Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

Jamie Reid: Lies

As our recent study of three great liars - Nietzsche, Twain, and Wilde - demonstrated, lying is an art essential to the functioning of society and, indeed, necessary for the preservation of human life in a violently chaotic and inhuman world.

But just as liars come in various guises, so too does lying come in different shades; although most people tend to think here as elsewhere in terms of black and white. Whilst both types of lie are intended to mislead or deceive, there are, of course, important differences between them. 

White lies are an attempt to induce pleasure or, at the very least, protect from unpleasantness; they are a form of affiliative falsehood, often motivated by kindness. Black lies, on the other hand, are an attempt to manipulate and/or exploit the other in order to gain a personal advantage or benefit, regardless of the cost to the one deceived. At best they have a selfish motive; at worst, a malicious intent.

To the truth fanatic, however, who believes honesty is a matter of policy, even white lies - no matter how small or innocuous in nature - are morally wrong and cause harm in the long run (to others and to the soul of the liar himself). These truth fanatics include all the usual suspects, from St. Augustine to Kant, and they seem to regard lying not only as a sign of moral corruption, but as a perversion of the natural faculty of speech, which is to truthfully reveal the authentic thoughts of the speaker. There are, therefore, no circumstances in which it is right (or harmless) to lie.   

Rather surprisingly, even everybody's favourite neuroscientist-cum-philosopher, Sam Harris, seems to adopt this hardline stance in his work on the subject. Harris argues that we not only radically simplify our own lives but greatly improve society - by deepening bonds of trust - simply by telling the truth at all times. For Harris, even white lies deny others access to reality and many forms of private vice and public evil often begin with a willingness to suspend the truth.
  

Obviously, as a reader of Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde, I don't share this view and find it naive as well as too uncompromising for my tastes. Harris is right, however, to admit that lying, like all arts, is a difficult thing to do well and requires a sophisticated intelligence and imagination. That's precisely why most people stick to the truth most of the time; i.e., honest behaviour is often born of laziness and limited intellectual capacity.

  

Notes

See: Sam Harris, Lying, (Four Elephants Press, 2013).

Musical Bonus: Sex Pistols, 'Liar', from the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, (Virgin Records, 1977): click here ... Your chance to listen to Johnny Rotten getting on his moral high horse and complain about being lied to (by Malcolm and the World). You didn't really expect Fleetwood Mac, did you?

Agnès Gayraud: la philosophe de la pop

Agnès Gayraud / Photo: Vincent Ferrané

It's hard not to love the French philosopher and singer-songwriter Agnès Gayraud; she's French, she's a philosopher, and she's a talented singer-songwriter - so what's not to love?

At any rate, I like her (even if some of her records are a tad too arty and sophisticated - or Simonesque - for my tastes) and I'm very tempted to read her new book, Dialectics of Pop (2019), in which she explores the many paradoxes of pop music and calls for it to be recognised as a modern, technologically-mediated art form that fully deserves to rank alongside film and photography.* 

Oh, and she also delights in taking on the Frankfurt School's chief bore, Theodore Adorno, famous for his dismissal of popular culture; particularly popular music; particularly American forms of popular music, such as jazz. According to her publishers:

"Gayraud demonstrates that, far from being the artless and trivial mass-produced pabulum denigrated by Adorno, pop is a rich, self-reflexive art form that recognises its own contradictions, incorporates its own productive negativity, and often flourishes by thinking 'against itself'."

Pop music may never quite achieve the status that Gayraud wishes for it - and she may struggle to convince many of her fellow philosophers that Kylie should be accorded the serious critical attention given to Kant - but hers is an interesting attempt to make the case.   

Notes

Agnès Gayraud, Dialectics of Pop, trans. Robin Mackay, Daniel Miller, and Nina Power, (Urbanomic, 2019).

* For those less tempted to read Gayraud's 464 page book, there's a convenient 11 minute interview with the author on YouTube in which she discusses the work and summarises her main arguments: click here. 

Play: La Féline, Comité Rouge (Official Video With English Subtitles): click here. Taken from the album Triomphe (Kwaidan Records, 2017), this, I think, is a good example of her work as a singer-songwriter. 

On the Origins of a Solar-Phallic Landscape

S. A. von Hell: A New Day (c. 1985-87)

Someone very kindly emailed to say how intriguing and strangely affecting they found my solar-phallic landscape painted sometime in the mid-1980s and featured on a recent post [click here]. They also requested that I provide some background to the work which, as they rightly assume, wasn't merely imaginative ...

Primarily, the picture has its origins in the work of the writer and artist D. H. Lawrence, who once confessed in a letter to a friend:

"I put a phallus [...] in each one of my pictures somewhere. And I paint no picture that won't shock people's castrated social spirituality. I do this out of positive belief that the phallus is a great sacred image: it represents a deep, deep life which has been denied in us, and is still denied."

This brief remark encapsulated my philosophical aesthetic at the time and provided a kind of mini-manifesto.

Secondly, the picture was very much influenced by my love of Killing Joke, particularly during the period beginning with Fire Dances and ending with Brighter Than a Thousand Suns. I bought the three albums released before this period - and the first two albums that followed - but my beautiful obsession with the band was at its most intense and uncompromising between 1983-87, i.e., the pagan years, when I subscribed to an eco-apocalyptic model of Romantic primitivism tinged with Nazi occultism.

The oak tree foliage at the side of the picture was an idea I took from the cover to the Killing Joke single from which I also lifted the title, A New Day (1984) - see image below. 

Finally, the painting was born also of my reading of Jung's writings on the solar phallus and the collective unconscious; in other words, it was meant to be an image with archetypal significance. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, let me try to briefly explain ...    

One of Jung's favourite stories concerned a paranoid-schizophrenic patient with suicidal tendencies named Emile Schwyzer, who had spent most of his life in and out of mental institutions; a man who believed that stars were composed of dead souls and that the Earth was flat and surrounded by infinite seas.

One day, Schwyzer reported a particularly striking hallucination, in which the sun seemed to possess an erect penis that moved back and forth and caused the wind to blow. This vision stayed with Jung, although he was unable to fathom its meaning until he became aware of a similar solar-phallic image within the ancient Roman mystery religion centred on the god Mithras. Then, it all made perfect sense and everything clicked into place; here was a compelling piece of evidence for the existence of a collective unconscious.   

At the time - i.e., in the mid-1980s, when I thought Jung was a genius rather than a crank - I was happy to buy into all this, despite numerous problems with the actual details of the story and with Jung's celebrated theory (a theory that has more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese, as James Hillman acknowledges).

What Jung is essentially doing, is extending Kant's categories of reason to the production of fantasy; archetypes are conceived as categories of the imagination and analytic psychology is thereby revealed as a form of transcendental idealism with mytho-hermeneutic knobs on. Not my cup of tea at all; certainly not now, when the last thing I would paint - if I were to ever pick up a brush again - would be a solar-phallic landscape.       

Notes 

The letter by D. H. Lawrence to Earl Brewster (27 Feb 1927) can be found in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 648-49.  

(E. G. Records, 1984) 

Gallows Corner (Reflections on Capital Punishment and Lessons in Paganism)

I.

