On Travel/Writing (with a Deleuzian Punchline)

 Have monogrammed trunk will travel 

 

To consider travel writing is one thing: but to conceive of literature as travel is something else; something a bit more philosophically interesting, a bit more Deleuzean ...

 

For Deleuze understood that penser c'est voyager and that the true nomad doesn't need to traipse around the world or migrate here and there; that they move even when standing still and that the most vital trips are in intensity, not space. 

 

Deleuze hinged his theory of travel upon observations from several writers, including: 

 

(i) Fitzgerald, who insisted that travelling - even to remote islands or the darkest jungles - never amounts to a real break if one takes along one's old beliefs, memories, and habits of thought ... 

 

(ii) Beckett, who described it as dumb to travel simply for the pleasure of travelling itself; there had to be a destination of some kind ...

 

(iii) Proust, who said that upon waking the true dreamer has to go and check things out in the world; i.e., what motivates their desire to travel is not to discover new lands, but to confirm the reality of their own nightmares and visions. [1]     

 

Deleuze was also a serious reader of D. H. Lawrence - and Lawrence was both a great traveller and a great writer, frequently overtaken by the necessity to move, although, amusingly, his own savage pilgrimage ultimately brought him to the conclusion that travel is a splendid lesson in disillusion. [2]

 

Of course, that hasn't stopped Lawrence scholars packing their suitcases and floating from international conference to conference, in order to endlessly discuss Lawrence's world tour and talk about his uncanny ability to connect with the so-called spirit of place. 

 

For as Deleuze once joked, that's how academics travel - by generating a lot of hot air ...   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Gilles Deleuze: 'Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel', Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 77-78.  

 

[2] Readers interested in knowing more about Lawrence's thoughts on travel can click here for a related post to this one.  

This post is for Adam Peter Lang.

 

 

On Background Radiation (in a Cultural-Philosophical Sense)

The Cosmic Microwave Background (NASA 2010)

 

 

I. 

 

Readers may recall the big hoo-ha created by physicists Sokal and Bricmont back in the late '90s when they criticised (and indeed mocked) philosophers and postmodern theorists for their misuse - as they saw it - of very precise scientific and mathematical concepts. 

 

Their book - first published in French as Impostures intellectuelles (1997) - polarized opinion, with those in the scientific community largely supportive, whilst opponents in the humanities argued that Sokal and Bricmont lacked understanding of the work they subjected to analysis and of how concepts are malleable and can thus be subtly (and sometimes playfully) reworked within different contexts and that doing so isn't necessarily a sign of charlatanism, ignorance, or pretension on behalf of thinkers such Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Irigaray. 

 

Nor is this reworking simply a sign of cognitive relativism and anti-scientific prejudice within European philosophy (though that's not to deny that such may exist). Using scientific terminology within a non-scientific context doesn't deny the original technical meaning, it expands the meaning and/or transfers it into a new environment (the terms are revealed as having a metaphorical component and capacity). 

 

Sokal and Bricmont may find this peculiarly offensive for a number of reasons, but then, on the other hand, some of us may find their linguistic puritanism and Francophobia equally objectionable. As Derrida rightly pointed out at the time, science and philosophy have long discussed their differences, but never with such an ugly emphasis placed on the nationality of individuals. 

 

(Derrida also stated, for the record, that there was neither relativism nor a naive rejection of reason in his work and hoped that in the future the debate might be pursued more seriously and with greater dignity: "at the level of the issues involved" [1].) 

 

 

II.                  

 

So why did I bring all this up once again? Well, because I have just been reading an interview with Peter Sloterdijk in which he mentions his fondness for the concept of background radiation ... 

 

Now, as Sokal and Bricmont would be quick to point out, this is a scientific term which refers to a measure of the ionising radiation present in the environment at a particular location originating from a variety of sources, both natural and artificial.

 

And as I'm sure they'd be equally quick to point out, Sloterdijk is a philosopher and cultural theorist - not a physicist - and, worse, he's a German thinker in the tradition of Nietzsche and Heidegger, so really shouldn't be allowed to use the concept of background radiation at all. 

 

Nevertheless, use it he does and in his own unique way which, hopefully, illustrates what I was saying above:

"I really like the concept of 'background radiation', especially applied to cultural structures. Astrophysicists may rack their brains about what background radiation means in cosmological terms. However, that there is something like cultural radiation from a darkened background - patterns of order that are so deeply hidden in the oldest things, so strongly embedded in the sediment of what we think is self-evident that they seem to escape any reflection [...]" [2]

 

As an interesting example of this cultural background radiation, Sloterdijk points to the fact we still use a technique of temporal ordering that was first developed in ancient Babylon:

 

"We live in the Babylonian week apparently naturally, without thinking that it was predicated on a theology of the Heavenly Seven, that is, on a kind of septemtheism, which means the worship of seven deities. The seven day week is a cultural creation because, unlike the day, the month and the year, it has no cosmic basis, but represents a freely made decision that fixes the arrangement of social time." [3] 

 

In sum: Sloterdijk nicely demonstrates how you can borrow a term from one discipline and redefine it within another - without in any way harming the original meaning or preventing its continued usage by others.

 

Notes 

[1] See Jacques Derrida, 'Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious', originally published in Le Monde, this short text can be found in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby, (Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 70-72. It can also be found on Reddit by clicking here. 

[2] Peter Sloterdijk, 'With the Babble of Babylon in the Background', interview with Manfred Osten, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), pp. 313-14.

       

[3] Ibid., p. 314.  

Cars (Have You Ever Stopped to Think Who's the Slave and Who's the Master?)

Sleeve for the single 'Cars' by Gary Numan 
from the album The Pleasure Principle  (Beggars Banquet, 1979) 

Click here to play on YouTube

 

I. 

