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.   

The Four Drakes: Part 2: Nick and Gabrielle

Drake is an Old English surname, derived from the Anglo-Saxon term for serpent, draca, and thus etymologically related to dragon (and not to the word for a male duck). There have been a number of illustrious individuals by the name of Drake, including Sir Francis Drake and the comic entertainer Charlie Drake, both of whom we discussed in part one of this post: click here. 

Below, I wish to discuss a famous pair of siblings by the name of Drake, beginning with the younger brother ... 

Nick Drake (1948 - 1974): First the Day after Tomorrow Must Dawn for Me

Posh singer-songwriter and musician, Nick Drake, is a fine example of what Nietzsche terms a posthumous individual - i.e., one who only comes into their own and finds fame once they're dead.   

The prodigiously talented Drake signed to Island Records whilst studying English literature at Cambridge, releasing his debut album - Five Leaves Left - in 1969. By 1972, he had recorded two more albums - Bryter Layter and Pink Moon - neither of which sold more than 5000 copies on initial release.

The fact that he was extremely reluctant to promote the material by playing live and giving interviews to the music press, obviously didn't help matters. But one suspects that such reticence was more due to the chronic shyness and depression from which he suffered than any desire to create a mystique about his own person. 

After the failure of his third album, Drake retreated to his parents home and, aged 26, he took an overdose of amitriptyline pills, a prescribed anti-depressant. A verdict of suicide was given and although this has been challenged by some who knew him, his sister Gabrielle prefers to believe he made a conscious decision to end his life, rather than consider his death the result of a tragic mistake.

Five years later, the release of a retrospective album entitled Fruit Tree (1979) triggered a critical reappraisal of his work and by the mid-1980s artists including Robert Smith and David Sylvian were naming Drake as an important influence. Thirty years later, and he's now sold over two-and-a-half million records in the UK and US markets.

Gabrielle Drake (1944 - ): Serious Glamour 

To be honest, Nick Drake is no more my cup of tea than Charlie Drake; though again, that's in no way to deny or denigrate his obvious talent and intelligence. He's just too much of an introspective hippie for my tastes (Nick - not Charlie).

But his older sister on the other hand, Gabrielle - now there's someone I have always loved to see on screen; be it as the purple-wigged Moonbase commander Lt. Gay Ellis in UFO (1970-71), or as motel boss Nicola Freeman in Crossroads (1985-87). Her appearance in a 1967 episode of The Avengers as Angora and, a decade later, as Penny the schoolteacher in an episode of The New Avengers, is also worthy of note and something for which I'm grateful.

I'm grateful too for the fact that, unlike some actresses, Gabrielle was always happy when young to get her kit off and not above appearing in a number of seventies sexploitation films, including Au Pair Girls (dir. Val Guest, 1972), in which she has a leading role as Randi Lindstrom (that's right, ha-ha! she's Danish).

Perhaps of more interest to my more literary-minded readers will be the fact that she also appeared as a passenger (sacrifice) in a short film entitled Crash! (dir. Harley Cokeliss) and based on a story in J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition. The movie also featured the author talking about ideas that he would later develop into one of the great twentieth-century novels. As one critic rightly noted, the presence of Miss Drake brought serious glamour to urban alienation.

Finally, it needs to be said that Gabrielle has worked tirelessly to ensure her brother's name and music live on and it's clear that, rather touchingly, she remains his biggest fan. In 2014, she published a memoir of her brother and in 2018 she collected a Hall of Fame Folk Award on his behalf.

I wish she were my sister ...

Notes

The Avengers episode mentioned above was from Season 5 and entitled 'The Hidden Tiger' (first shown in the UK on 3 March 1967); The New Avengers episode was 'Dead Men are Dangerous' (first shown in the UK on 8 Sept 1977). 

To visit the official website of the estate of Nick Drake, please click here.

To visit the Gabrielle Drake fansite on Facebook, click here. 

Vajankle

 The vajankle designed and sold by Sinthetics

The vajankle - as the name suggests - is a sex toy designed for podophiles; a synthetic foot that comes complete with an inbuilt vagina. And a French pedicure. Whilst I'm sure it was developed with good intentions (i.e. to give pleasure), I think it fails for two reasons. 

Firstly, due to its almost-but-not-quite natural appearance it triggers an uncanny valley response (i.e. a feeling of revulsion). Thus the vajankle is aesthetically disturbing; it makes one think of heavy-footed zombies stumbling about or corpses lying in a morgue, rather than bare-footed beauties with dainty feet and lively little toes. 

Doubtless there are necrophiles aroused by the former and by fantasies of mutilation, but most foot fetishists love the vitality and playfulness of pretty feet as they dangle on the end of lovely legs; they wish to kiss and caress the objects of their desire, not chop them off.

