On the Quickness and Allure of Objects

Phoebe Stadler: Saucy (c. 1920)

collections.vam.ac.uk

Was ist Schnelligkeit? asks Heide. And it's an interesting question.

I suppose, for me at least, the quality of quickness is something I understand in relation to the work of D. H. Lawrence and in terms of an object-oriented ontology.

In his essay 'The Novel' (1925), Lawrence describes the quick as an invisible flame of impersonal presence that flickers in the words and deeds of the individual. Unless, that is, they belong to the legions of the undead; living corpses with ready-made sensations who drive to work, chew their fast food, stare at the screen, and engage in idle talk that merely passes the word along (what Heidegger calls Gerede).

These men and women are awfully lifelike, but lifeless; for they have no quickness, writes Lawrence.

It's important to be clear on this point: the corpse-bodies Lawrence fears have not become less than human, but, strange as it may sound - unless one hears this phrase with Nietzschean ears - all too human (which is to say, all too limited and cut-off). Quickness is, therefore, certainly not the same as human being; in fact, it's the non-human element of man which is found in all things.

Lawrence likes to call it the God-flame, but I prefer to describe it as object-allure, if only because I find his religious language unhelpful and off-putting.* Either way, it means we have two types of object: (i) those that are quick (though not necessarily alive in the conventional organic sense of the term) and (ii) those that are dead (again, not in the sense that they lack or have lost life, but in the sense that they aren't quick or very alluring - and so don't really affect us in the same way).

Lawrence writes:

"In this room where I write, there is a little table that is dead: it doesn't even weakly exist. And there is a ridiculous little iron stove, which for some unknown reason is quick. And there is an iron wardrobe trunk, which for some still more mysterious reason is quick. And there are several books, whose mere corpus is dead, utterly dead and non-existent. And there is a sleeping cat, very quick. And a glass lamp, that, alas, is dead." 

Thus, interestingly - according to Lawrence - there are degrees of quickness; though he claims not to know how or why this is so, even if he knows for certain that it's the case. Probably, he speculates, the quickness of the quick lies in a "certain weird relationship" between objects; one that is "fluid, changing, grotesque or beautiful".

Again, I would discuss this relatedness in terms of allure; objects attract and lead other objects, including ourselves, into temptation and it's in this way that we and all things come into touch. The more they entice us, the stronger their allure, the quicker they are; the more we come into touch - with "snow, bed-bugs, sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food, diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightning, and toilet-paper"** - the quicker we are.

Of course, even dead objects retain some power of attraction and can seduce us - they like to be tickled as Lawrence puts it - but ultimately they lead us not into touch but into the void. Dead objects, in other words, tease but don't deliver the goods; they are indifferent to those doing the tickling and drain the quick of their quickness. They are strange attractors, like black holes.       

Notes

* I like the word allure as it is drawn from the language of seduction, which is the appropriate language in which to discuss objects philosophically. One might also note that the modern English word quick is of Germanic origin and is related not only to the Dutch term kwiek, meaning sprightly, but the German word keck, meaning saucy; another term belonging to the language of seduction. In sum, quickness goes beyond merely a question of speed - it's more than Schnelligkeit - just as it's more than vitality.

** With the use of a list like this, composed of seemingly random objects, Lawrence wishes to show that there are no absolutes; all things exist relative to one another upon a flat ontological field and/or within a general economy of the whole. We can call this a democracy of objects, like Levi Bryant, or a democracy of touch, like Lawrence.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Novel', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 177-90. Lines quoted p. 183.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Cry of the Masses', Poems Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 511-12.

A Letter to Heide Hatry (Parts III-V)

Heide Hatry

III. The Truth of Masks

I don't want to appear dim, but I'm not sure I understand this opening sentence from your third text: "whatever sort of opposition one might want to level against the subject-object/presence-absence dichotomy ... it, too, will be inherently fissured by its origins".

