Notes on Patricia MacCormack's Ahuman Manifesto Pt. 1: Preface / Introduction

Patricia MacCormack at the launch of  

The Ahuman Manifesto (Bloomsbury, 2020) 

Photo by Keith Keppell

I.

In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that Patricia MacCormack - a Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University and the author of several books, including Cinesexuality (2008) and Posthuman Ethics (2012) - was formerly an acquaintance of mine and that she remains someone I hold in high esteem (even if, as someone who repudiates hierarchy and refuses to accept that some humans are superior to others, she'd probably find such value-laden language objectionable).     

In a sense, then, I regard The Ahuman Manifesto as a friend's book; even if - as I indicate below - there are things in it I find problematic and even if MacCormack probably regards me as just another posturing white male philosopher of whom nothing much can be expected.

II.

According to the Preface, The Ahuman Manifesto is a book that calls for direct and immediate action, rather than thinking, although, surely the latter is a form of such action, is it not? Indeed, MacCormack will later write of her inherent disdain for "any kind of bifurcating system where action is separated from criticism, word is separated from material reality" [5].
 
Still, this call for action does enable readers who have grown impatient with career academics posing as revolutionaries to throw the text across the room in good conscience.

However, if one resists the urge to do so, one discovers that the book is intended to be an optimistic work of joy and radical compassion, with the latter being interpreted as a form of grace to be extended to all life on earth; a counternihilism that affirms (amongst other things) queer feminism, atheist occultism, deep ecology, and human extinction.

In other words, it's ethics, Jim, but not as we know it ...  

III.

"The end of the anthropocene is the opening of the world." [1]

I don't know if that's true, but it's a nice opening sentence and slogan; though obviously not as catchy as Go vegan! Don't breed! which really should've been the subtitle of The Ahuman Manifesto (I can't help feeling the marketing department at Bloomsbury missed a trick there). 

MacCormack is right to suspect that, for many readers, the idea of the death of humanity will be an absurd and troubling proposition. Personally, however, I don't have any problem with it. What nicer thought is there than the Birkinesque vision of a world without people; just uninterrupted grass and a few rabbits sitting around? Having said that, I'm just as happy to imagine a world entirely devoid of all life and don't share MacCormack's insistent vitalism.

She wants an ahuman future, but she also wants to (a) avoid posthuman despair and (b) retain her political commitment to something that seems rather like old fashioned humanism and its values. Thus, cannibalism might be okay, if some people insist on the right to eat meat, but any form of discrimination, such as racism, for example, remains abhorrent (presumably on the grounds that it lacks compassion).             

At the same time, MacCormack rejects any form of identity politics; a peculiarly anthropocentric obsession as she describes it and it's brave of her to differentiate her thinking from some of her most influential contemporaries:

"Yes, I am an anti-racist, pro-queer, anti-ableist feminist while also wanting to rid the world of human subjective schemas altogether in favour of the individuation of life based not on groups, tribes, nations, genders, races and species, while actively critiquing any fetishization of alterity so beloved of much posthuman theory." [21]

I kind of admire this perversity of wanting to challenge everyone and everything even at the risk of being marginalised or branded a traitor to the human race. Not that such a charge would much bother MacCormack, who sees the concept of treachery as an active negation of the negative (our species having allegedly "betrayed the very concept and value of life at its most basic definition" [4]).

Ironically, however, for a woman who makes a virtue out of disloyalty, she stays philosophically faithful to certain privileged thinkers, including Spinoza, Deleuze, and Guattari, drawing upon familiar terms and concepts from these authors; potentia, desire, ecosophy, etc. This is the same kind of language that I formerly subscribed to and there are themes and sentences in The Ahuman Manifesto that made me nostalgic for my own past, rather than excited about the present or particularly hopeful for the future.

Indeed, MacCormack's ahumanism and my own philosophical musings share a good bit in common; cunt-awareness, gothic queerness, thanaterotics ... etc. However, whilst our obsessions and references may be similar, we view things from very different perspectives and come to very different conclusions; I'm not a vegan abolitionist and I don't, for example, share MacCormack's rejection of reason or regard all truth-claims as a form of (male) violence.

I hope, however, to provide the compassionate reading of her text that she asks for and in the same (inconsistent) tone.  

See: Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the end of the anthropocene (Bloomsbury, 2020). All page numbers given in the text refer to this work. 

To read part 2 of this post (notes on chapters 1-2), click here.

To read part 3 of this post (notes on chapters 4-6), click here. 

Two Great Dancers in Two Unforgettable Pop Videos: Maddie Ziegler and Sergei Polunin

Maddie Ziegler performing in "Chandelier". 

