Agents of Chaos: Messrs. Rotten and Lawrence
I.
If, like me, you are keen to promote the idea of D. H. Lawrence as a Sex Pistol, then one of his texts that you might discuss in order to lend credence to such a thesis is his introduction to Harry Crosby's volume of poetry Chariot of the Sun [1].
Enitled 'Chaos in Poetry', this short text develops the idea not merely of creative disorder that Malcolm McLaren and his young punk protégés will later inject into the moribund UK music scene of the mid-1970s, but of chaos as a realm of infinite possibilities and strange becomings [2].
According to Lawrence, poetry is not merely a matter of words: essentially, it is an act of attention and the attempt to discover a new world within the known world.
But this discovery of a new world involves an act of violence; the
slitting of what he terms the Umbrella and by which he refers to all
that is erected between ourselves and the sheer intensity of lived experience (our ideals, our conventions, and fixed forms of every
description) [3].
The poet, then, as Lawrence understands them, is also a kind of terrorist; an enemy of human security
and comfort who concerned with safeguarding the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, or merely experimenting with form and technique, as unleashing the inhuman and forever-surging chaos that punks, animals, and flowers all live within [4].
II.
On 12 February 1976, the Sex Pistols were due to play at the famed Soho music venue the Marquee, supporting the pub rock band Eddie & the Hot Rods.
Shortly before the gig took place, they were interviewed by Neil Spencer from the NME and extracts from this accompanied a review of the above performance, including what has since become a famous quote from guitarist Steve Jones:
"Actually, we're not into music. We're into chaos." [5]
As Bill Grundy later discovered, Jones always did have a nice turn of phrase. However, I think we can safely assume that he'd picked up this particular term - chaos - from Malcolm, as - along with the word ruins - it had a privileged place within his thinking.
For McLaren, as for Nietzsche, one must always retain a little chaos in one's character if one wishes to give birth to a dancing star [6]; and for McLaren, as for Lawrence, an originary chaos is what lies beneath the ruins of culture and its fixed forms erected to keep us safe and secure, though which in the long run cause us to become deadened.
III.
In sum: of course we require "a little order to protect us from chaos" [7], as Deleuze and Guattari recognise.
But so too do we need a little chaos to protect us from the monumental dead weight of civilisation.
And so we need our agents of chaos and angels of destruction - whether they come with red beards like D. H. Lawrence, or spiky red hair like Johnny Rotten.
Sous les pavés, la plage!
And surely
that's not simply a cry for freedom, so much as for the joy that
comes when we smash those structures and systems, narratives and networks, that enframe
us within a highly-ordered (and boring) world of discipline, convention, and common sense and get back to chaos.
Notes
[1] Lawrence wrote the introduction in 1928. A revised version was published under the title 'Chaos in Poetry' in the magazine Echanges in December 1929 (the same month in which Crosby committed suicide). Another version was used for the Black Sun Press edition of Chariot of the Sun (1931).
The text can be found in D. H. Lawrence, Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 107-116.
[2] I am, of course, indebted to the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari who, in their final work together, argues that philosophy, science, and art all have the essential task of confronting chaos and that each discipline does so in a manner specific to itself as a way of thinking and creating.
If philosophy adventures into chaos via a plane of immanence and science via a plane of reference, then art constructs a plane of composition; indeed, this, for Deleuze and Guattari is definitional of art. But by this they refer not merely to technical composition, but an aesthetic composition concerned with sensation. Thus art is a unique way of thinking and of opening a plane within chaos, which, whilst related to science and philosophy, should not be thought of as merely an aestheticisation of these practices.
See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (Verso, 1994). And see also my post on this book dated 23 May 2013: click here.
[3] See the post entitled 'On Poetry, Chaos and the Great Umbrella' (10 June 2013): click here.
[4] Unfortunately, unlike animals and flowers, even punks can't live within chaos for very long and that is why they soon topple into cliché and become stereotypical; why they parade up and down the King's Road pretending that they are revolutionaries breathing the wild air of chaos, when they are all the while living and dying beneath the Great Umbrella.
[5] Neil Spencer's piece in the New Musical Express (21 Feb 1976) was entitled 'Don't look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols are coming'. It was reproduced in The Guardian to mark the 30th anniversary of its publication in 2006: click here.
Readers will note that no mention is given to the headlining Eddie & the Hot Rods, who had some of their equipment smashed by the Sex Pistols when the night descended (appropriately and not atypically) into chaos (they, the Sex Pistols, were booed off stage and subsequently banned from playing at the Marquee in future).
[6] See section 5 of the Prologue to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
[7] Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 201.
For a related post to this one, on phallic artwork, please click here.