In as much as I do understand it - you're saying that both terms in a binary originate, circulate and ultimately coincide within the same conceptual schema or identity - I agree. That's why I try not to engage in oppositional thinking and why I'm not interested in Hegelian dialectics, nor in simply inverting terms (even if this can be fun and may well be a necessary first step in a more profound deconstruction, as Derrida concedes). 

As for the question of the face, maybe you're right and I need to rethink it. Certainly there are faces I love to look at. What Barthes felt about the face of Greta Garbo, I feel about the face of Marlene Dietrich for example; it's a pure and perfect object that appears to be untouched by time or finger-tips, unmarked by traces of emotion. It's a face that belongs to art, not to nature and which has all the cold and expressionless beauty of a mask; a face that has not been painted so much as sculpted. An archetypal and totemic face. A fetish object.

"And behind a mask there is still an identity, an identity that has chosen a mask ..."

No, sorry, I don't agree with this. The truth of masks is far more radical and disconcerting than that; it's the truth that masks don't hide faces or disguise identities, they mask the fact there's nothing behind them. That's why the invisible man is a more interesting and, to those who fear the thought of non-being, a more terrifying figure than the phantom of the opera. When the latter removes his mask he merely reveals scars. But when the former strips away his bandages, Dasein is obliged to confront the ontological truth that it rests upon the void of non-being (sein Nicht-mehr-dasein, as Heidegger writes).

It's this that produces Angst - particularly in those egoists who "dare not die for fear they should be nothing at all" [D. H. Lawrence] and in those who hope to still find a smiling face beneath the bandages, behind the mask, or in the ashes.


IV. The Lugubrious Game

As for the base material from which you compose your "micro-mosaics", my friend, the poet and translator Simon Solomon, is planning to write of ghost, of flame, and of ashes in the manner of (and with reference to) Derrida and I don't wish to anticipate his remarks. However, you might like to read my Reflections from a Sickbed, in which I muse on the problem of corpse disposal and what to do with cremains.

I think, were I an artist, I might be tempted to mix ashes with excrement and smear the combination across a large white canvas to show how what we leave behind us when we die - when we become that shipwreck in the nauseous - is not a face, but a slimy and disgusting residue, as when a snail or slug passes by. Or, to put it more crudely, a shit stain. (Obviously, I'm thinking back to Bataille here and to Dalí's 'The Lugubrious Game'.)

You say that human remains can be "ennobled by art" and maybe they can. But, for me, it's not the job of art to elevate anything belonging to mankind; on the contrary it should bring us back down Pisgah with a bump and remind us of our mortality and material nature; to make us grunt like pigs before the canvas, rather than sigh like angels full of smug self-satisfaction. It's important to realise that when Nietzsche says art is the great anti-nihilistic force par excellence, he implies also that it's a form of counter-idealism; for nihilism is not simply the negation of all values, it's the positing of ultimately hollow ideals in the first place.  


V. Iconography is Never Innocent

I'm glad to hear you don't intend to "freeze the dead in a permanent subordination" to an image. Though it's difficult for me to imagine this won't be an unintended consequence of producing icons in ash that are so realistic in their facial representation and reconstruction. Do you remember how some tribal peoples used to worry that the camera stole their soul? Well I have similar concerns. Indeed, I even have some sympathy with the authors of Exodus warning against graven images and the making of idols etc.

I certainly agree with Baudrillard that, whatever else it may be, iconography is never innocent. In fact, it plays a complicit role in the perfect crime by which he refers to the extermination of singular being via technological and social processes bent on replacing real things and real people with a series of images and empty signs. When this happens, we pass beyond representation (or, in the case of the dead, commemoration) towards obscenity; a state wherein everything and everyone is "uselessly, needlessly visible, without desire and without effect".

I worry, Heide, that those who are indecently exposed in a game of posthumous exhibitionism (you describe it in terms of self-expression and self-revelation) are left without secrets, without shadows, without charm. They become, if you like, ghosts caught up in a commercial art machine ...

Finally, I smiled when you wrote "if, as you seem to contend, the 'goal' or 'desire' of life ... is to merge back into material indifference, we might as well be dead already" - for don't you see that, in a very real sense, we are dead already ... 
 
