Above all Things Encourage a Straight Backbone

 

Winners of Miss Correct Posture - aka Miss Beautiful Spine 

(Chicago, May 1956) [1]

 

 

Deleuze - and those influenced by his work (particularly the books written in collaboration with Félix Guattari) - often thrill to the idea (borrowed from Artaud) of a body without organs. And they seem equally excited at the thought of heads without faces and backs without vertebrae. 

 

For if the face is a universal mask and machine of moral overcoding which makes pale-faced Christians of us all, then "the spinal column is nothing but a sword beneath the skin, slipped into the body of an innocent sleeper by an executioner" [2]. 

 

Perhaps that's why there's a radical tradition of associating bones with fascism and privileging the soft pathology of the flesh as somehow more vital - something I touched on briefly in a recent post: click here. 

 

It's a tradition that one might have expected D. H. Lawrence to have belonged to; for Lawrence certainly celebrated the flesh as opposed to the spirit - and the latter, as Hegel famously declared, is a bone.

 

However, it turns out that Lawrence is all in favour of back bone, particularly the lumbar ganglion which, he says, negatively polarizes the solar plexus in the primal psyche [4] and is the centre of all independent activity (or what we might term a will to separation).

 

Lawrence encourages children to stiffen their little backs and escape the influence of their mothers; to kick themselves into singular being full of pride and the joy of self-assertion; to know that they are themselves and distinct from all others. He writes:

 

"From the great voluntary ganglion of the lower plane, the child is self-willed, independent, and masterful. In the activity of this centre a boy refuses to be kissed and pawed about, maintaining his proud independence like a little wild animal. From this centre he likes to command and to receive obedience. From this centre likewise he may be destructive and defiant and reckless, determined to have his own way at any cost." [5]   

 

Obviously, those who despise these spinal characteristics, interpret them as signs of fascist or phallocratic imperialism. 

 

But, as Lawrence would say, curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines and slimy, belly-wriggling invertebrates [5] who slander those who dare to stand upright, with shoulders back, taking pleasure in their own sovereign power. 

  

 

Notes 

 

[1] In the 1950s and '60s, American chiropractors decided to stage a number of beauty contests in the hope that this would help legitimise their profession and raise their public profile. The photo reproduced here shows the winner and runners up of one such contest held in Chicago, May 1956. According to a newspaper report at the time, the girls were picked for their beauty and perfect posture. For more details and more images, click here.  

 

[2] Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, (Continuum, 2003), p. 23. Like many of his ideas and phrases, Deleuze is borrowing this from a writer of fiction; in this case, Franz Kafka. See: 'The Sword', in Diaries 1914-1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Martin Greenberg with Hannah Arendt (Schocken Books, 1949), pp. 109-10.   

 

[3] Lawrence borrows many of the ideas and terminology used in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) from theosophy rather than physiology and when he does use anatomical terms they only approximate with scientific and medical knowledge.  

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 89. 

[5] I'm paraprasing from Lawrence's famous letter written to Edward Garnett on 3 July 1912. See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 422.

 

 

This post grew out of correspondence with the artist Heide Hatry and I am grateful as always for her inspiration. 

I Don't Care if Monday's Blue ...

(John Hopkins University Press, 1997)

 

I.

 

Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (1967) is a novel by French writer Michel Tournier [a]. A philosophically-informed retelling of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), it subverts the original narrative and, according to Deleuze, "traces a genesis of perversion" [b]. 

 

Crusoe's attempt to transform his little island into a regular, well-organised home-from-home - "like one of those great tidy cupboards" [8] full of lavender-scented linen - fails when he discovers, thanks to his relationship with Friday, that there are other ways of living than those valued within white European society. 

 

Whether these ways are more natural, more authentic, or more vital, is, of course, open to debate. Personally, I'm not sure I buy into this anti-civilisation line any longer and doubt that there's all that much to learn from primitive peoples. And besides, I cannot gather at the drum any longer in good faith [c] and have no wish to wallow in the mire, roll in the damp warmth of my own excrement, or engage in savage acts of ritual atrocity. I'm not even interested in skinning a goat and making a wind harp from its dried entrails. 

