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 who - as he says - let him down in some manner).  

 

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 (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).  

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: A Little Bit More Politics (Sections VII - XIII)

Марк Фишер: Кислотный коммунист

(SA/2026)

 

Note: All page references in this post are to Mark Fisher's k-punk: 

The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), 

ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018). 

 

 

VII. 

 

Fisher may have hated D. H. Lawrence, but perhaps he might have appreciated Lawrence's idea of a democracy of touch [a], as one of his criticisms of the smartphone and other forms of touchscreen technology is that they involve touch devoid of any sensuality: 

 

"When the fingers encounter the glassy surface of the iPhone, everything they touch on the screen feels the same. The fingers are effectively acting as extensions of the eye and the brain - an eye and brain that have now been radically re-habituated by cyberspace." (487) 

 

Fisher thinks it astonishing that this line of thought was anticipated by Baudrillard in the 1980s - but even more remarkable is the fact that Lawrence foresaw all this in the 1920s. 

 

And like Tanizaki, Lawrence also wrote in praise of shadows, which, rather surprisingly, Fisher calls for the cultivation of in addition to the carving out of spaces "beyond the hyper-bright instant" (487). I so much prefer this poetic-philosophical Mark Fisher to the one who bangs on about politics and the financial crisis of 2008. 

 

 

VIII. 

 

The phrase that best sums up Fisher's utopian phase - his acid communism - is red plenty (a phrase he borrows from Francis Spufford's 2010 book of that title). It refers to the collective capacity of the People to "produce, care and enjoy" (510) and is the thing which, he says, capitalism is set up to block: 

 

"The attack on capital has to be fundamentally based on the simple insight that, far from being about 'wealth creation', capital necessarily and always blocks our access to this common wealth." (510) 

 

In a post-capitalist future, technological advancements and the communist re-ordering of society will provide abundance for all: "Everything for everyone" (510), including bread and roses. Gone forever will be the days of artificial scarcity. 

 

Further, everyone will feel a sense of red belonging - a sense of belonging that has nothing to do with faith, flag, or family and cannot be "reduced to the chauvinistic pleasures that come from being an insider in any group whatsoever" (510-511). 

 

It is, rather, a "special sense of involvement that promised to transfigure all aspects of everyday life in a way that, previously, only religion had promised to, so that even the dreariest task could be imbued with high significance" (511). 

 

The great promise of red plenty and red belonging is that it doesn't matter "where you come from or who you are" (511), you will be cared for unconditionally. 

 

It's clear how this line of thinking might feed into the open borders movement. What's not quite so clear is how such thinking relates to Fisher's own mental health; frankly, I can't see how anyone can promote such ideas without being in some sort of delirium (similar to the mystical state experienced by those who suddenly find God) [b]. 

 

I know some of his more ardent supporters believe that Fisher's speculative nostalgia and hallucinogenic politics is the best way to confront capitalist realism, but for those looking for a rather more practical strategy for transitioning from neoliberalism to a democracy to come, Fisher's work is essentially worthless. It also seems somewhat at odds with his own more pessimistic views and criticism of the moralising left. 

 

In sum: whilst I'm all for the creation of new narratives and conceptual frameworks - and maybe even a little bit of libidinal engineering - Fisher's acid communism fails to convince and red plenty leaves me hungry for something more. 

 

 

IX. 

 

And back to the topic of consciousness-raising ... A practice (or range of practices) that Fisher believes to be of crucial importance to molecular revolution: 

 

"Consciousness-raising opens up the possibility of living, not merely theorising about, a collective experience. It can give us the resources to behave, think and act differently [...]" (514) 

 

For Fisher: 

 

"The roots of any successful struggle will come from people sharing their feelings, especially their feelings of misery and desperation, and together attributing the sources of these feelings to impersonal structures [...] mediated by particular figures to which we must attach populist loathing" (514). 

 

These figures would include, for example, landlords and entrepreneurs, whom Fisher brands as parasites. We might, I would suggest, see this as a succinct definition of what Nietzsche calls ressentiment and which is central to slave morality. 

 

Fisher claims that the aim of consciousness-raising is to produce more compassion "for others and for ourselves" (514), but I worry that his proposed method of consciousness-raising will only generate class hate and make people feel pretty rotten about themselves too; has knowing that others feel as desperate as you do ever really helped? [c] 

 

 

X.

 

Fisher is grateful to Francis Spufford for reminding us all that "when communism was defeated, it wasn't just a particular ideology that disappeared" (518). 

 

No, the demise of communism - and he's thinking here of the USSR - was also "the disappearance of modernism's Promethean dream of a total transformation of human society" (518). 

