Bee Consciousness: the Latest Buzz from the World of Melittology (and How D. H. Lawrence Stung First)

Lars Chittka: The Mind of a Bee (Princeton University Press, 2022)

Stephen Buchmann: What a Bee Knows (Island Press, 2023)

 

I. 

 

According to Lars Chittka - a man who, after thirty-odd years of pioneering research, knows more (and cares more) about insect intelligence than most people - bees are sentient beings that deserve our respect and affection.

 

Not only can they count, recognise human faces, and learn simple tool use, for example, but Chittka's studies suggest that bees have a distinct sense of self, experience emotions, and conceptualise the world around them in abstract terms [1].

 

 

II. 

 

Stephen Buchmann, another insect-loving academic and author, has also arrived at the conclusion that bees have complex feelings - ranging from fear and frustration to joy - and, despite being small-brained, are far more mindful than even he imagined three decades ago [2].    

 

This, of course, raises ethical questions about how we treat bees, who play a vital role in food production (many fruits, nuts, and vegetables rely on bees for pollination). Presently, they are subject to shameful exploitation and abuse by an agricultural industry that makes billions of dollars from their intensive labour. 

 

Whilst the phenomenon of colony collapse disorder is often blamed on emerging diseases, the use of pesticides, and/or climate change, Buchmann and others concerned with this issue argue that the shocking decline in bee numbers is also due to the physical and psychological stress caused by the practices of industrialised agriculture; billions of bees are literally worked to death each year so vegans can pour almond milk on their organic cornflakes and feel virtuous [3].       

 

 

III. 

 

Like Buchmann and Chittka, I hope that things will change if enough people accept the fact that bees are sentient creatures - and can therefore suffer - and not merely tiny living machines [4].

 

And like both men, I am filled with a sense of wonder when I consider the mysterious, alien mind of a bee. 

 

However, coming as I do from an intellectual background heavily influenced by D. H. Lawrence, it does not surprise me in the least to discover that what is often called instinct in creatures such as bees, is the working of a primary mind - i.e., a form of spontaenous consciousness arising directly from the body, centeralising in the blood and nervous system.

 

Lawrence writes: 

"When a bee leaves its hive and circles round to sense the locality, it is attending with the primary mind to the surrounding objects, establishing a primary rapport between its own very tissue and the tissue of the adjacent objects. A process of rapid physical thought takes place [...] That is, there is a rapid sensual association within the body of the bee, equivalent to the process of reasoning; sensation develops sensation and sums up to a conclusion [...] which we may call a sensual concept." [5]

 

It's amusing, to me at least, how scientists, such as Buchmann and Chittka, have arrived at similar conclusions with reference to bee consciousness more than a century after Lawrence - who was a novelist and poet, not a zoologist, ethologist, or entomologist - wrote this astonishing passage.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lars Chittka is Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary University of London and author of The Mind of a Bee (Princeton University Press, 2022). 

      Not only has Chittka carried out extensive academic research on bees and their relationship with flowers, but he has been involved in a number of creative projects involving bees. For example, in 2006 he worked with installation artist Julian Walker to evaluate what bees think of Van Gogh's Sunflowers - click here - whilst in 2019 he and fellow members of the alternative rock band Killer Bee Queens released an album entitled Strange Flowers, which explores the world of bees and hopes to raise awareness of their fascinating biology. 

      Click here to play the first track on the album, entitled 'The Beekeeper's Dream'. The video uses footage from David Blair's surreal sci-fi documentary film Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991).

 

[2] Stephen Buchmann is a pollination ecologist specializing in bees and an Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Entomology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. See his book, What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees (Island Press, 2023). 

 

[3] Unfortunately, as Annette McGivney points out in an article in The Guardian (2 April, 2023), finding a method to mass-produce crops whilst at the same time reducing the pain and suffering of bees is not going to be easy: "If vegetarians and vegans who avoid eating animals for ethical reasons were to apply the same standards to foods pollinated by bees, they would have very little on their plates." Click here to read McGivney's piece in full. 

 

[4] Presently, there are no animal welfare laws protecting insects in a lab setting and experiments are often deliberately designed to fatally stress bees in order to determine out how much the insects can tolerate when working in the fields.  

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Nathaniel Hawthorne', chapter VII of the First Version (1918-19) of Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 241.

 

 

On Herman Melville's Moby-Dick & Larry David's Mopey Dick

Leon Black / Herman Melville / Moby Dick

 

 

I. 