 

For just as you don't reach the body without organs and its plane of consistency by wildly destratifying, sometimes it's preferable to exercise caution and remain all too human, than become-other or become-animal just for the fun of it. As Deleuze and Guattari were always at pains to point out, staying organized, signified, subjected so that you may still respond to the dominant reality, is not the worst thing in the world [d].      

 

Certain anarchists think we can do away with rules and regulations - just as certain gymnosophists think we can dispense with clothes. But as Crusoe discovers, keeping up appearances and forming habits of behaviour, are "sovereign remedies against the demoralizing effects of solitude" [76] - although later he abandons his old ways for a kind of solar pantheism. 

 

 

II.

 

Friday appears about half-way through the novel and Crusoe's first instinct is to shoot him as he flees his Araucanian captors before they make a sacrifice of him, by chopping up his body and burning it. 

 

Pursued by two men, Friday is running directly towards the spot in which Crusoe has been hiding and observing events on the beach, presenting the latter with a moral problem:

 

"If he shot down one of the pursuers he might rouse the whole tribe against him. On the other hand, if he shot the sacrificial victim it might be interpreted as a supernatural act, the intervention of an outraged divinity. He had to take one side or the other, being indifferent to both, and prudence counseled that he should support the stronger. He aimed at the breast of the fugitive, who was now very close ... [135].

 

Unfortunately, Tenn the dog decides to leap up and divert Crusoe's aim. And so Friday is saved and it was "the first of the pursuers who staggered and fell to the ground. The man behind him stopped, bent over the dying body, stared blankly for a moment at the trees, and finally turned and fled wildly back to his companions." [135]

 

And so, purely by accident, Crusoe ends up with a "naked and panic-stricken black man" [135] pressing his forehead to the ground and placing the foot of a "bearded and armed white man, clad in goatskin and a bonet of fur, accoutered with the trappings of three thousand years of Western civilization" [135] on his neck.     

 

Now, no one in their right mind wants a slave: the responsibility of being a master is exhausting and quickly makes one ill-tempered and often cruel. It's bad enough having any kind of dependent - a child, an elderly parent, a pet cat, but a slave offering total submission is just too much trouble. And so, Crusoe makes a big mistake taking on Friday. 

 

His second big mistake is trying to reform Friday and teach him all the white man's tricks; how to plough and sow, milk goats, make cheese, soft-boil eggs, trap vermin, dig ditches, wear clothes, etc. For Friday, with the slave's natural insolence, simply laughs at his his sober-minded mentor and undermines his authority on every occasion.      

 

Ultimately, he ruins everything that it had taken Crusoe years to build - literally stopping the clocks and blowing everything sky-high with gunpowder. And it was all so predictable. Friday causes Crusoe grave concern from the off: "Not merely did he fail to fit harmoniously into the system, but, an alien presence, he even threatened to destroy it." [156] 

 

But Crusoe simply can't bring himself to do what he needs to do in order to preserve the fragile victory of order over chaos that he had accomplised - not even after Friday fucks Speranza and produces mandrakes of his own from this illicit union. In fact, it's following this that Crusoe has a moment of biblical-inspired revelation:

 

"For the first time I asked myself if I had not sinned gravely against Charity in seeking by every means to compel Friday to submit to the laws of the cultivated island, since in doing so I proclaimed my preference, over my coloured brother, for the earth shaped by my own hands." [160] 

 

It's this kind of Christian moral stupidity that undermines all mastery. Crusoe forces himself to conceal his vexation, swallow his pride, and henceforth learn to love Friday, forgiving him his ways even when they are profoundly shocking (such as his cruel indifference to the suffering of animals): "For the first time he questioned his white man's sensibilities" [163] and values.  