Vocals by Sia. Written by Sia and Jesse Shatkin. From the album 1000 Forms of Fear (2014). 

Video dir. by Sia and Daniel Askill. Choreography by Ryan Heffington. 

A journalist writing for People magazine described Maddie Ziegler as a super-human child or graceful alien sent to Earth from Planet Talented to make us lesser beings look really stiff and clumsy in comparison. And, indeed, watching this eleven-year-old spin and scuttle around like the world's prettiest cockroach, or an insane fairy, in one of YouTube's most viewed videos, does make one feel not only inept and inferior, but very, very old.

We might, as Spinoza would say, still not know what a body can do; but we now have a much better idea, thanks to Maddie Ziegler, of what fabulous things some little bodies are capable of. Once seen, her mesmerizing performance is never forgotten - but never quite believed either (thus the compulsion to watch the video over and over). It's magical. It's grotesque. And it's genius.    

Meanwhile, in an atmospheric and erotically-charged video directed by the American photographer and filmmaker David LaChapelle, former Royal Ballet bad boy and principal dancer Sergei Polunin gives a stunning visual interpretation of Hozier’s powerful gay protest anthem, "Take Me to Church".

Sergei Polunin performing in "Take Me to Church". 

Vocals by Hozier. Written by Hozier. From the album Hozier (2014) 

Video dir. by David LaChapelle. Choreography by Jade Hale-Christofi. 

Set in a rather lovely white studio, amongst the trees and flooded with natural light, the twenty-five year-old Ukrainian shows off his muscles, his scars and his numerous tattoos; pirouetting, leaping and rolling around the stripped wooden floor, dressed in a pair of nude tights cut off above the knee. His passionate - if, sometimes slightly hackneyed performance - not only showcases his own genius and demons, but captures the angry brilliance of Hozier's song.

Lacking the bonkers exuberance of Maddie Ziegler that ultimately makes you want to laugh, Polunin has such immense beauty and eloquent control of his movements that it almost makes you want to cry.

Indeed, I would suggest that anyone who isn't moved by these two performances, these two songs, is probably dead ...

Postmodern Approaches to Literature 3: The Pleasure of the Text (Part II)

 ... and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me 

so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart 

was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

I suppose that one of the more attractive things about approaching literature according to a principle of pleasure is that it means we can have done with judgement in the traditional terms of good and bad. This in itself is surely a relief of some kind and a significant break with the moral history of the West. For as Deleuze rightly points out: "From Greek tragedy to modern philosophy, an entire doctrine of judgement has been elaborated and developed".

Kant notoriously gave us a false critique of judgement. It was Spinoza and his heirs, such as Nietzsche, who really carried this out and Barthes follows in their footsteps, refusing either to accuse or justify, defend or condemn. Indeed, Barthes quotes Nietzsche in the very first fragment of The Pleasure of the Text: 'I shall look away, that will henceforth be my sole negation.' All that matters is whether his body finds something pleasurable or not. It's a Nietzschean - not a subjective - game of love and hate.

Of course, what Barthes's body loves and what Barthes's body hates, will not be the same as what the body of another reader might love and hate. In Roland Barthes he makes a list of things he likes and a list of things he doesn’t like; two lists which are apparently of no great significance. But, of course, they do in fact mean something vital; namely, that no two bodies are the same: "Hence, in this anarchic foam of tastes and distastes ... gradually appears the figure of a bodily enigma ..." [1995]

Because all bodies are different, a Society of the Friends of the Text would be a social grouping in which members had nothing in common: "for there is no necessary agreement on the texts of pleasure" [1990]. This calls for a certain liberalism, therefore, each person consenting to "remain silent and polite when confronted by pleasures or rejections which they do not share", or run the risk of homicidal irritation. “I am liberal in order not to be a killer” [1995], as Barthes confesses.

The key thing is that within the above sodality, difference and contradiction is accepted. There is no judgement and no demand for conformity with a categorical imperative governing universal good taste. Barthes is very clear about who would comprise enemies of such a society:

"fools of all kinds, who decree foreclosure of the text and of its pleasure, either by cultural conformism or by intransigent rationalism (suspecting a 'mystique' of literature) or by political moralism or by criticism of the signifier or by stupid pragmatism or by ... loss of verbal desire." [1990]

Picking up on this idea of the body that Barthes introduces, we may say the following: for Barthes, the text itself can be thought of as a "body of bliss consisting solely of erotic relations" [1990] and utterly distinct from the body known by anatomists and discussed within scientific discourse. This is not to reduce the pleasure of the text to some kind of physiological process or need, but it is to affirm that the pleasure of the text "is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas" [1990] and fully comes into its own as a site of what Nietzsche calls the greater intelligence.