Living as I do just north of the notorious road junction known as Gallows Corner - a large roundabout with five exits, a flyover, a nearby retail park, and an above average number of collisions -  mean my thoughts often turn to the subject of capital punishment; particularly in the wake of some ghastly local crime, such as the murder of Jodie Chesney ... 

I'm not suggesting that they should demolish the drive-thru KFC and re-erect the gallows as a place of public execution, but it has to be asked what should be done with violent felons who have placed themselves outside of the law and society and what role cruelty, punishment and death (as a form of truth) should play within the socio-legal space.


II.

Historically, as Foucault notes, public executions were always about more than justice; they were a theatrical display of force within a system founded upon a notion of sovereignty. But we, of course, no longer live in such a world; as citizens and as subjects, we are are constituted by a very different regime of power - one that has given itself the task (and the right) to administer life, rather than take it.

Such a regime - let's call it liberal humanism - prides itself on its ability to sustain and coordinate life within a system of law and order: "For such a power, execution was at the same time a limit, a scandal, and a contradiction." It's because this is the case - because having to execute a prisoner is an embarrassing sign of failure - that most Western democracies have abolished capital punishment (and why those states that still carry out executions do so behind closed doors as a joyless, bureacratic procedure witnessed only by officials and a few selected individuals). 

It's not that they - we - have become more humanitarian or more squeamish; death isn't carefully evaded or hidden away within our culture due to a heightened moral sense or some peculiar form of modern anxiety, but due to the fact that death is that which frustrates (bio-)power's desire to micro-manage every aspect of an individual's life. 

III.

Again, I'm not saying that we should attempt to turn the clock back and resurrect violent spectacles or what Nietzsche would term festivals of cruelty, though one suspects that here in Essex - home of the witch trials - there would be an enthusiastic audience for such.

I'm just reminding readers that, as Foucault suggests, public executions were once an occasion also for the exercise of popular power; a chance for citizens to directly vent their anger and make their views known; to not only rejoice in the execution of a criminal, but to mock those who act with pretensions of higher (universal) authority.   

Perhaps there is still something important to learn from Lyotard's lessons in paganism after all ...


IV.

By the term paganism Lyotard refers to a style of thinking which affirms the idea of incommensurable differences founded upon an ontology of singular events. For Lyotard, all things - including crimes - should be considered on their own terms, without attempting to arrive at a universal law of judgement that can make sense of (or do justice to) each and every unique happening.       

In other words, paganism is a kind of godless politics; one that abandons One Truth and One Law in favour of a multiplicity of specific judgements that have no pre-existing (ideal) criteria to refer back to. This would, arguably, allow us to develop a kind of post-Nietzschean legal sytem wherein judgement becomes an expression of an active and affirmative will to power.   

I have to admit that I find it difficult to see how this plurality of judgements would work in practice, but that might simply be because I lack the constitutive imagination to do so (a Kantian notion that Lyotard also invokes in his work on paganism).

See:

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998); see Part Five: 'Right of Death and Power Over Life'.

Jean-François Lyotard, 'Lessons in Paganism', The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin, (Blackwell, 1998). 

The Three Questions

A teacher in France kindly wrote to say how much she enjoys reading Torpedo the Ark.

She also shared an insight into the kind of questions her pupils sitting their philosophy exam this summer are expected to answer and closed her email by suggesting I might find it amusing to address one or more of the topics myself.

And so, not wanting to disappoint and always happy to accept a challenge, I've selected three of the six questions that Mme. Stas sent and provided (brief) answers ...  

1. Is desire the sign of our imperfection?

No: desire is a term of folk psychology and is thus a sign of our clinging to false beliefs concerning human behaviour and cognitive states. In other words, it's a sign of superstition (and idealism) rather than imperfection (or Original Sin).   

2. Is it necessary to experience injustice to know what is fair?

No: the necessity (and value) of experience has rightly been interrogated within philosophy. Kant, for example, famously wrote: "Nothing, indeed, can be more harmful or more unworthy of the philosopher, than the vulgar appeal to so-called experience." It is thanks to our ability not only to reason but to empathise that we can recognise injustice without having to suffer such ourselves.    

3. Does culture make us more human?

This is what Mona Lisa Vito would describe as a bullshit question. For it presupposes the human condition outside of culture, whereas humanity is purely a cultural effect; a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea, as Foucault would say.

For Nietzsche, meanwhile, the human being results from a moral-rational overcoding of the flesh and the internalisation of cruelty; i.e., a cultural experiment in discipline and breeding that makes of man an interesting animal. 

I'm not sure I'd get a very good mark with these answers - aware as I am that French students are encouraged (and expected) to consider all sides of an argument before arriving at their own conclusion - but, thankfully, I'm not sitting in a classroom under strict supervision and attempting to pass my baccalaureate. 

Morgenröthe: Nietzsche's Red Dawn

Alicia Dunn: Red Dawn No. 5 (2017)

aliciadunnart.com

I. If Passion Ends in Knowledge then Nietzsche is the Best-Read Man in Town

According to Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's 1881 work Morgenröthe - usually translated into English as Daybreak or Dawn - is the most neglected of all his texts.*

If that's true, then it's a real shame. For it's a brilliant and beautiful book which illustrates how philosophy is, first and foremost, a form of erotics. For what is the pursuit of knowledge if not a passion, suggests Nietzsche; an intense desire to shatter established patterns of thinking and abandon the fears and consoling fictions that have for the greater part of history reduced man to the status of a herd animal.

Nietzsche anticipates "a new dawn in human existence" in which individuals are free to "cultivate their lives in a manner that is conducive to themselves and beneficent to others" [44]. He proposes ways of becoming who one is that involve thinking differently and, just as importantly, thinking critically with regard to the self. It's philosophy as a playful and experimental practice; what he'll term in his next work die fröhliche Wissenschaft.


II. Say Yes to a Single Joy and You Say Yes to All Woe

Nietzsche completed Daybreak in the Italian city of Genoa. He had by this time retired from his professorship at Basel University due to ill health and was living on a very modest annual pension in an unheated garret. His diet was as restricted as his income and consisted mostly of porridge and risotto, followed by more porridge.

Not only did he have to endure extreme cold and isolation, but Nietzsche spent a lot of his time suffering with blinding headaches that lasted for days at a time and caused him to vomit. His only relief was provided by that solitary vice much favoured by Diogenes, but condemned by Kant as an unnatural form of self-abuse. "And yet", writes Ansell-Pearson, "it was under these harsh conditions that he wrote over the course of a year one of his 'sunniest' books" [65].

And this is why one loves Nietzsche: for the fact that he says Yes to life in all circumstances and under any conditions; affirms, in other words, life as an economy of the whole and gives even the most terrible aspects of existence his blessing. It takes an almost inhuman degree of courage to affirm even a single moment or joy, when it's in the knowledge that by so doing we affirm all eternity and every pain, every sadness, every evil.

In sum: Nietzsche constructs a harsh philosophical ethic not only beyond good and evil, but, as Ansell-Pearson argues, beyond solitude and compassion as well; one that rests upon endurance and cruelty. Free-thinking, as he conceives of it, "will, initially at least, plunge people into despair and grief" [111]. But it results at last in happiness and in greatness.

