I Am Heinrich Heine

Portrait of Heinich Heine 

by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1831)

 

I. 

 

Readers may recall that I recently had a run-in with the Google censor-bots [1] that now patrol the sites hosted by Blogger, seeking out content which infringes their community guidelines.

 

Several posts on Torpedo the Ark have now been flagged for review and subsequently placed behind warning notices which let readers know that they contain sensitive content. 

 

Although they can still access the offending posts if they wish to do so, readers must first acknowledge these notices and confirm they are old enough to access adult material.  

 

As for me, I'm invited by the Blogger Team to update the content so as to adhere to Blogger's guidelines; once I have done so, I can then republish the posts and ask that their status be reviewed.

 

 

II. 

 

If all this wasn't troubling enough, Google have now gone a step further and actively deleted a post - without any prior notice or permission sought - on the grounds that it doesn't simply infringe but violates their guidelines - which is a particularly strong term to use. 

 

Just for the record: the post in question - 'On the Figure of the Prostitute' (15 May 2013) - did not advocate vice nor lend support to the illegal sex trade; nor did it use an image that could possibly be described as obscene or pornographic.

 

In fact, the post was a critique of sexual exploitation within a free market economy and phallocratic order, which affirmed the feminist position that within such an order there are no bad women, only bad laws. 

 

So, I'm a little puzzled as to what it is Google find so offensive in the above post - and I'm more than a little troubled by the threatening (and fascistic) nature of their closing remark:

 

"We encourage you to review the full content of your blog posts to make sure that they are in line with our standards, as additional violations could result in termination of your blog." 

 

One can only respond to this by paraphrasing the words of the nineteenth century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine: Where they terminate blogs, they will, in the end, terminate human beings too ... [2]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the post entitled 'Torpedo the Ark Versus the Censor-Bots' (1 March 2023): click here. 

 

[2] In his play of 1821, Almansor, Heinrich Heine wrote: "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."

Torpedo the Ark Versus the Censor-Bots

Screenshot of my post with sensitive content warning 

 

 

I.

 

D. H. Lawrence famously battled the censors throughout his life as a writer - often describing them as morons infected with the grey disease of puritanism and busy extinguishing the gaiety and rich colour of life, which they find both dangerous and obscene [1].

 

He also thinks of censors as dead men; "for no live, sunny man would be a censor" [2].

 

But of course, Lawrence was writing 100 years ago and things have changed since then. Now censorship is often carried out by an autonomous programme or bot relying on instructions supplied in the form of an algorithm.

 

Take, for example, the following case ...

 

 

II.

 

In ten years of publishing on Blogger - a site owned by Google since 2003 - I have never had any issue concerning content of the 2000 posts. 

 

But the first part of my post on Young Kim's erotic memoir - A Year on Earth With Mr. Hell (2020) - that I published recently (24 Feb), was immediately issued with a sensitive content notice, which warns that I have, apparently, infringed community guidelines (a document which describe the boundaries of what is - and is not - allowed on Blogger).

 

Admittedly, readers can still access the post, but it takes a bit more effort and this will, inevitably, result in a loss of views.      

 

I am unable to appeal this decision: and nor have I been told the exact nature of my offence; i.e., what word, phrase, or idea is so distressing to the censor-bot. 

 

Thus, although I have been invited by Google to update content so as to conform to their guidelines - and then instructed to republish the post so that it's status can be officially reviewed - I really don't know how or where to begin any revision. 

 

Not that I feel inclined to make changes to my text - to effectively self-censor. Did we have done with the judgement of God, merely to accept the judgement of Google ...? I think not. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] In a letter written in November 1928 to Morris Ernst - an American lawyer and prominent member of the American Civil Liberties Union who would later play a significant role in challenging the ban placed on works of literature including James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) - Lawrence makes his disdain for the censor-moron clear:

 

"Myself, I believe censorship helps nobody; and hurts many. [...] Our civilisation cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness. It is our developing and extending consciousness that he threatens - and our consciousness in its newest, most sensitive activity, its vital growth. To arrest or circumscribe the vital consciousness is to produce morons, and nothing but a moron would wish to do it." 

 

See: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 613.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Censors', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. by Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 459.   

The First Rule of Chinese Fight Club: the Authorities Always Win!

Trust me. Everything's gonna be fine.

Fight Club (dir. David Fincher, 1999) 

 

 

I. 

 

One has many good reasons to despise the Chinese Communist Party: for what they did to sparrows, for example, during the Four Pests campaign; for the mindless destruction of the four olds during the Cultural Revolution; and for the misery they have inflicted on the entire world thanks to the Wuhan coronavirus.

