Feisty One I'm Not!

 

The other day, at an event held at the National Poetry Library [1], I asked a perfectly reasonable question of the speakers (at their invitation). 

 

The question was pretty much brushed aside, but I was thanked for providing a feisty contribution to the evening. 

That word - feisty - irritated me at the time and has been troubling me ever since: for I am not a small farting dog looking to cause a stink and don't wish to be patronised as such [2].

 

I'm assured it was meant lightheartedly and in the modern sense. 

 

However, when middle-class people label working-class people feisty, then - even if unaware of the carminative origins of the word - it's insulting in much the same way as the word uppity is a highly offensive way of describing black people [3].

 

For the implication is given that those who dare to challenge the prevailing narrative are behaving in a manner that is just a little too rude and aggressive for polite society and next time might think twice before speaking (or even remain silent altogether in the presence of those who are clearly their superiors) [4].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] For details, click here.  

[2] Etymologically, feisty means something quite different from its modern sense; relating as it does to the breaking of wind and to canine flatulence in particular. See the entry on the term in the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary: click here.  

 

[3] See the article by Elspeth Reeve, 'Yep, "Uppity" Is Racist', in The Atlantic (22 November 2011): click here.

 

[4] There's arguably also a subtle sexism operating behind this word feisty when used by a man to describe a woman. See Melissa Mohr's article of 10 September 2020, on the Christian Science Monitor website: click here. 

No Justice, No Peace

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I.

 

No justice, no peace is a political slogan one often hears chanted during protests; particularly protests involving the black community. Its precise meaning is said to be contested, which is rather surprising as I would've thought its message is perfectly clear: as long as there is social injustice, there will always be political discord and violence [1].

 

What's interesting is how it ties ideas of justice and peace - or injustice and violence - inextricably together. And that's what I wish to examine here ...  

 

 

II. 

 

According to Byung-Chul Han, the fact that working-class children have restricted educational and employment opportunities, is an injustice, but it isn't a form of violence: "If violence is used as shorthand for general social negativity, the contours of the idea become hazy." [2] 

 

In other words, the conception of violence must be kept clear and distinct from other ideas and, indeed, not conflated or confused with the operation of power. For even structural forms of oppression in which power is embedded and codified within a system - be it a social, political, or legal system - "is not violence in the strict sense of the word" [3]. 

 

Rather, it is a rulership technique which allows those in control to "rule discreetly and much more efficiently than ruling by violence" [4]. 

 

 

III. 

 

Byung-Chul Han is not the only theorist to hold such a view; the Italian philosopher Vittorio Bufacchi, whose work is primarily concerned with questions of social injustice and political violence, also suggests that there is a need to rethink the relationship between these things. 

 

Whilst conceding that it is tempting to describe acts of injustice as acts of violence - if only to emphasise their brutality and immorality - he nevertheless argues that, ultimately, there is nothing to be gained by a polemical attempt to either replace one term for the other, or see them as synonymous: "Violence being a more extreme phenomenon than injustice [...]" [5]        

 

The thing is, however, as a working-class child, I feel myself entitled to speak of violence. And whilst I might not jump in front of racehorses or wear a BLM t-shirt, I'm also sympathetic to women who experience systemic sexism, or persons of colour who experience institutional racism, as forms of violence. 

 

For even if such violence is mostly symbolic and disguised or invisible, that doesn't make it any less real. And for academics to insist that despite the often intimate relationship between power and violence "there is a structural difference between them" [6], feels like an anaemic form of sophistry.          

 

Notes

 

[1] Obviously, I am interpreting the slogan as a conditional statement, implying that civil peace is impossible without social justice and which not only sees violence as a consequence of injustice, but arguably warns of (or threatens) such. Others, by contrast, see it as a conjunctive statement to be interpreted as saying that neither peace or justice can exist without the other. 

      Interestingly, just as its meaning is somewhat ambiguous, so is the origin of the slogan somewhat obscure, some researchers tracing it all the way back to a note written by the African-American author and activist Frederick Douglass in 1859.    

 

[2] Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence, trans. Amanda DeMarco, (Polity Press, 2018), p. 77.

 

[3] Ibid., p. 78. 

 

[4] Ibid. 

 

[5] Vittorio Bufacchi, Violence and Social Justice, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 2. 

      Later, Bufacchi admits that whilst the terms violence and injustice are not interchangeable, nevertheless the relationship between them is convoluted and they interact on several different levels. Thus it would be wrong to think of political violence and social justice as a mutually exclusive dichotomy, even if the former has an instrumental value and the latter an intrinsic value (i.e., violence is a means to an end, unlike social justice which is an end in itself). See his Introduction to the above text. 

