Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: We Are Not Here to Entertain You

 

 'All cultures have understood that being a blogger 

is to be a tortured monkey in Hell ...' 

 

 

I. 

 

Having taken a short break from my engagement with Mark Fisher, I'm diving back into k-punk - his collected and unpublished writings (2004 - 2016), edited by Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018) - and all page references given here (in round brackets) refer to this work (while additional notes are indicated by letters in square brackets). 

 

Let's pick things up in part six with an early post published on his famous blog to do with Spinoza and neuropunk ...

 

 

II.   

 

According to Fisher, being a Spinozist is "both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world" (622):

 

"Easy, because it is simply a matter of acting in such a way as to produce joyful encounters. Hard, because the defaults of the Human Operating System are [...] set against this." (622)

 

The problem lies in the oversized human brain and its complexity; the fact that the reptilian and mammalian layers are covered with a thin, folded third layer that is responsible for the so-called higher functions. 

 

It's this hominid layer responsible for language and consciousness on the one hand, that causes us also to desire that which is harmful to us - addictive and destructive forms of behaviour. Were it not for our unique brains, then we might not have art - but we might also have been spared the "unremitting misery, hatred and violence that have characterised human history" (623).  

 

What can be done about this? Well, short of blowing our brains out à la Kurt Cobain, we can attempt to become-inhuman via a cybernetics of organic disassembly. Fisher is keen to be clear on this point: 

 

"You don't disassemble the human organism by replacing its parts with metal or silicon components. [...] What matters is the overall organisation of the parts. Do the parts operate as hierarchically organised and functionally-specified 'organs' within a cybernegatively construed interiority or do they operate as deterritorialised potentials pulling from/towards the Outside?" (623)

 

The latter - as everybody now knows - is what Deleuze and Guattari (following Artaud) designate as the Body without Organs; a concept that Spinoza would have loved. 

 

Anyway, the point is this: becoming-inhuman via the building of a BwO is in our best interests if we want to be free and happy and escape our "enslavement to a vast immiserating machine" (622) that is the human brain. It's for this reason that Fisher is able to declare that "k-punk is also neuropunk: an intensive rewiring of humanity's neural circuits" (624).  

 

And you thought it was just a blog ... [a]

 

 

III. 

 

Like Fisher, I'm not keen on hostile and abusive narcissists who choose to "air their resentments, ill-thought bile, and tedious ego-defence opinionism" (628) in the comments sections of blogs. Although, unlike Fisher, I don't operate any kind of policy regarding who can say what on TTA, nor do I delete negative remarks. 

 

So, even when I am faced with "clinically deranged second-stringer stalker-obsessive autists with delusions of relevance" (630), I try to smile, stay calm, and move on. 

 

IV.  

 

Like Fisher - and this is probably a punk thing [b] - I despise hippies; their hedonic infantilism and its "pathetic legacy in New Age zen bullshit" (23). 

 

As fundamentally "a middle-class male phenomenon" (234), there was never really anything countercultural about the counterculture, nor sensual about its hazy-lazy aesthetic: 

 

"The hippies' sloppy, ill-fitting clothes, unkempt appearance and fuzzed-out psychedelic fascist drug talk displayed a disdain for sensuality characteristic of the Western master class." (235)

 

And like Fisher, I also despise the hippies' drug of choice: dope. 

 

In a k-punk post dated 03 December 2004, he writes:

 

"What is supposed to be good about dope? The problem with it is not just the resultant psychosis but the ACTUAL STATE it puts people into in the first place - chronically demotivated, lethargic, filled with [...] idiot porcine self-satisfaction ..." (632)

 

Dope, Fisher continues, reduces people to the status of unthinking zombified consumer dreamed of by late capitalism. 

 

Only those who are dissatisfied want to read and think; not those enslaved to the pleasure principle. It's politically expedient, therefore, to have effectively decriminalised the consumption of cannabis (even if, in the UK, laws technically remain in place controlling the possession, sale, and production).   

 

 

V.

 

Does all this - his refusal to enter into dialogue, his hatred of hippies, his opposition to dope-smoking - make Fisher an intolerant dogmatist? 

 

Probably. 

 

Indeed, he admits as much in a k-punk post dated 17 February 2005, dismissing those who defend or advocate for tolerance, debate, respect for otherness, etc., as bourgeois liberals.

 

Now, I have to admit, I was similarly fanatic when younger. But I don't recall ever actually declaring myself to be an out-and-out dogmatist committed to the view that there are Truths (with a capital T) and that there is such a thing as the Good (with a capital G). 

 

And by the time I was Fisher's age when he was writing this - thirty-six - I was a long way removed (philosophically and politically) from my position during my punk, pagan and eco-fascist days and no longer wished to kill the bothersome fly. 

 

Fisher would doubtless say I had become a cynical PoMo-puppet, lost in sceptico-relativism and thus unable to act with conviction or affirm the future with hope and uncurbed enthusiasm. But I'd rather be a grey vampire [c] than end up arguing in all sincerity that dogmatism is religion in the best sense - in that it allows for an unapologetic assertion of universal values - thereby inviting people to spit on me. 

 

 

VI.

 

Moving on ... I was amused to read this: "I'm of course delighted to have been shopped to the commissars of commonsense who compile Private Eye's 'Pseuds Corner'" (643).  

 

Because, like Fisher, I too was once assigned a place in the above: one of Ian Hislop's lackeys deciding to mock my 2007 lecture series titled Zoophilia at Treadwell's Bookshop and finding the paper on Eve's encounter with the serpent discussed in relation to transhuman futures and sexual congress with snakes particularly worthy of ridicule [d].