 

Of course, there are moments when Crusoe pulls himself together and he feels nothing but rage and hatred as he thinks of "the ravages caused by Friday in the smooth functioning of the island, the ruined crops, the wasted stores, and scattered herds; the vermin that multiplied and prospered, the tools that were broken or mislaid" [164]. Friday even steals his tobacco. 

 

Sometimes, Crusoe dreams of Friday's death; be it the result of natural causes, accident, or foul play. But at other times, the new Robinson adores Friday's physical beauty and delights in his nakedness; he observed with a passionate interest "Friday's every act and their effect upon himself, which seemed to lead toward an astonishing metamorphosis" [182]. 

 

Crusoe lets his hair grow into long tangled locks and, encouraged by Friday, he goes naked in the sun until his flesh takes on a deep, golden-copper colour. He has effectively gone native - or become-minoritarian as some might say [e]. 

 

That's certainly a goal for those who want it and Crusoe is clearly proud of the great change he has undergone via his relationship with Friday - "Under his influence [...] I have travelled the road of a long and painful metamorphosis" [210] - but, for me, it holds no appeal: I don't care if Monday's blue, I have no wish to become-Friday ...

  

III. 

 

The irony, of course, is that Friday jumps at the first opportunity to get off the island and abandon Crusoe; he does everything he can to ingratiate himself with the crew of the Whitebird so that he is taken aboard and transported to England. 

 

In other words, he knows where his best interests lie; in the very civilisation that Crusoe rejects. Having said that, Tournier will later make it clear that he thinks this a grave mistake on Friday's part; a decision that will mark his downfall. 

 

For, according to Tournier, unsmiling Europeans live in "glass cages of reserve, coldness, and self-containment" [f] and have an obsessive distrust of the flesh. Thus, a happy-go-lucky aeolian spirit like Friday will never find a home amongst such people ...     

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The English edition of this work which I'll be referring to and quoting from throughout this post is simply entitled Friday, trans. Norman Denny, (John Hopkins University Press, 1997).    

[b] Gilles Deleuze, letter to Jean Piel (27 August, 1966), in Letters and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2020), p. 31. Deleuze will later describe Tournier's work as a great novel - a view shared by l'Académie française which awarded it the Grand Prix du roman in 1967.

 

[c] Despite his fascination (and, indeed, identification) with primitive cultures, D. H. Lawrence came precisely to this conclusion. In the essay 'Indians and an Englishman', he writes: 

 

"The voice out of the far-off time was not for my ears. It's language was unknown to me. And I did not wish to know. [...] It was not for me, and I knew it. Nor had I any curiosity to understand. The soul is as old as the oldest day, and has its own hushed echoes, its own far-off tribal understandings sunk and incorporated. We do not need to live the past over again. Our darkest tissues are twisted in this old tribal experience, our warmest blood came out of the old tribal fire. And they vibrate still in answer, our blood, our tissue. But me, the conscious me, I have gone a long road since then. [...]

      I don't want to live again the tribal mysteries my blood has lived long since. I don't want to know as I have known, in the tribal exclusiveness. [...] I know my derivation. I was born of no virgin, of no Holy Ghost. Ah no, these old men telling the tribal tale were my fathers. [...]  But I stand on the far edge of their fire light [...] My way is my own, old red father; I can't cluster at the drum any more." 

 

See Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 119-120. Critics will doubtless point out that this model of human cultural evolution subscribed to by Lawrence - advancing from dark-skinned tribal society to white-skinned modernity - is certainly questionable (if not inherently racist).    

 

[d] See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996), pp. 160-61.  

[e] I have written about Crusoe's becoming-minoritarian via his relationship with Friday in an earlier post. See 'On the Sex Life of Robinson Crusoe 3: Becoming the Perverted Sun Angel' [click here]. 

[f] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 185.

