Further Reflections on Baby Mia

Baby Mia with eyes open (2 weeks)

I.

Babies: what on earth do they think about, when they stare with eyes full of inhuman darkness?

I'm not certain, but I find myself agreeing with D. H. Lawrence that it's "by no means a gaze of innocence", but is rather one of "profound, pre-visual discerning."

It's obvious (is it not?) that the infant looks across a strange gulf of some kind and does so with such cruel objectivity that we instinctively attempt to chase the look away with kisses. 

II.

It's mistaken to believe babies are born blind, like kittens. For even at birth they can see something of the world and can make out the shape of objects, like a maternal breast for example, if these things are within very close range. But pretty much everything else is a black and white blur to which they are supremely indifferent.     

By two weeks, they can just about recognise a face (or a camera lens) and are able to hold eye contact for a few seconds - as baby Mia demonstrates above. But we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that they have any feelings for us, nor expect to get a genuine smile out of them (any appearance of such is purely an automatic reflex, more likely to indicate the passing of gas rather than the signalling of affection). 

III.

Barely able to perceive, babies have no clear ideas of anyone or anything and remain darkly self-centered. That doesn't mean babies are stupid or selfish. It just means they aren't mentally conscious and live not from the mind, but from the dynamic centre of first consciousness acting powerfully at the solar plexus.

In other words, it's from their little round tummies that they know "with a directness of knowledge that frightens us and may even seem abhorrent". 

And what does the infant know?

It knows that having lost the peace and joy of the womb and had its umbilical cord severed, it must develop ever-further into single identity. Exiled from uterine paradise, "no wonder there are storms of rage and separation."

Ultimately, baby Mia must scream herself into being and independence; for a soul cannot come into its own through love alone. 

See: D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

For earlier Lawrentian reflections on Baby Mia, click here; for Nietzschean reflections on Baby Mia, click here. 

Lady Chatterley's Daughter

Cover of Lady Chatterley's Daughter, ed. Lawrence Lariar, 

(Popular Library, 1960)

At the end of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Connie is carrying a child of unknown sex. But, of course, within the pornographic imagination, it has to be a girl; a daughter who will inherit her mother's desire for unlicensed pleasure and sexual freedom; a Lawrentian nymphet who would make Nabokov smile.

For the pornographic imagination unfolds within a universe in which, as Susan Sontag points out, everything is conceived as an opportunity to fuck and everyone is allowed (and encouraged) to screw everyone else. This is what makes it a total universe; one with "the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing everything into the one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative".

The dream, ultimately, is of a pornotopia in which there are no fixed distinctions between the sexes and no inhibitions can be allowed to endure. Gender, for example, is fluid; something to be performed and perverted. And taboos surrounding things such as incest are simply another means to intensify pleasure and multiply the possibilities of sexual exchange.

Whether the incestuous fantasy of the hot milf and her even hotter daughter was one of Lawrence's, I don't know. Probably not: for Lawrence relates incest to idealism and he is keen to reject and overcome the latter. For Lawrence, incest is just another example of what he terms sex-in-the-head. He writes:

"Finding himself in a sort of emotional cul-de-sac, man proceeds to deduce from his given emotional and passional premises conclusions which are not emotional or passional at all, but just logical, abstract, ideal."

Thus, incest is a logical deduction of human reason, filtered through the pornographic imagination. If at first it rouses deep instinctive opposition, this can soon be eroded or persuaded away. But this motivizing of the passional sphere by idealism is, for Lawrence, the great danger facing us today; "the death of all spontaneous, creative life, and the substituting of the mechanical principle".

However, Lawrence also says that we have no choice but to fulfil these ideals in their extremity. In other words, the pornographic nihilism of our culture cannot be ignored, reversed, or transcended; it can only be consummated.

But note, this doesn't mean spending all day surfing internet porn; it means, rather, rediscovering something of the pristine unconscious - and for this we still need our really great artists and poets.


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Chapter 2, 'The Incest Motive and Idealism'. 

Susan Sontag, 'The Pornographic Imagination', essay in Styles of Radical Will, (Penguin Books, 2009).