 

[6] Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence, p. 79.   

Black is Not Beautiful: Black is Sublime (A Note on Race and Aesthetics)

 

Zanele Muholi Self-Portrait (2016) from the series 

Somnyama Ngonyama ('Hail The Dark Lioness')

The Cooper Gallery

 

 

I. 

 

Racism is often ugly and yet, interestingly, it is clearly related to the question of aesthetics and what constitutes the beautiful (and thus, by transcendental implication, the good and the true; a linkage that Nietzsche describes as philosophically shameful). 

 

I suppose we can trace this back to the Age of Enlightement, when, as Sander Gilman notes, the relation of blackness to questions of representation and perception was at the heart of the debate concerning artistic value and aesthetic judgement [1]. 

 

For whilst black was certainly not seen as beautiful by Kant and company, it was impossible to conceive of the latter without also formulating ideas about the former and so blackness came to serve as the ideal counterpoint not only to beauty, but morality and reason. 

 

In brief, race - and by extension racism - was at the heart of aesthetic theory in the modern period. Artists, philosophers, and scientists all wanted to know if there was an innate reason for the usually negative response to blackness, or whether this was acquired socially and culturally. 

 

Which is why a curious case concerning a 13-year-old boy with impaired vision became central to this debate ...

 

 

II. 

 

According to Gilman's account, after operating on the child and restoring his sight, Dr. William Cheselden was keen to observe and report on his young patient's response to colours (of which he previously had only a vague idea). 

 

Whilst the boy found all the bright colours pleasing - particularly red, which he thought the most beautiful - black made him feel distinctly uneasy, although eventually this feeling passed. However, when, some months later, he encountered a black woman for the first time, the child was, according to Cheselden, struck with great horror at the sight: Mama, look! It's a negro! I'm frightened!

 

Commenting on this case, Simon Gikandi writes:       

 

"The conclusion here was that since the boy had not seen a black woman before, and had certainly not acquired the ability to associate blackness with ugliness through his culture and instruction, his terror was immediate and intuitive. Located on the level of physiology, that is, the eyes' immediate association of blackness with values not acquired through social association, the Cheselden experiment would be used to counter Locke's view that the association between darkness and fear was acquired through association. In its overpowering negativity, blackness was accorded an immanent value." [2]

 

Of course, whether that's a legitimate conclusion to draw is, of course, debatable; though it's one that Edmund Burke was happy to reinforce. Referring directly to the Cheselden study in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke argued that terror was innately associated with darkness and that blackness instinctively triggered a feeling of horror independent of any learnt associations:

 

"Blackness terrifies us not simply because we have been taught to fear it, Burke claimed, but because the fear of darkness has a physiological source: it causes tension in the muscles of the eye and this, in turn, generates the terror; it is precisely because of its innate capacity to produce terror that blackness functions as the source of the sublime." [3] 

Again, whilst I'm not sure how valid Burke's claim is - particularly the physiological explanation in terms of eye-strain - it's certainly an interesting proposition to say the least; one which rationalises (and thus legitimises) white racism as a natural response and which posits dark bodies as frightening yet, at the same time, awe-inspiring.

 

We continue to see this played out within Western culture even now; not least of all within the pornographic imagination wherein blackness is both fetishised as desirable, but also portrayed as something powerfully threatening to white masculinity and the socio-sexual order. 

Notes

 

[1] Sander L. Gilman, 'The Figure of the Black in German Aesthetic Theory', Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4, (1975), pp. 373–391. To access on JSTOR, go to www.jstor.org/stable/2737769

 

[2]  Simon Gikandi, 'Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic', Michigan Quarterley Review, Vol. XL, Issue 2, (Spring, 2001). To read online click here. 

      Locke's views on the nature of darkness etc. can be found expressed in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689-1691). 

[3] Ibid. 

Tales from Storyville 1: Shame Upon Those Who Think Badly of It (With a Note on Tony Jackson)

Photo of a Storyville prostitute 

by E. J. Bellocq (c. 1912)

For those who don't know, Storyville is not simply the title of an excellent series of BBC TV documentaries made by various international filmmakers. It was also the red-light district of New Orleans, established by municipal ordinance to officially regulate (and profit from) prostitution between 1897 and 1917.

The ordinance originally designated a thirty-eight block area to be known as The District, but it was soon universally referred to as Storyville, after Sidney Story, a city alderman, who wrote the guidelines to control activities within this zone of tolerance. Story, whose big idea was to replicate the port cities of Europe that legalised prostitution, was not amused by this. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, Storyville soon became the most popular - and swingin' - part of town [1], both with locals and tourists who were able to purchase Blue Books to familiarise themselves with the district and give an indication of what girls and services were being offered at which houses (prices, however, were not included). These guides, priced 25c, and available from saloons, barbershops, and street corner vendors, were inscribed with the French motto (more usually associated with the British Order of the Garter): Honi soit qui mal y pense.