      Later, in this same work, Tournier reveals that he had wanted to dedicate his novel "to all of France's immigrant workers, to those silent masses of Fridays shipped to Europe from the third world [...] on whom our society depends". And, just in case his political sympathies (and self-loathing) weren't already clear enough, he adds: "Our affluent society relies on these people; it has set its fat white buttocks down on their brown bodies and reduced them to absolute silence [...] They are a muzzled but vital population, a barely tolerated yet totally indispensable part of our society, and the only genuine proletariat that exists ..." Ibid., p. 197

      For a counterview to this way of thinking, see Pascal Bruckner's The Tears of the White Man, trans. William R. Beer, (Free Press/Macmillan, 1986) and/or The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, trans. Steven Rendell, (Princeton University Press, 2010). For my take on the latter text, click here.  

Notes on the Youthful Writings of Gilles Deleuze 2: From Christ to the Bourgeoisie

 A young Deleuze pretending to read for the camera

 

 

I.

 

From Christ to the Bourgeoisie [a] was another very early text by Deleuze, first published in 1946, when he was twenty-one. It's central argument and conclusion is: "The relationship that connects Christianity and the Bourgeisie is not contingent." [275] Which is true, I suppose, though hardly an original insight.

 

Deleuze opens the essay by discussing the decline of spirit in our modern world, which critics and opponents of modernity and materialism often decry: "What they mean is that today, many people no longer believe in internal life, it doesn't pay." [266] 

 

Deleuze continues:

 

"To be sure, there are different reasons why the internal is disdained today. My first thoughts go to the revolutionary consciousness in an industrial and technological world. The greater the power of this technological world, the more it seems to empty people of all internal life like a chicken and reduce them to total exteriority." [266]

My first thought is that this seems rather unfair on chickens, which remain sacred birds within some cultures. One wonders how Deleuze might know anything about their internal life, or lack thereof? For whilst I'm sure this young French philosopher enjoyed many a dish of coq-au-vin, had he ever tried to form a relationship with a living bird? 

 

I'm doubtful: for despite what he might believe, they are intelligent and sensitive creatures, who display some degree of self-awareness (i.e., have a fairly complex inner life) [b].   

 

Personally, I'm with Lawrence on this point: I like to imagine that even a common brown hen is a goddess in her own rights and blossoms into splendid being, just as we do, within the fourth dimension and that we might form a vital (non-anthropocentric) relationship with her [c].     

 

But I digress ... And, to be fair, there's an ambiguity in what Deleuze writes here; he could be saying that chickens too are emptied of internal life (i.e. have their being negated) within techno-industrial society thanks to factory farming (Heidegger controversially suggests that there is a metaphysical equivalence between mechanised food production and the Nazi extermination camps).      

 

Anyway, let's move on ... And let's do so by immediately pointing out that Deleuze isn't necessarily complaining about this loss of soul - because, like Sartre, he hates moist interiority and regards the issue as a far more complex one than it is often characterised. For one thing, Deleuze suggests the possibility of a spiritual life outside of (and without reference to) any interiority and he believes in a revolution that takes place as a form of action and as an event in the world, rather than in us:

 

"The revolution is not supposed to take place inside us, it is external - and if we do it in ourselves, it is only a way to avoid doing it outside." [267]

 

Again, like Sartre whom he quotes, Deleuze suggests that ultimately everything is outside - including the self (l'existence précède l'essence, and all that jazz):

"'Outside, in the world, among others. It is not in some hiding-place that we will discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a human among humans.'" [268]

 

Interestingly, Deleuze finds this existentialism in the Gospel: Christ, he says, shows us a new possibility of life that is not lived posthumously in some kind of heaven, but in the external world. Only this, paradoxically, "is not a social, historical, localized world: it is our own internal life" [268].

