Reflections on the Verb to Be

To stamp Becoming with the character of Being - 

that is the supreme will to power ... Nietzsche

 

 

I've seen it said that fascism begins with the verb to be. And, in fact, I may even have used the phrase myself in order to conclude a past post with a polemical punch line [1]. Whether it's true or not is, of course, debatable.  

 

However, it's certainly the case that false (and often pernicious) beliefs derive from mistaken values that are rooted in language rather than any underlying reality; something that Nietzsche demonstrates in his writings on metaphor and grammar (the latter defined as the presence of God within language) [2].   

 

Thus it is that I'm extremely wary of anyone who in wishing to declare their existence or express their identity asserts: I am (X,Y, or Z) in an ontologically sincere manner (i.e., unaware of the game they're playing). 

 

And I really loathe that Broadway musical number composed by Jerry Herman and famously recorded by Gloria Gaynor - I Am What I Am [3] - and which has since become a global gay anthem, regrettably reinforcing (the paradox and irony of) queer essentialism and the even more regrettable consequences that follow from the belief that sexual identities are innate and come with certain immutable characteristics or necessary attributes.

 

I can't help thinking that such idealism gives rise to all kinds of reductive, reified, discriminatory, and extremist ideologies - which returns us to where we began: fascism begins with the verb to be. Which is unfortunate, particularly if D. H. Lawrence is right and Hamlet's question is still the one that preoccupies us and the ache for being remains the ultimate hunger [4].  

 

Still, as every good ascetic will tell you, there's no need to heed every ache and pain and surrender to every yearning; I seem to recall that Aleister Crowley once adopted the admirable practice of cutting his arm with a razor every time he said 'I' and took false pride in this word [5]. 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Actually, it was the recently published post of 1 August 2022 - 'Dead Dreams Fly Flags' - click here. 

 

[2] See Twilight of the Idols, where Nietzsche writes: "I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar." Walter Kaufmann's translation of this text can be found in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Penguin, 1982), p. 483. 

 

[3] 'I Am What I Am' was a song featured in Jerry Herman's Broadway musical La Cage aux Folles (1983). It was recorded by disco queen Gloria Gaynor and released as single in the same year, quickly becoming one of her biggest hits. The song also appears on the 1984 album I Am Gloria Gaynor (Silver Blue Records). Click here to watch Ms Gaynor perform a live version of the song at an awards ceremony in Germany in December 1984.

 

[4] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Manifesto', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 218. 

[5] In 1920, Crowley and followers moved to Sicily and founded a community that would operate on the principles set out in The Book of the Law. The Abbey of Thelema, as it was known, was basically a restored farmhouse, not far from the beach and next to the ruins of an ancient Roman temple. Here, daily rituals were performed and all social conventions abandoned. Any one who used the word 'I' was obliged, like the Great Beast himself, to self-administer a cut on their forearm with a razor blade. It's possible that this practice was inspired by Crowley's reading of Nietzsche and that his hope was that Thelemites might resurrect the greater intelligence of the body, which does not speak its selfhood, but, rather, physically enacts or performs it. 

      See 'Of the Despisers of the Body', in Part One of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  

D. H. Lawrence and Trans Issues

Image of D. H. Lawrence from Dawn of the Unread, Issue 7
Transgender Pride Flag designed by Monica Helms with added trans symbol

Those who think J. K. Rowling a hateful transphobe (which she isn't), had probably better look away now as we discuss D. H. Lawrence's essentialism in relation to questions of sex and gender identity.

 

For whilst Lawrence clearly understands the role that culture plays in, for example, the construction of feminine identity - see the article 'Give Her a Pattern' [1] - and concedes that you can have cocksure women and hensure men [2], he nevertheless insists that biology ultimately plays a determining role and that this forecloses the possibility of transitioning from one sex to another, no matter how extensive the hormone treatment, how radical the surgery, or how convincing the end result may be.

 

In Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence writes:  

 

"A child is born with one sex only, and remains always single in his sex. There is no inter-mingling, only a great change of rôles is possible. But man in the female rôle is still male. 

      Sex - that is to say, maleness and femaleness - is present from the moment of birth, and in every act or deed of every child. [...] 