Although the brothels employed black, white, and mixed race prostitutes, African-American visitors were barred from legally purchasing services within them, demonstrating how, at this point in time, racial concerns (and racism) trumped even commerce [2]. Despite this restriction on a potential source of income, by 1900 Storyville was fast-becoming New Orleans's largest centre of revenue; the world's oldest profession proving itself to still be the most lucrative.        

So why did it all come crashing down in 1917?

The answer, of course, has to do with the puritanism of wartime leaders, who suddenly rediscover their moral backbones: the US Navy had sailors located in New Orleans and the Secretary of War, Newton Baker, did not want them to have any distractions before being sent to fight. And so he pressed to have the whorehouses of Storyville closed and for prostitution to be recriminalised throughout the entire city. This included even the famous Mahogany Hall, an establishment employing forty women run by Lulu White, which drew its clientele from amongst the wealthiest and most influential men in Louisiana.

Baker - with the support of the American Social Hygiene Organization - is on record saying of the young men he was about to send overseas in order that they might have the (dubious) honour of killing and dying for their country: 'I want these boys armed and clothed by ther government; but I also want them to have an invisible armour ... a moral and intellectual armour for their protection overseas.' 

Whilst the New Orleans Mayor, Martin Behrman, and others strongly protested the closure - You can make prostitution illegal, but you can't make it unpopular - Storyville officially shut up knocking shop at midnight on November 12, 1917.

It continued, however, in a much subdued (and, thanks to Prohibition, sober) manner to be a centre of entertainment throughout the following decade. But essentially the wild times were finished and almost all the buildings in the district were demolished during the 1930s to make way for public housing. Today, there are just three saloons still standing from the Storyville period.  

Notes

[1] Many of the more more upmarket brothels would hire a piano player and sometimes a small ragtime band. Thus, although jazz did not originate in Storyville, it flourished there as in the rest of the city and it was where many visitors first encountered this new style of music, associating it thereafter with vice. Musicians who emerged from Storyville include Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, and Tony Jackson, the latter of whom would become the most popular (and flamboyant) entertainer in New Orleans. As Louis Balfour reminds us, even fellow musicians conceded that Jackson was the hottest performer in town - which is nice. He was also the best-dressed and many attempted to copy his style; the argument being that whilst you couldn't hope to play the piano as well as him, at least you could try to look as good. 
       
Many remember Jackson today as the writer of the song 'Pretty Baby' (1916), the original lyrics of which were said to refer to his male lover of the time. This much-covered song later inspired the 1978 film of the same title, directed by Lois Malle, and starring Brooke Shields as a 12-year-old prostitute (Violet), working in a Storyville brothel: click here for a recent post on this.   

[2] Even the Blue Books, which alphabetically listed the names and addresses of all the prostitutes of Storyville, separated them on the basis of race; going so far as to categorise girls with one great-grandparent of colour (i.e., who were only one-eighth black by descent) as octoroon.   

To read part two of this post - on the photos of Storyville taken by E. J. Bellocq - click here. 

To read part three - on the poetry of Natasha Trethewey - click here. 

Becoming-Other (Part 1): The Case of Boglarka Balogh

Seven types of digital blackface produced by Boglarka Balogh 

(with the assistance of graphic artist Csaba Szábó)

boredpanda.com

I'm sure that some readers will recall the amusing case of Boglarka Balogh, the blonde, blue-eyed Hungarian idealist, who naively published a series of self-portraits in which she had digitally transposed her own facial features on to those of seven African tribal women, instantly provoking a furious online reaction. 

The project was intended to raise awareness of the difficulties faced by such women and to celebrate their unique beauty and cultural diversity. But Balogh, a human rights lawyer and journalist, was swiftly - often brutally - informed that, despite her good intentions, the images were offensive, degrading, and narcissistic.

It seems no matter how woke you may be - and no matter how skilled you are with the latest photo editing software - blackface is never acceptable and white people should stay in their own lane.

Not wanting to add insult to injury, Balogh made no reply to her critics and removed her work from the Bored Panda blog on which she'd posted it (though not before it had already received over 130,000 views), advising everyone to keep calm and love all humanity.

Obviously, such advice is inadequate as well as nauseating. But how then should one respond to this case and the issues raised? The answer, I think, has to do with a queer form of alien sympathy and the poetic imagination. And we can discover why by turning to the work of D. H. Lawrence ...

Click here to read part 2 of this post.