 

After a recent post, someone sent me the following email:

'I don't know who Peter Sloterdijk is, but, one thing's for sure, this so-called philosopher knows nothing about the history of horses, nor how they are still being exploited and abused by human beings even today - particularly those within the racing industry. His overly-fanciful observation on post-historical horses leading lives of leisure at their own pace may have been intended to be amusing, but it ultimately serves to distract from the continuing cruelty and hardship faced by many animals. I suspect this well-paid German professor spends more time riding around in a BMW than he does caring for horses, so should stick to speaking of what he knows - money and machines!'

 

Now, I don't know if my correspondent's suspicions are correct, but, funny enough, Sloterdijk does quite often speak about cars and their cultural and philosophical significance; as symbols, as commodities, as expressions of identity, etc.

 

II.

 

In a 1995 interview [1], for example, he argues that the driver and motor vehicle form a unity in much the same way as previously man and horse formed a unity, as symbolised by the figure of the centaur; that man is always imagining himself as faster and more powerful than he is. The car, in other words, is not simply a means of transport; it is also a means of intoxication. 

But it is also a means of regression, says Sloterdijk, for the car is also a kind of womb, or uterus on wheels and many drivers become aggressive on account of this. For regressed individuals often feel the need to childishly assert themselves; revving their engines, attacking the space, running red lights, dangerously overtaking others, etc., proving they are kings of the road. 

That's why perfectly reasonable people often become raging maniacs behind the wheel and why there will always be fatal traffic accidents; "cars are connected with a kind of archetypal violence" that is immune to all the road safety propaganda in the world. 

 

III. 

 

In a later interview [2], meanwhile, Sloterdijk develops his theory of the car and the reason for its irresistible (quasi-religious) attraction for so many people:

"The car is a machine for increasing self-confidence. [...] The car gives its driver additional power and reach. [...] I think we have to see the vehicles of humans in the first place as a means of idealization and intensification, and consequently as a kinetic anti-depressant. The big demand for automobility certainly comes from people who want the vehicle for increasing their radius of action and capability. [...] Two out of three movements are escapes: people drive to their lovers, they take trips to the countryside and on holiday, they go visiting, or they use their car for letting off steam. We could almost think people use the car as revenge on the heavy demands of settledness."   

Whilst I understand that, I tend to agree with D. H. Lawrence that, ultimately, the soul needs to travel naked and light and on her own two feet along the open road - not by car. I also agree with Deleuze who insists that the most important trips are measured in terms of intensity, not distance covered, and that the true nomad moves even when standing still.

Sloterdijk knows this, I think, which is why he acknowledges that people who belong to more magical cultures "achieved their exalted feelings with soul journeys, and no driving licence exists for that". However, Sloterdijk - himself a motorist - concedes that:

"The automobile can also take us to places we have never visited before. It is not just the means of regression [...] it can also give us access to new, open places, it can also be a medium of coming-into-the-world. [...] If they were only a means to re-create a womb-like situation and return to an inner world, then they would merely be 'homecoming vehicles'."

But cars are not just that; they can also be a means for many people of making a great escape or exodus of some kind, though this undoubtedly requires more than a Sunday morning drive to Homebase. In fact, one might suggest - like Ballard - that what it requires is not so much a car ride as a car crash; i.e. something which "harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status" [3] into a single event. 

Commenting on the delirious, sacrificial aspect of driving, Sloterdijk notes that road deaths will never result in a call for the banning of cars; "because mobility is actually the occult kinetic religion of modernity". Thus, at present, there's not the slightest chance of restricting the desire to build still more roads and manufacture still more vehicles, no matter how many lives are lost, or how much damage is done to the natural environment. 

 

Having said that, even the age of the horse eventually passed ... 

 

Notes

[1] Peter Sloterdijk, 'Uterus on Wheels', interview with Walter Saller, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), pp. 23-24. The line quoted from is on p. 24.

[2] Peter Sloterdijk, 'We're Always Riding Down Maternity Drive', interview with Mateo Kries, in Selected Exaggerations, pp. 40-48. The lines quoted are on pp. 42, 43, and 47.  

[3] J. G. Ballard, 'Sci-Fi Seer', interview with Lynn Barber, in Penthouse, Vol 5, No. 5, (May 1970), pp. 26-30. Click here to read in full.

Readers interested in this topic might also like to read David Gartman's essay entitled 'Three Ages of the Automobile: The Cultural Logics of the Car', in Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 21, Issue 4-5, (October 2004), pp. 169-195.   

Simply Nietzschean

As Simon Solomon is keen to remind me, any attempt to cloak oneself in the skin of another is to violate Zarathustra's greatest teaching: Lose me and find yourselves. No master worthy of the name wants disciples and, in truth, there was only ever one Christian and he died on the cross.

And so, what then are we to make of Foucault's remark in an interview shortly before his death in 1984: I am simply a Nietzschean ... Doesn't this already betray an essential misunderstanding of Nietzsche and his philosophy?

I don't think so. Foucault wasn't a slavish disciple of Nietzsche's, nor an uncritical reader and so this statement is rather more complex than it first appears. It helps, I think, to read the sentence from which the remark is taken in full:

"I am simply a Nietzschean, and I try as far as possible, on a certain number of issues, to see with the help of Nietzsche’s texts - but also with anti-Nietzschean theses (which are nevertheless Nietzschean!) - what can be done in this or that domain. I attempt nothing else, but that I try to do well." [1]

I suppose what Deleuze says of D. H. Lawrence, we might also say of Foucault: it's not that either writer simply imitated Nietzsche; rather, each picks up the arrow shot into the future by the latter and then shoots it in a new direction.

