Holy Cow

Kamadhenu (aka Surabhi)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lipstick Traces: Lessons for Lucia

Lucia Pica photographed by Daniel Jackson 

Vogue (Sept 2015)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See:

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

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

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

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

Going Gaga for Go-Go Boots

Young woman in white go-go boots 
and red hot pants: it's a good look

I've been told - and I don't know if it stands up to serious etymological scrutiny - that the term go-go is not simply what linguists term a reduplication.

That it derives, rather, from the French expression à gogo (in joyful abundance); an expression which is in turn derived from the ancient French word for happiness, la gogue. This sounds plausible to me, and I love the idea that go-go boots are a form of footwear born of gaiety and plenitude; just as go-go dancers embody the Dionysian spirit of ecstasy and excess. 

Introduced into the world of women's fashion in the mid-1960s, go-go boots as originally conceived by French designer André Courrèges, were mid-calf in length, low-heeled, and distinctively white in colour. Since then, the term has also come to include knee-high boots with block heels in a multitude of colours.

Purists might moan about this development, but, personally, I think it a good thing. Indeed, if I'm honest, I prefer the later designs that come higher up the leg and have chunkier heels. I also prefer the boots to be made of PVC, rather than leather, thus giving them a younger, poppier, more futuristic feel (as intended by Courrèges) than footwear made from more traditional materials.

Ultimately, despite Nancy Sinatra's insistence to the contrary, these boots are made for dancing and for space travel, not walking - and certainly not walking all over another person as if one were wearing a pair of black jackboots! Sinatra may have helped popularise the go-go boot, but in also establishing it as an aggressive symbol of empowerment, she robs it of its seductive appeal which is based on the subversion of phallocratic forms through playfulness (understanding seduction as a differential concept in the manner of Baudrillard, not as a sexual term).              


Notes

To see an original boot design by Courrèges, click here. 

The song, These Boots Are Made for Walkin' (1966), written by Lee Hazlewood, recorded and performed by Nancy Sinatra, can be found on YouTube by clicking here. 

To read posts related to this one on futuristic 60s and 70s fashion, click here (mini-skirts) and here (hot pants). 

On Operational Whitewash

Mark Tansey 

Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight (1981)

Oil on canvas with crayon

(182.9 x 183.4 cm)

Like many of his pictures, Mark Tansey's Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight (1981), is a lot more interesting than it first appears and certainly shouldn't be mistaken for a work of banal realism or straightforward representation, even if it utilizes certain conventions and structures of figurative painting. To fully appreciate its philosophical importance requires an awareness of how art is essentially a symbolic medium; i.e., a space in which different meanings interact.

The first thing one notices upon closer inspection of the canvas is that the human figure is not simply a madman scrubbing any old objects lying about randomly in the desert. They are, rather, the ruins of the Sphinx and Stonehenge; the remains of formerly great civilizations and long-dead peoples, the spirits of whom still haunt the present.    

Robbe-Grillet isn't attempting to remove the dust and the dirt from these fragments of the past in the naive and vain hope of one day reassembling them, driven by ideals of Unity and Wholeness. He is, rather, trying to cleanse them of significance, of their markings and metaphors, to remove every trace of meaning from them.

It's the ultimate act of iconoclasm and forms part of what Jean Baudrillard referred to as the operational whitewashing of human history. Everything is cleansed of evil until nothing remains that might possibly upset or offend or trouble anyone of a liberal-snowflake disposition; it's political correctness gone retroviral - guaranteeing a more inclusive tomorrow by destroying the past and all memory of the past and its divisions.

Baudrillard also described this form of self-inflicted social leukemia as the perfect crime; the murder not only of the real, but also of the imaginary until all that remains is a kind of aseptic whiteness (free of all shadow and every dark glimmer of fate and negativity).

I thought of all this - of Baudrillard's operational whitewash and of Mark Tansey's 1981 painting - when reading about those activists, anti-fascists, and assorted social justice warriors in America intent on smashing statues, tearing down monuments, burning books, and censoring images that don't correspond with how they want the world to be and to have been.