 

But now there's a new reason to hate the CCP: for what they have done to the ending of David Fincher's Fight Club (1999), one of my favourite films ...

 

 

II. 

 

Although recently authorising the movie's availability on the streaming platform Tencent Video, the censor-morons of the CCP just couldn't allow it to pass without imposing their own brutal edit.

 

Thus, whilst the original film closes with a strangely touching scene in which the unnamed narrator-protagonist (played by Edward Norton) holds hands with Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) and watches as the world of financial services comes tumbling down in an explosive finale courtesy of Project Mayhem, the new Chinese version cuts this scene entirely and replaces it with a black screen upon which a caption reads:

 

The police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding. 

 

It is also revealed that Norton's schizophrenic character was sent to a lunatic asylum for psychological treatment. 

 

This is so ridiculous: we are now living in a world in which the defenders of the banks and credit card companies are the Chinese Communist Party ...! One is tempted to remind them of Chairman Mao's famous line oft-repeated by members of the revolutionary Red Guard:

 

Marxism comprises many principles, but in the final analysis they can all be brought back to a single sentence: It is right to rebel.

Anyway, for those who would like to be reminded of - or perhaps watch for the first time - the original ending of Fight Club in all its terrible beauty and dark humour, click here.  

This post is in memory of Robert Paulson. 

 

 

Update: 07-02-22: It seems that the original ending to Fight Club has been restored in China. I doubt this was due to the above post, but as a friend of mine joked: TTA 1 CCP 0.

Reflections on an Art Controversy (With Simon Solomon)

John William Waterhouse: Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) 
Oil on canvas (132 x 197.5 cm)
Manchester City Art Gallery

I.

The controversial decision by Manchester City Art Gallery working in collaboration with Black British artist Sonia Boyce to temporarily remove the well known and - so it would seem - still much-loved painting by J. W. Waterhouse depicting the story of a handsome Greek youth, Hylas, being seduced by a group of water nymphs in that slightly pervy but rather pedestrian pre-Raphaelite manner, caused a predictable shitstorm of reaction.    

And that, apparently, was the aim; to incite discussion and challenge the contemporary relevance of a Victorian fantasy belonging to the male porno-mythic imagination.

It certainly seems to be the line that Clare Gannaway, the gallery's curator of contemporary art, is holding fast to now that Waterhouse's masterpiece is hanging back on the wall. She insists that there was never any intention to censor or permanently remove a work that some today consider offensive and even obscene; suggesting as it does that the pubescent female body exists to serve a decorative and titilating function.

I have to admit, I'm slightly skeptical about this. One can't help feeling that Gannaway and Boyce were rather hoping to test public opinion and see how far they could go, or what they could get away with. Having said that, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the arguments advanced by both women and certainly don't think that any artwork is above critical contestation (though this is probably not best served by simply removing it from view and then inviting visitors to leave post-it notes in the empty space).    

My friend, the Dublin-based poet and scholar Simon Solomon, feels rather more strongly on this issue, however, and has posted a series of remarks on the gallery's website voicing his anger and making clear his contempt for Gannaway and Boyce. Generously, he's consented to my reposting below his latest piece on this ludicrous (though vitally important) affair, written in response to Boyce's article in The Guardian defending the takedown of Waterhouse's work as part of a performance piece of her own.


II.

"In Boyce's pursed-lipped piece of historical revisionism, the Waterhouse painting depicts 'seven long-haired, topless nymphs (pubescent girls)'. Is she really this offensively reactionary or is she being paid by Manchester Art Gallery to be? They are NYMPHS! As in alluring mythic/inhuman feminine entities in mortal garb. The Victorians didn't share our paranoiac, paedo-coated modern concept of pubescent in this domain, with all of its moralistic cultural anxiety. Boyce also seems suspiciously preoccupied with their exposed breasts for reasons best known to herself (of which more below) - presumably, she would feel better if they had been depicted in bathing suits, bloomers and caps. (Or just not depicted at all.)

Boyce then attempts to make the ridiculous case that, because other galleries do not display and/or store certain artworks at certain times for different reasons, the accusations of 'censorship' in this case against Manchester Art Gallery are ill-conceived - and even tries to imply we, as mere 'visitors', are extraordinarily lucky to have been invited into the discussion at all. We are then advised that the 'dialogue' that has been engendered (a dialogue she clearly feels she must resist) is composed by hate-filled simpletons looking for 'easy soundbites', driven by 'bigotry', and is misguidedly 'polarising'. (Even though the hundreds of posts I have read on the gallery blog have been, for the most part, stirring, educated and highly articulate, as well as, yes, angry and justifiably indignant.)