 

Now you might be forgiven for thinking that's a good thing. For this dream became a dystopian nightmare, did it not? Surely Fisher knows the history of the Soviet Union - and, indeed, he might also be expected to know what happened to Prometheus (for those who don't recall their Ancient Greek mythology, it ended even worse for him than for Trotsky).    

 

Is Fisher really falling back into what Nick Land would call a sentimental indulgence - i.e., the hope that a political revolution will lead to "new productive, perceptual, cognitive and libidinal possibilities" (518). 

 

I don't want to be a postmodern killjoy who radically lowers expectations and crushes dreams, etc. But, really, c'mon! Knowing, Mark, that there's no way back to old school communism [d], why pin your hopes on renewing (and resuming) class solidarity and the building of radical machineries of desire? 

 

 

XI. 

 

I mentioned above how, for Fisher, "the roots of any successful struggle will come from people sharing their feelings" (514). 

 

And yet, in another text from 2015, titled 'Anti-Therapy', Fisher acknowledges that the idea that "talking about our feelings could be a political act seems counterintuitive" (521) and that this new emotionalism seems closely linked to capitalist realism - born of Tony Blair's "manipulation of the extraordinary grief jamboree that ensued in the immediate wake of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales" (521). 

 

Fisher rightly says that the new emo-politics enforced by New Labour "went far beyond mere mood-setting" (522) - now we all had to possess the right feelings and share them in the approved manner. Blair "led the way in normalising the emotional self-exploitation that was necessary for the final phase of neoliberalism in Britain" (522) - a phase that Fisher amusingly calls spincerity (the public performance of an emotion you may or may not genuinely feel). 

 

It's enough to make one wish for the return of traditional British restraint and resolve; of stiff upper-lips and stoical detachment. However, Fisher sees this as reactionary and posits in contrast a third way (if I can use such a phrase); one based on his reading of Spinoza. 

 

For Spinoza's philosophy "makes the management of emotions central to its project" (524) and aims not to repress feelings, but engineer joy via the use of reason. This, for Fisher, makes Spinoza "a thinker whose work is an indispensable resource for any progressive project" (524) - a view that is not uncommon amongst neo-Marxist thinkers (particularly those influenced by Deleuze and Badiou) [e].  

 

Get Spinoza on board, says Fisher, and talking about our feelings can become a radical political act; "part of a practice of consciousness-raising that makes visible the impersonal and intersubjective structures that ideology normally obscures from us" (530).  

 

  

XII.  

 

This seems at first a rather disingenuous thing to write: 

 

"It's somewhat ironic that theories of the 'Event' have come to the fore [...] at just the moment in history when it has become clear that events in and of themselves don't change anything." (531)

 

For Fisher surely knows that the Event (as conceptualised by philosophers) is extremely rare and has little to do with the events covered by the news media, such as Live Aid, for example, or the G20 protests. The Event - at least as I understand it (inspired by Lawrence) - is a rent in the Great Umbrella; something that allows a glimpse of chaos and the discovery of a new world via the destruction of fixed forms [f].  

 

But perhaps Fisher was thinking of something said by Zarathustra to the effect that what matters more than noisy, violent events are those changes that take place in us in our stillest hours: "'The world revolves, not around the inventors of new noises, but around the inventors of new values: it revolves inaudibly.'" [g] 

 

Heidegger picked up on this idea after the War, when he attempted to purge his notion of Transzendenz - Dasein's ability to start over and transform the world - not only from its conventional ties to metaphysics but to the idea of action. What was required, Heidegger argued, was not some great event, but a form of silent waiting. 

 

What seems most to worry Fisher is that events often result in euphoric outbursts of feeling "followed by depressive collapse" (531) - but the same could be said of love, no? 

 

Still, if events are the be-all and end-all - if change doesn't happen through them alone - "there are nevertheless moments which function as thresholds, opening up a new terrain of struggle, and allowing different collective emotions to propagate" (532). 

 

Which is basically saying things can still happen out of the blue ...   

 

 

XIII.  

 

Finally, we come to the two short texts, both from 2016, with which part four of k-punk closes; firstly, 'Cybergothic vs Steampunk' and, secondly, 'Mannequin Challenge' ...

 

In the former, Fisher argues that the global terrorist network ISIS "holds up a mirror to twenty-first century capitalist nihilism" (544). A form of nihilism that is essentially a type of existential poverty. We might not like to admit it, but ISIS offer a solution to this (albeit a horrifically false solution). For like criminal gangs and religious cults, ISIS offer those who join fellowship and meaning.    

