from an early age, was noted for her bold and impetuous nature. For whilst, like her siblings, she received a classical education from her tutors, her grandmother encouraged Caterina to also take inspiration from the notorious condottierri from whom she was descended. 

 

A skilled huntress, Caterina also loved to dance, conduct experiments in alchemy, and involve herself in the complicated - and violent - politics of her day. Invariably, this brought the independent-minded and free-spirited woman into conflict with some powerful men, including Cesare Borgia, who at one time had her imprisoned.     

 

Following her marriage to Girolamo Riario, Catarina went to live in Rome with her husband, who served his uncle, the Pope. Upon her arrival, in May 1477, the fourteen-year-old Caterina found the city buzzing with cultural fervour and political intrigue; a city in which material interests and the desire for power far exceeeded spiritual matters.

 

Although Caterina's husband told her not meddle in affairs of state, thanks to her extroverted and sociable character she quickly integrated into aristocratic Roman society, becoming much admired for her beauty and highly respected for her intelligence. Before long, this young woman became an influential intermediary between Rome and other Italian courts, particularly Milan.   

 

Unfortunately, following the death of Sixtus IV, in 1484, the lives of Caterina and her husband were thrown into turmoil ... Riots and rebellions spread throughout Rome and their home, the Palazzo Orsini, was looted and almost destroyed. 

 

Then, worse, in 1488, Girolamo was killed and Caterina found herself at the mercy of her enemies, which leads us to the incident that I wanted to discuss in particular ...

III.

 

According to legend, Caterina was besieged inside a fortress and when her enemies threatened the lives of her children whom they held captive, she stood on the walls, exposed her lower body and, pointing to her cunt, cried: Do it! Kill them in front of me if you want to! I have what's needed to make more! 

 

Now, true or not, this is an astonishing act not only of defiance, but of what Baudrillard terms seduction. 

 

For the effect of this genital display was to render her enemies uncertain of how to respond. Not knowing how to reply, or what to do, they backed down and backed away, sparing her children. Caterina had effectively stripped them of their power and agency, reducing them to impotence. Baudrillard also describes this as the revenge of the object. 

 

Caterina was one of the few women discussed at length by Machiavelli in his writings: if he only briefly mentioned this act of genital defiance in The Prince, he recounted the story at some length and with a certain vulgar relish, in both his Discourses on Livy and Florentine Histories.   

 

And, four centuries later, Valentine de Saint-Point also recalls the story in her Manifesto della Donna futurista (1912) [2]. 

Arguably, what this demonstrates is that prior to our epilated culture of feminism, digital pornography, and labiaplasty, when a woman lifted up her skirt and displayed her cunt, it invoked profound horror in male onlookers. Indeed, even gods, demons and insects were disconcerted by this apotropaic act of magical indecency.

      

Sadly, however, the cunt has now been rendered null and void having lost much of its monstrous beauty and magical capacity. Women have been fatally exposed in the name of sexual emancipation and and close-up images of their exposure are today endlessly circulated via the media; an act of violent and systematic exorcism [3]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), Pt. VII, §239.       

      Nietzsche continues in this important section for an understnding of his sexual politics: "That in woman which inspires respect and fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more 'natural' than that of the man, her genuine cunning, her beast-of-prey suppleness, the tiger's claws beneath the glove [...]." I don't know if Nietzsche was thinking of any woman in particular here, but it's interesting to note that Caterina Sforza was nicknamed La Tigre.   

 

[2] See the recent post on Valentine de Saint-Point and her two Futurist manifestos: click here.

 

[3] I'm self-plagiarising here from an earlier post on Torpedo the Ark, entitled Anasyrma: Upskirt Politics and Vulva Activism (15 Nov 2013): click here. 

 

Readers interested in knowing more about the heroic women of the Renaissance - rulers, philosophers, artists, saints, consorts, courtesans, etc. - might like the following site on Tumblr: Fuck Yeah, Renaissance Women! Several posts on Caterina Sforza can be found here.

 

For a (kind of) follow up post re: vulva activism and the case of Yulia Tsvetkova, click here. 

 

Never Give a Doppelgänger the Keys to Your Car ...

Roger Moore in The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970)

There is always a part of ourselves by which we are haunted; 

an avenging apparition which stands between us and our own lives, 

thwarting our attempt to remain whole.

I.

What is it with doppelgängers [i] and their urge to drive recklessly? I ask this having just read the opening chapters of Daphne du Maurier's 1957 novel The Scapegoat [ii] ...

