Another Sponge Worthy Post

Alejandro Mogollo Art on X

@alemogolloart

 

 

I. 

 

Someone called me a human sponge the other day, implying that I simply absorb other people's ideas and information found online in order to produce posts for Torpedo the Ark; a blog that has, they said, 'almost no original or creative content'. 

 

That seems a bit harsh: although it's perfectly true that I regard Romantic concepts of originality and individual creativity as untenable, subscribing as I do to the idea of intertextualité; i.e., that every text is shaped by (and functions within) a cultural and linguistic network of meaning and that compositional strategies including paraphrase, parody, and plagiarism are not only perfectly legitimate, but unavoidable [1]. 

 

My critic may not like it, but there are no private language games or individual thoughts and experiences [2] and ideas are never created ex nihilo.   

 

 

II. 

 

As for being labelled a human sponge, that doesn't trouble me at all: I like sponges. 

 

Sponges are amazing aquatic animals [3] and I dislike the speciesism contained in the accusation, as if being called a sponge were something one should feel insulted by or as if actually being a sponge were something to be ashamed of. 

 

If I were told that in the next life I would reincarnate as a member of the phylum Porifera that wouldn't trouble me in the slightest and nor would I see it as an evolutionary regression. Who needs the complexity of organs when one's body is continually exposed to circulating currents of water which supply food and oxygen on the one hand, whilst removing waste on the other? 

 

Human beings have been around for approximately 300,000 years: which is a long time. But it's nothing compared to the 543 million years that multicellular sponges have existed and done their thing - which includes fucking with one another [4] and, in the case of carnvivorous deep-water sponges, catching and eating prey [5]. 

 

My critic might want to consider this before using the term sponge in a derogatory manner. Indeed, he might even question his own worthiness in relation to the sponge ... [6]

 

Notes

 

[1] There are several earlier posts on TTA discussing this idea of intertextuality: click here. 

 

[2] Wittgenstein famously examined (and dismissed) the idea of a private language in Philosophical Investigations (1953); see sections 243-271. For Wittgenstein, even if there could be such a language it would be unintelligible not only to others, but to its supposed originator too.   

 

[3] Many people think that because sponges lack organs and don't move they must therefore be a simple form of plant life - just as they mistakenly believe that sea cucumbers are vegetables - but they're not; sponges are animals, just like you and me, and we possess a common ancestor (which is why we share 70% of our genetic material and why, for example, the elastic skeletons of sponges are made from the same protein (collagen) that is found in human tendons and skin). 

 

[4] Most sponges are hermaphroditic and reproduce sexually by releasing sperm cells into the water current which are then carried to other sponges, where they fertilise egg cells (ova). If need be, however, sponges can also reproduce asexually - not something we can do.

 

[5] This includes the recently discovered harp sponge (Chondrocladia lyra) which use velcro-like hooks on external body surfaces to capture much larger prey than the typical suspension feeding sponges which simply filter bacteria and microscopic organisms from the surrounding water. Once a carnivorous sponge has ensnared its prey, it secretes a digestive membrane that surrounds and engulfs the captured animal, breaking down its tissue so that it can eventually be absorbed and digested. 

 

[6] Fans of the American sitcom Seinfeld will immediately recognise that I'm thinking here of the question that Elaine Benes once posed to potential lovers: So you think you're sponge-worthy? (Obviously, I'm aware that a contraceptive sponge - a soft, saucer-shaped device made of polyurethane foam and filled with spermacide - is not the same thing as a sea sponge.)

      Readers who wish to do so can click here to watch a clip from the season seven episode, 'The Sponge', dir. Andy Ackerman and written by Peter Mehlman (7 Dec 1995).  

 

 

Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) - Part 2: Propositions 121-240

Joan Mitchell: Les Bluets (1973) 

Oil on canvas (281 x 580 cm) [f]

 

 

NB: part one of this post (reflecting on selected propositions from 1-120) can be read by clicking here.  

 

 

131 

 

This makes smile: 

 

"'I just don't feel like you're trying hard enough,' one friend says to me. How can I tell her that not trying has become the whole point, the whole plan?" 

 

 

134 

 

Once, I began assembling a book of fragments to do with the practice of joy before death - suicide notes, if you like. This proposition would've made a welcome addition: 

 

"If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones [...] and head down to the river." 

 

Philosophers, however, from Empedocoles to Deleuze, usually like to leap to their death like iridescent jumping spiders. 

 

 

150 

 

"For Plato, colour was as dangerous a narcotic as poetry." 

 

And, many centuries later, the Puritans also hated colours and "smashed the stained-glass windows of churches, thinking them idolatrous, degenerate". 

 

I knew both these things. 

 

But I didn't know that, before becoming a holy colour - one particularly associated with the Blessed Virgin - blue "often symbolized the Antichrist" (i.e., he who comes out of the blue to deceive mankind and deny the Father and Son).

 

 

156 - 161

 

According to Lawrence, it's a terrible thing to educate children into abstract knowledge, so that they may understand the world. For adults to solemnly explain to three-year-olds why grass is green is, he says, inexcusable stupidity and will arrest their dynamic development [g]. 

