On Criminals and Capital Punishment

Flick through the numerous TV channels on Freeview on any night of the week, any week of the year, and you are guaranteed to find endlessly repeated episodes of Top Gear. But you will also just as surely come across programmes that bring you up close and personal with some of the most hardened criminals and gang members serving time in some of the world's most notorious prisons. And these shows - even when fronted by someone as likeable as Louis Theroux - have a phenomenally depressing effect.

It could be, I suppose, that some producers are interested in humane reform and want to shock us out of our complacency by forcing us to think more carefully and more compassionately about the issues and the people caught up within the criminal justice system. But most shows simply seem sensational and exploitative; turning human misery into cheap and voyeuristic entertainment.    

Either way, I suspect that many viewers will - like me - come away completely dispirited and despairing about the entire penal system and the deplorable wretches confined within it. And some will find themselves asking what's the point of keeping extremely violent and irredeemable offenders banged up for life behind bars; why not just have them all exterminated without fuss or any further ado?

These viewers are not moral and intellectual monsters and the question is not, I think, completely illegitimate.

Rather, like Lawrence, they have been driven partly by despair and partly by a form of utopianism into thinking such thoughts and into examining their souls for a way forward; they know a new vision of society is needed and that the true criminal should be afforded no place within it; they know that, at a certain point - and due to the very nature of the crimes committed - these shaven-headed, tattooed imbeciles with what Carlyle memorably describes as ape-faces, imp-faces, angry dog-faces [and] heavy sullen ox-faces, have compromised their humanity and, thus, all claim to rights based on such. 

I don't even think we should regard their elimination as capital punishment. It's simply pest control; the necessary destruction of vermin who have no interest in rehabilitation, but just want to steal, rape, torture, and murder for personal gain and personal pleasure; individuals who, as Rod Liddle rightly says, couldn't care less about society or its laws.    

As Liddle also says, if being nice to criminals worked, we'd all be happy to shower them with kindness. But it doesn't. Nor does being cruel and vindictive and it's here that Liddle and I part company; for what doesn't kill these individuals only serves to make them stronger. And so we might as well be honest with ourselves and deprive them not merely of their freedom, but of their foul lives (though this means of course granting to the State - that coldest of all cold monsters - powers that we might later regret handing over).  

See: 

D. H. Lawrence, '[Return to Bestwood]', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 13-24. Lawrence places his call for the execution of those he designates as true criminals within a wider programme of state eugenics, justified by his philosophical vitalism. 

Rod Liddle, 'The Spectator has gone soft - prisons should be much nastier places', in The Spectator, 26 Nov 2016: click here to read online. I'm grateful to Liddle for the reference to Thomas Carlyle that I made use of above.

Philosophy on the Catwalk

Nunzia Garoffolo: fashionbeyondfashion.wordpress.com

Six reasons why fashion is fabulous and the question of style is philosophically crucial:

1) Because Professor Teufelsdröckh, despite being a typical German Idealist in many respects, is right to suggest that in the "one pregnant subject of clothes, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been" [Sartor Resartus].

2) With its obsessive desire for the New as a value in and of itself, the logic of fashion is the determining principle of modernity. To his credit, Kant, who was often mocked by his friends for his fine silk shirts and  silver-buckled shoes, was one of the first to identify this irrational principle and note that fashion therefore has nothing to do with aesthetic criteria (i.e. it's not a striving after beauty, but novelty, innovation, and constant change). Designers seek to make their own creations as superfluous as quickly as possible; they don't seek to improve on anything and there is no progress, purpose, or ultimate goal within the world of fashion (a short skirt is not an advance on a long dress). If it can be said to have any aim at all, it is to be a potentially endless proliferation of forms and colours.

3) It's true that many philosophers regard fashion as something trivial and beneath their attention. Doubtless this is why the most interesting work written on the subject has tended to come from the pens of our poets and novelists including Baudelaire, Wilde, Mallarmé, Edgar Allan Poe, Proust, and D. H. Lawrence. But there are notable exceptions to this: Nietzsche, Barthes, and Baudrillard, for example, all concerned themselves with the language of fashion and the question of style. And they did so because they understood that once the playful and promiscuous indeterminacy of fashion begins to affect the 'heavy sphere of signs' then the liquidation of values associated with the order of referential reason is accelerated to a point of rupture. Fashion, in other words, is a method for the consummation of nihilism. 

4) Closely associated with fashion is the practice of dandyism: whilst primarily thought of as a late eighteenth and early nineteenth century phenomenon, dandyism can in fact be traced back as an ethos or way of living to the Classical world of ancient Greece, where techniques of the self and arts of existence were accorded singular importance amongst all those who wished to give style to their lives (i.e. that one needful thing which, in all matters, is the essential thing rather than sincerity).

5) The world of fashion also understands and perpetuates ideas of camp and queer. The first of these things, thought of somewhat problematically as a sensibility by Susan Sontag, taught us how to place quotation marks around certain artefacts and actions and thereby magically transform things with previously little or no worth into things with ironic value and perversely sophisticated appeal. Camp thus challenges conventional notions of good taste and high art and also comes to the defence of those forms and, indeed, those individuals, traditionally marginalized and despised.

As for queer, it's never easy or advisable to try and summarize this notion; it's a necessarily mobile and ambiguous concept that resists any fixed definition. Indeed, it's technically impossible to say what queerness 'is' as isness is precisely what's at issue in its rejection of all forms of onto-essentialism: it refers to nothing in particular and demarcates a transpositional positionality in relation to the normative. In other words, queer is a critical movement of resistance at odds with the legitimate and the dominant; it challenges the authority of those who would keep us all on the straight and narrow and wearing sensible shoes.

6) Finally, fashion matters because, without it, figures such as Nunzia Garoffolo would not exist and without women such as this in the world, clothed in the colours of the rainbow, life would be as ugly and as dull as it would be without flowers. We do not need priests all in black, or politicians all in grey. But we do need those individuals who bring a little splendour and gorgeousness into the world, otherwise there is only boredom and uniformity.