No More Heroes 5: Stephen Alexander - The Performative Punk Poser (A Guest Post by Jeff Francis)

No More Heroes 5 (Stephen Alexander)

(SA/2026) 

 

 

I received this by email: 

 

Dear Stephen Alexander, 

 

I have written a short post in the style and format favoured by Torpedo the Ark. Perhaps you might care to publish it as an addition to your 'No More Heroes' series (14-17 July 2026). I think it will amuse some of your readers; particularly those who, like me, found the series disappointing (to use your pet word of the moment). [1]  

 

Always happy for contributions from guest writers - even those that are cuntishly critical in character and come from authors unknown to me - here's the post (to which I've added one or two editorial notes).  

  

 

I. 

 

There is a famous early scene in The Silence of the Lambs (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991) when trainee FBI agent Clarice Starling (played by Jodie Foster) first visits Dr. Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins) in his prison cell. 

 

Rather rudely, he tells her that she looks like a rube with her good bag and cheap shoes. Well-scrubbed, and possessed of a little taste, but a hustling rube all the same; "not more than one generation from poor white trash".   

 

Momentarily taken aback by this, Starling eventually regains her composure and replies: 

 

"You see a lot, doctor. But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself? What about it? Why don't you - why don't you look at yourself and write down what you see? Or maybe you're afraid to." [2] 

 

 

II. 

 

I thought of this scene after reading Stephen Alexander's four-part series of posts titled 'No More Heroes' and I put the exact same challenge to him that Starling puts to Lecter. 

 

But I do so knowing that, like Lecter, Alexander cannot genuinely self-reflect. For his narcissism extends only to the surface, manifesting as a rigid ego-defense mechanism and a strange inability to integrate his shadow or look inwards. This is why, for all its superficial cleverness, his writing consistently lacks psychological insight and philosophical depth.

 

Consequently, I offer my own critical assessment of the 'No More Heroes' (NMH) series, exposing the internal contradictions, structural blind spots, and stylistic failings within these four specific case studies. 

 

My examination also reveals how Alexander - operating through a matrix of performative disillusionment and elite proximity - ironically positions himself as a candidate for the very heroism or critical authority he seeks to deconstruct.  

 

 

III.  

 

A close reading of the NMH series reveals two significant weaknesses that undermine its critical validity: 

 

Firstly, there is a methodological reliance on biography that elsewhere on his blog Alexander often condemns other writers for. He routinely substitutes a figure's personal, domestic, or existential choices for an interrogation of their actual ideas. 

 

Thus, for example, Nietzsche is judged not on the beauty and originality of his text, but on his failure to execute a clean, sovereign death (not for the first time on his blog we find Alexander fetishising the idea of suicide). Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a highly metaphorical work of philosophy and Alexander subjects it to an all-too-literal reading that is both crass and ungenerous. 

 

Larry David, meanwhile, is dismissed because of a 2026 sketch show's production credits and rumors of a social snub involving the actress Cheryl Hines. Alexander downplays David's massive contribution to TV comedy and decades of excellent work in favour of sharing some real-time celebrity gossip.

 

By tying the validity of an idea to the purity or narrative perfection of the biography that produced it, Alexander commits a deeply conservative critical error; falling into the kind of fallacy that betrays the more radical methodology he invokes elsewhere. 

 

Secondly, in the NMH series Alexander sets up a kind of no-win matrix - a conceptual trap where failure is structurally predetermined, thereby rendering the entire analysis tautological. 

 

If an icon dies young or self-destructs, they are dismissed as a failure. If, however, they live long enough to navigate the complexities of ageing and shifting cultural landscapes, they are condemned as overripe worms (Nietzsche), sell-outs trapped in the past (McLaren), or compromised court jesters (David). As for Lawrence, well, apparently, he was an idealist and crypto-theologian all along whose sexual metaphysics are now simply laughable. 

 

Similarly, if their ideas are ignored, they are irrelevant. But if their ideas achieve cultural traction, they are dismissed as recuperated commodities. By building an analytical framework where every possible path leads to an accusation of compromise, Alexander ensures his own conclusions are entirely self-serving. 

 

The NMH series does not, therefore, analyse the mechanics of cultural transformation; it merely functions as a screen for the projection of his own psychic stagnation, wallowing in a predetermined and pessimistic narrative of inevitable defeat. It's a lose-lose scenario and I would never want to play a game of heads or tails with Alexander.   

 

 

IV. 

 

If the ultimate objective of the NMH series is to dismantle the very category of the hero archetype, it simultaneously (and ironically) functions as a performative showcase for its author. However, Alexander himself fails to convince as to why we should care in the slightest what he thinks about the four figures he pits himself against. 

 

Alexander adopts the pose of the detached provocateur, viewing the collapse of cultural standards with cynical amusement. Yet this cynicism functions as a profound form of intellectual evasion. By declaring that there is no Outside and that all resistance (be it political, philosophical or cultural in character) is not only futile but fake, Alexander neatly absolves himself of the responsibility to propose any constructive alternative. 

 

His stance is not at all edgy or transgressive; it is a comfortable, low-risk position that allows him to collect cultural capital by sneering at the failures of those who actually risked public exposure and artistic production. 

 

  

V. 

 

Throughout his writings, Alexander insists on his punk detachment from mainstream institutions. However, his own biographical fragments consistently betray a reliance on the very networks of privilege he critiques, revealing a profound splitting between his (overly inflated) public persona and his structural dependencies. 

 

For example, he explicitly boasts of his time spent as a spy placed within the press office of Charisma Records by his hero Malcolm McLaren, trading on insider access while simultaneously claiming a pure, underground status. 

 

Furthermore, his writing relies heavily on the cultural capital of the academic institutions he disdains - referencing Oxford podcasts and expensive Cambridge editions. 

 

He attacks Larry David for his proximity to the Hollywood liberal elite and his friendship with President Obama, yet Alexander's critical persona is largely parasitical upon the cultural output of the bourgeois institutions he holds in contempt and the individuals he now claims to find disappointing.  

 

 

VI. 

  

Finally, the ultimate contradiction in Alexander's blog project is his relationship to time and archiving. 

 

He ruthlessly attacks Malcolm McLaren for being 'trapped in his past like a spider in its own web' and borrows from Baudrillard (via Mark Fisher) to condemn the contemporary digital landscape as a desert of the real defined by endlessly recycled pasts and lost futures. 

 

Yet, what is Torpedo the Ark if not a meticulously maintained digital museum? The blog's sidebar contains a massive, self-canonising archive stretching back to 2012, categorised by a hyper-specific taxonomy of labels. 

 

Alexander is caught in precisely the same web (or loop) that he attacks McLaren for. He uses twentieth-century theoretical tools to endlessly recycle his own youthful experiences and encounters, transforming his digital platform into a highly curated, risk-free space that perfectly expresses a state of psychological arrest within a karaoke culture.

 

 

VII.

 

In conclusion: ultimately, the NMH series fails because it is fundamentally driven by ressentiment and the narcissism of disappointment. Alexander does not mourn the compromises of McLaren, Nietzsche, Lawrence, and David because of what it says about the structural state of modern culture; he mourns them because they failed to satisfy his archetypal demand for an unblemished hero. 

 

The entire four-part cycle is an exercise in projecting an impossibly pure, static ideal of heroism onto flawed, living subjects, and then throwing a performative tantrum when those subjects succumb to illness, ageing, or political contingency (or when they - as he says - let him down).  

