The Perfect Shoe

Following a recent post in which I mentioned the importance of  footwear, I have been asked to describe what might constitute - for me at least - the perfect men's shoe. 

Fortunately, thanks to the creative genius of the designers at Prada, this isn't difficult. For the perfect shoe already exists: the Levitate is an insanely beautiful mash-up between the old school formality of the brogue and the urban cool of the Nike Air sports shoe - topped off with a golf fringe as an almost ludicrous addition just for the hell of it.  

Malcolm would always speak of the three things that matter most in fashion: sex, style, and subversion. These shoes possess all these elements. Are they comfortable? Who cares. Are they practical? Again, who cares! Do you imagine Cinderella's sister's were thinking of comfort and practicality when they mutilated their feet in order to squeeze into her magical glass slippers?

By wearing these shoes, your life will be instantly transformed for the better; for they make heroic and they make fabulous. As Marilyn Monroe once said: 'Wear the right shoes and you can conquer the world'.  

   

Ants and the Spirit of Christmas

Teeny-tiny little red spider-ants have taken up residence in my electric kettle: which is kind of annoying and a little inconvenient. I should probably kill them. 

But it's Christmas day and I don't have the heart to do it. Peace and goodwill to all mankind - but why not extend this to insects and arachnids? 

It's not that I think Christ the Saviour was born to redeem them of their sins too, but because it seems to me that this is just as much their world as it is mine.

Nevertheless, tomorrow, when I wake up and want a cup of tea, then I know that I'll reach for the poison spray, or squash them under thumb.

And this, in a nutshell, was why Jesus ended up nailed to a cross.

The Case of Jacintha Saldanha

Potlatch is an archaic form of economic exchange, based on the notion of giving a gift of such value that the receiver is thereby humiliated and at the same time obligated. This can include the gift of life.

For it is not only possible to shame and to challenge an enemy via a spectacular display of wealth, but also by a senseless and violent act of sacrifice, including self-sacrifice or suicide.

And so we come to the case of Jacintha Saldanha: the nurse who killed herself after falling victim to a prank telephone call made by two Australian DJs who thought it funny and inconsequential to make a fool of someone. Now they know better.

For what this proud and honourable woman has done is turn the tables on those who would make her look naive and gullible in the eyes of the entire world. She has effectively rendered them speechless and powerless by making of her own life a sacrificial offering that has to be accepted with deep sorrow and regret, but which can never be returned. 

In refusing to be a figure of fun and by making exchange impossible, Jacintha Saldanha has extracted the object's revenge.

So who's laughing now? Certainly not Michael Christian or Mel Greig. 

American Psycho and the Slave Revolt in Morals

Patrick Bateman is one of the great fictional figures within contemporary culture, even though the question of his identity remains ambiguous and his reliability as a narrator suspect. Stylish,  charming, and with a dandy's eye for detail, he's a postmodern Dorian Gray living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.      

However, it's clear that the author of American Psycho doesn't wish for his readers to admire Patrick Bateman. On the contrary, Bateman is someone we should repudiate; a man trapped in a world that lacks depth, meaning, and reality and his story serves as a warning about the dangers of surrendering one's soul to Mammon. This is why Ellis opens the novel with a line from Dante - 'Abandon all hope ye who enter here' - an allusion to the hell that awaits those who choose to lead a life lacking in firm moral foundation and worry more about looking good than being good. 

Thus, for all the protests from various concerned quarters that greeted publication of the book, American Psycho is above all else a moral fable and not a celebration of schizo-psychosis, or a nihilistic advocacy of murder and mayhem. Its central teaching is one subscribed to by all good Christians: love of money is the root of all evil. Ellis even goes so far as to imply there might be a causal connection between serial consumption and serial killing. 