 

As there is always something a bit childlike about poets, it didn't surprise me to learn that although she had been told the answer several times to the question 'Why is the sky blue?', Nelson can never quite recall the explanation. 

 

The only part she does remember is that "the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it". 

 

Never mind the scattering of sunlight and the length of waves, etc., for Nelson the blueness of the sky "is something of an ecstatic accdent produced by void and fire".        

 

I love this thought: as I do the idea of divine darkness and agnosia - the latter being a form of unknowing that one discovers (or accomplishes) within the former: 'Explanations', as Wittgenstein once said, 'come to an end somewhere' [h].

 

 

164

 

I agree with Lawrence that the proverbial ideas of beauty as something sinful and shallow are all of them false [i]. 

 

And because I agree with this, I also very much like Maggie Nelson's proposition that, "despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said", beauty "neither obscures truth nor reveals it". 

 

And that blue - the colour of sex [j] - is perhaps the most beautful of all colours. 

 

 

167 - 168

 

When - like Cézanne, Artaud, and the American artist Mike Kelley - you've had enough of psychology and the narcissistic pleasure of seeing your own reflection (on film screens, for example), then it's time to attend to colour:

 

"Perhaps this is why I have turned my gaze so insistently to blue: it does not purport to be me, or anyone else for that matter."

 

 

171

 

Philosophically, this is at the heart of my project to do with the Ruins: gathering fragments of blue has nothing to do with paying tribute to (or wishing to recreate) some ideal model of blue wholeness; "a bouquet is no homage to the bush". 

 

 

183 / 185

 

Readers might recall that in proposition 20 Nelson stated: Fucking leaves everything as it is. 

 

Here, she echoes this by writing: "For better or worse, I do not think that writing changes things very much, if at all. For the most part, I think it leaves everything as it is."

 

That's an unusual thing for a writer to say: usually, like Goethe, they are anxious about the possibly destructive nature of language; the fact that words can kill the essential quality of a thing. 

 

If for Warhol sex was just another (occasionally quite satisfying) way to pass the time, then that's pretty much what writing is for Nelson [k]. 

 

 

204

 

And now, finally, thanks to Nelson, I have an answer when someone asks why I can never be bothered to have things repaired (even when this will cause significant damage and expense in the long term): I have little to no instinct for protection ...

 

"Out  of laziness, curiosity, or cruelty - if one can be cruel to objects - I have given them up to their diminishment."   

 

Notes

 

[f] Maggie Nelson names this as her favourite painting in proposition 145 of Bluets (Jonathan Cape, 2017), p. 57. She later admires Mitchell for her chromophilic recklessness, that is to say, for choosing her pigments "for their intensity rather than their durability". See proposition 154, p. 61.     

[g] See D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 123. 

[h] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell Publishers, 1953), §1. Nelson quotes this line in proposition 161 (p. 64).

[i] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Artcles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 182 - 217. Lawrence writes: "Beauty is not a snare, nor is it skin-deep, since it always involves a certain loveliness of modelling [...]" (p. 192). 

[j] Again, see Lawrence; 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, pp. 143 - 148, where he asserts that "sex and beauty are one thing, like fire and flame" (p. 145). 

[k] Later, "upon considering the matter further", Nelson admits in proposition 193 that writing does in fact do something; namely, it replaces the memories it aimed to preserve.   

Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) - Part 1: Propositions 1-120

 Jonathan Cape (2017)

 

 

I. 

 

As long-time readers of Torpedo the Ark will know, whilst, as a nihilist, my default position is always paint it black, I do also have a philosophical fascination with a colour much loved by painters and poets and which Christian Dior identified as the only one which can possibly compete with black: blue. 

 

This includes, for example, the lyrical blue celebrated by Rilke and Trakl; the deep blue invented by Yves Klein; the blue of the Greater Day that D. H. Lawrence writes of; and my fascination with this colour extends to blue angels, blue boys, blue lenses, and blue lagoons.  

 

Thus, no surprise then that I should eventually get around to reading Maggie Nelson's wonderful little book Bluets ...

 

 

II. 

 

First published by Wave Books in 2009, Bluets consists of 240 numbered propositions arranged not so much randomly, but with what we might term considered whimsicality to create the illusion of logical precision and continuity à la Wittgenstein. Each proposition is either a sentence or a short paragraph; none exceeds two hundred words in length.

 

The book documents not only the author's bowerbird-like obsession with the colour blue, referencing many famous figures along the way associated with the colour, but also provides an insight into Nelson's understanding of love and mental health and examines what role - if any - beauty plays in times of heartache or depression.

 

In 2016, she won a MacArthur Fellowship - known to many as the genius grant - and, on the basis of this one book alone I think that Nelson is indeed one of those very rare individuals who probably deserves the title of genius; an original and insightful writer who produces work that is both lyrical and philosophical.  

