Free the Probe-Heads! Once More into the Uncanny Valley with Daniel Silver

Daniel Silver: Angel Dew (2024)

Statuario Altissimo marble and bronze (172 x 66 x 104 cm)  

frithstreetgallery.com

 

Beyond the face lies an altogether different inhumanity - free the probe-heads!

 

 

I. 

 

One of the things I like about Daniel Silver's Uncanny Valley exhibition at the Frith Street Gallery, is that it has given me a new appreciation for the astonishing beauty of that metamorphic rock formed from limestone or dolomite (and composed of calcite crystals) that the ancient Greeks called mármaros, with reference to its gleaming character, and that we know today as marble. 

 

Previously, I've expressed concerns with this material long-favoured by sculptors keen to work within a Classical tradition; concerns mostly of a political nature to do with marble's high-ranking status within what Barthes terms a hierarchy of substances [a].  

 

But, after seeing Silver's new works up close, it becomes impossible not to admire the grandeur of the marble sourced from an old Italian stone yard - particularly as Silver essentially leaves the rock as quarried, only lightly treating the surface or making sculptural marks upon it. 

 

Even without the bronze heads that sit atop them, one could spend many hours happily contemplating these rocks and their geo-aesthetic qualities.

 

But, talking of the metal alloy heads ...

 

 

II.

I'm pleased that Silver seems to privilege the head over the face; that he leaves the latter inscrutable and unsmiling. Because, like Deleuze and Guattari, I have problems with the face which has long held a privileged and determining place within Western art and Western metaphysics in general [b].

 

We like to think our face is individual and unique. But it isn't: it's essentially a type of social machine that overcodes not just the head, but the entire body, like a monstrous hood, ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance. 

 

The smile and all our other familiar facial expressions are merely types of conformity with the dominant reality. If men and women still have a destiny, it is to escape the face, becoming imperceptible. 

 

And how do we do that? 

 

Not by returning to animality, nor even returning to the head prior to facialisation. We find a way, rather, to release what Deleuze and Guattari term têtes chercheuses ...

 

 

III.

 

The primitive head is beautiful but faceless: the modern face is produced "only when the head ceases to be part of the body ..." and is overcoded, as we say above, by the face as social machine in a process "worthy of Doctor Moreau: horrible and magnificent" [c].  

 

But we can't go back: neo-primitivism is not the answer. As Deleuze and Guattari note, renegade westerners will "always be failures at playing African or Indian [...] and no voyage to the South Seas, however arduous, will allow us to [...] lose our face" [188].

 

But perhaps art can help us here: not as an end in itself existing for its own sake, but "as a tool for blazing life lines, in other words, all of those real becomings that are produced only in art, and all those [...] positive deterritorializations that never reterritorialize on art, but instead sweep it away with them toward the realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless" [187].

 

In other words, perhaps art can liberate probe-heads that "dismantle the strata in their wake, break through the walls of significance, pour out of the holes of subjectivity" [190] and steer inhuman forces and flows along lines of creative flight. 

 

 

IV.

 

To be honest, I'm not entirely convinced that Daniel Silver is on board with this project; he's a self-confessed Freudian after all and what we're proposing here is very much anti-Oedipus. Ultimately, I fear there's something a little Allzumenschliches about his vision. 

 

But, you never know: he clearly finds heads fascinating and there's definitely the promise of something vital in his work; something that "exists between the human and non-human, intertwining rocks with bodies, minerals with flesh, embodying multiple temporalities" [d].

 

 

Notes

 

[a] See the post dated 1 December 2012 - Why I Love Mauro Perucchetti's Jelly Baby Family - click here. And see Roland Barthes, 'Plastic', in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Paladin, 1973), pp. 104-106, where the phrase 'hierarchy of substances' is used.  

[b] See the post dated 13 September 2013 - The Politics of the Face - click here.

[c] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 170. Future page references to this text will be given directly in the post. 

[d] Paula Zambrano, Curator of Programmes at the Contemporary Art Society, writing in a short piece posted on 6 December 2024: click here. 

Readers might be interested in an earlier post published on Daniel Silver's Uncanny Valley exhibition  - From Victory to Stone (17 Dec 2024): click here. 

 

This post is for Poppy Sebire (Director of the Frith Street Gallery) for kindly sharing her insights into Daniel Silver's artwork. 

What Was I Thinking? (13 December)

Torpedo the Ark: images from posts published on 

13 December (2014-2023)

 

 

Apart from 2012, 2013, 2019, 2020, and 2022, I have published a post on this date on Torpedo the Ark in every year since its inception. And sometimes, it can be instructive to look back and see what one was thinking and how things may have changed since ...

 

 

Carry On Facesitting (13 Dec 2014) 

This perfectly innocent post is, I discover, another now placed behind a sensitive content warning by the censor-morons who police things for Blogger (which has been owned and hosted by Google since 2003): is it something I said in the text, is it the accompanying image, or is it both? 

 

I don't know. And Google will not say: they simply refer you to their community guidelines and then invite you to identify your own wrongdoing, rectify the situation, and then republish the post in the hope that, after an official review, you'll be allowed to keep it up and that it will be freely accessible to readers. 

For the record: the post is fine as is and I do not intend to make any changes to it. It does not advocate facesitting, although, even if it did, this is not a criminal activity and harms no one.

 

Rather, the post simply reported on a good-natured and somewhat comical protest outside Parliament by sex workers, freedom-loving perverts, and various interested and/or sympathetic parties against new legislation that prohibits the depiction of certain kinky (but nonetheless perfectly legal) acts between consenting adults.