So it is that, whilst finding new targets of his own, the weapons (i.e. genealogical methods) that Foucault adopts, originate in Nietzsche: "Many things change or are supplemented from one initiative to another, and even what they have in common gains in strength and novelty." [2] 

Ultimately, what enables one to call oneself a Nietzschean without embarrassment (but always with a dash of irony) is the fact that there was no one Nietzsche with whom one might identify.

Thus, what it means, to call oneself a Nietzschean, is that one is loyal only to fluidity of thought and a multiplicity of perspectives; that one likes wearing masks as a philosopher; that in all things, one values style above all else. It doesn't mean you have to have a big letter S tattooed on your chest or grow a walrus-handlebar moustache ... 

Notes

[1] Michel Foucault, 'The Return of Morality', trans John Johnston in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. by Sylvère Lotringer (Semiotext(e), 1996), pp. 465-73. The lines quoted are on p. 471. This interview was conducted by Gilles Barbedette and André Scala on 29 May 1984 and was originally published as 'Le Retour de la Morale', in Les Nouvelles littéraires, (Paris, 1984), pp. 36-41. 

[2] Gilles Deleuze, 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, (Verso, 1998), p. 37.

D. H. Lawrence: In Sickness and in Health

D. H. Lawrence: self-portrait (June 1929) 

It was Nietzsche, of course, who first put forward the idea that artists and philosophers are physicians of culture for whom phenomena are symptoms that reveal a certain state of forces. Without explicitly saying so, I think that D. H. Lawrence also recognised that the critical (in the literary sense) and the clinical (in the medical sense) are destined to enter into what Deleuze describes as a new relationship of mutual learning.

In other words, as a writer, Lawrence is essentially interested in the relation literature has to life, with the latter conceived as an ethical principle that is both impersonal and singular.

Arguably, because he had such a frail physical constitution and was so often ill, Lawrence was always vitally concerned with the possibility of a greater health; something over and above the bourgeois model of wellbeing tied to keeping fit and staying safe; something which must be attained or activated within the self via a struggle with sickness. And perhaps because - like Gethin Day or the man who died - he so often came close to death, he was always fascinated by life as a phenomenon of pure immanence that is lived beyond good and evil and which has had done with judgement.

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence is of the belief that there are some ideas one cannot possibly think except on the condition of being a decadent and harbouring deep resentment against life (even whilst concealing oneself behind the highest idealism). On the other hand, there are also feelings one cannot possibly experience or express unless one is a strong and healthy individual who affirms life (even if committing deeds that the herd regard as immoral).  

In sum:

(i) Bad life, as Lawrence understands it, is an exhausted and degenerating mode of existence that judges life from the perspective of its own sickness; the good life, by contrast, is a rich and ascending form of existence that is able to transform itself and open up strange new possibilities or becomings.

(ii) In so far as every great work of literature provides a model of living, then they must be evaluated not only critically, but clinically. Thus it is that the question that links literature and life (in both its ontological and ethical aspects) is the question of health.

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. 

Douglas Murray: The Madness of Crowds

Bloomsbury (2019)

Douglas Murray's new book is conveniently divided into four main sections headed by a single term (dramatically printed in bold even on the contents page): Gay - Women - Race - Trans

Each of these terms plays a foundational role within contemporary culture; they are the four pillars of postmodernity; the terms to which all paths lead and all other signifiers refer. Whilst they provide meaning and allow individuals to forge identities, they are also the true causes of the collective insanity that lies at the root of what is happening today.

That - in brief - is Murray's central argument; one with cultural and socio-political aspects, but which essentially remains a philosophical argument to do with the collapse of old values in an age after God, when even the secular narratives that initially promised to fill the void no longer retain our belief.     

The problem is, Murray is not a philosopher; he's a journalist and public intellectual. And so his analysis tends to be common sensical rather than conceptually challenging and when he does mention philosophers by name, it's only ever in passing and nearly always in a dismissive manner - never once does he engage with their ideas or even think it might be worthwhile to do so.

And that's a real problem for me - even if, broadly speaking, I agree with Murray on many points and share some of his concerns. Perhaps if he did read the work of thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze with serious critical attention he might understand a little better why we are where we are and avoid the anglophonic arrogance that he and others of his ilk (Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro) are prone to.          


Gay

According to Murray, Foucault's views on homosexuality are deeply confused. I don't think that's true: I think, rather, that Murray dislikes any degree of ambiguity and, in the end, Foucault is a little too radical and a little too queer for his liking. For whereas gays, such as himself, want social acceptance and pride themselves on their respectability, "queers want to be recognized as fundamentally different to everyone else and to use that difference to tear down the kind of order that gays are working to get into" [37]. 

For Murray, irresponsible queers - along with radical feminists, black militants and trans activists - take things too far; instead of seeking liberal consensus and some form of historical resolution, they just keep banging on about power and politics, identity and intersectionality:

"Such rhetoric exacerbates any existing divisions and each time creates a number of new ones. And for what purpose? Rather than showing  how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren't very good at living with each other." [4]

Murray's fear is that this risks a backlash that would threaten some of the advances made in civil rights and sexual freedoms that he supports: "After all it is not clear that majority populations will continue to accept the claims they are being told to accept and continue to be cowed by the names that are thrown at them if they do not." [232]

That's a very reasonable concern, but, ironically, some critics would argue that his moral conservatism is part of that reaction.    


Women

Murray's wish that we might all just get along is developed in his chapter on women and the relations between the sexes. But he seems to think that we'll never get along until everyone acknowledges the innate biological differences between men and women (including aptitude differences) and accepts these as a basis for ordering society, rather than the "political falsehoods pushed by activists in the social sciences" [65]. 

The problem is, of course, that even biological facts are subject to cultural and socio-political interpretation. And even if we could identify biological facts concerning sexual difference in and of themselves, Murray doesn't provide any reason why they should be inscribed within society and its institutions as natural law; why biology should become not only a determining factor but a destiny.  