Not that this is limited to the US: the writer, broadcaster and Oxford graduate, Afua Hirsch, has recently called for Nelson's column to be pulled down on the grounds that Nelson was "what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist", who used his power and influence to vigorously defend slavery and thus "perpetuate the tyranny, serial rape and exploitation" of black people.  

Ms Hirsch continues:

"It is figures like Nelson who immediately spring to mind when I hear the latest news of confederate statues being pulled down in the US. These memorials - more than 700 of which still stand in states including Virginia, Georgia and Texas - have always been the subject of offence and trauma for many African Americans, who rightly see them as glorifying the slavery and then segregation of their not so distant past."

Just to be clear: (i) I'm not entirely unsympathetic to those who advance this line of argument; (ii) I really don't give a shit about those historical figures who are immortalised as the great and the good; (iii) I think a lot of the vile abuse directed at Ms Hirsch for simply expressing her view is absolutely shameful.

However, the concern remains - as Heine recognised almost 200 years ago - that where cultural and historical artefacts are destroyed one day, human beings will be murdered the next ... For if you really want to wipe out all trace of European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, then it follows with a certain genocidal logic that you have to get rid of the descendants of the slave owners too; every white face becomes a provocation.

Indeed, even that might not do the trick. Because the descendants of the peoples who were enslaved also carry this history within them; they are, if you like, in their rage and resentment and inability to forget, living monuments to a terrible past. Thus they would ultimately have to abolish themselves.

And this is why peace on earth isn't accomplished until the last man kills the last but one and then tops himself, leaving behind a smiling corpse ...  


Notes 

Jean Baudrillard, 'Operational Whitewash', The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993), pp. 44-50. 

Afua Hirsch, 'Toppling statues? Here's why Nelson's column should be next', The Guardian (22 Aug 2017): click here. 

This post is for Thomas Bonneville.

Loving the Alien: Reflections on Otherness, Difference and the Joy of Kinship

It's important to note that otherness is not merely an extreme form of difference.

In fact, as Baudrillard makes clear, the latter, difference, is the insidious simulation of otherness and its regulation within Western culture. In other words, we generate difference in order to mask our extermination of otherness and the subordination of its singular principle to the law of the Same via knowledge and representation:

"Our society is entirely dedicated to neutralising otherness, to destroying the other as a natural point of reference within a vast flood of asceptic communication and interaction, of illusory exchange and contact."

Otherness, reduced to mere difference, is made both tolerable and useful; it can be packaged and it can be traded (often under the brand name of diversity).

However, Baudrillard also insists on the indestructability of otherness, which, as the fundamental dynamic of the world, is ultimately greater than reason, morality, or universal humanism. Otherness - like evil - will always return when we least expect it and extract its revenge.   

Now, whilst I still pretty much agree with this analysis - despite the fact it lends itself to romantic primitivism and seems designed to induce guilt - I have to admit I'm no longer as excited by the thought of radical altérité as I once was.

Indeed, at the risk of sounding insular and narcissistic or like a sudden convert to identity politics, it's become something of a relief (and a pleasure) to occasionaly meet a kindred spirit with similar interests and shared values, tastes and experiences; loving the alien is such hard work (the rewards uncertain, the consequences often fatal). 


See: Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso Books, 1993). The line quoted is on p. 121.

Notes on the Case of Andrew Dobson and the Chinese Sex Doll

The doll in the Andrew Dobson case: 

thoughtfully pixelated by the British Press 

so as not to cause offence or arouse illicit desire    

Following the prosecution and jailing last month of 49-year-old Andrew Dobson for attempting to import a supposedly childlike mannequin - deemed to be an indecent object - into the UK from Hong Kong, moral and legal experts have been debating the ethics of non-consensual relations with increasingly sophisticated and apparently soon-to-be sentient sex dolls - particularly when designed to appear underage.

Seeing as this is a subject on which I have previously written at some length, I feel entitled to offer my own thoughts here ...

Firstly, I'd like to point out that - contrary to what's been claimed in some quarters - this is not the first time that an item of this nature have been stopped from entering the country. In fact, sex dolls were banned from doing so back in 1876 on the grounds that as objects used primarily to facilitate human sexual pleasure they were inherently obscene.