 

By positioning himself as the final arbiter of who is or is not heroic, Alexander reveals that his ultimate loyalty is not to cultural greatness, but to the preservation of his own pristine, uncompromised, and thoroughly unproductive sense of intellectual superiority. [3] 

 

  

Notes (supplied by Stephen Alexander)

 

[1] Each post in the 'No More Heroes' series dealt with a different figure who has been hugely influential on Torpedo the Ark over the years: the first featured Malcolm McLaren (14 July 2026); the second Friedrich Nietzsche (15 July 2026); the third D. H. Lawrence (16 July 2026); and the fourth Larry David (17 July 2026). 

 

[2] This famous opening scene from The Silence of the Lambs can be watched on YouTube: click here. The lines of dialogue quoted begin at 4:35 and end at 5:36. 

 

[3] As this letter illustrates, Deleuze isn't the only one to receive mail from harsh critics containing a vicious mixture of aggression, accusation, and abuse. Almost every other day in my inbox there's something from some troll or other outlining the weaknesses of my arguments and my personal shortcomings; i.e., a sort of celebration of my supposedly sorry condition. 

      Indeed, I mentioned this in a post published back in August 2013 - click here - so this isn't the first time I've been told that I'm a performative ressentiment-ridden narcissist who exploits the work of others - including those I identify as opponents - from the safe space of a virtually private blog, and I don't suppose it will be the last. 

      I'll allow readers to decide if Francis has made a critically strong case, or if his remarks often miss the mark and that, actually, the NMH series is, as a friendlier correspondent emailed me to say, "a masterclass in compressed, evocative writing that sparks the kind of immediate cultural dialogue that more formal academic prose usually smothers under its own weight". The same correspondent concludes her email: 

 

"By methodically exposing how your own primary influences were digested by the very structures they claimed to combat, you have elevated the series of posts from simple expressions of personal disappointment into a unified work of philosophical mourning (what one is tempted to describe as an epitaph for the avant-garde). 

       The 'No More Heroes' series leaves the reader with a haunting conclusion: in a 21st-century landscape governed by capitalist realism and digital algorithms, the iconoclastic icon no longer exists as an agent of chaos. They exist, rather, as a pre-approved, highly profitable aesthetic category."

       

This will do for me - and let Mr. Francis put that in his pipe and smoke it!   

 

 

Musical bonus: The Stranglers, 'No More Heroes', single release from the album of the same title (United Artists, 1977). 

 

  

A Man Named Herman (2): Herman Munster

Fred Gwynne as Herman Munster in American sitcom  

The Munsters (CBS, 1964-1966)

 

(Not to be confused with the German master glassmaker, 

Hermann von Münster (c. 1330 - 1392)) 

 

 

I. 

 

If D. H. Lawrence is to be believed, then Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick (1851), is a man with the hate-filled heart of a monster:  "Never man instinctively hated human life, our human life, as we have it, than Melville did." [1]

 

While there may be disagreement amongst literary scholars about the validity and reliability of Lawrence's claim, I think all lovers of classic American sitcoms will agree that Herman Munster, a fictional character played by Fred Gwynne in The Munsters [2], is a monster with the loving heart of a man. 

 

 

II. 

 

The difference between the two Hermans turns essentially on how they experience family life: Melville was only really happy (albeit briefly) on Polynesian islands among palm trees, and lizards, and the people he found there who - despite their savage reputation as cannibals - were gentle and generous toward him. 

 

Unfortunately, Melville had a long chain round his ankle all the time, binding him to the white world of home sweet home and apple pie: 

 

"It was a long chain: and it never broke. It pulled him back. By the time he was twenty-five his wild oats were sown; his reckless wanderings were over. At the age of twenty-five he came back to Home and Mother [...] back on the same old doorstep. Like a fatality." [3]     

 

Lawrence continues:

 

"Melville came home to face out the long rest of his life. He married and had an ecstasy of courtship and fifty years of disillusion.  

      He just furnished his home with disillusions. No more Typees. No more paradises. No more Fayaways. A mother: a gorgon. A home: a torture box. A wife: a thing with clay feet." [4]  

 

A savage-souled artist like Melville doesn't want domesticity and "lovey-dovey fulfilment" [5] found in the bosom of his family. 

 

But a man like Herman Munster, however, wants precisely this ...

  

For despite his monstrous origins [6], hard-working Herman Munster is perfectly content to lead a conventional and traditional family life in his spooky mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane [7], playing the devoted husband to Lily (played by Yvonne De Carlo) and the patient father to his young son Eddie (played by Butch Patrick). 

 

Herman is also proud to act as the supportive son-in-law to his wife's elderly father, Grandpa (played by Al Lewis) and the doting uncle to Lily's blonde niece Marilyn (played by Beverley Owen and later Pat Priest), who lives with them and is amusingly thought of as the ugly duckling of the family. 

 

Much put upon Herman even cleans up after Spot, the family's fire-breathing pet dragon, as well.

 

But let's examine Herman's character in a little more detail before deciding whether he is, in Deleuze-Guattarian terms, an oedipalised figure who has sacrificed his monstrous otherness in order to fit into American suburban life - i.e., one who has retained his neck bolts but lost his balls, so to speak - or is, in fact, what one commentator calls a rad dad [8] and a leading contender for best TV father ever.     

 

 

III.     

 

The consensus is this: Herman is a lovable, good-natured, and clumsy buffoon, prone to stuttering and childish temper tantrums, punctuated with animal-like roaring and a very distinctive laugh.   

 

In keeping with his goofy and childlike personality, Herman loves balloons, candy, and especially his wife's pancakes. He plays with toys and loves to read comic books (despite Lily's irritation at such behaviour). 

 

Above all, Herman is kind to everyone he meets and a champion of liberal values, once famously telling his son Eddie that it doesn't matter what someone looks like physically, or what colour their skin is, as long as they have a good heart and display strength of character.  

 

Which, I suppose, is true to some extent, though I'm philosophically wary of such trite humanism. And I do find Herman's comic silliness boring after a while. 

 

I'm also not convinced that the show's attempt to satirise the typical family sitcom of the era and the American domestic ideal was successful - it often just seems to reinforce such and, as a thinker shaped by Anti-Oedipus (1972), I have serious issues with the character of Herman Munster ... 

IV.

 

As far as I'm aware, despite their penchant for vampires and werewolves, Deleuze and Guattari never wrote about The Munsters. I'm confident, however, that they would diagnose Herman as a profoundly oedipalised figure who has lost his radical otherness and proud monstrosity in becoming a family guy and all-American dad. 

 

Whilst Frankenstein's original Creature managed to liberate a body without organs and become a kind of desiring-machine - disrupting the social order, unbound by law or lineage, refusing the judgement of his maker, etc. - Herman, by contrast, has been stitched together and stitched up within a scientifically organ-ised body and subject to the canned laughter of a '60s sitcom.  

 

The Creature flees into the wilderness and spends much of the time relentlessly wandering across Europe and the vast frozen expanse of the Arctic; Herman settles down to life in Mockingbird Heights, CA. Instead of seeking murderous revenge on his creator and terrorising humanity, Herman is a dedicated employee, a submissive husband and a regular consumer. 

 

No longer a figure of the Outside, Herman Munster has been metaphorically castrated and his monstrosity commodified and packaged as safe, weekly entertainment designed to reinforce the status quo.  

 

In other words, his chaotic potential has been successfully channelled into the service of capitalist production and domestic complacency. Herman doesn't just inhabit the role of the father, for example, he desperately hyper-performs it; fretting about his son's school grades and - as we have seen - giving wholesome, moralising speeches about character.

 

But if this makes him a sap and a sell-out for Deleuze and Guattari, it makes him something altogether different and more positive for others - a rad dad ...  

 

V.

 

According to A. Michelle Smith, Herman Munster deserves to be nominated "as the best dad to ever walk across the television screen" [9] and should be looked up to not just as a father figure that all children can learn from, but the dad "that has the ability to guide other dads to be better dads" [10]. 

