Kiss Me Deadly: Thoughts Inspired by J. G. Ballard's 'Track 12'

Videodrome Lips Art Print designed by ep-pandality 

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Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth, for your love is deadlier than poison.

 

 

I. 

 

To press one's lips against those of another human being and then to insert your tongue into their mouth in an act of amorous exploration, has always seemed a rather queer thing to do. 

 

Of course, I'm no philematologist, and I don't know if kissing is an instinctual act of passion or an example of learned behaviour reinforced by poets and filmmakers. But I do think that Freud was right to identify it as a primary form of perversion [a].    

 

And I do think that D. H. Lawrence was right to describe the close-up kiss on screen in terms of obscenity (i.e., a loss of scenic distance) [b]. There's something profoundly unpleasant about an intimate and private act made visible and public - when it is literally in your face.

 

And the sound of smooching can also become disgusting and disorientating when it is recorded, amplified, or in some way mechanically processed - as we discover in J. G. Ballard's short story 'Track 12' [c]. The fact is, there are some sights that should always remain unseen and there are some sounds that should always remain unheard ...

 

 

II.     

 

Ballard's story rather reminds me of one of those written by Roald Dahl that originally formed the basis of the British TV series Tales of the Unexpected (ITV 1979-88); slightly sinister, darkly comic, and with an unexpected sting in the tail.

 

'Track 12' concerns a love triangle between a university professor, Sheringham, his wife, Susan, and her lover, Maxted. The latter, a former athlete, has been invited by Sheringham to his home on the pretext of discussing a potential business deal (although Maxted suspects he is about to be confronted over the affair).   

Throughout the evening, Sheringham insists on playing odd sound recordings of otherwise inaudible sounds amplified 100,000 times and challenging Maxted - fitted out with headphones that have made his ears feel bruised and numb - to guess what they are (one of them is the sound of a pin dropping). 

 

Maxted finds these games infantile and irritating; one man's obsession with microsonics is another man's boring waste of time:

 

"'Some of the records are interesting,' he admitted. 'They have a sort of crazy novelty value, like blown-up photographs of moths' faces and razor blades. Despite what you claim, though, I can't belive microsonics will ever become a scientific tool. It's just an elaborate laboratory toy.'" [91]  

 

Maxted - "a tall fleshy man with a coarse handsome face" [92] - also finds Sheringham a grotesque bore: 

 

"He surveyed Sheringham with as much detachment as he could muster, wondering whether this prim unattractive man, with his pedantry and in-bred academic humour, had any redeeming qualities whatever." [92]  

 

Sheringham insists on playing one last track. Maxted, however, is feeling cold and shivers as a low noise begins to crackle from multiple speakers placed around the patio. As he attempts to reach across the table to help himself to more whisky, he uncontrollably falls back into his chair:

 

"His stomach seemed to be full of mercury, ice-cold and enormously heavy. He pushed himself forward again, trying to reach the glass, and knocked it across the table. His brain began to fade, and he leaned his elbows helplessly on the lass edge of the table and felt his head fall onto his wrists." [93]  

 

This is never a good sign: in fact, it's often a sign one has - as in this case - been poisoned: "'Chromium cyanate. Inhibits the coenzyme system controlling the body's fluid balances, floods hydroxyl into the bloodstream. In brief, you drown'" [93], as Sheringham politely informs Maxted with a sympathetic smile. 

 

He then goes on to reveal his knowledge of the affair that's been going on behind his back and explains to Maxted how he's been secretly recording the illicit acts of intimacy with numerous hidden microphones. Meanwhile, track 12 continues to play:

 

"Being fed into the patio was a curiously muffled spongy noise, like elastic waves lapping in a latex sea. The rhythms were huge and ungainly, overlaid by the deep leaden wheezing of gigantic bellows. Barely audible at first, the sounds rose until they filled the patio and shut out the few traffic noises along the highway. 