 

The title doesn't refer us simply to those small and delicate blue flowers belonging to the genus Houstonia, but also to a triptyque by the American abstract artist Joan Mitchell, Les Bluets (1973), which Nelson describes as perhaps her "favourite painting of all time" [a]

 

Here, I would like to provide a commentary on the book, picking up on some of the things that particularly resonate with me or pique my curiosity to know more. Hopefully, in the course of doing so I can demonstrate why the author and critic Hilton Als was spot on to praise Bluets as a "new kind of classicism" that, whilst queer in content, remains elegant in form [b].     

 

 

III.

5

 

Are we to understand that when, like Mallarmé, one replaces le ceil with l'Azur - "in an effort to rinse references to the sky of religious connotations" - one ceases to be a crypto-theologian and becomes a poet-philosopher? 

 

Is it true to say: whereof one can perceive blueness, thereof one cannot imagine God ...     

 

 

18

 

"A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck."

 

For a moment I thought I was reading Young Kim's A Year on Earth with Mr Hell (2020). 

 

But then I read the three sentences following: 

 

"Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my seceret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence."  

And realised I wasn't.  

 

20 

 

"Fucking leaves everything as it is." 

 

This is a very un-Lawrentian sentence; perhaps the most un-Lawrentian sentence you could imagine. 

 

For Lawrence insists that, on the contrary, fucking is transformational of the individual - changing the very constitution of the blood - and that a politics of desire, founded upon the act of coition, has revolutionary potential. 

 

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence believes that the lover is richer and stronger than those who do not fuck; that lovers grow wings and possess new capabilities. And there arises, he says, a post-coital "craving for polarized communion with others" [c] - not just for cigarettes. 

 

 

26 / 31

 

Nelson says that she's heard that "a diminishment of color vision often accompanies depression" and I couldn't help wondering if that's true; if feeling blue ironically makes the world seem greyer ...?

 

Well, apparently, it is: depression lowers the production of dopamine and this can impair neurotransmitters in the retina, making the world appear less vibrant and colourful. 

 

But then Nelson reminds us of the case of Mr Sidney Bradford, who had his vision restored in his fifties (having lost his sight as a baby) and saw the world at last in full-colour:  he died of unhappiness due to disappointment soon afterwards [d].      

 

35

 

"Does the world look bluer from blue eyes?", asks Nelson, before concluding that's probably not the case. 

 

But, like her, I like to imagine it does.

 

 

56

 

When reminded of Saint Lucy - patron saint of the blind, who was tortured and put to death by the Romans in 304 CE - I can't help thinking of Simone, the teenage erotomaniac at the heart of Bataille's notorious short novel L'histoire de l'œil (1928). 

 

For whilst Lucy didn't - as far as I know - insert the eye of a murdered priest into her vagina, she is often depicted in "Gothic and Renaissance paintings holding a golden dish with her blue eyes staring weirdly out from it".   

 

Depending on what sources one refers to, Lucy's eyes were either gouged out by her captors, or she removed them herself in order to avoid male attention and prove her religious devotion. For as Nelson writes, there are numerous stories of women "blinding themselves in order to maintain their chastity" and to demonstrate their fidelity to God (i.e., the fact that they 'only have eyes' for Christ).   

 

 

62

 

Nelson's definition of puritanism: the exchanging of corporeal reality for ideal representation. Not something that appeals to her: 

 

"I have no interest in catching a glimpse of or offering you an unblemished ass or airbrushed cunt. I am interested in having three orifices stuffed full of thick, veiny cock in the most unforgiving of poses ..."  

 

Fair enough: but this is still an image conjured up with words, is it not? And as Merleau-Ponty pointed out: Words do not look like the things they designate [e].  

 

 

71 / 72 

 

Hard to find dignity in loneliness; easier to find it in solitude. A pair of propostions of such high truth value that we may for all intents and purposes declare them true.  

 

 

101

 

When Nelson's friends were asked "how much time they would grant between 'a blinding, bad time' and a life that has simply become a depressive waste", the consensus was "around seven years". 

 

I suspect - based on my own experience between April 2016 and February 2023 - that that's probably about right; that the seven year mark is the limit. Perhaps that's why when a person goes missing there is a presumption of death after seven years. 

 

(As for how long it takes to fully recover having reached one's limit, that's a question to which neither Nelson nor her friends provide an answer and I suspect it might take longer to retreat from the edge of the abyss than it does to get there.)

Notes

 

[a] Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Jonathan Cape, 2017), Prop. 145, p. 57. Note that I will henceforth only give proposition numbers (in bold) in the post.      

 

[b] Hilton Als, 'Immediate Family', The New Yorker (11 April, 2016): click here. 

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 135. 

      Later, in proposition 201, Nelson does acknowledge the truth of change, newness, and becoming-other: "I believe n the possibility - the inevitability, even - of a fresh self stepping into ever-fresh waters [...]" (p. 80).

[d] This is a real case, although Nelson is taking artistic license with her conclusion. For whilst Bradford did admit to finding the world visually disappointing following corneal grafts - and did die two years afterwards - he also had chronic health issues and no specific cause of death was entered on his death certificate. 

[e] Nelson quotes this line herself in proposition 70. It can be found in the essay 'Cézanne's Doubt', in Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwyn (Routledge, 2003). 