 

It amazed me then and amazes me now, that the UK government might spend its time opposing activities such as facesitting - or regulating the size of dildos - on the (spurious) grounds of health and safety. As one of the organisers of the protest pointed out, the new laws are not only anti-queer, but also inherently sexist, as many of the activities discriminated against are ones that afford specifically female pleasure and empowerment. 

 

 

On the Truth of Things (13 Dec 2015) 

 

Whilst conceding that questions concerning politics and psychagogy are philosophically interesting and that one must invariably return to them at some point, for me, back in 2015 - in my object-oriented days - I was more enthralled by those entities that make up an inhuman and non-human universe and encourage the posing of questions that do not always posit Man as the central subject or final solution.

 

In other words - and I still think this now - the beauty and the truth of things is precisely that they exist mind independently and it's a real joy to occasionally write about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens (not to mention bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens), rather than just human ideas and human relations.

 

 

Reflections from a Sickbed (13 Dec 2016) 

 

It strikes me that the depressing thing about a long-term health condition, is that it lowers your expectations of what constitutes a good life; one is suddenly pleased merely to experience a pain-free day.  

On the other hand, convalescence is a vital phenomenon and so sometimes one welcomes being sick, so that one can, as Heidegger would say, return home to oneself and one's destiny - which of course is death (as all being is a being-towards death). 

 

That being the case, it's not surprising that when ill in bed back on December 13th, 2016 my thoughts should turn to the question of how best to dispose of that most accursed of all objects, one's own corpse. After considering several of the main methods, including cremation, inhumation, and immurement, I decided that a Tibetan sky burial - in which one is literally fed to the vultures - was the most attractive option.  

 

 

Kissing Hitler 1: Some Like It Hot / Kissing Hitler 2: Notes on the Führer's Love Life (13 Dec 2017) 

 

Not one, but two posts on the theme of kissing Hitler published on the same day back in 2017 - what was I thinking, indeed! Perhaps there's some truth in Godwin's law after all ...

Although, as a matter of fact, the first post - 'Some Like It Hot' - was more about Tony Curtis (and what it was like to share an on-screen smooch with Marilyn Monroe), than about Hitler as a recipient of amorous affection. 

 

The second post, however, did look somewhat deeper into Hitler's love life - something that has long been subject to critical and clinical analysis, as well as sensational speculation and obscene rumour. I arrived at the conclusion that, ultimately, it was a pity that Hitler wasn't more of a libertine and less of a Nazi; it's always better to make love rather than war, no matter how perversely one may choose to do so.      

 

On Poetry and Plagiarism (With Reference to the Case of Ailey O'Toole) (13 Dec 2018) 

 

The case of the young American poet Ailey O'Toole - which caused a bit of fuss in certain literary circles - still interests me and I still feel that Ms. O'Toole has nothing to apologise for or feel ashamed about and that she was treated poorly by moralists defending bourgeois (and untenable) notions of intellectual property.

 

For the fact remains, very few poets invent neologisms; and even fewer have original thoughts or feelings. They essentially rearrange the words of a shared language and play with the ideas and emotions of the culture to which they belong. It's an art - and it can produce amazing results - but poetry is never a personal or private matter, no matter how idiosyncratic one's writing style. 

 

As Roland Barthes would argue, the poem-as-text is neither representative of a non-linguistic reality, nor expressive of an author's unique being. It's explainable only through other words that are also drawn from a pre-given, internalised dictionary. Every poem is, in a sense, already a copy of a copy of a copy whose origin is forever lost and meaning infinitely deferred. 

 

Wherever she is today - and whatever she's doing - I send Ms. O'Toole kind regards and warm wishes.  

 

 

Notes on the Fetishist (And Other Stories) by Michel Tournier (13 Dec 2020)

 

Michel Tournier was the writer I loved reading most in the winter of 2020-21 and I wrote over twenty posts inspired by (or referencing) his work in this period. 

 

This includes the above post, in which I offered a series of notes on a collection of stories originally published in French under the title Le Coq de Bruyère (1978) and which offered a queer and often disconcerting dip into the world of the sordid supernatural (to borrow the author's own description).  

 

Those who enjoy philosophically-informed fiction that explores the porno-mythic imagination and accelerates what Jonathan Dollimore terms the perverse dynamic, will like this book - and like it a lot. Other readers, who don't enjoy such fiction, probably won't like it so much (but then, such people probably aren't spending time on this blog either). 

 

The Day of the Golden Jackal (13 Dec 2021)

 

I love felines: but I'm not so keen on canids. 

 

That said, I was happy to discover back in December 2021 that the number of golden jackals - small wolf-like animals, about three times the size of a red fox - have been rapidly expanding in number and increasing their range in recent decades. 

 

Apparently, you can now find jackals living, hunting, and howling in many parts of Central and Northeastern Europe and it has been estimated by the IUCN that whilst there may be fewer than 17,000 wolves left in Europe, there are around 117,000 jackals - and the more the merrier, I say, although, of course, all the usual suspects - such as farmers - raise their familiar objections. 

 

Sadly, therefore, these intelligent and sociable animals continue to be hunted in many countries; one can only invoke the great jackal-headed god Anubis to bite off the hands and tear out the throats of those who harm them (some think that capital punishment for deliberate cruelty to animals is a bit extreme, but I'm not one of them). 

 

 

On the Haunting Beauty of Sue Lloyd (13 Dec 2023)

 

Finally, on December 13th last year, I discussed how, as I get older, my desire is increasingly tied to nostalgia and has effectively become a type of spectrophilia; i.e., sexual attraction to ghosts, or, as in my case, the haunting images of dead actresses from the 1960s and '70s. 

 

This includes Sue Lloyd, who guest starred in many much loved English TV shows during this period, but is perhaps best remembered today for her long-running role as as Barbara Hunter (née Brady) in the British soap opera Crossroads.

