On Traversing the Excluded Middle

Andrew Weir: Excluded Middle (2019)

Acrylic paint on paper, 36 x 48 cm
saatchiart.com

 

Logicians to the left of me, Derrideans to the right, 

here I am, stuck in the excluded middle with you ... [1]

 

 

I. 

 

In classical logic, the law of the excluded middle (p ∨ ¬ p) states that either a proposition or its negation has to be true.

 

It is the third of the three great laws of thought upon which rational discourse is based; the other two being the law of identity - each thing is identical with itself - and the law of non-contradiction - propositions cannot both be true and false at the same time.

 

But such axiomatic rules don't really mean a great deal to me as someone who is happy to do their thinking in the moral no-go zone that is the excluded middle; i.e., the evil realm of fuzzy logic, dark limpidity, and what Nietzsche terms dangerous knowledge.

 

 

II. 

 

Similarly, as someone who privileges difference over identity and refuses to be haunted by the spectre of logical contradiction, I'm prepared also to cheerfully transgress the other two laws. For as I wrote in a post from a few years ago:

 

'Whether our analytic philosophers like to admit it or not, some forms of thinking rely upon daimonic inspiration and so are not regulated by reason alone. Our very greatest poets, for example, creatively affirm paradox and ambiguity; they are unafraid of appearing inconsistent or irrational and are proud to proclaim that if, like Whitman, they contradict themselves, that's because they contain multitudes.' [2]

  

One suspects that a good deal of the continued hostility aimed towards those who take a more continental approach to philosophy is that we see the latter as more of an art than a science (unless it be a gay science). Nothing enrages the Anglo-American mindset more than logical inconsistency and the idea that some feel free in the excluded middle to affirm the neither/nor and defy the spirit of gravity so that thinking becomes pleasurable.      

 

 

III. 

 

In sum: without wishing to explicity reject the law of the excluded middle, I don't support its rigid enforcement and, like Deleuze, see le milieu exclu as a zone in which becoming is stamped with the character of being and where not only do new possibilities emerge, but it is reasonable to demand the impossible.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm paraphrasing a lyric from the well-known song by the Scottish folk rock band Stealers Wheel entitled. 'Stuck in the Middle With You', written by Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan. It can be found on their eponymous debut album Stealers Wheel (A&M Records, 1972) - or played by clicking here. 

 

[2] See the post entitled 'Hello Darkness My Old Friend ...' (1 Oct 2021): click here. 

 

This post is for Bryan Kam who probably cares more - and certainly knows more - about this topic (and many others) than I do. London-based for the last 20 years, Kam studied English and Russian literature at Princeton and Cambridge, but is also widely read in both Western and Eastern philosophy. He regularly publishes work on Substack: click here. 

      According to Kam, the law of the excluded middle, born in Athens c. 350 BC, died in Amsterdam in 1908 at the hands of L. E. J. Brouwer. That might be true, but, unfortunately, even dead concepts can still retain an icy grip on our thinking.  

 

 

Who Is Stephen Alexander? A Guest Post by Sasha Thanassa

Stephen Alexander 

A Non-Selfie Selfie (2025) 

 

And how do you see yourself when looking in the bathroom mirror 

through someone else's eyes? 

 

 

I. 

 

Who (or what) is Stephen Alexander, the shadowy figure who blogs at Torpedo the Ark?

 

The multiple possibilities that he himself has playfully suggested in the past include: artist, anarchist, and antichrist; punk, pirate, poet, pagan ... More recently, he has declared himself to be a darkly enlightened philosopher-provocateur whose concerns are no longer with sex, style, and subversion, but more with silence, secrecy, and seduction. 

 

Using these and other terms that arise from within his own writings - as well as from the work of other figures to whom he often refers - I will attempt here to give a brief impressionistic sketch of someone who, like Foucault, neither wishes to self-identify as a unified subject nor feels obliged to remain forever the same [1].       

 

 

II.

 

Again, by his own admission, there are two names that have shaped Alexander's thinking above all others: Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence; neither of whom he entirely embraces, but both of whom provide him with the critical weapons and crucial conceptual tools for the fight against moral idealism (i.e., the belief that the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are the highest of values and fundamentally connected) and modern humanism (i.e., the belief that behind everything sits the kind and reasonable figure of Man).    

 

Working in the entrails of Nietzsche and Lawrence more like a postmodern haruspex than a forensic pathologist, Alexander has managed on Torpedo the Ark to produce an idiosyncratic (and intertextual) brand of fiction-theory that suspends the genre distinction between philosophy and literature [2]. 

 

Arguably, it is this mode of language and thought that has enabled him to move across other established categories and freely discuss an almost infinite variety of ideas, experiences, and events in a creative and profoundly superficial manner that is always alert to the play (and permissiveness) of language.  

 

III. 

Another name we might mention is that of Simon Solomon; more than a mere commentator on posts or a sometimes contributor, Solomon is a very real (often hostile) presence on Torpedo the Ark and a vital interlocutor. 

It's sometimes hard to tell whether Solomon is Alexander's shadow or vice versa; who's the Jekyll, who's the Hyde (or are they equally monstrous)? In queer ontological alliance - if there is such a thing -  Alexander and Solomon seem fated to remain the best of frenemies [3], each presumably drawing some benefit from their relationship, despite the mutual antagonism [4]. 

IV.

But isn't Alexander just another in a long line of reversed Platonists? 

Perhaps - but what's wrong with that? We need more not less such people. A reversed Plato may still be, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, a reversed Plato [5], but that's better than an unreversed Plato.