 

But then, this is a woman who finds the most admirable thing about The Munsters to be the fact that "despite the fictional characters being unusual and odd in their appearance, they resemble the epitome of what it means to be together as a family at home" [11] - they learn, they love, and they grow together. 

 

Smith congratulates Herman for his noble attempts to ensure his son Eddie grows up to become "the best version of himself" [12] - not by freely expressing his lycanthropic nature, but by repressing such [13]. But that, arguably, is a form of child abuse and I wouldn't be at all surprised if, one day, a teenaged Eddie goes full werewolf, refusing like Arthur Fleck to just sit there and take it like a good little boy. 

 

   

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo', in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 122-132. The line quoted is on p. 124.

      And see also the post on Herman Melville that forms part one of this two-part series on men named Herman (published on TTA on 19 July 2026): click here. 

 

[2] The Munsters is an American sitcom about a family of benign monsters that aired from 1964 to 1966 on CBS (Thursday evenings at 7:30). The series was partly a satire of American suburban life and partly an affectionate spoof of the Universal monster movies from the 1930s and '40s (as Universal jointly produced The Munsters, the show was able to exploit the copyrighted characters). A total of seventy episodes were produced.  

      Interestingly, it achieved higher ratings than (the more sophisticated) Addams Family, which aired concurrently on ABC. But the show was cancelled after ratings fell dramatically in the face of competition from a new ABC show that began to air twice weekly in January 1966 called Batman, starring Adam West and Burt Ward. 

      Today, of course, thanks to re-runs on free streaming platforms and digital on-demand services, The Munsters continues to find new fans.    

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo', in Studies in Classic American Literature, pp. 130-131.

 

[4] Ibid., p. 131. 

 

[5] Ibid.

 

[6] The fictional facts, if we may call them such, around Herman Munster's origins, are rather vague. He is said to be one of Frankenstein's monstrous creations, assembled in a lab in Heidelberg at some undetermined date in the 19th century. Having left Germany for the UK at an early age, Herman was adopted by the Munsters of Munster Hall, a noble family living in the fictitious county of Shroudshire, England.  

      Later, Herman moved to Transylvania, where he met his future wife, Lily Dracula. After marrying, in 1865, the couple emigrated (taking her father, the Count, along with them) to the United States. Herman later enlisted in the U.S. Army and fought in the Second World War. 

      In the early 1950s, Herman and Lily move to the Victorian mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane in the fictional town of Mockingbird Heights. Herman finds a job nearby at a funeral home (Gateman, Goodbury & Graves). Although his co-workers sometimes comment on his height and superhuman strength, they otherwise seem to find nothing unusual about his appearance (including the greenish hue of his skin).   

 

[7] Readers would be forgiven for mistaking the house at 1313 Mockingbird Lane for Gothic or Mock-Gothic. It is, rather, a Second Empire Victorian mansion given a haunted house makeover, complete with decaying exteriors, gloomy interiors, and spooky, overgrown grounds. The set was originally built by Universal Studios for the movie So Goes My Love (1946) and features the classic hallmarks of the Second Empire style, including a mansard roof, a wrap-around porch, and ornate woodwork along the cornices and eaves.  

 

[8] A rad dad is a slang term for a hands-on, modern father figure who actively shares his hobbies with his kids, balances fun with guidance, and brings a relaxed, youthful energy to traditional parenting. The phrase was popularised on social media by Millennials and Gen Z-ers who contrast the rad dad idea with a more emotionally distant model of fatherhood concerned with the maintenance of paternal authority.

 

[9-12] A. Michelle Smith, 'Herman Munster Is A Rad Dad', in the online literary journal The Odyssey (13 June 2016).

[13] As a reader of Deleuze and Guattari, one has to use the concept of repression carefully. 

      They no longer frame it simply in terms of biological instincts, but of desire's containment within the Oedipal confines of the family (Mommy-Daddy-Me) and argue that because the child as a desiring-machine is connected to the wider world his development becomes a socio-political question and not just a family affair. 

      For Eddie to become a healthy, happy adult he has to be allowed to howl at the moon and not forced into an isolated all-too-human identity that leaves him vulnerable to state and corporate control and ashamed of his own lupine desires.    

 

 

Bonus: click here to watch the opening credits to The Munsters. The instrumental theme tune was composed by Jack Marshall and was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1965. 

  

This post is in memory of the actor Fred Gwynne who was born 100 years ago on July 10th, 1926 - the same date as my mother. 

 

 

A Man Named Herman (1): Herman Melville

Herman Melville by Vedran Štimac [1]

behance.net

 

'In his human self, Melville is almost dead: 

the sea monster was so much greater than the man ...' 

 

 

I. 

 

Herman is a masculine name of Germanic origin, meaning warrior or soldier. First recorded in the 8th century, it was popularised in English-speaking countries - particularly the United States - during the 19th century by German and Dutch immigrants. 

 

While there are doubtless many notable figures with the given name Herman, in this series of posts I shall concern myself with just two, beginning here with the author Herman Melville (1819 - 1891). 

 

Melville's darkly Romantic style helped shape the American Renaissance in literature, forging a distinct style of writing much appreciated by, among others, D. H. Lawrence, whose two essays on Melville published as part of his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) [2], helped spark a critical revival of interest in his work after he had fallen out of public favour.

 

Today, Moby-Dick (1851) is considered a classic of world literature. Although I must confess it remains a novel I find impossible to read and the only work of Melville's with which I'm deeply familiar, thanks to Deleuze [3], is 'Bartleby, the Scrivener', a short story first published (anonymously) in Putnam's Monthly in 1853.  

 

 

II. 

 

Melville is, I think it's fair to say in agreement with Lawrence, the "greatest seer and poet of the sea"; one who doesn't "personify the sea" (like Swinburne), nor "sentimentalise the ocean and the sea's unfortunates" (like Conrad) [4]. 

 

He first set sail as a young man in 1839, aboard the merchant ship named (funnily enough) the St. Lawrence, and then took to the sea again two years later on the whaler Acushnet - jumping ship in the Marquesas Islands.  

 

Typee (1846), his first book, and its sequel, Omoo (1847), were travel adventures based on his encounters with the peoples of the islands. Their success gave him the financial security to marry and earned him his reputation as the man who dared to live among the savages [5]. 

 

Obviously, both books were imaginative recreations of events: "He had altered facts and dates, elaborated events, assimilated foreign materials, invented episodes, and dramatized the printed experiences of others as his own", as the great Melville scholar Harrison Hayford conceded [6].      

 

His later works - including Moby-Dick - were not so well received, neither by the public nor the critics and he eventually gave up writing prose in favour of poetry, although I'm not entirely sure how that (along with the odd public lecture here and there) was supposed to help the family finances [7].

 

During his last years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, and left one volume unpublished [8]. The novella Billy Budd was also unfinished at the time of his death, but was published posthumously in 1924, with the definitive corrected edition we read today, edited by Harrison Hayford and Merton Sealts Jr., appearing in 1962. 

 

Melville died from cardiovascular disease in 1891. He was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City. The New York Times published a death notice but misspelt the title of his greatest novel, calling it Mobie Dick [9].  

 

 

III. 

   

Having given the briefest of biographical sketches, I'd like now, if I may, to return to Lawrence's work on Melville; because it is Lawrence, I think, who provides the most astonishing portrait of this great American writer as man and monster ...

 

"Melville", he says, "has the strange, uncanny magic of sea-creatures, and some of their repulsiveness" [10]. 