 

A friend of mine, Anja, has decided to read Melville's epic novel Moby-Dick (1851) between now and the end of May (she plans to digest a chapter a day for the next 135 days).

 

It's not a book that I've read: I've tried, but have never managed to get through more than a few pages. For some reason, I find it irritating. And this, despite the fact that Lawrence describes it as "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world" [a].

 

Indeed, in his chapter on the book in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), Lawrence also insists that Moby-Dick is "the greatest book of the sea ever written" [146]; a work whose profound symbolism inspires him with a mixture of fear and wonder. 

 

And, let me assure you, that's rare praise coming from Mr. Lawrence, who doesn't often gush about books or their authors. But Melville is, for him, the greatest poet of the sea:

 

"His vision is more real than Swinburne's because he doesn't personify the sea, and far sounder than Joseph Conrad's, because Melville doesn't sentimentalise the ocean and the sea's unfortunates." [122] [b]

      

Perhaps that's because, according to Lawrence, Melville has "the strange, uncanny magic of sea-creatures, and some of their repulsiveness" [122] - i.e., something not quite human. 

 

But never mind Melville, let's focus on the huge white sperm whale, Moby Dick, and discuss what it is that Lawrence finds so fascinating (and yet so terrifying) about these magnificent mammals whose commercial hunting began in the 18th-century and only came to an end in the 1980s [c].   

 

 

II. 

 

Of course, Lawrence being Lawrence, he is more interested in Moby Dick as a symbol. Although, like Melville, Lawrence is not quite sure what the warm-blooded whale symbolises. 

 

But that doesn't prevent him from declaring Moby Dick to essentially be a phallic symbol; "the deepest blood-being of the white race [...] our deepest blood-nature" [146]. 

 

And the fact that he is so cruelly and relentlessly hunted "by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness" [146] symbolises the fact that we are motivated by a kind of death drive: 

 

"We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal  conscious hunt of ourselves [...] is our doom and our suicide." [146]   

 

Lawrence continues:

 

"The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of upper consciousness and the ideal will. Our blood-self subjected to our own will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitic mental or ideal consciousness.

      Hot-blooded sea-born Moby Dick. Hunted by monomaniacs of the idea." [146]

 

A tragic fate. But one that Lawrence accepts: 

 

"Ah well, if my day is doomed, and I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am." [146]    

 

 

III.

 

Of course, there are some fates worse than the collective doom of a people; worse even than having your leg torn off at the knee, or being drowned at sea. 

 

For example, one can be so heart-broken following a painful separation from a loved one, that one takes to one's bed, depressed, and lacking the energy to do anything. This form of spiritual impotence is what Leon Black famously describes as mopey dick [d]. 

 

Whether the cure for this psycho-physiological condition involves inserting a gerbil into one's anus remains, please note, highly controversial.  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Moby Dick', in Studies in Classic American Literature (Final Version, 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 145. 

      Future page references to this text - and to the preceding chapter, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo' - will be given directly in the post. 

 

[b] Despite his admiration for Melville the artist, Lawrence can't help taking a pop at Melville the man; "a rather tiresome New Englander of the ethical-mystical-transcendentalist sort" [134]; someone often clownish and clumsy as a stylist who writes in sententious bad taste. 

 

[c] Commercial hunting led to the near-extinction of large whales, including sperm whales. The International Whaling Commission only granted the species full protection in 1985 (although hunting by Japan in the northern Pacific Ocean continued until 1988). Recovery has been slow, but remaining sperm whale populations are now large enough that the species is no longer listed as endangered. 

 

[d] See the season 6 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, entitled 'The Bat Mitzvah', dir. Larry Charles, written by Larry David, and first broadcast on 11 November 2007: click here. The character Leon Black is played by J. B. Smoove.

 

 

On Dis/Obedience

Portrait of le poète maudit Síomón Solomon

Stephen Alexander (2023) [1]

 

 

According to the Satanist Simon Solomon, at the root of all human sin lies a refusal to listen to the Word of God. This, essentially, is the meaning of disobedience; the turning of a deaf ear to the Holy Spirit. 

 

And, of course, as a natural born anarchist and self-styled anti-Christ, I'm instinctively disobedient; neither wishing to comply with nor conform to any external authority. Like Nietzsche, I fear that those who are too weak to command themselves and lay down their own law, will ultimately submit to tyranny and come to desire their own oppression (i.e., that a culture of obedience breeds fascism).