However, this ban was lifted in 1987 under European free trade agreements, so I'm not sure on what grounds border force officials at East Midlands Airport were entitled to intercept the doll addressed to Dobson and alert the police who subsequently arrested him at his home.   

Secondly, as Dobson's defence counsel Simon Parry pointed out during his trial at Chester Crown Court, although the prosecution insisted on describing the doll as childlike it was more accurate to describe it as child sized. Even the forensic physician and paediatric consultant who examined the doll on behalf of the prosecution, only agreed its size would be consistent with that of a girl aged between four and six were it a child - but, of course, it's not a child; it's a doll that hasn't been manufactured to a realistic adult scale.

Parry also mentioned the mitigating fact that there was nothing in the online promotional material or sales description, indicating that it should be thought of as a child sex doll.

Now - just to be clear - I'm not saying that Dobson isn't the twisted pervert that some in the media have made him out to be; he was discovered to have pornographic images of children on his computer and pleaded guilty to both making and possessing such images. However, I do not think buying a silicone doll on ebay for sexual gratification - be it in the form of a child, an animal, or an alien entity - should be a criminal offence.

Members of the Cheshire constabulary and tabloid journalists may find it sickening that some individuals choose to indulge dark masturbatory fantasies involving perverse acts and illicit paraphilias, but it's surely important to realise that real acts with objects simply aren't the same as actual acts with bodies.

Ultimately, I suspect that in addition to the legitimate concerns surrounding paedophilia there are other forms of puritanism and prejudice at play here. Thus it is, for example, that in closing Judge Nathanial Berkson said he was disgusted to think that such dolls even existed: "The user would be, in effect, able to simulate sex with a child" - and heaven forbid that should be allowed, for, as Baudrillard provocatively suggested, simulation is the gravest sin of all in the eyes of those defenders of the Real.

The authorities, in other words, find a self-consciously simulated act or virtual crime far more disconcerting and dangerous than a real one. If you rape a child, you clearly transgress the law and thus paradoxically reaffirm the criminal justice system. But if you simulate the rape of a child, it throws a spanner in the works and you expose the essential immorality - and absurdity - of a system that rests on a set of values that are ultimately null and void.

Of course, this doesn't mean the authorities won't respond exactly as if you committed a real crime - indeed, as Dobson has now discovered, they may very well come down even harder upon you.

And all the while I can hear David Bowie singing ... 

A Letter to Heide Hatry (Parts III-V)

Heide Hatry

III. The Truth of Masks

I don't want to appear dim, but I'm not sure I understand this opening sentence from your third text: "whatever sort of opposition one might want to level against the subject-object/presence-absence dichotomy ... it, too, will be inherently fissured by its origins".

In as much as I do understand it - you're saying that both terms in a binary originate, circulate and ultimately coincide within the same conceptual schema or identity - I agree. That's why I try not to engage in oppositional thinking and why I'm not interested in Hegelian dialectics, nor in simply inverting terms (even if this can be fun and may well be a necessary first step in a more profound deconstruction, as Derrida concedes). 

As for the question of the face, maybe you're right and I need to rethink it. Certainly there are faces I love to look at. What Barthes felt about the face of Greta Garbo, I feel about the face of Marlene Dietrich for example; it's a pure and perfect object that appears to be untouched by time or finger-tips, unmarked by traces of emotion. It's a face that belongs to art, not to nature and which has all the cold and expressionless beauty of a mask; a face that has not been painted so much as sculpted. An archetypal and totemic face. A fetish object.

"And behind a mask there is still an identity, an identity that has chosen a mask ..."

No, sorry, I don't agree with this. The truth of masks is far more radical and disconcerting than that; it's the truth that masks don't hide faces or disguise identities, they mask the fact there's nothing behind them. That's why the invisible man is a more interesting and, to those who fear the thought of non-being, a more terrifying figure than the phantom of the opera. When the latter removes his mask he merely reveals scars. But when the former strips away his bandages, Dasein is obliged to confront the ontological truth that it rests upon the void of non-being (sein Nicht-mehr-dasein, as Heidegger writes).