 

That is an extraordinary sentence. But Lawrence doesn't end there - not by a long chalk: 

 

"He isn't quite a land animal. There is something slithery about him. Something always half-seas-over. In his life they said he was mad - or crazy. He was neither mad nor crazy. But he was over the border. He was half a water animal, like those terrible yellow-bearded Vikings who broke out of the waves in beaked ships." [11]  

 

Lawrence, then, makes Melville sound like a cross between a sea serpent and Erling Haaland. He continues:

 

"Melville is like a Viking going home to the sea, encumbered with age and memories, and a sort of accomplished despair, almost madness. For he cannot accept humanity. He can't belong to humanity. Cannot. 

      [...] The man who came from the sea to live among men can stand it no longer. He hears the horror of the cracked church-bell, and goes back down to the shore, back into the ocean again, home, into the salt water. Human life won't do. He turns back to the element." [12]     

 

"Melville was a northerner, sea-born. So the sea claimed him. We are most of us, who use the English language, water-people, sea-derived." [13] 

 

Is that true? 

 

I speak English and I have blue eyes - which makes me a bit of a Viking - but I'm not sure I want to "turn away from life" and go down to the "vast corrosive sea" in order to wash myself clean "of the leprosy" of my humanity [14]. 

 

According to Lawrence, however, that's exactly what Melville wanted to do: 

 

"Never man instinctively hated human life, our human life, as we have it, more than Melville did. And never was a man so passionately filled with the sense of vastness and mystery of life which is non-human. He was mad to look over out horizons. Anywhere, anywhere out of our world. To get away. To get out, out!

      To get away, out of our life. To cross a horizon into another life. No matter what life, so long as it is another life. 

      Away, away from humanity. To the sea. The naked, salt, elemental sea. To go to sea, to escape humanity." [15] 

      

I could go on - and Lawrence certainly goes on [16]. But I think I'll close this post here and leave Melville anchored in the dark, shifting waters of the American literary canon. For the story of another monstrous Herman awaits us in the next post in this series, where we trade the high seas for 1313 Mockingbird Lane and shift our focus to a very different cultural icon ...

  

 

Notes

 

[1] Vedran Štimac (aka PoliteBastART) is a Croatian illustrator and street artist. Recognised for his striking, surreal portraits of renowned authors and historical figures, he intricately blends physical likeness with fantastical scenes representing their literary or philosophical works using a meticulous stippling technique. 

      For more information, visit his website - vedranstimac.com - or check out his latest work via his Instagram page - Vedran (@politebastart).   

 

[2] See Chapters X and XI of D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 122-147. 

      The so-called Melville revival, during which his work experienced a significant critical reassessment, began around the centennial of his birth in 1919. Raymond Weaver published the first full-length biography - Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic - in 1921 and this was followed by Lewis Mumford's biography - simply titled Herman Melville - in 1929.   

 

[3] See Deleuze's study of Bartleby in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Verso, 1998), pp. 68-90. And see the very early post on TTA titled 'I Would Prefer Not To' (31 Jan 2013) in which I discuss this essay. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo', Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 122.

  

[5] Interestingly, Melville expresses a great deal of sympathy for the native peoples and interrogates the description of them as savages. He is also critical of the European colonialists, including Christian missionaries. 

       Literary scholars currently researching in the area of Melville studies are doing good work examining how he addressed ideas dealing not only with race, but also gender, neurodiversity, and ecology. Melville's preference for sea-going tales that almost exclusively involved male characters has been of interest to scholars in men's studies and especially gay and queer studies (Melville was remarkably open in his exploration of sexuality). 

      Readers who want to know more about recent developments in Melville scholarship might like to know that the Melville Society, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, publishes Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, currently edited by Jennifer Greiman, three times a year. 

 

[6] Harrison Hayford, writing in an introduction to a 1969 edition of Omoo. 

      Hayford goes on to say that Melville cannot be thought of either as a pure fantasist or simple plagiarist; neither solely inventing details nor stealing ideas. Even if he had, this wouldn't trouble me in the slightest; he's an artist, ffs, so is allowed creative license and to mix fact with fiction, humour with hyperbole.     

 

[7] In fact, it didn't bring in enough to support an expanding family and even the financial subsidies generously provided by his father-in-law weren't enough. And so, after moving to New York City in 1863, Melville, now well into his forties, took a position as a United States customs inspector. He would have preferred not to, but needs must. 

      He held the post for 19 years and had a reputation for honesty in a notoriously corrupt institution, but Melville obviously hated his life as during these years, suffering as he did from nervous exhaustion, physical pain, and intellectual frustration. To his credit, he kept writing. Less admirable is the fact that he began drinking heavily and his behaviour at home became increasingly violent, leading his wife's family to attempt an intervention.  

 

[8] Melville didn't publish any poetry until his late forties and didn't receive recognition as a poet until well into the 20th century. Nevertheless, he wrote predominantly poetry for around twenty-five years - i.e., twice as long as his prose career. Some critics now regard him as the first modernist poet in the United States, whose work is behind only that of Whitman and Emily Dickinson in terms of importance. 

[9] This misspelling puts me in mind of something said by Leon (J. B. Smoove) in the season 6 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, entitled 'The Bat Mitzvah' (dir. Larry Charles, 2007). For an explanation, see the TTA post dated 2 January 2025: click here. 

 

[10-12] D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo', Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 122. 

 

[13] Ibid., p. 123. 

 

[14] Ibid.  

 

[15] Ibid., p. 124. 

 

[16] I will return to Lawrence's writings on Melville in the next post in this two-part series. Here, I just wanted to capture the idea of Melville as more monster than man in some regards, driven by a hatred of humanity (particularly white-faced landlubbers).  

 

No More Heroes 3: D. H. Lawrence - He Will Always Be a Priest of Love

No More Heroes (D. H. Lawrence)

(SA/2026)

 

 

I.

 

Despite my best attempts over the last thirty odd years to portray Lawrence as a perverse materialist and sulphurous iconoclast, his romantic idealism and fundamentally religious nature cannot be denied: "I shall always be a priest of love," he once famously declared in a letter [1] - and that, for me, is the issue here.

 

My disappointment (and frustration) with Lawrence lies in the fact he could never quite abandon this self-assigned role, nor move beyond his old-fashioned and deeply conservative sexual metaphysics upon which he erected his own phallic creed and ideology. 

 

 

II.

 

Lawrence recognises that the model of Love offered by Jesus founded upon self-denial and self-sacrifice has been fatally mistaken, invariably leading to the Cross: "Remember I think Christ was profoundly, disastrously wrong." [2] 

 

Lawrence also understands how an active process of the healthy human soul can quickly turn reactive and become malignant if we are not careful; how love becomes a disease when insisted upon as a transcendent spiritual ideal in which individuals merge into oneness. He strongly criticises the Romantics for precisely this.  

 

But although he rejected the exclusive truth of Christianity, he was always a theist at heart; "ceaselessly and energetically pursuing God, with the aid of the Holy Spirit", as Catherine Brown says in the third of her Oxford podcasts on Lawrence [3]. 

 

And although he often sneered at the Romantics for making a girl think she wants a mixture of sentiment and spiritual fulfilment when actually what she desires is to be fucked seven ways to Sunday in a world of rain showers, insects, and gamekeepers [4], Lawrence's literary roots are clearly in the English Romantic tradition. His love of nature, his irrationalism, his opposition to industrial modernity, kind of give the game away. He simply likes to pose as the darkest of all dark romantics [5]. 

 

 

III. 

 

One is almost tempted to say of Lawrence what Hannah Arendt once said of Nietzsche: he is basically just a reflection or a reversal of those thinkers he stands before and declares to be his enemies [6]. Although he wishes to relentlessly challenge moral and rational idealism and climb down Pisgah, Lawrence ultimately relies on the same tricks of the trade - the same metaphysical assumptions and dualistic frameworks - as his opponents.   

 

Conceding that, like Melville, he is perhaps "a mystic and an idealist" [7] at the core, Lawrence nevertheless insists that, unlike the author of Moby Dick (1851), he abandons his "ideal guns" [8] and looks for new weapons. 