 

Fisher is spot-on, of course, to say that the function of 'Pseud's Corner' is "to punish writing that in some way overreaches itself, that gets ideas above its station or gets carried away" and that "the effect on any writer who internalises the critique is to be intimidated into colourless mediocrity" (643). 

 

Luckily, I never internalise anything, so that wasn't an issue for me - and I do hope Mark didn't take being called self-serious and pretentious too much to heart. 

 

 

VII.   

     

I've never been a big fan of Morrissey: I like some of his songs, but have never bought any of his records. But Fisher does a good job of making Morrissey sympathetic to me, if what he writes here is true: 

 

"Morrissey represented the desire for a proletarian bohemia at the moment when - after the Sixties, after glam, after punk and post-punk - that possibility was being closed down." (653)

 

Fisher calls this Wildean defiance and writes of how the aspiration to enter into bohemia "was always the wrong kind of ambition from the perspective of a certain working-class way of thinking" (654). 

 

Like Mark, I also know what it's like to have family members who regard writing as a hobby and put pressure on me to get a real job.

 

 

VIII.     

 

'Exiting the Vampire Castle' (2013) remains one of my favourite pieces by Fisher - perhaps because it was one of the first things by him that I read. But it's also a piece I have written about in an earlier post, so  readers who are interested can click here.

 

That, then, just leaves the unfinished introduction to Fisher's proposed new book - Acid Communism - to discuss; a text from 2016 that comprises part seven of k-punk ...

 

A friend of mine - who, as a matter of fact, likes Fisher's work more than I do - nevertheless admits that Capitalist Realism (2009) might be regarded (somewhat ungenerously) as Fredric Jameson for beginners. 

 

And one can't help wondering if Acid Communism wouldn't have been a far more readable, updated sequel to Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) ...

 

Fisher's unfinished introduction certainly lends itself to this view, as it opens with a long quote from Marcuse and Fisher regrets the "declining influence of his work in recent years" (674) - work which "vividly evokes, as an immediate prospect, a world totally transformed" (675). 

 

Fisher continues:

 

"It was no doubt this quality of his work that meant Marcuse was taken up so enthusiastically by elements of the Sixties counterculture. He had anticipated the counterculture's challenge to a world dominated by meaningless labour. The most politically significant figures in literature, he argued in One-Dimensional Man, were 'those who don't earn a living, at least not in the ordinary and normal way'. Such characters, and the forms of life with which they were associated, would come to the fore in the counterculture." (675) 

 

Critics will dismiss this as an outmoded Romanticism. But it's worth pointing out, as Fisher does point out, that "as much as Marcuse's work was in tune with the counterculture, his analysis also forecast its ultimate failure and incorporation" (675). 

 

He, Marcuse, wasn't naive or a starry-eyed dreamer - and neither is Fisher. Both see quite clearly the way in which even the most radical art can be quickly and effectively neutralised:

 

"A major theme of One-Dimensional Man was the neutralisation of the aesthetic challenge. Marcuse worried about the popularisation of the avant-garde, not out of elitist anxieties that the democratisation of culture would corrupt the purity of art, but because the absorption of art into the administered spaces of capitalist commerce would gloss over its incompatibility with capitalist culture. He had already seen capitalist culture convert the gangster, the beatnik and the vamp from 'images of another way of life' into 'freaks or types of the same life'." (675)

 

So, let's return to Marcuse - and let's return to the Sixties! Of the two, it's perhaps the later which is the most surprising move after all that Fisher once wrote about hippies and the counterculture (see section IV above). But, says Fisher, Marcuse allows us to see why the Sixties continue to exert a crucial influence on the present:

 

"In recent years, the Sixties have come to seem at once like a deep past so exotic and distant that we cannot imagine living in it, and a moment more vivid than now - a time when people really lived, when things really happened. Yet the decade haunts not because of some unrecoverable and unrepeatable confluence of factors, but because the potentials it materialised and began to democratise - the prospect of a life freed from drudgery - has to be continually suppressed." (675)    

 

It's not so much that Fisher is now encouraging us to trust the hippies after all, rather, he's attempting to re-narrate the past [e] and salvage the utopianism of the 1960s counterculture and divorce psychedelic consciousness from both New Age escapism and capitalist commodification. 

 

As we saw earlier (section II), Fisher wants to rewire the collective consciousness in such a manner that misery and depression no longer seem part and parcel of the human condition - that we have the right to demand joy (be that Spinozan or bohemian in nature). 

 

Acid communism was Fisher's term for the ultimate neuropunk experiment - "a provocation and a promise" (677) to blow minds and raise consciousness - although whether it would also result in red plenty, universal liberation and happiness all round is something I remain unconvinced of. 

 

And I'm really not about to start listening to The Beatles, FFS, or take up residence in some psychedelic shack alongside The Temptations [f].

  

 

Notes

 

[a] Fisher had high hopes for blogging (at its best) when he started k-punk: "What has begun to emerge on the most destratifying elements of the blogosphere is a depersonalising, desubjectifying network producing more joyful encounters in a positive feedback process ..." (624)

      I rather suspect, however, that were Fisher still with us he would say of me what he says of fellow blogger Marcello Carlin in this k-punk post of 13 August 2004: "a morbidly compelling example of how not to be a good Spinozist" (624); someone who engages with "their own frozen images" (624) rather than directly and sensitively with the world and displays a "pathetically resentful hunger for attention" (624). I don't feel I show enough loyalty to the Kollektive to appeal to someone like Fisher.    

      Although you never know, he may have found something to his liking on TTA, just as Fisher's critical view of Carlin radically changed over the following decade, transforming their relationship from public conflict into one of deep, mutual respect. 

 

[b] Johnny Rotten hated hippies for their complacency as he saw it. And Malcolm McLaren famously warns Helen in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980) to never trust a hippie. 