      We are all wrong when we say there is no vital difference between the sexes. There is every difference. Every bit, every cell in a boy is male, every cell is female in a woman, and must remain so. Women can never feel or know as men do. Man, acting in the passive or feminine polarity, is still man, and he doesn't have one single unmanly feeling." [3]

It's thus pretty clear where Lawrence would stand vis-à-vis the current debate around trans issues. And just to make this even clearer, we might read the following passage on organ transplantation (including xenotransplantation) in relation to sex reassignment surgery: 

 

"Every nose, every stomach is different, actually, from every other nose and stomach. [...] Noses and stomachs are not interchangeable. You might perhaps graft the end of one man's nose on the nose of another man. But the grafted gentleman would not thereby have a dual identity. His essential self would remain the same: a little disfigured, perhaps, but not metamorphosed. Whatever tricks you may perform, of grafting one bit of an individual on another, you don't produce a new individual, a new type. You only produce a disfigured, patched-up individual. [...] 

      It is sickening to hear scientists rambling on about the interchange of tissue and members from one individual to another. They have at last reached the old alchemistic fantasy of producing the homunculus. They hope to take the hind leg of a pig and by happy grafting produce a marvellous composite individual, a fused erection of living tissue which will at last prove that man can make man, and that therefore he isn't divine at all [...]" [4] 

 

Again, I think it clear what Lawrence would say about the idea of sex change operations: he would not approve, not accept, and scornfully dismiss. In the same essay, Lawrence also indicates that he would regard those seeking medical assistance to transition from one sex to another as being mentally ill in some manner: 

 

"The truth about man, before he falls into imbecility, is that each one is just himself. [...] Every man has his own identity, which he preserves till he falls into imbecility or worse. Upon this clue of his own identity every man is fashioned. And the clue of a man's own identity is a man's own self or soul, that which is incommutable and incommunicable in him. Every man, while he remains a man and does not lapse into disintegration, becoming a lump of chaos, is truly himself, no matter how many fantastic attitudes he may assume. True it is, that man goes and gets a host of ideas in his head, and proceeds to reconstruct himself according to those ideas. But he never actually succeeds in this business of reconstructing himself out of his own head, until he has gone cracked. And then he may prance on all fours [...] or do as he likes. But whilst he remains sane the buzzing ideas in his head will never allow him to change or metamorphose his own identity: modify, yes; but never change. While a man remains sane he remains himself and nothing but himself, no matter how fantastically he may attitudinise according to some pet idea." [5] 

 

Clinically speaking, I don't know how fair or accurate an assessment this is, but it should be noted that transsexualism is no longer classified as a mental disorder, but regarded as a sexual health issue. And it's somewhat surprising - if not disappointing - that a writer whose fiction is so profoundly queer and so richly perverse, should also reaffirm conventional notions of identity, integrity, and sanity.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] 'Give Her a Pattern' can be found in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 160-65. Whilst arguing that womanhood is in part an adaptation to male ideals and fantasies, Lawrence nevertheless insists that beneath this pattern lies "a real human being of the feminine sex" who comes with her own logic of emotion.   

[2] 'Cocksure Women and Hensure Men' can also be found in Late Essays and Articles, pp. 123-27. 

 

In this piece, Lawrence makes a dubious comparison between human beings and chickens in order to advance his argument that whilst a woman can certainly act in a cocksure manner, it's best if she retain her hen-like nature; "quietly and busily clucking around, laying her eggs and mothering her chickens". Similarly, whilst men today are often "timid, tremulous, rather soft and submissive", it's preferable that they be cocksure and boss the human farmyard. Indeed, Lawrence says that when the sexes play one another's role and throw the natural order out of scheme, it invariably has tragic consequences.  

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 131. 

 

This may or may not be true, but Lawrence is obliged by the terms of his own philosophy, based on vital polarity and sexual otherness, to believe this. The amusing thing, however, is the fragility of this metaphysic. For although he insists on the essential and immutable nature of sex, Lawrence also says it's important to keep boys and girls apart in virgin purity, as even casual mixing and familiarity threatens their "male and female integrity" and risks the "dynamic magic of life" [ibid., 132].    

[4] 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. 101. 

[5] Ibid., pp. 101-102. 

  

Ours Is Essentially a Tragic Age: Notes on the Opening of a Novel

Two female readers of the Penguin edition of 
D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1960)

showing little interest in the opening lines

Lady Chatterley's Lover opens with the following paragraph:

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

I think it's an opening that deserves to be looked at a little more closely ...


One immediately notes the use by Lawrence of an omniscient third person narrator; one who sees and knows all things in a god-like manner, even the private thoughts and feelings of the characters. As one Nietzschean little girl informed her mother, there's something indecent about this.