And this is why as much as I admire the work as a piece of writing, I despise it for reinforcing the great conceit of the poor and badly dressed: namely, that whilst the rich and powerful might have money and lead superficially fabulous lives, they are all unhappy and corrupt and heading towards eternal damnation. This resentment-ridden philosophy of secret envy and hatred is what underlies slave moralities everywhere and it ends not merely with contempt for material well-being and good fortune, but with an apocalyptic desire for worldly destruction. For as Lawrence writes:

"It is very nice, if you are poor and not humble - and the poor may be obsequious, but they are almost never truly humble, in the Christian sense - to bring your enemies down to utter destruction ... while you yourself rise up to grandeur." 

- Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, (CUP, 1980), p. 63.

American Psycho is meant to scare us back onto the straight and narrow path that leads to heaven. We are asked to accept that salvation belongs exclusively to those who are honest and hard-working; i.e. those who think their meekness and self-restraint is a voluntary achievement or accomplishment, rather than simply a sign that they lack the power to act.

Sadly, not only do lies turn impotence into virtue, but they make us suspect and despise those things which the heart needs even more than love: splendour, pride, good shoes, and expensive-looking business cards.
   

Fragments of Glass (2006)

Dromeas (1994), glass and iron sculpture by Costas Varotsos, Athens, Greece

Crash!

And suddenly, with a crash, I find myself 
thrown like Alice into another world.

A world in which self, day, and window lie shattered
on the floor in a sparkling chaos of glass, blood and
sunshine.


In the Confrontation with Glass 

In the confrontation with glass,
flesh is rarely the winner.

For whilst the former shatters,
the latter bleeds and knows
pain.

Which is the secret of life's
victory over death.


At the Hospital in Athens 

As my doctor displayed her skill with a needle
on gashed head and wounded knee, I found
comfort in the thought that we are born to
embody our scars.


Poppies

We had only the day before been looking at wild poppies
staining the roadside, admiring their obscenity of colour -
'little hell-flames' indeed.

But shocking all the same to discover how the body too
is capable of producing it's own poppy-redness - look!
as drops of blood flower on shards of broken glass.


The Vengeance of Objects

Glass is so unforgiving,
so cruel, so ... sharp!

It cuts and slices the flesh without
mercy or hesitation, or the warm
softness of sand.

As it shatters one can almost hear laughter
and every blood-stained splinter seems to
smile.


On Which Side is Wonderland?

On one side of the glass lives she who offers
love and the prospect of a life together.

And on the other is she who dreams of
an elaborate suicide.

And I have crashed through the window not knowing
on which side I've landed.


I Love Everything That Flows

There is nothing more beautiful than blood
when it flows and carries life away with it.

Nothing more disgusting than when it begins
to coagulate; to clot and to curdle.

There's something shameful about scabs.
 

Haemostasis

For Lawrence, who subscribes to a libidinal materialism in which 'touch' is of crucial importance, the physical handling of an object brings us much closer to a true understanding of it than any abstract theory of the thing. Via frequent contact and usage, we gain what he terms 'blood-knowledge' and by which he means an intuitive, sensual, and pre-cognitive way of relating to the material world.

Although he often claims that he is not an opponent of mind and doesn't advocate an acephalic humanity, Lawrence clearly privileges some form of primal consciousness that he locates in the lower-body and which delights in doing the washing-up. One of the reasons he dislikes Kant is because the latter only thought coldly and critically with his head and never darkly and desirously with his blood: and he never did the dishes!

Real thought, says Lawrence, is an experience and requires the establishment of a 'peculiar alien sympathy' with the otherness of things that lie external to our selves and exist mind-independently. Idealism marks the death of all this: it is a negation of the real and of the great affective centres within the body wherein the pristine unconscious is located. If we are to be happy and vital creatures, then we must, says Lawrence, get back into vivid relationship with the cosmos; i.e. get back into touch and know once more not in terms of apartness (which is rational and scientific), but in terms of togetherness (which is religious and poetic).

What are we to make of all this? At one time, I would have subscribed to this vision and affirmed Lawrence's libidinal materialism without hesitation. And, in fact, I still think there is much to be said for the latter and believe it may hold a fundamental key to the development of an object-oriented ontology. Ultimately, Lawrence plays for me much the same role that Heidegger plays for Graham Harman and he remains a major influence on my thinking.