Yours with respect, admiration, and affection,

Stephen Alexander


To read parts I and II of this letter to Heide Hatry, please click here. 

To read Heide Hatry's extensive series of comments please see the posts to which they are attached: Heide Hatry: Icons in Ash and On Faciality and Becoming-Imperceptible with Reference to the Work of Heide Hatry.

A Letter to Heide Hatry (Parts I and II)

Heide Hatry

I. The Sickness Unto Death

Dear Heide,

Many thanks for your fascinating five-part response to the posts on Torpedo the Ark that referred to your recent body of work, Icons in Ash. I'm touched that you kindly took the time to write not only at length, but with such good grace and critical intelligence. I will attempt to reply in the same manner and to each part in turn. However, I should point out that I'm unconvinced about the possibility (or desirability) of serious discussion: either two people agree - in which case there's not much to say; or they disagree - in which case there's nothing to say. This renders the attempt to exchange ideas narcissistic and futile; a vacuous academic game to be avoided at all costs.

Having said that, there's no need for absolute silence; we can surely keep company and converse without attempting to discuss things and break words apart. It's just a question of bearing in mind this idea of incommensurability and accepting that even speaking subjects who seem to share a language never truly understand one another; that there's always a pathos of distance between things, between people. It's not surprising, therefore, that you fail to "recognise" yourself in my words: for I don't know you. Indeed, if I might be permitted to paraphrase Nietzsche once more, we knowers are unknown even to ourselves ...

You ask if I have "really looked" at your work. Sadly, as I don't live in New York, I've not been afforded the opportunity to do so. I've had to make do with printed reproductions and images online. Perhaps this explains why I haven't "felt" it (though I'm not quite sure I know what you mean by this). Ultimately, it's fair to say that I'm more interested in what you (and others) say about the portraits, rather than the portraits themselves. As I'm neither a practicing visual artist, nor a qualified art critic, you'll have to forgive my insensitivity.   

I'm pretty much in agreement with your remarks on Deleuze and Guattai; certainly theirs was a project critical and clinical in nature and they regarded themselves as cultural physicians. But it should be noted that they have a very unusual understanding of what constitutes health and it doesn't coinicide with the dreary and functional good health which we've been given and which we're endlessly told we have to look after.

In fact, it's an irresistable and delicate form of health that the conventionally robust who eat their five-a-day and visit the gym after work might find feeble and sickly. The key thing is, whilst strength preserves, it's only sickness that advances. That's why we need our decadents, our convalescents, and those artists and philosophers who have returned from the Underworld with bloodshot eyes and pierced eardrums. You mention Artaud and Rimbaud. I might mention others - such as D. H. Lawrence, for example. Theirs may not have been "salutary examples of the good life", but they were vital figures nevertheless. 


II. On Death and Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence       

I'm very sorry if my suggestion that, in calling up the spirits of deceased loved ones, you were seeking to have the last word upset you. It might well be that such a remark displays all of the faults you ascribe to it (banality, reductiveness, wrong-headedness, tone-deafness, remarkable ungenerosity, and wilful misunderstanding). Nevertheless, it surely has to be admitted that the dead, being dead, have no right of reply and cannot give consent.

In fact, one of the irritating things about the dead is that no matter how loud you cry and scream at them, or or how fully you explain yourself to them, they never listen and they never respond. Again, it's not so much rudeness or indifference on their part - it's just how they are (dead).

Obviously, we disagree on this ... It might please you to know, however, that I like the idea of the souls of the dead investing the lives of the living. And of the dead who do not die, but look on and silently help. It might be noted too that I've written sympathetically and approvingly of necrophilia and spectrophilia. But still - with the possible exception of those posthumous individuals who, as Nietzsche says, only enter into life once they've died - I can't quite accept that the dead have a great deal to offer (although, to be fair, neither do the noisy majority of the living). 