Bootylicious

Oh my gosh! Look at her butt!

Nicki Minaj sleeve photo for her smash hit single 'Anaconda' 

taken from the album The Pinkprint (2014)  

Curb Your Enthusiasm has taught me that for a man to comment on a woman's ass is always to invite trouble and misunderstanding. For as Cheryl points out to Larry, a woman's ass is very personal and it's simply inappropriate to make even a lighthearted reference to it. This is perhaps particularly the case when the ass in question belongs to a woman of colour.

However, at the risk of being mistaken not only for an ass man - and I'm not an ass man - but also for a middle-aged white man with a fetish for young black girls, I would like to defend and celebrate the bootyliciousness of women such as Beyoncé Knowles and Nicki Minaj, particularly in the faces of those who denigrate and seek to body shame such women in a manner that often betrays underlying misogyny and racism. 

For example, I read a piece recently by a (white male) music critic in which he laments the passing of truly gifted black female singers including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, Gloria Gaynor, Gladys Knight, Diana Ross, Nina Simone, and Dinah Washington. Which is fine, if a somewhat predictable and uncontroversial list of names that no one with ears is going to seriously dispute or raise objection to. 

Unfortunately, however, he can't resist taking a dig at today's performers, including Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj, whom, he says, have helped pornify popular culture and become famous "not for their soulful voices or beautiful faces, but for endlessly twerking and firing lasers from their grotesquely over-inflated behinds". These women, he says, "have none of the talent, none of the charm, and none of the sophisticated intelligence" of their predecessors.            

This may, perhaps, have some element of truth in it. But, it seems also to display a puritanical fear of the flesh; particularly female flesh and particularly the black female bottom. One wonders if the writer is simply scared he'll not be able to handle all that jelly or what we might term corporeal excess - the too-muchness of nature, that Camille Paglia writes of in relation to the Venus of Willendorf.   

In a sense, then, the critic is right - the performers of today are earthy in every sense of the word and they drag us down and drag us back with their crude, uninhibited, anally-fixated sexuality. Whereas the great artists mentioned earlier elevate the human spirit with their soulful voices and beautiful faces and represent "the triumph of Apollonian image over the humpiness and horror of mother earth".

In the end, you pays your money and you takes your choice ...


Notes

To watch the scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm (S2/E2) in which Cheryl confronts Larry about his ass fetish, click here. 

To listen to the track 'Bootytlicious', by Destiny's Child, taken from the album Survivor (2001), click here. 

This song popularised the term bootylicious as an approving neologism and it has now entered mainstream English, as has a greater appreciation for women with larger hips, thighs and buttocks (i.e., a body type culturally associated with black and Latina women, though there are plenty of European women who also pride themselves on a fuller, more Rubenesque figure). 

See: Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990), Ch. 2, 'The Birth of the Western Eye'.

Jüdische Insekten or Himmler's Lice

Antisemitic poster from 1942 used in German occupied Poland to warn against the 

supposed connection between Jews, lice and typhus; for the Nazis, Jews infected 

with the disease were metaphysically indistinguishable from its insect carriers.  

To paraphrase Shakespeare, if I may: Some are born insects, some wish to become-insect, and some have insecthood thrust upon 'em. 

Take the Jews, for example, in Hitler's Germany. When not being described as a cancer to be cut out of the body politic, or portrayed as a plague of sewer rats, they were obscenely characterised as parasitic lice or giant cockroaches in need of extermination. For racism loves to dehumanise and to operate in terms of pest control and personal hygiene.

In a speech to his fellow officers in April 1943, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler openly declared:

"Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, antisemitism, for us, has not been a question of ideology, but a matter of cleanliness ..."

To be judenfrei was, in Himmler's mind, to be deloused - i.e. free of blood-sucking, disease-carrying insects that infest individuals and threaten to spread throughout the entire population; creatures that cause feelings of revulsion and which deserve to be eradicated. 

Of course, Jews are not actually insects; they're human beings. And there are moral and legal prohibitions on the premeditated killing of human beings; we even have a special term for it - murder. And it's difficult to persuade people to commit murder. Thus the Nazis had a problem ...

The solution, as the quotation from Himmler demonstrates, involves pushing a metaphor - the Jews are inhuman vermin; the Jews are disgusting insects - beyond its own limit, transforming it into a pseudo-scientific fact and a deadly piece of doxa. Genocide ends with a pile of corpses, but it always begins with an abuse of language that allows us to kill in good conscience. As Hugh Raffles writes:

"There is no doubt that this happened in the Holocaust. ... Explaining it is at the heart of understanding the fate of the Jews, who, after all, would be killed like insects - like lice, in fact. Literally like lice. Like Himmler's lice. With the same routinized indifference and, in vast numbers, with the same techologies."

