Showing posts with label becoming-imperceptible. Show all posts
Showing posts with label becoming-imperceptible. Show all posts

7 Oct 2023

Yiff Yiff Hooray! Three Cheers for Furries and the Otherkin

 
Three members of the furry fandom and an 
elf-girl member of the otherkin community
 
 
Opening Remarks 
 
The following material consists of revised extracts from Chapter 5 of Zoophilia, Vol. III of The Treadwell's Papers (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). 
 
It was originally presented as part of a series of talks at Treadwell's Bookshop in 2006 and might be said to have anticipated the direction our culture was heading vis-à-vis questions of identity, etc.
 
These questions, however, have mostly been thought through (and fought over) in terms of sex, gender, and race, rather than our humanity as such. 
 
Thus, even though in the years since I first wrote on the subject of becoming-animal and/or becoming-other, there has been far more academic and media attention given to therians, furries, and otherkin, most members of the public still remain blissfully unaware of the term transspeciesism, even whilst obsessively worrying about issues to do with transsexuality and gender fluidity.
 
 
The Furry Fandom
 
I.
 
Whilst there's a level of crossover with the therian community - which I discussed in a recently published post [1] - the furry fandom is often looked down upon by members of the former, who regard furries as frivolous and lacking in respect for the true nature of the animals they like to dress up as. 
 
On the other paw, however, members of the fandom often accuse therianthropes of taking the idea of metamorphosis too far and themselves too seriously. 
 
I suppose, if one wanted to be unkind and offer a crude stereotype of both parties, one could say that whilst therians are genuinely barking, furries are simply mimicking animal noises. 
 
 
II.
 
Essentially, the furry fandom is a movement that celebrates the hybridization of humans and animals in cartoons, comics, and films. It is, therefore, predominantly composed of persons with artistic and literary interests, rather than occult or fetishistic leanings. 
 
That said, many members of the fandom do have a strong attraction to animal cosplay and like to indulge their transformation fantasies - some of which are overtly erotic in character and involve the loss or rippage of human clothing - whilst being suitably attired in a fursuit
 
Those who have a particular penchant for furry sex are sometimes labelled as furverts and, whilst these people compose only a small minority of the fandom, they are the ones who - rightly or wrongly - excite most interest from those outside of the fandom [2]
 
 
III.
 
The furry fandom started as a discussion group that met at various science fiction and comic-book conventions in the early 1980s and who were interested in all kinds of anthropomorphic characters, but particularly those covered in fur. By 1987, enough interest had been generated for there to be a furry convention in its own right and these have continued to be held annually in Europe and the US ever since [3].
 
With the rise and spread of the internet, the furry fandom has also grown rapidly around the world as an on-line community with many of its own specialised sites and virtual meeting places.
 
Those fans possessing handicraft skills, often like to make their own plush toys, or design elaborate costumes in a wide range of styles and worn either for private pleasure, or when participating at furry events. 
 
Whilst those fans who are more technologically-minded, often create their own anthropomorphic animal avatars called - predictably enough - fursonas (or tiny-bodies), via which they engage in (sometimes kinky) role-playing games with others of their kind in a virtual world.
 
 
IV.
 
As mentioned, for the most part, furries and therians don't usually have much to do with one another and the two phenomena legitimately deserve to be regarded as separate concepts attracting different types of people. 
 
However, there are those - known as furry lifestylers - who blur this distinction by occupying the space between the two categories. 
 
These individuals have beliefs similar to those who practice animal related religions and philosophies, such as shamanism. Thus it is that some lifestylers often claim they have a totem animal that watches over them, or that they are the reincarnation of an animal spirit. 
 
Other lifestylers, meanwhile, are keen to promote the idea that animal instincts exist within humans as part of our genetic code and hope to translate man back into nature, as Nietzsche would say; i.e., to strip away the anthropocentric conceit that has blinded us to our own reality and fooled us into vainly thinking we are of a different origin and higher status to other animals. 
 