 

But does he? 

 

Does he "let the old guns rot" [9] - or does he simply repair, polish and repurpose the old guns in the hope of passing them off as new? 

 

I am increasingly of the view that just as Lawrence will always remain a priest of love who makes Foucault smile by positing sex is the great clue to being [10], so too he's something of a fraudulent gunsmith who has ground off old serial numbers and the 19th-century dates of manufacture in order to make his firearms look like newer models.  

 

  

Notes

 

[1] See the letter to Sallie Hopkin, dated [25 Dec 1912] in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 492-3. 

      Lawrence not only promises to remain forever a priest of love - and a glad one at that - but that he'll preach his heart out, insisting: "Once you've known what love can be, there's no disappointment any more, and no despair."

      This self-description and his defence of (heterosexual) love in face of modern scepticism has proved very popular with his devotees. Personally, however, I have always rather regretted the phrase and the way in which it's been interpreted by those who insist on viewing Lawrence's work as a type of moral idealism - which, let's be clear, it isn't (even if his writing repeatedly falls back into such).            

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence writing in a letter to Dorothy Brett, dated [26 Jan 1925], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 205. 

      Later, just to clarify his (quasi-Nietzschean) position, Lawrence will write in a letter to Else Jaffe (Frieda's sister): "I am with the antichrist." See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 332. 

      For my post on Lawrence's sympathy for the devil and Luciferianism (10 April 2020), please click here. 

 

[3] Catherine Brown, 'D. H. Lawrence 3: Christianity', University of Oxford podcast (28 Feb 2012): click here. 

 

[4] I'm primarily thinking here of the conclusion that Connie arrives at in chapter XVI of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), after a night of sensual passion in which Mellors takes her in the Italian way: "It was not really love. [...] It was sensuality sharp and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder." 

      But I'm also thinking of what Lawrence writes at the opening of his essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), sneering at the more soppier forms of Romantic literature in which "rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time". The line can be found on p. 81 of the Cambridge Edition of this work, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (2003) - oh, and the line from Lady C. can be found on p. 246 of the Cambridge Edition of that work (1993).   

 

[5] For those (like me) without a degree in literature, Dark Romanticism is a 19th-century movement that explored the more sinister and irrational aspects of human being. Unlike mainstream Romantics who believed in the inherent goodness of people and nature, Dark Romantics believed mankind is inherently fallen and lives in an outrageously cruel and violent world. It's a little less spooky than the Gothic tradition (i.e., not so reliant on supernatural elements). 

      Several of the American authors admired by Lawrence - Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne - are often seen as representative of the genre. 

 

[6] In 'Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture', Arendt writes: 

      "The quest for meaning, which relentlessly dissolves and examines anew all accepted doctrines and rules, can [...] as it were, produce a reversal of the old values, and declare these as 'new values'. This, to an extent, is what Nietzsche did when he reversed Platonism, forgetting that a reversed Plato is still Plato [...]"

      This essay is in Social Research, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Autumn 1971), pp. 417-446. The paragraph quoted is on p. 435. She later incorporated this idea into the first volume of her (unfinished) work The Life of the Mind (1977) although she's essentially just echoing Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche as remaining within Western metaphysics, despite his best efforts to overcome such. 

      Obviously, Arendt is right to say that simply reversing values paired in binary opposition isn't enough - though it's important to also note that it's a necessary first step toward deconstruction and revaluation. Derrida argues that to effectively dismantle a philosophical hierarchy, one must follow up reversal with displacement; a second phase that aims to disrupt the oppositional structure itself via the introduction of new concepts - such as différance - that resist clean categorisation and cannot be easily placed on either side of the binary   

[7-9] D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo', in Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 132

 

[10] See the post titled 'Lady Chatterley's Postmodern Lover' (9 Sept 2013), in which I adopt a Foucauldian position to argue - contra Lawrence - that the metaphysical notion of sex as the great clue to being cannot be allowed to pass without close critical examination.

      For rather than simply being an ideal anchorage point that supports the various manifestations of what we term sexuality, sex, says Foucault, is a complex and tyrannical type of agency formed by regimes of power. The Lawrentian belief that it somehow eludes and resists power and resides deep within us over and above the material reality of bodies and possessing its own intrinsic properties and laws, is simply a piece of modern romance.  

      As much as I love Lawrence, I have to admit that I get tired of the austere monarchy of sex ruling over all our thoughts and actions. And I agree with Foucault that what is really peculiar about modern societies is not that they kept sex locked away in darkness, "but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret" [35].  

      In a time to come, after the orgy, so to speak, readers will be unable to fathom Lawrence's sex mania. And they will smile, says Foucault, when they recall that there were once a people who believed that in sex resided a truth "every bit as precious as the one they had already demanded from the earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought". 

      See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 35, 159.    

 

 

Other posts in this No More Heroes series include: 

 

Malcolm McLaren: Stuckism and the Quest for Authenticity (14 July 2026): click here. 

 

Nietzsche: The Man Who Failed to Die at the Right Time (15 July 2026): click here.

 

Larry David: From Social Assassin to Court Jester (17 July 2026): click here.  

 

 

No More Heroes 2: Friedrich Nietzsche - The Man Who Failed to Die at the Right Time

No More Heroes (Friedrich Nietzsche)

(SA/2026)

 

 

I. 

 

Having in the previous post examined the source of my disappointment with my punk mentor Malcolm McLaren [1], I'd like now to turn to my philosophical hero - and I use that word with reservations [2] - the untimely thinker Friedrich Nietzsche ... 

 

What is it about him that ultimately leaves me feeling a little let down? 

 

Actually, the answer to this question is pretty straightforward: Nietzsche didn't die at the right time ...

 

 

II.  

 

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), Nietzsche famously preaches the gospel of voluntary death and praises the difficult art of dying at the right time: "Many die too late and some die too early. Still the doctrine sounds strange: 'Die at the right time.'" [3] 

 

Do this, and death becomes a festival and a triumph; a perfect death which serves as "a spur and a promise to the living". 

 

To die in battle and thus to squander a brave soul is good, says Zarathustra. But to die freely at a time of one's own choosing and most advantageous to one's goal, surrounded by friends "filled with hope and making solemn vows", that is the best death of all.

 

Anyone who wants glory and to be remembered with fondness long after their death must take their leave in good time and not hang "withered wreathes in the sanctuary of life", or lie around just waiting for death to creep up on them.      

 

Perhaps this is doubly true for those fuck-ups who have made a failure of their life; they more than others need to see to it that their death is a great success. 

 

But again, timing is the crucial thing here; for whilst, as we have said, many die too late, there are those who die too soon. Zarathustra names Jesus at this point: "and that he died too early has since been a fatality for many" - something that D. H. Lawrence absolutely agrees with, thus his insistence on mortal resurrection as being far more important than the crucifixion or any ascension unto heaven [4].      

 

But, mostly, the problem is one of people dying too late, not prematurely; of hanging on like apples on a tree even when full of worms and overripe to the point of rottenness. Zarathustra - and let's concede that he's pretty much Nietzsche's philosophical mouthpiece and alter ego - says he would hate to be one of these individuals.

 

He wants to die when at the height of his physical and intellectual powers, so that, in death, his spirit "should still glow like a sunset around the earth" with which he joyfully reunites, so that he may know peace in the material world that bore him.       

 

 

III.  

 

Unfortunately, Nietzsche doesn't die at the right time. After collapsing in Turin, aged 44 [5], Nietzsche lived on for eleven more agonising years in a state of severe physical and mental decline. Thus, in a disappointing twist of cosmic irony, Nietzsche utterly failed Zarathustra's ultimate test.