      'Fantastic, isn't it?' Sheringham said. [...] 'These are 30-second repeats, 400 microsens, amplification one thousand. I admit I've edited the track a little, but it's still remarkable how repulsive a beautiful sound can become.'" [94]

 

Fearing that the drugged and dying Maxted will never guess what it is he's listening to, Sheringham gives him a clue: 

 

"'Last Saturday, just after midnight, you and Susan were lying back in this same chair. [...] The wind is your own breathing, fairly heavy at the time, if I remember; your interlocked pulses produced the thunder effect.'" [94]

 

But it's no good: Maxted is too far gone to answer. Watching as his rival "drifted in a wash of sound" [94], Sheringham pumps up the volume and bellows in his rival's ear: 

 

"'Maxted, can you hear the sea? Do you know where you're drowning?' [...] 

      'In a kiss!' Sheringham screamed. 'A kiss!'" [95]

  

 

Notes

 

[a] In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916-17), Freud reminds readers that the mouth is the entrance to the digestive tract and not a sex organ per se. Thus, even a kiss between the most respectable married couple who pride themselves on leading a normal love life might be described as a perverse act, since it consists in the bringing together of the oral erotogenic zones instead of the genitals.

 

[b] In his essay 'Pornography and Obscenity', Lawrence claims that "the most obscene painting on a Greek vase [...] is not as pornographical as the close-up kisses on the film". See Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 253. 

      See also Lawrence's poem 'When I went to the film', in The Complete Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 385, and Lawrence's 1928 painting Close-Up (Kiss), in D. H. Lawrence's Paintings, Introduction by Keith Sagar, (Chaucer Press, 2003), p. 58. Prints of this artwork are available to buy on pixels.com in a variety of formats: click here. 

 

[c] 'Track 12' first appeared in the April 1958 edition of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds (Vol. 24, No. 70). Readers can find it in several different collections of Ballard's short stories, including Passport to Eternity (1963), The Overloaded Man (1967), and The Venus Hunters (1986). It is also in The Complete Short Stories, Vol. I, (Fourth Estate, 2014), pp. 90-95, and it's this edition that page numbers given in the post refer to. 

      Interestingly, the story was adapted for screen by Harold Pinter and a short film (22 mins), directed by Joseph Losey, was made in 1967, featuring Stanley Baker (as Maxted), Dirk Bogarde (as Sheringham), and (an uncredited) Julie Christie (as Susan), whose puckered lips fill the screen at the film's deadly climax (a scene which, according to Mark Bould, had a profound influence on David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983)).  

     

 

Musical bonus: 'Kiss Me Deadly', written by Billy Idol and Tony James, from the album Generation X (Chrysalis, 1978): click here. Or, to see Generation X in action, click here. 

Reflections on The Tranparency Society by Byung-Chul Han (Part 2: From The Society of Pornography to The Society of Intimacy)

David Spriggs: Transparency Report (2014)

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III. 

The Society of Pornography

If we must engage in aesthetics, then it's legitimate to point out that transparency "is not the medium of the beautiful" [a] and remind ourselves of Benjamin's argument that beauty requires "what conceals and what is concealed to be inextricably joined" [21]. 

 

In other words, "The beautiful is neither the veil nor the veiled object but rather the object in its veil." [b]

 

This means, somewhat ironically, that beauty can never be revealed or seen; that like truth, beauty hates to go naked: in fact, naked beauty, like the naked truth, does not exist. Having said that, Benjamin thinks the naked human body sublime - i.e., beautiful beyond all beauty and exceeding representation. 

 

But that doesn't hold true it seems for the naked human bodies within pornography: Han is quick to emphasise that the miserable body revealed in pornography may have exhibition value as a piece of flesh, but is lacking in all sublimity: "It is precisely exhibition that destroys creaturely sublimity." [22]

 

The pornographic body is obscene because it lacks grace. But - even if true - we might ask, so what? We admire the graceful movements and gestures of the ballet dancer or gymnast, but why should we expect such (or desire such) from the pornographic model or prostitute? 

 

I tend to agree with Giorgio Agamben, who maintains that "exhibition affords a prime opportunity for a nudity to emerge" [23] that is free of theo-aesthetic value and which, having become transparent, has a singular appeal (or unique allure) [c]. 

 

The girl posing pornographically online doesn't want you to admire her beauty with cool detachment as she exposes her gaping cunt (she's indifferent to your immaculate appreciation); she wants you to jerk off. Porn is a shameless incitement to masturbation, not contemplation [d]. 

 

Han might not like this, but to complain that porn is graceless - or disgraceful - seems to miss the point and all he's doing (apart from revive religious language) is reinstate the "essential difference between the erotic and pornographic" [25]. And that, like all such metaphysical binaries, is philosophically untenable (not to mention a form of violence).   