 

[c] For Fisher, a grey vampire is an individual who attaches himself to passionate, creative people, only to slowly drain their energy by constantly equivocating and sneering. If outwardly they appear charming, humorous, and intelligent, they are all the time seeking to undermine, demoralise and curb enthusiasm. Forever promising they are about to produce a major piece of work themselves, their perpetual procrastination ensures they fail to ever finish anything of value or substance.

      See his k-punk post 'Break Through in Grey Lair' (16 August 2009), pp. 645-648, where he describes grey vampirism as a symptom of mental illness as well as characteristic of postmodern scepticism. He also posits a family resemblance between grey vampires and trolls, both of whom find a home in the Academy.

      Here, of course, I am adopting the term grey vampire ironically and self-deprecatingly. And whereas Fisher viewed the grey vampire as a deeply negative, energy-sapping symbol of late capitalism, my text uses it to defend a model of scepticism contra dogmatism.  

 

[d] Unfortunately, I cannot recall the number or date of the issue of Private Eye in which I featured in Pseud's Corner. However, Gary Lachman wrote of it in an article for the Independent (16 September 2007) and this can be read online here.

 

[e] According to Fisher: "The past has to be continually re-narrated, and the political point of reactionary narratives is to suppress the potentials which still await, ready to be re-awakened, in older moments." (676) 

      I suppose the point is there's much more to the Sixties than the simulated version we are presented with by the media; i.e., "the reduction of the decade to 'iconic' images, to 'classic' music and to nostalgic reminiscences" (676) which neutralise the real promise of the era. 

 

[f] Fisher refers us to The Beatles track 'Tomorrow Never Knows' on Revolver (1966) and to 'Psychedelic Shack' by The Temptations (from the album of the same name, 1970) and argues that in these songs and the counterculture that inspired them you can hear the promise of acid communism: a new humanity, a new way of thinking, a new way of loving; "music such as this was an active dreaming which arose out of real social and cultural compositions, and which fed back into potent new collectivities [...] which rejected both drudgery and traditional resentments" (689). 

      Again, I'm not convinced, but anyone who wants to tune in and drop out can click on the links supplied.    

 

 

Retromania: Reviewed and Reassessed - Part 4: Tomorrow (Chapter 10: Ghosts of Futures Past)

Simon Reynolds: Author of Retromania (2011)
and an 'old modernist-minded post-punk'

I.

Technically, this is not really a review, so much as an attempt to occupy the textual space that Reynolds has generously opened up in his book Retromania and meet him there in and on his own terms.

But it is also the staging of a confrontation or reckoning [Auseinandersetzung]; an attempt not to find common ground - I clearly share with Mr Reynolds certain interests, ideas, and points of reference - but key areas of difference, so as to open up a pathos of distance between us as cultural commentators.

Readers who have worked their way through the first three parts of this post can decide how successful I've been in that aim so far ... 

II.

The title of chapter 10 suggests that the hauntological theme with which Reynolds closed chapter 9 is going to be developed. And obviously, that makes me happy, as I'm somewhat smitten by this spooky pop cultural concept developed by Reynolds and Mark Fisher in 2005, based on Derrida's philosophical work in this area [a]. 

 

I even like the punning neologisms that have been coined, such as ghost modernism and seance fiction - though maybe Reynolds might be challenged when he describes sampling as groove robbing (not because it's a pun too far, but because it implies intellectual property and the ownership of sounds) [b].  

Sampling isn't theft; it's a practice that reveals the musical equivalent of intertextuality (this is sometimes known as sonic resonance, or intersonority); i.e. the manner in which all recordings echo and refer to other recordings. To put it simply: there is no such thing as an original pop song or an original piece of music; everything's a cover version and the dead are always with us.   

Reynolds finds this uncanny - "because different studio auras and different eras were being placed in 'ghostly adjacence'" [c] - but then, as he goes on to point out, it's not unusual. For recording has "always had a spectral undercurrent" [312], not least because it separates "the human voice from a living body" [312]. 

 

He continues: "Records have certainly habituated us to living with phantoms [...] In a sense, a record really is a ghost: it's a trace of a musician's body, the after-imprint of breath [...]" [312]. That's true. At least that's true of analogue recordings, but not digital works, in which the direct physical relationship with the sound source is replaced by a reading of such in terms of binary data.    

Reynolds concludes: "Recording is pretty freaky, then, if you think about it." [313]. Though the same can be said of photography, of course; "both are reality's death mask" [312]. Sampling simply intensifies this inherent supernaturalism, creating a "musical event that never happened; a mixture of time-travel and seance" [313]. 

 

(Again, at this point I have to express my admiration for Reynolds's thinking here - I love all this stuff on the art of musical ghost arrangement, etc.)

 

But is sampling a form of exploitation? Reynolds seems to think so: 

 

"In a certain sense - neither literally true nor utterly metaphorical - sampling is enslavement: involuntary labour that's been alienated from its original environment and put into service in a completely other context, creating profit and prestige for another." [314]

 

Let's, for the sake of argument, say that's also true: one could just give a Warholesque shrug and say so what? 

 

Alternatively, as a Nietzschean, one might point out that slavery is a necessary precondition for the flourishing of higher culture and that artists have always exploited the work of untold others. Reynolds may find that a politically uncomfortable fact, but, as a cultural theorist he's obliged to acknowledge such an inconvenient truth. 

 

Art is not a form of liberal humanism; it's an aristocratic practice that requires a certain cruelty to impose new forms upon chaos and create new values, etc. For me, therefore, sampling can be defended from a philosophical perspective that is anything other than 'left-wing' [d].      

 

As for the argument that sampling shifts power to the producer and disempowers those "real musicians who think they're so cool and hip", that only holds up providing one wishes to deny the phonographic artistry of the former and see them as merely technicians, devoid of creative talent or skill, just because they wear less "complicated shoes" [e].  