Murray also worries far too much about silly slogans, hashtags, and memes on social media that betray an apparent war on men being fought by man-hating fourth-wave feminists: things such as 'men are trash', 'kill all men', and references to 'toxic masculinity', etc.

I'm surprised Mr. Murray has the the time or patience to read the latest tweets from Laurie Penny et al and would suggest he spend less time on social media (which, in an interlude following this chapter, he describes as a massively disruptive force that dissolves the public/private distinction and ultimately leads to group think and mass hysteria).*     

Race

It's not only queers, feminists, and the tech giants of Silicon Valley who are foisting us off with "things [we] didn't ask for, in line with a project [we] didn't sign up for, in pursuit of a goal [we] may not want" [120], it's also those anti-racists who "turn race from one of many important issues into something which is more important than anything else" [122], writes Murray.  

Just when black and white people were learning to live together in the same perfect harmony as the keys on Paul and Stevie's piano, along came critical race theory and black studies to fuck things up with "a newly fervent rhetoric and set of ideas" [122] that don't simply celebrate blackness, but problematise (and even demonise) whiteness.

Why, it's almost as if race were a political issue to do with power and privilege ... things which, as we have noted, Murray wishes to turn a blind eye to; just as he wants us all to be colour-blind: "the idea of which Martin Luther King was dreaming in 1963" [126]. To get beyond race is such a beautiful thought, says Murray. But, obviously, it's not going to happen: not least of all because race isn't simply a question of skin colour, as Murray acknowledges; it's a time bomb.  
 

Trans

Murray writes:

"Among all the subjects in this book and all the complex issues of our age, none is so radical in the confusion and assumptions it elicits, and so virulent in the demands it makes, as the subject of trans [...] trans has become something close to a dogma in record time." [186]

That, unfortunately, seems to be the case: and whilst I have no problem with trans individuals, dogma and/or doxa, should always be challenged - even genderqueer dogma.

Anyway, moving on ... I was fascinated to discover that:

"One of the most striking trends as the trans debate has picked up in recent years is that autogynephilia has come to be severely out of favour. Or to put it another way, the suggestion that people who identify as trans are in actual fact merely going through the ultimate extreme of sexual kink has become so hateful to many trans individuals that it is one of a number of things now decried as hate speech." [196]

This surprised (and disappointed) me as someone who has written positively about autogynephilia and eonism in the past on Torpedo the Ark: click here, for example. Why must everything - even changing sex - be presented as a spiritual journey and an issue to do with human rights?**

Call me old-fashioned, but I'd rather think in terms of desire and seduction, perversion and pathology. And if I were a transwoman, the last thing I'd want to be is some kind of sexless figure like a nun whose newly constructed vagina is a sign of sacrifice and suffering rather than a site of potential pleasure.    

To conclude: The Madness of Crowds is an informative and interesting book, rather than an important and inspired one; a piece of intelligent journalism, rather than a work of philosophy. A book that ends with a call to love, as if it weren't precisely such idealism that got us into the mess we're in today.

Notes

* Murray will later go on to say: "The arrival of the age of social media has done things we still have barely begun to understand and presented problems with which we have hardly started to grapple. The collapse of the barrier between private and public language is one. But bigger even than that [...] is the deepest problem of all: that we have allowed ourselves no mechanisms for getting out of the situation technology has landed us in. It appears able to cause catastrophes but not to heal them, to wound but not to remedy." [174]

One suggests Murray read (or re-read) Heidegger's classic 1954 essay The Question Concerning Technology, which might deepen his thinking on this point and also provide him with a wider perspective. I suspect, however, that Heidegger would be another of those philosophers that he'd dismiss for lacking clarity (though he could hardly accuse the latter of being a crypto-Marxist).  

** Murray provides the answer to this question:

"If people have a particular sexual kink then [...] it is hard to persuade society that it should change nearly all of its social and linguistic norms in order to accommodate those sexual kinks.  [...]
      If trans were largely, mainly or solely about erotc stimulation then it should no more be a cause to change any societal fundamentals than it would be to change them for people who get a sexual thrill from wearing rubber. Autogynephilia risks presenting trans as a softwear [i.e. non-biological] issue. And that is the cause of the turn against it. For - as with homosexuals - there is a drive to prove that trans people are 'born this way'." [198-99] 

Readers might be interested in a post on Douglas Murray's previous book, The Strange Death of Europe (2017): click here.        

Guilt-Shame-Fear (Notes on the Spectrum of Cultures)

Henri Vidal: Caïn venant de tuer son frère Abel (1896)

Someone writes in response to a recent post on the subject of pride:

'I don't quite understand what your problem is. Would you prefer it if, rather than feeling proud of who and what they are, individuals who have historically been not only marginalised but victimised due to their sexual orientation or racial identity, went back to experiencing themselves in terms of guilt, shame and fear?' 

This is a reasonable question and I'm not going to pretend that any of these emotions - typically associated with negative self-evaluation - are particularly pleasant for anyone to experience.

But, having said that, it's interesting to note that cultural anthropologists have categorised three distinct types of social order founded upon the individual's sense of guilt, shame, and fear and shown how these feelings - rooted in our evolutionary history - can very successfully be refined and exploited. 

In a shame society, for example, keeping up appearances and retaining one's honour is all-important; the prospect of publicly losing face, or the threat of being made an outcast, is what maintains the smooth running of the system. This can be contrasted with a fear society, in which control is secured with overt physical force; an individual who steps out of line will not merely be shamed or ostracised, but violently punished for their actions.

In a guilt society - which for those of us living within a Christian moral culture is the type of society with which we will be most familiar - the key is to construct a subject with a moral conscience; i.e., a subject capable of knowing the difference between good and evil and who accepts responsibility for their own actions, having been endowed with a free will. Judgement comes from within and the threat of punishment exists not only in this world and this life, but in the next world or afterlife.