 

Perhaps more interestingly, Fisher describes ISIS in relation to his concept of the cybergothic:

 

"There are no 'pure' archaisms, nothing ever repeats without difference, and ISIS is properly understood as a cybergothic phenomenon which combines the ancient with the contemporary (beheadings on the web)." (546)

 

And whilst he is obviously not a supporter of ISIS, Fisher - a bit like Foucault, who greeted the Iranian Revolution in 1979 with warm enthusiasm [h] - is excited by "the rising tide of experimental political forms in so many areas of the world at the moment" (546). 

 

And that's because, for him, this shows that "people are rediscovering group consciousness and the potency of the collective" (546).     

 

I can't help wondering whether, if he were alive today, Fisher (like Foucault in his late work) would find it necessary to rethink questions central to the Enlightenment and to liberalism. To concede, for example, that whilst the individual is a political fiction, it's nevertheless a useful one which needs vigorously defending; as does secular society when threatened by militant religious fascism. 

 

In the latter piece, Fisher comments on Donald Trump and his successful campaign in 2016 to become President of the United States. 

 

In contrast to Clinton and her team of "political robots playing out an exhausted programme" (547), Trump's campaign "was possessed of a sense of effervescing excitement, of anarchic unpredictability, the feeling of belonging to a building-movement" (547). 

 

Fisher understands how Trump caught the mood of popular dissatisfaction with capitalist realism and performed with a certain libidinal freedom that was attractive not only to his supporters, but to many who wouldn't vote for him in a million years and were appalled by his rhetoric and immoderation. His campaign may have been ugly, but at least it wasn't boring. 

 

In brief, like many other commentators of a certain generation, Fisher recognised that Trump was the punk candidate (what this tells us about the latter is an interesting question we might discuss one day).   

 

Notes

 

[a] I have written several posts referencing this Lawrentian idea; see, for example, the post dated 14 May 2014 - 'Towards a Democracy of Touch' - click here. 

      Note that the word 'hated' is used deliberately here; Matt Colquhoun confirmed to me in a recent email (7 May 2026) Fisher's visceral hostility toward Lawrence.

 

[b] Normally, I would not comment on someone's mental health. However, since Fisher and his followers make such a point of politicising depression - arguing that it is a social phenomenon heavily influenced by capitalism rather than a purely chemical or biological issue - I feel justified in doing so.

      Note, however, that my use of the term delirium is not simply intended in the narrow clinical sense, but more in the philo-political sense deployed by Deleuze and Guattari, for whom delirium is a way the unconscious invests in the social field, sometimes opening up revolutionary lines of flight. I suggest that Fisher's vision of acid communism operates as this precise kind of political delirium; an elaborate, idealised alternative reality constructed to escape the immense psychological claustrophobia of capitalist realism. Such a vision of utopia functions as a temporary, internal flight mechanism from profound depression. Suddenly, the world feels meaningful and loving once more. 

      However, as a political strategy, this hallucinogenic clarity borders on a mystical state rather than practical materialist organising. And, unfortunately, such states seldom last; when the speculative fantasy dissolves, the individual comes back down to earth with a bump, resulting in renewed depression. Fisher, as most readers will know, tragically committed suicide less than two years after writing the text discussed here.

 

[c] Historically, of course, it has. In the second-wave feminist consciousness-raising groups of the late 1960s and 1970s, for example, sharing personal experiences of isolation, shame, and subjugation was precisely what allowed women to see that their private misery was structural and political. This collective realisation was a vital catalyst for solidarity and agency. 

      However, my contention with Fisher is that his specific formula for consciousness-raising risks short-circuiting this therapeutic transformation. Rather than moving from shared misery to structural agency, Fisher's explicit demand for populist loathing targeted at parasites paves a direct line toward Nietzschean ressentiment. It risks trapping the participants in a permanent state of reactive anger and class hate, which ultimately toxicifies the self and breeds a new form of psychological misery. 

      Of course, Fisher himself is aware of this danger, which is why he later refers readers to Wendy Brown's essay 'Wounded Attachments' (1993) - an essay in which she diagnoses the psycho-libidinal origins of an identity politics and what those on the right call wokism. 

      Fisher writes: "Drawing on Nietzsche's account of resentment [...] Brown wrote of a political subjectivity which 'becomes deeply invested in its own impotence, even while it seeks to assuge the pain of its powerlessness through its vengeful moralizing, through its wide distribution of suffering, through its reproach of power as such'" (526-527). And Fisher concludes that today "the mixture of moralizing aggression and investment in impotence has proliferated in a political atmosphere now substantially shaped by the online environment" (527).

      Brown's essay can be found in Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3 (August 1993), pp. 390-410. It can be accessed via JSTOR by clicking here.  