 

And besides, as Derrida indicated, the first task of deconstruction has to be reversal (i.e., the locating and overturning of oppositions within a text). That may not be enough in itself - a reversal is not the same as a revaluation - but it's a start on the road toward a new way of thinking.

 

And so, like Lawrence, Alexander encourages his reader to think in terms of immanence rather than transcendence and to climb down Pisgah [6]; to affirm appearances and the natural world of scarlet poppies rather than fantasise about a world above (and/or beyond) this one in which there are eternal white flowers and other Ideal Forms.   

And like Deleuze - another thinker whom Alexander often refers to - he perverts Plato by siding with the Sophists, the Cynics, the Stoics "and the fluttering chimeras of Epicurus" [7].  

 

 

V.

So, have I answered the question with which I opened this post? 

 

Probably not. 

 

Perhaps all I've done is refer to a number of proper names to whom Alexander himself often refers. But then, these proper names serve a crucial textual purpose and contain within them a series of associations (and connotations) that allow us to see how Torpedo the Ark unfolds within a much wider philosophical and literary history and an intertextual space. 

 

When Alexander refers to himself as a Lawrentian, for example, he's not identifying with Lawrence as an extratextual being, but evoking a certain style of thinking and writing.  

 

Using proper names is also, of course, a way of dispersing and disguising the self; like Nietzsche, Alexander wants to be able to declare himself all the names in history [8] - onymic ambiguity rather than unified authorial presence is his aim.  

 

Notes

 

[1] In his introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault famously writes: "I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order." 

      See The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 17.

 -

[2] This has been a long time goal for Alexander; see the introduction to his PhD thesis Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000): click here. 

      Admittedly, he problematically writes here about dissolving lines of distinction, whereas in his later writings, influenced by Derrida, he speaks more about troubling (or curdling) these lines and concedes that the deconstructive objective is not the dissolving or permanent suspension of all oppositions, because, ultimately, they are structurally necessary to produce meaning.  

      

[3] The term frenemy - a portmanteau of 'friend' and 'enemy' - could have been invented for Alexander and Solomon, although Jessica Mitford claimed that it had been coined by one of her sisters when they were children for a particularly dull acquaintance; see her article 'The Best of Frenemies' in the Daily Mail (August 1977). It can also be found in her book, Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (NYRB Classics, 2010), or read online by simply clicking here.       

      

[4] Interestingly, Freud recognised that a close friend and a worthy enemy are equally indispensble to psychological wellbeing and have not infrequently been one and the same person. See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (Pelican / Penguin Books, 1964) p. 37.

 

[5] See Hannah Arendt, 'Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture', in Social Research, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 417-446, (The John Hopkins University Press, Autumn 1971), where she writes: 

      "The quest for meaning, which relentlessly dissolves and examines anew all accepted doctrines and rules, can at every moment turn against itself, 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 ..." (435)

      A revised version of this can also be found in Thinking, the first volume of her two-volume posthumously published work The Life of the Mind, ed. Mary Mccarthy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-78). 

 

[6] See the essay by D. H. Lawrence 'Climbing Down Pisgah', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 223-229.

 

[7] Michel Foucault, 'Theatrum Philosophicum', in the Essential Works 2: Aesthetics, ed. James D. Faubion (Penguin Books, 2000), p. 346.

[8] In a letter to Jakob Burckhardt dated 6 January, 1889 (although postmarked January 5th), Nietzsche claims that by becoming every name in history, he (paradoxically) fights the reduction to anonymity and generality. 

      See his Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 346.

 

 

From Kant's Cave to Nietzsche's Kindergarten (Confessions of a Children's Entertainer)

Me in my role as a punk children's entertainer 

(c.1985)

 

Now watch closely little girl as I prick your red balloon 

with a safety pin ...

 

I. 

 

Last night I gave a short talk to the crowd gathered at Kant's Cave; a monthly meeting organised by Philosophy for All [1] and held in a first floor function room at the the famous Two Chairmen pub, in Wesminster [2].

 

The paper addressed the question of what constitutes dark enlightenment [3], so perhaps not ideal material for "shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats" [4] - or indeed young children. 

Nevertheless, I was delighted to discover that one of the people Zooming into the event was watching it accompanied by her precocious four-year-old son, who was equally fascinated by my public persona and appearance as he was by the contents of the paper itself:  

 

Mummy, why does he talk so fast? Why is he wearing such funny clothes? What's a zombie apocalypse?

 

 

II. 

 

Deleuze says that children are born philosophers or, more exactly, natural Spinozans; by which I think he means they instinctively know how to map real (rather than imaginary) trajectories and experiment with immediate (rather than representational) affects. 

 

That may or may not be the case. 

 

But what is undoubtedly true is that I should never have abandoned (my very short-lived) career as a punk children's entertainer in the mid-1980s, in order to become a failed artist and spectacularly unsuccessful poet-philosopher. 

 

For it seems I have a real knack for amusing little ones (and corrupting young minds in the manner of Socrates), whereas I have strictly limited talents as a grown up intellectual and adult educator. 

 

Not that I'm unhappy about this: for like Nietzsche, I think it is only by remaining a little childlike ourselves that we remain close also to the flowers, the grass, and to butterflies ... [5]

         

 

Notes

 

[1] Founded by Anja Steinbauer in 1998, Philosophy for All is an independent non-profit organisation that welcomes everyone with a love of wisdom - whatever their intellectual background or IQ - to attend its various events; walks, talks, film screenings, etc. Click here to visit the PfA website for full details.