 

This post continues in part two (selected propositions from 121-240): 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. 

 

 

On the Philosophical Comeback

jakelikesonions.com / @jakelikesonions 

 

 

 

In philosophy, as in comedy, there have been many great comebacks, ranging from the retort courteous and the quip modest to the reply churlish and countercheck quarrelsome, to borrow, if I may, some of the seven categories humorously established by Shakesepeare in As You Like It [1].

 

Personally, I've always liked Karl Popper's response when challenged by a poker-wielding Wittgenstein to produce an example of a moral rule: Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers [2]. It's an amusing and (a quite literally) disarming response; Wittgenstein threw down the poker and stormed out the room after Popper delivered this zinger.

 

But I think my favourite debate-ending comeback involving philosophers is one reported on by Nicholas Blincoe and involves Nick Land leaving a fellow member of the faculty at the University of Warwick speechless when confronted by his inhumanism:

 

"Every month staff would give readings from work-in-progress. Nick's first talk was entitled: 'Putting the Rat back Into Rationality,' in which he argued that, rather than seeing death as an event that happened at a particular time to an individual, we should look at it from the perspectives of the rats carrying the Black Death into Europe; that is, as a world-encircling swarm, without any specific coordinates, or any sense of individuation. An older professor tried to get his head round this idea: 'How might we locate this description within human experience?' he asked. Nick told him that human experience was, of course, worthy of study, but only as much as, say, the experience of sea slugs: 'I don’t see why it should receive any special priority.'" [3]

You can't argue with that. 

 

Nor can you come to any kind of agreement with a thinker like Land, who, of course, gave up on that idea a long time ago. Like Deleuze and Guattari - and to his credit - Land is more concerned with the creation of provocative concepts rather than entering into interminable discussion [4].    

 

Notes

 

[1] See Act V, scene IV.  

[2] See David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers (HarperCollins, 2001). 

[3] Nicholas Blincoe, 'Nick Land: the Alt-writer', in Prospect (18 May 2017): click here.

[4] See what Deleuze and Guattari say about genuine philosophers having a horror of discussion in What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 28-29. 

Heidegger Vs Tyson Fury

Tyson Fury Gypsy King 

by Ryan James Wilson 

ryanthedesigner.uk

 

 

As someone who has always admired those brave enough to enter the ring and dedicate themselves to the always brutal, often bloody - sometimes deadly -  art of boxing, I would like to send my congratulations to the self-styled Gypsy King, Tyson Fury, for defeating the American Deontay Wilder and thereby retaining his WBC heavyweight title. 

Boxing - a sport that transcends sport, being as it is about so much more than competitive physical activity - has inspired many great writers and film-makers and even though Fury undoubtedly has his flaws and shortcomings (made much of by critics who seem not merely to take issue with some of his remarks, but object to his very existence), he's a remarkable figure. 

 

Amusingly, however, I've just come across this note by Heidegger which seems to offer a counter-view to my own: "An age in which a boxer can be acclaimed a great man and be deemed worthy of the usual tokens of honour, in which purely physical virility (brutality) counts as the mark of a hero," is an age where there is little or no place for philosophy.*

 

Of course, Wittgenstein would argue that the philosopher must be prepared to fight for a space in which to think and that the philosopher who isn't prepared to regularly engage others in intellectual combat is like a boxer afraid to enter the ring.  

 

 

* See Martin Heidegger, 'Ponderings and Intimations III', 177, in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks (1931-1938), trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 134.   

Reincarnation is Making a Comeback: Notes on Chapter 3 of Metamorphoses by Emanuele Coccia

Cover of the German edition of 

Emanuele Coccia's Métamorphoses (2020) 

 

 

I. 

 

One of the things I like about Coccia's book is that he makes mundane things - like eating - sound strange. Most people having a sandwich for lunch tend not to think of this as "more like an alchemical mystery than a physiological necessity" [a], no matter what the ingredients. 

 

But Emanuele Coccia does, and I admire him for that. It's precisely such a level of craziness which makes him a writer and philosopher. He wants to remind readers of the fact that when they eat a chicken salad they "literally incorporate the bodies of other living things" [87]. And quite right, too!

 

I think he's wrong, however, to believe that the reason many people choose to overlook or forget this fact is due to a powerful sense of guilt:

 

"We feel so guilty about this common, banal, everyday, yet miraculous and incomprehensible act that we tend to reduce it to a simple exchange of energy that can be described in terms of pure thermodynamics" [88] 

 

Or, in the case of vegetarians and vegans: 

 

"We feel so guilty about the fact that our lives involve the death of other living beings that we prefer to establish an arbitrary limit, an artificial boundary between living beings that suffer (animals) and those that do not (plants)." [88]       

 

Actually, most people are simply indifferent; they just don't care that they are obliged as heterotrophic beings to life off the lives of other organisms. 

 

Coccia's presumption of guilt is the sign of a moralist who cannot conceive of the fact that most people have no such feeling and don't view food from an ethical perspective (that's why, for example, informing them about the terrible cruelty involved in factory farming has very little effect on their behaviour). 