Obviously, this isn't a philosophy that everyone might choose to live by, or be capable of living by: 

"I think it is clear, both from hints he gives in Dawn and says in other texts, that Nietzsche thinks the tasks of free-spirited thinking are ones reserved, and perhaps best reserved, for a few individuals who will constitute what we might choose to call a moral (or 'immoral') avant-garde." [112]


*Note: Ansell-Pearson reminds us that the original German title literally means 'morning redness' and specifies "the precise but fleeting moment at which the sky is aflame with colour and before the red yields to the customary blue or grey. It suggests a time of possibility, invention, inspiration and renewal, in which the freshness of the day augurs a new way of life." [67] 

See: 

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018). All page numbers given in square brackets refer to this book. 

Nietzsche, Dawn: Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality, trans. Brittain Smith, (Stanford University Press, 2011). 

Three Portraits of Naomi 3: Naomi's Fruit Passion

Introductory Note

The three portraits of London-born supermodel Naomi Campbell that I wish to discuss were all taken by David LaChapelle for an issue of Playboy magazine (1 Dec 1999). As one might expect, all are visually stunning and typical in terms of composition and content of LaChapelle's aesthetico-erotic obsessions at this period. Unfortunately, these obsessions - such as his very obvious black girl fetish - rest upon rather questionable sexual and racial politics  ...     

Naomi Campbell: Fruit Passion (1999)

By David LaChapelle

In the third portrait, Naomi is displayed as the ripest, sweetest and juiciest centrepiece in an exotic fruit salad. Lying passively and provocatively, the object of masturbatory male gaze, she invites us to squeeze, taste, and consume her soft, smooth, easily bruised flesh.

The afro wig serves to remind us of her blackness and of the exotic origin of much of the world's fresh produce. But it also adds an element of nostalgia; the photo has a funky seventies feel to it, a period when Playboy was at its peak in terms of circulation and cultural relevance (the November 1972 issue was the best-selling ever edition of the magazine, with sales topping seven million copies).

The seventies was also the decade during which the sub-genre of exploitation movie known as blaxploitation emerged in the United States. Featuring a mostly black cast and originally developed for an urban black audience, the appeal of these movies quickly spread across racial boundaries as white movie-goers learned to love films such as Shaft (dir. Gordon Parks, 1971), and Foxy Brown (dir. Jack Hill, 1974).

The latter starred the undisputed queen of the genre, Pam Grier, in the title role. Foxy was a whole lot of woman whom you wouldn't want to mess aroun' with, seeing as she was the meanest chick in town; a sexy mix of brown sugar and spice who, apparently, would put on ice any man who didn't treat her nice. As one might gather, the film relied upon and reinforced a number of racist stereotypes concerning black women, their sexuality, their sassiness, and their all-too-ready involvement in criminal violence, prostitution, and drug abuse.

Having said that, there are feminist film critics who feel a good deal of respect and affection for Foxy Brown, not least of all because she was a strong and independent African-American woman, fearless in confronting male power, seeking justice, and attempting to protect (or avenge) loved ones to the best of her ability in extremely trying circumstances.

Whilst we might discuss this further in a future post, I'd like to return here if I may to LaChapelle's portrait of Naomi and his pornographic imagining of the female body in terms of fruit ...

There is, of course, a long established tradition in the arts in which this metaphorical comparison is made and sex is equated with food. Indeed, it quickly became a cliché for (predominantly male) poets and painters to compare breasts to melons, nipples to dark cherries, and moist cunts to ripe figs that show crimson through the purple slit, as D. H. Lawrence would have it.

So, LaChapelle is certainly not doing anything groundbreaking. Far more innovative and provocative are the fruit-fingering videos of the artist and vulva activist Stephanie Sarley, which last year caused a viral storm on social media. The less-than-innocent but technically blameless videos depicted a range of fruits, including oranges, limes, lemons, strawberries, apricots, and kiwis, being gently caressed, rubbed, and poked by Sarley until their skins split and juices oozed out.

Ever prepared to act the censor-morons, Instagram ludicrously removed the videos and disabled Sarley's account on several occasions, informing her that they infringed the company's rules governing 'sexually suggestive content'.

You have to smile, for it seems that when a celebrated male photographer places a naked black woman in a fruit bowl and invites the male consumers of a pornographic magazine to objectify her body and ejaculate over her image, before then discarding it - as Kant would say - like a sucked dry lemon, that's socially acceptable. Indeed, the photo is reproduced many times in art and fashion magazines and deemed either a work of stylish eroticism, or a harmless and ironic piece of kitsch.

But when a woman simply posts a short film of her finger penetrating a pomegranate and, in so doing, subtly challenge tired clichés and sexual stereotypes with humour and absurdity, then she can be assured to receive a shitload of vile abuse online and have her work removed by the self-appointed moral guardians of Instagram in the name of defending public decency.        

It's no wonder women - of all skin tones - sometimes get angry ...


Note: those interested in watching Stephanie Sarley's fruit art videos can find them on her official website: stephaniesarley.com  

To read part one of this post - Naomi as Playmate, Bunny Girl and Jezebel - click here.

To read part two of this post - Naomi in the Cat House - click here. 

On the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge in Nietzsche's Early Philosophy

Portrait of Nietzsche as a Young Professor
 University of Basel, 1872

What Nietzsche terms in his early writings the knowledge drive, is something he favours subjecting to strict control. For whilst it powerfully propels modern science, it does so in a promiscuous and indiscriminate manner that is incapable of determining value. To give it free reign is, at the very least, a sign of vulgarity.

The role of the philosopher, therefore, is to act as a kind of guardian and ensure that science serves life and furthers the aim of culture; left unchecked, the will to truth will ultimately result in nihilism. But this subordination of the knowledge drive isn't accomplished by means of metaphysics, or the establishment of a new faith. It requires, rather, the granting to art new powers and responsibilities. 

Readers in the analytic tradition of philosophy who are unfamiliar with German Romanticism, might be surprised at this. But, for the youthful Nietzsche, writing as an ardent devotee of Richard Wagner, philosophy - whilst it might rely upon similar methods to science - is, in its desire to invent beyond the limits of experience, a form of art and a continuation of the mythical drive. It is thus essentially pictorial and not mathematical in its expression.

What's more, according to Nietzsche, the reason why philosophy retains its value - and, indeed, a higher value than science - is because it continues to concern itself with notions of beauty and human greatness. Of course, this makes philosophy a refined form of anthropocentrism; one that transforms all nature into man's own image and posits all being as a permanent correlate of thinking, thereby demonstrating its radical incompatibility with scientific realism.     

Leaving us in no doubt about what this means, Nietzsche writes: "Man is acquainted with the world to the extent that he is acquainted with himself ..." A little later, he adds: "We are acquainted with but one reality - the reality of thoughts". And, as if to show how Kantian he remained in his epistemology, he concludes: "The world has its reality only in man: it is tossed back and forth like a ball in the heads of men." 

Nietzsche doesn't at this point flatly deny the existence of the thing-in-itself or dispute the possibility of facts, he simply argues that because objects are mind-dependent, we can say nothing about them outside of this relationship. In other words, for Nietzsche - as for other sceptics - we can only know reality as it appears to us. Consequently, Nietzsche privileges art over science, as art, of course, is all about appearances and attempting to form representations of reality (i.e. pictures of the world that are ever more complete).  