 

Musicianship is, in my view - as a McLarenista - hugely overrated - so more power to the elbow of people like the Canadian composer and audio pirate John Oswald, who on Plunderphonic (1989) "turned sampling into a form of digital iconoclasm, literally smashing pop idols to smithereens" [317], as well as challenging notions of originality and identity [f].    

 

Rock musicians are often the most self-serious and pompous of all artists and so deserve to be "subjected to various degrees of insult, satire or travesty" [321]. 

 

But it should be noted that often digital-era artforms like hip-hop often display an almost reverential regard for the obscure analogue grooves they exploit; "they honour through recycling, in the process conferring a kind of immortality for the music, if not for its anonymous creators" [323]  

 

 

III. 

I was a bit surprised by Reynolds's admission that his sense of Britishness remains so acute after so-many years living in the United States with an American wife.  

 

Obviously, he doesn't define such in terms of blood and soil, but, rather, sees it in cultural terms; nationality is, he says, "a matrix of collective character that involves gesture and intonation, phrase and fable, and an immense array of common reference points [...] from the shape of post boxes to newspaper fonts" [337], which, I suppose is true enough.   

Interesting to consider hauntology as a specifically British thing, however; a mourning for a lost time, before the British were increasingly pressured to apologise themselves out of existence or make themselves either more American or more European (isn't this pretty much the same line that Morrissey takes - or does he veer a little too close to ethnonationalism as well as cultural pride?) [g]. 

1958-1978: this is the golden era that haunts hauntologists and ghost boxers alike; and, ironically, it's the era that "rock 'n' roll in some sense rebelled against by celebrating desire, pleasure, disruptive energy, individualism" [338]. The nanny state suddenly doesn't seem so "suffocating and oppressively intrusive" [338] from the perspective of the early 21st century ...

Everything was better, wasn't it, in the sixties and seventies; the music, the fashion, the films, the football, and, of course, the TV: "The memoradelic imprint left by vintage TV on the child's impressionable grey matter is central to hauntology." [h]  
 

The question is: is this just a British thing catering to a certain generation? Or does "every country, and each successive generation within that nationality [...] produce its own version of hauntology - a self-conscious, emotionally ambivalent form of nostalgia that sets in play the ghosts of childhood?" [343]  

 

 

IV. 

 

Unsurprisingly, some commentators are less than impressed with all this; seeing hauntology as postmodern retro by another name. And Reynolds admits: 

 

"It's true that hauntology emerged from the same matrix of baseline cultural conditions - the scrambling of pop time, the atrophy of any sense of futurity or forward propulsion - that generated many of the things I've castigated in this book." [355]

 

But, of course, he's not going to let go of the concept that he and Fisher worked so hard to develop and popularise: "What makes hauntology different, what gives it an edge, is that it contains an ache of longing - for history itself." [355-356] 

 

By this I think Reynolds means that hauntology is a profoundly serious desire for the real pain and actual horror of past events and not just the nice things which make us feel comfortable in the present; he's affirming history as is (or as was). 

 

And he does this because unless you affirm the past as a total economy, you'll never be able to recover the lost futures he and Fisher hope to find. In other words, tomorrow can be ours - but there's a price to pay and it will require courage (not just irony); the one thing that for Ursula Brangwen really matters at last [i]. 

 

 

V. 

 

If Reynolds is, shall we say, ambivalent about sampling, he clearly doesn't like the mash-up; "bootleg remixes that combined two or more pop hits" [356] to produce nostalgia without the ache. He explains that whilst mash-ups may briefly amuse due to their incongruous juxtaposing of elements, there is no "creation of surplus value, musically; even at their very best they only add up to the sum of their parts" [359].    

 

Mash-ups are thus a form of pseudo-creativity "based on a blend of mild irreverence and simple pop fandom" [359]. Worse: "Mash-ups mash the history of pop like potatoes, into indistinct, digital-data grey pulp [...] devoid of nutritional value" [360], by which I think he means they don't feed the soul.

 

And so, forget about mash-ups and retro. For even if it remains a "precarious and paradoxical strategy" [361], its hauntology which will resurrect the "eyes-on-the-horizon optimism" [361] of late modernism, by radically parodying heritage culture and uncovering "alternate pasts secreted inside the official narrative" [361], thereby turning the past into a foreign country.

 

As Heidegger might say: Nur noch ein Geist kann uns retten ... [j] 

 

 

Notes

[a] See the post 'Notes on Hauntology and Ghost Modernism' (28 Sept 2023): click here.

      Whilst for Derrida hauntology is a framework for understanding that being is always haunted by what is not fully present (traces of both past and present; the no longer and the not yet), for Reynolds and Fisher hauntology is more about the way in which pop culture explores a zone of nostalgia in the hope of finding a way beyond the present (so-called lost futures). It's a little amusing how, on the one hand, Reynolds expresses a certain anxiety about sampling and yet, on the other hand, cheerfully borrows (shall we say) Derrida's term simply because he liked the sound of it.  

[b] It turns out that Reynolds didn't invent this pun, but borrowed the idea of groove robbing from someone called DJ Shadow. See p. 323 of Retromania where he writes of the appropriately Gothic nature of the term. 

 

[c] Simon Reynolds, Retromania (Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 312. Future page numbers will be given directly in the post and refer to this edition.