 

Although, having said that - and if I read Coccia correctly - then he really doesn't want anyone to feel guilty about stuffing plants and animals in their face. For eating is not all about death and it's "a misrepresentation to see the act of eating only as a form of sacrifice and violence" [88]. Eating is the enigmatic transmission of (indeterminate) life - a kind of vitalistic game of pass the parcel and food is "the contemplation of life in its most terrifying universality" [89].

The chicken eats the worm; we eat the chicken; the worm eats us - it is, as Elton and Tim would say, the circle of life. Coccia puts it this way:

"Life goes from body to body, from species to species, never entirely satisfied with the form in which it is found. And that is all eating is: proof that there is only one life, common to all living beings [...] Proof that no barrier of nature, species, or personality can enclose it eternally in one single form, one single species, one single body." [90]

       

And death? Death is only a metamorphic threshold, so not something we should fear. Nothing really dies, says Coccia, everything is just transformed, recycled, and reincarnated. Like eating, dying is a "universal multispecies encounter" [91] which forms a kind of posthumous community beyond all difference and all borders. (Which is fine, but I don't want to be there when it happens ...)

 

In sum: as a thanatologist, I'm neither unfamiliar with nor averse to Coccia's line of thinking on the deathly reality of life and the necessity to eat. Indeed, in a post written back in December 2016, entitled Reflections from a Sickbed, I expressed a preference for a traditional Tibetan sky burial when I die. 

 

In other words, I'm quite happy to be fed to the vultures and don't feel it is in any way shameful or degrading for a human corpse to become food. In fact, I don't even think being eaten alive by a pride of lions or a pack of wolves, is the worst way to die - though as I'm not a vore fetishist, I don't erotically desire this to happen. 

 

Learning to accept ourselves as prey or a potential meal is, as Val Plumwood, realised, crucial to the development of a truly radical ecosophy that rejects the hyperseparation of humans from the natural world [b].     

 

 

II.

 

One of the things I don't like about Coccia's book is that he makes material processes - like death - sound vitalistic. Carbon atoms, for example, may endlessly pass from one body to another, but carbon atoms are not alive, so it's simply not true to say that "the life that animates our body [...] will migrate elsewhere" [99] when we die, like a little bird flying off [c].  

In a sense, I still tend to side with those thinkers who, like Wittgenstein, insist that death is not an event in life and nor is it lived through [d]. Coccia would reject this as a mistaken positing of death as an absolute event and accuse me of dogmatically making a fetish of temporary forms, but there you go. I would rather be accused of doing this - would rather even be guilty of this - than of writing which (at times) veers toward tautological mysticism.  

 

Ultimately, for Coccia even death is just an everyday aspect of the unstoppable dance that is life; whereas for me, following Nietzsche, life is just a rare and unusual way of being dead. 

 

And so, whilst I have myself written a post on atomic reincarnation [click here] which concluded that the living house and reincarnate the carbon atoms of the departed - and that it is in this way the souls of the dead might be said to re-enter and pervade the souls of the living - I do not see this as a form of spiritual continuity or psychic transmigration. 

 

It is only due to the conservation of mass, that we can legitimately declare ourselves to be all the names in history and Coccia's insistence that the dead think in us, is an ideal misunderstanding of this point. And whilst every self may be multiple, it is not a spiritual reincarnation of the life force and I really don't think it helps matters to borrow the technical terms of theology to discuss this important topic either [e].

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses, trans. Robin Mackay, (Polity Press, 2021), p. 87. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the main text. 

 

[b] Val Plumwood (1939-2008) was an Australian philosopher and ecofeminist, known for her work deconstructing anthropocentrism. Her posthumously published book The Eye of the Crocodile, ed. Lorraine Shannon, (ANU E-Press, 2012), details her violent and life-changing encounter with a saltwater crocodile in Kakadu National Park, in February 1985. 

      Plumwod first described this incident in the essay 'Human vulnerability and the experience of being prey', in Quadrant, 29 (3), (March, 1995), pp. 29-34. Click here to read online in The Aisling Magazine.       

      Although Coccia mentions Plumwood and the crocodile (pp. 96-98), he informs readers that he primarily developed his idea of reincarnation by way of reflections on the work of the French artist Philippe Parreno. Although he doesn't mention any specific works by the latter, I'm guessing he would have been a big fan of the 2013 exhibition Anywhere, Anywhere Out Of The World. Using sound, image, lights, and the spectral presence of objects, Parreno transformed the monumental space of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; turning the building itself into a constantly evolving organism.

 

[c] Writing under the influence of Aldo Leopold - whom he describes as "one of the greatest thinkers of the last century" [102] - Coccia seems to believe that atoms are, in a sense, alive and that seeing things from their perspective is philosophically instructive: 

      "Adopting the point of view of the atom [...] is what makes it possible to understand and to demonstrate the absolute continuity, both material and spiritual (subjective), of all life on this planet. [...] Discontinuity is not ontological (death), but purely modal and formal: X and Y - Leopold's atoms - change their mode of being, not their substance." [103]

      See Aldo Leopold, A Sad County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, (Oxford University Press, 1949). 