She asserts, as if it were self-evident, that 'judgment is at the heart of art'. The problem is this authoritarian statement is far from obvious. One could say - I would say - that being moved or disturbed, being ravished or silenced, is the alpha and omega of aesthetic feeling. Or falling in love with an image so hard one cannot forget it. [...] Unfortunately, for the likes of Boyce and Gannaway, classicism, monumentality, genius and mythic beauty are 'out', because art must fit modern demands for contemporary relevance, cultural inoffensiveness and whatever the #metoo generation is twittering about this week. Apparently, she also knows much more about these things than the Ancients, myth-makers and visionaries of our Western past.

There’s an ill-advised reference to Mengin's 1877 painting Sappho, in regard to which the first adjective she can tellingly find is that the subject is, once again, 'topless'. Apparently, this Sappho is not lesbian enough, among other things, for her retrospective/revisonist needs [...] and/or not evocative enough of Sappho’s cultural achievements. (The lyre that the subject is holding has apparently been overlooked by Boyce.)

What Boyce claims to celebrate is the contestability of art and its meanings. But she exposes her true agenda by telling us that the removal of the Waterhouse painting 'can' (read should) be seen in the 'context' (an hilarious irony, given her peerless deafness and blindness to Victorian context) of visitor-centred curatorial initiatives in Eindhoven and Middlesborough, in addition to conveying the spiteful and embittered reactions above that suggest people just aren’t sophisticated enough to attune themselves to her ideologically motivated cultural programme. The boot is so clearly on the other foot it’s embarrassing: a self-selecting elite - organised by fatuous/simplistic notions of binary gender, seduction and resentment of myth and history, topped off with puritanical outrage over bare-breasted images of femininity - hijacking art for politically driven ends. Against which hundreds of people, as invited, have now spoken eloquently, incisively and emphatically - not that, to read Boyce’s snookered, self-serving and bitter piece, you’d have realised this fact.

I do not wish art to be preserved in aspic and love the kind of baroque, life-loving and darkness-affirming criticism of feminist commentators such as Camille Paglia. I will also concede that Boyce makes a decent point about the modern hypocrisy of sometimes treating, say, myth differently from photography. But one reasonable claim hardly gets her off the dozens of hooks upon which she is rightly snagged.

The painting is back up ... and the egg is all over these imposters’ faces!"

Note: Simon Solomon can be contacted via simonsolomon.ink

Should Sade be Saved?

Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage (1785) 
Photo of the original manuscript: Benoit Tessier / Reuters

It was amusing to read that the Marquis de Sade's eighteenth century masterpiece, The 120 Days of Sodom, has been awarded official status as a trésor national and withdrawn from sale at auction in Paris - along with André Breton's Surrealist Manifestos - thereby ensuring that the novel doesn't fall into foreign hands.    

The work, which Sade famously composed in just 37 days on a roll of paper 39 feet in length made from bits of parchment glued together that he had smuggled into his cell whilst imprisoned in the Bastille, tells the story of four wealthy male libertines in search of the ultimate form of sexual gratification achieved via the rape, torture, and murder of mostly teenage victims.

When the prison was stormed and looted at the beginning of the French Revolution in July 1789, Sade was freed but his manuscript was lost (and believed destroyed) - much to his distress. However, after his death (1814), the unfinished work turned up and was finally published in 1904 by the German psychiatrist and sexologist, Iwan Bloch.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it was banned in the UK until the 1950s. Indeed, even in post-War France the work remained highly controversial due to its pornographic nature and disturbing themes to do with power, violence and sexual abuse. Government authorities considered destroying it along with other major works by Sade, prompting the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir to write an essay provocatively entitled Must We Burn Sade? (1951-52).

The essay protests the destruction of The 120 Days of Sodom and celebrates freedom and the flesh, whilst also calling for an authentic ethics of responsibility. Beauvoir not only argues that, ultimately, Sade must be thought of as a great moralist, but she also admits to being sympathetic to his utopian politics of rebellion and credits him with being one of the first writers to expose the despotic (and obscene) workings of patriarchy.

Where he falls short - apart from being a technically poor writer - is that he doesn't examine the manner in which cruelty destroys the intersubjective bonds of humanity and ultimately compromises the naked liberty that he most desires. In the end, Beauvoir concludes, Sade was misguided and his work misleads. But his failure still has much to teach us and it would be folly to consign his work to the flames.