 

[2] The Two Chairman is thought to be the oldest public house in Westminster and is housed in an 18th-century Grade II listed building in a part of Town at one time as notorious for cockfighting as political intrigue.        

 

[3] I published a four-part series of posts on dark enlightenment on Torpedo the Ark in July 2024: click here for part one, on the politics of hate; here for part two, on exiting the present; here for part three, on the zombie apocalypse; and/or here, for part four, on rejecting universalism. These four posts essentially formed the heart of the paper given at Kant's Cave.

[4] Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1990), 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man', 38, p. 102. 

 

[5] See Nietzsche writing in Human, All Too Human, Vol. II, Part 2 ('The Wanderer and His Shadow'), section 51. 

 

 

Becoming-Robot With Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik: Robot (1990) 

Mixed metal with lightbulb 

55 x 12 cm

 shaperomodern.com 

 

I. 

 

Last week, as mentioned in a recent post [1], I paid a visit to the Shapero Gallery on Bond Street, in London's Mayfair, to see the Modern Muse exhibition, featuring works by various twentieth and twenty-first century artists. 

 

Prints by all the usual suspects were included - Picasso, Warhol, Hockney, and (groan) Banksy - but there were also works by artists with whom I'm rather less familiar, such as Nam June Paik, whose lightbulb-headed robot giving a friendly wave hello made me smile at least. 

 

For whilst traditionally a muse is conceived as an inspirational female figure, either mortal or divine, that seems a bit narrow and I think and we should open up the concept to include animals, plants, and even inanimate objects, including machines.

 

After all, we're not ancient Greeks. And surely, like Paik, we can all find inspiration even in a rusty robot assembled from wires and scrap metal. In other words, an automaton might serve as a muse just as easily as Venus rising from the waves - especially if, like Paik, you believe technology has become the body's new membrane of existence.  

 

 

II. 

 

Nam June Paik (1932-2006) was a South Korean artist who is often considered to be the founder of video art. He is also the man who coined the phrase electronic superhighway and foresaw several of the technological innovations (in communications and social media) that would shape the digital age.

 

Originally a classically trained musician, he was pals with John Cage (whom he met whilst studying in West Germany) and became part of the the international avant-garde network of artists and composers known as Fluxus. 

 

Paik moved to NYC in 1964 and it was there he began to experiment with a variety of media, incorporating TVs and video tape recorders into his work. 

 

His infaturation with (often radio-controlled) robots also began around this time, though it wasn't until 1988 that he unveiled the mighty Metrobot [2], followed in 1993 by a number of robot sculptures for the Venice Biennale [3] that emphasised how East and West were now connected via technology.  

 

And then, in 2014-15 a (posthumous) solo exhibition entited Becoming Robot was held in New York at the Asia Society Museum, exploring Paik's understanding of the relationship between technology and society and, more specifically, how technology will impact art, culture, and the human body in the future [4].

 

 

III. 

 

D. H. Lawrence would hate, loathe, and despise Paik's work. 

 

For Lawrence, the key to achieving what the Greeks termed εὐδαιμονία is "remaining inside your own skin, and living inside your own skin, and not pretending you're any bigger than you are" [5]. 

 

Thus, as a reader of Lawrence, I also have reservations when Paik talks about the inadequacy of skin and the need to encase the body in technology so as to better interface with reality. 

 

Interestingly, however, he qualifies his transhumanism by conceding that even the most advanced cyborg requires a strong human element in order to guarantee modesty and safeguard natural life. 

 

And what is modern man's most human aspect - lacking as he does a soul - other than his skin? 

 

What's more, far from being inadequate, the skin has never been so vital and so present within critical and cultural theory as today:

 

"The skin asserts itself  in the erotics of texture, tissue and tegument played out through the work of Roland Barthes; in the concern of Emmanuel Levinas with the exposed skin of the face, as the sign of essential ethical nudity before the other [...] the extraordinary elaborations of the play of bodily surfaces, volumes and membranes in Derrida's concepts of double invagination [...] the concept of the fold in the rethinking of subjective and philosophical depth in the work of Gilles Deleuze; the fascination with the intrigues of the surface in the work of Baudrillard; and the abiding presence of skin in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, from the arresting evocation of the opened out skin of the planar body at the beginning of his Libidinal Economy through to the Levinsian emphasis on the annunciatory powers of skin at moments through The Inhuman. Most strikingly of all [...] there has been the prominence of the skin in the meditations on place, shape and the 'mixed body' of Michel Serres. Across all this work, as ubiquitously in modern experience, the skin insists." [6]   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See 'You Don't Have to Be Yayoi Kusama to Make Pumpkin Art' (25 November 2024): click here. 

 

[2] Metrobot is an electronic public art sculpture designed by Nam June Paik. At the time of its unveiling in 1988, it was his first outdoor sculpture and his largest. Since 2014, it has stood in front of the Contemporary Arts Center in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. 

      The gold-painted aluminum sculpture is 27 feet in height and resembles a box-shaped humanoid robot. It's cartoon-style facial expression (and large red heart) are made from neon tubing behind clear plastic covers. On it's outstretched  left arm is an LED informing the viewer of such things as the time and temperature. On Metrobot's stomach is another display feature, showing full-colour videos. And, finally, a payphone is built into its left leg.