This sounds at first precisely like the kind of mysticism which his critics accuse him of and which Barthes is eager to deny. Later in The Pleasure of the Text he will insist that his major aim is to materialize the text and its pleasure; making it into an object of pleasure like any other and thereby abolishing the "false opposition of practical life and contemplative life" [1990].

Jonathan Culler's commentary on this aspect of Barthes’s work is particularly insightful and thus worth quoting at length:

"Reference to the body is part of Barthes’s general attempt to produce a materialist account of reading and writing, but it has four specific functions. First, the introduction of this unexpected term produces a salutary estrangement, especially in the French tradition, where the self has long been identified with consciousness, as in the Cartesian cogito ...
      Second, structuralism has devoted much energy to demonstrating that the conscious subject should not be taken as a given and treated as the source of meaning but should rather be seen as the product of cultural forces and social codes that operate through it. ...
      Third, given structuralism's treatment of the subject ... Barthes could not talk about the subject’s pleasure without begging numerous questions ... Yet he needs a way of speaking that takes account of the empirical fact that an individual can read and enjoy a text ... the notion of the body permits Barthes to avoid the problem of the subject ...
      Fourth, replacement of 'mind' by 'body' accords with Barthes’s emphasis on the materiality of the signifier as a source of pleasure."

Of course, problems remain with this invoking of (and appeal to) the body. For even if one strives to avoid falling into mysticism or some form of biological essentialism, we’re still left with a word that seems to have a greater degree of authority and authenticity than other words; "a word whose ardent, complex, ineffable, and somehow sacred signification gives the illusion that this word holds an answer to everything" [1995] - i.e. what Barthes calls a mana-word.

Although aware that the word 'body' was functioning as such in his later writings, I’m not sure Barthes ever fully addresses this issue. He seems happy to use it, if only as deliberate provocation to the new intellectual orthodoxy - which, ironically, he had helped to create.

Further, if via his use of the term body Barthes allows a form of faceless subjectivity back into the Text, so too is he prepared to welcome back the author as a kind of spectral guest:

"If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters ... no longer privileged, paternal ... He becomes, as it were, a paper-author: his life is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work ..." [1977]

In The Pleasure of the Text, he expands on this theme: 

"As an institution, the Author is dead: his civil status, his biographical person have disappeared ... they no longer exercise over his work the formidable paternity whose account literary history, teaching, and public opinion had the responsibility of establishing and renewing; but in the text, in a way, I desire the author: I need his figure (which is neither his representation nor his projection), as he needs mine ..." [1990]

The reason for this necrophilia is easy to appreciate. Barthes desires the return of the author for the same reason that the text needs its shadow - "a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject" [1990] - and a painting its chiaroscuro: in order for it to become fertile. Those who would argue that we abandon all caution and strip a work of everything that we previously valued within it take us towards sterility and suicide.

As Deleuze and Guattari note, caution is the immanent rule of experimentation, whether one is producing an avant-garde artwork or building a body without organs: "if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing down the plane [of consistency] you will be ... plunged into a black hole, or ... dragged towards catastrophe".

Barthes attempts to shatter the dead-grip of traditional criticism upon classical literature - not to destroy the latter. In his ‘Inaugural Lecture’ to the Collège de France, he declares:

"The old values are no longer transmitted, no longer circulate, no longer impress; literature is desacralized, institutions are impotent to defend and impose it as the implicit model of the human. It is not, if you like, that literature is destroyed; rather it is no longer protected, so that this is the moment to deal with it. ... Our gaze can fall, not without perversity, upon certain old and lovely things, whose signified is abstract, out of date. It is a moment at once decadent and prophetic, a moment of gentle apocalypse, a historical moment of the greatest possible pleasure." [1989]

Of course, whilst Barthes may retain a nostalgic fondness for these old and lovely things (works by Zola, Balzac, Proust et al) - and whilst they may still give him a great deal of plaisir - they cannot induce jouissance. For bliss comes only with the absolutely new; "for only the new disturbs (weakens) consciousness" [1990]. This is a rare occurrence and does not come easily. Often, what we take to be the new is merely "the stereotype of novelty" [1990].

The New, as Barthes conceives it, is then not simply the latest thing - it's a value. And it opposes all the old forms of encratic language (i.e. the language of power), which are founded upon repetition and stereotype; "all official institutions of language are repeating machines: school reports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology" [1990]. Barthes continues:

"The stereotype is the word repeated without any magic, any enthusiasm, as thought it were natural ... Nietzsche has observed that 'truth' is only the solidification of old metaphors. So in this regard the stereotype is the present path of 'truth'..." [1990]

Opposing the rule of the stereotype is the New and the exceptional pleasure of the New (which is bliss). But finding new ways to write and to speak is not easy and would seem to involve more than merely coining endless new terms or indulging in a kind of linguistic Saturnalia. Indeed, Nietzsche warns us against those innovators in language who constantly seek to supplement language, rather than bring greater style or discipline to it.