Raffles also suggests - and one suspects this might very well be the case - that Himmler in his speech was "indulging in an intimate irony with his men"; making a little joke at the expense of those murdered in the gas chambers:

"As is well known, prisoners at Auschwitz were treated to an elaborate charade. Those selected for death were directed to 'delousing facilities' equipped with false-headed showers. They were moved through changing rooms, allocated soap and towels. They were told they would be rewarded for disinfection with hot soup. ... The prisoners massed uncertainly in the shower room. Overhead, unseen, the disinfectors waited in their gas masks for the warmth of the naked bodies to bring the ambient temperature to the optimal 78 degrees Fahrenheit. They then poured crystals from the cans of Zyklon B - a hydrogen cyanide insecticide developed for delousing buildings and clothes - through the ceiling hatches. Finally, the bodies, contorted by the pain caused by the warning agent ... were removed to the crematoria.
      In this grotesque pantomime, the victims ... move from objects of care to objects of annihilation. To diseased humans, delousing promises remediation, a return to community, a return to life; to lice, it offers only extermination. Too late, the prisoners discover they are merely lice."

One of the reasons that the language of National Socialism continues to fascinate (and to appal) is because of the way it conflates and confuses metaphor, euphemism and a brutal literalism into a witches' brew that is vague and void of meaning on the one hand, whilst paradoxically transparent and full of deadly intent on the other.    


Afterword

There are, thankfully, far happier and more positive associations between Jews and insects. In fact, several species of the latter have been named after celebrated Jewish figures; there is, for example, the Karl Marx wasp and the Sigmund Freud beetle - not to mention the Harry Houdini moth, the Lou Reed spider, and the Carole King stonefly.   

See: Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia, (Vintage Books, 2010); particularly the chapter entitled 'Jews', pp. 141-61, from where all of the lines quoted - including those from Heinrich Himmler - were taken. 

Those interested in knowing more about the insects (and other organisms) named after famous Jewish figures, should click here.  

On the Politics of Movember

You might have thought that the Movember Foundation - a charity dedicated to improving men's health and raising awareness of issues around male well-being - would be able to stage its events without attracting too much controversy or critical attention. But you'd be wrong. For even growing a moustache for thirty days can have prickly and pernicious political implications.

Indeed, according to Arianne Shahvisi and Neil Singh, the annual campaign which encourages men to proudly or humourously display facial hair during November and raise money for research into male-specific cancers, such as prostate and testicular cancer, is divisive, gender normative and racist. The problem, as they see it, is essentially twofold:

Firstly, women are effectively prevented from joining in the event, as females with facial hair are regarded as totally unacceptable within our culture (apart from the bearded ladies who appear in circus freak shows). Women who have attempted to show solidarity by relaxing their own shaving etiquette, have often been subject to vile and violent abuse across social media. No one, it seems, wants to see women with hairy legs or upper-lips.

Movember thus lacks inclusivity and serves as a reminder that "women should think carefully before subverting their sexually objectified bodies to join in with boy's games". What's more, the phallocentric decision to fetishize the moustache "reinforces the regressive idea that masculinity is about body chemistry rather than gender identity, and marginalises groups of men who may struggle to grow facial hair, such as trans-men".

Secondly, Movember sends out a very negative message to those minority-ethnic men who sport beards and/or moustaches as cultural and/or religious signifiers and for whom facial hair is neither optional nor something of a joke. For such men, including the millions of UK Muslims, Movember reinforces the othering of hairy, dark-skinned foreigners by the (usually) clean-shaven, white majority and invites laughter in and at their faces.

Thus, for a white man to temporarily grow a moustache as part of a sponsored activity is undeniably racist; at the very least, it displays the same kind of insensitivity and ignorance as shown by those who think it funny to wear blackface or appropriate certain symbolic items of clothing as fancy dress.

And so it's no real surprise to discover that Movember culminates in a number of gala costume parties that showcase what the movement is ultimately about: "white young men ridiculing minorities, and playing up to the lad culture within which the charitable practice has become embedded ... [whilst] female attendees take on the uniforms that now seem fit for any occasion, yet really for none at all: Playboy bunnies, air-hostesses, nurses, cheerleaders ..."

Sadly, because of its laddish tactics and macho bluster, it's doubtful that the Movember Foundation even succeeds in getting male health issues taken more seriously. One might suggest that if they genuinely want to change things and enable men to live healthier, happier lives then they might think more, for example, about deconstructing gender norms that encourage jerkish and destructive behaviour. 


See: Arianne Shahvisi and Neil Singh, 'Why Movember isn't all it's cracked up to be', essay in the New Statesman, (27 Nov 2013). Click here.

