In Anticipation of the Forthcoming Book 'Punk & the Animal' (Intellect Books, 2026)

(Intellect Books, 2026)
 

 

I. 

 

One of the forthcoming books I'm looking forward to this autumn is Punk & the Animal: Ethos, Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Laura D. Gelfand and Angela Bartram [1]. 

 

And the reason I'm curious is because apart from the fact that Sid Vicious was named after Rotten's aggressive pet hamster, I can't really think of any alignment or intersections between a subcultural movement that originated in the 1970s and multicellular organisms belonging to the biological kingdom Animalia [2]. 

 

In fact, one of the things that lyricist and lead singer with the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten, insisted upon was that he was not an animal [3] and the punk movement as I remember it was an urban experience with a deliberate sense of its own artificiality [4].  

 

And so, it will be amusing to see how, for example, Kieran Cashell approaches the idea of punk as enactive animality (i.e., a form of nonhuman behaviour). And it will be fun to discover what rodent-loving Russ Bestley has to tell us about the rat in punk lore [5].

 

 

II.

 

If I'd been asked to contribute to the above volume - which I wasn't - I suppose I may have discussed the division of animals into three main categories made by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus [6]:

 

(i) Oedipal animals - particularly pampered pets with which people form sentimental attachments. It's popularly believed that dog owners come to resemble their mutts, but, unfortunately, it's more often the case that domesticated creatures reflect the all-too-human neuroses and petty personal histories of their owners.  

 

(ii) State animals - i.e., archetypal (sometimes mythological) creatures affiliated with fixed territories and molar classifications; noble beasts that symbolise the power and history of a nation, such as the lion and the unicorn as seen on the UK's Royal Coat of Arms.  

 

(iii) Pack animals - i.e., demonic creatures that must be conceived collectively, such as wolves, bats, and rats. Deleuze and Guattari are also fond of animals that typically swarm - particularly insects - as they conveniently illustrate the idea of a multiplicity (a large, self-organising body or assemblage). 

 

No prizes for guessing which category they were most excited by. 

 

And no prizes either for what my argument would have been; namely, that we might also describe these pack animals as punk animals and examine how forming a molecular alliance with these creatures may enable a becoming-animal of the human being [7].  

 

 

 

 Stuffed punk rat made by mbcreature

etsy.com 

 

Notes

 

[1] For more details of this text due to be published in October - including a list of contents - please visit the Intellect website: click here.  

 

[2] Cynics might suggest that this volume is primarily an example of academic trend-merging; a hybrid book born of two increasingly exhausted sub-genres - Punk Studies and Animal Studies - as publishers, editors, and authors all desperately seek novel areas of research.

 

[3] I'm referencing the track 'Bodies', which can be found on the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977): click here. 

 

[4] I'm aware that the second wave of punk in the early 1980s became concerned with animal rights, anti-vivisection, and vegetarianism. But this anarcho-hippie variant (typified by bands like Crass) wasn't something I was involved in or cared about.

 

[5] Dr Kieran Cashell is a lecturer and researcher at the Limerick School of Art and Design, within the Technological University of the Shannon, Ireland. His chapter is titled 'Nonhuman Behaviour: Punk as Enactive Animality' and opens Punk & the Animal (2026). 

      Dr Russ Bestley is Reader in Graphic Design & Subcultures at London College of Communication (University of the Arts London). His chapter immediately follows and is titled 'Rattus rattus: The Rat in Punk Lore'.

 

[6] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988). See the section '1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ...' (pp. 232-309). 

      Note that Deleuze and Guattari also allow for exceptional animals that can't always be categorised; animals such as Moby Dick, for example, or the Cheshire Cat. Russ might like to be reminded also that they make frequent reference to rats - including the large and highly intelligent rat named Ben, star of the 1971 American horror movie Willard (dir. Daniel Mann).

 

[7] I really don't wish to go over the concept of becoming-animal again at any length, as I have discussed and referenced this idea in several earlier posts on Torpedo the Ark: click here. 