It's possible - and may very well be desirable - to think of a future society that isn't located on this cultural spectrum of guilt-shame-fear. Indeed, having read Reich, Marcuse, and Deleuze, I'm well aware of such possibilities. However, these days I'm increasingly sympathetic to Freud's pessimistic view that there will always be a fundamental tension of some kind between the requirements of civilisation and the individual's wish for instinctive freedom.

In other words, it now seems to me doubtful that any society can function without some mechanism of repression and that neurosis, discontent and feelings we might prefer to do without are simply the price we pay for living alonside others; that culture is always synonymous with the internalisation of cruelty.


Notes 

Darwin regarded shame, for example, as a universal human trait that speaks of our common evolutionary history as a species, even if he carefully avoided upsetting his Victorian readership by discussing the radical implications of this (something that Nietzsche certainly didn't shy away from doing, declaring that not only were our precious feelings ultimately of animal origin, but so too were our moral values). See Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872): click here to read online.

The idea of distinct social orders founded upon guilt and shame was popularized by Ruth Benedict in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Houghton Mifflin, 1946), who studied Japan (as an example of the latter) in contrast with the USA (as an example of the former). 

For Freud's views on the self and society, see his classic work Civilization and Its Discontents (Penguin Books, 2002). 

Diversity: What Would Nietzsche Think?

Image: Scotty Hendricks (2018)  

bigthink.com

I.

The word diversity is frequently used today, particularly by those who regard it as a value and like to signal their politico-moral correctness even if that means denigrating or disprivileging their own people, culture and history.

In order to illustrate this latter point, one might refer to the recent case of students at the University of Manchester who painted over a mural of a poem by Rudyard Kipling and replaced it with a verse by the African-American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou.

This was done in the name of anti-racism - for Kipling, a well-known British imperialist, was said to dehumanise people of colour - and in order to celebrate the diversity of a student body looking to reclaim history by - quite literally - whitewashing it.            

I don't here wish to discuss the merits (or otherwise) of either Kipling's or Maya Angelou's work; nor do I want to express my concerns about historical revisionism and literary censorship. But I would like to say something further about diversity and the idea of multiculturalism, from a post-Nietzschean perspective ...


II.

If confronted with a world in which everyone was retreating to their own safe space from which to assert an identity (on the basis, for example, of sex, gender, race or religion) whilst, at the same time, speaking about the benefits of ever-greater diversity within society and culture, I suspect that Nietzsche would feel himself compelled as a philosopher to argue that greatness belongs only to the individual or the people who find a way to stylise chaos and give birth to a dancing star - the latter being a sign of unity within diversity.

Nietzsche loves words like difference, plurality and multiplicity; he thinks of the will to power as composed of a large number of competing forces, flows, and desires. But - and this is important to understand - he doesn't affirm diversity as a good in itself nor as a goal to be aimed at.

On the contrary, Nietzsche insists that culture, for example, has to be unified; that the only alternative to such is a civilization based upon a barbarism of styles and tastes and incapable of ever producing art or sovereign individuals. Nietzsche opposes the systematic anarchy, the aggressive philistinism, and the Volkerchaos that characterise European modernity and are the symptoms of culture's extermination.

Thus, whilst he may have announced the death of God and thereby decentered and demoralised the world, he still believes in shared ethical bonds between people. His nihilism is not the same as the nihilism of those who devote themselves to free markets and money-making, or to the neo-Platonic fantasies of science and technology; those who lack the ability to act under the constraint of a single taste or - as Heidegger would say - to dwell poetically upon the earth.


III.

Deleuze is right to say that, for Nietzsche, history can be read as the process by which "reactive forces take possession of culture or divert its course in their favour". That the will to diversity can therefore be understood as part of an ongoing slave revolt in morals and the overcoding of active forces by the modern State - that coldest of all cold monsters that thrives at the expense of culture and sucks the life out of people in the name of human rights and globalism.

Nietzsche is aggressively opposed to all this and when faced with the ways in which societies become decodified and unregulated, makes no attempt at recodification. But, again, we must be careful here. For whilst Nietzsche makes no attempt to recodify along old lines or patch the holes ripped in the great social umbrella, he very much wants to bring together newly liberated forces onto what Deleuze terms a plane of consistency and regain mastery over the chaos that has been released.

Why? Because for Nietzsche culture is above all unity of style in all the expressions of a people and this requires harmonious manifoldness - not fake diversity built upon idiotic identity politics and an ugly jumble of all styles and peoples. Multiculturalism is not just a failed experiment, it's an absurd fallacy.

Of course Nietzsche's thinking has anti-democratic and illiberal implications - and he wasn't shy about saying so. But I would suggest we need to urgently think about these questions and not simply attempt to close down conversation by calling anyone who does so a fascist or a supporter of the alt-right. 


Notes

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, (The Athlone Press, 1992), p. 139.

Isn't it Grand! Isn't it Fine! Graham Harman's New Theory of Everything

(Penguin, 2018)

According to Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is first and foremost a form of realism. It is thus a counter-idealism. But it's not a materialism; more a weird and intangible metaphysics in which "reality is always radically different from our formulation of it, and is never something we encounter directly in the flesh" [7]. The fact that things withdraw from direct access into ontological darkness is the central principle of OOO. 

Harman acknowledges the obvious objection that arises: that when you posit an unknowable reality, there's really nothing you can say about it; for any propositions advanced are ultimately unverifiable. But he doesn't let this objection worry him too much. For hey, philosophy isn't a natural science or an accumulated body of knowledge; it's a love of wisdom, man, and OOO is an attempt to share the love and pass the word along. 