Moving on ... I opened my eyes wide in astonishment when you referred to (human) life as the "most glorious phenomenon" - but decided you were only teasing. I mean, Heide, c'mon - you can't be serious! At best life is epiphenomenal - a rare and unusual way of being dead, as Nietzsche describes it. To privilege life over death is just prejudice. I'm all for living life joyfully, but it's only ever a practice of joy before death and the real festivity begins when we make a return to material actuality.

To be clear: I'm not championing that negative representation of death conceived as a form of judgement which comes at the end of a life upon which, as you say, it "exerts an oppressive and defeatist effect". Rather, I'm speaking of death as a form of becoming (a line of flight and a dissolution). You mention at this point in your comments Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence and, clearly, it speaks of both types of death which Keith Ansell-Pearson characterises as heat death and fire death. Please note, however, that there's never any attempt at reconciliation in Nietzsche's work.

I wouldn't say Nietzsche's eternal recurrence is a "life-affirming" teaching (even you put this phrase in scare quotes); what it affirms, rather, is repetition and the difference engendered by it (the Same - das Gleiche - is not a fixed essence and does not refer to a content in and of itself). Nor is it a cheerful teaching - it's a form of tragic pessimism; there's no promise of salvation or any hope of transcending existence precisely as is. The happiness it promises is forever tied to pain and suffering (as well as moonlight, spiders and demons).      


To read parts III-V of this letter to Heide Hatry, please click here. 

To read Heide Hatry's extensive series of comments please see the posts to which they are attached: Heide Hatry: Icons in Ash and On Faciality and Becoming-Imperceptible with Reference to the Work of Heide Hatry. 

On Faciality and Becoming-Imperceptible with Reference to the Work of Heide Hatry

Scarlett Johansson as Lucy (2014)

I've been told that my post on Heide Hatry's Icons in Ash was unkind and unfair. And, further, that my refusal or inability to recognise their philosophical interest and aesthetic power either perverse or shameful:

"Do you not see how the very materials from which they are composed deconstruct the life and death binary? If only you'd drop your anti-humanistic posturing for a moment, you might learn to appreciate their uncanny, bitter-sweet beauty and significance."

Let me, then, offer a few further remarks on Hatry's ash portraits, attempting to make clear the basis for my criticisms and concerns ...


I: On Faciality

I have written elsewhere on this blog about my Deleuzean dislike of the face: click here and here, for example.

In sum: the face has long held a privileged and determining place within Western metaphysics that I think we need to challenge. For whilst we might fool ourselves that each face is individual and unique, it isn’t. Rather, it’s a type of social machine that overcodes not just the head, but the entire body, ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance. The smile and all our other familiar facial expressions are thus merely types of conformity with the dominant reality.

And so, when Heide Hatry insists on the primacy of the face and reconstructs it in all its complexity and vulgarity from ash, I have a problem. Asked if it was necessary to create facial images rather than do something else with the cremains, she replies:

"It's absolutely necessary; and it's necessary that the portrait is as realistic as possible because ... the face is where we understand communication is happening ... for capturing all the subtleties that make us human."

Hatry thus openly subscribes to the ideal moral function of the face; as that which reveals the soul and allows us to comprehend the individual: "Other ways of reading a person are incidental or filtered through this", she says - not incorrectly, but in a manner that suggests she's entirely untroubled by this. 


II: Becoming-Imperceptible

For me - again as someone who writes in the shadow of Deleuze - it's crucial to (i) rethink the subject outside of the moral-rational framework provided by classical humanism and (ii) escape the face and find a way of becoming-imperceptible. Thus, rather than drawing faces in the dust and displaying a sentimental attachment to personal identity, artists should be helping us experiment with different modes of constituting the self and new ways of inhabiting the body.   

Further, they should be helping us form an understanding of death that is entirely inhuman and faceless and which opens up a radically impersonal way of being linked to cosmic forces: a return to material actuality, as Nietzsche says; i.e. merging with a universe that is supremely indifferent to life. To think death in terms of becoming-imperceptible is ultimately to privilege ashes over the epiphenomenal phoenix that arises from them (despite the beauty of its feathers).