 

A former dancer and model, Miss Lloyd also appeared in a number of films; performing alongside Michael Caine in The Ipcress File (1965) and Joan Collins in The Stud (1978), for example.  

 

But what I like most about Miss Lloyd is not her acting credentials, but the fact she exuded the kind of dazzling beauty and sexual sophistication of the older woman which excited me as an adolescent and continues to work its magic some 50 years later. 

 

 

Can a Writer Ever Overshare? On Maggie Nelson's Self-Exposure

Author Maggie Nelson: skilled in the art of making 

the personal and the private public and political

 

 

I. 

 

Someone recently asked me the following question: Can a writer ever overshare?   

 

Well, having graduated from the Deleuzian school of literary theory, I'm certainly uncomfortable with the idea that the writer's main (or only) task is to give expression to the feelings, or impose a coherent and conventional model of language on lived experience.

In other words, literature should not become merely a form of personal overcoding and writing a novel, a poem, or a play is more than an opportunity for an author to confess and tell all. 

 

Like Deleuze, I'm of the view that any genre of writing reliant upon the recounting of childhood memories, foreign holidays, lost loves, or sexual fantasies, is not only frequently bad writing, but dead writing; for literature dies from an excess of emotion, imagination, and autobiography, just as it does from an overdose of reality [1].

 

I don't think it makes me a philosophical prude to say that just as it's advisable to exercise a degree of caution [2] as an artist, so too do terms such as modesty, reservation, and self-restraint have crucial importance. Oversharing and trauma dumping is not the only way - or even the best way - to produce genuinely transgressive work.     

 

 

II.

 

Although she sometimes refers to Deleuze's work - particularly the books written in collaboration with Félix Guattari - Maggie Nelson doesn't seem to be overly concerned with the danger of giving herself away via the giving of a little too much personal information. 

 

In fact, she's a little defensive and prickly on the subject having, I suspect, been accused of oversharing by numerous critics on multiple occasions. So it is that when in conversation with the Canadian artist Moyra Davey in 2017, Nelson responds thusly to the idea that tell-all memoirs can sometimes be a bit much and leave the reader uncomfortable:

 

"Besides mainstream celebrity memoirs or other genres in which artistry need not apply, I don't know where all these narcissistic tell-alls are, not to mention the fact that there can literally be no such thing as a 'tell-all'." [3]

She continues: 

 

"Personally, I never think to myself while reading, 'Why would you want to tell me this?' That question seems to me to speak volumes about the reader/critic more than about the writer. What I hear in that question is the baseline assumption that the writer should not be telling you all this [...] that there's shame in the telling, and the critic's job is to wake the artist or writer up to the shame she/he may have missed." [4]

Nelson concludes:

"At the far end of this logic lies the virulent idea that we're better off with less speech, less telling, less expression; nearly every nasty review of a work of autobiography I've read contains this latent or manifest wish that the writer/artist would just shut up [...] it bugs the hell out of me." [5]

 

 

III. 

 

Whilst one can certainly sense Nelson's irritation - and whilst I don't doubt the genuineness of such for a moment - I don't share her conclusion. 

 

For one thing, I'm of the view that confronting (and achieving) silence is the ultimate aim of literature; that it should push language to its own external limits (which are not outside language but are the outside of language). 

 

In other words, the writer does have to learn how to shut the fuck up due to the fact that, once spoken, speech immediately and directly "enters the service of power" [6] - even if that speech is born of the writer's ultimate nakedness, wherein we like to believe ourselves to be essentially free and shameless.

 

In sum: there's nothing radical, liberating, or progressive about self-exposure and articulating one's seceret desires. On the other hand, there's a good deal to be said for those who know how to remain the soul of discretion and have the ability to withhold certain details [7].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Gilles Deleuze, 'Literature and Life', in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael E. Greco (Verso, 1998), pp. 1-6.   

      Of course, all writers can be guilty of self-obsessed dead writing (necro-narcissism) at times; of being a little too personal. But this is something to try and keep to a minimum and an author should always aim to become-imperceptible as far as possible. Or, as Wilde says in the Preface to Dorian Gray: "To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim."

 

[2] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 160-61, where they advocate caution and the Nietzschean art of small doses, since overdosing - like oversharing - is a very real danger when it comes to dismantling the organism, following a line of flight, or effecting a strange becoming via literature. 

 

[3] Maggie Nelson, 'A Life, A Face, A Gaze', in Like Love: Essays and Conversations (Fern Press, 2024), p. 137.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] See Roland Barthes's 'Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France', in Selected Writings, ed. with an introduction by Susan Sontag (Fontana Press, 1989), p. 461. 

[7] For an alternative view, see Lucretia Rose McCarthy's essay 'Radical Exposures: Crip and Queer in Maggie Nelson's Autotheory', in C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2023): click here. In a nut-shell, McCarthy argues that through her autotheoretical writings: 

      "Nelson familiarizes crip and queer experience, embracing difference through detail whilst challenging stigma and otherness common to the categories. She rejects the mundane and pathological associations of 'oversharing' and shows the way self-exposure can deepen understanding of marginalized lives." 

 

On Board the Ship of Theseus With Melissa Mesku

Melissa Mesku and the 

Ship of Theseus

 

 

I. 

 

A correspondent who knows her Greek mythology (and her French literary theory) writes:

 

In a recent post [1] you refer to Roland Barthes's reference to a ship that has each of its parts replaced over time until it has been entirely rebuilt and how this reinforces one of the key principles of structuralism; namely, that an object is not necessarily born of a mysterious act of creation, but can be produced via the substitution of parts and nomination (i.e., the giving of a fixed name that is not tied to the stability of parts). 