For those interested in knowing more about the Movember Foundation (UK), click here.

 

Executing Elephants Part II: The Case of Topsy (Death by Electrocution)

Thirteen years prior to the macabre public execution of poor Mary discussed in part one of this post, was the equally gruesome murder of Topsy at an amusement park in Coney Island, New York by a combination of methods, including electrocution.    

Topsy was a female elephant born in SE Asia around 1875, smuggled into the United States in order to become part of a herd of performing circus animals. Like many others of her kind, however, Topsy didn't enjoy a showbiz lifestyle and rebelled against it, gaining the reputation as a troublesome beast. 

In 1902, after killing an idiot spectator who thought it would be amusing to stub out a cigar on her trunk, she was sold to Luna Park where she again became involved in several well-publicised incidents. Not wishing to tolerate a bolshie elephant, the owners of the park decided to hang Topsy in a pay-to-view, end-of-season public spectacular. This plan was abandoned, however, following objections from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. 

Nevertheless, a new event was quickly arranged; one for invited guests and members of the press only. It was also agreed to use a more certain - and thus arguably more humane - method of strangulation; Topsy was to have large, heavy ropes tied to a steam-powered winch put round her neck. She was also to be given poisoned carrots to consume and electrocuted for good measure.  

On January 4, 1903, in front of a small audience, poor Topsy was duly killed; the 6,600 volts of electricity providing a sizzling coup de grâce. Among those present was a film crew and the resulting snuff movie was released under the title Electrocuting an Elephant. This was available to view via coin-operated kinetoscopes at the time and can still be watched today on YouTube by those with a ghoulish disposition [click here]. 

Doubtless because of the existence of this film, Topsy the elephant has secured her place within the popular cultural imagination.

Finally, it is interesting and I think significant to note that the name, Topsy, was taken from that of a female slave character in Uncle Tom's Cabin - demonstrating how racism and speciesism, as well as violent misogyny, belong to the same matrix of fear and loathing: niggers, women, and dumb animals are all regarded within the white male psyche as dirty and dangerous; creatures in need of taming with a whip and being shown who's boss.  


Note

Part I of Executing Elephants: The Case of Mary (Death by Hanging), can be read by clicking here. 
And Part III: The Case of Chunee (Death by Firing Squad), can be read by clicking here. 

Nietzsche and the Question of Race

Unpersuaded by the determining influence of environmental factors, such as sunlight, upon the production of melanin and ignorant of genetics, Nietzsche has a rather outlandish explanation for variations in human skin colour: starting from the assumption that the primal colour of man "would probably have been a brownish-grey", he suggests that blackness is the evolutionary result of anger and whiteness the result of fear.

Nietzsche thus speculates that racial difference is psychological in origin. "Could it perhaps not be", he muses, that blackness is the "ultimate effect of frequent attacks of rage (and undercurrents of blood beneath the skin) accumulated over thousands of years", whilst, on the other hand, "an equally frequent terror and growing pallid has finally resulted in white skin?" 

Section 241 of Daybreak would be embarrassing enough for readers and admirers of Nietzsche if this was all that he said. But, unfortunately, there's more - and idiosyncratic philosophizing on human biodiversity seems to betray (as is so often the case) an inherent racism. For Nietzsche goes on to explicitly link fearful white timidity to intelligence and violent black fury to animality. 

However, before Nietzsche is once more vilified as a fascist and critical opprobrium again directed towards his writing, it should be recalled that, for Nietzsche, cleverness is a trait he often associates with slave morality and men of ressentiment. Nobility, in contrast, is distinctly bestial in character and frenzied fits of passion are to be admired as a sign of underlying health and vitality.  

Thus, if Nietzsche seems to reinforce the classical ideal that equates what is good with fairness of complexion and what is bad with darkness of hair and skin, his notorious concept of the blond beast doesn't merely refer us to blue-eyed Europeans, but equally to those non-white peoples who also "enjoy freedom from every social constraint" and the good conscience of the wild animal.

In sum: when it comes to the question of race (as with the question of woman), Nietzsche is a complex, challenging, and controversial thinker whose work continues to disturb because it so aggressively refuses to conform with the moral and political standards and expectations of liberal humanism. Ultimately, he doesn't seek to enlighten, but to provoke.     

See: Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), IV. 241 and On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), I. 11. 

Nick Land and the Dark Enlightenment

Old Nick himself

I knew Nick Land, briefly and not very well, in the mid-1990s, whilst I was in the Philosophy Department at Warwick as a Ph. D. student. In fact, Land was assigned to monitor my progress and act as someone to whom I could turn for guidance other than my official supervisor, Keith Ansell-Pearson.