 

[d] Fisher says as much: "I don't believe that the old signifier 'communism' can be revived [...] It is now irretrievably tainted by terrible associations, forever tied to the nightmares of the twentieth century" (520). Funnily enough, however, a few months later he names his new politics of desire emerging from the future ... acid communism.  

 

[e] As a Lawrentian, I have my reservations about Spinoza and his rationalism. Nevertheless, his work is useful in exposing the myth of the autonomous individual at the heart of the liberal tradition which drags with it notions of free will and responsibility.   

 

[f] See the post titled 'on Poetry, Chaos and the Great Umbrella' (10 June 2013): click here.  

 

[g] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 153-154.  

 

[h] Writing in an Italian daily newspaper (Corriere della Sera), Foucault praised the Iranian Revolution as an authentic anti-imperialist movement and a spiritual revolt against Western-imposed modernity, rather than just a religious coup. See my post dated 14 August 2014, in which I discuss this: click here. 

 

 

This post is a continuation of my previous post on Fisher's political writings in the book k-punk (2018): click here. 

 

And for earlier thoughts on Fisher's political writings in the above work, please click here.

 

  

Retromania: Reviewed and Reassessed - Part 3: Then (Chapters 6-9)

Simon Reynolds: Retromania  - cover of the US edition

(Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011)

 

 

I.

 

So, here we are at page 183 and still not half-way through a book which can be summarised in one short sentence: We live in a culture that prefers to curate the recent past rather than create the future. And whilst he doesn't use the phrase, Reynolds seems to suggest that the solution to this is: torpedo the archive! 

 

It amazes me that there are still another 7 chapters and another 250 pages or so to get through; Reynolds is like a spider that has already caught the fly, but can't resist weaving an ever-expanding web, delighted with its own ingenuity.  

 

Anyway, let's explore the four chapters that make up part two of Retromania - and let me remind readers that the page numbers refer to the 2012 Faber edition of the book.  

 

 

II. 

 

Because I like fashion, I do like chapter 6; one which opens with Reynolds expressing his excitement at discovering just how fabulous the futuristic looks designed by the likes of André Courrèges, Pierre Cardin, and Paco Rabanne in the early 1960s were - before everything turned psychedelic and full-on hippie and "youth style started to revel in anything and everything that was neither modern nor from the industrialised West" [185] [a]. 

 

I don't quite agree with this: "From a distance [...] retro and historicism blend into each other and look rather like inspiration-starved designers, rifling through the past's wardrobe" [190] - but it's not far from being the case. At some point, even Vivienne Westwood - for all her attempts to justify her historicism - ends up frantically pillaging the past just like everyone else.     

 

The footnote provided by Reynolds on vintage and class is excellent; "vintage is a largely middle-class game [...] The further down the class ladder you go, the more value is set on things being brand new [...] the UK's white working class [...] would not be seen dead in anything that even looked old, let alone actually was second-hand" [194]. Chavs, says Reynolds, are - in some ways - "Britain's last bastion of futurist taste" [194] [b] - heaven help us if that's true!   

 

 

III. 

 

Here's a claim that would make for an interesting discussion: "Pop music exists somewhere between fashion and art, but leans far more to the art side." [196] 

 

I'm not sure that's the case. And it's certainly not always the case. Indeed, one could make a strong counterargument; that music is, as Malcolm McLaren never tired of saying, the sound of fashion, just as fashion is often the look of music. 

 

And it's absolutely false to claim: "People are moved by music in a way that is different to the feelings they might have for a pair of shoes or a jacket. They become attached to music in a more enduring and deeply felt way." [196] 

 

I would remind Mr Reynolds that the king of rock 'n' roll himself valued getting dressed up to mess up above money or performing on stage and that whilst you can burn his house, steal his car, or smash his record collection, under no circumstances would he accept anyone criticising or stepping on his blue suede shoes [c].     

 

Ultimately, trying to defend a hard and fast distinction between music and fashion in terms of emotional value is not only in vain, but a little ridiculous. For the record, I remember the excitement of pulling on a pair of tight black PVC trousers for the first time just as vividly (perhaps more) than hearing the first Clash album. The fresh and bold aspect of punk lay in the fashions created by McLaren and Westwood, not in the records produced by bands strumming and banging away on traditional instruments to a 4/4 beat.   

  

 

IV. 

 

There are somethings I'd rather not know; including the fact that, when a student at Oxford, Reynolds chose to associate with a group of "out-of-time hippies" [202], despite the fact that his "musical leanings [...] were incompatible with theirs" [202] - and despite the fact that Malcolm had explicitly warned to never trust them.  