      Barthes, however, mistakenly refers to this ship as the Argo, on which Theseus was said to have sailed with Jason. In fact, it was a different vessel (of unknown name) on which the former sailed from Crete that has given rise to the question that has so intrigued philosophers. Probably you know this, but I think a note for general readers might have been useful so as to avoid confusion and the spreading of misinformation.    

 

I'm extremely grateful for this email which arrived overnight and my correspondent is quite right in what she says; both about Barthes's error and my oversight in not fact checking what he wrote and supplying a brief note of correction.    

 

II.

 

Of course, my correspondent is not the first person to have pointed out that this famous French theorist misremembered his Plutarch; Melissa Mesku, for example, also mentioned this in a brilliant piece in Lapham's Quarterly a few years back [2].

 

Founding editor of ➰➰➰ - a website that delights in recursion and weirdness [3] - Melissa Mesku is someone I greatly admire for daring to celebrate divergence rather than diversity and I thought it might be fun to examine her ideas in the above essay on Theseus's Paradox ...

 

 

III.

 

As Mesku reminds us, Theseus was the mythical hero who famously slayed the minotaur and returned victorious from Crete on a ship that the good people of Athens decided to preserve for posterity; removing old timber as it decayed and replacing it with new wood. 

 

Perhaps inevitably, this soon attracted the attention of the philosophers, who wanted to know if, after many years of such maintenance, the vessel that remained was essentially still the same ship. Some thought it was; others that it wasn't - and philosophers have been arguing over the Ship of Theseus ever since, inspiring many modern ideas to do with the persistence of identity and the return of the same. 

 

Thus, whether this tale has any historical basis or is simply an invention of Plutarch's doesn't really matter, although Mesku is keen to point out that Plutarch "is known for taking liberties as a biographer, and most of his source texts have been lost to time". Further, she adds, the veracity of Plutarch's story "seems especially dubious when we consider that Theseus himself likely never existed". 

 

Leaving the question of whether he was or was not an actual figure, Mesku rightly points out that "the conundrum of how things change and stay the same has been with us a lot longer than Plutarch". Plato, for example, certainly addressed the problem; as did pre-Socratic thinkers such as Heraclitus, to whom it was clear that you can never step in the same river twice. 

 

Two-and-a-half thousand years later, and philosophers are still puzzling their brains over this, although folksy American thinkers often prefer to articulate the question with reference to an axe belonging either to George Washington or Abraham Lincoln depending on who you ask. Followers of John Locke, meanwhile, prefer to think things in relation to an old sock [4] ...!

 

 

IV.

Moving on, Mesku returns us to Maggie Nelson's reference in The Argonauts (2015) to Roland Barthes's discussion of love and language. For Nelson, the Argo functions as a foundational metaphor - retaining what Barthes imparted to it, but also expanding as "a metaphor for the paradox of selfhood, of the 'I' which is immutable yet undergoes constant change". 

 

Since this is where my interest mostly lies - rather than with the work of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei or the ancient Japanese method of pottery repair using gold lacquer - I think I'll close this post here if I may. 

 

Like Mesku, I'm amused at how changes to Theseus's Paradox have only "augmented its paradoxical nature", whilst leaving us still faced with the question of "just how much change something can withstand without it changing into something else".

 

As a Nietzschean, however, i.e., someone who has stamped becoming with the character of being [5], it's not particularly concerning to realise that the eternal return of the same is an illusion and that what actually returns is difference.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The post referred to was entitled 'Argonauts' and published on 27 August 2024: click here.  

 

[2] Melissa Mesku, 'Restoring the Ship of Theseus: Is a paradox still the same after its parts have been replaced?', Lapham's Quarterly (21 Oct 2019): click here to read online. Lines quoted in this post are from this digital version of the work.  

[3] ➰➰➰ (spoken as 'many loops') is a website launched in 2019 that publishes prose, fiction, poetry, photo essays, and artwork alongside various hybrid forms and is preoccupied with the concept of recursion - something which Mesku explains far better than I can here.   

 

[4] Mesku suggests that Locke's version of Thesus's Paradox holds up as a metaphor and might even be preferable with a contemporary audience: "Except for one small problem. Scholars are unable to locate any references to socks in Locke's work." Despite this, it has become, according to Mesku, "the current identity paradox par excellence". 

      Personally, I think Hobbes rather than Locke provides us with a far more interesting development of Theseus's Paradox in De Corpore (1655), where, he asks: What if the discarded parts of the original ship were not destroyed, but collected and used to create a second ship? Mesku notes: "As a thought experiment, Hobbes' version solicits different philosophical proofs and can float on its own like the second ship it posits. Yet it is considered to be a mere addition, a twist - just another plank on Theseus' ship."

 

[5] See Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), III. 617, p. 330. Nietzsche opens the section with the following line: "To impose upon becoming the character of being - that is the supreme will to power."

Readers interested in reading the 'Life of Theseus' should see Vol. 1 of Plutarch's Lives, trans. Aubrey Stewart and George Long (George Bell & Sons, 1894). Click here to access it as a Project Gutenberg eBook (2004) based on this edition. Section XXIII is the key section for those interested in the fate of his thirty-oared ship once it reached Athens.

 

 

Argonauts

Lorenzo Costa: The Argo

(detail of a panel painting c. 1480–90) 

Civic Museum, Padua, Italy

 

 

I. 

 

As everybody knows, the Ἀργοναῦται were the heroic crew aboard the good ship Argo who, sometime before the Trojan War kicked off, accompanied Jason on his quest to find the Golden Fleece, protected by the goddess Hera.  