Unlike Kant, however, Nietzsche feels sensory knowledge is more than mere illusion; that it's adequate to the truth of the world and that the mind mirrors what is, because the mind of man has itself evolved out of matter and not out of thin air. The mind might structure and colour things, but it doesn't do so in an entirely arbitrary manner; even if its reflections are distorted, they are not entirely false or simply the product of dreamy idealism.

In other words, objects may conform to mind - but mind is itself an object. Thus, breaking out of the correlationist circle and directly accessing what Meillassoux terms the ancestral realm that exists prior to humanity (or, indeed, any forms of sentient being whatsoever), is not a major concern for Nietzsche. Indeed, even in his later, supposedly positivist mid-period, Nietzsche is still primarily concerned with what is true for us (mankind) and his model of science remains distinctly gay and tied to his understanding of art.

Ultimately, what does an arch-vitalist care about arche-fossils ...?    

See: Nietzsche, 'The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge', in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Humanities Press International, 1990). The lines quoted are from sections 80, 94 and 106.

Postmodern Approaches to Literature 3: The Pleasure of the Text (Part II)

 ... and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me 

so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart 

was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

I suppose that one of the more attractive things about approaching literature according to a principle of pleasure is that it means we can have done with judgement in the traditional terms of good and bad. This in itself is surely a relief of some kind and a significant break with the moral history of the West. For as Deleuze rightly points out: "From Greek tragedy to modern philosophy, an entire doctrine of judgement has been elaborated and developed".

Kant notoriously gave us a false critique of judgement. It was Spinoza and his heirs, such as Nietzsche, who really carried this out and Barthes follows in their footsteps, refusing either to accuse or justify, defend or condemn. Indeed, Barthes quotes Nietzsche in the very first fragment of The Pleasure of the Text: 'I shall look away, that will henceforth be my sole negation.' All that matters is whether his body finds something pleasurable or not. It's a Nietzschean - not a subjective - game of love and hate.

Of course, what Barthes's body loves and what Barthes's body hates, will not be the same as what the body of another reader might love and hate. In Roland Barthes he makes a list of things he likes and a list of things he doesn’t like; two lists which are apparently of no great significance. But, of course, they do in fact mean something vital; namely, that no two bodies are the same: "Hence, in this anarchic foam of tastes and distastes ... gradually appears the figure of a bodily enigma ..." [1995]

Because all bodies are different, a Society of the Friends of the Text would be a social grouping in which members had nothing in common: "for there is no necessary agreement on the texts of pleasure" [1990]. This calls for a certain liberalism, therefore, each person consenting to "remain silent and polite when confronted by pleasures or rejections which they do not share", or run the risk of homicidal irritation. “I am liberal in order not to be a killer” [1995], as Barthes confesses.

The key thing is that within the above sodality, difference and contradiction is accepted. There is no judgement and no demand for conformity with a categorical imperative governing universal good taste. Barthes is very clear about who would comprise enemies of such a society:

"fools of all kinds, who decree foreclosure of the text and of its pleasure, either by cultural conformism or by intransigent rationalism (suspecting a 'mystique' of literature) or by political moralism or by criticism of the signifier or by stupid pragmatism or by ... loss of verbal desire." [1990]

Picking up on this idea of the body that Barthes introduces, we may say the following: for Barthes, the text itself can be thought of as a "body of bliss consisting solely of erotic relations" [1990] and utterly distinct from the body known by anatomists and discussed within scientific discourse. This is not to reduce the pleasure of the text to some kind of physiological process or need, but it is to affirm that the pleasure of the text "is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas" [1990] and fully comes into its own as a site of what Nietzsche calls the greater intelligence.

This sounds at first precisely like the kind of mysticism which his critics accuse him of and which Barthes is eager to deny. Later in The Pleasure of the Text he will insist that his major aim is to materialize the text and its pleasure; making it into an object of pleasure like any other and thereby abolishing the "false opposition of practical life and contemplative life" [1990].

Jonathan Culler's commentary on this aspect of Barthes’s work is particularly insightful and thus worth quoting at length:

"Reference to the body is part of Barthes’s general attempt to produce a materialist account of reading and writing, but it has four specific functions. First, the introduction of this unexpected term produces a salutary estrangement, especially in the French tradition, where the self has long been identified with consciousness, as in the Cartesian cogito ...
      Second, structuralism has devoted much energy to demonstrating that the conscious subject should not be taken as a given and treated as the source of meaning but should rather be seen as the product of cultural forces and social codes that operate through it. ...
      Third, given structuralism's treatment of the subject ... Barthes could not talk about the subject’s pleasure without begging numerous questions ... Yet he needs a way of speaking that takes account of the empirical fact that an individual can read and enjoy a text ... the notion of the body permits Barthes to avoid the problem of the subject ...
      Fourth, replacement of 'mind' by 'body' accords with Barthes’s emphasis on the materiality of the signifier as a source of pleasure."

Of course, problems remain with this invoking of (and appeal to) the body. For even if one strives to avoid falling into mysticism or some form of biological essentialism, we’re still left with a word that seems to have a greater degree of authority and authenticity than other words; "a word whose ardent, complex, ineffable, and somehow sacred signification gives the illusion that this word holds an answer to everything" [1995] - i.e. what Barthes calls a mana-word.

Although aware that the word 'body' was functioning as such in his later writings, I’m not sure Barthes ever fully addresses this issue. He seems happy to use it, if only as deliberate provocation to the new intellectual orthodoxy - which, ironically, he had helped to create.

Further, if via his use of the term body Barthes allows a form of faceless subjectivity back into the Text, so too is he prepared to welcome back the author as a kind of spectral guest:

"If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters ... no longer privileged, paternal ... He becomes, as it were, a paper-author: his life is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work ..." [1977]

In The Pleasure of the Text, he expands on this theme: 

"As an institution, the Author is dead: his civil status, his biographical person have disappeared ... they no longer exercise over his work the formidable paternity whose account literary history, teaching, and public opinion had the responsibility of establishing and renewing; but in the text, in a way, I desire the author: I need his figure (which is neither his representation nor his projection), as he needs mine ..." [1990]

The reason for this necrophilia is easy to appreciate. Barthes desires the return of the author for the same reason that the text needs its shadow - "a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject" [1990] - and a painting its chiaroscuro: in order for it to become fertile. Those who would argue that we abandon all caution and strip a work of everything that we previously valued within it take us towards sterility and suicide.

As Deleuze and Guattari note, caution is the immanent rule of experimentation, whether one is producing an avant-garde artwork or building a body without organs: "if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing down the plane [of consistency] you will be ... plunged into a black hole, or ... dragged towards catastrophe".

Barthes attempts to shatter the dead-grip of traditional criticism upon classical literature - not to destroy the latter. In his ‘Inaugural Lecture’ to the Collège de France, he declares:

"The old values are no longer transmitted, no longer circulate, no longer impress; literature is desacralized, institutions are impotent to defend and impose it as the implicit model of the human. It is not, if you like, that literature is destroyed; rather it is no longer protected, so that this is the moment to deal with it. ... Our gaze can fall, not without perversity, upon certain old and lovely things, whose signified is abstract, out of date. It is a moment at once decadent and prophetic, a moment of gentle apocalypse, a historical moment of the greatest possible pleasure." [1989]

Of course, whilst Barthes may retain a nostalgic fondness for these old and lovely things (works by Zola, Balzac, Proust et al) - and whilst they may still give him a great deal of plaisir - they cannot induce jouissance. For bliss comes only with the absolutely new; "for only the new disturbs (weakens) consciousness" [1990]. This is a rare occurrence and does not come easily. Often, what we take to be the new is merely "the stereotype of novelty" [1990].