 

[d] See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), 6.4311.  

        

[e] I know how Coccia would reply to this: he would say I'm one of those who, whilst finding it easy "to imagine the material continuity of the universe", remain "troubled by the idea that this continuity might also apply on a spiritual and speculative level" [104]. 

      That's right: and the reason I find this difficult to accept is because I don't believe in the transmigration of the self and don't believe that "every act of thinking is an exchange of spiritual identity" [107]. Coccia suggests that whenever we utter the phrase cogito, ergo sum we are momentarily allowing "the spirit of Descartes to be reincarnated" [104] in our person. This may be figuratively true, but it's not literally true in the way that the recycling of atoms, or the passing on of genes, is true.

 

 

To read my notes on the Introduction and first chapter of Emanuele Coccia's Metamorphoses, click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter two ... click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter four ... click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter five ... click here. 

 

 

On Private Language and Post-Truth (Or How D. H. Lawrence Opens the Way for Donald Trump)

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence opens his 1929 essay on pornography and obscenity by claiming that there is no consensus of opinion regarding a definition of the former: "What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another". And that, similarly, nobody knows what the word obscene means: "What is obscene to Tom is not obscene to Lucy or Joe" [1].  

 

I suspect it's this line of thinking which lies behind James Walker's claim that "any attempt to define obscenity is itself obscene" [2], by which I think he means that the attempt to impose shared meaning (or common values) on the individual and their lived experience is something he finds offensive.  

 

But I'm not entirely sure that's what he means: for by the logic of his own argument - which seems to subscribe to a solipsistic fantasy of purely personal feeling and, indeed, a purely private language - how could I ever be certain of understanding what he's saying?    

 

 

II.  

 

The idea of a private language was, of course, made famous by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), where he explained it thus: "The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know - to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language." [3]

 

However, no sooner does Wittgenstein introduce this idea of a language conceived as ultimately comprehensible only to its individual originator - because the things which define its vocabulary are necessarily inaccessible to others - than he rejects it as absurd. 

 

Naturally, there has been - and remains - considerable dispute about this idea and its implications for epistemology and theories of mind, etc.

 

Not that the validity or falseness of the idea will bother Lawrentians, for whom inner experience and (their own) singular being is everything. They'll simply repeat after their master: If it be not true to me / What care I how true it be [4] - surely the most intellectually irresponsible lines Lawrence ever wrote, showing disdain for facts, evidence, and reasoned debate and, ironically, opening the way for figures that James Walker certainly doesn't approve of ...

 

 

III. 

 

Arguably, Lawrence anticipates the post-truth world we live in today; one in which shared objective standards and meanings have dissolved into thin air; one in which Tom, Lucy, and Joe all get to define words however they like, à la Humpty Dumpty. Knowledge is confused with opinion and belief; fact is replaced with feeling; intelligence gives way to intutition.

 

It all sounds very liberal, but it isn't. Indeed, historian Timothy Snyder argues, post-truth is pre-fascism:

 

"When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions [...] Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth." [5]  

If it be not true to me / What care I how true it be ... This could so easily have been tweeted by Donald Trump!

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence. 'Pornography and Obscenity', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 236. 

      Lawrence appears to think that a shared meaning or commonly accepted definition of a word is inherently inferior and that only the individual meaning of a word has poetic power and rich symbolism. Even the simplest of words, he says, never mind those that are complex or controversial, has both a mob-meaning and an imaginative individual meaning. And these two categories of meaning are, apparently, forever separate. The problem, however, as Lawrence sees it, is that most people are unable to preserve integrity and private thoughts and feelings become corrupted by those which come from outside: "The public is always profane, because it is controlled from the outside [...] and never from the inside, by its own sincerity." [238] Such thinking is, of course, completely untenable.            

 

[2] James Walker, writing on his Digital Pilgrimage Instagram account: click here. See the post published on 13 April 2021, concerning Peter Hitchens and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

   

[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. Anscombe, (Macmillan, 1953), §243. It's crucial to stress that a private language is not simply a language understood by one person, but a language that, in principle, can only be understood by one person. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 70. 

[5] Timothy Snyder, 'The American Abyss, The New York Times, (9 Jan 2021): click here. 

Drinking the Silence: Notes on the Case of Georg Trakl

Georg Trakl: Self-Portrait (1913)

I.

You should probably read more Trakl, says Simon. And, yes, I probably should ...

For even if his work isn't quite my cup of tea, there are elements within his lyrical expressionism to which I'm sympathetic; such as his fascination with the blueness of twilight and his love of silence. No one can deny that there are many arresting - and disturbing - images in his work, as he fully exploits the often uncanny ambiguity of German. 


II. Wer war Georg Trakl? 

Georg Trakl was a typical Romantic figure; a depressed drug fiend, who engaged in an incestuous relationship with his younger sister, Greta, and received generous financial support from wealthy patrons, including the philosopher Wittgenstein, who, like Heidegger, was a huge fan (see section III below).

A pharmacist by profession, Trakl liked to hang around with the avant-garde artists involved with the well-known literary journal Der Brenner, edited by Ludwig von Ficker. The latter was also an avid supporter of the young poet and not only regularly printed his work, but attempted to find a publisher for his first collection.