 

[3] La Biennale di Venezia is an international cultural exhibition first organised in 1895 and hosted annually in Venice, Italy, by the Biennale Foundation. It includes events featuring contemporary art, dance, architecture, cinema, and theatre (often in relation to political and social issues). 

 

[4] An eight minute video of the exhibition made by Heinrich Schmidt for Vernissage TV can be found on YouTube: those who are interested are invited to click here.

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 161.

 

[6] Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 9-10. 

      Readers who are interested in the subject of the skin might like to see the post entitled 'Lose This Skin: Thoughts on Theodore Roethke's Epidermal Macabre' (7 August 2018): click here.  

A Feisty Evening with Isobel Dixon, Douglas Robertson and D. H. Lawrence

Isobel Dixon, Douglas Robertson & D. H. Lawrence

 

 

I. 

 

A couple of nights ago, I went to the National Poetry Library - which, for those who don't know, is housed on the fifth floor of the Royal Festival Hall in London's Southbank Centre - for what was billed as a D. H. Lawrence celebration, with particular focus being given to the collection of poems entitled Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923).

 

The event also called attention to a recent book by the South African poet Isobel Dixon, produced in collaboration with the highly acclaimed Scottish artist Douglas Robertson who provided a dozen finely detailed illustrations: A Whistling of Birds (Nine Arches Press, 2023).

 

II. 

 

Whilst this work is essentially a response to Lawrence's text - and his short essay 'Whistling of Birds' (1919) lends the book its name - Dixon also invites others, including William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Ted Hughes into the conversation, whilst still finding time to make her own distinctive voice heard. 

 

It's a work that will leave the majority of members of the D. H. Lawrence Society very happy, as it uncritically reinforces the idea of Lawrence as a nature lover in the English Romantic tradition and a poet with an almost uncanny ontological insight into the essence of birds, beasts, and flowers. 

And in their hour long presentation at the NPL, this idea of Lawrence was further reinforced; it was almost as if the important challenge thrown down by the Indian author Amit Chaudhuri twenty-odd years ago to read Lawrence's poetry in light of poststructuralist theory has been completely forgotten [1].

 

Which is profoundly unfortunate in my view. For it results in an interpretation of Lawrence that not only fails to understand the radical nature of his aesthetic, but means he is sold short as a thinker-poet whose primary object is language. 

 

It's because Lawrence writes so well, that we believe he has captured the true nature or being of a snake, for example, when, actually, he dissolves such essentialism based on the idea of a fixed identity into a game of difference and becoming - which is why philosophers including Derrida and Deleuze are such admirers of Lawrence's poetry [2].     

 

 

III. 

 

Just to be clear: I enjoyed the event and wish Dixon and Robertson every success with their book (which has already garnered considerable praise).

 

However, they disappointed by refusing to take Lawrence seriously as a writer; preferring instead to think of him in all too human terms (thus the frequent references to biographical details, as if these somehow might illuminate the text or explain away its complex and often troubling character). 

They also disappointed by dismissing Lawrence's work as a painter in a lighthearted manner, saying it simply wasn't very good. Again, without wanting to go into too much detail here - as I've written at length on this subject elsewhere - this simply betrays an ignorance of what it is Lawrence is attempting to do on canvas; namely, produce an art of sensation that is concerned with the invisible forces and flows that shape the flesh via what Deleuze terms a very special violence. 

 

His is a non-representational depiction of the body without organs and therefore Lawrence is not overly concerned with anatomical fidelity, or reducing figures to the level of optical cliché. In other words, he is not trying capture a likeness and, by his own admission, his pictures are rolling in faults of technique - but that doesn't matter; Lawrence is not so much interested in that which is merely true-to-life, but that which is more true-to-life (we might call this phallic realism).   

 

In sum: just as Lawrence's poetry is primarily involved with language and the assembling of textual abstractions, his painting is involved with colour, line, and the forces of chaos; a violence that works upon the flesh and upon the canvas, distorting and deforming bodies and liberating pictures from the tyranny of the stereotype; a violence that knows nothing of symbolism or signification and cares nothing for narrative or illustration (for if painting has no model to depict, neither has it a story to tell).

 

Lawrence may not be a great painter, or even a very good one. But he's a better one than his critics realise - and a far more intelligent and sophisticated writer than they think him too.   

  

One of Robertson's illustrations for A Whistling of Birds (2023) feat. a squirrel 

next to Lawrence's astonishing Ink Sketch (1929) feat. a nude man and woman 

within a field of rhythm and desire demonstrating how waves 

of inorganic life exceed the bounds of organic activity.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Amit Chaudhuri, D. H. Lawrence and 'Difference': Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, (Oxford University Press, 2003). 

      I have discussed this book and made reference to it elsewhere on this blog: click here. I might not agree with everything Chaudhuri says, but this is an important text whose challenge to the (almost wilfully naive) manner in which Lawrence is usually portrayed and his writing interpreted has still not been met by many within the Lawrence world.

 

[2] See for example Derrida's discussion of Lawrence's poem 'Snake' in volume one of The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago University Press, 2009).

      Readers might also be interested in a post dated 17 July 2015 on Lawrence, Derrida, and the snake: click here.

 

 

Re the use of the word feisty in the title of this post: click here. 

 

This post is for Chloe Rose Campbell and Tamara Ber.   

 

It's Your Verses That We Want and Your Verses We Shall Have! Notes on Plagiarism, Piracy, and Found Poetry

 

'Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, 

and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.' [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

Coming as I do from a punk anarchist tradition [2], I'm pretty much of the view that all property - including intellectual property - is theft and that piracy is a swashbuckling method of redistributing gold and cultural capital.