The New, as Barthes conceives it, is then not simply the latest thing - it's a value. And it opposes all the old forms of encratic language (i.e. the language of power), which are founded upon repetition and stereotype; "all official institutions of language are repeating machines: school reports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology" [1990]. Barthes continues:

"The stereotype is the word repeated without any magic, any enthusiasm, as thought it were natural ... Nietzsche has observed that 'truth' is only the solidification of old metaphors. So in this regard the stereotype is the present path of 'truth'..." [1990]

Opposing the rule of the stereotype is the New and the exceptional pleasure of the New (which is bliss). But finding new ways to write and to speak is not easy and would seem to involve more than merely coining endless new terms or indulging in a kind of linguistic Saturnalia. Indeed, Nietzsche warns us against those innovators in language who constantly seek to supplement language, rather than bring greater style or discipline to it.

Heidegger also argues that whilst it’s right to identify the metaphysics of language, there is no need to abandon all grammatical convention. For a revitalizing of language does not result "from the fabrication of neologisms and novel phrases" [1994], but from a change in our relation to (and usage of) language. Even old words, worn out by convention and repetition, can be recontextualized, reinterpreted, and revalued.

Often, it’s case of transforming the Word back into the Flesh; that is to say, of giving back to language what Anaïs Nin described as the “bulginess of sculpture, the feeling of heavy material fullness” and perhaps our poets are best placed to lead the way here. But it’s philosophy, says Heidegger, which is ultimately responsible for preserving “the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself” [1998] and to protect language from being degraded by a common intelligibility into doxa, cliché, or sheer nonsense.

To allow language, in other words, the right to live and, equally important, the right to die. For what is the stereotype at last but the "nauseating impossibility of dying" [1990] - the rule of a world in which words become reified, fixed, undead.

The pleasure of the text, we might conclude, lies in its mortality ...


Bibliography

Roland Barthes, 'From Work to Text', essay in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath, (Fontana Press, 1977). 
Roland Barthes, 'Inaugural Lecture', trans. Richard Howard, in Barthes: Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, (Fontana Press, 1989).
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Blackwell, 1990).
Roland Barthes, ‘Twenty Key Words for Roland Barthes’, interview in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991), pp. 205-06.
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Miller, (Papermac, 1995).
Jonathan Culler, Barthes, (Fontana Press, 1990).
Gilles Deleuze, ‘To Have Done With Judgement’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, (Verso, 1998)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press,
Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language’, essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994).
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, (Blackwell, 1998).
Anaïs Nin, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, (Blackspring Press, 1985).
Mireille Ribière, Barthes: A Beginners Guide, (Hodder and Stoughton, 2002).

Note: this and the two related posts have been assembled from extensive notes made for a course entitled Postmodern Approaches to Literature, that I taught at Morley College, London, in the Spring of 2010. To read PAL 1 click here. To read PAL 2 click here. To read the first part of this post click here. 

This post is dedicated to Gail who asked 'Why read Barthes?'

Thoughts on D. H. Lawrence (Stephen Alexander in Conversation with David Brock)

                                   

Back in the far-off summer of 2014, I was interviewed by then Editor of the D. H. Lawrence Newsletter, David Brock, who wanted to know my thoughts on a number of questions that were then troubling him in relation to his hero poet.

As most torpedophiles are not members of the D. H. Lawrence Society and will not therefore have read the published interview, I thought it might be helpful to reproduce extracts of it here, thereby making my own rather ambivalent relationship to Lawrence a little clearer ... 


DB: In her guide to the life and work of D. H. Lawrence entitled The Country of My Heart (1972), Bridget Pugh argues that Lawrence looked deeper into the human soul than any of his contemporaries, concerned as he was with the hidden and unconscious sources of the self. Do you feel that any writers today look as deeply?

SA: Probably not. But then this metaphysical notion of subjective depth is no longer one that greatly troubles us in an essentially non-essential age of irony, inauthenticity, and insincerity. We are far more Wildean in this regard than we are Lawrentian and have become - in Nietzschean terms - superficial out of profundity. Personally, I think this is a good thing and much prefer Lawrence when he sticks to the surface, writing about the importance of fashion for example, than when he indulges in folk psychology and starts speculating about fundamental human desire, feeling, and belief.

DB: Bridget Pugh also writes that Lawrence "saw the invasion of the landscape by the ugliness of industrialism as a reflection of the destruction of natural man removed from his instinctive communion with the rest of the universe ..." Other than by reading and re-reading Lawrence, how do you feel we can regain that vital communion? What hope is there for humanity?

SA: Well, hope isn't something I cling to or seek to offer others; not only does it encourage optimism, but it's one of the three theological virtues upon which Christianity is founded and, like Lawrence, I am, in a sense, with the Anti-Christ, rather than with Jesus and all the saints and angels of heaven. As for humanity, that's something to be overcome, is it not? A form that is restrictive and no longer tenable. Sorry to be so Nietzschean about this once again.

As for the quotation from Bridget Pugh, I'm afraid that doesn't interest me in the least. That's not to say it's wrong: Lawrence clearly subscribed to certain romantic and neo-pagan narratives regarding nature, industrialism, and the vital character of the cosmos. But it's very difficult for us to share his beliefs without sacrificing intellectual integrity. We can have an immensely exciting understanding of the universe we inhabit - thanks to modern science - but we cannot enter again into any kind of religious communion with the earth and stars in good faith. Or, as Lawrence concedes when face to face with the religious rituals of Native America: Sorry, I can no longer cluster at the drum. This might seem like typical English reserve in the face of genuine otherness, but it is rather one of the most honest admissions that Lawrence makes anywhere in his writings. He knows there’s no going back to an earlier way of being.

DB: As Lawrentians, Stephen, how do we justify our joy and our continual celebration of his creative genius? Would Lawrence prefer to have loyal readers, or active followers who put his ideas into practice?

SA: Nietzsche once said that there was only ever one Christian and that he died on the Cross; that for others to call themselves Christians was a fatal misunderstanding. I think we can - and should - feel something similar whenever the term Lawrentians is used. Thus I would answer your question this way: we don’t need to justify our pleasure in reading his books and celebrating his life; there’s no need for apology or explanation here. Those who seek to make others feel guilty about their pleasures are the kind of censor-morons sitting in judgement on life that Lawrence despised and so courageously fought against.

Lawrence would prefer unashamed readers, rather than loyal ones. Like Zarathustra, he would quickly lose patience with followers and tell them that ultimately their task is simply this: Lose me and find yourselves. That’s the key. Unashamed readers must be prepared to challenge Lawrence and recontextualise his ideas; which isn’t the same as simply putting them into practice as if Lawrence supplied a convenient set of dos and don’ts. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze - who happens to be one of Lawrence’s great readers - says the task is to pick up the arrow that he fired into the world and then shoot it anew into the future, in a new direction and at a new target. As a reader - particularly as a reader of a writer like Lawrence - you remain loyal by an act of infidelity.