However, I now have some reservations and find much of what Lawrence writes here, as elsewhere, problematic. Thus, the idea that the physical handling of a mundane object such as a tea-pot, or the frequent use of a tool such as a hammer, somehow brings us closer to it than we might ever be to those things of which we have only a theoretical understanding - such as molecules, black holes, or electromagnetic waves - seems dubious.

In fact, it seems to be based on an entirely false (although common) distinction made between theoretical and non-theoretical forms of knowledge, in which the former are presented as artificial, speculative, and parasitic upon the latter which is the warm-blooded body of true human  understanding. As Paul Churchland points out: "That these specious contrasts are wholesale nonsense has not prevented them finding expression and approval" in the writings not only of artists and poets like Lawrence, but also in the work of many philosophers. Churchland continues:

"Upon close inspection the various contrasts thought to fund the distinction are seen to disappear. If viewed warily, the network of principles and assumptions constitutive of our common-sense conceptual framework can be seen to be as speculative and as artificial  as any overtly theoretical system. ... Comprehensive theories, on the other hand, prove not to be essentially parasitic, but to be potentially autonomous frameworks in their own right. In short, it appears that all knowledge ... is theoretical; that there is no such thing as non-theoretical understanding. Our common-sense conceptual framework stands unmasked as being itself a theory, or a battery of theories. And where before we saw a dichotomy between the theoretical and non-theoretical, we are left with little more than a distinction between freshly minted theory and thoroughly thumb-worn theory whose cultural assimilation is complete."

- Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (CUP, 1979), pp. 1-2.

In other words, Lawrence's blood-knowledge is simply another term for doxa - or that which can be passed off as true without question simply because it has already been widely accepted as such in advance. Thus Lawrence, the arch-opponent of the cliche and stereotype, is here exposed as trading in such; just as he panders to prejudice and reinforces reactionary ignorance with his lazy and disappointing dismissal of modern science. 

     

On the Philosophical Importance of Making Lists

Writing in the above work, Ian Bogost suggests that we might use the term ontography to refer to an inscriptive strategy that gives a snapshot of the world and the wealth of objects that constitute it, without necessarily providing a wider context of meaning. At its simplest, this would take the form of a list: "a group of items loosely joined not by logic ... but by the gentle knot of the comma" [38].

Lists are something we regularly come across in the work of object-oriented ontologists. Critics might say they take the place of argument, or are simply a form of bad writing. But that's unfair and it seems to me that lists can and do serve real philosophical importance. Further, at their best, they also have a stylistic charm that borders on being poetic. 

Lists matter because, as Francis Spufford says, they allow the things that compose them to retain their independence and uniqueness by refusing 'the connecting power of language, in favour of a sequence of disconnected elements' [quoted by Bogost, 40]. This idea of things as autonomous things in themselves is crucial to OOO and it offers a welcome alternative to the now tedious idea of Deleuzean becoming with its preference for continuity and underlying monism. 

As Bogost argues, the notion of becoming this, that, or the other,  ultimately suggests "comfort and compatibility in relations between units" [40]. In contrast, his own model of alien phenomenology assumes radical incompatibility and disjunction, instead of harmonious flow. His use of lists, therefore, reminds us that "no matter how fluidly a system may operate, its members nevertheless remain utterly isolated" [40] and alien to one another. 

In other words, lists don't just challenge the connecting power of language, but serve to remind us of the ontological claim that being is not one and undivided, but made up of a multiplicity of objects that may or may not relate to one another, but which never fully reveal or give themselves away.

 

On the Political Importance of Making Lists

The list often acts as a manifesto and call to arms: divided into dialectical categories of things loved and things hated, such lists are exemplified by the early McLaren/Westwood t-shirt design entitled: 'You're gonna wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you've been lying on!'

For Malcolm, punk was a form of blackmail and a type of terrorism. It forced a generation into making a fateful choice: you were either for the Sex Pistols or against them - and if you were for them, then your commitment had to be absolute: there could be no passers-by and no part-timers in this revolution. 