As an openly erotic form of aesthetics, OOO is thus heavily reliant upon metaphor to make its case. Or, more accurately, to make itself as alluring as the objects it describes in order to seduce those open to its often provocative - if implausible - ideas. Harman particularly prides himself on the fact that his new theory of everything has emerged as a major influence on individuals in the arts and humanities, "eclipsing the previous influence ... of the prominent French postmodernist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze" [8]. 

And, as if that weren't enough, the charisma of OOO has even "captured the notice of celebrities" [8]. So it's obviously very important. Or fashionable. You won't read about Harman's flat ontology or the quadruple character of existence in Nature anytime soon, but you're quite likely to see him on the cover of Art Review and, who knows, maybe you'll one day come across a spread on him in Hello! (perhaps in the private London residence where he once entertained Benedict Cumberbatch).

Never one for false modesty, Harman compares his writing style in this new OOO for beginners book from Penguin, to that of Sigmund Freud. For whatever one thinks of Freud's psychological theories, "he is an undisputed master of the literary presentation of difficult ideas, and is well worth emulating in at least that respect" [14].

That's true. But it's also much easier said than done. And, sadly, Harman doesn't quite pull it off. He hopes that reading his book will be as "pleasant an experience as possible" [17], but this is frustrated by the fact that it is often extremely tedious. Even passionate objectophiles with a good deal of sympathy for Harman's project, will, I fear, struggle to enjoy this text.

Which is a shame. For whilst I'm not convinced that his post-Heideggerean philosophy offers the best hope of a theory whose range of applicability is limitless, Harman and his fellow-travellers do at least offer an opportunity to reimagine a mind-independent reality - even if we can never accurately describe such in the language of literal propositions and must, therefore, either resort to poetic speculation or be reduced to silence, as Wittgenstein famously acknowledged.   

In Sickness and in Greater Health (Or Something I Need to Get Off My Chest)

First I had a flu-like virus that left me with a dry ticklish cough and a dry stuffy nose. This mutated into a chest infection, for which I was prescribed anti-biotics. This left my bronchial system so inflamed and hypersensitive, that it triggered some form of asthmatic reaction. 

So now I've been told to suck on an inhaler and puff away up to four times a day, like a real fucking invalid. Masculine pride (or what women often term stubborn stupidity) dictates that I ignore medical advice. But a tight chest and inability to breathe properly gradually erodes all virtue; indeed, what else is sickness ultimately other than a loss of dignity?  

On a positive note, the dry ticklish cough has gone. Unfortunately, the nasal congestion continues; this despite repeatedly shoving a Vicks inhaler up my nose. If Nietzsche is right and human genius resides in the nostrils, then I've subjected my creative intelligence to a huge quantity of menthol, camphor and Siberian pine needle oil during the last weeks.

Hopefully, this might make my thinking clear and cool (though I doubt it). What it has done is make me much more sympathetic to D. H. Lawrence and Gilles Deleuze who suffered terribly with their chests and often experienced breathing difficulties (not that I'm equating my condition with theirs, both of whom had tuberculosis).        

It's no wonder that both authors seemed to be so obsessed with fresh air and subscribed to a vitalist philosophy built upon the Nietzschean notion of die große Gesundheit - "a new health, stronger, more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health".

This sounds nice. But it's important to know that such a health grows out of sickness and is in fact an affirmation of the latter.  

See: Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), Section 382. 

Note: Lawrence eventually coughed and spat his way out of this mortal life on 2 March, 1930, aged just 44. Deleuze committed suicide on 4 November 1995 after his chronic respiratory condition(s) became increasingly severe and even writing became difficult.  

Torpedo the Ark: Thoughts on the Occasion of a 1000th Post

Orizuru (origami cranes)

Those who love stats or genuinely believe that numbers have occult significance, will be interested to learn that this happens to be the 1000th post on Torpedo the Ark. But whilst this may provide a convenient opportunity to reflect back and look forward, I'm neither nerdy nor superstitious enough to get unduly excited about this conventional milestone.

As for the suggestion that this might be not only a good time to stop writing the blog, but delete it entirely - leaving no trace behind, in order that I may begin a new cycle of work and a new phase in my creative life ... Well, I have to admit, the first (nihilistic) part of this millenarian fantasy rather appeals. But the second part - the hope of a new beginning - strikes me as laughable; the kind of thing subscribed to by those happy-clappy idiots who think the universe rewards optimism and enthusiasm, or that the future is full of promise.

And so, Torpedo the Ark will continue firing on all fronts and I will keep writing posts and stringing sentences together in the same way that Sadako Sasaki liked to fold and tie paper cranes - though not in the expectation of being granted a wish by the gods, obviously.

As for dreams of good luck and rude good health ... The first of these things, says Lawrence, is desired only by the vulgar and the desperate; whilst the latter - understood in its reactive sense as the absence of suffering - is less honourable than death, according to Deleuze.    

In sum: torpedo the ark means cultivate pessimism, curb enthusiasm, affirm misfortune, and seek out that strangely fragile greater health which allows Dasein to face up to its own mortality with angst, but also with courage and with joy.  

In Praise of the Postcard and Correspondence Art (with Reference to the Work of Jack Logan and Kosmo Vinyl)

To and Fro: Correspondence Art  by Jack Logan and Kosmo Vinyl

The Lyndon House Arts Center, Athens GA, 

June 3 – July 29, 2017 

I. In Praise of the Postcard

There's always something intimidating and depressing about a letter sealed in an envelope. You just know it's going to make a demand upon you, even if it's from a loved one and has been sealed with a loving kiss (especially if it's from a loved one and has been sealed with a loving kiss).

But still today - in this age of tweets, texts, and emails - nothing makes happier than receiving a hand-written, hand-delivered postcard through the letterbox having completed its mysterious journey through time and across land and sea.