DB: Do you think that Lawrence Society members should oppose factory farming and care about animal rights?

SA: In principle I’m tempted to say yes. Obviously the question of the animal and its suffering is an important one, although I’m not sure it’s one that is best addressed in terms of ‘rights’. I’d like to think we might develop an altogether different relationship with non-human forms of life - and it’s here that Lawrence might perhaps prove useful.

To be clear on this: I don’t think we should plead the case for animal liberation, or argue that they have specific interests that give rise to certain moral claims; rather, I’m interested in the becoming-animal of man and undermining the singular status of the human. We need to find a post-metaphysical way of thinking man and animal both; one that does away with anthropocentrism and deconstructs the violent hierarchy that places us in opposition to the animal and accords us superiority.

Having said this, whilst you have every right to imagine Lawrence as an ardent animal activist, I’m not sure you’re entitled to imply that those members of the Lawrence Society who don’t concern themselves with the exploitation of animals and who don’t think meat is murder, are somehow morally deficient or missing the point of his work. It should always be remembered that Lawrence was primarily a writer and his concern was language and thus, even when seemingly celebrating the otherness of the animal, be it a bat, snake, or fish, it might be argued that Lawrence is really still just playing textual games on the page. Amit Chaudhuri makes a very powerful argument that even in the famous poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers Lawrence doesn’t accurately describe such things at all, or directly touch on them as things in themselves. Rather, he recreates and imitates them for his own amusement and that of his readers, assembling an exhibition of stuffed creatures; “his collection of textual mannequins, his pantomime of nature”.

DB: You once reminded me that Lawrence thought there was nothing romantic about madness - that it was a tragic waste of sane consciousness. Do you consider that we have an insane and romantic view of the importance of human life and are we wasting our consciousness in this respect?

SA: We certainly have a conceited and somewhat sentimental view of our own importance and one of the things I love most about Lawrence is that, for the most part, he avoids (and combats) anthropocentric vulgarity. Unfortunately, he doesn’t go far enough in his attempt to thoroughly dehumanize nature and remains trapped within what Quentin Meillassoux terms correlationism - i.e., Lawrence continues to make a link between thinking and being and so can never quite accept the possibility of a mind-independent reality.

This is a great shame and a great failing in his work; one which keeps him within a theo-humanist tradition. Ultimately, he’s not really interested in the stars, animals, trees, or other objects, but only in their relation to man, who, in turn, cannot be considered outside of his relation to the world. That’s the contradiction or paradox at the heart of his writing. For whilst he repeatedly insists that he wants to know the great outside - that inhuman space of the savage exterior - like all critical thinkers after Kant Lawrence too is fundamentally more interested in consciousness and language and these concerns keep him tied to a form of correlationism. 

DB: Despite all Lawrence's best efforts, one has a strong sense that most people are still only half alive. Should this concern us, do you think?

SA: No, I don’t think so. As is perhaps clear from some of the earlier answers, I’m not a vitalist and don’t fetishize or privilege being alive over being dead. As Nietzsche pointed out, being alive is only a rare and unusual way of being dead. Death is ultimately a welcome return to material actuality and an escape from complexity and, as Heidegger argued, all being is a being-towards-death. I think Lawrence recognised this as is clear in his late poetry.

Perhaps the undead fascinate more, philosophically-speaking, than the half-alive. The zombie, for example, embodies the Derridean notion of undecidability which so threatens the traditional foundations of Western metaphysics and so-called common sense. Like the vampire, or, more recently, the cyborg, the zombie cannot be classified as either alive or dead. Rather it belongs to the indeterminable realm of the neither/nor whilst also being, paradoxically, both at once.

Zombies not only indicate the limits of our thinking on life and death, but help to subvert all of those other binary oppositions upon which we establish conceptual coherence and build a stable world - but also a world of violent inequality. It might be stretching things a bit, but might we not read the story of The Man Who Died as a piece of zombie fiction?

Mario Perniola: Il sex appeal dell'inorganico

 Mario Perniola: Professor of Aesthetics,

University of Rome

It soon becomes obvious when reading Mario Perniola's Sex Appeal of the Inorganic that what he most wants is to have his cock sucked for all eternity; that is to say, in a perpetual manner in which all feeling is suspended and orgasm forever deferred. 

For where other men would simply find frustration, Perniola hopes to locate the beginning of a new and neutered sexuality that is entirely divorced from nature and freed from all metaphysical notions of telos, or vital fantasies of carnal fulfilment. He neither wants to love like an angel, nor fuck like a beast. But most of all he doesn't want to come: "To free oneself of orgasmomania," he writes, "is the first step towards the neuter, suspended and artificial sexuality of the thing" which promises to open up a world "where the difference between the sexes, form, appearance, beauty, age and race no longer matter" [3].  

Other steps towards this pornotopia without a happy-ending include: 

(1) Reading philosophy, which Perniola interestingly characterizes as a form of speculative extremism (even if it still tediously refers back to Kant and Hegel). Above all, read Heidegger; Heidegger looks for Being not in Geist (like Hegel) or in Life (like Nietzsche), but in the thing (and the thingliness of the thing) and although he never directly speaks of sexuality in his work, it is only with Heidegger "that the path of thinking and the sex appeal of the inorganic ... reveal their essential belonging together" [108].    

(2) Understanding the body in terms not of flesh, but of clothing, furniture and upholstery; "the folds of the female sex are no different from the depressions of a seat cover, the skin that runs along the rod of the male sex is similar to the covering of an arm rest" [11]. I'm not sure that's the case, but Perniola insists: "As long as we remain prisoners of the idea that living bodies excite us more than clothes, we will never escape the organicistic aestheticism that considers sexuality in terms of life" [45].
      This sounds like fetishism, but Perniola is ambiguous on the subject of fetishism; if, on the one hand, it is the category via which modernity has traditionally thought the erotics of the object, on the other hand it constitutes a grotesque and extravagant "caricature of the sex appeal of the inorganic" [53].           

(3) Recognizing that addiction to opium-based drugs, such as heroin, provides an exemplary experience in dependency "analogous to the neutral feeling of becoming thing" crucial to the development of an inorganic sexuality [14].

(4) Moving beyond the BDSM crowd; it would be very much mistaken to consider Perniola's model of impersonal sexuality in terms of a master and slave relationship and even the apathy of the Sadean libertine or the peculiar mixture of coldness and cruelty so loved by the masochist, belong to an entirely different universe.

(5) Developing a taste for cybersex and science fiction, a genre that understands more than most "how the organic and inorganic, the anthropological and technological, the natural and the artificial overlap and blend in one another" [28]. Neutral sexuality can be considered both posthuman and virtual - not in the sense of simulated reality, but, more radically, a real simulation that offers access to an ontologically different order. Perniola further advises we study vampires as well as philosophical-cyborgs; for the undead also embody the sex appeal of the inorganic and provide access to another world which is "radically different from everyday life" [77].   