One suspects that Lawrence would seek to justify his narrative technique in terms of perfect empathy rather than epistemological transparency, but I still find it questionable that although in this opening paragraph the narrator describes Connie's position in a rather matter-of-fact manner, thereby ironically distancing himself from her, he will later describe things from Connie's perspective in a far more lyrical fashion, as if even her most intimate experiences were also his own and ours as readers.

Thus, whilst we get to see the workings of Clifford's mind, we get to share Connie's orgasm and made fully complicit in her sexual shenanigans. That's what happens when free indirect discourse meets the pornographic imagination - interiority is taken to a perversely material conclusion.   

What I'd like to suggest is that whenever a narrator says ours is we should be on our guard; we certainly shouldn't be lulled into false consensus or made an accessory after the fact. His - and maybe Connie's - may be an essentially tragic age, but it's not compulsory for any reader to subscribe to this belief.

And what does this claim mean anyway, for those of us living in an essentially inessential age that lacks any intrinsic character or indispensable quality? Lawrence would doubtless say that's the nature of our (postmodern) tragedy; that we have no soul or substance and live accidental lives of random contingency. But Lawrence is more of a metaphysician than he often pretends and still clings to the verb to be in all seriousness. 

Essential or otherwise, it seems that the narrator employs the idea of tragedy in a conventional sense; i.e. this is a post-cataclysmic period of great suffering, destruction, downfall etc. But it's important to note that Lawrence is not a tragic writer and, in fact, hates tragedy as usually conceived; thus his refusal to take it tragically.

This saying no to the tragic reception of tragedy is part of Lawrence's admirable attempt to take a great kick at misery and his refusal to wallow in his or anyone else's misfortune. Lawrence despises those who, in his words, are in love with their own defeat; he would be the last person on earth to subscribe to the contemporary cult of victimhood. 

But what is the terrible deluge that is supposed to have happened? Obviously, it's a reference to the Great War. But, as a Nietzschean, I also conceive of this cataclysmic event as the death of God - a tragic but also joyous event that changes everything and creates opportunities to build new little habitats and opens new spaces for thought in which we might also allow ourselves to dream again and form new little hopes.  

Nietzsche famously (and cheerfully) writes of this event in The Gay Science and the rejuvinating effect it has upon free spirits who feel themselves "irradiated as by a new dawn" by the news that God is dead:

"Our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation. At last the horizon seems open once more, granting even that it is not bright; our ships can at last put out to sea in face of every danger; every hazard is again permitted to the discerner; the sea, our sea, again lies open before us; perhaps never before did such an 'open sea' exist."

Thus, to be among the ruins needn't be thought negatively; needn't oblige one to give in before one starts. Indeed, whilst Lawrence doesn't quite go so far as the Situationists and believe in the ruins, I think he understands their appeal and the fun to be had with fragments - or bits as he calls them in Kangaroo. Indeed, one could read the cataclysm as the collapse of grand narratives and understand the building of new little habitats as the attempt to find more localised, more provisional, more relative truths that aren't coordinated by an ideal of Wholeness or swept up into an Absolute.

Almost one is tempted to suggest that in the following paragraph from Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari are rewriting Lawrence's opening to Lady C. and theoretically expanding upon his thinking on plurality and multiplicities: 

"We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We no longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges. We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately." 

Finally, we come to the last line: We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. I suppose that's true - even if it's factually not the case. For we could, of course, choose to die; as Gerald chooses to die at the end of Women in Love, rather than accept being broken open once more like Mellors, or voluntarily leave the tomb like the man who died.

And learning how and when to die at the right time is as much an art, requiring just as much courage, as living on regardless of the circumstances and becoming one of those unhappy souls; individuals like Clifford who are afraid to die and fall silent, determined to continue asserting themselves even when they have fallen out of touch with others. 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 5.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 42.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Press, 1974), V. 343, p. 280. 

See also: Catherine Brown, 'Resisting Tragedy: A Report on the International D. H. Lawrence Conference, Paris, 2018', in the D. H. Lawrence Society Newsletter (Winter 2018/19), or click here to read in a pre-edited version on her website.

Interestingly, Dr. Brown argues that Lawrence adopts various literary means and devices in order to resist tragedy, whereas the narrator calls for a refusal - something that those researching this topic might like to consider. As a nihilist, I'm more attracted to a strategy of active negation (refusal) than offering a dialectical form of (often complementary) opposition (resistance): click here for an explanation why.  

Aces High: Reflections on Asexuality

Asexual flag 

I. 