Sadly, one suspects that today - in this new age of puritanism known as political correctness, with its safe spaces, trigger warnings, and all-round snowflakery - Beauvoir's philosophical arguments would fail to convince and there would be rather more voices prepared to answer Yes to the question she posed in relation to the Divine Marquis ...      

See:

Simone de Beauvoir, 'Must We Burn Sade?', Political Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, (University of Illinois Press, 2014).

Marquis de Sade, The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver, (Arrow Books, 1990). Note that this edition also contains other writings by Sade, the above essay by Simone de Beauvoir, and an essay by Pierre Klossowski, 'Nature as Destructive Principle' (1965). 

This post was suggested by Simon Solomon, to whom I'm grateful. 

On the Politics of Beach Body Readiness

D. H. Lawrence wrote a series of poems sneering at modern sunbathers in all their beach body readiness. Yes they looked fit and healthy (healthy, healthy, healthy). And yes, they even looked good enough to eat. But somehow their flesh lacked meaning and vitality; their great inert thighs leading nowhere.  

So, far from feeling bad about his own emaciated and disease-ravaged physique when confronted with those bodies deemed biologically admirable, Lawrence defiantly affirmed his own contrasting quickness.  

I thought of this last year when there was a great hoo-ha over a poster for Protein World's weight-loss collection featuring a perfectly formed bikini-clad model (Renee Somerfield). The Advertising Standards Authority received almost 400 complaints from those who found the campaign objectifying and socially irresponsible. There was also a protest in Hyde Park and an online petition that attracted more than 70,000 signatures.   

Eventually, the fuss died down and everyone either forgot about the case, or found something else to get het up over. But now this issue of body shaming is back in the headlines thanks to the new London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, who has said he will ban all ads on the Tube and bus network that might offend commuters or make them feel pressured to conform to an ideal body type.

Speaking as a father of two teenage daughters, Khan warned that images such as the above demeaned women and caused confidence issues among young people. It is high time, he said, that such advertising came to an end.         

Obviously, this is an astonishing and, to my mind, rather worrying development. For it means that the Mayor is making policy on the basis of a Helen Lovejoy approach to decision making; one that effectively turns all Londoners into Sadiq's little girls in need of daddy's protection and wise authority.    

Ultimately, I'm no more beach body ready than Lawrence. But nor am I ready for Khan's progressive paternalism which offers a soft form of sharia and censorship in the name of feminism and thinking of the children.   

ISIS Threaten Sylvania



Detail from ISIS Invade a Sylvanian Picnic (2014)

Part of the series ISIS Threaten Sylvania (2014/15), by Mimsy



ISIS Threaten Sylvania is a series of humourous (yet deadly serious) light-box images created by London-based artist Mimsy, featuring the loveable toy animals who make up the Sylvanian Families universe; rabbits, mice, hedgehogs and other woodland creatures all living in peace and harmony as they happily go about their daily lives. 

Until, that is, armed jihadis show-up and threaten to execute every individual of any species that doesn't submit to their extreme vision of the world.    

It's a piece of political satire, obviously, but the joke is more on us, in our cosy complacency, than it is the Islamists possessed by religious mania.

And the joke has only been intensified after the organizers of the Passion for Freedom exhibition at the Mall Galleries gave in to police pressure to remove the work on the grounds that its inflammatory content might offend Muslim sensibilities, incite religious hatred, and potentially result in violence.    

The police - those well-known guardians of public morality and aesthetic judgement - informed the organizers that if they went ahead with their plans to display the work (which, in their view, had little or no artistic merit), then they would have to pay the £36,000 cost of extra security for the six-day show.    

It's a lot of money; enough at any rate to serve the purpose of effectively blackmailing the organizers and gallery owners into an act of self-censorship. Mimsy, the daughter of a Syrian father whose Jewish family had experienced religious persecution, was discreetly asked to withdraw her work, thereby legitimating it, of course.  

Despite being acutely aware of the danger of speaking out against Islamofascism, Mimsy has bravely declared that she has no intention of pandering to such, or attempting to justify her darkly funny work. Clearly, as Jonathan Jones has noted, if we cannot laugh at IS then the terrorists and black clad puppets of intolerance have already won.

Thus the suppression of these images - as of so many other images and texts - is not only absurd and cowardly, but sinister: "To let fear of bigots and maniacs rule our art galleries is a betrayal of the civilisation we claim to uphold."    

Notes

Those  interested in knowing more about the artist Mimsy and seeing further images from ISIS Threaten Sylvania should click here.

Those interested in reading Jonathan Jones's Guardian review of ISIS Threaten Sylvania should click here.