 

Whether there is any historical basis to this ancient Greek myth - or whether it was pure fiction - is debatable, but hardly important. It remains, factual or not, central within the Western cultural imagination and, in the modern world, the term argonaut refers to anyone engaged in any kind of quest of discovery ...

 

 

II.       

 

For Nietzsche, a philosophical argonaut was one who continually sought out what he terms die große Gesundheit - that is to say, a form of well-being way beyond the bourgeois model of good health we've been given and endlessly told we have to protect; a form of well-being that doesn't make us superhuman, but, on the contrary, allows us to conceive of that which lies overman. 

 

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche describes this new and greater type of health as "more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health" [1] and he argues that anyone who wishes like an artist-philosopher to experience every desire and sail round the dangerous coastal regions of the soul, needs this great health above all else.    

Argonauts of the spirit, who stand divinely apart from others and who "with more daring than is prudent" risk disastrous shipwrecks, will eventually come upon "an as yet undiscovered country whose boundaries nobody has surveyed [...] a world so overrich in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine" that to return home no longer holds the slightest attraction.

 

 

III.

 

In 2015, the genre-defying American writer Maggie Nelson published her award-winning and best-selling book The Argonauts; a series of autotheoretical reflections on desire, identity, family, etc.

 

For Nelson, the term refers to one who sets out to explore (in a quasi-Barthesian manner [2]) the possibilities (and limitations) of love and language and she discusses in detail her relationship with the transgender artist Harry Dodge, with whom she lives in Los Angeles. 

 

This queering of the term Argonaut is certainly an interesting development and one wonders what Apollonius would have made of it ...? 

 

Of course, as almost nothing is known about this ancient Greek author who composed the epic poem about Jason and his quest to locate the Golden Fleece in the 3rd century BC - the Argonautika - it's impossible to answer this question. 

 

However, as Apollonius was clearly interested in the pathology of love, I'm fairly confident he'd approve of Nelson's "always questioning, sometimes wonderfully lyrical" [3] attempt to document the series of bodily experiments she and Harry engage in in order to construct a happy and rewarding life [4]. He might even recognise Nelson's book as belonging to a classical genre of literature that deals with queer phenomena: paradoxography. 

 

The literary critic and cultural historian Lara Feigel rightly identifies the question that haunts Nelson's book; namely, can a love that claims to be radically-other or queer unfold within a conventional domestic setting? Or, to put it another way: can one be a sexually and socially transgressive Argonaut and also a regular mom?

 

Although she attempts to get round this by insisting that "queerness can hold together forms of strangeness that have nothing to do with sexual orientation" [5], Nelson remains "conscious of the dangers of 'homonormativity' [...] and aware that the more the state opens its institutions to the LGBTQ world, the less that world will "'be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe'" [6].

 

Perhaps that's the ultimate sign of the Argonaut: someone who wants the best of both worlds; someone who thinks it reasonable to demand the impossible ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Die Fröliche Wissenschaft (1887), V. 382. I am using the English translation by Walter Kaufmann published as The Gay Science (Vintage Books, 1974). See pp. 346-347. Lines quoted here are on p. 346. 

[2] According to Nelson, the title is a reference to Barthes's idea that two people in a long-term love affair have to continually renew things without changing the form of their relationship - i.e., a bit like the Argonauts had to gradually replace each piece of their ship. Nelson expresses her surprise and joy at the manner in which love can be forever renewed. 

      See the sections Le vaisseau Argo and Le travail du mot in Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac, 1995), pp. 46 and 114. 

 

[3] Lara Feigel ...'The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson review - a radical approach to genre and gender' The Guardian (27 March 2016): click here. 

 

[4] Whilst Maggie busies herself becoming pregnant with a sperm donor, Harry undergoes a bilateral mastectomy and begins taking testosterone. 

 

[5-6]  Lara Feigel ... op. cit. 

 

 

Fot a follow up post to this one - on board the Ship of Theseus with Melissa Mesku - click here. 

 

I am grateful to Maria Karouso whose blog post on the Greek poet Seferis and mythic history inspired this one: click here. 

Punk's Dead Knot: Reflections on an Essay by Ian Trowell - Part 1: I Got You in My Camera ...

 

Sex Pistols on Carnaby Street 

Photo by Ray Stevenson (1976)

 

I. 

 

Ian Trowell's dead knot essay [a] provides a fascinating insight into how time and space are encoded in punk imagery and demonstrates how a photograph, for example, is not simply an objective or neutral representation of reality, but an artefact that is both constructed and constructive of the world as we know it.    

 

The essay analyses two visual artefacts: a photograph of the Sex Pistols from 1976 and a 30-second TV commercial for McDonald's from 2016. Here I shall reflect on the first of these, whilst in part two of this post I shall discuss the latter. 

 

 

II.

 

Ray Stevenson's famous photo of the Sex Pistols strolling along Carnaby Street in the spring of 1976 still makes smile almost fifty years later, due mostly to what Trowell terms the performative iconoclasm and punk theatricality that is here captured and preserved on film; a second of their lives ruined for life, as Rotten might say [b]. 