      Let it suffice to say that it describes a dynamic and experimental process whereby a subject detaches from fixed, normative identities and enters a continuous, molecular flow of traits, speeds, and affects shared with the non-human world. It does not mean mimicking, imitating, or literally transforming into an animal - and it involves more than merely using an image of rat, for example, as a band logo à la The Stranglers. 

 

 

Bodies

"I'm not a discharge / I'm not a loss in protein 

I'm not a throbbing squirm"

 

 

I. 

 

The debate around the issue of abortion is often loud and ugly, with those who take up the polarised (and politicised) positions of either pro-life or pro-choice often viewing the matter as one in which there is no compromise possible. 

For the former, abortion is wrong in most if not all circumstances on the grounds that human life begins at conception and an unborn baby deserves protection. For the latter, on the other hand, affirmation of a woman's right to bodily autonomy is sacrosanct over and above all other considerations, including any supposed rights of an embryo or foetus.    

But, of course, no issue is cut and dried and abortion is (in every sense of the word) a messy business. To discuss it fully requires consideration of complex moral, legal, and medical questions. I'm not, however, here to address the question of abortion from the perspective of a priest, a lawyer, or a doctor. Rather, I'm interested in it in relation to a controversial song by the Sex Pistols entitled 'Bodies' ...     

 

 

II.

 

To be honest, I never much liked 'Bodies' although it seems to be a fan favourite and the band would often open their live set with the song, so one assumes they always enjoyed playing it. 

 

Found on the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (1977), 'Bodies' tells the true and terrible tale of a female fan from Birmingham called Pauline, who stalked the group whilst carrying an aborted foetus in a plastic bag [1]. 

 

According to the song's graphic and expletive-laden lyrics, this schizophrenic young woman lived in a tree house in the grounds of a mental institution at one time and made even Nancy Spungen seem sane and reasonable in comparison.

 

Apparently, Pauline recounted her experiences of having had several abortions to Rotten at length and in detail and it was these stories that inspired him to write 'Bodies'. 

 

Interestingly, the song is sung from multiple perspectives and is not quite the reactionary and misogynistic anti-abortion diatribe that it is now thought to be by many liberal critics [2], including the loathsome Mark Kermode, who finds the song absolutely reprehensible and thinks it explains why it is Lydon ends up as a Trump supporter [3].

 

What it doesn't do is shy away from the tragic aspect of abortion, which some activists who identify as pro-choice are often keen to overlook, deny, or downplay. It's a difficult track to listen to, but Rotten here as elsewhere captures some of the horror, pain, confusion, and ambiguity that characterises human life conceived as a gurgling bloody mess.             

 

 

Notes

 

[1] To listen to the version of 'Bodies' that appears on Never Mind the Bollocks, click here. To watch the song being performed live at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, Texas Tuesday, on 10 Jan 1978, click here.  

 

[2] It should be pointed out that there are also some on the right who have interpreted 'Bodies' as one of the greatest conservative rock songs; charting, for example, at number 8 on John J. Miller's list of fifty such songs in the National Review (5 June 2006): click here.  

 

[3] Whilst discussing Danny Boyle's 6-part miniseries Pistol with his (equally odious) sidekick Simon Mayo on their podcast Kermode and Mayo's Take (1 June 2022), the former makes clear his moral contempt of the Sex Pistols - particularly Rotten and particularly the song 'Bodies' - click here and go to 4:12 - 4:48.  

     

Reflections on Venus Emerging Slowly From an Old Bathtub

The Venus of Willendorf [1]

Image: Naturhistorisches Museum Wien

nhm-wien.ac.at

 

 

I.

 

I recently reflected on how the figure of a woman emerging from the sea allows us to glimpse something of the goddess Aphrodite in her flesh; and how, in turn, this invites us to consider the relationship we have with our own bodies and the bodies of others (as well as the nature of the divine) [2]. 

 

Of course, such meditations are made easier when that woman is, for example, Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder, or Ana de Macedo skipping among the fishes and rock pools, like a Portuguese Venus; one could spend all day happily musing on lithe and lovely limbs and firm young breasts, etc. 