 

Unfortunately, it's not this aspect of the Gospel that has triumphed and ultimately Christianity has been more bad news than good and brought about the disastrous "dissociation of Nature and Spirit" [268]. Deleuze continues:

 

"Some might say that the union did not exist at the time of the Greeks either. No matter. The identity of Nature and Spirit exists as nostalgia in the modern consciousness; whether it is defined in reference to Greece, to a state preceding original sin, or, if you prefer psychoanalysis, to a state prior to the trauma of birth, it matters little. Once upon a time there was a union between Nature and Spirit and this union formed an external world. Nature was mind and mind, nature; the subject was not involved except as an error coefficient." [268-69]  

 

Christianity subjectified both nature and spirit and ended up with a torn consciousness unable to grasp in itself "the relationship of natural life to spiritual life" [269]. Jesus as mediator came to fix this via the Gospel which is "the exteriority of an interiority" [269]. 

To be honest, I'm not sure I understand this. But let's see how Deleuze now relates this material to the bourgeois opposition between private life and the state ...

 

II.

At first glance, says Deleuze, this latter opposition seems "very different from the Christian opposition between Nature and Spirit" [269]. But - surprise, surprise - it isn't:

 

"The bourgeois has been able to internalize internal life as mediation of nature and spirit. By becoming private life, Nature was spiritualized in the form of family [...] and Spirit was naturalized in the form of homeland [...] What is important is that the bourgeoisie is defined first by the internal life and the primacy of the subject. [...] There is bourgeoisie as soon as there is submission of the exterior to an internal order [...]" [269]

 

Deleuze expands:

 

"The bourgeoisie is essentially internalized internal life, in other words the mediation of private life and state. Yet it fears the two extremes equally. [...] Its domain is the golden mean. It hates the excess of an overly individualistic private life of a romantic nature [...] Yet it is no less fearful of the state [...] The domain of the bourgeoisie is the domain of the apparently calm humanism of human rights. The bourgeois Person is substantialized mediation; it is defined formally by equality [...] and materially by internal life. If formal equality is materially refuted, there is no contradiction in the eyes of the bourgeois nor is there a reason for revolution. The bourgeois remains coherent." [270]

Ultimately, they have no interest in the question of to be or not to be; they wish to have (to own, to possess); property rights are their concern - not ontological unfolding. But money - as an abstract flow - is problematic; it is not substantialized, "on the contrary, it is fluctuating [...] Whence the threat and danger" [271]. Anticipating his work with Félix Guattari written twenty-five years later, Deleuze notes: "Money negates its own essence [...]" [271] and capitalism inexorably moves towards its own external limit [d].

So, in sum: the fraudulent and secretive bourgeoisie internalise interior life in the form of property, money, and possession: "everything that Christ abhorred and that he came to fight, to substitute being for it" [273] - coming, in effect, not to save the world, but to save man from the world (in all its manifest evil). 

 

Having said that, I rather like the world in all its demirugal and external beauty and resent the idea of salvation, however you present it ...      

 

Notes 

 

[a] Gilles Deleuze, 'From Christ to the Bourgeoisie', Letters and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2020). All page numbers given in the above post refer to this work.

 

[b] See Lori Marino, 'Thinking chickens: a review of cognition, emotion, and behavior in the domestic chicken', Animal Cognition 20, (Jan 2017), pp. 127-147. Click here to read online. 

 

[c] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Him With His Tail in His Mouth', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 307-317. Lawrence discusses forming a relationship with his Rhode Island Red on pp. 313-316.  

[d] In Anti-Oedipus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari describe money as that which has been substituted by capitalism for the very notion of a social code and which has created "an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius". See Anti-Oeipus, trans. Robert Hurley et al, (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 33. 

 

Part 1 of this series on Deleuze's youthful writings - Description of Women - can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

Notes on Patricia MacCormack's Ahuman Manifesto Pt. 1: Preface / Introduction

Patricia MacCormack at the launch of  

The Ahuman Manifesto (Bloomsbury, 2020) 

Photo by Keith Keppell

I.

In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that Patricia MacCormack - a Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University and the author of several books, including Cinesexuality (2008) and Posthuman Ethics (2012) - was formerly an acquaintance of mine and that she remains someone I hold in high esteem (even if, as someone who repudiates hierarchy and refuses to accept that some humans are superior to others, she'd probably find such value-laden language objectionable).     