 

Revivalists and those living in a time warp (whether wilfully remaining there or trapped like insects in amber), have never particularly interested me. It's not that I encourage people to move on; but I don't like the idea of standing still and remaining the same either. The knack is to reverse the past into the present so that one might live yesterday tomorrow and ensure that what returns is difference itself, the engine of newness and becoming [d].    

 

Pleased to see Reynolds write this: "Time-warp cultists [...] seem unable to recognise that the same energies they prize about the music of the remote past can be found in the present [...]" [206], which is both true and important, but one suspects they want more than these 'energies' - though what it is they're after I'm never quite certain. 

 

If it's authenticity then there's a problem, for there's an "inherent contradiction to musical cults of authenticity: fixating on a style that is remote either in time or space [...] inevitably condemns the devotee to inauthenticity" [211]. Reynolds spells out this contradiction:

 

"Either he strives to be a faithful copyist, reproducing the music's surface features as closely as possible, risking hollowness and redundancy; or he can attempt to bring something expressive and personal to it, or to work in contemporary influences and local musical favours, which then risks bastardising the style." [211]

 

That is a dilemma. 

 

Were I to advise, I'd say to the faithful copyists, don't worry about hollowness; be a bit more Buddhist about how one views the idea and worry a bit less about what T. S. Eliot might say [e]. And to those who wish to jazz or punk things up a little even at the risk of bastardising the original, I'd say knock yourselves out; what is corruption and debasement to one man is the laughter of genius to another.     

 

 

V.  

 

"I've never totally understood the appeal of Northern Soul" [214]; no, me neither - so let's skip this section and abandon the faith ... If Reynolds is right to say that the logic of redemption is what defines this subculture, then let me just remind readers that, actually, you can never buy back the past. 

 

As for the post-punk mod revival of the late 1970s - wasn't impressed then, and I'm not interested now. Admittedly, The Jam made some great singles, but Paul Weller's a prick and the band essentially appealed, as Reynolds says, "to British kids who liked punk's high-energy sound but didn't care for either the yobbish element or the art-school theory-and-politics contingent" [224]. 

 

Ultimately, the new mods only contributed to the cultural stagnation; a "betrayal of the original principles of modernism, which involved being into the latest, coolest thing" [229] and not dressing up "in the glad rags of a secondhand subculture" and listening to "copies of yesterday's sounds" [229].      

 

   

VI. 

 

Rave culture: NMCoT. At all. 

 

But I'm sure my old friend Kirk Field [f] would agree with this:

 

"In its early years, 1988 to 1993, rave was like a flash flood-engorged river bursting its banks and scattering off foaming side-streams in a dozen directions. The era's sense of runaway momentum was stoked by the energy flash of Ecstasy and amphetamine." [234]   

 

But would he, I'd be interested to know, also agree with this, now that he makes a living from rave nostalgia:

 

"By the mid-nineties, though, rave's engine of drug/music synergy was sputtering; the participants had hurtled down the road of excess at top speed only to crash into various aesthetic and spiritual dead ends. Once so future-focused, ravers began to look back wistfully. 

      Like everyone else who got swept up in the collective rush, I never dreamed that the culture would ever slow down, let alone succumb to retrospection." [234] 

       

Old skool: it's always been a slightly irritating term; "a shorthand for notions of origins and roots [...] used by epigones [...] who believe that the present is less distinguished than the illustrious past. [...] People who [...] often seem to believe that things could be righted if only the ignorant and insufficiently reverent new generation [...] would let itself be schooled by wiser elders." [235]

 

Well said, that man! Surely, the only thing worse than someone identifying as old skool is someone insisting that we keep it real ...

 

Of course, we're all prone to a touch of nostalgia; Reynolds admits to being "highly susceptible" [239] himself. Which is why, perhaps, he suddenly offers the mnemonic muse defence: "Nostalgia [...] can be creative, even subversive [...] the past can be used to critique what's absent in the present" [239] - an idea that takes us into chapter 8 ...

 

 

VII. 

 

"There is a paradox right at the heart of punk: this most revolutionary movement in rock history was actualy born from reactionary impulses. Punk opposed iself to progress. Musically, it rejected the sixties idea of progression and maturity that had led to prog rock and to other sophisticated seventies sounds. A concerted effort to turn back the clock to rock's teenage past [...] punk rock also rejected the notion of progress in a broader philosophical sense. Driven by an apocalyptic appetite for destruction and collapse, its vision was literally hope-less." [240]

 

I might phrase the above passage slightly differently at certain points, but I would basically agree that this provides an insightful reading of the slogan no future. The rejection of progress as an ideal is, of course, central to Torpedo the Ark as well: it's a secularised religious fantasy, born of what Nietzsche terms enfeebled optimism. Life is not getting better, humanity is not moving toward some predetermined higher goal, and Sgt. Pepper's is not superior to Elvis Presley.    