 

Never in the best of health in bourgeois terms, Nietzsche had nevertheless possessed an extraordinary vitality (what he termed die große Gesundheit). So, it's regrettable that he didn't die defiantly with his arms around the neck of a horse in 1889, but became this vegetable, cared for by his elderly mother and anti-Semitic sister who put him on display for visitors like a living museum exhibit. 

 

Worse still, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche took control of his archives, systematically falsifying his letters and editing his Nachlaß in order to present his philosophy as a form of proto-fascism [6]. Thus, not dying at the right time was not only a personal catastrophe, but by failing to leave his affairs in order Nietzsche enabled his philosophical legacy to be hijacked, distorted, and weaponised by the reactive forces of ethno-nationalism he spent his life combatting. 

 

If only Nietzsche had learnt from Socrates or Seneca before being overtaken by biological fate! They provided masterclasses in how to die and shape their own narratives. As it is, however, his end contrasts as the tragic antithesis to these highly controlled, theatrical exits [7]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] 'No More Heroes 1: Malcolm McLaren - Stuckism and the Quest for Authenticity' (14 July 2026): click here. 

 

[2] The word hero derives from the Ancient Greek term ἥρως which referred to one such as Heracles born of divine ancestry, or to one who was awarded divine honours for their deeds. Whilst Nietzsche retained the concept in his work, he was unhappy with the way it is used in the modern world, often taking on a moral aspect and tied to notions of self-sacrifice, for example. Others may disagree, but, for me, to call Nietzsche a hero would betray a fundamental misunderstanding of his philosophical project.    

 

[3] See Nietzsche, 'Of Voluntary Death', Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 97-99. All lines quoted in section II of this post are taken from this edition of Nietzsche's text.  

 

[4] See Lawrence's vitally important short novel The Escaped Cock (1929), which can be found in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 123-163. 

      One of the earliest posts on Torpedo the Ark was written on this work by Lawrence (29 March 2013): click here. 

 

[5] On 3 January 1889, Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown and was briefly detained by two policemen for causing a public disturbance in the streets of Turin. What happened exactly remains unknown, but an often-repeated tale from shortly after his death states that Nietzsche witnessed the flogging of a horse in the Piazza Carlo Alberto, threw his arms around its neck in order to protect the animal and then collapsed to the ground. 

      In the following few days Nietzsche sent several letters - known as the Wahnbriefe - to a number of friends including Cosima Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt. Most were signed Dionysus, though some were also signed der Gekreuzigte (the Crucified). He ended his days physically and mentally paralysed and in the care of his sister (i.e., a fate worse than death; see note 6 below).  

 

[6] Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche physically curated her brother's final public image by transforming his living death into a highly orchestrated spectacle. Rather than hiding his vegetative state, she paraded it, meticulously staging his environment, dress, and physical presentation before a carefully selected audience. 

      Thus, for example, she would routinely wheel a silent, uncomprehending Nietzsche dressed in a flowing, heavily pleated white robe that closely resembled a classical philosopher's toga out onto a prominent first-floor balcony, allowing visiting disciples and curious tourists to look up and venerate him from the garden below like a tragic prophet. She also meticulously groomed his famous, oversized moustache in an attempt to maintain the fierce, recognisable profile of his lucid years and disguise his frailness. 

      At the same time, Elisabeth established the Nietzsche-Archiv and - in collaboration with Peter Gast - forged and spliced together entries from his notebooks to create what was intended to be his magnum opus - Der Wille zur Macht. The first German edition of this spurious text, containing 483 sections, was published a year after Nietzsche's death in 1901. This version was superseded in 1906 by an expanded second edition containing 1067 sections and it was this edition that was translated into English as The Will to Power, by Anthony M. Ludovici, in 1910.  

 

[7] Condemned to death by the Athenian court, Socrates refused flight or compromise, choosing instead to drink hemlock as a final, supreme act of obedience to the laws of the state that shaped him. He spent his final hours calmly debating the immortality of the soul with his grieving disciples. 

      Similarly, Seneca - ordered to commit suicide by Emperor Nero - embraced his fate with Stoic equanimity, using his final moments to dictate philosophy and comfort his family while bleeding to death in a bath. Both men transformed state-mandated executions into ultimate proofs of concept, ensuring their deaths perfectly authenticated their life's work.

 

 

The next post in this series - on D. H. Lawrence as inveterate priest of love - can be read by clicking here.  

 

 

Whitley Bay (In Memory of My Mother)

Vintage poster from the 1920s encouraging holidaymakers 

to take the train to Whitley Bay [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Although, in a very real sense, Soho is my spiritual home and the place in which I feel happiest, dig deeper, as Heidegger would say, and you will find me standing on golden sands ... [2] 

 

 

II.

 

Whitley Bay is a seaside town in the North Tyneside borough of Tyne and Wear, England [3] - about ten miles east of Newcastle. It's perhaps most famous for its grey-black rocks that my mother used to love climbing on as a little girl and St. Mary's Lighthouse [4].

 

The town has a long history stretching back to at least 1100 when it is first mentioned in historical documents. But it wasn't until the late 19th-century that it emerged as a popular seaside holiday resort - rather than a coal mining town [5] - after it, along with several other small coastal towns, was connected by rail to Newcastle. 

 

At this time, the town was still known as Whitley and was often confused with the far more famous (and upmarket) town of Whitby, in North Yorkshire. Fed up with the problems this caused, including misdirected mail, in 1901 local residents were asked to suggest a new name and Whitley Bay came out on top (the town officially adopted this new name the following year).    

 

 

III. 

 

If it doesn't have the most illustrious roll call of famous names associated with it, Whitley Bay is nevertheless where comedy writer Ian La Frenais was born, in 1937, and he went on to co-create with Dick Clement one of the 1970s British TV shows most celebrated on Torpedo the Ark [6]. 

 

And it is also where my mother was born, 100 years ago today ... Whitley Bay remaining the place she loved best, despite her living in Essex for over 75 years and rarely returning to the North East after leaving to start a newly married life at the end of the 1940s.  

 

A print of the picture above, by John Littlejohns, still hangs in her bedroom even now, three years after her death [7].  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The original art deco style poster was designed by John Littlejohns in 1929. It was commissioned by the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) to promote services to Whitley Bay and displayed at local stations as well as larger stations on the East Coast Main Line including London. The work is held in the collection of the National Railway Museum in York, which is part of the Science Museum Group. 

      The poster features Table Rocks Pool, situated just south of Whitley Bay and north of Cullercoats, showing people in fashionable bathing gear. This small natural tidal pool was developed and made safe for swimmers in the 1890s following a number of fatalities. It was later significantly expanded in size (to 70ft) and steps were added along with a hut to provide changing facilities, although, unfortunately, this blew down in strong gales four years after its erection in 1912. 

      Sadly, by the 1970s - as more and more English people deserted the British seaside and flew off to the Spanish Costas - the pool had fallen into disuse. However, it still remains visible at low tide even today.  

 

[2] I'm paraphrasing a line that Heidegger is reputed to have liked saying: 'Dig deeper and you will find yourself standing on Catholic ground.' See the essay by John D. Caputo, 'Heidegger and Theology', in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignan (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 270.

 

[3] Whitley Bay has been part of Tyne and Wear since 1974. Prior to that it was governed as part of Northumberland. 

 

[4] St. Mary's Lighthouse (1898) is on the tiny St. Mary's Island (aka Bait Island), just north of Whitley Bay on the coast of NE England. The small rocky island is linked to the mainland by a short concrete causeway which is submerged at high tide. 

      Sadly, it was decommissioned in 1984, just two years after its conversion to automatic operation. It is now a tourist attraction run by the North Tyneside Council. In addition to the lighthouse itself there is a small museum, a visitor's centre, and a café. In 2012, St. Mary's Lighthouse attained grade II listed status. Plans for further renovation have so far come to nothing due to financial issues and environmental concerns.   