That may be, as Nietzsche says, a queer and possibly insane task, but it's certainly a revaluation of values [4]
 
 
The Otherkin
 
I.
 
The term otherkin is a rather nice neologism, coined in the early-mid-1990s when it became clear that a distinct new sub-culture was emerging on-line out of various other communities. 
 
Like therians, members of the otherkin like to think of themselves as essentially non-human, to a lesser or greater degree. But whereas therians believe themselves to be part-animal, the otherkin often regard themselves as being part mythological or legendary creature; such as centaurs, mermaids, or elves, for example.
 
Some members of the otherkin also identify in terms of fictional characters who have arisen within modern popular culture; and some, albeit far fewer in number, identify as plants, abstract concepts, or natural phenomena, which is philosophically interesting and one wonders if those who think of themselves as a weather system, for example, wish to become-imperceptible - i.e., reach the point at which they can no longer be identified in human terms, but only acknowledged as a chaos of non-subjectified effects and impersonal elements that must be mapped meteorologically ...?
 
If so, that's kind of cool, speaking as a Deleuzian ...
 
 
II.
 
Whilst almost all otherkin insist that they are neither fantasizing nor role-playing - claiming, for example, that their nonhuman aspect is spiritual in nature and not merely an assumed persona or self-constructed identity - others attribute it to unusual psychology or neurodivergence and do not hold any spiritual beliefs. 
 
Some even suggest that they are biologically other, considering themselves to be directly descended from the species with which they identify via a primeval marriage at some point with mankind. Again, that's very interesting; it reminds one of the fact that stories of humans descending from animals, giants, aliens, or gods are common among tribal peoples all over the world and very often involve illicit sexual relations.
 
Others, meanwhile, believe in a multitude of parallel universes, wherein supernatural or sapient non-human beings exist to whom they are psychically attuned or able to visit via a form of astral projection. I don't know if many otherkin speak in terms of possession, but such a concept surely provides an explanation for their altered state of consciousness and associated behaviours that is found in many religions.
 
But again, just as I understand why furries don't wish to be thought furverts, I understand why members of the otherkin can be a little uncomfortable with being thought part of a weird neo-pagan religion or occultists (despite sharing an obvious interest in the paranormal). 
 
Sadly, there's already a peculiar degree of public fear and suspicion (as well as scorn) directed their way - as there is for others who are perceived as threatening the predominant moral and social order - so no need to also add to this by openly declaring themselves to be devil-worshippers or involved in the dark arts.      
 
Personally, whatever beliefs the otherkin may choose to hold and however they may choose to modify their physical appearance so as too resemble the being it is they identify with (or as), I wish them well and would happily fly the Fairy Star flag if asked to do so ... [5]
 
      
 
 
Notes
 
[1] See 'Madness and Animality: Notes on Therianthropy' (6 Oct 2023): click here.
 
[2] It's perhaps not surprising that the question of sex has at times been a source of controversy and division within the furry fandom. Some members strongly object to what they regard as the distasteful and deviant aspects amongst the community and the term furvert has been coined to specifically identify a sub-section of the fandom that deliberately sexualises anthropomorphic animal characters. 
      Many outsiders also find the pornification of cute and childish animal imagery troubling. But furverts are quick to stress that they have no interest in paedophilia - anymore than they do in zoophilia - and that furvert activity consists primarily of creating, exchanging, and collecting illustrations of their own particular furry fetish character online; a genre of erotic image making known as yiffy art; yiff being a widely used slang term within the furry fandom which, like fuck, has various meanings, applications, degrees of nuance, and which etymologically derives from an onomatopoeic representation of the sound made by mating foxes.
      Whilst it's certainly the case that not all furries are furverts, whether the more prudish members of the fandom like it or not, there is an overlap between furverts and those who enjoy pornography, as well as participants within the world of BDSM and - fairly or unfairly - this has attracted a fair deal of attention, even inspiring an episode of CSI back in 2003 (S4/E5: 'Fur and Loathing') and a book by Michael Cogliantry in 2009 (Furverts, Chronicle Books) - both of which infuriated many furries. 
 