[d] Reynolds writes: 

      "It's curious that almost all the intellectual effort expended on the subject of sampling has been in its defence [...] nearly always focused on the legal aspect, framing the samplers in punk-like terms (as rebellious, iconoclastic). Academic studies of sampling have likewise generally sided with 'the streets' versus the multinational entertainment companies. This reflects the left-wing bias of academia and a tendency to see the whole area of property rights, including copyright, as intrinsically conservative, aligned with corporations and [...] the status quo. [...] A Marxist analysis of sampling might conceivably see it as the purest form of exploiting the labour of others. In a more general sense, you could see it as a form of cultural strip-mining, a ransacking of the rich seams of past musical productivity." [314-315] 

      Hopefully, my post-Nietzschean analysis provides an interesting alternative. 

[e] I'm quoting George Costanza here from an episode of Seinfeld, 'The Burning' (S9/E16), dir. Andy Ackerman (1998). 

 

[f] Plunderphonic (1989) was a 25-track CD in which Oswald reworked material by both popular musicians like The Beatles, and classical works such as Beethoven's Symphony No. 7. Whilst sources for all the samples used were scrupulously listed, Oswald was happy to acknowledge that authorisation for their use had neither been given nor sought. Although the work was not made available for sale, all undistributed copies were destroyed after a threat of legal action by the Canadian Recording Industry Association on behalf of several of their clients, including Michael Jackson, whose song "Bad" had been chopped into tiny pieces and rearranged as 'Dab': click here. 

      One suspects Jackson wasn't best pleased with the albums cover art either; a photo collage that transposed his head and leather jacket from the cover of his album Bad (1987) onto a naked female body - something that Reynolds compares with "the on-line porn practice of taking images of movie stars and other celebrities and Photoshopping their heads onto nude bodies engaged in hardcore sex acts" [317]. 

      Obviously, this practice has massively accelerated and become ever more widespread and sophisticated thanks to AI. I don't really have an issue with it, but Reynolds insists that, for him, its a "blatant infringement of an individual's rights in their own image" [317] and infringes their dignity, blah, blah, blah.  

      Reynolds does concede, however, that Oswald's 'Dab' is a masterpiece that injects alien DNA into an all-too-human pop song; "micro-syllable vocal particles are multitracked as if in some infinite hall of mirrors and a strobing swarm of micro-Jacksons billows back and forth across the stereo field" [317]. 

 

[g] Reynolds discusses the case of Stephen Morrissey in terms of reflective nostalgia (good) and restorative nostalgia (bad) in a footnote on pp. xxvii-xxviii. 

      Describing him as the "supreme poet of reflective nostalgia", he neverthless fears that Morrissey has, at times, crossed over to the dark side and flirted with fascism, declaring England to no longer be recognisable to the country of his youth due to mass migration. 

 

[h] Where I differ from Reynolds here is that I never gave a shit about British shows like Doctor Who - it was American shows (and their theme tunes) I loved best; see the post 'Theme Tunes in a Man's Life' (2 Feb 2013): click here. 

 

[i] See D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 270. When her uncle asks her "'Courage for what?'" Ursula replies "'For everything.'"

 

[j] I'm paraphrasing Heidegger's famous statement - 'Only a god can save us now' - from a 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, published posthumously in 1976. It reflects his belief that modern humanity is trapped in a crisis that cannot be resolved through human agency alone. Not that he was referring by his use of the term 'god' to a traditional religious deity or a personal saviour, anymore than by my use of the term 'ghost' I am referring to a sheet-wearing apparition or supernatural entity in the clichéd sense. 

      The interview with Heidegger, conducted by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff, was translated by William J. Richardson and can be found in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Transaction Publishers, 1981), pp. 45-67. Click here to read on the Internet Archive.   

 

 

To read part 1 of this post, please click here. 

 

To read part 2 of this post, click here. 

 

To read part 3 of this post, click here. 

 

The fifth and final part will be published shortly.  

The Velvet Underground Versus the Sex Pistols: a Postscript

The Velvet Underground (Sterling Morrison / Maureen Tucker / Lou Reed / John Cale) 

Photo by Gerard Malanga (1966)

The Sex Pistols (Steve Jones / Glen Matlock / Johnny Rotten / Paul Cook)

Photo by Peter Vernon (1976) 

 

I. 

 

As conceded in a recent post contrasting 'Venus in Furs' by the Velvet Underground with 'Submission' by the Sex Pistols [1], the former song is undoubtedly the more interesting of the two. However, that's not to say I would agree with this which arrived in my inbox in response:   

 

Quite why anyone would choose the scuzzy little marketing joke of Sex Pistols over the catastrophic beauty and kinetic mystique of The Velvets is beyond me . . . 

 

 

II. 

 

It's a peculiarly affecting line of criticism; one that could only have been written by a fan of the latter - note, for example, the use of the shortened band name to indicate intimacy and insider status (although there was also an early 1960's doo-wop group called The Velvets and one is tempted to feign confusion just to be irritating). 

 

Clearly, the writer prioritises artistic complexity over what they see as crude commercialism. But what is also clear from the sentence structure and grandiloquent language employed, is that this critic is something of an intellectual and cultural elitist - catastrophic beauty ... kinetic mystique - who uses phrases like this without wishing to signal their superiority? 

 

By dismissing the Sex Pistols as no more than Malcolm McLaren's scuzzy little marketing joke, they also position themselves as someone who can see through popular cultural trends such as punk; trends that lack the depth, authenticity, and high aesthetic value of the kind of avant-garde pop (or art rock) produced by the Velvet Underground. 

 

 

III.

 

Of course, this subjective and judgemental style of writing is one that many music journalists have experimented with and, to be fair, it can be entertaining (even if some readers may find it a tad pretentious) [2]. And one is reminded also of a letter written by a teenage Stephen Morrissey to the NME critiquing the Sex Pistols for their shabby appearance and 'discordant music' with 'barely audible' lyrics [3]. 