 

[5] Exposed coal seams can still be seen in the cliffs north of St. Mary's Island and it's possible to pick up shiny black pieces of coal from the beach at low tide. 

      For younger readers who may not know, coal is a combustible sedimentary rock formed from fossilised plant matter subjected to intense heat and pressure over millions of years. While sparkling diamonds may be a girl's best friend, for me, it's coal that has a more magical allure with its lustrous sheen; and for D. H. Lawrence, the son of a miner, coal was a powerful symbol of the earth's hidden forces, carbon providing the elemental clue to human nature. 

      I mention Lawrence here not only for a literary connection to coal, but because, like him, I am also the son of a miner (loosely speaking); my father left school in Newcastle at fourteen in the year my mother was born and the General Strike took place (1926) and spent a very brief spell down the pits. Hating the experience, he took a job working in a paint factory instead. 

 

[6] I'm referring of course to Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (BBC One, 1973-74). 

      Certain scenes in The Likely Lads (dir. Michael Tuchner, 1976) - the feature-length spin-off of the TV show - were filmed in Whitley Bay. Written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, the movie starred Rodney Bewes and James Bolam, reprising their roles as Bob and Terry. 

 

[7] Readers who want a fine art quality medium-sized print (52 x 62 cm) can find one (framed) on the King & McGaw website priced at £160. Produced in partnership with the National Railway Museum, every purchase of the print helps support this institution.  

 

 

SIG News 5 Manifesto: A Friendly Deconstruction

SIG Manifesto 

(SIG News 5: September 2026)

 

 

I.

 

The new, bumper edition of SIG News (#5) is out now - arriving two months ahead of its cover date and two weeks ahead of its public launch at the Mausoleum - sorry, Museum - of Youth Culture (see below). Edited by the established team of Russ Bestley, Tim Gibney, Kevin Quinn and Roger Sabin, it assembles an eclectic mix of articles by a disparate group of authors from both within and without the University of the Arts London (UAL). 

 

By deliberately choosing the inky medium of an old-school, limited-run newspaper, SIG's explicit aim is to thumb its nose at mass circulation and the algorithmic curation of the online world. Anyone interested in the history and practice of music- and style-based subcultures is guaranteed to find something to excite them in this issue. 

 

However, it is the ever-changing SIG Manifesto, printed boldly on the back cover, which I invariably read first, and it's this ten-point text that I'd like to discuss - by which I mean deconstruct - here. Let us begin by looking at each point in turn, offering a brief response before building towards a critical overview of a text that functions as a public declaration of the Group's ideology. 

 

Ultimately, we are obliged to ask: does this text genuinely rally readers to radical action, or does it risk encouraging mere repetition of the same old inauthentic busyness [1] and the restless pursuit of novelty? 

 

II.

  

1. We at SIG News decree that the high-street purveyors of plainstream bad dreams dispense nothing more than tribal whorefare. A cavalcade of copycat caricatures and clone-clowns cascade across mediascapes devoid of depth and bereft of breadth.

 

Point 1 playfully, if somewhat aggressively, sets the tone: mock-authoritative, mock-confrontational, and mock-avant-garde, delivered with an over-reliance on alliteration and Situationist-style wordplay. 

 

Strip away the performative hostility, however, and it's a bog-standard critique of the Mainstream Media (MSM). It accuses the latter of lacking both substance and diversity whilst actively exploiting social divisions for profit (tribal whorefare), manufacturing systemic anxiety (bad dreams), and recycling formulaic content (copycat caricatures).

  

2. Scenes should be heard, not spread. 

 

Point 2 of the manifesto posits that for subcultures to remain authentic and flourish, they must foster local, organic connections through live performance, material publications (such as fanzines) and word-of-mouth, rather than engaging in global, digital dissemination. In line with subcultural theory, the statement also suggests that exposure via modern media causes rapid commodification and the loss of a scene's underground edge.

 

Ultimately, there's nothing virtual or viral about SIG News: it demands physical presence. Ironically, however, by demanding scenes remain localised, it inadvertently privileges those living in metropolitan cultural hubs whilst excluding the isolated, provincial outsider, i.e., the sort of poor sod stuck in the sticks or in some shitty seaside town that SIG often seems to champion.

  

 

3. Within the suffocating technological netweb 'DIY-bother' has become the despairing mantra of an autonomous muddleground desperate for something 'more'. 

 

Point 3 suggests that within a restrictive digital infrastructure, autonomous DIY culture has devolved into an exhausting, ineffective, and futile struggle - hence DIY-bother.

 

Whether we like it or not, platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have successfully co-opted, neutralised, and commercialised creative independence, transforming the radical punk ethos of Do It Yourself into a neoliberal chore that demands constant content creation, algorithmic self-optimisation, and endless self-promotion.

 

Independent creators are left confused, isolated, and trapped on a digital muddleground - profoundly exhausted by the machinery of the burnout society [2], yet desperate for an authentic path forward that doesn't involve feeding the algorithm.

 

 

4. Be impossible, demand the unrealistic.

 

By reversing the famous Situationist slogan from May '68 - Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible - this point serves as an update appropriate to the age of capitalist realism [3]. It is a potent mix of defensive absurdism and revolutionary desire for alternatives in an era dominated by the mantra there is no alternative.

 

By becoming-impossible, one becomes capricious and unclassifiable and thus useless to systems that rely on reliable data and predictive modelling. By demanding the unrealistic, one asks for the very things that consumer capitalism cannot commodify or deliver: silence, secrecy, and stillness.

 

   

5. It is absolutely normal to be resolutely on the outside of anything and everything. 

 

Point 5 normalises and validates splendid isolation and magnificent marginalisation, asserting that refusing to belong to any mainstream group, trend, or digital network is a completely valid way to live. 

 

This position is arguably more countercultural than subcultural. For in actively rejecting anything and everything one acknowledges that even the most radical subcultural movements will eventually be compromised, co-opted, and commodified. 

 

However, in affirming such an extreme model of individualistic detachment, it becomes politically problematic for those of a more socialist persuasion who believe that it requires collective power (i.e., solidarity with others) to build lasting alternative structures.  

 

  

6. Inspiration + imagination x application = no sweat.

 

Quite possibly, this is the point I dislike the most. It reads like an uninspired motivational slogan dreamed up by some corporation trying to sound knowledgeable about the creative process. Ironically, it undermines SIG's own depiction of cultural production as involving a good deal of sweat (not to mention blood and tears). Only artificially intelligent machines don't sweat.   

 

If I were to be generous, I might accept that the author of this manifesto is attempting to subvert the capitalist no pain, no gain work mantra. In other words, they might be trying to say that when one is genuinely inspired, creative work ceases to feel like alienated, exhausting labour. 

 

However, by dressing this concept up as a reductive, pseudo-logical mathematical formula they have ended up producing a trite, neoliberal slogan that completely devalues the demanding reality of artistic practice.

 

 

7. Omniformed existences expire with no trace. A feast of spectres amasses. 

 

Jesus! Point 7 reads like gothic poetry as much as cultural theory. Nevertheless, the warning here is stark: if you allow yourself to be shaped entirely by the Matrix, your life will leave no lasting legacy; you will expire with no trace and the world will become haunted by the ghosts of mass-produced human entities who failed to realise their potential or blossom as individuals.

 

Put another way, it's arguing that total conformity leads to a form of spiritual and cultural death and what Mark Fisher would term lost futures.  

 

 

8. Humanarchism is the logical evolutionary step away from total disconnection towards renewed social connection. Unplug, turn off, conjoin in. 