 

Was punk the "ultimate time-warp cult" [257]? Again, that's debatable. But let's agree that even if it started out as such it quickly escalated into a revolution: 

 

"Musical influences from outside rock 'n' roll, as well as non-musical catalysts from the worlds of politics, art theory and avant-garde fashion, entered the picture. Everything came together in a surge of energy, and then, Big Bang-like, exploded outwards into new galaxies of sound and subculture." [258] [g] 

 

That's the key: punk was never a unified musical movement; it was an Event or, as Reynolds metaphorically implies, a singularity. Although, strangely, the post-punk universe saw "revivals of every kind" [262] and a "retreat to established forms" [262]; it's hard living in the chaotic period immediately after a Big Bang - much safer to retreat to a prior time [h].   

 

 

VIII. 

 

Billy Childish and Stuckism: I'm not convinced and I'm certainly not on a quest for authenticity. 

 

But interesting that Reynolds should conceive of it as a form of love; fidelity to a golden past that one either remembers or imagines (albeit a form of love that can quickly become obsessive and turn rotten). 

 

 

IX. 

 

Chapter 9 - the never-ending fifties revival; not sure that's a topic that warrants a whole chapter (any more than Childish warranted an entire section at the end of chapter 8), but let's take a look ...

 

Nice idea that glam rock "musically harked back to the fifties without replicating it" [291] - perhaps that's why I loved it so as a ten-year-old (and later loved punk) [i]. 

 

And I'm pleased to see that, despite everything, Reynolds has the courage and integrity to admit that "the glam era's most creative reinventions of rock 'n' roll came from Gary Glitter [...] It was a genuinely new sound achieved by communing with the decade's lost spirit" [292].

 

I think Glitter's writing out of pop history is absurd, quite frankly - and hypocritical. And I agree entirely with what Reynold says here:

 

"Glitterbeat's atavistic-futuristic brutalism sounded totally seventies. If the singer had been a little less camp and a lot younger and scrawnier-looking, songs like 'I'm the Leader of the Gang' could have been a proto-punk sound for early-seventies juvenile delinquents [...]" [292] [j]   

 

And then there's The Cramps ... "a fusion of non-mainstream rock 'n' roll and pulp fiction [...] into a cult of adolescence" [297]. 

 

I can't say I was a big fan, but I know a girl who was and those psychobillies who "fixated on the moment when rock 'n' roll's jungle rhythm and voodoo frenzy was seen as ungodly and subversive" [298] are alright by me [k].   

 

Reynolds concludes the chapter on a hauntological note ...

 

"From the early eighties on, rock 'n' roll recurred only as a ghostly signifier detached from any real-world referents. Like a spook, it moved through the world without affecting it, lingered as a faintly disquieting trace of what-once-was." [307]

 

One might interrogate the above by asking what constitutes a non-ghostly signifier and a real-world referent for Reynolds and what is the nature of their relationship - but as this part of the post is already far longer than I would wish, probably best we leave such questions for another day. 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] It amazes me that a young woman would choose to dress like a villager in Bangladesh when she could look as if she had just arrived from Moon Base Alpha. For my take on space age fashion, see my post on futuristic fashion with reference to the sci-fi mini-skirt: click here. 

      Interestingly, Reynolds also seems smitten with such designs invented for a world that hasn't yet arrived, though one might have imagined he'd approve of the authenticity of clothes made in Asia, but no, he prefers ultra-modernism to retro-shit and the Biba aesthetic.      

 

[b] Reynolds wrote this in defence of chavs earlier in Retromania: 

      "In the UK, almost the only people who remain immune to the romance of the antiquated are the 'chavs', a derogatory term for working-class whites who identify with black American style and music at its most flashy and materialistic. Although chav-haters complain about their lack of taste and vulgarity [...] the subtext of the animosity is the chav's un-English lack of interest in old stuff: antiques, heritage, costume drama." [24] 

 

[c] Obviously, I'm referencing Elvis's version of the Carl Perkins song 'Blue Suede Shoes', the opening track from Elvis Presley (RCA Victor, 1956) and later released as a single: click here.   

 

[d] According to Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence, the key thing is not the return of the Same or the identical, but rather the repetition of difference itself. It's false to think we remain the same person from one moment to the next or that the phrase 'same time, same place' is meaningful. The future, my friend, is not merely blowing in the wind, it actively ruptures the circularity of habit (the present) and the depths of memory (the past) allowing for newness to emerge.  