[3] Click here for a peek at ConFuzzled 2023, held at the Hilton Birmingham Metropole Hotel (26-30 May).  
 
[4] See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, VII. 230.
 
[5] A regular heptagram known as the Elven Star or Fairy Star is used to denote nonhuman identity. It was designed by the Elf Queen's Daughters and first published in the Green Egg newsletter in March 1976. The background colour added here is my own and does not (as far as I know) have any significance within otherkin circles.  
 

9 May 2019

Becoming-Imperceptible: Notes on 'The Woman Who Wanted to Disappear'



I.

The last piece of fictional writing by D. H. Lawrence was an untitled fragment of text scribbled in a notebook during the final year of his life and unpublished until 2005, when it was transcribed and added as an appendix to the Cambridge edition of The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories.  

In the story - called by the Cambridge editors 'The Woman Who Wanted to Disappear' - an unnamed woman announces to her husband that she would like to vanish for a year and intends to leave him and her two young children the following day, taking only a small suitcase with her. She makes it clear that she wants no one to come sniffing after her when she's gone, whatever the circumstances.  

Seeing as she has already made arrangements with her lawyer and the bank - and knowing that it would be pointless objecting to her planned disappearance - the husband, Henry, says nothing and simply marks the date of her anticipated reappearance the following year in red pencil on the calendar. 

It wasn't so much that she wanted to get away from him and the children; rather, she wanted to get completely away from herself and find a place in which she might feel at peace - and also of some use to somebody else, for her own superfluity was troubling to her: 

"If only she could get away from herself, and be different, somehow! Oh, be different! come to rest somewhere! She could never come to rest, never for a second." 

And so, this wealthy, restless woman departs and, after a brief stay in an expensive mountain top hotel, she buys a car and drives into the surrounding dark forest:  

"It reminded her of her childhood - but it was not a disappearance. Hundreds of cars were on the road, and all the hotels were rather full. A mistake, really, to start romantically disappearing at the end of July, when everywhere is overcrowded. Somehow she didn't want to disappear into a crowd, though that is supposed to be the easiest thing to disappear into. She wanted to disappear into some rare and magical place where she could become her own rare and magical self - her true self, that nobody knew, least of all she herself."

I suppose many people have felt this way; have desperately sought out some kind of rare and magical place in which they might both disappear and become who they are. But, of course, to discover some kind of immanent utopia involves leaving the main road and abandoning the safety of one's vehicle and that requires a certain reckless courage that is increasingly rare today.  


II. 

Although - as far as I recall - they don't talk of disappearing as such, Deleuze and Guattari do suggest that the ultimate aim of all becoming is becoming-imperceptible, i.e. to reach the point at which individuals can no longer be identified in human terms, but only acknowledged as a chaos of non-subjectified effects (or what Lawrence terms vibrations). 

In other words, this is to recognise that our haecceity is entirely composed at a molecular level of impersonal elements and can only be mapped in schizoanalytic terms of "longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles".  

Becoming-imperceptible marks an evanescence of the self. It means arriving at that fourth dimensional space that is now/here, rather than no/where, described by Lawrence in an essay on love as "the realm of calm delight [...] the other-kingdom of bliss". It is here we accomplish our perfection, even as we stage our disappearance.  


See:

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Woman Who Wanted to Disappear', The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Appendix V, pp. 251-55.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'Love', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 9. 

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 262.


13 Jun 2017

On Faciality and Becoming-Imperceptible with Reference to the Work of Heide Hatry

Scarlett Johansson as Lucy (2014)


I've been told that my post on Heide Hatry's Icons in Ash was unkind and unfair. And, further, that my refusal or inability to recognise their philosophical interest and aesthetic power either perverse or shameful:

"Do you not see how the very materials from which they are composed deconstruct the life and death binary? If only you'd drop your anti-humanistic posturing for a moment, you might learn to appreciate their uncanny, bitter-sweet beauty and significance."