Secondly, the vajankle completely misses the point of a fetish for a genuine devotee; it isn't merely a substitute for something else or a type of foreplay before the real event - i.e. genital penetration. Podophiles love feet and have no interest in sexual intercourse as traditionally conceived; they're not looking to ejaculate within a vagina, be it real or otherwise. 

In other words, they subscribe to an entirely different economy of bodies and their pleasures than those who automatically insert their penises where they've been instructed to put them. Foot fetishists, like paraphiliacs in general, want to find new uses for old organs; transforming sex into an exploratory ordeal in which, as Ballard puts it, the body becomes a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities. 

Placing a fake pussy into a rubber foot is, therefore, a banal and laughably naive gesture; both unimaginative and reactionary. There's nothing depraved or deviant about it. It's an attempt to bring the fetishist back into line by reinforcing the view that nothing is more gratifying or exciting than the membrane of a vagina (an orifice designated as the only legitimate and natural place of orgasm). 

Ultimately, what makes perverts philosophically interesting is the fact that whilst they may want to masturbate at every given opportunity, they also want to build bodies without organs and to have done with the judgement of God ...   

The Case of Joyce McKinney

One of the figures who captivated my adolescent imagination and who has subsequently continued to shape my adult understanding of sexuality, was twenty-seven year old American beauty queen Joyce McKinney; a woman who achieved tabloid notoriety in the UK due to her unusual relationship with a young Mormon missionary, Kirk Anderson, in the summer of '77.  

Abducted with an imitation revolver from the steps of a Mormon meetinghouse in Surrey, Mr. Anderson reported to the police several days later subsequent to his escape, that he had been chloroformed and driven to a cottage in Devon, where he was fastened to a bed with a ten-foot chain and mink-lined handcuffs by Miss McKinney - with whom he had previously had a brief romantic relationship - and forced to be her sex slave (something he claimed to find extremely upsetting).    

Without wishing to make light of kidnap, false imprisonment, and indecent assault - or even to cast doubt on the veracity of Kirk Anderson's story - there were not many teenage boys in Britain at the time who didn't envy him and wish that they too could be subject to a crime of passion and perversity at the hands of a former Miss Wyoming.

Arrested on 19 September, McKinney denied all police charges, claiming her former lover had, in fact, fully consented to his part in this kinky escapade. Released on bail for health reasons, she fled the country with an illicitly obtained passport, disguised in a wig and glasses whilst pretending to be a deaf-mute. Two years later she was picked up by the FBI, having returned to the United States. Although not extradited, the McKinney case was eventually heard in a UK court and, having been found guilty of assault under the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, she was sentenced in absentia to a year in jail.

Coverage of events in the British press was extensive and highly sensational. The Daily Mirror famously published the above photo of McKinney, taken during her nude modelling days, on the front of one of their editions, causing a Church of Scotland working party on obscenity to object that this was the sort of image that would have only been sold to adults under plain sealed cover ten years earlier.

Such has been the continued fascination with this tale, that Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris recently directed a documentary about it - and the media circus surrounding it - entitled Tabloid (2010). Although made with McKinney's co-operation, she subsequently filed a lawsuit against Morris and his producer, Mark Lipson, on the grounds of defamation; claiming that the film portrayed her as a kinky prostitute and an insane sex offender. 

Whether the film does or does not do this and whether such a characterization does or does not constitute defamation of character, for me, Joyce McKinney - now living in Palm Springs with her cloned dogs - will always be an object of great affection. As I think J. G. Ballard once wrote, those events and those people which impress themselves upon the imagination of a boy in his fourteenth summer will stay with him for life.

Crash (Towards a New Economy of Bodies and their Pleasures)

Nadja Auermann by Helmut Newton

I understand, philosophically, the attraction for scar tissue, amputation, and prosthetic limbs and how some are aroused by the prospect of bone, flesh, and metal forming an intimate alliance in a cyborg future.

And I would lend my support to those who - either from necessity or boredom - dream of morbid new sexualities, in which perverse pleasures and mutilated forms of beauty become possible for the first time; pleasures and forms unknown and unimaginable to the able-bodied and regular-featured who have been preserved by fate into normalized good health and a fully functioning organism.

To speak of such will require a new type of language, combining the clinical, the poetic, and the pornographic. Ballard calls it the language of invisible eroticisms and attempts to articulate the first terms in his brilliant novel Crash. 

The beautiful thing about this work is that it helps us transcend feelings of disgust, shame, or guilt and move beyond a crippling identification of ourselves with genital sexuality. It anticipates the emergence of new erogenous zones all over the body and characterizes vaginal and anal coition as forms of nostalgia. 

Is it really so immoral or unnatural to to want to find a new use for old organs? I don't think so. And it's rather a sweet thought, is it not, that we might find an air vent as inviting as the warmest organic orifice?