It's this that produces Angst - particularly in those egoists who "dare not die for fear they should be nothing at all" [D. H. Lawrence] and in those who hope to still find a smiling face beneath the bandages, behind the mask, or in the ashes.


IV. The Lugubrious Game

As for the base material from which you compose your "micro-mosaics", my friend, the poet and translator Simon Solomon, is planning to write of ghost, of flame, and of ashes in the manner of (and with reference to) Derrida and I don't wish to anticipate his remarks. However, you might like to read my Reflections from a Sickbed, in which I muse on the problem of corpse disposal and what to do with cremains.

I think, were I an artist, I might be tempted to mix ashes with excrement and smear the combination across a large white canvas to show how what we leave behind us when we die - when we become that shipwreck in the nauseous - is not a face, but a slimy and disgusting residue, as when a snail or slug passes by. Or, to put it more crudely, a shit stain. (Obviously, I'm thinking back to Bataille here and to Dalí's 'The Lugubrious Game'.)

You say that human remains can be "ennobled by art" and maybe they can. But, for me, it's not the job of art to elevate anything belonging to mankind; on the contrary it should bring us back down Pisgah with a bump and remind us of our mortality and material nature; to make us grunt like pigs before the canvas, rather than sigh like angels full of smug self-satisfaction. It's important to realise that when Nietzsche says art is the great anti-nihilistic force par excellence, he implies also that it's a form of counter-idealism; for nihilism is not simply the negation of all values, it's the positing of ultimately hollow ideals in the first place.  


V. Iconography is Never Innocent

I'm glad to hear you don't intend to "freeze the dead in a permanent subordination" to an image. Though it's difficult for me to imagine this won't be an unintended consequence of producing icons in ash that are so realistic in their facial representation and reconstruction. Do you remember how some tribal peoples used to worry that the camera stole their soul? Well I have similar concerns. Indeed, I even have some sympathy with the authors of Exodus warning against graven images and the making of idols etc.

I certainly agree with Baudrillard that, whatever else it may be, iconography is never innocent. In fact, it plays a complicit role in the perfect crime by which he refers to the extermination of singular being via technological and social processes bent on replacing real things and real people with a series of images and empty signs. When this happens, we pass beyond representation (or, in the case of the dead, commemoration) towards obscenity; a state wherein everything and everyone is "uselessly, needlessly visible, without desire and without effect".

I worry, Heide, that those who are indecently exposed in a game of posthumous exhibitionism (you describe it in terms of self-expression and self-revelation) are left without secrets, without shadows, without charm. They become, if you like, ghosts caught up in a commercial art machine ...

Finally, I smiled when you wrote "if, as you seem to contend, the 'goal' or 'desire' of life ... is to merge back into material indifference, we might as well be dead already" - for don't you see that, in a very real sense, we are dead already ... 
 
Yours with respect, admiration, and affection,

Stephen Alexander


To read parts I and II of this letter to Heide Hatry, please click here. 

To read Heide Hatry's extensive series of comments please see the posts to which they are attached: Heide Hatry: Icons in Ash and On Faciality and Becoming-Imperceptible with Reference to the Work of Heide Hatry.

Miles Aldridge: Supposing Truth to be a Supermodel

Miles Aldridge: 3-D (2010) 
milesaldridge.com

London-born photographer Miles Aldridge is someone whose work I admire immensely; it's so beautifully dark beneath the fluorescent colours and combines so perfectly his obvious obsessions: the great F-words of fashion, film, and fetishised femininity.

Clearly interested in the philosophical question of style, Aldridge playfully explores and experiments with the semiotics of the catwalk, the fatal seduction of cinema and the cultural construction of woman as a revered object within the pornographic imagination.

It's an artistic and a perverse quest for truth, resting upon the quasi-Nietzschean supposition that truth might be a supermodel or a goddess of the silver screen; sacred monsters whose mask-like faces express neither sensitivity nor sincerity; transsexual creatures who, as Baudrillard says, never dazzle because of their talent or intelligence, but because of their remoteness and what we might even describe as their apparent frigidity.