 

And I have little sympathy when bourgeois poets complain about plagiarism, bleating that such an illicit compositional technique is an assault upon originality of expression and the authenticity of experience (i.e., their artistic integrity). 

 

I can see there's something slightly shameful about covert plagiarism, when an attempt is made to hide or disguise what one's doing; if you're going to steal, then do so like Willie Brodie for the sake of the danger and to liberate ideas, not merely so that you might pass off something taken as your own. 

But if you're upfront and open about what you're doing - if your plagiarism is overt and you make no secret of the fact that you located your materials here, there, and everywere - then that seems admirable to me. 

 

In fact, I'm something of a fan of so-called found poetry ...

 

 

II.

 

Found poetry is verse created by recontextualising words, lines, and even whole passages purloined from elsewhere and then making a number of crafty modifications to the text in order to give it fresh meaning or look. How and to what extent the poem is changed - or treated, as they say in the trade - is really up to the finder.    

 

In a sense, a found poem is the literary equivalent of the readymades that Duchamp and the Dadaists foisted on the art world over a century ago. I don't know if he was the first to hit on the technique, but the great American writer and artist Bern Porter famously published Found Poems with the Something Else Press in 1972 [3] and it's him that I initially think of whenever the subject comes up.   

 

 

III.

 

Having found a text to work on, there are several ways one might then begin to fuck with it, including  ...  

 

(i) Erasure

 

Poems produced by erasure have had words from an existing text redacted or blacked out, thereby producing a new work whilst at the the same time making us curious about what has been concealed.

 

Thus, whilst erasure may subvert the question of authorship, it nevertheless acknowledges (and draws attention to) an original text and perhaps raises political questions around censorship, secrecy, and the control of information. 

 

The name often associated with the technique is Doris Cross, who, in 1965, famously placed certain columns from a 1913 edition of Webster's Dictionary under erasure [4]. 

 

(ii) Patchworking

 

A cento is a poetical patchwork entirely composed of verses, passages, or simply short fragments taken from an author (or several authors), then stitched into a new body of text à la Dr. Frankenstein. 

 

It's a very old form, originating in the 3rd or 4th century (if not earlier), but it's one that is still explored and experimented with today by writers such as myself [5]. 

 

(iii) Découpé

 

This is what we call in English a cut-up technique; i.e., one that involves a lot of textual snipping and rearranging in order to create what is known as an aleatory narrative; i.e., a story that incorporates chance or randomness into its composition and/or structure. 

 

William Burroughs and his pal Brion Gysin popularized this technique in the 1950s and 1960s, although it can be traced back to the Dadaists of the 1920s (Tristan Tzara was a fan of such instant poetry). 

 

It has since been used by many scissor-wielding artists in a wide variety of contexts, though those who think that découpé might magically reveal a text's implicit content or true meaning are being ridiculous [6]. 

 

In closing, let me express my admiration for Deleuze's attempt to transform the cut-up into a rather more promiscuous (and less learned) pick-up technique. As he writes: 

 

"You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere, in another area, so that something passes between the two which is neither in one nor the other." 

 

Deleuze continues:  

 

"You don't have to be learned, to know or be familiar with a particular area, but to pick up this or that in areas which are very different. [...] Burroughs' cut-up is still a method of probabilities - at least linguistic ones - and not a procedure [...] which combines the heterogeneous elements" [7]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] T. S. Eliot, 'Philip Massinger', essay in The Sacred Wood, (Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1920), p. 114.

 

[2] That is to say, an anarchist tradition that owes more to Malcolm McLaren than it does to Proudhon. 

 

[3]   In 1972, Bern Porter published Found Poems via Something Else Press. It features hundreds of found poems selected from newspapers, ads and everyday printed matter, some involving collage techniques, others displayed as readymades. 

 

[4] For an interesting attempt to answer the question 'Who Is Doris Cross?' by Lynn Xu posted on the Poetry Foundation website (25 April 2014): click here. 

[5] See the post: 'My Name is Victor Frankenstein' (6 March, 2022): click here. 

[6] Burroughs was drawn towards the idea of a text being invested with unconscious meaning. He also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination: 'When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.' That seem's doubtful, although it's a nice thought. 

      I found this line from Burroughs in the 'Translator's Introduction' to Síomón Solomon's Hölderlin's Poltergeists (Peter Lang, 2020), p. 14.  

 

[7] Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (The Athlone Press, 1987), p. 10.   

Reflections on Stephen Alexander's 'Lascivious' (1985) - A Guest Post by Sally Guaragna

 

Fig. 1: Stephen Alexander: Lascivious

 Oil on canvas (c. 1985) 

 

 

Stephen Alexander's aureate canvas entitled Lascivious depicting a rather shy and youthful-looking faun sharing a coital embrace with a flame-haired and sexually more experienced nymph, is, sadly, lost to the world: destroyed by the artist's sister in an act of malice that displayed sororal spite, philistine contempt for culture, and a previously unsuspected streak of puritanism [1]. 

 

The painting, which, as the title indicates, is essentially a reimagining of one of Agostino Carracci's erotic prints (c. 1590-95) [2], also betrays the influence of Van Gogh with its dynamic starry night sky and use of warm, radiant golden-yellow [3] (Alexander was at the time an avid reader of the Dutch artist's letters and kept a postcard featuring Vincent's self-portrait with a bandaged ear by his bedside). 