Let me, then, offer a few further remarks on Hatry's ash portraits, attempting to make clear the basis for my criticisms and concerns ...


I: On Faciality

I have written elsewhere on this blog about my Deleuzean dislike of the face: click here and here, for example.

In sum: the face has long held a privileged and determining place within Western metaphysics that I think we need to challenge. For whilst we might fool ourselves that each face is individual and unique, it isn’t. Rather, it’s a type of social machine that overcodes not just the head, but the entire body, ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance. The smile and all our other familiar facial expressions are thus merely types of conformity with the dominant reality.

And so, when Heide Hatry insists on the primacy of the face and reconstructs it in all its complexity and vulgarity from ash, I have a problem. Asked if it was necessary to create facial images rather than do something else with the cremains, she replies:

"It's absolutely necessary; and it's necessary that the portrait is as realistic as possible because ... the face is where we understand communication is happening ... for capturing all the subtleties that make us human."

Hatry thus openly subscribes to the ideal moral function of the face; as that which reveals the soul and allows us to comprehend the individual: "Other ways of reading a person are incidental or filtered through this", she says - not incorrectly, but in a manner that suggests she's entirely untroubled by this. 


II: Becoming-Imperceptible

For me - again as someone who writes in the shadow of Deleuze - it's crucial to (i) rethink the subject outside of the moral-rational framework provided by classical humanism and (ii) escape the face and find a way of becoming-imperceptible. Thus, rather than drawing faces in the dust and displaying a sentimental attachment to personal identity, artists should be helping us experiment with different modes of constituting the self and new ways of inhabiting the body.   

Further, they should be helping us form an understanding of death that is entirely inhuman and faceless and which opens up a radically impersonal way of being linked to cosmic forces: a return to material actuality, as Nietzsche says; i.e. merging with a universe that is supremely indifferent to life. To think death in terms of becoming-imperceptible is ultimately to privilege ashes over the epiphenomenal phoenix that arises from them (despite the beauty of its feathers).

It doesn't mean "returning indistinguishable ashes to the particular" and vainly attempting to keep alive what was "in danger of being lost or forgotten". The idea that art exists in order to secure "the sense of a person, of her or his individuality, to lovingly preserve that quality even in death, in memory, and with it the integrity of the human lineage through generations", is anathema to me.

I think, at heart, most of us - like Sade - desire to be completely forgotten when we die, leaving no visible traces behind of our existence. As Rosi Braidotti puts it, central to posthumanist ethics lies evanescence (not transcendence) and the following paradox: "that while at the conscious level all of us struggle for survival, at some deeper level of our unconscious structures, all we long for is to lie silently and let time wash over us in the perfect stillness of not-life".

To be everywhere and nowhere; everything and nothing; to vanish like Lucy or the Incredible Shrinking Man into the eternal flux of becoming  - that's better than ending up ashen-faced, is it not?       

Notes

Rosi Braidotti, 'The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible', in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin Boundas, (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 133-59. To read this essay online click here.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The University of Minnesota Press, 1987); see chapters 7: 'Year Zero: Faciality' and 10: 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ...'

Mark Pachter, 'A Conversation with Heide Hatry', in Heide Hatry, Icons in Ash, ed. Gavin Keeney, (Station Hill in association with Ubu Gallery, New York, 2017), pp. 76-91. 

Re: Luc Bresson's film, Lucy (2014), of course it's shot through with crackpot science, Hollywood hokum and idealism of the worst kind - what Nietzsche would think of as Platonism for the people. But it at least hints at the form of becoming towards which all other becomings aim - the becoming-imperceptible. It's just unfortunate it ends with an idiotic text message - I am everywhere - which implies omnipresence in terms of personal consciousness, rather than impersonal materiality.    


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