(6) Listening to rock music; a sexually inorganic form of sound that has nothing to do with "the sentimental conception of music, which considers it as the expression of an emotional interiority, and from the vitalistic one which sees in it the animal cry" [65]. Schelling would understand perfectly why it is that prog rock in particular "constitutes a paradigm for the cultural operations to come" [66]. He means it man! Frank Zappa rules!

(7) Exploring plastic landscapes and appreciating architecture as an inorganic art divorced from construction that brings into question all attempts to harmonize "form and function, nature and culture, country and city" [83]. Not only can architecture be compared to tailoring, but it can be understood as an erotics; as if drifting in and out of buildings or through the city streets was a sexual act not dissimilar to strapping a tiny camera to your penis and penetrating the interior landscape of the vagina, generating "a quite different excitement to the natural one" [90].
      As well as the internal spaces of the body, Perniola also gets excited by the possibility of entering cyberspace; a new dimension opened up by computer technology that "radicalizes contemporary architectural experience". But cyberspace, albeit a "spatialized visualization of information", must not be understood as "a dematerialization or, worse, a spiritualization of reality". Rather, it's the creation of a liquid environment that allows the cybernaut who navigates it to "perceive his own real body as a sentient thing not essentially different from the sentient landscapes of electronic architectures" [91]. 

(8) Rejecting all notions of desire. But - and this is important to note - neutral sexuality is not simply a form of erotic mysticism or a tantric practice to delay orgasm in order to thereby intensify the moment of climax. And unlike Zen Buddhism which aims at a state of spiritual elevation and detachment from the world, the sex appeal of the inorganic wants to abolish the distance between man and world; to absorb the human into the realm of things. Perniola writes:

"Neutral sexuality is not a state of inertia, of reducing excitement to zero, eliminating all tensions, is not Nirvana, or Freud's death drive, and not even lethargy ... Quietism, fatalistic and defeatist renunciation, paralysis, are more indirect affirmations of desire than actual suspensions of it. The sex appeal of the inorganic is more an after-desire than a without-desire." [98-9]        

(9) Privileging hermaphroditism over androgyny; the latter, says Perniola, is "as remote as one can imagine it to be from the sex appeal of the inorganic"; a victory for the metaphysical dream of organic unity. But hermaphroditism, on the other hand, "implies the best possible way in which the characteristic of both sexes are contained in a figure, namely a man with breasts or a woman with a penis" [115]. Rather than place emphasis on unification and the harmonious co-presence of masculine and feminine elements, hermaphroditism promotes indetermination and neutralization.
      However, even hermaphroditism fails to reach the sex appeal of the inorganic. For that you need to push on far beyond the sexual dichotomy of male and female - to sexual infinity in which there are an innumerable number of sexes. The inorganic lover loves the thought of endless division and of tearing into ever smaller pieces the dress worn by his bride on their wedding night and then carefully putting together one by one the tiny shreds on her naked body:

"In the transit that goes from the cloth to the skin, and from the skin to the cloth, one can re-establish the experience of a neutral and inorganic sexuality. It is sympathetic ... with an abstract excitement that never tires of operating infinite divisions on one's own body and that of one's partner." [120]       

(10) Learning to hear the expression inclusive metawriting as "more loaded with sexual intensity than most obscene words" [126]. Because - wouldn't you know it - it's philosophically-informed literature that is the crucial "accomplice of neutral and impersonal experience" [121]. Perniola is then, like Barthes, a homotextual. But whereas the latter affirms and delights in the pleasure of the text, Perniola hates pleasure and wants to free sexuality from such vulgarity. There is nothing in pleasure, he insists, that inevitably binds it to sexuality - and particularly not to a model of sexuality that is "not content with staying natural and organic" [132].

Follow these ten steps and you too can enter the inorganic realm. But don't think that this makes you in anyway superhuman; on the contrary, it might just betray the fact you are spiritually sick or physically disabled in some manner - perhaps thanks to the fact that you've read too much philosophy or written too much poetry!

It certainly signifies you're abnormal and perverse; someone who "derives excitement from inadequate stimulation ... such as concepts, numbers, sounds, spaces, objects, writings, all things that normal people keep immersed in a functional-utilitarian boredom, or in an aesthetic-formal tedium" [144].  


Mario Perniola; The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, trans. Massimo Verdicchio, (Continuum, 2004). All page numbers supplied refer to this edition.

Never Mind the Bildungstreib Here's the Science

Blackmetal Kant (2007) by King of Porn 

deviantart.com

Kant famously insisted that base matter lacks spontaneity; that inorganic substance cannot spontaneously generate organic life. To think otherwise would be a logical paradox, since the essential character of non-living things is their complete inertia or lack of vital purpose. What makes living things so rare and unusual is precisely the fact that they can spontaneously self-organize thanks to the presence of a formative drive which mysteriously enlivens the material of which they are composed. Kant calls this vital force (after Blumenbach) Bildungstreib. Jane Bennett conveniently glosses the term for us:

"Bildungstreib ... names a non-material, teleological drive that imparts to matter its functional coherence, it's 'organic' quality ... Bildungstreib is what impels an undifferentiated, crude mass of matter to become an organized articulation of cooperating parts, the highest version of which is 'Man'".

To be clear, Kant does not mean by Bildungstreib something that common folk and theologians might mistakenly term a soul. For whereas a soul is a metaphysical principle that can exist even in a disembodied state, Kant's concept is always embodied and only exists in conjunction with the mechanical activities of matter and subject to the Newtonian laws of physics.

Having said that, Kant does insist that the workings of Bildungstreib can never become fully known to us; such a drive remains fundamentally inscrutable. At best, we can learn about it indirectly by studying its effects. And what these effects teach us is that this formative drive operates under an internal constraint or purposive predisposition which directs the organism towards some end goal, "thus linking its becoming to a stable order of Creation".

In other words, things become what they are meant to become; only man has a free will and can thus to some extent overcome his own determining. Thus Kant sought to make the case "not only for a qualitative gap between inorganic matter and organic life but also for a quantum leap between humans and all other organisms."  

What, then, are we to make of Kant's flirtation with vitalism and his attempt to combine teleological and mechanistic explanations of life?

Jane Bennett is obviously attracted to the notion of Bildungstreib. For her, it gestures towards the kind of inhuman and ahistorical form of agency that she needs to make her own model of vibrant matter feasible. Whilst for Kant any such drive would have to have a divine origin, Bennett thinks it "both possible and desirable to experiment with the idea of an impersonal agency integral to materiality as such". 

But for me, as for Daniel Dennett and others who happily subscribe to a mechanistic materialism and remain confident that science will eventually explain in a perfectly adequate manner how life emerges from dead matter thanks to a chemical process, vitalism is not a profound philosophical insight, but simply a failure of critical intelligence and imagination.

In fact, a new study published recently by researchers at the University of Colorado and University of Milan, hints at the spontaneous appearance of primordial DNA four billion years ago and shows how the self-organizing properties of these DNA-like molecular fragments - just a few nanometres in length - may have guided their own growth into repeating chemical chains long enough and stable enough to act as a basis for primitive life.

In other words, contrary to everything Kant and the vitalists who have followed him like to believe, these new findings provide further evidence for the non-biological origins of nucleic acids, which are the building blocks of living organisms.  