 

According to Trowell, whilst Paul Cook is perfectly content to eat his grapes purchased from Berwick Street Market and remain not only partially obscured but as anonymous as the brown paper bag containing his fruit - and whilst Steve Jones and Johnny Rotten are both happy to clown and pose for the camera - Glen Matlock looks uncomfortable and out of place:

 

"His comportment is akin to Wittgenstein's multi-stable rabbitduck illusion in that he is both relaxed and not relaxed at the same time. He has taken the relaxed pose of a pop star going through the motions of a publicity photograph but it clearly seems that he is out of step with the posed anti-comportment of the rest of the band." [183]

 

Matlock, with his buttoned-up jacket and persona, doesn't quite fit in with a band safety-pinned together or with the wider punk aesthetic and ethos; he's just a little too smart and sensible; the slightly nervous observer of the scene, always hanging back and looking on: 

 

"It is a disorienting picture since he appears to know his time is running out, but at the same time he gives the impression of lingering with admiration and anticipation, an adumbration of what is to come evidently with or without him." [184]

 

If, due to Rotten's "hogging of the frame" [185], locating the picture's true point of magic is made difficult, neverthless, for Trowell, it's not Rotten's ugly mug but the fastened button on Matlock's jacket that forms the pictures punctum - i.e., that troubling detail that disturbs and distracts from the more general field of interest (the photo's studium); that which pricks our attention and often moves us with a certain poignant delight [c]. 

 

 

III. 

 

Glen Matlock's button and Wittgenstein's duckrabbit aside, Trowell gives us many other interesting ideas to consider; about Carnaby Street as a subcultural epicentre; about the staging of photography; and about Rotten's performance for the camera.

 

He suggests, for example, that "Stevenson's photograph bears an uncanny resemblance to Roger Fenton's 1855 photograph Valley of the Shadow of Death" [184]. I don't quite see it myself, however, and might just as easily imagine the Sex Pistols "photoshopped into the immediate foreground" [184] of many an image containing a tapering path. 

 

For instance, here's Jones and Rotten following the yellow brick road:

 

 

 

I wasn't entirely convinced either by Trowell's suggestion that we might consider Stevenson's photograph as "a precisely posed document with the four punk musicians reminiscent of the generic crouched figures of Captain Kirk and his original Star Trek crew materializing on a hostile, alien planet with their phasers at the ready to deal with the subcultural detritus that might turn on them at any moment" [186], although it's certainly an original reading.  

 

These things aside, for the most part one agrees with Trowell's interpretations and marvels at his insights. Rotten's captioning of Stevenson's photo as forced fun at Malcolm's behest is pithy, but one needs Trowell's essay to provide the theoretical and cultural context without which it's just another snap. 

 

The band may never have had much clue as to what was going on or what was at stake, but Malcolm knew exactly what he wanted to do and how he wanted the band to look: "The photograph tries to set out McLaren's deliberate positioning of punk as against the process of accumulation of all music genres and stylistic connotations and manifestations that have gone before." [188]

Obviously, in due course every image loses its power and becomes just another stock photo filed away in an archive: cultural fodder, as Trowell puts it. Some truly great pictures, however, retain their abilty to shock or seduce or to scandalise for decades; others, like this one, now mostly rely on Matlock's button to provide a point of interest.

 

Ultimately, argues Trowell, even the Sex Pistols "cannot escape time and space" [188] just as punk cannot escape being co-opted and commercialised by the forces of capital, as McLaren and Reid conceded in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980).

   

 

Notes

 

[a] Ian Trowell, 'Punk's dead knot: Constructing the temporal and spatial in commercial punk imagery', Punk & Post-Punk, Volume 5, Number 2 (2016), pp. 181-199. Page references given in the post refer to the essay as published here.  

[b] Somewhat surprisingly, Trowell doesn't refer us to the following lines in the Sex Pistols' song 'I Wanna Be Me': 'I got you in my camera / a second of your life, ruined for life'.

      He does, however, refer us to John Berger who argues that the true content of a photograph is invisible as it "derves from a play not with form, but with time ... it isolates, preserves and presents a moment taken from a continuum". See Understanding a Photograph (Penguin, 2013), p. 20. 

[c] Barthes's concept of the punctum raises a problem discussed by commentators such as Michael Fried and James Elkins; if it calls forth a highly idiosyncratic response on behalf of an individual viewer, then how can that experience ever be communicated and theorised? In other words, can Matlock's button ever intensely move anyone other than Trowell himself? I might understand what he says and appreciate what he writes, but is his experience of pleasure (as of pain) not uniquely his own?  

 

 

Musical bonus: Sex Pistols, 'I Wanna Be Me', b-side to 'Anarachy in the UK' (EMI, 1976): click here.  

 

Part two of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

Johnny Rotten as an Abject Antihero (2)

Johnny Rotten as an Abject Antihero 

(SA/2024)

 

 

I. 

 

Following publication of a recent post on Johnny Rotten as an abject antihero, a young woman writes from France to accuse me of body shaming the former Sex Pistol: 

 

'If he wasn't larger-bodied than you and many others in our fatphobic society find acceptable, then I very much doubt you'd feel at liberty to ridicule Lydon and subject him to such unfair criticism.' 

 

Whilst I'd accept there's an element of truth in this, I think it misses the point of the post, which - as the opening reference to Julia Kristeva indicates - was essentially concerned with the state of abjection and what an abject individual may have to teach us, rather than with Rotten's weight per se (although his obesity obviously plays a role here). 

 

Perhaps I might offer a few further remarks in an attempt to clarify ... 

 

 

II. 

 

In critical theory, to be an abject individual is to exist outside of social expectations and moral standards in a manner that doesn't only challenge but unsettles conventional notions of identity. One isn't so much inhuman, as abhuman (i.e., not-quite-human and seemingly caught up in the process of becoming-monstrous). 

 

For Julia Kristeva, this can easily induce horror, particularly when one is confronted by an intrusion of corporeal reality into the symbolic order [1] - such as seeing Rotten on stage now whilst remembering him on stage back in the day. 

 

Being forced to face the abject truth is an inherently traumatic experience; like being asked to look at the decomposing corpse of a loved one. It's deeply disturbing and I understand how it can manifest in the desire not merely to look away, but do away with the abject subject. 

 

Learning how to accept others in their otherness - particularly when that otherness strikes us as repulsive - is to adopt what Roland Barthes describes as a politics of pure liberalism: I am a liberal in order not to be a killer [2]. 