Unlike many others, however, I failed to fall under his evil spell. In fact, if I'm honest, I found him somewhat unsympathisch and don't recall anything he ever told me that particularly amused or struck a chord, apart from the fact that it was, in his view, preferable to sell burgers from the back of a van than to build a conventional academic career. 

Having said that, and to be fair to Land, his Thirst for Annihilation (1992) is a book to which I often return and that's not something you can say of many other (if any) theoretical studies of Bataille and for a long time I characterized my own work as a form of libidinal materialism.

But it's not this text from long ago that I wish to comment on here; rather, I'm interested in his more recent (neoreactionary) writings and his provocative notion of a Dark Enlightenment which seems to involve people waking up to the fact that democracy is incompatible with liberty, equality is a theological conceit, human biodiversity something to be affirmed and capitalism something to be accelerated.

Now, to me, this sounds simply like a form of post-Nietzschean anti-modernism; for others, including Jamie Bartlett, it's a sophisticated neo-fascism spread online by over-educated, often angry white men worried about a coming zombie apocalypse and looking for an emergency exit.

Bartlett describes Land as an eccentric philosopher, which, obviously, he is; but then all genuine thinkers are eccentric, are they not? To be a conventional individual who upholds orthodox opinion and subscribes to moral common sense is to be a bien pensant, but never a truly perverse lover of wisdom.   

Bartlett also complains that Land's thinking is difficult to pin down. But again, I might suggest that it's not usually a sign of lively philosophical intelligence when one's ideas have all the vitality of dead butterflies.

As to the charge that Land is a racist (the worst form of heresy to those who subscribe to and enforce a universal humanism), well, if he is, it's certainly not in the ordinary or banal sense. Indeed, Land is at pains to demonstrate how the latter rests on a grotesquely poor understanding of reality and utter incomprehension of the future that is unfolding (a future in which genomic manipulation will dissolve biological identity in an as yet inconceivably radical manner making the concern over miscegenation and skin-colour seem laughably old-fashioned).

So, without wishing to defend Land from his critics - something he is perfectly capable of doing for himself - I would nevertheless like to encourage readers of Torpedo the Ark to invest the time and accept the challenge of reading Land's work on Dark Enlightenment by clicking here.


Note: Jamie Bartlett is a journalist and the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos (i.e. part of the Cathedral). He regularly writes about online extremism and the perils of the dark web. His blog post for the Telegraph on Nick Land, Mencius Moldbug, and the Dark Enlightenment can be read by clicking here. 

     

Artificial Intelligence and the Question of Racism (The Case of Jacky Alcine)

Jacky Alcine and Friend - laughing and posing for selfies 

in a manner that is all too human 

One of the more disconcerting stories doing the digital rounds at the moment concerns Google's amazing new picture service which lets you store (and edit) unlimited images online. So far, so good. 

But Google Photos also automatically stores the images under a wide but predetermined variety of category headings using the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence to identify objects. And this is where the problems begin; including the problem of racism as an inbuilt feature of technology.  

Thus, embarrassingly for Google, the case of Jacky Alcine, an African American, and his female friend, also black, who were both labelled as gorillas! 

Now, whilst there's nothing essentially wrong or shameful with looking like an ape - we are apes! - of course this issue needs to be understood within the cultural context and long history of racism. This is what makes this case of mistaken identification in the words of a Google executive, "100% not okay". 

To their credit, Google acted swiftly to rectify the situation, apologised to Mr. Alcine and his friend, and issued a statement expressing their genuine sorrow at the upset caused. But still the question tweeted by Mr. Alcine, himself a computer programmer, not of how this happened, but why, remains discreetly passed over in silence. 

For whilst we can all understand glitches in the technology involved and accept that more work needs to be done, the key question concerns the kind of image data that was collected and used by Google in the first place. It's here that an unconscious cross-race effect enters in. For when engineers attempt to teach a machine what a human being looks like by showing it the happy white faces that belong to the majority of their fellow employees in Silicon Valley, then unintended (but nonetheless real and just as offensive) racist consequences follow.

Somewhat depressingly, though unsurprisingly perhaps, it seems that just as the White Man is modelled in the image of God, so is Sonny made in the image of his pale-faced creator and comes with bias built in as standard ...                 

The Case of Rachel Dolezal

The controversial case of Rachel Dolezal continues to fascinate and to challenge many of our ideas and misconceptions concerning race and the cultural construction of identity. 

Ms Dolezal, according to her parents, is a white woman of predominantly European descent who has been wilfully misrepresenting and disguising herself as an African American in order to advance her career and rise to a position of prominence within the black community. For not only did she become a university professor of African studies, specialising in the intersection of gender, race and class, but also president of her local NAACP.  