 

However, Nietzsche also says that the only thing which makes life worth living is the giving of obedience for a prolonged period in a single direction; that obedience is the essential thing in heaven and earth and the rebellious refusal to obey is merely the sign of a slave. 

 

And, as the cultural commentator James Walker reminds us, D. H. Lawrence also encourages his readers to obey the promptings of their own souls - not so much the voice of God within, but their own genius or demon: "Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice ..." [2], not living in frictional opposition to such. 

 

This passage from his 1923 novel Kangaroo is perhaps the most memorable statement Lawrence makes on the joy of obedience

 

"If a man loves life, and feels the sacredness and mystery of life, then he knows that life is full of strange and subtle and even conflicting imperatives. And a wise man learns to recognize the imperatives as they arise [...] and to obey. But most men bruise themselves to death trying to fight and overcome their own, new, life-born needs, life's ever strange imperatives. The secret of all life is obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations." [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This portrait - the first in the Simon Solomon Says ... series - is, in part, inspired by Shepard Fairey's phenomenal - and, apparently, phenomenological - Obey Giant project, which transformed from a sticker campaign to a successful clothing line. Click here to visit the official website.  

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 17.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 112.  

 

 

Freedom In the Age of Coronavirus (Update)

Illustration by Jonathan McHugh (2021) 

beepencil.com

 

Well, how are you enjoying your newly returned freedom post-June 21st? Doesn't feel much like freedom in the old (pre-pandemic) sense, does it? 

 

Even the fully vaccinated who have been jabbed three times (because, who knows, maybe the third time will work like a charm) are still expected to wear masks on public transport, take endless tests for viral infection, and (in parts of the UK) flash Covid passes to gain access to certain venues and services. 

 

And hanging over us all is the threat of what the government calls Plan B - the most sinister plan since Plan 9 was devised in fiendish extraterrestrial minds - involving another Christmas lockdown.  

 

I'm beginning to think that Byung-Chul Han is right to argue that we are living in a peculiar phase of history when our ideal of freedom is paradoxically generating new and unlimited forms of compulsion and constraint:

 

"Freedom will prove to have been merely an interlude. Freedom is felt when passing from one way of living to another - until this too turns out to be a form of coercion. Then, liberation gives way to renewed subjugation." [1] 

As a matter of fact, I didn't need Han to tell me this; D. H. Lawrence was already exposing the Fata Morgana of Liberty a hundred years ago: "She may lead you very definitely away from today's prison. But she also very definitely leads you towards some other prison. Liberty is a changing of prisons [...]". [2]

 

Of course, Lawrence was never very keen on freedom (in a liberal, individual sense), being more concerned with belonging and fulfilment (in a religious sense), as is clear from the following lines: 

      

"Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealised purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. [...]

      Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes." [3] 

 

I have to admit, I'm uncomfortable with the language Lawrence uses here and prefer to think of freedom precisely in the (nomadic) terms he rejects; as straying and breaking away from all bonds, homelands, and forms of authority. 

 

Interestingly, however, Byung-Chul Han also stresses that freedom is ultimately relational; something which involves being among friends [4]. He writes: "A real feeling of freedom occurs only in a fruitful relationship - when being with others brings happiness. But today's neoliberal regime leads to utter isolation; as such, it does not really free us at all." [5]   

Ultimately, we have to ask in closing whether men and women have ever really had the courage for freedom: didn't we invent the Covid-19 pandemic for the same reason we once invented God ...? And don't we carry smartphones for the same reason we once fiddled with rosary beads; to show our devotion and our obedience to the age in which we live [6].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, trans. Erik Butler, (Verso, 2017), p. 1.

      For Han, psychic maladies such as depression and burnout are "pathological signs that freedom is now switching over into manifold forms of compulsion" [p. 2].     

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence and M. L Skinner, The Boy in the Bush, ed. Paul Eggert, (Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 37. Thanks to David Brock for reminding me of what Lawrence writes here.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 17-18.   

 

[4] Etymologically, it's true that the words freedom and friendship share a common root in Indo-European languages, so that we might best think freedom as a form of connection to others on the basis of kinship and affection.

 

[5] Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, p. 3. 