Of course, some critics find Aldridge's work vacuous and a form of conceit; a glossy fantasy that far from subverting the political and social realities of gender, class and consumerism - as is sometimes claimed - merely reinforces these things. But I beg to differ with this analysis. For me, his work matters. And it matters because it demonstrates how what we consume, what we worship, or what we most desire - be it a Birkin bag, a lifestyle, or the attractive stranger sitting across the bar - is never a new object in itself, but is rather an object previously encountered on screen or in the pages of Vogue; i.e. one that has already been assigned meaning within a discursive framework.

In other words, Aldridge's work disconcertingly suggests that it's impossible to know real objects existing outside a frame of reference; reality itself is constituted via representation and staged performance - just like a photo shoot. Those commentators who, like Glenn O'Brien, insist that Aldridge is in the business of constructing dreams, have radically misunderstood what is going on in his work - or underestimated what's at stake. For what Aldridge is doing is far more fundamental; he's using the logic of fashion and his passion for artificiality to rupture the order of referential reason.

And central to this project, as indicated, is the figure of woman as actress, as model, as perfect object; as one who understands the need for cosmetics and defends the right to lie. Not because she wishes to protect or disguise some concealed essence beneath appearances, but because she has no such essence. Again, many critics will protest that by placing the question of woman into the context of fashion and film, it means she becomes fetishized and commodified as an object or image, rather than liberated as a subject. But, even if this is the case, is that so bad? Mightn't a clever woman - who is always a well-dressed woman - use her own emptiness and reification to her own advantage?

Aldridge insists that his models have a blank expression not because they are mindless, but, on the contrary, because they are lost in thought. And, far from feeling on the verge of extinction because they have been transformed into a hollowed-out figure of male fantasy, they exhibit the pale power of seduction and stillness that is particular to those who are soulless; what Walter Benjamin termed the sex appeal of the inorganic.

For me, as for Aldridge, it's on the runway or the movie screen, where woman best stages her refusal of - and resistance to - male power and masculine depth. For although obliged to pout and to pose and embody consumer capitalism's ideals of femininity, luxury and artifice, woman as seductive object remains fundamentally untouchable and inaccessible. She teases her male spectators with a glimpse or the promise of her nakedness, whilst exposing also the truth that they are as fake and as hollow as she (in their desires, emotions and highest values).

Stare long enough into the void, says Nietzsche, and the void begins to stare into you ...

Love and Hate in a Very Cold Climate

Katja Hietala: founder of the Sisters of Kyllikki

Photo: AFP/Sam Kingsley 

For idealists, driven by a will to love and insistent upon the notion of a universal humanity, the acceptance of strangers and embrace of foreignness is a desperate moral duty.  

Thus it is, for example, that the Sisters of Kyllikki in a determined effort to make migrants feel welcome and demonstrate what a kind and tolerant people the Finns are, have taken to the streets distributing smiles and heart-shaped cards that grant permission to hug and carry other positive messages. 

Quite what the women of Cologne and other German cities who were assaulted on New Year's Eve think of this one can only wonder. But I do know that despite what the Sisters of Kyllikki may believe, not everyone wants to be assimilated into a coercive system of reciprocated emotion in which they have no choice but to love and be loved; a system which is happy to generate superficial difference and cultural diversity, but which refuses to conceive of genuine otherness. That is to say, a form of radical alterity that may very well be violently antagonistic. 

Why can't privileged white liberals ever quite accept that not everyone wants to be like them? That many feel an almost visceral aversion towards them and what they represent, decisively rejecting what they have to offer. This feeling of hate might be rooted in class, race, religion or a combination of these things. But it's a profound and authentic form of passion that makes our own feelings and values look pale and feeble in comparison. 

Baudrillard understands the hate of the un-Enlightened Other better than anyone. In an interview with François Ewald, he says:

"There's something irremediable, irreducible in this. We can offer them all the universal charity we are capable of, try to understand them, try to love them - but there is in them a kind of radical alterity that does not want to be understood, and that will not be understood."

Ominously, Baudrillard warns:

"I have the impression that the gulf is hardening and deepening between a culture of the universal and those singularities that remain. These people cannot allow themselves offensive passions; they don't have the means for them. But contempt is still available to them. I believe they have a profound contempt for us; they dislike us with an irreducible feeling of rejection." 

