Passion Ends in Fashion

Michel Houellebecq is right: We're a long way from Wuthering Heights. 

Our obsession with love and the forming of human relationships is today evidence only of a certain loyalty to the past. All our feelings are completely artificial and our nights are "no longer shaken by terror or ecstasy". Sex is a form of nostalgia.

After the naked excess of the orgy - which was all about bodies and organs and gross acts of penetration - there comes the masked ball in which desire for the flesh has been replaced by a passion for fashion and dressing-up has become more exciting than stripping-off. We can witness this in our popular culture and I would suggest that Carrie Bradshaw tells us a good deal more about ourselves today than Cathy Earnshaw.

For whilst her significantly older friend, Samantha, still faithfully subscribes to the myth of sex and sexual liberation, Carrie - despite the residual romanticism of her character - is keenly aware that a finely crafted pair of shoes is likely to last longer and bring more satisfaction than a relationship with a man. 

Ultimately, even Mr Big can't compete against Manolo Blahnik and you can't help wondering whether Carrie didn't marry the former simply so she might wear the Something Blue satin shoes designed by the latter ...?    

Non Placet

Having just finished reading the Derrida biography written by Benoît Peeters (trans. Andrew Brown), I was reminded once more of the time in 1992 when four Cambridge dons brought shame upon themselves and their University with a decision to oppose the awarding of an honorary degree to M. Derrida on the grounds that his thinking failed to meet accepted standards of philosophical clarity and rigour.

The fact that this ignominious decision was supported by numerous other academics in an open letter to The Times which accused Derrida of being, at best, a clever trickster whose writing style not only defied comprehension but threatened the very foundations of scholarship, only made things even more embarrassing for those of us who, whilst belonging to a British intellectual tradition, were excited by the challenge French theory presented to traditional models of thought and methods of reading.   

Thankfully, when put to a wider ballot, it was decided by 336 votes to 204 to give Derrida his degree. But of course, the old prejudices and stupidities continued to circulate and erupt from time to time and even some of the obituaries written following his death in 2004 contained an ugly, jeering tone full of resentment and in stark contrast to Derrida's own profoundly beautiful writings of mourning and commemoration.  

Snow

It's snowing and I hate it: the ice-cold wetness and the silent whiteness that isolates the soul and surrounds the heart with frozen air. 

It makes one think of poor Gerald stumbling towards his death amidst sheer mountain slopes; the terrible snowy landscape offering promise of eternal rest.  

This Be the Post

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. 
They may not mean to, but they do. 

From my mother I get: 

My urgency, my phobias, my obsessive character, my estrangement from the world and my prejudices (I do not eat tins of tuna, buy things from a market stall, or trust Cockneys). In a word, from my mother I get my complexity.

From my father I get:

My passivity and lack of worldly desire or ambition, my inability to prosper and almost Christ-like unconcern for those things belonging unto Caesar. In a word, from my father I get my saintliness.

Perversion Makes Happy

Someone recently asked me why I no longer characterize my work as a form of libidinal materialism, preferring instead to now label it as a perverse materialism. Well, firstly, I wanted to move away from the whole politics of desire shtick, particularly as associated with Deleuze and Guattari. 

Secondly, the concept and practice of perversion, understood as a quest to find joyful thoughts and feelings not made profitable by any social end and which deviate from the straight and narrow, is something that has always appealed. Even as a young child, I hated any kind of norm or convention and would often wear my clothes inside-out.

I think Barthes is right when he argues that the pleasure potential of perversion is always greatly underestimated by moralists who fail to understand that it does not corrupt or make sinful, but, quite simply, makes happy. 

     

Dare to See the World Through Deaf Eyes

Sometimes, I like to pretend that I'm deaf and I try to imagine what it would be like not to be able to hear ... 
It's not so bad.

Perhaps we should all try like Larry to imagine what it would be like not to be able to hear and dare to see the world through deaf eyes. Perhaps we'd find the silence beautiful. And liberating as well as instructive.

For to live in a soundless, speechless world without birdsong or the insistence of the human voice, is not to live without contact or to be loveless: we do not become fish simply because we surrender our ears and enter a mute but amazingly dexterous world of sign and physical gesture.

But, of course, most people will never concede the point that the profoundly deaf are neither disabled nor stupid. For audism is deeply-rooted within our culture and draws philosophical support from what Derrida has identified as phonocentrism: i.e. the belief that the voice is the privileged medium of truth and meaning and that hearing is the deepest of all the senses, sound acting directly upon the great affective centres of being.