      Han reminds us also that Marx defined freedom "in terms of a successful relationship to others" [3] (i.e., freedom is synonymous with communism and the bourgeois notion of individual freedom merely a ruse of capital). 

      Cf. Nietzsche's conception of freedom in Twilight of the Idols, however, which a libertarian friend of mine loves to quote: "Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself." ['Expeditions of an Untimely Man', §38.]

      For Nietzsche, then, the value of freedom lies not in what it attains for the individual, but in what he or she pays for it - what it costs them. Freedom doesn't make happy - it makes strong and marks an overcoming of self-contempt. The free spirit spurns the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, etc. and they learn not merey how to love their enemies, but hate their friends.

 

[6] Byung-Chul Han writes: 

      "Every [...] technique of domination brings forth characteristic devotional objects that are employed in order to subjugate. Such objects materialize and stabilize dominion. Devotion and related words mean 'submission', or 'obedience'. Smartphones represent digital devotion - indeed, they are the devotional objects of the Digital, period. As a subjectivation-apparatus, the smartphone works like a rosary [...] Both the smartphone and the rosary serve the purpose of self-monitoring and control."

      Psychopolitics, p. 12.    

            

 

To read the earlier post on the subject of freedom for which this forms an update, click here.

Greta Thunberg: Child Saviour or Witch?

We cannot help regarding the phenomenon of Greta with wonder, fear, 
amazement, and respect. For in her the spirit of modern childhood 
is profoundly, almost magically revealed.  

Following a recent post, someone who identifies as a practicing Christian and environmental activist writes quoting scripture in support of Greta Thunberg: And a little child shall lead them [Isaiah 11:6].    

I have to say, I'm always a little troubled by this idea of an infant saviour - even when it turns up in Nietzsche's Zarathustra. And with reference to the case of Miss Thunberg, it's a startling model of redemption she offers; one that denies people hope, deliberately spreads panic, and desires that the entire world suffers, as she herself has suffered, on a daily basis.

Addressing a UN climate conference last year, she virtually placed a curse on all their houses, as if she were less salvator mundi and more some kind of witch. Indeed, seeing how she's enchanted an entire generation and left so many world leaders - including the Pope - spellbound, describing Greta Thunberg as a witch seems entirely justified: she's like a Swedish Joan of Arc.
   

I'm not saying this to denigrate her, or dismiss her message. But I do think we need to exercise caution when dealing with charismatic individuals who claim to possess (or be possessed by) special gifts and who speak with absolute conviction, seeing the world as they do in stark black and white terms.

When Greta presents her arguments within the bounds of science, I don't have a problem. But when she offers us an interpretation of the facts that veers towards apocalyptic vision, then I have my concerns - for her and for all those who share her vision. Their love - for the planet, for humanity - becomes questionable and subtly diabolic, to borrow a phrase from Lawrence, exerting as it does a destructive force. 

Women like Greta - and her mother - who campaign to save the world and save the future, may have kind hearts and the very best of intentions. But, underneath, there's something malevolent; an unconscious desire for revenge on those they blame for the crisis that afflicts them at a personal level. You can almost see it in their eyes. Still, this malevolence is just as necessary as superficial goodness - maybe more so, especially when it comes to exposing the world's own corruption and stupidity. 
  

Like that other witch-child, of whom Hawthorne writes, Greta is a being 'whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder, or with an order peculiar to themselves'. We say she's neurologically diverse, or has Asperger's, a condition that manifests itself in all kinds of ways; depression, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, selective mutism, etc.

And again, it gives Greta a peculiar look in her eyes that is also Pearl-like: 'a look so intelligent, yet so inexplicable, so perverse, sometimes so malicious' that one almost questions whether she's a human child. Who knows what this brave but tormented sixteen-year-old will be like as a fully grown woman. I wish her well and hope she discovers a little peace and happiness; hope, above all, that she doesn't martyr herself to her own cause.      

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter' (Final Version, 1923), Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Quotes taken from Hawthorne's 1850 novel can be found on pp. 93-94.  

Note: The lines underneath the image of Greta Thunberg are paraphrased from Lawrence (writing of Pearl) in the First Version (1918-19) of the above essay, SCAL, p. 252. 

For a sister post to this one on Greta as Pippi Greenstocking, click here. 

He That Aches With Amorous Love: Lawrence's Critique of Walt Whitman's Idealism

Lawrence's essay on Whitman in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) is more piss-take than critical analysis. Lawrence is particularly mocking of the American poet's claim to be he that aches with amorous love, which he thinks a ludicrous assertion born of the latter's idealism rather than genuine feeling.