To be fair, Dolezal grew up in a family with adopted black siblings and attended a school in Mississippi where most of her friends and fellow pupils were black. She also married (and subsequently divorced) a black man with whom she has a child. But, of course, none of this serves to make her African American - anymore than does the deep-tanned skin, the clothing, the jewellery, or the make-up and hairstyling. Biologically speaking, she remains what she has always been: a white woman.

But since when has race ever simply been a question of biology? 

Thus, I have to admit I'm sympathetic to Dolezal and know precisely what she means when she suggests that her case is far more complex and multi-layered than many of her critics (or her parents) understand or wish to concede. This includes, for example, that great paragon of sensitive and sophisticated commentary, Piers Morgan, who brands Dolezal a lying, deluded idiot and is clearly outraged by the thought that race might be reconfigured as a question of style rather than blood and the fear that other essential binaries might in this manner also be problematized.

For Morgan - and he explicitly says as much - race is an either/or issue: you're either black or you're white. And Dolezal is 100% white by birth and breeding and can never be anything but white. Morgan thus brands her carefully crafted and performed identity fraudulent and a mockery; akin to wearing blackface. It would be laughable, he says, were it not so serious, concluding that Dolezal has "committed an appalling act of deception that deserves every heap of abuse now raining down on her head".

Of course, what those such as Morgan really wish us to understand is not that Dolezal is who and what she is no matter what she does, but that we are all born into fixed and fatal identities, regardless of what we learn, accomplish, or become in later life. And this would even include Barack Obama: he might be living in the White House and be the son of a white mother, but, according to those for whom race is an all-determining absolute, he remains a nigger for all eternity.     

In other words, racism begins and ends with a form of death sentence; the belief that colour is so much more than merely skin-deep and blackness entirely unrelated to artifice. 

     

On Doing (and Not Doing) the White Thing

Having earlier this year evicted lesbians from their store in Brighton for kissing in the aisles and taken the decision to exploit the tragedy of the Great War for a Christmas ad in order to flog a few extra bars of chocolate, Sainsbury's seem eager to now demonstrate their racial insensitivity with a new poster campaign designed to promote its company values. Paying a marginally fairer price to British dairy farmers for their milk than some others in the retail sector, is just one way in which Sainsbury's are, apparently, doing the white thing.

Obviously, I get it: it's a pun that even has something of a history to it. One recalls, for example, a popular campaign launched several years ago by the National Dairy Council in which various celebrities encouraged us to drink more of the white stuff. However, speaking as a black man, I have to say I do find the Sainsbury's ad to be contentious at the very least - if not overtly offensive.

For unlike the Dairy Council slogan, the Sainsbury's one crosses a fine line and passes onto extremely unpleasant territory. One can't help thinking of skin colour and normative Aryan values, rather than a pint of semi-skimmed; can't help recalling a long and depressing history of racism in which all of the ancient virtues were associated with fairness of complexion. Nietzsche writes of this in the Genealogy (I. 5).

And so Sainsbury's should stop using this slogan and they should apologise to their non-white staff and customers. They should, in other words, do the right thing by all of us who reject entirely the false and pernicious equivalence made between skin colour, purity of blood, and nobility of spirit - all of us who have no wish to play the white man. 

Non-Racist Photo Sparks Mistaken Outrage

Photo of Dasha Zhukova copyright Buro 24/7

The above picture of fashion designer and magazine editor Dasha Zhukova, in which she sits looking somewhat awkward on an amusingly kitsch piece of human furniture by British pop artist Allen Jones, has, apparently, sparked outrage. 

Rather surprisingly, it's not the fact that the chair objectifies women by assigning them a sexually-submissive whilst decoratively functional role that has caused this storm of angry protest across various social networks and media outlets: it's the fact that the mannequin-sculpture happens to resemble a woman of colour.  

According to some, this makes the work not only misogynistic but racist and the photo of a privileged and extremely wealthy white woman sitting on the chair merely serves to emphasise this. The fact that it was published on Martin Luther King Day ironically - if unintentionally - adding further insult to injury.   

   

Should I bother to comment on this? I'm tempted to do so, obviously. Indeed, when I first glanced at the photo and the headline on the Yahoo news page I felt like a fish being offered bait on a hook.

But, to be perfectly honest, I'm tired today and my heart's simply not in it. So let me just say, for the record if you will, that of course racism, sexism and class hatred are realities that infect every aspect of our culture, society and politics. And of course these things should be questioned and critically challenged. But knee-jerk liberalism rooted in naive moral sentiment and humourless political puritanism rarely helps matters.