In a sense, then, I regard The Ahuman Manifesto as a friend's book; even if - as I indicate below - there are things in it I find problematic and even if MacCormack probably regards me as just another posturing white male philosopher of whom nothing much can be expected.

II.

According to the Preface, The Ahuman Manifesto is a book that calls for direct and immediate action, rather than thinking, although, surely the latter is a form of such action, is it not? Indeed, MacCormack will later write of her inherent disdain for "any kind of bifurcating system where action is separated from criticism, word is separated from material reality" [5].
 
Still, this call for action does enable readers who have grown impatient with career academics posing as revolutionaries to throw the text across the room in good conscience.

However, if one resists the urge to do so, one discovers that the book is intended to be an optimistic work of joy and radical compassion, with the latter being interpreted as a form of grace to be extended to all life on earth; a counternihilism that affirms (amongst other things) queer feminism, atheist occultism, deep ecology, and human extinction.

In other words, it's ethics, Jim, but not as we know it ...  

III.

"The end of the anthropocene is the opening of the world." [1]

I don't know if that's true, but it's a nice opening sentence and slogan; though obviously not as catchy as Go vegan! Don't breed! which really should've been the subtitle of The Ahuman Manifesto (I can't help feeling the marketing department at Bloomsbury missed a trick there). 

MacCormack is right to suspect that, for many readers, the idea of the death of humanity will be an absurd and troubling proposition. Personally, however, I don't have any problem with it. What nicer thought is there than the Birkinesque vision of a world without people; just uninterrupted grass and a few rabbits sitting around? Having said that, I'm just as happy to imagine a world entirely devoid of all life and don't share MacCormack's insistent vitalism.

She wants an ahuman future, but she also wants to (a) avoid posthuman despair and (b) retain her political commitment to something that seems rather like old fashioned humanism and its values. Thus, cannibalism might be okay, if some people insist on the right to eat meat, but any form of discrimination, such as racism, for example, remains abhorrent (presumably on the grounds that it lacks compassion).             

At the same time, MacCormack rejects any form of identity politics; a peculiarly anthropocentric obsession as she describes it and it's brave of her to differentiate her thinking from some of her most influential contemporaries:

"Yes, I am an anti-racist, pro-queer, anti-ableist feminist while also wanting to rid the world of human subjective schemas altogether in favour of the individuation of life based not on groups, tribes, nations, genders, races and species, while actively critiquing any fetishization of alterity so beloved of much posthuman theory." [21]

I kind of admire this perversity of wanting to challenge everyone and everything even at the risk of being marginalised or branded a traitor to the human race. Not that such a charge would much bother MacCormack, who sees the concept of treachery as an active negation of the negative (our species having allegedly "betrayed the very concept and value of life at its most basic definition" [4]).

Ironically, however, for a woman who makes a virtue out of disloyalty, she stays philosophically faithful to certain privileged thinkers, including Spinoza, Deleuze, and Guattari, drawing upon familiar terms and concepts from these authors; potentia, desire, ecosophy, etc. This is the same kind of language that I formerly subscribed to and there are themes and sentences in The Ahuman Manifesto that made me nostalgic for my own past, rather than excited about the present or particularly hopeful for the future.

Indeed, MacCormack's ahumanism and my own philosophical musings share a good bit in common; cunt-awareness, gothic queerness, thanaterotics ... etc. However, whilst our obsessions and references may be similar, we view things from very different perspectives and come to very different conclusions; I'm not a vegan abolitionist and I don't, for example, share MacCormack's rejection of reason or regard all truth-claims as a form of (male) violence.

I hope, however, to provide the compassionate reading of her text that she asks for and in the same (inconsistent) tone.  

See: Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the end of the anthropocene (Bloomsbury, 2020). All page numbers given in the text refer to this work. 

To read part 2 of this post (notes on chapters 1-2), click here.

To read part 3 of this post (notes on chapters 4-6), click here.