Better, says Lawrence, to have a belly-ache, which is at least localised. For man is a limited creature and if he aches with love (i.e. physical longing) it's usually for someone or something specific; such as the girl next door, for example. Only some sort of superhuman being aches with amorous love for the entire universe: "And the danger of the superman is that he is mechanical." [149]  

Whitman insists on some kind of elective affinity between himself and every Tom, Dick and Harry he should ever happen to encounter and relates this to the gravitational pull of the earth: 'Does not all matter, aching, attract all matter? / So the body of me to all I meet or know.' 

In what is, for me, a crucial passage, Lawrence writes:

"What can be more mechanical? The difference between life and matter is that life, living things, living creatures, have the instinct of turning right away from some matter, and of blissfully ignoring the bulk of most matter, and of turning towards only some certain bits of specially selected matter. As for living creatures all hurtling together into one great snowball, why, most very living creatures spend the greater part of their time getting out of sight, smell or sound of the rest of the living creatures. Even bees only cluster on their own queen. And that is sickening enough. Fancy all white humanity clustering on one another like a lump of bees.
      No Walt, you give yourself away. Matter does gravitate, helplessly. But men are tricky-tricksy, and they shy all sorts of ways." [149]  

If Whitman finds himself gravitating towards everyone it's a sign not only of his promiscuous idealism, but of something having gone very wrong with him; the "lonely phallic monster" [150] of his individual and sensual self has either been murdered or mentalised. Or allowed to go all mushy and leak out into the universe.    

Healthy individuals keep themselves to themselves; happy to meet and embrace a few others, but unwilling to touch most people with a barge-pole.

Whitman, however, insists with false exuberance on grasping everyone to his bosom, believing as he does in One Identity as the great desideratum: "Walt becomes in his own person the whole world, the whole universe, the whole eternity of time", until he reaches the supreme state of Allness. Or until, as Lawrence rather cruelly says, he becomes a fat old man bloated with "senile, self-conscious sensuosity" [151].    

Lawrence - to his credit - knows that there are many things outside of himself that, in their very otherness, he can never know or assimilate: "But Walt wouldn't have it. He was everything and everything was in him. He drove an automobile with a very fierce headlight, along the track of a fixed idea, through the darkness of this world." [152]

Whitman was a great poet. But the very greatest poets are those who sleep under bushes in the dark and prefer the trackless wildernesses, or the woodpaths, to zooming along the Highway of Love in one direction only. For it becomes a dead end at last, as we'll eventually discover. 

Ultimately, Whitman's major mistake was confusing his own message of sympathy, with Christian moral-idealism: "He didn't follow his Sympathy. Try as he might, he kept on automatically interpreting it as Love, as Charity." [158]

What a shame, says Lawrence, that Whitman didn't see that sympathy is a form of compassion, i.e.,  feeling with rather than feeling for, and has nothing to do with identifying (or merging) with others in the name of solidarity, social justice, and self-sacrifice.

In other words, sympathy means "partaking of the passion" [159] which inspires the other; it doesn't mean that their experience, their pain, their struggle, is yours. It means lending support where and when you can, but without trying to walk in shoes (or wear headscarves) that don't belong to you. 

For sympathy also means drawing limits, even to love, and preserving integrity: Love what the soul loves; hate what the soul hates; be compassionate, but don't be an indiscriminate. And remember: it's better to display starry indifference, than sentimental stupidity and false feeling. 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', Studies in Classic American Literature (Final Version, 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 148-61. 

See also the Intermediate Version (1919) of the Whitman study in the above edition, pp. 358-69, and the 1921-22 version which appears as Appendix V, pp. 401-17. In many respects, these versions are more interestingly complex, although Lawrence's argument remains the same: Whitman is the best modern example of the great triumph into infinitude. 

On Learning to Laugh at Everything with Larry David, Georges Bataille and D. H. Lawrence

Credit: durantelallera/Shutterstock

I. Everything's Funny

As I said in a recent post, one of the things that the phrase torpedo the ark means to me is having the freedom to criticise everything under the sun - even if that risks offending others. Nothing is sacrosanct or off limits; everything can be targeted and everything can be ridiculed, mocked, or poked fun at because, as Larry David rightly informs his friend Richard Lewis, everything's funny - even the death of a beloved parakeet.*

Here, I'd like to expand on this idea with reference to the work of Georges Bataille and D. H. Lawrence ...