 

It is not so easy, or so pleasurable, however, to consider what we might collectively term vile bodies - i.e., old bodies, ugly bodies, obese bodies, deformed bodies, mutilated bodies, and, at the extreme, dead bodies (there is surely nothing more repulsive than a decomposing corpse, which is why necrophilia remains such a rare phenomenon).

 

The problem, as Nietzsche pointed out, is that everything ugly weakens and saddens the spectator [3]. Thus, reflecting upon vile bodies has a dangerous psycho-physiological effect; it actually depresses and deprives one of strength. 

 

Ugliness, like sickness, is therefore not only a sign and symptom of degeneration, but a cause of such; which is why healthy happy souls prefer to be surrounded by beauty and turn to art when such is lacking in reality; for art, as Nietzsche says, is the great stimulant of life - a counterforce to all denial of wellbeing [4]. 

 

However, having said all this, the philosopher, as Nietzsche understands them, is one who lives dangerously and who can not only embrace more of human history (in its entirety) as their own, but, like the artist or great poet, find beauty in those individuals, things, and events where most people would see only horror and look away in disgust. 

 

 

II. 

 

And so we come to Rimbaud's poem, Venus Anadyomène (1870); one that I think important, but which critics often overlook, or dismiss as less serious than his later (more mature) verses. 

 

For one thing, the poem - written when Rimbaud was just sixteen - challenges static and traditional ideals of feminine beauty [5] and dares readers to glimpse some aspect of the divine even in an ulcerated anus (which, admittedly, isn't easy). 

 

Wherever the poet might be taking us, we're a long way from Botticelli and moving towards Bataille territory; this hideously beautiful Venus in an old bathtub serves as the vehicle of love in much the same manner that a drunken woman vomiting - or a dog devouring the stomach of a goose - perform the role [6].   

 

Ultimately, not being a scholar of French literature or a Rimbaud expert, I'm unsure what he intended with this verse; is it a serious (slightly disturbing) attempt to revalue beauty, or simply an adolescent parody of the Venus myth - who knows? 

Anyway, readers can decide for themselves by clicking here to access Venus Anadyomène as found in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a bilingual edition trans. Wallace Fowlie and revised by Seth Whidden, (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The Venus of Willendorf is a small figurine, carved from limestone tinted with red ochre, and believed to have been made almost 30,000 years ago in the Paleolithic period (i.e., the Old Stone Age). It was found in 1908, during archaeological excavations at a site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria. Anyone wishing to see it should get along to the Natural History Museum in Vienna. 

 

[2] See the post entitled 'And Venus Among the Fishes Skips' (18 Feb 2022): click here. 

 

[3] See Nietzsche, 'Expeditions [or Skirmishes] of an Untimely Man', §20, in Twilight of the Idols.  

 

[4] See Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), §853 (II), p. 452.    

[5] For more on the challenge to these ideals presented by Rimbaud's poem, see the essay by Seth Whidden, 'Rimbaud Writing on the Body: Anti-Parnassian Movement and Æsthetics in "Vénus Anadyomène"', in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 27, no. 3/4, (University of Nebraska Press, 1999), pp. 333–45. This essay can also be accessed online via JSTOR: click here.

 

[6] See Georges Bataille, 'The Solar Anus', in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Alan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 5-9. The lines I refer to are on p. 6. 

 

 

You Are Like a Beautiful Black Hole to Me My Love

Illustration by Emma Charleston

Sometimes, the longing arises to obscenely scrutinize the naked body of one's lover; to peer and probe like a technician of desire into their cunt or anus, as if hoping to locate the hidden truth of their being.

But clinical fascination soon gives way to impatience and frustration, as one realises that for all the mystery surrounding these secret places, there is nothing to see or discover; that the only truth revealed is the nihilistic truth of the void in which all values come crashing back down to nought. 

Of course, rather than despair or grow angry at this, we might choose to celebrate the body as a site of sheer loss in which to joyfully abandon all hope, as well as deposit semen. As so often, it's simply a question of interpretation. For whilst bodily organs and orifices can serve all kinds of functions, they are revered or despised entirely depending on the disposition of the subject performing the erotic autopsy.