Notes

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, (Duke University Press, 2010). All lines quoted were taken from the sub-section of chapter 5 entitled Bildungstreib, pp. 65-69.

For those interested in reading at length what Kant has to say on this subject, see his Critique of Judgement (1790), available in numerous English translations, including the one by Werner Pluhar, (Hackett, 1987), cited by Jane Bennett in her text. 

For those interested in the reading more about the new scientific study I refer to above, click here.  

Torpedo the Ark Means: I Hate Everything

 I Hate Everything bangle by Me and Zena

See website for full details: meandzena.com

I am often asked what the phrase torpedo the ark signifies, despite the fact that I have explicitly stated in several posts that, for me, it primarily means having done with the judgement of God; i.e. rejecting any notion of indebtedness to a deity and refusing to face a celestial tribunal where one will eternally be found guilty and sentenced to death and damnation.  

In taking up this critical project - one that Kant failed so miserably to accomplish - one hopes to continue and possibly develop or send spiraling off in a new direction, the work of the truly great artists and thinkers, including Spinoza, Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, and Deleuze.

For those, however, who like things expressed in less philosophical terms, then torpedo the ark might be said to simply mean this: I hate everything.

The concept of hate, of course, mustn't be understood in a purely reactive manner; hate is more than simply love on the recoil (as if love were the great primary term or essential prerequisite). And it's crucial not to simply fall back into metaphysical dualism, where love and hate are two fixed terms of opposition.

That said, I suppose we can provisionally agree that love is ultimately a will to merger and the dream of blissful union with all mankind, the heavenly host, and, ultimately, God himself, whilst hate is the desire to be separate and the ability to discriminate and distinguish between things. Thus whilst love makes us open up our arms and embrace the universe, hate teaches us to kick with our legs and stand on our own two feet as sovereign individuals, proud of our own singular nature and keen to discover and create new worlds. 

When Zarathustra encourages his listeners to become hard like diamonds, he means they should abandon love when it has become a morbid moral ideal exclusively tied to values born of sickness; he means they should become a little more independent and a little more hateful; that they should shatter the old law tables, tear down the Cross, and torpedo the ark.

This might seem to be an evil teaching, but, as Blake pointed out, evil is only the active or most vital power that flows into us from behind and below. And it is this power - or more precisely the feeling of this power - that causes delight and helps us give birth to what is best in us and to the future.     

We can conclude, therefore, that whilst kindness, kisses, and cuddles all have their place within a general economy of the heart, so to does cruelty, combat, and the determination to kick against the pricks and all that is rotten. As Lawrence writes, we must learn to accept all the subtle promptings of the incalculable soul; from the most passionate love, to the fiercest hate. Only this will keep us sane and beyond judgement.

On the Nose

Idealist philosophers, such as Kant, hate the nose: they only care about the eyes and the production of visual images and mental concepts; scents and smells, be they base or beautiful, mean nothing to them and might almost entirely be ignored.

But for those philosophers who seek to develop a form of libidinal materialism that is firmly rooted in the body and wider sensual experience - who don't wish merely to picture the world, but also to sniff it at close quarters - the nose is the most crucial of organs.

Thus it is that Nietzsche boasts that his whole genius resides in his nostrils and praises the nose as "the most delicate tool we have at our command"; a subtle scientific instrument which can detect minimal changes of condition, including symptoms of moral decay. As such, the nose deserves to be shown respect and gratitude by philosophers.

    

Lovers too know that the nose knows best, which is why they like to literally breathe in the odour of the beloved other; not merely for sensual intoxication and pleasure, but in order to make an accurate physiological assessment of their partner's health and breeding potential.

For it is believed that an individual's body odour - or what is sometimes termed their olfactive signature - is linked with an area of the genome that has crucial import for the immune system. Thus it might well be that knicker-sniffing, for example, is a form of biological imperative; one is seeking out histocompatibility and not just being a bit pervy.  

Sexual Solipsism

Clive Barker, The Happy Masturbator, (1997)

Recently, I attended a very interesting research seminar at Senate House. The paper, presented by Professor Marco Wan of Hong Kong University, examined the obscenity trial that resulted from publication of Paul Bonnetain's novel Charlot s'amuse in 1883 - the story of a serial masturbator told in a naturalist style much influenced by Zola. 

Despite causing a huge scandal at the time, the work is little read today outside of French literary circles and the author, who died in 1899 aged just forty-one, is mostly a forgotten figure. Interestingly, however, 130 years after Charlot s'amuse, the subject of masturbation is one that still attracts moral condemnation from philosophers who place themselves in a feminist Kantian tradition in order to critique pornography; philosophers such as Rae Langton, for example.

Langton has two main concerns, which she relates to the question of pornography: the first is the sexual objectification of women (pre-given as a bad thing per se in her work); the second is the sexual solipsism that men, as the primary consumers of pornography, fall into via the solitary vice of masturbation. In brief, Langton argues that in a pornified world of objectified women, men too pay a heavy price; i.e. by mistaking women for things and substituting things for real women, they ultimately isolate and dehumanise themselves.

Now it could be that there is something in this argument. But Langton overlooks the fact that men are not quite alone in a world of objectified women. For not only do they still have one another to form relations with of a social, fraternal, and, indeed, sexual nature if they so desire, but they also have their animal companions and, as everybody knows, a man's best friend is his dog. 

Further, as Simone de Beauvoir was obliged to concede, not all men would regard an isolated and solipsistic existence as problematic. Indeed, for many it would be a more attractive option than a supposedly authentic relationship with another human being. The world of the masturbator may not be deeply fulfilling, but it's by no means unhappy and perhaps a little superficial physical pleasure means more today than vague promises of spiritual satisfaction and the soul's consummation via union with another.  

Langton, however, insists - and this is never a good sign in someone who claims to be a philosopher - that there has to be an escape from solipsism, as if it were the worst kind of trap to fall into. And she insists that in order to make this escape "some of the beings with whom one interacts must be people (not things); and one must treat them as people (not as things)" [Sexual Solipsism, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 312]. 

Ultimately, for Langton, this is a matter of moral duty: one must not fuck dolls, or jerk off over on-line images. Rather, one must seek out a real lover to hold in one's arms. For when sex is something you do with a thing, you reduce your own ontological status and become self-objectified. Kant has no sympathy for those 'worms' who violate themselves in this manner. And neither does Langton much care for those who remain shut up inside their own heads, alone with their own fantasies, when they could (and should) be sharing with others in a paradise of love and total transparency.

And here, we arrive at the crux of the matter: for Langton, there is a fundamental human need to unburden the heart and communicate the self. To articulate the body, she says, rather than masturbate it, "enables us better to learn what we think and feel and desire" [361].

This, in my view, is not only optimistic and naive, it is also highly sinister. For we know now how confession serves ultimately to better enable correction; that we have been encouraged to speak the self  historically in order that our thoughts and feelings may be judged and corrected by others. Humanists like Kant and Langton always promise to lead us out of our solipsistic and fallen condition into communal bliss, but they just as invariably end up marching us into drab social conformity and ugly moral convention.

And so there is, I think, something to be said for those who want to keep themselves to themselves and indulge private fantasies behind closed doors; better the solipsist and the solitary masturbator than the fascist who compels speech, or the moral exhibitionist exposing themselves in the name of Love.