 

As to whether capitalism "heightens the pornographication of society by exhibiting everthing as a commodity and handing it over to hypervisibility" [24], well, that's another matter. I suspect it probably does and, in as much as it does, Han is justified in borrowing the old Situationist term to describe today's society as "a society of the spectacle" [28].

      

  

The Society of Acceleration

 

Pure movement, which "accelerates just for its own sake" [29] and is going nowhere fast, is something else that Han finds obscene: "it no longer really moves anything or anywhere, and it does not really bring about anything" [29]. 

 

He prefers, in contrast, those narrative processes that elude acceleration and structure time in a meaningful manner; rituals and ceremonies: 

 

"Rituals and ceremonies have their own temporality, their own rhythm and tact. The society of transparency abolishes all rituals and ceremonies becase they do not admit operationalization; that is, they impede the accelerated circulation of information, communication, and production." [30]

The result of this abolition is that our world is uneventful, in the philosophical sense of that term; plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. 

 

Also, we are no longer able to linger in attentiveness (or dwell in peace); no longer able to live the vita contemplativa. The pilgrim is replaced by the tourist, who never really arrives anywhere or finds what they're looking for:

 

"The pilgrimage is a narrative event. For this reason, the itinerary is not a passage to be traversed as quickly as possible, but a path rich in significance. Being underway is charged with meanings such as atonement, healing, or thanksgiving. Because of this narrativity, pilgrimage cannot be accelerated." [31]

 

Han continues: 

 

"In terms of temporality, the pilgrim is on the way to a future in which well-being or salvation [ein Heil] is expected. For this reason, he is not a tourist. The tourist sticks to the present, stays in the here-and-now. He is not underway in the proper sense. The way he travels holds no significance [...] The tourist knows nothing of the rich significance, the narrativity, of the way." [31]     

No surprises to learn that Byung-Chul Han studied Catholic theology and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Heidegger. Nor to discover the same kind of prejudice when discussing tourism that his attitude to porn betrays [e]. I suspect his real objection to contemporary society is the fact that it's secular in character and that when he uses the word obscene he essentially means profane. 

 

And when he says that compulsive transparency "annihilates the fragrance of things" [32], I'm guessing the fragrance he has in mind is a mix of benzoin, frankincense, and myrrh ...

 

Han concludes this chapter:  

 

"The crisis of our times is not acceleration, but rather the scattering and dissociation of temporality. Temporal dis-synchrony makes time buzz without direction and disintegrate into a mere series of  punctual, atomized presences. Thereby, time becomes additive and is emptied of all narrativity." [32-33]

 

So what's the solution? Not deceleration, since acceleration per se is not the actual problem. I think, for Han - as for Heidegger - the answer is: Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten ... [f]     

 

The Society of Intimacy

 

Whilst 18th-century society was theatrical in character, ours, in contrast, is far more intimate, as we abandon distance for immediacy and symbolic representation yields to pornographic exhibition. People don't want to play clearly defined social roles, they wish to strive for authenticity:

 

"Intimacy is the psychological formula of transparency. One believes that one attains transparency of the soul by revealing intimate feelings and emotions, by laying the soul bare." [35] 

And where does one commit this soul baring? Not in the confessional, or in a potentially hostile public space, but on social media, which sets up a virtual space of absolute closeness and closedness; "the outside has been eliminated" [35]. 

 

One can at last be perfectly safe and perfectly alone with oneself: 

 

"This digital vicinity [Nachbarschaft] offers users only sectors of the world that please them. In this fashion, it dismantles the public sphere [Öffentlichkeit] - indeed, it dismantles public, critical consciousness - and it privitizes the world." [35]  

 

We have been transformed into digital narcissists who prefer to encounter ourselves everywhere, rather than the stranger, or Other, who just might help us escape from the hell of the Same ...      

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society, trans. Erik Butler, (Stanford University Press, 2015). Future page references will be given in the post itself. I would remind readers that the chapter titles given in bold are Han's. Part one of this post, which discusses the first three chapters (and preface), can be read by clicking here. 