Much the same type of list was drawn up by Roland Barthes. However, unlike McLaren, Barthes didn't want to bully anyone with his list or display his penchant for fanaticism and provocation. In fact, with his list of things liked and things not liked, he was attempting to provide grounds for a model of negative liberalism:

"I like, I don't like: this is of no importance to anyone; this, apparently, has no meaning. And yet all this means: my body is not the same as yours. Hence, in this anarchic foam of tastes and distastes ... gradually appears the figure of a bodily enigma, requiring complicity or irritation. Here begins the intimidation of the body, which obliges others to endure me liberally, to remain silent and polite confronted by pleasures or rejections which they do not share.
      (A fly bothers me, I kill it: you will kill what bothers you. If I had not killed the fly, it would have been out of pure liberalism: I am liberal in order not to be a killer.)"

                    - Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard.

A Short Meditation on an Old School Photograph

An old b&w photograph of two little boys, one of whom has said to the other: 'Pretend to be reading and we'll look clever.'

Could it be then that intellectualism is just a pose?

Well, yes. But to realise that as a five -year-old is pretty smart.

As for the third young boy, completely oblivious to the presence of the photographer - and the two girls at the back of the class - who's to say they're not happy and their parents weren't right to love them?

Under the Sign of the Golden Phallus

Because for a long time I dreamed of being Lady Chatterley's lover, ideas of 'phallic consciousness' and 'phallic tenderness'  had a powerful hold on my youthful imagination: I painted the phallus, wrote poems in celebration of the phallus, and religiously revered the phallus as part of a neo-paganism of my own invention. 

Kate Millet would have been at least partially justified, therefore, in accusing me of doing precisely what she famously accused Lawrence of doing: i.e., transforming an already questionable model of masculinity into a misogynistic mystery religion founded upon homoerotic worship of the penis. 

But this isn't entirely fair. What Millet failed to appreciate is that when Lawrence wrote almost obsessively of the phallus in his later work, he was not referring to the penis-as-organ belonging exclusively to a male agent. On the contrary, the phallus, for Lawrence - as for me back in my golden phallic days - was a sacred symbol that cannot be reduced to being 'a mere member of the physiological body'. 

And it's not, for Lawrence at least, even a symbol of male power or cosmic potency, so much as it's a symbol of the relatedness between bodies. Sneering contempt for the phallus, therefore, betrays a horror of being physically in touch with others: this, writes Lawrence, is the 'root-fear of all mankind' since the Fall into idealism. Hence the often frenzied efforts on behalf of moralists to denigrate the phallus and to nullify it - not least of all by wilfully confusing it with the penis. 

What Nietzsche terms the slave revolt in morals begins, arguably, as a revolt against the phallus; the free man or woman - free, that is to say, from fear and from shame - is more than happy to submit before the phallus and accept it as that which unites them into one flesh, or a single phallic body. When the phallic wonder is dead in us, writes Lawrence, then we become wretched and have no sense of beauty or joy.  

Only when the phallic wonder is strong and healthy can men and women come into direct touch with one another and with the world. By acknowledging the phallus as she does, Connie learns how to respond not only to the naked body of her lover, but also to animals, trees, rain, moonlight, and even inanimate and mundane household objects, such as an old kettle. Phallic wonder makes everything sparkle with fresh glamour and allure and enables the heart to enter the fourth dimensional kingdom of bliss. 

This sounds, I know, like the worst kind of occult-metaphysics and romantic fantasy. But I still think there's something important in this phallic philosophy and that it can be read today as a type of speculative realism that would lend itself rather nicely to an object-oriented ontology. 

Thus, without too much embarrassment, I still - all these years later - continue to write under the sign of the golden phallus. Though these days, like Warhol, I like to decorate the phallus with tiny flowers and hearts and tie it with a pretty ribbon to indicate my recognition of the fact that even art, religion, and sex shouldn't be taken too seriously; that they are all, as Susan Sontag suggests, exercises in failed seriousness - and all the more beautiful for their failure.