 

However, before my anonymous correspondent gets too excited by this - for if he loves the Velvet Underground, he's bound to love Morrissey -  he should note that Morrissey also praises the punk band for knowing how to get their audience dancing in the aisles and compares them favourably to his beloved New York Dolls (another scuzzy group managed briefly by McLaren which, I imagine, my correspondent hates just as much as the Sex Pistols). 

 

 

IV.

 

Ultimately, whilst belonging to two very different eras, the Velvet Underground and the Sex Pistols were both seminal bands and it is beyond me why we should be forced to choose between them. 

 

Having said that, my love and loyalty remains with the peculiars of 430 Kings Road rather than Andy Warhol's Factory and I prefer the comic anarcho-nihilism of the Sex Pistols to the dark poetic surrealism of the Velvet Underground.      

 

  

Notes

 

[1] See 'The Velvet Underground Versus the Sex Pistols: Venus in Furs Contra Submission' (6 Jan 2026): click here.

 

[2] I am sympathetic to Thomas Tritchler who calls for a rethinking of the term 'pretension'; see the third and final part of his post 'On the Malign/ed Art of Faking It' (27 Dec 2014): click here.

 

[3] Morrissey's letter was published in the NME on 16 June, 1976. It was written in response to the Sex Pistols' gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, in Manchester, on 4 June, 1976. To read the letter on Laughing Squid, click here. See also Alice Vincent's article on the letter in The Telegraph (23 July 2013): click here. 

 

On Recuperation and Karaoke Culture: Welcome to Glastonbury 2023

Steve Jones, Billy Idol, Tony James, and Paul Cook demonstrating 

the spectacular nature of punk rock at Glastonbury 2023 [1]

 

 

I. 

 

 

I hate - and have always hated - the Glastonbury Festival. 

 

And so, whilst 'Smash It Up' may not be my favourite track by The Damned, it contains one of my favourite verses of any song and I fully endorse the vitriol aimed at those zen fascists who continue to insist we all wear a happy face and share their vision of unity in diversity: You can keep your Krishna burgers and your Glastonbury hippies [2].  

 

Glastonbury may have started out in 1970 as a counter-cultural event rooted in the free-festival movement, but that's not what it is today, over fifty years on. Now it has become the coldest of all cold monsters, feeding on everything and everyone, and from whose mouth comes the monstrous lie: Art can make you happy and music set you free! 

 

Glastonbury, basically, is a means of establishing the total control and coordination of all aspects of what was once known as pop culture, or youth culture. 

 

The Nazis had a term for such a process: Gleichschaltung. Some translate this as bringing-into-line, but it more accurately means that everything is placed on a single circuit or network, so that it only requires one master switch that can be flicked on or off at the will of a single governing body or individual: Michael Eavis Über alles.   

 

 

II. 

 

For those who think this comparison with Nazi Germany is a bit over the top and who are uncomfortable with the use of the word Gleichschaltung, let's try another term - this time one that is recognisable in English, even though it's French in origin: Récupération ...

 

This term, often associated with the Situationist Guy Debord, refers us to a process by which politically radical ideas and subversive art works are defused, incorporated, and commodified within mainstream culture (usually with the full collaboration of the media) [3].  

 

Glastonbury is a huge recuperative machine making a spectacle out of aged rockers who were once the voice of teen rebellion; gleefully castrating the Sex Pistols, for example, and even managing to strip the songs of the Smiths of all negativity (their dark humour, their melancholy, their pain) by hiring the smiling anti-punk Rick Astley to show that Morrissey really isn't needed any longer. 

 

The audience sing along and wave their arms, or passively stand and watch the reified spectacle. It's an amusing irony that the festival takes place in fields where usually there are a large number of dairy cows grazing, because that is what these audience members essentially constitute - a human herd consuming pop fodder.     

 

Shortly before he died in April 2010, Malcolm McLaren bemoaned the fact that genuine creativity (which is a chaotic phenomenon that often ends in failure) was increasingly becoming impossible within what he described as a karaoke world - i.e., an ersatz society, that only provides us with an opportunity to safely revel in our own stupidity and the achievements of others; a life lived by proxy [4].

 

And, whilst I'm a little uneasy with his use of words like authenticity, he was making an important (though hardly original) point. Britain's got talent: but it's lost its soul.          

 

Notes

 

[1] I am grateful to Roadent for suggesting that Generation Sex are best understood in terms of the Spectacle (i.e. from the theoretical perspective of Situationism).

 

[2] The Damned, 'Smash It Up', single release from the album Machine Gun Etiquette (Chiswick Records, 1979): click here for the official video. 

      Alternatively, you can click here, for a live performance of the song on The Old Grey Whistle Test (6 November 1979), followed by a (curtailed) performance of another track released as a single from the above album, 'I Just Can't Be Happy Today'. 

 

[3] See Debord's seminal text La société du spectacle (1967). It was first published in English in 1970, trans. Fredy Perlman and friends.  

[4] Readers who are interested can click here to watch McLaren deliver his final public talk at the Handheld Learning Conference (2009). Originally entitled 'Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Txt Pistols', the talk is now better known by the title it appears under on ted.com - 'Authentic creativity vs. karaoke culture'.  

 

At the Polar Bear Hotel

 Photo: Xinhua / Rex / Shutterstock

 

 

I wouldn't go so far as Morrissey, who once described the Chinese as a subspecies of human being due to their absolutely horrific record on animal welfare, but, really, do the owners, staff, and guests of the new Harbin Polar Land Hotel feel no shame?

 

It's bad enough how the Chinese treat their own native bears - with the exception of the panda, which is regarded as a national treasure and thus afforded some degree of protection - but do they really need to import members of a threatened species all the way from the Arctic, just to make a sad spectacle of them for the amusement of tourists? 