    

Islamic terrorism is only the most extreme and overt form of this contempt; "a passion of radical vengeance, a kind of absolute reversion that's not about to subside" anytime soon. But, I would suggest, the imported phenomenon of taharrush gamea can also be analysed from the theoretical perspective of hate.      

Thus, despite the good offices of Angela Merkel and the huggy women of Finland, one suspects things are going to become increasingly ambiguous in Europe as we wake up to the fact that the world is governed not by a principle of Love and Unity, but by the irreconcilability of evil.


See: Jean Baudrillard, 'Hate: A Last Sign of Life', interview with François Ewald, trans. Brent Edwards, in From Hyperreality to Disappearance, ed. Richard G. Smith and David B. Clarke, (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 132-42. Lines quoted are on pp. 133-34.

Think of the Children

Helen Lovejoy: The Simpsons 

Throughout the European migrant crisis, the Helen Lovejoys and Corbynistas of this world have continually beseeched us to think of the children in an attempt to negate all serious discussion of what is an urgent political problem without any easy solution. 

Via the use of distressing images and necro-emotive language, powerfully compelling in its stereotypic consistency, campaigners who wish to welcome all refugees into Europe have transformed a complex question into a simplistic moral issue about which right-minded people everywhere must surely be in agreement. 

Bereft of any argument as to how Europe might accommodate (never mind assimilate) millions of people from very different cultural backgrounds - many of whom are fundamentally opposed to the values (or lack of values) of the West - humanitarians have simply pointed to the suffering and demanded Europeans share in it and, indeed, accept a large part of the blame for it; we are expected to feel not only pity and compassion, but guilt.     

The strategic use, however, of sentiment and stereotype to fill the void in thought is always suspect and all forms of logical fallacy and opportunism should surely be exposed as such.

Ultimately, we should think of the children - though not in that sticky, ideal manner in which perceived vulnerability is equated with innocence. But this should also include children who are native Europeans and not just young migrants. For presumably they too have the right to a secure and prosperous future on a continent that has its own distinctive history, culture, and destiny.

One really doesn't want to fall back into the Nazi rhetoric of blood and soil - and Europe is, I think, more than an ethno-geographical space - but current events force one to think about race, demographics, territory, borders, identity and notions of otherness, etc. That is to say, all those politically contentious subjects that seem to come to the fore in times of crisis and Völkerchaos.  

Godwin's law is, it appears, far wider in its application (and has far greater explanatory power) than some people imagine. And, somewhat paradoxically, fascism marks not only the end of all serious debate, but the beginning too. It's certainly fair to say that most of the really provocative political thinking today is carried out by those on the far right.

And this, says Baudrillard, is precisely because everything moral, orthodox and conformist - everything which was traditionally associated with the right - has now passed to the once radical left, stripping the latter of its political and intellectual energy. You only pathetically think of the children when you have nothing better to do.  

Picture This (On the Evil Genius of the Image)

There is a great affectation in ascribing meaning to the photographic image. 

To do so is to make objects strike a pose. - Jean Baudrillard

I have recently developed a liking for taking photographs, though perhaps it would be better to call the images produced visual fragments (or simply snaps). 

For photographs are taken by photographers and refer us to an aesthetic practice with its own history, and I'm not a photographer. Nor do I know much (or care much) about photography as an art form or technical pursuit. 

I simply enjoy taking random snaps of objects that have in some mysterious manner captured my attention and, as it were, revealed something of themselves. This aspect is crucial: I don't choose the objects or imagine the world (in the same way that I don't speak language). There's nothing imaginary about the production of images or subjectively predetermined.

Pictures - the very rare ones that work at any rate - are not merely representations of something else which can immediately be understood and discussed in conventional and critical terms. Rather, they are fatal objects in their own right which allow an impersonal and inhuman reality to shine through in a way that is untainted and unmediated; what Baudrillard refers to as the transparency of evil (the showing-through of the world as is, rather than as we would have it).  