 

 

III. 

 

The irony is that whereas in his punk period Lydon was merely pretending to be Rotten and a social outsider, he has now become truly abject. 

 

And yet, as I suggested at the close of the post we're referring to here, perhaps we should be grateful to him for this; for mightn't it be the case that Rotten, in his very abjectness, draws us unto him and not only grants us a perversely-morbid pleasure of some kind, but exemplifies a Christ-like level of passion by which we might all learn something important ...? 

 

I think so. 

 

And thus, I wasn't so much subjecting Rotten to 'unfair criticism', as my correspondent suggests, rather I was trying to find a way to view him in a positive light; recalling, for example, Jean Genet's insistence that it is only via a becoming-abject that the individual can achieve an existentialist form of sainthood (something that might appeal to the son of Irish Catholics who self-righteously believes himself to be the voice of Truth). 

 

 

IV. 

 

Ultimately, why Rotten does what he does now in the manner he chooses, is, I suppose, only something he can explain. 

 

Perhaps his speaking tour is not simply a commercial venture, but a method of public mourning; i.e., a form of catharsis via which he can express all his anger, sorrow, regret, etc. 

 

And perhaps his karaoke rendition of 'Anarchy in the UK', in which he invites the audience to clap and sing along as if they were the elderly residents of a care home, can be seen as a piece of abject performance art in which old ideals (such as artistic integrity) are devalued once and for all.

 

Or perhaps he's just become what he is (and what he formerly despised) ... 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press, 1982). 

 

[2] Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac, 1995), p. 117. My italics.

 

 

In Defence of Fun

 

 

I. 

 

Stephen Bayley says that fun is facsimilie amusement ...

 

By which he means that fun is a false form of pleasure: "And you don’t have to be a pious old-school Modernist-moralist to find any kind of fakery not amusing at all." [1]

 

No, that's true: but it probably helps. Not that Bayley is, you understand, a Puritan: "gaiety and laughter are all very good" [2], he says.

 

It's simply that, on the one hand, he values authenticity and takes his pleasure seriously, whilst, on the other hand, he feels "both cheated and threatened by the prospect of 'fun'" [3].

 

 

II. 

 

Bayley's position is actually quite common amongst an intellectual class whose language, as Barthes would say, submits too easily to moralising imperatives that characterise fun as a vulgar notion [4]. 

 

I must confess, like Bayley, I also used to sneer at the idea of fun and would speak of the superior Greek notion of leventeia - a zest for life and life's pleasures, such as fine wine, expensive meals, and great art. The sort of pleasures, that is to say, enjoyed by those who believe themselves high-spirited and quick-witted; not those dullards who like to play a round of crazy golf and celebrate Christmas [5].

 

Lately, however, in reaction to this intellectual snobbery, I have reintroduced the word fun into both my personal and political vocabulary in an attempt to counter the negative connotations it has acquired and lift its censorship.  

 

If you make a revolution, says Lawrence, make it for fun ... [6]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Stephen Bayley, 'Why I Hate Fun', Idler Magazine (29 Dec 2023): click here to read online. This article can also be found in the Jan/Feb 2024 print edition of the Idler.

 

[2] Ibid. 

 

[3] Ibid.

 

[4] As Alan McKee has argued, whilst fun is a vital part of popular culture, certain writers in the aesthetic tradition have tended to value it negatively and excluded it from "their consideration of cultural value or even demonised it as a dangerous distraction from what is truly worthwhile in life". 

      See the chapter entitled 'In Defence of Fun', in FUN! What Entertainment Tells Us About Living a Good Life (Palgrave, 2016), pp.41-59. 

 

[5] According to Bayley: "Christmas is a snare and a delusion: a resonantly empty hoax." 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'A Sane Revolution', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 449.  

What Was I Thinking? (22 May)

Images used for the posts published on this date 

in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020

 

 

Sometimes - especially those times when, like today, I'm busy working on an 8000-word essay, the structuring of which is giving me a real headache - it's convenient to be able to look back and see what one was thinking on this date in years gone by, rather than produce all-new material. 

 

It seems that I published a post on this date for five consecutive years: 2016 - 2020. And these posts were: 

 

 

On the Death of a Wellness Warrior (The Case of Jessica Ainscough)

In the first of the May 22nd posts (2016), I discussed the tragic case of a so-called Wellness Warrior from Down Under called Jessica Ainscough. She died, in 2015, from cancer, despite her fanatic adherence to a range of alternative treatments based on diet and lifestyle rather than medical science - including the ludicrous Gerson therapy. 

 

Her case perfectly illustrating the peculiar mix of denial, dishonesty and desperate self-delusion of those who reject chemo and surgery in favour of fruit juice and coffee enemas.  

 

Ainscough sadly placed her hopes in quackery and became a pin-up girl for those who believe there's a global conspiracy by the medical establishment (in cahoots with big business and governments) to cover up the beautiful truth about cancer; i.e. that it can be cured with positive thinking and a bizarre range of practices that are basically forms of faith healing and folk magic despite the pseudo-scientific language they are disguised with. 

 

Having said that - writing in a post-Covid era - I have to admit I'm a lot more reluctant to follow the science and allow untested experimental vaccines to be used on me at the behest of the authorities.

 

 

Towards a Queer Ethology: Who Fucked Bambi (The Case of the Deer-Loving Monkey) 

 

In the second of the May 22nd posts (2017), I discussed a short ethological study of something that those who like to idealise animal behaviour and use Nature as a metaphysical reference point for their own moral values, would probably prefer not to know about; a female sika deer contentedly having sex with a male Japanese macaque (or snow monkey) on the island of Yakushima. 