 

[b] Walter Benjamin, 'Goethe's Elective Affinities', Selected Writings 1913-1926, Vol. I, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael. W. Jennings, (Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 351. Quoted by Han on p. 21 of The Transparency Society. 

[c] See Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, (Stanford University Press, 2010). Byung-Chul Han quotes fairly extensively from this work, even though he disagrees with what Agamben writes.

[d] D. H. Lawrence also pointed this out: "The pornography of today [...] is an invariable stimulant to the vice of self abuse; onanism, masturbation, call it what you will. In young or old, man or woman, boy or girl, modern pornography is a direct provocative of masturbation." See 'Pornography and Obscenity', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 244.

  

[e] This snobbish disdain for numerous aspects of popular culture - from tinned food to tourism; newspapers to cinema - was common amongst modernist writers in the twentieth-century - from D. H. Lawrence to T. S. Eliot; Theodor Adorno to Martin Heidegger. Although there are some deeply stupid opinions expressed in John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (Faber and Faber, 1992), it remains one of the go-to books on this subject. 

[f] This phrase - Only a God Can Save Us - is the title of an interview given by Martin Heidegger to Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff, published in Der Spiegel magazine on September 23, 1966. 

 

This post continues and concludes in part three: click here. 

 

 

Toilettenphilosophie

"[There are] three different attitudes towards excremental excess: 

an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; 

a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way."

- Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (1997)

I.

Faced with a 48-hour (non-figurative) shitstorm, I've come to the conclusion that there's really nothing funny about anorectal dysfunction and that bowel incontinence is not only beyond the pale, but beyond a joke.

Scatological humour might solicit laughter, but I agree with Cindy LaCom that this laughter is always rather hollow and "limited in its power to diminish public shame around the biological fact of shit".

Indeed, we might think of such gross-out comedy as a nervous defence mechanism designed to reduce anxiety and distance ourselves from the grim - often disgusting - reality of bodies subject to chaotic violence (bodies that have lost all integrity and self-control).     


II.

If the obscene is a loss of perspective that renders aesthetic judgement impossible, then horror might be defined as a shattering of taboo that results in a loss of illusion; i.e., it's the way in which the world rubs our noses in our own filthy mortality and its own base materialism. No matter how idealistic you are, you can't polish a turd. And you can't stop it stinking. 

Thus, even if there's nothing to laugh about when a frail and demented old woman shits her pants seven times in a weekend (the consequence of prescribing an aggressive laxative administered during a month long stay in hospital), there is something philosophically important to reflect upon ...


III.

Whilst clearly understanding the complex psycho-cultural reasons behind coprophobia, Georges Bataille and D. H. Lawrence both affirm the fact that human beings shit. Indeed, rather than seeing the act of defecating as something shameful, they think it should be acknowledged and celebrated.

Thus, in Lady Chatterley's Lover, for example, Mellors famously tells Connie as he strokes her soft sloping bottom and fingers the two secret openings to her body - "'An' if tha shits an' if tha pisses, I'm glad. I don't want a woman as couldna shit nor piss.'" 

I understand the point that Lawrence is trying to make here: he wants the human mind to free itself of its fear of the body and the body's potencies. For in his view, "the mind's terror of the body has probably driven more men mad than ever could be counted" and it's monstrous that anyone should be made to feel morally ashamed of their natural bodily functions.

That's fine. But I can't help wondering whether Mellors would be quite so un-Swiftian if Connie experienced a catastrophic loss of bowel control during the night of sensual pleasure ... Further, I have to admit - following recent experiences - that perhaps we need our illusions, our taboos, our lies surrounding the body.

Ultimately, perhaps it's preferable to have stars rather than shit in our eyes and not so unforgivable to find comfort in the reassuring smell of bleach ...

Notes

Cindy LaCom, 'Filthy Bodies, Porous Boundaries: The Politics of Shit in Disability Studies', Disability Studies Quarterly, Winter/Spring 2007, Volume 27, No.1-2. Click here to read online. 

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 223 and 309.  

To read a related post to this one from March 2015, click here. 

In Praise of Shadows and the Beauty of Japanese Ghost Girls (A Post for Halloween 2016)

A Japanese Ghost Girl or Yūrei [幽靈]

The Land of the Rising Sun is also the Land of the Falling Shadow; a place in which the gathering gloom of twilight and the brilliance of daybreak are held in equal regard and darkness causes no anxiety or discontent. The Japanese accept the moon at midnight and resign themselves to the presence of bats, ghosts, and witches, etc.  