      See Deleuze writing in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), trans. Hugh Tomlinson (The Athlone Press, 1983) and/or Difference and Repetition (1968), trans. Paul Patton (Columbia University Press, 1994).  

 

[e] In Buddhism the idea of emptiness (Śūnyatā) is a central, liberating truth about the nature of reality and understanding the hollowness of self is an important practice. For the poet T. S. Eliot, of course, hollowness implies spiritual and emotional deadness; hollow individuals lack substance, purpose, authenticity, and the ability to act in a morally meaningful manner.    

 

[f] Kirk Field is a dance culture devotee, promoter, travel agent, and writer; see his best-selling book Rave New World (Nine Eight Books, 2023). I knew him in a previous life when he was a punk rocker (and still, to this day, greatly admire his work as vocalist and lyricist with Initial Vision).   

 

[g] As Reynolds concedes: "Arguably, the non-sonic aspects of punk were more crucial in terms of generating all these 'futures' than the music itself ..." [258] - that must slightly pain him to admit as a music lover and music critic first and foremost.  

 

[h] I understand that this may not make any conceptual sense to a scientist for whom there is no before the Big Bang - but we're discussing pop history here, not physics. 

 

[i] See the post 'Notes on a Glam-Punk Childhood' (24 July 2018): click here.  

  

[j] In fact, Glitter was later adopted by the punks as one of their own, many of whom, like me, remembered him fondly from their childhood.   

[k] Reynolds provides an excellent footnote on the punk/rockabilly connection on pp. 303-306, rightly arguing that rockabilly remained a "submerged but crucial component" [303] of punk, repeatedly rising to the surface. 

 

 

Part 1 of this post can be read here. 

 

Part 2 of this post can be read here. 

 

Parts 4 and 5 of the post will be published shortly. 

D. H. Lawrence and the Queer Defamiliarisation of St. Mawr

 

Front cover of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 

Volume 7, Number 2 (2025) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

There are, of course, many ways of reading D. H. Lawrence. 

 

But it seems to me that the real battle now is between those who like to revere his writings from a mythopoetic perspective - i.e., an interpretive approach which looks for connections between his work and those archetypal narratives known as myths - and those who prefer to fuck Lawrence up the arse [2] and defamiliarise his texts in a queer and/or perverse manner. 

 

The first kind of reader - and they have traditionally been dominant within Lawrence scholarship - whilst conceding that there are closely observed realistic elements in his work, like to celebrate his ability to transfigure these elements via a mythopoetic imagination and thereby provide us with a glimpse into the fourth dimensional realm of Being.

 

The second kind of reader - and I'm one of a small but increasing number of such within the world of Lawrence studies - whilst conceding there is symbolic truth and metaphorical meaning in his work, prefer to celebrate his decision to climb down Pisgah and keep his feet firmly planted on the flat earth, providing us with his own form of what Bataille termed base materialism: formless, filthy, and heterogeneous.

 

For the first type of reader, Lawrence will always be a priest of love communing with ancient gods and channelling primal forces, so as to impose some kind of order and value on a secular modern world. For the second, he's more the king of kink [3], exploring the world of fluid sexuality and peculiar paraphilias, making the known world strange and always caught up in a process of becoming-other.  

 

 

II. 

 

Choosing between mythopoiesis and queer defamiliarization [4], ultimately depends on whether you think of Lawrence as a red-bearded visionary and defender of religious faith in a disenchanted world, or a radical opponent of moral rationalism and the metaphysical dualism that it rests upon; is he searching for wholeness, or is he a believer in the ruins? 

  

While traditionalists favour mythopoiesis in order to promote his prophetic genius, readers on the LGBTQI+ spectrum often find queer defamiliarization more useful for accompanying Lawrence on the thought adventures via which he tested the limits of selfhood (particularly in relation to questions of sex and gender). 

 

 

III.

 

In practice, what does all this mean? 

 

Well, it means, for example, that when distinguished Lawrence scholars still susbcribing to a mythpoeic approach read the short novel St. Mawr (1925), they immediately speak of sacred symbols and animal archetypes. 

 

John Turner, for example, although primarily wishing to discuss the sardonic aspects of the above tale, can't help insisting that what Lawrence sought beneath the mockery was "a myth that would marry the old and the new, in such a way as to [...] enrich the visionary power of the eye and re-establish religious connexion with the cosmos" [5] and that the female protagonist, Lou Witt, is on a savage pilgrimage to find "a holy place in which the self in its full depth may be known, experienced and integrated" [6].       