II. A Philosophy of Laughter

Bataille discovered the importance of laughter very early on in his career as a writer.

It wasn't, however, until a lecture made many years later, in 1953, that he was able to admit with a smile that, insofar as he'd been engaged in serious philosophical work at all, he'd been constructing a philosophy founded upon (and exclusively concerned with) the experience of laughter as that which escapes reason and understanding.    

In other words, it's not just the unknown or unknowable that causes us to laugh; laughter is itself inexplicable and we often have no idea why we laugh when we do - joy bubbles over or bursts forth unexpectedly and as a form of excess (or what Bataille terms unproductive expenditure).

And - crucially, from the perspective of ethics - laughter is often infectious; when we laugh, others laugh too. Indeed, whilst it's perfectly possible to weep alone, I'm not sure one can ever really laugh in isolation (without being a madman). It's laughter - not sorrow (or mourning) - that is the social practice par excellence.     

But what, for Bataille, is there to laugh at?

The answer, as for Larry David, is everything: Bataille encourages us to laugh not just at the world and the things that are in it, but at being itself and, ultimately, at that which all being is a being towards: death. This is clear in his short poem entitled 'Laughter' [Rire]:

Laugh and laugh
at the sun
at the nettles
at the stones
at the ducks

at the rain
at the pee-pee of the pope
at mummy
at a coffin full of shit

Commenting on the above verse, Nick Land writes:

"It is because life is pure surplus that the child of Rire - standing by the side of his quietly weeping mother and transfixed by the stinking ruins of his father - is gripped by convulsions of horror that explode into peals of mirth, as uncompromising as orgasm. [...] Laughter is a communion with the dead, since death is not the object of laughter: it is death itself that finds a voice when we laugh. Laughter is that which is lost to discourse, the haemorrhaging of pragmatics into excitation and filth."

Ba-dum-tsh!

III. Curb Your Enthusiasm

D. H. Lawrence is another writer who makes an important contribution to the philosophy of laughter - perhaps surprisingly so, as this self-styled priest of love is thought by many to be utterly humourless, though often unintentionally comic or absurd.   

However, as Judith Ruderman points out, the mistaken idea that Lawrence had no sense of humour is an opinion held for the most part by those who are misled (or disconcereted) by his intensity. He is often over-earnest and can sometimes be a bore. But Lawrence also values (and utilises) humour in his work, often deliberately undermining his own seriousness and tendency to preach.    

Ruderman also reminds us of this crucial passage written by Lawrence in his essay on Edgar Allan Poe (a passage that LD would surely approve of): 

"The Holy Ghost bids us never to be too deadly in our earnestness, always to laugh in time, at ourselves and at everything. Particularly at our sublimities. Everything has its hour of ridicule - everything."

The Holy Ghost, according to Lawrence, also helps us to keep it real; "not to push our cravings too far, not to submit to stunts and high falutin, above all not to be too egoistic and willful [...] to leave off when it bids us leave off".

In other words, the Holy Ghost helps us curb our enthusiasm and recognise that the latter - particularly when tied to moral and ideological fundamentalism - is what threatens us today.

Notes

*I refer here to a scene in the first episode of the ninth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm entitled 'Foisted!', dir. Jeff Schaffer, written by Larry David and Jeff Schaffer (2017): click here.

Bataille, 'Nonknowledge, Laughter, and Tears', in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, ed. Stuart Kendall, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall, (University of Minnesota, 2001). 

Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, (Routledge 1992), p. xvii. The translation of the poem is also found here. 

Judith Ruderman, 'D. H. Lawrence on Trial Yet Again: The Charge? It's Ridiculous!', Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, ed. Susan Reid, Vol. 5, Number 1, (2018), pp. 59-82.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 73. 

Notes on Identity Politics and Intersectionality

Marc-Édouard Nabe: Lawrence assis (2007)

Ink and watercolour (24 x 32 cm)

marcedouardnabe.com

The ideal man! And which is he, if you please? 

There are other men in me, besides this patient ass who sits here in a tweed jacket. 