Perhaps no one writes more profoundly in praise of shadows than Junichirō Tanizaki. He understands that the power and the beauty of the object - its allure - is tied precisely to that aspect of it which is forever concealed in darkness and which withdraws from sight (that is to say, its occult aspect).

Take, for example, the fairest and most seductive of all objects - woman - who is arguably never so lovely as she is when at her most spectral, like a phosphorescent jewel glowing softly in the night that loses its magic in the full light of day. In the erotic imagination of the Japanese male, woman is inseparable from darkness; cosmetically enhanced and concealed in the folds of her robe or gown; her raven black hair framing (and often hiding) her white face.       

This is not, typically, a Western aesthetic. For Westerners, beauty is that which shines forth, which radiates, which loves, like truth, to go naked and which can be perceived by the eye. There is, thus, something obscene about our theory of beauty in that it ultimately rests on indecent exposure (not least of sun-kissed female flesh).

And we really rather despise shadowy existence: our quest for enlightenment never ceases and we spare no effort to eradicate even the faintest trace of darkness. Indeed, as Jean Baudrillard pointed out, we would, if we could, leap over our own shadows into a world of pure lucidity and transparency in which to accomplish perfect self-actualization.

Thankfully, however, a being devoid of their shadow, of their mystery, of their object-allure, is no more than a mad fantasy. No matter how bright we make the lights, no matter how much we bare our flesh and reveal our innermost thoughts and feelings, we'll never transcend the night or escape the shadows.

Happy Halloween ...


See: Junichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker, (Vintage, 2001).

Fruity Shit

According to Lawrence, writing in one of his better known verses, it is the secretive fig that tells us most about the mystery of female flesh and the manner in which it too, having over-ripened, bursts apart showing crimson through the purple slit.

For according to Lawrence, the most beautiful women, just like the most beautiful plants, flower inwardly; unseen, and rejoicing in their covert nakedness. And they die only when they wilfully make an obscene display of their sex and sew together fig-leaves not to hide but to adorn their genitalia; affirming their delicious rottenness through moist, scarlet lips that laugh at the Lord's indignation.   

Lawrence thinks that these women have fatally forgotten that ripe figs won't keep. But mayn't it be that they simply don't care any longer about self-preservation, or submitting to models of femininity rooted in moral injunction? Perhaps they wish to make themselves attractive only to those for whom death is the most exquisite of all pleasures; men and women who dare to put their mouths to the crack and take out the flesh in one bite.

To live, that is to say, more as medlars and sorb-apples rather than secretive figs; with a touch of morbidity and sticky with the sweet essence of hell.

See: D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, (Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 280-84. 

 

No-Pan Kissa

Whatever the problematic sexual politics of such places, there was something undeniably charming about the Japanese coffee shops known as no-pan kissa that flourished in the 1980s, where the waitresses wore short skirts without underwear and served drinks and snacks to customers fascinated by what they saw reflected on the mirrored floors. 

Alas, such establishments rapidly declined in number as their owners made the fatal error of moving ever-further in the direction of naked truth and full-exposure: this trend terminating in the vaginal cyclorama wherein nude women would sit on the edge of a platform with their legs apart, inviting their male admirers to closely inspect their genitalia. 

As Baudrillard writes, all forms of seduction and traditional striptease pale before this spectacle of absolute obscenity and visual voracity that goes far beyond erotic playfulness towards extreme pornographic idealism. The men who pay to push their faces between open thighs and stare with mortal seriousness, never smiling or trying to touch, are participants within an orgy of realism.

The cunt, meanwhile, made monstrously visible, has simply become another empty sign in a hypersexual realm of simulation. That is to say, the object of desire is itself lost in close-up just as myopic voyeurs end by staring themselves blind. Without a little distance and ambiguity, a little secrecy and even, yes, a little romance (i.e. a metaphorical dimension) there can be no gaze, no seduction, and no sex.

Obscenity means nothing other than that the body and its sex organs are literally and often brutally shoved in your face; there is, says Baudrillard, a total acting out of things that ought to be subject if not to privacy, then to dramaturgy, a scene, a game between lovers.