 

Is humanarchism a SIG neologism? At any rate, it's a new word to me; a portmanteau blending humanism and anarchism which suggests that in order to survive the isolating effects of modern digital life, society must evolve a new philosophy that rejects technological control in favour of autonomous (and essentially analogue) human community. 

 

There's no point (and no fun) in being connected to networks if we are physically out of touch not only with other people, but with animals, plants, and objects. We need a form of libidinal materialism born of desire, not merely a new idealism. 

 

Unfortunately, whilst I approve of the necessary update to (and inversion of) Timothy Leary's famous countercultural mantra, I'm not sure humanarchism is the best term for this new philosophy. 

 

Also, one must ask how realistic is this as a solution; by simply instructing people to unplug and turn off the SIG manifestoists assume people can easily walk away from the digital infrastructures that control their jobs, bank accounts, and daily communication and make a nostalgic return to pre-internet socialising [4]. 

 

 

9. Renounce the over-the-counterculture. Spurn the splendour-vendors and venal frontiers. Difference is natural indifference.

 

I like that last sentence: Difference is natural indifference (even if, obviously, I think indifference is a highly stylised pose born of stoicism and dandyism and has nothing natural about it). Indifference, along with several other 'I' terms - irony, insouciance, insincerity - is one of my watchwords here on Torpedo the Ark (TTA). 

 

The starry individual does not care about being noticed or need to be validated. They are secure in their own distinctiveness and completely indifferent to mainstream trends, social media metrics, or corporate attempts to categorise them - and, as the rest of the point makes clear, they have renounced the over-the-counterculture too which all-too-often means pseudo-rebellion and commercialised bullshit sold by splendour-vendors (i.e., hucksters working in the advertising business or those in marketing who wish to build and promote brands).    

 

Of course, again, this sounds good - but it involves the same naive romanticism as we have encountered already; just because you choose to ignore the Matrix it doesn't mean you are outside of it; in capitalist reality, modern data tracking doesn't care if you are indifferent to it; the system still tracks your habits and monetises your lifestyle; it might frame your structural isolation and indifference, for example, as the adoption of a zen attitude (Would you like to buy a yoga mat?)   

  

 

10. Fashion is no more than a fleeting fad. Follow nothing except your shadow. Go forth and amplify. 

 

The SIG Manifesto ends with a tripartite series of slogans intended, one assumes, to inspire readers and incite them to acts of defiant rebellion. 

 

The third - Go forth and amplify - is simply a play on the biblical injunction given initially by God to Adam and Eve (Genesis 1:28) and then later repeated to Noah and his sons (Genesis 9: 7). I suppose it's encouraging us to find our own voices and to speak up (so is again at odds with the ethos of silence and shutting the fuck up promoted on TTA). 

 

The first sentence - Fashion is no more than a fleeting fad - is one that I'm astonished to see in a manifesto born of a university which includes the London College of Fashion as one of its six constituent colleges. Also, as the author of Philosophy on the Catwalk (2011), I am very much of the view that in fashion we can discover "all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been" [5].

 

As for the fleeting character of fashion - or what we might term after Barthes the logic of fashion - isn't that its beauty and philosophical importance? Lars Svendsen is spot on when he writes: 

 

"Fashion does not have any telos, any final purpose, in the sense of striving for a state of perfection [...] The aim of fashion is rather to be potentially endless, that is it creates new forms and constellations ad infinitum." [6] 

 

This is why, one might suggest, the most interesting writings on fashion have tended to come from our poets and novelists; for "they alone are sufficiently free from its perceived triviality" [7]. 

  

As for the second sentence ... ironically, despite speaking of shadows, it's another essentialist injunction; for it is saying, is it not, be completely self-reliant and look only to your own true self for direction. One of the problems, however, is that Baudrillard powerfully illustrated how in an obscene hyperreal world and an era of total transparency, we have no shadows!  

 

So that's another issue - one of many - for the signatories of the SIG Manifesto to address ...

 

 

III.    

 

We are told to memorise the ten-point SIG Manifesto and ignore it at our peril. 

 

Obviously, this is said humorously - but, somehow, the text doesn't leave us smiling and I suspect that's because it functions primarily as an academic pastiche rather than a viable blueprint for contemporary cultural resistance. 

 

Whilst it accurately diagnoses the exhaustion inherent in a hyper-commodified digital landscape, its structural utility is limited by an outdated binary framework. It posits, for example, an enlightened avant-garde operating from an imaginary external position that ignores how modern capital functions through decentralized, participatory networks. 

 

Consequently, directives to unplug (Point 8) or remain on the Outside (Point 5) overlook the material reality that economic survival and communication are fundamentally embedded in digital infrastructure. Further, by framing resistance as a personal lifestyle choice, the manifesto risks falling into bourgeois individualism and what theorist Mark Fisher termed the privatisation of discontent, effectively atomising opposition rather than fostering collective solidarity.

 

Aesthetically, the wider SIG project draws heavily from historical precedents, specifically 1970s punk fanzines and 1990s culture jamming. The decision to print SIG News as a physical newspaper highlights a deliberate engagement with obsolete media forms, positioning the work closer to an archival art project than a contemporary subcultural critique. 

 

However, viewed through the lens of radical graphic design and visual history, the SIG Manifesto might be said to succeed on its own terms. For while it lacks a coherent political strategy for navigating an algorithmic mediascape and, theoretically, it has more holes than a proverbial piece of Swiss cheese, it functions effectively as a stylish conceptual provocation, illustrating the profound difficulty of offering meaningful resistance today. 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Heidegger terms this Geschäftigkeit - a key concept introduced in Sein und Zeit (1927) as a structural component of Dasein's everyday manner of existing; i.e., constantly occupied with the immediate tasks at hand and numerous daily distractions. 

      For Heidegger, this relentless busyness is a coping mechanism; one that allows us to avoid confronting the deeper questions of our existence, including our own mortality. It is closely connected to his concept of Verfallen, wherein the individual tumbles into superficiality and evaluates their life simply by how much they are doing, losing their authentic self in the process. 

 

[2] The phrase Müdigkeitsgesellschaft was used by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han as the title of an essay first published in German in 2010 (the English translation by Erik Butler was published by Stanford University Press in 2015). 

      It might be noted that the term literally translates as fatigue society, but the word burnout - coined in 1970 by the German-born American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger to refer to a state of mental and physical exhaustion - arguably has greater contemporary resonance.     

      Readers who are interested can find a two-part post published on Torpedo the Ark back in November 2021 discussing Han's text: click here to access part one.  

 

[3] The phrase capitalist realism is, of course, forever associated with Mark Fisher; see his book of this title (Zero Books, 2009). The first of a three-part post written on this work published on Torpedo the Ark earlier this year can be accessed by clicking here. 

      In brief, capitalist realism refers to the fact that capitalism is more than an economic arrangement of society or a political ideology; that it has become a singular reality that is so all-encompassing that we mistake it for the natural order or inevitable way of the world. This, in turn, makes alternative models either unimaginable or seem foolish and utopian: 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,' as Fisher famously puts it. 

  

[4] It must also be pointed out that in demanding that people gather and collaborate as what D. H. Lawrence would term a democracy of touch, point 8 is at odds with point 5 - remain a singular individual on the outside of everything.

 

[5] Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor, (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 57. 

      Admittedly, this novel derides those who would make of fashion the basis of all human experience, but, contrary to his own idealism, Carlyle is obliged to concede that clothes do play a crucial role in materially constituting the self.  

 

[6] Lars Svendsen, Fashion: A Philosophy, trans. John Irons, (Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 29.

 

[7] Roland Barthes, 'Language and Clothing', in The Language of Fashion, trans. Andy Stafford, ed. Andy Stafford and Michael Carter, (Berg, 2006), p. 21.