 

We also discover something of D. H. Lawrence's painting style in Alexander's canvas; see for example Lawrence's Fauns and Nymphs (1927) which features a golden-brown satyr embracing a large-breasted sun-nymph; and see also Lawrence's 1928 painting entitled Close-Up (Kiss), which may have influenced Alexander's compositional decision to simply produce a headshot of his mythological lovers (as well as the picture's golden-yellow colouring). 

 

Like Lawrence, Alexander seems primarily concerned with the invisible forces of desire that work upon the flesh and distort and deform bodies, caring little for anatomical fidelity. Deleuze terms such an art of sensation - an art that is neither representational nor symbolist.  

 

Lascivious is not, therefore, the work of an innocent Sunday painter; it's a philosophical gesture born of Alexander's libidinally material - essentially pagan - worldview. Very deliberately and with joy - though perhaps not with great subtlety or success - he promotes a Lawrentian concept of phallic tenderness in a manner that is not so much all'antica (despite the mythological theme) as très moderne.

 

Figs. 2-4

For details see note [4] below. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The digial image shown here is taken from a photo of the painting in the artist's possession.

 

[2] Agostino Carracci (1557-1602) was an Italian artist recognised internationally as one of the finest engravers of his time. 

      Between 1590-1595, he produced a financially rewarding series of fifteen erotic works known as the Lascivie, inspired by a notorious earlier set of prints known as I modi (c. 1524-27) engraved by Marcantonio, after drawings by Giulio Romano and illustrating various sexual acts and positions.

      Whilst enhancing his reputation amongst wealthy collectors of such works, Carracci's prints elicited censure from the Church which inveighed against works of an openly sexual nature even when they were given a mytho-classical veneer in an attempt to make them appear less salacious and the men who took pleasure in contemplating the images seem cultured rather than just pervy.

 

[3] Alexander discusses his love for the colour yellow (with reference to the works of Van Gogh) in a post on Torpedo the Ark entitled 'How Beautiful Yellow Is' (1 May 2024): click here.

 

[4] Fig. 2: Agostino Carracci, A Satyr and Nymph Embracing, print from an engraving (150 x 102 mm), British Museum, London. One of fifteen in the series Lascivie (c. 1590-95).

      Fig. 3: D. H. Lawrence, detail from Fauns and Nymphs (1927), oil on canvas (95 x 80 cm). 

      Fig. 4: D. H. Lawrence, Close-Up (Kiss) (1928), oil on canvas (45 x 37.5 cm). 

 

Art critic Sally Guaragna has written two other posts for Torpedo the Ark. Click here to read  Reflections on Stephen Alexander's 'When the Moon Hits Your Eye' (5 May 2023) and/or here to read Reflections on Stephen Alexander's 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' (6 August 2024). 

Advice to a Young Blogger (1): Be Consistent, Insistent, and Persistent

 

Advice to a young blogger just starting out [1] [2]:

 

 

1. Be Consistent

 

Not so much at the level of content or argument, but in terms of style; i.e., don't worry if your blog contains wild variations of subject matter and logical contradictions - consistency is not the same as identity - just ensure it maintains a certain look and feel and a certain level of intensity [3]. 

2. Be Insistent

 

Not on one's rightness - as Nietzsche said, it is nobler to declare oneself mistaken than to insist on being right (especially when one is right) - but insistent like the waves on the rocks; i.e., completely indifferent to the morality of your actions, but all the time shaping the coastline.    

 

3. Be Persistent

 

Just keep writing and keep publishing posts even when it is difficult, or tiring, or boring to do so - even when other people encourage you to stop. Persistence is a perverse virtue that pushes one beyond what others regard as normal or usual or even healthy; it's continuing to dig even when you're in a hole.   

 

Notes

[1] Funnily enough, this is the same advice that is given to gender diverse children who believe themselves to be born in the wrong bodies and wish to transition to a gender identity other than the one assigned at birth: be insistent, persistent and consistent and you just might persuade your parents and the health care professionals dealing with your case that you are genuinely transgender and not merely gender non-conforming or simply like dressing up and playing imaginative games.  

 

[2] Any would-be bloggers reading this - of any age (or gender) - might also like an earlier post (published in October 2021) offering untimely advice on how to develop an effective blog: click here. 

 

[3] Deleuze would probably speak at this point of forming a plane of consistency upon which concepts can arise from chaos, but I'm not Deleuze. 

 

 

For a follow-up post to this one - on establishing your blog as a plane of immanence - click here. 

Will Absence Make My Heart Grow Fonder of Byung-Chul Han? (Part 1)

(Polity Press, 2023)

 

 

I. 

 

Although Daniel Steuer's English translation of Byung-Chul Han's book Absence was only published last year, the original German text appeared back in 2007 [a], and so we can rightly think of it as one of his early works; more philosophical and less political in tone as it explores the Western obsession with essence in contrast to the Eastern (and deeply foreign) notion of absence.    

 

As Han rightly says: "The concept of 'essence', which unites identity, duration and inwardness, dwelling, lingering and possessing, dominates occidental metaphysics." [1] From ancient Greeks like Plato to German idealists like Kant, essence is the key and be yourself the melody. What is outside and inessential can stay there and remain that way.

 

Even Heidegger, argues Han, "despite his best efforts at leaving metaphysical thinking behind [...] remained a philosopher of essence" [4]. In wanting to let things be he wants things to remain true to their own essence. Ultimately, Dasein both dwells and endures. It does not wander too far from itself (even if it explores the odd woodpath from time to time). 