 

And Michael Bell, in a short piece titled 'Lawrence's Horse Sense', says that St. Mawr "belongs among those mythic tales [...] in which the balance of realism to mythopoeia shifts towards the latter" [7]. This, I suppose, is true enough. But surely we are not obliged as readers to shift accordingly and we can discuss the horse as a horse and not as a symbol with mythic significance; and surely we are entitled to claim that the new awareness that the red-golden stallion with his big, black, brilliant eyes provokes in Lou is zoosexual in nature, rather than onto-theological.

 

For although Paul Poplawski claims that there is a "relative lack of sexual content" [8] in St. Mawr, I would argue now - much as I did back in 2006, in a paper on the question of why girls love horses [9] - that St. Mawr is, in many respects, far more transgressive than Lady Chaterley's Lover (1928). 

 

For whilst in the latter book Lawrence wishes to radically challenge class divisions, in St. Mawr he challenges the distinction between human and animal by envisioning a love affair between a woman and a horse, which, whilst not explicit in its depiction - there are no sexual acts as such - is fully eroticised nonetheless. Here, for example, is a description of their very first encounter: 

 

"She laid her hand on his side, and gently stroked him. Then she stroked his shoulder, and then the hard, tense arch of his neck. And she was startled to feel the vivid heat of his life come through to her […] So slippery with vivid, hot life! 

      She paused, as if thinking, while her hand rested on the horse's sun-arched neck. Dimly, in her weary young-woman's soul, an ancient understanding seemed to flood in." [10]

 

What exactly is Lou thinking of here? 

 

Personally, I think it's clear that when Lawrence writes of an 'ancient understanding' flooding into her female soul this is a form of carnal knowledge. And I don't think this is a crassly reductive or obscene interpretation, as some critics would protest. Rather, I think that Lawrence is deliberately flirting with the possibility of a human-animal sexual relationship in St. Mawr - as he does elsewhere in his work - and that this passage is an overtly bestial piece of fantasy writing. 

 

Lou may not be Bodil Joensen [11], but she's the closest to such in Lawrence's queer fictional universe ...  

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The JDHLS (2025) is published by the D. H. Lawrence Society (Eastwood, Notts.) and edited by Jane Costin. The cover shows an original artwork by Lewis Weber of Nottingham High School. For details on the DHL Society (and how to join), visit their website: click here. 

 

[2] Deleuze famously speaks of approaching an author from behind and buggering them in order to inseminate them with strange new ideas and in this way produce monstrous offspring. See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 6.  

 

[3] See my post titled 'D. H. Lawrence: Priest of Kink' (19 July 2018), in which I list an A-Z of paraphilias, perversions, and fetishistic behaviours that can be found in his work: click here. 

 

[4] Defamiliarization - or, to use the original Russian term, остранение (ostranenie) - is an artistic technique of magically making ordinary objects in the everyday world appear new and as if seen for the first time. It was coined by the formalist Viktor Shklovsky in an essay of 1917. It has been utilised and adapted by many different artists and thinkers and has now become an important component of queer theory. 

      See, for example, Helen Palmer, Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), in which she explores how we might radically reimagine this concept in order to affirm deviant, errant, and alternative modes of being which have become synonymous with queer theory. 

 

[5] John Turner, 'Drift and Depth: the Sardonic in St. Mawr', in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, Volume 7, Number 2 (2025), p. 52. Note the dated - slightly affected - spelling of the word connection.  

 

[6] Ibid., p. 53.  

 

[7] Michael Bell, 'Lawrence's Horse Sense', JDHLS, 7. 2 (2025), p. 140.  

 

[8] Paul Poplawski, 'Less is Mawr: Revisiting Lawrence's St. Mawr', JDHLS, 7. 2 (2025), p. 80. 

 

[9] I'm referring to the essay 'Equus Eroticus: Why Do Girls Love Horses?', written in 2006, presented at Treadwell's Bookshop (London) in March 2007, and published in The Treadwell's Papers Vol. 3: Zoophilia (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 87-117. 

      Without wishing to blow my own trumpet, I would suggest that this text might be seen as seminal for those who are now discovering the notion of queer defamiliarisation and/or perverse forms of materialism.     

 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney (Penguin Books, 1997), p. 30. 

 

[11] Bodil Joensen (1944-1985) was a Danish porn star who ran a small farm and animal husbandry business. She gained public notoriety for her many  films in which she engaged in sex acts with animals, including horses, although she warned in an interview that being fucked by a horse is always a dangerous affair, particularly for those inexperienced in the practice; for not only can these powerful creatures bite and kick, or suddenly thrust and flare when excited, but at orgasm the glans of a horse will swell considerably and this can cause serious (if not fatal) internal damage. In this same interview (1980), she explained how she had developed a special technique to allow penetration without the risk of vaginal tearing.