Back in the day, one could look forward to receiving numerous postcards - seemingly infinite in their variety - from friends with pleasing regularity. But now, it can be many months before a little fragment of open correspondence perfectly combining the visual and the textual lands on the mat.

Admittedly, I have fewer friends now. But, unfortunately, this doesn't account for the universal decline in the number of postcards going to and fro. The fact is, hardly anyone can be bothered to send 'em anymore - and that, I'm ashamed to say, includes me (although, in my defence, it could be argued that these short texts published here are a form of postcard - they even have a little picture - though I'm sure ardent deltiologists would dispute this).    

So, hats off then to those rare few individuals who keep the practice of making and sending postcards going and, indeed, raise it to the level of a minimalist art form; individuals such as the NYC based artist and former Clash City Rocker Kosmo Vinyl and his correspondent Jack Logan, a cartoonist and recording artist based in Athens, Georgia.   

Their joint exhibition of around fifty postcards with an amusing pop-cultural frame of reference and aesthetic, is currently showing at the Lyndon House Arts Center (Athens, GA) and I encourage all readers who can go, to go and show their support.  


II. On the Politics of Correspondence Art (aka Mail Art)

Of course, whilst the works of Logan and Vinyl are original, mail art itself is nothing new and what they're doing is by no means unique. Ray Johnson, for example, began posting small prints of abstract drawings inscribed with poetry to friends and key figures in the art world during the mid-1950s, giving rise to what eventually became known as the New York Correspondence School.

During the following decade, many artists began sharing work in a subversively generous manner, creating networks of free exchange rather than exhibiting or selling their art in the conventional fashion. This cheap and cheerful practice grew into a global phenomenon and expanded to include telegrams, faxes, emails and blog posts as well as postcards and packages.

Sadly, by the 1990s, mail art had peaked in terms of real world activity. Not only was the price of stamps becoming ridiculous, but many artists saw the new forms of digital communication and social media as where the future lay.

And, to be fair, the internet does allow a faster dissemination of ideas and encourage the involvement of a much larger number and greater diversity of people, thereby realising the egalitarian promise of mail art, which is all about openness, inclusion and an anarchic spirit of anything goes. Indeed, even in its virtual incarnation, mail art remains vehemently opposed to all forms of regulation, judgement, and censorship, so one can well understand its attraction for punks like Kosmo Vinyl.

Ray Johnson's remark that mail art has no history, only a present, is absolutely true. For whilst it's a utopian movement, its utopianism is what Deleuze would describe as immanent - i.e., it exists now/here rather than no/where - and is to be found precisely in the bonds of friendship that are formed between correspondents.

It's this fraternal model of democracy that artists like Logan and Vinyl who work and play within the eternal network, invoke every time they send postcards to and fro. As Chuck Welch would say: "Their shared enterprise is a contribution to our common future."


Notes

See: Chuck Welch, Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology, (University of Calgaray Press, 1995). 

Readers interested in knowing more on this subject should visit the web page of the International Union of Mail Artists (IUOMA): click here. 

On Trolls and the Task of Philosophy

Internet Troll by Leon Strapko

deviantart.com

Originally, a troll was a type of grotesque-looking creature depicted within Norse mythology and Scandinavian folklore, often living in isolated caves or under old bridges and intent on causing harm to any human beings - or billy goats - who had the misfortune to encounter them.

But today, in online circles, a troll is a type of moron who likes to pick fights, disrupt on-topic discussion and insult people by posting often malicious, usually anonymous and nearly always extraneous comments, full of bigotry and wilful ignorance. Often claiming to represent the majority of ordinary decent folk, trolls pride themselves on their common sense and their plain-speaking.

Either way, it's advisable to avoid or ignore them and certainly not do anything to encourage their nastiness. Unfortunately, this isn't always possible. Sometimes, therefore, one is obliged to confront trolls. Indeed, if one is a philosopher, one has a certain ethical obligation to do so. For as Deleuze liked to remind his readers, the essential task of philosophy is to degrade stupidity and expose all forms of baseness of thought; to make these things shameful.

And so, if set upon by an ugly troll - perhaps disguised in the form of a squalid porcupine or an elderly badger (for trolls are excellent shape-shifters, changing form as easily and as often as they bend or break the rules governing intellectual exchange) - my advice is to stand your ground, like a philosopher.

And then shoot to kill - as much as one may dislike having to do so ...         

On Revolutionary Fun (A Message for May Day)

If you make a revolution, writes Lawrence, don't act with ascetic militancy in the name of some grand ideal, or in order to seize control of the economy; make it simply for the pleasure of gobbing in the eye of those who would assert authority and the anarchic joy of upsetting the old order.

As a manifesto, this will doubtless strike many terrorists of theory interested in preserving the pure order of politics and the serious business of revolution, as puerile and irresponsible; the sort of romantic tosh that only a poet can get away with.

Nevertheless, it rather nicely anticipates the poststructuralist thinking that flourished prior to, during, and after the festive upheaval of May '68 and, indeed, encapsulates the insouciant nihilism of punk as conceived by a Situationist-inspired Malcolm McLaren in the mid-late Seventies.    

What unites Lawrence with Deleuze and ties Anti-Oedipus to Never Mind the Bollocks, is a perverse refusal to conform to the accepted way of doing things as prescribed by tradition (be it a literary, philosophical, or artistic tradition); they challenge and change the terms of the debate and shift the zone of combat, discrediting old idols in the process.

But above all, these figures and these works show us that we do not have to be sad or self-serious in order to be radical. Thus, paraphrasing Lawrence if I may: If you want to torpedo the ark, don't do it in ghastly seriousness, don't do it in deadly earnest - do it for fun.


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'A Sane Revolution', in The Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, (Penguin Books, 1977). 