It doesn't mean "returning indistinguishable ashes to the particular" and vainly attempting to keep alive what was "in danger of being lost or forgotten". The idea that art exists in order to secure "the sense of a person, of her or his individuality, to lovingly preserve that quality even in death, in memory, and with it the integrity of the human lineage through generations", is anathema to me.

I think, at heart, most of us - like Sade - desire to be completely forgotten when we die, leaving no visible traces behind of our existence. As Rosi Braidotti puts it, central to posthumanist ethics lies evanescence (not transcendence) and the following paradox: "that while at the conscious level all of us struggle for survival, at some deeper level of our unconscious structures, all we long for is to lie silently and let time wash over us in the perfect stillness of not-life".

To be everywhere and nowhere; everything and nothing; to vanish like Lucy or the Incredible Shrinking Man into the eternal flux of becoming  - that's better than ending up ashen-faced, is it not?       

Notes

Rosi Braidotti, 'The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible', in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin Boundas, (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 133-59. To read this essay online click here.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The University of Minnesota Press, 1987); see chapters 7: 'Year Zero: Faciality' and 10: 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ...'

Mark Pachter, 'A Conversation with Heide Hatry', in Heide Hatry, Icons in Ash, ed. Gavin Keeney, (Station Hill in association with Ubu Gallery, New York, 2017), pp. 76-91. 

Re: Luc Bresson's film, Lucy (2014), of course it's shot through with crackpot science, Hollywood hokum and idealism of the worst kind - what Nietzsche would think of as Platonism for the people. But it at least hints at the form of becoming towards which all other becomings aim - the becoming-imperceptible. It's just unfortunate it ends with an idiotic text message - I am everywhere - which implies omnipresence in terms of personal consciousness, rather than impersonal materiality.    

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Heide Hatry: Icons in Ash

Two portraits by Heide Hatry (2009): Paul Schmid and Stefan Huber from the Icons in Ash series

(Loose ash particles, pulverized birch coal and white marble dust on beeswax)

New York based artist Heide Hatry is, despite her thanatological obsessions, all too human at heart. It's not surprising, therefore, that she aims to transform objects into subjects and to provide the impersonal dead with new, posthumous identities that are literally fixed in ash.

Regarding death as a terrible abdication of self or a humiliating loss of face, Hatry has determined that the dead be memorialised by providing a smiling likeness one more time: a sort of selfie from beyond the grave that she describes in iconic and shamanic terms; potent images that allow communion with the ethereal presence of lost loved ones.

She summarizes her project of facial reconstruction in the following vitalist terms:

"I want to reintegrate life and death: to touch death, work with death, to be an artist of and for death, to let it speak in its mundanity, its grandeur, its familiarity and its mystery, its uniqueness and its universality, to redeem it from oblivion, to give it its own life again."

Clearly, she has absolutely no intention of letting the dead bury the dead or even letting the poor cunts rest in peace; rather, she's going to insist that they look her in the face and fulfil their personal obligations. And so she resurrected her father, to whom she felt connected at the very core, followed by close friend Stefan Huber, who, without any consideration of how it might make her feel, topped himself.

And, having raised them from the dead, she then proceeded to give 'em what for - crying and screaming at them, in a vain attempt to ensure they understood the unresolved pain, anger and grief that their mortal departures had caused her. 

 

Since then, having calmed down and apparently found some degree of solace, Hatry has produced several portraits out of cremains for others suffering in the same manner (and for the same reasons) she had suffered; people in need, not of closure, but of a chance to have the last word.

Ultimately, despite what the many admirers of her work believe, Hatry's portraits are not profound meditations upon death; they are, rather, one final opportunity for recrimination: How could you leave me, you bastard!

See: Heide Hatry, Icons in Ash, ed. Gavin Keeney, (Station Hill in association with Ubu Gallery, New York). Lines quoted and phrases echoed are from the artist's preface: 'Icons in Ash: From Art Object to Art Subject'. 

Readers interested in Heide Hatry's work should visit her website: heidehatry.com

See also the follow-up post to this one in which I outline my philosophical concerns with Hatry's ash portraits in greater detail: On Faciality and Becoming-Imperceptible ...