 

Apparently, although these two species enjoy a close and playful symbiotic relationship, it's extremely rare for them to engage in acts of coition. It seems wrong here to speak of consent or rape and the lead author of the study insisted that both animals seemed to enjoy their shared sexual experience (the female deer even licking the male monkey's ejaculate off her body).

 

 

On the Erotics and Etiquette of Wearing Gloves 

 

In the third of the May 22nd posts (2018), I reflected on a time when respectable women (including my mother) still wore gloves as a matter of course; not just as an elegant fashion accessory to be matched with hat and shoes - nor simply to protect the hands - but as a sign of culture, discipline and breeding.

 

Gloves encoded an entire set of values and were worn to display one's knowledge of - and conformity to - a complex series of social norms governing polite behaviour. In other words, the wearing of gloves was a question of etiquette, belonging to a wider politics of style.

 

But just as important as the wearing of gloves was their removal; a lady should always do so discreetly and not as if performing a striptease of the hand - a point that led us on to the erotics of the glove, as examined by Roland Barthes in his beautiful little book Le plaisir du texte (1973). 

 

According to Barthes, the erotics of the glove is often tied to the pleasure of glimpsing naked female flesh exposed between two edges. In other words, it's 'the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing' which the amorous subject finds arousing. 

 

But of course, there are fetishists who love gloves in and of themselves and couldn't care less about glimpsing the flesh or intermittence; their concern is with the length, style, colour and - often most crucially of all - the material of the glove (be it leather, silk, cotton, or latex).

 

 

The Man and the Dreaming Woman: Notes on D. H. Lawrence's The Witch à la Mode

 

In the fourth of the May 22nd posts (2019), I provided a reading of Lawrence's early short story 'The Witch à la Mode' - one that anticipates his often underrated second novel The Tresspasser (1912) and which is born of the author's sexual frustration and sardonic anger.

 

Interestingly, at the end of the tale, Lawrence seems to come down firmly on the side of sexual maturity and a conventional married life. For having saved his ex-girlfriend from the flames, the protagonist of the story, Coutts, abandons her in order to become the good husband and father, growing fat and amiable in domestic bliss, that he always wanted to be.

 

 

Clap Trap  

 

Finally, there's this post dated 22 May 2020 on the North Korean style communal clap-along in support of our NHS heroes and other key workers that became almost compulsory during the Covid pandemic when we were all in lockdown (a slightly sexier-sounding way of saying imprisoned in our own homes).

 

Doubtless, many clapped with sincerity and a sense of civic duty and were not just showing off or virtue signalling with their saucepans, but the entire performance was cynically orchestrated by politicians and the media and, as I said at the time, I would rather have had a dose of the clap than stand on my doorstep and join in with a depressing (and sinister) display of mock-solidarity. 

 

Freedom is often best expressed as refusal and not-doing, because, as Barthes powerfully reminds us, fascism is the power to compel activity. 

 

 

A Tale of Two Toby Jugs

Fig. 1: Paul Gauguin: Jug Self-portrait (1889)

Fig. 2: Friar Tuck character jug made in England (mid-20thC)

 

I. 

 

The 19th-century French artist, Paul Guaguin, was an interesting and influential figure who produced some astonishing work in a number of mediums, including ceramic; first during the period 1886-1888 (a couple of months of which he spent living in Arles with his friend Vincent Van Gogh) and then again from 1893-1895 (after returning to Paris from his first trip to Tahiti).  

Whilst there are thought to be around sixty of Gauguin's ceramic pieces still surviving, the one that is perhaps best known is a self-portrait in the form of a jug made shortly after his famous bust-up with Van Gogh, in early 1889. 

 

Whilst being threatened with a razor and then having to deal with a madmen cutting off part of his left lughole would undoubtedly be unsettling, Gauguin also witnessed a second traumatic event a few days later; the beheading of a notorious Spanish murderer, Prado, in Paris [1].

 

These two things clearly influenced his macabre and grisly ceramic self-portrait, in which coloured glaze is used to suggest blood running down the side of his face and congealing at his neck. If one looks closely, one sees that an ear is missing. The closed eyes, meanwhile, suggest a death mask. 

 

It's a brilliant - if brutal - work, reproductions of which largely fail to convey both the brilliance and brutality.

 

 

II. 

 

Having said that, I still wouldn't swap the Friar Tuck Toby jug [2], pictured above, which was one of my mother's most treasured possessions and which she kept in the cupboard by the gas meter for over seventy years.  

 

For despite the fact that this object used to frighten me as a small child and lacks the artistic, cultural and finacial value of Guauguin's piece, it means far more to me. Walter Benjamin insists that a mass manufactured object lacks aura - but that, I find, is simply not true. 

 

Or, even if it is true, I don't care; my mother's Friar Tuck Toby jug has a magical presence for me (as well as sentimental value, which certain intellectuals like to sneer at and find indecent, although Roland Barthes appreciated its importance).        

 

Notes

 

[1] Prado had murdered a prostitute. Gauguin - like Nietzsche - thought his sentence unjust and the execution profoundly disturbed him; not least because, according to his account, it was botched and it took two attempts to decapitate the prisoner. 

      Prado was executed on 28 December, 1888. Van Gogh, with whom Gauguin had discussed Prado's case, mutilated his ear on 23 December. Thus, it was anything but a merry Christmas that year for Gauguin. 

 

[2] I'm sure a collector or an expert in this area will tell me that what I have is not, in fact, a traditional Toby jug, but rather a character jug - the difference being that the latter only features the head and face and not the full body. Be that as it may, my mother always called her piece a Toby jug and I grew up referring to it as such and don't intend to stop calling it a Toby jug now.