I'm not a fan of identity politics whose adherents, it seems to me, start off by affirming their difference, only to end by reinforcing a narrow, narcissistic and needy conception of self based upon a reactive morality that fetishizes victimhood and reinforces the very marginalization that they complain about via a process of auto-segregation. Thus, whenever I turn on the TV and hear some politician or activist begin a sentence with the words 'Speaking as ...' X, Y, or Z, I immediately want to throw something at the screen.

It's not that I demand people think of themselves as impersonal abstractions founded upon some fantasy of a universal subject. But I don't want them to speak either as if they were not only defined but determined by some piece of bio-cultural fate and had entirely forgotten the strategic (and ironic) nature of their essentialism. 

What, then, do I want?

I suppose it's a kind of ontological intersectionality. That is to say, I want individuals to acknowledge that the self is a crossroads amidst a dark forest; that the grammatical unity of the 'I' disguises a vibrant plurality of often competing forces. Of course, this is something that many poets, philosophers, and theorists have acknowledged, including D. H. Lawrence in his astonishing Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) ...

From the opening line of his chapter on Benjamin Franklin, Lawrence makes it clear what his theme is going to be: I am many men. And because his self is multiple (and non-ideal) in nature, he can never be perfected. At the very least, we are all of us double and the self we like to think we are and present to the world is twinned with "a strange and fugitive self shut out and howling like a wolf".

This, I think, calls for a queer politics; but it problematizes any naive (single-issue) identity politics. Those who would speak as if they were destined only by their race, gender, or sexuality, for example, deny their own complexity and, in so doing, restrict their own freedom; for how can anyone be free, without an illimitable background? 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Benjamin Franklin', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 

The original 1923 text is available online thanks to the University of Virginia and can be accessed by clicking here.

Readers interested in the theory of intersectionality as conceived by Kimberlé Crenshaw and in how it's currently used - and misused - within contemporary debate, might like to read Eleanor Robertson's article 'Intersectional-what? Feminism's problem with jargon is that any idiot can pick it up and have a go', in The Guardian, (30 Sept 2017): click here. 

I realise, of course, that I would probably be one of the idiots that Robertson refers to; i.e. one who has appropriated a term without really caring about its origin, or showing due fidelity to its original meaning. 

On Orgasm and the Will to Merger (Another Thanatological Fragment)

Man can find his individual isolation or discontinuity hard to bear. Thus he often seeks primal unity, or a return to universal oneness. But this will to merger is, of course, a sign of fatigue and decadence; a thinly disguised longing for oblivion.

Lawrence is clear: "The central law of all organic life is that each organism is intrinsically isolate and single in itself". When this is no longer the case - when individual singularity breaks down - death results.

And yet love, of course, is a vital attraction that brings things together into touch ...

This obliges us, therefore, to admit the relationship between Eros and Thanatos and acknowledge that the French description of orgasm as la petite mort is not merely a metaphor.

As Nick Land writes:

"Orgasm provisionally substitutes for death, fending off the impetus toward terminal oblivion, but only by infiltrating death into the silent core of vitality … The little death is not merely a simulacrum or sublimation of a big one … but a corruption that leaves the bilateral architecture of life and death in tatters, a communication and a slippage which violates the immaculate [otherness] of darkness."

When we come, we open ourselves onto this otherness and to the possibility of personal annihilation; losing identity in a spasm and an exchange of shared slime.

Despite the primary law that dictates singularity, the greater truth is that we need one another and we need love. Thus the secondary law of all organic life - according to Lawrence - is that "each organism only lives through … contact with other life". 

Of course, if we go too far in this direction, then love is no longer vivifying, but destructive and deadly. Men might live by love, but so too do they die, or cause death, if they love too much or allow their love to become infected with idealism.

Lawrence values coition precisely because it is a coming-close-to-death, but not a form of merger; a meeting but not a mixing of separate blood-streams. There is no real union during sexual intercourse and, once the crisis is over, the discontinuity of each party remains intact.

But such intimacy brings us to the very point of fusion and leaves us changed, or wounded by the experience (which is why love is often poignant, painful, and transformative all at the same time).

Orgasm gives us a clue regarding the return to the actual and the deep communion that awaits us. It is, as Bataille says, a betrayal of life as something individual and distinct.

Thus, ultimately, the truth of eroticism is ... treason.

See:

Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992).

D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed.  Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Note: this is a revised extract from a paper presented at Treadwell's on 28 Feb, 2006 as part of a lecture series entitled Thanatology. Those interested in reading related thanatological fragments can click here and here.