Until we deconstruct, or, if you prefer, curb our enthusiasm for this metaphysical prejudice, then we will continue to remain enthralled by orality and continue to discriminate against those who cannot hear and find the idea of reading lips offensive and humiliating. 

A Short Lesson in Queer Theory

One of the things that Lawrence disliked Whitman for was the latter's obsession with the notion of One Identity. That is to say, Whitman's compulsion to embrace everyone and weave everything into himself until, at last, the entire universe had been absorbed and personalised and made Walt Whitmanesque.

Whitman's great mistake was confusing his watchword Sympathy with the Christian Love-ideal. Thus, rather than respect the pathos of distance between things and celebrate otherness and plurality, Whitman calls for universal merger. Instead of feeling with, he tries to feel for and, in this way, compassion gives way to egoism. 

Broadly speaking, I agree with Lawrence's reading of Whitman and think we should remain alert to the danger presented by the will-to-merger. But, having said that, one of the joys of queerness is that it enables one to cruise and drift transpositionally between  fixed subject-formations, so that one might indeed become-Eskimo or become-woman: not in an historical or ethno-biological sense, obviously, but as a question of style.

I'm really not interested in assimilating anyone's soul. And I'm not asserting, like Whitman, that I am X, Y, or Z. Rather, I'm saying: I am not I and that X, Y, or Z are never truly themselves either. Thus we should not fetishize, eulogize, or ontologize notions of self or identity; be they based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever else. 

This, of course, brings me into clear opposition with Lawrence, as well as Whitman. But that's okay. For if Lawrence once meant so much to me, these days I can't help feeling his will-to-integrity is as suspect as Whitman's will-to-merger. For me, utopia begins when we stop talking about souls and refuse to be bound by stupid binaries.    

On Irony

Nietzsche warns that habituation to irony, like habituation to sarcasm, can spoil the character and turn one into a snapping dog 'which has learned how to laugh, but forgotten how to bite'.

No one wants that to happen. So we must therefore exercise caution and be alert to the dangers of cynicism. But I'm certainly not prepared to abandon irony, as many advocate, in the name of a new sincerity. For irony remains not only an important means of gaining critical distance from the object of analysis, but is also, as Barthes writes, 'the question which language puts to language' and that expands the latter by playing with its forms.

In other words, irony need not make one smug and superior and it need not be the narcissistic product of a thought which has collapsed inwardly and become fatally self-enclosed. At it's best, irony can make happy and set free. And it can help us recover something mistakenly believed to be its very antithesis: passion. For in becoming playful, we find once more the lost intensity of childhood.

Living Dolls

Thanks to the work of American Pygmalion Matt McMullen, sex-dolls have come a long way during the last two decades. In his obsessive desire to recreate as closely as possible the appearance and feel of  living female bodies, he has developed a range of silicone love companions complete with articulated skeletons, synthetic skin, real hair, and three fully penetrable 'pleasure portals'. 

But, ironically, just as McMullen's RealDolls become ever-more life-like, so real women are becoming ever-more doll-like, due to advances in cosmetic surgery and pressure exerted by our culture for conformity to a deep-throated and large-breasted, but small-waisted and pubicly-hairless ideal formulated within the pornographic imagination.  

And so we come to the case of Valeria Lukyanova; the 21 year old Ukrainian model and internet sensation. Miss Lukyanova - or the Russian Barbie doll as the press like to describe her - is, for us in 2013, what La Cicciolina was for Baudrillard in 1993: a marvellous incarnation of sex in pornographic innocence. 

With her customized body and "realer-than-real curves worthy of an inflatable doll", Miss Lukyanova is both transsexual and transhuman and, as Lawrence would say, she exists beyond desire, cut off from any mystery or allure: even her nudity is no more enticing than that of a dolls. 

All of this casts an interesting light upon the sexual revolution espoused with such passion and conviction by an earlier generation. We were promised that "the bursting forth of the body's full erotic force" would be particularly favourable to women and yet they've ended up having silicone implanted into their breasts and submitting to Hollywood waxing, labiaplasty, and anal bleaching.     

  

Anti-Oedipus

Blood is thicker than water, so they say. Which is true enough, but why should viscosity and a certain heavy stickiness be privileged over fluidity and sparkle? Why should family bonds be thought of as so much more vital and important than friendships formed?

There is always something suspect about those who fetishize the blood and pride themselves on their genetic inheritance. I would never put siblings before strangers simply on the grounds that I share parental DNA with the former and it seems to me that non-familial connections are the source of real joy in this life.

And so when she said her sister was dearer to her than anyone else, I had to conclude that she was all too human in her incestual primitivism and probably a fascist at heart.