Unfortunately, Trakl overdosed on cocaine in the autumn of 1914 and became an early member of what is now known as the 27 Club. There's a very strong possibility of suicide. In a letter written in 1913 he confessed:

"I long for the day when my soul shall cease [...] to live in this wretched body polluted with melancholy, when it shall quit this laughable form made of muck and rottenness, which is all too faithful a reflection of a godless, cursed century."


III. Philosophical Readings of Trakl

As mentioned above, both Wittgenstein and Heidegger were keen readers of Trakl. But, perhaps not surprisingly, they responded very differently to his poetry ...

The former, for example, wrote that whilst he didn't understand the verses, their tone - one of true genius - made him very happy. The latter, on the other hand, claimed that Trakl's work made perfect sense, once it had been situated and unified as a single rhythmic wave within his own thinking.

Derrida would later question this rather outrageous attempt by Heidegger to co-opt Trakl's work - what we might describe as an act of philosophical Anschluss - though, to be fair, it's something we've all done is it not; to read an author in light of one's own ideas and obsessions (indeed, it might be argued that every reading is an act of violation, as the reader seeks out their textual pleasure).


Thanks to the poet and literary scholar Simon Solomon for suggesting this post.

On the Ethics of Ambiguity

Jastrow's ambiguous figure of the duck-rabbit made famous by 

Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), II, §xi

As a writer, one lives more in fear of being understood than misunderstood. Thus, like Nietzsche, one greatly values ambiguity ...

Ambiguity enables one to appear transpositional and to create an open text in which meaning is always subject to interpretation and, ultimately, deferral; i.e., it allows one to have it not only both ways, but all ways and no way.

(I suppose that's why criminal defence lawyers also like ambiguity. Only prosecutors hoping for a conviction or judges looking to pass sentence, worry about certainty and establishing the facts of a case beyond a reasonable doubt.)    

It's naive, of course, to think that meaning can ever be fully determined; for language is never innocent. Not only does it lack transparency, but ambiguity is built into every word. If grammar is the presence of God within language, then ambiguity is the devil hiding behind every sentence.

 

Thus it is that man - a being who dwells within language - is the ambiguous animal par excellence. Even if we faithfully dot our i's and cross our t's, our relationship to the world, to others, and to ourselves is never straightforward.

Sartre famously follows Heidegger here and, interestingly, Simone de Beauvoir attempts to base an entire ethics on ambiguity, arguing that we need to accept the latter and, indeed, learn to love our fate: 

"Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us, therefore, try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting."

Ethics, she goes on to say, cannot be based on the mathematical certainty of science and the attempt to think the world and ourselves in such clear and absolute terms invariably leads to fascism and to genocide. It's not grey uncertainty but black-and-white conviction that should trouble us.

Thus we should learn to love those philosophers who privilege the dangerous perhaps; for it expresses not only vagueness concerning the present, but future possibility - which is why, of course, ambiguity is also the basis of creativity.       

Notes:

Joseph Jastrow's duck-rabbit (or, if you prefer, rabbit-duck) illustration originally appeared in 'The Mind's Eye', Popular Science Monthly, Issue 54, (1899), pp. 299-312.

Simone de Beauvoir's, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman, (Citadel Press, 1949), can be read online by clicking here.
 
Nietzsche speaks of Philosophen des gefährlichen Vielleicht in Beyond Good and Evil, Pt. 1. 2. 

For a sister post to this one waxing philosophical on insincerity, click here.

Isn't it Grand! Isn't it Fine! Graham Harman's New Theory of Everything

(Penguin, 2018)

According to Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is first and foremost a form of realism. It is thus a counter-idealism. But it's not a materialism; more a weird and intangible metaphysics in which "reality is always radically different from our formulation of it, and is never something we encounter directly in the flesh" [7]. The fact that things withdraw from direct access into ontological darkness is the central principle of OOO. 

Harman acknowledges the obvious objection that arises: that when you posit an unknowable reality, there's really nothing you can say about it; for any propositions advanced are ultimately unverifiable. But he doesn't let this objection worry him too much. For hey, philosophy isn't a natural science or an accumulated body of knowledge; it's a love of wisdom, man, and OOO is an attempt to share the love and pass the word along. 

As an openly erotic form of aesthetics, OOO is thus heavily reliant upon metaphor to make its case. Or, more accurately, to make itself as alluring as the objects it describes in order to seduce those open to its often provocative - if implausible - ideas. Harman particularly prides himself on the fact that his new theory of everything has emerged as a major influence on individuals in the arts and humanities, "eclipsing the previous influence ... of the prominent French postmodernist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze" [8]. 

And, as if that weren't enough, the charisma of OOO has even "captured the notice of celebrities" [8]. So it's obviously very important. Or fashionable. You won't read about Harman's flat ontology or the quadruple character of existence in Nature anytime soon, but you're quite likely to see him on the cover of Art Review and, who knows, maybe you'll one day come across a spread on him in Hello! (perhaps in the private London residence where he once entertained Benedict Cumberbatch).