Heidegger also argues that whilst it’s right to identify the metaphysics of language, there is no need to abandon all grammatical convention. For a revitalizing of language does not result "from the fabrication of neologisms and novel phrases" [1994], but from a change in our relation to (and usage of) language. Even old words, worn out by convention and repetition, can be recontextualized, reinterpreted, and revalued.

Often, it’s case of transforming the Word back into the Flesh; that is to say, of giving back to language what Anaïs Nin described as the “bulginess of sculpture, the feeling of heavy material fullness” and perhaps our poets are best placed to lead the way here. But it’s philosophy, says Heidegger, which is ultimately responsible for preserving “the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself” [1998] and to protect language from being degraded by a common intelligibility into doxa, cliché, or sheer nonsense.

To allow language, in other words, the right to live and, equally important, the right to die. For what is the stereotype at last but the "nauseating impossibility of dying" [1990] - the rule of a world in which words become reified, fixed, undead.

The pleasure of the text, we might conclude, lies in its mortality ...


Bibliography

Roland Barthes, 'From Work to Text', essay in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath, (Fontana Press, 1977). 
Roland Barthes, 'Inaugural Lecture', trans. Richard Howard, in Barthes: Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, (Fontana Press, 1989).
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Blackwell, 1990).
Roland Barthes, ‘Twenty Key Words for Roland Barthes’, interview in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991), pp. 205-06.
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Miller, (Papermac, 1995).
Jonathan Culler, Barthes, (Fontana Press, 1990).
Gilles Deleuze, ‘To Have Done With Judgement’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, (Verso, 1998)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press,
Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language’, essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994).
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, (Blackwell, 1998).
Anaïs Nin, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, (Blackspring Press, 1985).
Mireille Ribière, Barthes: A Beginners Guide, (Hodder and Stoughton, 2002).

Note: this and the two related posts have been assembled from extensive notes made for a course entitled Postmodern Approaches to Literature, that I taught at Morley College, London, in the Spring of 2010. To read PAL 1 click here. To read PAL 2 click here. To read the first part of this post click here. 

This post is dedicated to Gail who asked 'Why read Barthes?'

Torpedo the Ark Means: I Hate Everything

 I Hate Everything bangle by Me and Zena

See website for full details: meandzena.com

I am often asked what the phrase torpedo the ark signifies, despite the fact that I have explicitly stated in several posts that, for me, it primarily means having done with the judgement of God; i.e. rejecting any notion of indebtedness to a deity and refusing to face a celestial tribunal where one will eternally be found guilty and sentenced to death and damnation.  

In taking up this critical project - one that Kant failed so miserably to accomplish - one hopes to continue and possibly develop or send spiraling off in a new direction, the work of the truly great artists and thinkers, including Spinoza, Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, and Deleuze.

For those, however, who like things expressed in less philosophical terms, then torpedo the ark might be said to simply mean this: I hate everything.

The concept of hate, of course, mustn't be understood in a purely reactive manner; hate is more than simply love on the recoil (as if love were the great primary term or essential prerequisite). And it's crucial not to simply fall back into metaphysical dualism, where love and hate are two fixed terms of opposition.

That said, I suppose we can provisionally agree that love is ultimately a will to merger and the dream of blissful union with all mankind, the heavenly host, and, ultimately, God himself, whilst hate is the desire to be separate and the ability to discriminate and distinguish between things. Thus whilst love makes us open up our arms and embrace the universe, hate teaches us to kick with our legs and stand on our own two feet as sovereign individuals, proud of our own singular nature and keen to discover and create new worlds. 

When Zarathustra encourages his listeners to become hard like diamonds, he means they should abandon love when it has become a morbid moral ideal exclusively tied to values born of sickness; he means they should become a little more independent and a little more hateful; that they should shatter the old law tables, tear down the Cross, and torpedo the ark.

This might seem to be an evil teaching, but, as Blake pointed out, evil is only the active or most vital power that flows into us from behind and below. And it is this power - or more precisely the feeling of this power - that causes delight and helps us give birth to what is best in us and to the future.     

We can conclude, therefore, that whilst kindness, kisses, and cuddles all have their place within a general economy of the heart, so to does cruelty, combat, and the determination to kick against the pricks and all that is rotten. As Lawrence writes, we must learn to accept all the subtle promptings of the incalculable soul; from the most passionate love, to the fiercest hate. Only this will keep us sane and beyond judgement.