One of the reasons that Nietzsche has a difficult time accepting the idea of aesthetic detachment - he derides the idea as immaculate perception - is because sex is such a crucial aspect of his Dionysian philosophy and the lover, he says, is not only a stronger but more valuable type of human being:

"His whole economy is richer than before, more powerful, more complete than in those who do not love. The lover becomes a squanderer: he is rich enough for it. Now he dares, becomes an adventurer, becomes an ass in magnanimity and innocence [...] this happy idiot grows wings and new capabilities."    

Nietzsche insists that our sexuality reaches into the uppermost summit of our spirit and that beneath all our purest thoughts and high ideals lie unconscious libidinal investments that attest to the fact we are first and foremost creatures of desire. This is not to say that an erotic motive is to be attributed to all human activities, but that an element of sex is never far away.

For Nietzsche, as for so many nineteeth century thinkers, sex is the great clue to being and the truth of ourselves. I suspect he would refuse to conceive of asexuality except in purely negative terms - as evidence of retarded puberty, for example, or a form of degeneracy.


II.

Unfortunately, there are still people today who regard asexual individuals either with suspicion, contempt, or a mixture of both; believing them to be unfeeling and unnatural, almost inhuman in their apparent indifference to sexual pleasure.

Personally, however, I rather admire those individuals who have refused - inasmuch as asexuality does involve behavioural choice - to be amorous subjects and stepped beyond LGBT whilst remaining happily within the uncanny order of Q (much to the annoyance of some within the allosexual community).

What's more, I sometimes think that the reason individuals who pride themselves on their sexual identity and orientation sometimes feel threatened by and hostile towards asexuals is due to the fact that the latter (a) do not find them attractive and (b) refuse to make themselves available for fucking.       


III.

Before going any further with this defence-cum-celebration of asexuality, let's just be clear on a few important points ...

Firstly, asexuality is distinct from abstention and celibacy; i.e., it's not merely an expression of ascetic idealism. Indeed, some religious writers openly condemn asexuality as delusional and immoral. The Jesuit priests David Nantais and Scott Opperman write:

"Asexual people do not exist. Sexuality is a gift from God and thus a fundamental part of our human identity. Those who repress their sexuality are not living as God created them to be: fully alive and well. As such, they're most likely unhappy."

This characterisation amuses me and I have to admit that I'm quite happy to think of asexuality as a form of blasphemous living that refuses consummation. Better that, than attempts to portray it as a medical disorder, a form of sexual dysfunction, or the result of bad conscience concerning the body. 

Finally, it should be noted that some asexuals may in fact engage in erotic activity despite lacking any real desire to do so - perhaps as a matter of courtesy or curiosity - although most prefer romantic relationships that involve non-physical activity (apart from hand-holding and the odd cuddle), friend-focused non-romantic relationships, and/or queer-platonic relationships that invent new ways of associating.

There are, thankfully, no hard and fast rules governing the so-called ace community and there are also plenty of grey areas (of ambiguity) to explore.     


IV.

For me, then, asexuality holds a good deal of interest as something that (potentially) challenges sexual normativity and offers (passive) resistance to the coital imperative to fuck over and over and over again; what one critic refers to as the tyranny of orgasmic pleasure. 

The socially cherished myth that sex is the most basic and universal of instincts - often repressed and thus in need of liberating so that men and women can lead happy, fulfilled lives - is one that Michel Foucault and Judith Butler began to deconstruct decades ago, but it seems that more work still needs to be done convincing people that sexuality is not a natural given, but a historical construct. Essentialism, alas, continues to exert itself - not least in the idiocy of identity politics.

Notes

The black stripe in the asexual pride flag is for those individuals who identify as asexual; the grey stripe represents those who are demi- or semi-sexual; the white stripe is for those who subscribe to or manifest some full form of sexuality; and, finally, the purple stripe is to display solidarity with members of the wider queer community. 

For more information on asexuality visit the website of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), founded in 2001 by David Jay. I don't necessarily share or endorse the views expressed here; particularly the reactive attempt to make of asexuality an intrinsic identity or orientation and to present asexuals as people with 'the same emotional needs as everybody else'. How dreary and disappointing if that's the case! I'm hoping, like Ela Przybylo, that asexuality might prove to be a bit more provocative and create spaces of complication. See her essay, 'Crisis and safety: the asexual in sexusociety', in Sexualities, (SAGE, 2011), 14 (4), pp. 444-461. Click here to read online via Academia.edu

Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, (Vintage Books, 1968), 808, pp. 426-27.