When you see a picture of this kind, there's nothing to say about it, nothing to know. Any attempt to drape meaning over it or identify the author of the image as if that will tell you something essential, is futile and inappropriate. A great image, in other words, renders silent and is the site of disappearance (the fact that so much has been written on photography is therefore somewhat ironic). 

Now, this is not to say or imply that any of my snaps are rare in this sense. But, in their naivety and imperfection - in their lack of title and date - perhaps a small number have something diabolical about them ... 

Making Love to Music

Etruscan dancers in a tomb near Tarquinia, Italy (c 470 BC) 

Provocative dance moves, such as grinding and twerking, are obviously obscene in an everyday sense of the term, but that's not what makes them tiresome and strangely offensive. I really don't care if idiots want to aggressively thrust their hips, wiggle their bottoms, and dry hump in public.

However, far from being sexual, it seems to me these moves are distinctly anti-sexual and obscene also in the very specific manner that Baudrillard uses the term. That is to say, they lack any metaphorical dimension or any stylish, carefully choreographed component.

In grinding and in twerking, as in pornography, "the body, the sex organs, the sex act are brutally no longer mis en scène, but immediately proffered for view" - and for consumption. It's a total acting out of things that have previously been kept off-stage and regarded as part of a seductive game usually played in private between partners.        

Although his concern is with the sublimation of sex, rather than its exorcising through obscenity, Lawrence was also concerned with the relationship between Eros and Terpsichore. In a short article written in 1927, entitled 'Making Love to Music', he identifies the tango and Charleston as modern dances that are secretly averse both to actual copulation and to the ancient magic of dance.

In contrast to the young men and women of the Jazz Age, Lawrence writes of the dancers painted on the walls of Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia:

"There the painted women dance, in their transparent linen ... opposite the naked-limbed men, in a splendour and an abandon which is not at all abandoned. There is a great beauty in them ... They are wild with a dance that is heavy and light at the same time, and not a bit anti-copulative, yet not bouncingly copulative either."

Although free from clothes and moral inhibition, these Etruscan figures are not grotesquely acting out sex in a crude and callous fashion, like Miley Cyrus: they are simply dancing a dance that is full of joy and a delight in movement; dancing their very souls into existence as it were.

It is, alas, we moderns who have "narrowed the dance down to two movements: either bouncing towards copulation, or sliding and shaking and waggling, to elude it", or make of it something vulgar and obscene.

   
Notes: 

Jean Baudrillard, 'The Obscene', Passwords, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 2003). The line quoted from is on p. 27.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'Making Love to Music', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 41-8. Lines quoted can be found on pp. 46-7.

Geoff Dyer

Photo by Matt Stuart (2011)

geoffdyer.com

Someone - not quite a friend, but not, I think, someone motivated by any real enmity either - writes to tell me what is wrong with this blog and why it fails to find an audience of any size: It's too random, he says, too much made up of bits and pieces that lack any coherent theme or continuity.  

This, of course, is not untrue, but it somewhat misses the point; i.e. that I'm very deliberately subscribing to a fragmented method of writing which encompasses as wide a range of concerns and interests as possible, all of which are assembled in a single space, but without being coordinated or synthesized into any kind of unity or whole. Obviously, such a non-systematic (and anti-systematic) approach is indebted to several of the writers I love the most, including Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and Roland Barthes. 

Geoff Dyer understands: for he shares in this love of the fragmented and whimsical and has built a successful non-career by following wherever his imagination and his desire has taken him, producing a variety of original works, without any regard for a target audience, that speak of his admirable (and enviable) freedom as a writer. 

By learning how to loiter, as Dyer says, on the margins of everything, "unhindered by specialisms ... and the rigours of imposed method", one becomes not merely a man of letters, but a homotextual - i.e., one whose life is virtually synonymous with their writing.

I might not particularly care for all of his books, or share all of his passions or opinions; I might even find him something of a fraud. But, in Dyer, I recognise a degree of kinship and so can't help feeling a little friendly and fraternal towards him - whilst not entirely sure this would be reciprocated ...

Note: Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels, two collections of essays, and several genre-defying books. The line quoted is from his Introduction to Anglo-English Attitudes: Essays, Reviews, Misadventures 1984-99, (Abacus, 2004), p. 4.