 

The hotel, in the frozen north-east province of Heilongjiang, resembles a giant igloo and is built in a reverse panopticon manner around a brightly lit central enclosure, complete with fake rocks and icicles and a white painted floor, housing a pair of live polar bears. Guests can thus gawp out of their windows and watch or photograph the animals 24/7. 

 

To be fair, even some Chinese commentators are raising voices of concern. But the fact is that businesses are allowed to exploit animals in any manner they may wish without having to worry about infringing any laws. 

 

I suppose the best that can be said is that at least these snow-white bears are not being milked of their bile like their Asiatic cousins and that, push comes to shove, an air-conditioned enclosure is better than being kept in a cage that is not large enough even to stand up in or turn around. 

 

What's more, if those who bang on about melting sea ice are correct, then polar bears may be heading for extinction by the end of this century. So perhaps those individuals that find sanctuary of sorts - and a life in showbiz - at a theme park hotel might one day be regarded as the fortunate ones ... 

 

 

On Why Lawrentian Werewolves Are Not Vegans 2: A Reply to Catherine Brown

Benicio del Toro in The Wolfman (2010) 
Does he look like he enjoys lentils?

Interestingly, the attempt to not merely anticipate but invoke and affirm a vegan world in relation to the work of D. H. Lawrence is also now being made by the much admired literary scholar Catherine Brown, herself a recent convert to this militant form of ascetic idealism. 

Brown argues that although Lawrence wasn't a vegan - nor even a mild-mannered vegetarian - his thought contains much that resonates with veganism as it is understood and practiced today. This is perhaps true, but, having said that, I don't think we can simply equate Lawrence's work with veganism, nor allow his thinking to be co-opted by any single cause or crusade. 

For whilst I'm sure Lawrence would have despised factory farming as much as Heidegger - the latter notoriously suggesting metaphysical equivalence between mechanized food production and the Nazi death camps long before Morrissey came up with the slogan meat is murder - he remained, as Brown admits, "comfortable within the omnivorism and speciesism that was dominant in his as in our culture".  

Indeed, whilst the tiger and the wolf present terrible problems to those idealists who want to think life exclusively in terms of the lamb, Lawrence invariably sides with those beasts of prey - including man - that feast on the flesh of other creatures in good conscience. What's more, he makes no secret of his contempt for those domestic farm animals - pigs, sheep, and cattle - that fail to attain purity of being and lapse into nullity:

"They grow fat; their only raison d'être is to provide food for a really living organism. [...] It is given us to devour them." [RDP 41]  

You can try and get around this by adopting the trust the tale, not the teller defence, and find fictional passages in which a character might turn their nose up at a plate of beef, or, like Ursula Brangwen, thoroughly enjoy a tasty vegetarian hot-pot, but, still the stubborn fact remains that Lawrence's carnivorous vitalism ultimately trumps any nascent veganism.    

And if, as we have noted, Lawrence despises those creatures that lack creative impulse, so too does he abhor human beings who have become docile grazing animals, subscribing to what Nietzsche calls a herd morality - cry-bullies forever bleating about rights and bloated on their own sense of righteousness. Such people are, he says, "the enemy and the abomination" and he is grateful for the "tigers and butchers that will free us from the abominable tyranny of sheep" [RDP 42].

Ultimately, Lawrence wants men and women with large mouths, big teeth and sharp claws and we can even locate within his work something that might be termed a werewolf manifesto - cf. the vegan manifesto that Dr. Brown finds within his writing. This werewolf manifesto openly sets itself against the Green Age - i.e., the utopia imagined by cabbage-hearted vegans, environmentalists, cows, Christians, and social justice warriors in which the lion lies down with the lamb and "no mouse shall be caught by a cat" [RDP 275].

Lawrence writes:

"This is the [...] golden age that is to be, when all shall be domesticated, and the lion and the leopard and the hawk shall  come to our door to lap [soy] milk and to peck the crumbs, and no sound shall be heard but the lowing of fat cows and the baa-ing of fat sheep. This is the Green Age that is to be, the age of the perfect cabbage." [RDP 275-76]

Of course, Catherine is perfectly at liberty to read Lawrence however she wishes: as am I. And, as a matter of fact, I'm very sympathetic to her idea that if we conceive of veganism "not as a dogma, identity, or state of putative purity, but as a queer nexus of perceptions and affects, then Lawrence can, at moments, be described as vegan".

Although, of course, we could easily replace the word veganism here with any other -ism - including fascism or feminism - and this sentence would still make perfect sense: that's the beauty (and the danger) of Lawrence's text; it invites anyone and everyone to play within the space that it opens up and to invest it with their own forces.  

See:

Catherine Brown, 'D. H. Lawrence and the Anticipation of a Vegan World'. This paper was originally given at the 33rd annual international D. H. Lawrence conference held at the University of Nanterre, Paris (3-7 April 2019). It can be read on the author's website: click here. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace' and 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). 

Readers interested in part one of this post - in which I address the comments made by another vegan Lawrentian (David Brock) on an earlier post to do with dental morphology - should click here.

Why I Love Carry On Teacher

Print by artandhue.com 
based on the original film poster

Carry On Teacher (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1959) is the third in the long-running Carry On series of film comedies and one of my favourite movies set in the classroom (as it is one of Morrissey's) ...

It features Ted Ray, who does a sterling job in this, his only Carry On role, alongside the usual suspects. Leslie Philips also puts in another ding-dong performance in what, sadly, will be his final Carry On until the much mistaken last entry in the series, Carry On Columbus (1992), once voted the worst British film ever made.    

Fans of classic seventies sitcom Man About the House, will also note the presence of a young Richard O'Sullivan as one of the Maudlin Street pupils (coincidentally, he's even named Robin).