David Nantais and Scott Opperman, 'Eight myths about religious life', Vision (Vocation Network, 2002): click here to read online. 

Ours is Essentially a Tragic Age ...

The opening passage of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, which more or less establishes Connie's precarious position at the beginning of the book, is one of the great opening passages in twentieth-century literature: 

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

What I love most about this passage is the insouciant refusal to take an essentially tragic age tragically, thereby paradoxically rendering the essential inessential and denying the need to be determined by that which masquerades as fundamentally determining, or absolute necessity.

There might be blood on the floor, implies the narrator, but there's no use crying over it any more than spilled milk: the cataclysm has happened - get over it and move on  - no matter how many skies have fallen.

In other words, like Nietzsche when faced with the death of God and the problem of modern nihilism, the narrator displays not only admirable courage, but also a certain ironic intelligence that laughs in the face of earnest stupidity (not so much transforming tragedy into comedy, but recognising that the drama of human existence is born in the space between them).

Further, when confronted with the way in which an established order can rapidly become chaotic and disintegrate at every point, there's no call for reterritorialization along old lines, or a nostalgic longing for past wholeness; new little habitats and new little hopes are the key - and this, too, I greatly admire.
                 
As much as I love this passage, however, I can appreciate that some readers might have problems with certain aspects of it - not least of all with the presence of a phantom narrator who despite being outside of events is nevertheless a privileged spectator to them; not to mention a narrator who, from the get go, cheerfully deploys a possessive pronoun, thereby implicating us all in the fictional affair that is about to unfold.   
 
The narrator's presumption that readers inhabit the same moral and spatio-temporal universe as the lovers, is a way of homogenizing the text (and shaping interpretations of the text), as well as soliciting sympathy for Connie and Mellors; their position is our position; their feelings are our feelings; their sins are our sins.

Not everyone is comfortable with such complicity, or happy with the attempt to ensure consensus. As readers, we've got to live and that means - as Lawrence himself knew, anticipating the postmodern aesthetic - trusting the tale and not slavishly obeying the author or agreeing with their (often unreliable, sometimes manipulative) textual proxy, the narrator.                

See: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

The Case of Rachel Dolezal

The controversial case of Rachel Dolezal continues to fascinate and to challenge many of our ideas and misconceptions concerning race and the cultural construction of identity. 

Ms Dolezal, according to her parents, is a white woman of predominantly European descent who has been wilfully misrepresenting and disguising herself as an African American in order to advance her career and rise to a position of prominence within the black community. For not only did she become a university professor of African studies, specialising in the intersection of gender, race and class, but also president of her local NAACP.  

To be fair, Dolezal grew up in a family with adopted black siblings and attended a school in Mississippi where most of her friends and fellow pupils were black. She also married (and subsequently divorced) a black man with whom she has a child. But, of course, none of this serves to make her African American - anymore than does the deep-tanned skin, the clothing, the jewellery, or the make-up and hairstyling. Biologically speaking, she remains what she has always been: a white woman.

But since when has race ever simply been a question of biology? 

Thus, I have to admit I'm sympathetic to Dolezal and know precisely what she means when she suggests that her case is far more complex and multi-layered than many of her critics (or her parents) understand or wish to concede. This includes, for example, that great paragon of sensitive and sophisticated commentary, Piers Morgan, who brands Dolezal a lying, deluded idiot and is clearly outraged by the thought that race might be reconfigured as a question of style rather than blood and the fear that other essential binaries might in this manner also be problematized.

For Morgan - and he explicitly says as much - race is an either/or issue: you're either black or you're white. And Dolezal is 100% white by birth and breeding and can never be anything but white. Morgan thus brands her carefully crafted and performed identity fraudulent and a mockery; akin to wearing blackface. It would be laughable, he says, were it not so serious, concluding that Dolezal has "committed an appalling act of deception that deserves every heap of abuse now raining down on her head".

Of course, what those such as Morgan really wish us to understand is not that Dolezal is who and what she is no matter what she does, but that we are all born into fixed and fatal identities, regardless of what we learn, accomplish, or become in later life. And this would even include Barack Obama: he might be living in the White House and be the son of a white mother, but, according to those for whom race is an all-determining absolute, he remains a nigger for all eternity.     

In other words, racism begins and ends with a form of death sentence; the belief that colour is so much more than merely skin-deep and blackness entirely unrelated to artifice.