Never one for false modesty, Harman compares his writing style in this new OOO for beginners book from Penguin, to that of Sigmund Freud. For whatever one thinks of Freud's psychological theories, "he is an undisputed master of the literary presentation of difficult ideas, and is well worth emulating in at least that respect" [14].

That's true. But it's also much easier said than done. And, sadly, Harman doesn't quite pull it off. He hopes that reading his book will be as "pleasant an experience as possible" [17], but this is frustrated by the fact that it is often extremely tedious. Even passionate objectophiles with a good deal of sympathy for Harman's project, will, I fear, struggle to enjoy this text.

Which is a shame. For whilst I'm not convinced that his post-Heideggerean philosophy offers the best hope of a theory whose range of applicability is limitless, Harman and his fellow-travellers do at least offer an opportunity to reimagine a mind-independent reality - even if we can never accurately describe such in the language of literal propositions and must, therefore, either resort to poetic speculation or be reduced to silence, as Wittgenstein famously acknowledged.   

Reflections on Wittgenstein's Rhino

Albrecht Dürer: The Rhinoceros (1515)

Even many non-philosophers know two stories concerning Wittgenstein's time at Cambridge: the first, an amusing confrontation with Karl Popper in October 1946 involving a poker, was the subject of a best-selling book by David Edmonds and John Eidinow; the second, an encounter between Bertrand Russell and his young Austrian student thirty-five years earlier, involving a discussion that centred on the question of whether or not there was a rhinoceros in the room ...

In brief, Russell wanted Wittgenstein to concede that we can have empirical knowledge of the world by admitting that there was, in fact, no rhino present. But the latter refused to do so - even after Russell amusingly began looking for the beast under the desk to no avail. Whilst Wittgenstein may have had a point, one can't help thinking he was, in this instance (as in others), being a bit of a dick.

Indeed, I'm not sure I understand the point he's trying to make or why he can't simply accept the factual non-presence of the rhino, given that in his early work he maintains that only such propositions can legitimately be asserted. But then, my understanding of Wittgenstein's thinking is limited (and probably inaccurate) due to its having been shaped primarily by drunken discussions in the Barley Mow pub many years ago.        

At this very early stage in their relationship, Russell worried that Wittgenstein was a crank, rather than a philosophical genius. I can imagine how he felt, for I experience the same concern whenever I correspond with a friend of mine, let's call him Mr X, who also likes to deny - or at least contest - the propositions of natural science and refuse to accept that there is a mind-independent reality about which we can speak with confidence.

For Mr X, the world consists neither of facts nor of things, but only of interpretations and all descriptions are essentially metaphorical. He thus posits a daemonic ontology that is mytho-poetic rather than material-scientific in character. Rather than agree there was no rhino in the room, Mr X would sooner insist on its invisibility, or point out that imaginary objects are also real even if physically not present as actual entities; thus his (psycho) logical belief also in supernatural beings.

For Mr X, as for Wittgenstein (though for different reasons), Russell's seemingly commonsensical proposition is questionable on the grounds that it doesn't meaningfully assert anything about the world - certainly nothing upon which we can ever be completely certain - and is, therefore, what Wittgenstein terms in the Tractatus a 'nonsensical pseudo-proposition' [4.1272] (i.e. one that refers us only to the logic of language by which we talk about the world and not to things in themselves). 

And so, perhaps Wittgenstein wasn't being a dick after all ... Perhaps, as J. F. Macdonald argues, it was Russell who profoundly misunderstood matters and who, by attempting to ridicule the younger man, was the one acting like a dick. Wittgenstein, says MacDonald, wasn't rejecting empirical propositions; rather, he was rejecting propositions that posed as such, but were not, and discreetly "making a point about what can be meaningfully said, not about what we don't know".

And perhaps I too should learn to listen more carefully to what it is Mr X is saying and not be so quick to dismiss it as absurd, or him as foolish ... For I fear this reveals merely my own philosophical arrogance and limitations. 


Notes

Details of the conversation between Russell and Wittgenstein on the rhinoceros can be found in Russell's letters from the period to Lady Ottoline Morell (reprinted in Ray Monk's biography, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, (Vintage, 1990), pp. 38-40), and in Russell's article in Mind Vol. 60, issue 239 (July 1951), pp. 297-98, which served as an obituary notice for Wittgenstein who died in April of that year.

Click here to read the above article online, noting how Russell misremembers the conversation concerning a hippo, not a rhino.

The essay by J. F. MacDonald from which I quote, 'Russell, Wittgenstein and the problem of the rhinoceros', is in the Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 31 (4), (1993), pp. 409-24, but can also be found in full online at the Rhino Resource Center (the world's largest rhino information website): click here.   

The book by Edmonds and Eidinow that I mention at the beginning of the post - Wittgenstein's Poker: the story of a 10-minute argument between two great philosophers - was published by Faber in 2001.

Finally, readers interested in directly engaging with the early Wittgenstein should either get hold of a copy of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), or click here to read the original 1922 edition as an ebook trans. C. K. Ogden, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

This post is for Mr X and Andy G.