Nietzschean Notes on the Question of Power

The question of power is, for Nietzsche and those who write within his shadow, one of primary importance and the attempt to formulate and advance a critical conception of power beyond the reactive representations of moral idealism remains a real concern. That is to say, a conception free from what Lawrence describes as the superficial contempt for power which most of us experience due to the fact that we moderns only know dead power. Live or active power is worthy of esteem. It is not brute force, which is base and tied to bullying authority or what Deleuze identifies as emaciated forms of prohibition.

This is the key: to rethink power outside of currently accepted values and as more than that which restricts, prohibits, and denies. For power, as Foucault pointed out, has somewhat ironically been made subject to a repressive hypothesis and conceived as poor in resources, sparing in its methods, and incapable of invention. Only when we liberate our thinking on power will we see that what makes power so intoxicating is the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no; rather, "it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasures, forms of knowledge, produces discourse". 

In other words, power keeps us alive and in touch with one another acting as it does as the great productive network running throughout the social and political body. This is why Lawrence insists that power is not only prior to love, but that the latter is ultimately called into being by the former; "the first and greatest of all mysteries". 

Jesus failed because he didn't understand this; didn't experience the joy of an erection on a sunny day. Indeed, rather than thinking of power as a form of eternal delight, he taught that goodness is a form of impotence and passivity and evil is the active springing from energy which violates all human attempts to stabilize the free movement of life. 

Nietzsche was having none of this. Like Blake (and like any other poet worth his salt), he recognised that man needs what is most evil in him if he is to develop what is also best and most beautiful in him. Be happy, he says, and you will be good (once more reversing Christian teaching). But one is only happy when one feels oneself powerful and a little bit demonic via an expenditure (not an accumulation) of energy - shining like a tiny star with brilliant intensity, but to no end. 

Power is thus not something one can consciously seek out or seize and possess; power, rather, is that which can only be accepted as a gift flowing into us from behind and below - and flowing just as vitally away from us forever beyond our control. And humanism is everything that would limit this and accustom us to see the figure of Man behind every event and phenomenon.

Nietzsche's anti-humanist philosophy doesn't consider goodness or pleasure as its primary aim. Nevertheless, as indicated, his notion of joy connected to his concept of power allows for a new ethic to emerge. Or perhaps not so new: ethos anthropoi daimon, as Heraclitus would say ...

Note: this post is an extract taken from my study of Nietzsche's project of revaluation entitled Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010) and those who are interested in reading more on the subject of power and the politics of evil - as well as tracking down references - might like to consult part II, chapter 5 of this text. 

Psychasthenia

Cover of the 1930 pamphlet produced by Georges Bataille and others 
in response to André Breton's attack upon them in the 
Second Surrealist Manifesto (1929)

The more I read about that castrated old lion and false revolutionary André Breton, the more I dislike him. Not loving love as a moral absolute and not believing that the marvellous can exist separately from the morbid and the monstrous, means I can't possibly embrace his concept of surrealism either.

Does this mean that I too suffer, like Bataille, from a form of decadence or that which Breton, with his clinical background, delighted in identifying as psychasthenia (a mental disorder characterized by irrational phobias, obsessions, anxieties and, apparently, a love of flies)? 

Maybe. 

But anyone who has read Nietzsche knows that these things are advantageous traits in an artist or philosopher (that whilst strength preserves, only sickness advances). Indeed, better death, as Deleuze says, than the good health we have been given and which is so valued by the bourgeois. 

And better even Bataille's excremental philosophy than Breton's angelic surrealism that is ultimately suited only to mystics, poets, and idealists.       

D. H. Lawrence's Becoming-Bat

Lawrence doesn't like bats, but this doesn't stop him writing about them in his poetry in a manner of real philosophical interest. For rather than anticipate Thomas Nagel's question and attempt to say what it's like to be a bat, Lawrence allows a proto-Derridean play of différance to infuse his writing, constructing a dummy creature with a mask-like face which parodies and subverts the very notion of an essential batness.

In the short poem, 'Bat', for example, Lawrence first confuses them for swallows flying late in the Italian twilight and sewing the shadows together. But then he realises his mistake:

Swallows?

Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop ...
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in the flight 
And serrated wings against the sky,
Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,
And falling back.

Never swallows!
Bats!The swallows are gone.

This realisation that he's watching bats and not birds flitting about the Ponte Vecchio and flying overhead, gives Lawrence an uneasy creeping in his scalp. He thinks of them as little clots of darkness with wings like bits of umbrella:

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.
Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!

They may very well be symbols of happiness and good fortune in China, but not so for this former resident of Eastwood.

In the much longer and more amusing poem 'Man and Bat', Lawrence develops his chiroptophobia whilst again doing something of philosophical and literary import. The impure frenzy with which a bat flies round and round his room in mad circles of delirium disgusts and disconcerts him, but it also allows Lawrence to demonstrate not merely how experience might be transfigured into art and given poetic expression, but how writing is inseparable from a process of becoming.

Lawrence, that is to say, establishes what Deleuze terms a zone of proximity with the bat, just as he does elsewhere with various other birds, beasts and flowers. He becomes-bat as the bat in turn becomes-rag or old umbrella. This is not something which is easy to accomplish. But to affect a becoming of this kind is something which all great writers must achieve. Indeed, this is the very mark of literary greatness.  


Notes

For an excellent reading of Lawrence's poetry in terms of différance and intertextuality, see Amit Chaudhuri's study, D H. Lawrence and 'Difference', (Oxford University Press, 2003). I am grateful to Chaudhuri for showing how - contrary to the conventional view - Lawrence is not a simple-minded nature lover concerned with understanding the beauty and essence of real animals, but, rather, in artificially constructing creatures in and on his own terms.

'Bat' and 'Man and Bat' may be found in Volume I of the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence's poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (CUP, 2013), pp. 294-300.