 

But in Daoism, the wise man is without fixed abode and never stops wandering; evading all substantive determination and having no stable identity, he leaves no trail or name behind him. Daoist wandering may not be the same as Zen Buddhist non-dwelling, "but the negativity of absencing connects the two" [5]. 

 

Ultimately, the "fundamental topos of Far Eastern thinking is not being but the way [...] The way lacks the solidity of being and essence, which is what leads to the emergence of traces" [5]. Westerners talk about finding the way, but by that they really just mean finding themselves; the Eastern wanderer, however, becomes the way and doesn't hope to find anything (walking with neither intention nor direction). 

The Western philosopher wants his soul to blossom; the Eastern thinker, like the flower, doesn't have a soul (and remains nameless). They also remain rooted in the material world and care for the body; eating when hungry, sleeping when tired. Oh, and they also remain silent, still, and inactive.  

 

I have to admit, all of this appeals to me very much - and I say that as someone who has been hostile to (and dismissive of) Eastern thought in the past. It seems to me to that absence and emptiness and meaninglessness may very well lead "not to nihilism but to a heavenly joy [...] being without direction or trace" [13]. 

 

Kant - and those idiots who think happiness is all about being stuffed-full and satiated; all about having purpose and direction - wouldn't like this, but I do. Like Laozi, I'm happy to lead a life "without sense and goal, without teleology and narration, without transcendence and God" [14] - to be, as the Sex Pistols once sang, pretty vacant [b] and to find in this freedom, not spiritual deprivation [c]. 

 

 

II.

 

This is interesting: 

 

"Of course, postmodern thinkers also oppose ideas of substance and identity. [...] The negativity of these thinkers brings them closer to absencing and emptiness, but [...] Far Eastern thinking [...] is alien to them [...] The Far Eastern thinking of emptiness leaves deconstruction behind in order to achieve a special kind of reconstruction." [16]

 

This special kind of reconstruction is worldly immanence - "the 'this-is-how-it-is' of things" [16]. 

 

To be fair, I think Deleuze gets this when he transforms no-where into now/here. And when Derrida insists il n'y a pas de hors-texte - for isn't that similar to the Daoist notion that there is nothing above, beyond, or outside of the immanence of the world ...?

Anyway, the point is this: immanence is a crucial concept - as is "the painful charm of transience" [19] which allows for the development of an art and poetry of blandness, in which things fade out and blow away (again, this reminds me somewhat of Roland Barthes's theory of neutrality). 

 

 

III.

 

If essence is difference and a way of keeping things clear cut, then absencing is a form of indifference; one that un-bounds and makes indistinguishable. It's hard to see the outline of a white flower against a snow-covered backdrop (or a black cat in a coal cellar as others would say). 

 

The East is messy - things flow into each other: "Nothing imposes itself. Nothing demarcates itself from other things. Everything appears to retreat into an in-difference." [22-23]  The West, by contrast, likes strong boundaries and distinctions and closure.

 

Han continues:

"In-difference also fosters an intense side-by-side of what is different. It creates an optimal degree of cohesion with a minimal amount of organic, organized connection. Synthetic composition gives way to a syndetic continuum of closeness in which things do not come together as a unity." [23-24]

The cathedral is a space that is perfectly enclosed; even stained-glass windows are designed to keep the natural daylight out, which is why D. H. Lawrence preferred them in a state of ruin, exposed to the elements, etc. [d]

 

Han, however, seems to prefer a Buddhist temple that is "neither fully closed nor fully open" [26]. The spatiality of the latter "effects neither an inwardness nor a being-exposed" [26]. Doors of white rice paper are preferable to colourful stained-glass windows and standing light without direction is preferabe to a divine radiance from above that is intended to illuminate everything:

 

"The standing light, which has become fully indeterminate, in-different, does not emphasize the presence of things; it submerges them in absence." [27]    

 

It's almost as if white standing light brings a special type of darkness. You don't get that with modern glass architecture which marks the triumph of transparency. 

For Han, then, the Buddhist temple is preferable to the Christian cathedral; the Greek temple; and the shiny American skyscraper of glass and steel. It's not just a question of spatiality and light, but asymmetry; "an aesthetic principle of Zen Buddhism" [29] which "breaks up presence into absencing" [29].

 

I suppose some might say that it's all a question of how one sees things. And this brings us on to the question of eyes:

 

"According to Hegel's philosophical physiognomy, the eyes should be surrounded by the elevated bones so that 'the strengthened shadow in the orbits gives us of itself a feeling of depth and undistracted inner life'." [30]

 

But Eastern eyes, of course, are flat:

 

"Hegel would explain this in terms of a lack of inwardness, that is, an infantile spirit that has not yet awoken to subjective inwardness and therefore remains embedded in nature." [30]

 

But what does Hegel know about the beauty of the absencing gaze ...?

 

 

IV.

 

D. H. Lawrence thought there was nothing more bourgeois than the unfading flowers of heaven. But the Kantian lover of the beautiful would probably delight in such; their "imperishable splendour would most likely [...] make him happy" [33].

 

For sure, he'd not like it if they were revealed to be fake flowers - their artificiality depriving them of "their teleological, even theological, significance" [33] - but their everlasting nature would only intensify his love for them. Plato too dreamed of a divine form of beauty that "neither emerges nor vanishes, neither increases nor decreases" [33]. 