And finally, since we're discussing the cast, special mention should also be made of the very wonderful Rosalind Knight, as the severe (but sexy) Ministry of Education Inspector, Miss Wheeler: that hair! that face! those clothes! 

But, apart from the actors, what is it that I love about this film so much?

It's the fact that, like all of the early Carry On movies written by Norman Hudis, it has a warmheartedness and a gentle good humour that's hard to resist; a quality that was lost over the years and films that followed as sentiment was increasingly sacrificed for sauciness and character gave way to caricature. 

Of course, there's nothing wrong with bawdiness and some of Talbot Rothwell's scripts have elements of genius. But one increasingly finds the sight of Bab's bursting out of her bikini top less amusing than that of Miss Allcock ripping her shorts. 

Notes

To watch the Carry On Teacher trailer on Vimeo, click here. 

For a sister post to this one - Why I Love Carry On Cruising - click here. 

They Eat Donkeys Don't They?

A box of donkey-hide gelatine from the 1960s 

Photo: George Knowles / South China Morning Post  

I. Meat is Murder - and So is Traditional Chinese Medicine

I suppose most people are aware of the Chinese practice of grinding up tiger bones and rhinoceros horns in the belief that these things have magico-medicinal properties and can help relieve numerous chronic ailments, cure disease, boost vitality and improve potency.

And I suppose most people are also aware that these crackpot claims lie behind an illegal international trade in body parts from critically endangered species; there are now less than 4000 tigers in the wild and only around 30,000 rhinos.    

But how many people, I wonder, are aware of the fact that the Chinese are also responsible for the dramatic decline in donkey numbers, both domestically and abroad? Twenty years ago, China had around 11 million donkeys; now the figure is less than 6 million.

As we will discuss, this, too, is mostly due to the mania for traditional medicine, although the fact that the citizens of the People's Republic of China also like to chow down on donkey meat - including so-called donkey burgers in which chopped or shredded meat is placed within a warm flatbread, known as a shaobing, and seasoned either with green pepper or coriander - is an added factor. 

II. How Eeyore is Turned into Ejiao 

Ejiao - or, as it is known in English, donkey-hide gelatine - is obtained from the skin of a donkey via a process of drying, soaking and stewing.

What was once believed to be a humble blood tonic, has successfully been re-branded as miracle product and marketed at China's expanding middle class. As well as being found in a wide variety of medicinal goods, ejiao also features in foodstuffs and expensive beauty products; for ejiao is said to not only make you feel better - but look better.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the ejiao industry has now become a global mega-business, with Dong-E E-Jiao, the world’s largest producer, reporting sales of £700 million in 2016.

But there's a problem: according to the ejiao industry's own figures, they process around 4 million donkeys each year, producing 5000 tonnes of gelatine. As domestic supply is capped at less than half this figure - 1.8 million, to be precise - it means manufacturers have to find an extra 2.2 million donkeys elsewhere and are thus heavily reliant upon imported skins often purchased from illicit supply networks at over-inflated prices and an unsustainable rate.

The shortage of genuine Chinese donkey hide has not only sent the cost of raw material through the roof, but it has encouraged the poor in Africa into (literally) selling their asses in order to cash in, undermining the long-term stability of rural economies.    

Whilst I'm vaguely sympathetic towards these people being exploited by Sino-capitalism, it's mostly the poor donkeys I feel sorry for; malnourished and mistreated during their short lives, they are then brutally killed and butchered in the unregulated slaughterhouses that can be found popping-up all over Africa, Asia and South America. 

As for the Chinese, who keep the ejiao industry grinding on ... one is almost tempted to share Morrissey's assessment of them - though, ultimately, aren't carnophallogocentrism and cruelty defining characteristics of humanity? 


Notes

For a related post on cruelty towards donkeys and the politics of zoosadism in Pakistan, click here. 

For an earlier post on Chairman Mao and the swindle of traditional Chinese medicine, click here. 

Anyone interested in doing something to help donkeys, should visit the website of The Donkey Sanctuary: click here. 

Welcome to Taiji Cove

Despite what I wrote in a recent post (Delphinophilia), some people neither wish to swim with dolphins, nor have sex with them. Rather, they wish to corral dolphins, kill dolphins, and eat dolphins: welcome to the blood-red waters of Taiji Cove.

Every year in this remote bay, thousands of wild dolphins are rounded up by fishermen. The cutest looking are sold into captivity and obliged to spend the rest of their lives performing in the entertainment industry. The rest are slaughtered with knives or by having a metal spike thrust into their spinal cord. When they have bled to death, they are then hauled to a harbour-side warehouse and prepared for exclusive Japanese dinner tables along with whale blubber and shark-fin soup.

This annual festival of cruelty came to public attention after the release of Oscar-winning documentary The Cove (dir. Louis Psihoyos, 2009). The film followed a group of eco-activists attempting to gain access to the the hunt. It met with predictable opposition in Japan from groups saying it was racist and an affront to an ancient way of life.  

And so, despite continuing international protest, the government of Japan staunchly defends the practice on the grounds of cultural tradition - a phrase that effectively functions as a moral release clause and which is used to justify all of those things which lack any other form of legitimacy, from badger baiting to female genital mutilation.

   

Taiji's mayor, Kazutaka Sangen, remains particularly defiant and almost belligerent as he reminds Western devils about the bombing of Hiroshima. This, of course, is insanely besides the point. But, on the other hand, it's certainly fair to question our eating of other warm-blooded and sentient mammals, such as cows, sheep, and pigs. 

For ultimately, as Morrissey says, all meat is murder and there's no easy way around the fact that the brutal and systematic exploitation and destruction of animals on an industrial scale (an aspect of what Derrida terms carnophallogocentrism) is a global phenomenon and not one peculiar to the Land of the Rising Sun.