In the book, a dull (and depressed) historian with no real connections to the present, dreams of belonging and acting directly in the world and of establishing human relations; he's sick of living in the past and of merely recording events; tired of being alone. He wants another, more meaningful life; a life shared and experienced with friends and family.

Then, by chance, he comes face to face with his double in a busy station buffet:

"Someone jolted my elbow as I drank and said, 'je vous demande pardon,' and as I moved to give him space he turned and stared at me and I at him, and I realized, with a strange sense of shock and fear and nausea all combined, that his face and voice were known to me too well.
      I was looking at myself." [9]

The narrator continues:

"We did not speak: we went on staring at one another. I had heard of these things happening [...] and the idea is amusing, or perhaps fraught with tragedy [...]
      This was not funny: nor was it tragic. The resemblance made me slightly sick, reminding me of moments when, passing a shop window, I had suddenly seen my own reflection, and the man in the mirror had been a grotesque caricature of what, conceitedly, I had believed myself to be. Such incidents left me chastened, sore, with ego deflated, but they never gave me a chill down the spine, as this encounter did, nor the desire to turn and run." [10]

The man doesn't run, however. Rather, he accepts the double's invitation to have a drink and tells him of his life in London. And he allows him to drive his car, that he had left parked outside a nearby cathedral.

"He settled himself with assurance behind the wheel and I climbed in besdide him. As he turned the car away from the cathedral [...] he continued to enthuse in schoolboy fashion, murmuring, 'Magnificent, excellent!' under his breath, obviously enjoying every moment of what soon turned out to be, from my own rather cautious standard, a hair-raising ride. When he had jumped one set of lights, and sent an old man leaping for his life, and forced a large Buick driven by an infuriated American into the side of the street, he proceeded to circle the town in order, so he explained, to try the car's pace. 'You know,' he said, 'it amuses me enormously to use other people's possessions. It is one of life's greatest pleasures.' I closed my eyes as we took a corner like a bob-sleigh." [16]

This is doubtless intended to be humorous, but, strangely, it reminded me of a far more sinister scene involving a dull man, his car, and a reckless driving doppelgänger ...  


II.

What I have in mind is the opening scene of spooky psychological thriller, The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970), in which Roger Moore puts in a superb performance as staid business executive Harold Pelham [iii] ...

When driving home from work one day, Pelham appears to suffer - quite literally - a splitting of his personality and begins to drive recklessly and at speed, as if no longer himself and no longer behind the wheel of his Rover saloon, but seated, rather, in a silver sports car (a Lamborghini Islero, to be precise).

Following the inevitable crash, Pelham is shown on the operating table where he experiences clinical death. Fortunately, the surgical team manage to restore his vital functions. However, they notice that, for a moment, there appear to be two heartbeats on the monitor - his alter-ego or shadow self having become fully manifest.

This figure of both identity and non-identity challenges both epistemological certainties and ontological securities. Further, he is intent on making the original Pelham's existence his own (with a little added spice and an attractive mistress played by Olga Georges-Picot). Ultimately, as there is only room in the world for one Harold Pelham, things are destined to turn out badly for at least one of the two men.

I suspect that will be the case also for either John or Jean de Gué (having only read the first fifty-five pages of The Scapegoat, I don't know this for sure). The moral has to be this: Never give a doppelgänger the keys to your car ... because they'll drive off with your life! [iv]

Notes

[i] From earliest times, human beings have felt themselves to be accompanied by a double; be it a spirit, a shadow, a reflection, or what in more recent times the Germans termed a doppelgänger - a sinister figure which became a familiar trope in Gothic and Romantic literature, as well as in the modern thriller. For Freud, the doppelgänger constituted the definitive manifestation of the unheimlich (i.e., the strangely familiar realm that in English is known as the uncanny).

[ii] Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat, (Virago Press, 2004). Page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

[iii] To watch the trailer to The Man Who Haunted Himself, (written and dir. Basil Dearden, 1970): click here. The film was an adaptation of Anthony Armstrong's, The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham, which appeared first as a short story in 1940, before being developed and published as a novel in 1957.
 
[iv] Jean Baudrillard, who was a big fan of demonic doubles and evil twins, also insists that an individual cannot survive an encounter with their doppelgänger. But, interestingly, he also argues that neither can the latter survive in the age of the clone.  
 

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.