 

But for someone who views the word from a Far Eastern perspective, the most beautiful thing of all about a flower is its transience; the fact that it loses its petals without any hesitation and is content to disappear. For such a person, the bare stem or twig is as beautiful as a flowering plant or tree in full bloom. 

 

In other words: 

 

"In the sensibility of the Far East, neither the permanence [Ständigkeit] of being nor the stability [Beständigkeit] of essences is part of the beautiful. Things that persist, subsist or insist are neither beautiful nor noble. Beautiful is not what stands out or exceeds but what exercises self-restraint or retreats, not what is solid but what hovers. Beautiful are things that carry the traces of nothingness [...] not full presence but a 'there' that is coated with an absence [...]" [33-34]   

 

The Japanese call this wabi-sabi - the art of impermanence that "combines the unfinished, the imperfect, the transient, the fragile and the unassuming" [34]. Even your favourite Clarice Cliff milk jug is made more beautiful by a tiny crack or chip; and every silver bowl is improved when it loses its sheen and begins to darken [e].    

 

Han writes: 

 

"Satori (illumination) actually has nothing to do with shining or light. This is another point on which Eastern spirituality differs from occidental mysticism, with its metaphysics of light. Light multiplies presence. Buddhism, however, is a religion of absence." [35]

 

In the West, people almost want to be blinded by the light; a light either from some transcendent source or an inner light that emphasises the presence of things. Han - like Tanizaki - seems to admire the magic light of absence; a light that does not disturb or dispel the darkness; a friendly light. 

 

 

V. 

 

Finally, a few brief notes on (i) food, (ii) flower arranging, (iii) rock gardens, and (iv) theatre ...

 

(i) It's funny, but one of the complaints of English people is that Chinese food leaves them feeling empty inside five minutes after eating. Han provides a possible explanation: "Emptiness and absence also characterize the cuisine of the Far East." [39] Rice is the perfect example of this; lacking colour, lacking taste, offering no resistance (providing nothing to chew).

 

"Far Eastern cuisine appears empty also because it does not have a centre [...] The meals lack the centre or weight of a main dish and the closedness of a menu." [40]  

 

Further, in the West we like to cut food up with a knife and fork; in the East they assemble food with chopsticks.

 

(ii) The Japanese art of flower arranging is known as Ikebana - which means bringing flowers to life: 

 

"It is, however, an unusual kind of invigoration, because the flower is cut off from its root [...] The flower is invigorated by dealing it a mortal blow. [...] This raises it above the process of slow withering, its natural death. The flower is thereby removed from the difference between 'life' and 'death'. It shines with a special vitality, a flowering in-difference  [...] that has its source in the spirit of emptiness." [40-41]

 

The flower radiates with an unnatural (and transient) vitality; the shining of absence. 

 

(iii) If you have ever walked round a Japanese rock garden, you might have come away feeling a bit disappointed that there wasn't much to see. But that's the point; they are designed as gardens of absence and emptiness. 

 

However, despite their absence and emptiness, "they radiate", says Han, "an intense vitality" [41] and visitors must learn to appreciate the flow of the lines raked into the gravel and the darkness of the rocks. 

 

The Japanese rock garden is another method of paradoxical invigoration: "It invigorates nature by completely drying out its soul" [42] and placing it in a state of satori. 

 

(iv) Traditional Japanese puppet theatre (Bunraku) is also radically different to the world of Punch and Judy, showing that the latter is not the only way to do it. The Western puppet theatre animates characters via funny voices; in Bunraku it's all about the gesture and the puppets remain soulless figures.    

 

Similarly, Noh theatre is a theatre of absence: the costumes and masks worn by the living, human actors are designed to make them look like puppet figures. Even when an actor appears on stage without a mask, "the uncovered face is expressionless and empty" [44]. 

 

And the narrative composition of Noh theatre also adds to the sense of absence; its hard to tell what is real and what is dream - what is past and what is present - things appear only to then disappear once more (probably best not to worry too much about the plot in such cicumstances) [f].

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The German edition was published as Abwesen: Zur Kultur und Philosophie des fernen Ostens (Merv Verlag, 2007). In this post, page numbers refer to the English edition (Polity Press, 2023).  

[b] 'Pretty Vacant' was the third single released by the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977): click here to watch the official video for the song (which was shown on Top of the Pops) and/or here to read my post written on the track and published on TTA on 30 July 2108.   

[c] Is this also Han's view? It's hard to know. For whilst here he writes that the world "has no narrative structure" and is therefore "resistant to the crisis of meaning" [14], sixteen years later he will publish a book entitled Die Krise der Narration (2023) in which he seems to argue strongly in favour of narratives that anchor us in being and subscribe to a form of Catholicism informed by Martin Heidegger. Anyway, readers who are interested can click here to access the first part of a three-part post on this recent text. 

[d] See the post 'Believe in the Ruins: Reflections of a Gargolyle ...' (16 April 2019) in which I discuss Lawrence's thoughts on religious architecture: click here.

[e] Han at this point refers us to Tanizaki's famous essay on Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows (1933). I have mentioned this work in several posts on Torpedo the Ark (click here, for example) and it partly formed the basis for a paper delivered at Treadwell's Bookshop in September 2023 on occultism in the age of transparency (an extract from which can be read by clicking here). 

 

[f] For the record: I find all theatre irritating and tedious; I do like the tranquility of a Japanese rock garden, but enjoy also the colourful chaos of an English wildflower meadow; and, if obliged to choose, I'd prefer to have steak and chips for dinner than a bowl of egg-fried rice. 

Part two of this post can be read by clicking here.