Thank Heaven for Little Girls

What are little girls made of: sugar and spice and all things nice?

Whilst it's possible that these are their material elements, according to Deleuze and Guattari's reading of Proust, their individuation, be it collective or singular, doesn't proceed via subjectivity, but by pure haecceity. Which means, I think, that they shouldn't be understood as molar forms, or defined by the functions they fulfil. Rather, we should think of girls in terms of their movements and the intensive affects of which they are capable. 

Little girls, in other words, are not just young female human beings that grow up into women (although, obviously, this is true in a banal organic sense); they are something other than this and something more than this. At their best - which is to say at their most phenomenal - they are extraordinary events and so do not belong to any age group or sex.

Joan of Arc, Anne Frank, and here, with us, right now, recovering from her surgery, Malala Yousafzai, are singular beings via whom molecular politics unfolds. For these girls teach us something vital about life understood in terms of immanence, virtue and virtuality. We should be grateful to the heavens that send them our way. 

Theme Tunes in a Man's Life

In an essay written towards the end of his life, Lawrence reflected on the fact that certain hymns he heard and sang as a child continued to resonate more potently within him than many of the finest poems he had since become familiar with. It didn't matter that, lyrically and musically, these hymns were often banal and rather horrible on the ear; what counted was that they had delighted and inspired his childish imagination and so retained for him a more lasting value. 

Geoff Dyer feels the same about the Marvel comic books he read as a child and this is something he and I share, in addition to our love of Lawrence. But I also feel the same about all of those TV theme tunes that I would tape on my primitive - but precious - cassette player and then listen to over and over again.

For some reason, I was particularly fond of American detective shows and must have recorded the openings to all of them, including Kojak, Cannon, McCloud, Ironside, Starsky and Hutch, Hill Street Blues, Police Woman, Police Story, Hawaii Five-O, Harry O, The Streets of San Francisco, and, my favourite, The Rockford Files. 

These tunes suggested and still suggest a whole world of action and adventure; there has been "no dwindling into actuality, no hardening into the common place" - they excite the same feelings of joy and excitement now as then. In a sense, my childhood was as much a Quinn Martin production, as it was the result of a comprehensive school education and growing up in Essex.

But I also loved American sit-coms, such as Rhoda, and still to this day know the words to the opening song from Laverne and Shirley better than I do the lyrics to either the Lord's Prayer or the national anthem (this as a matter of pride, not shame):  

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight!

Schlemiel! Schlemazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!  

We're gonna do it!

Ikizukuri

Cruelty, writes Nietzsche, is one of the oldest festive joys of mankind. Indeed, to practise cruelty - to refine it into an art form and a virtue - is the mark of human culture; a means by which we express our power over life and our divine indifference to suffering, be it that of animals, slaves, or those regarded as enemies of the state.

For it is not only beasts that are tortured and butchered, or sea-creatures that are turned into sashimi. And so as my companion's plate of ikizukuri was prepared and served with all the delicate knife-work that a Japanese chef is capable of, I thought once more of Fu Chou Li, who was executed in 1905 by being cut into a hundred pieces. 

The public dismemberment of this poor wretch - guilty of murdering a prince - was something that obsessed Bataille, who kept a photograph of the event which played a decisive role in his thinking. For he saw in the picture not only great horror, but also a look on the victim's face of ecstatic joy that seemed to transcend his torment. And it was this that lent the picture an almost unbearable beauty and fascination:

"The young and seductive Chinese man ... I loved him with a love in which the sadistic instinct played no part: he communicated his pain to me or perhaps the excessive nature of his pain, and it was precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to take pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin."

- Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt, Albany State University Press, 1988, p. 120.

I understand, I think, where Bataille is coming from - and why he finds the anguished eroticism of human sacrifice and sadism so rich in meaning. But as I looked down at my friend's plate and saw the still-living but semi-sliced fish attempt to take one last gasp of air, I was glad I had chosen the noodles.

I Would Prefer Not To

"He does not resist, he does not defend his rights, he takes no steps to avert the worst that can happen to him - more, he provokes it ..."

This happens to be Nietzsche writing of Jesus, but it could well be someone commenting on Bartleby the scrivener. Both figures belong to the same type: that of the enigmatic redeemer who sets himself apart from his fellow man and makes himself untouchable and unknowable. 

Bartleby is one of the most discussed figures in American literature, but I find it hard to believe that he is also one of the best loved. For my part, I hate him. I would prefer not to have to explain this dislike or make any further critical analysis of this monstrous and motionless character, but, for the record ...

I hate Bartleby for much the same reason as Judas came to resent Jesus; the former felt in some sense let down by the latter and recognised the denial and subterfuge inherent in the latter's teaching. And so, despite his feelings of love and loyalty, he betrayed him: with a kiss. Bartleby too is ultimately a fraud and a moral fanatic who leads us not towards new life or greater health and happiness, but to suffering, misery and death.

Thus, like Bartleby's employer (and the narrator of his tale), I can't help feeling a  profound repulsion for the scrivener, who, clearly, is a decadent, suffering from some form of incurable disorder. His very presence is a curse and he sucks the joy out of life, just as he casts a general air of gloom over the office premises he refuses to leave. 

Bartleby's ideal is stasis: he is driven by a will to inertia, or what Freud terms a death drive. Thus he seeks to reduce all tension and avoid all conflict; to return, ultimately, to a state of inorganic objecthood: unthinking, unfeeling, uncaring, uneating, unliving. Surprisingly, Deleuze of all people finds this admirable and amusing. Not only does he think of Melville's book as a comical text, but he describes Bartleby as an anti-hero who, with his five-word formula, manages to suspend all operational logic and indicate the very limits of our world.

Deleuze seems to regard Bartleby as that first perfect nihilist whom Nietzsche spoke of and anticipated. But surely Nietzsche's thought of affirmative destruction and an active negation of the negative, is something very different to Bartleby's passive-aggressive 'negativism beyond all negation' ...? 

Deleuze is not wrong to describe Bartleby as Christ-like - "stricken with a constitutive weakness but also with a strange beauty" - the question is whether we think that's a good thing or not. Is it desirable - or even possible - to collectively imitate Bartleby and live as he lives, die as he dies? He surely provides at best a practice for the individual, but not a politics. Thus Deleuze is mistaken to locate a new model of fraternal alliance and immanent utopia in the story of Bartleby the scrivener. He has been seduced by the latter's suffering and martyrdom, but as Nietzsche points out, we should never confuse pain and showmanship with philosophical profundity.

And so, to conclude, Bartleby is not the physician of culture or the "doctor of a sick America" that Deleuze believes him to be. He's just another pale-faced case of retarded puberty and an apolitical idiot, with an instinctive hatred of reality and a morbid fear of being touched. What we need is someone who can teach us how to live in physical relation to one another; not just curl up and die in a corner, or hang naked on a cross.

On the Love of Boys

Despite his keen philosophical interest in their sexual ethics and techniques of the self, Foucault always maintained that the ancient Greeks do not in fact offer an attractive or plausible model for us today. No people, he says, can ever find the answer to their own social problems in the solutions found by another people at another time.

However, without wishing to necessarily advocate pederasty as a vital moral and educational institution, I can't help feeling a degree of sympathy with the following speech by Phaedrus:

"I would maintain that there can be no greater blessing for a boy than to have a worthy lover from his earliest youth; nor for a lover than to have an object worthy of his affection. Life's guiding principle for those who intend to live virtuously cannot be instilled either by family or by class or by wealth or by anything else so effectively as by love. 'What principle is that?' you ask. I mean the principle which inspires shame at what is contemptible and desire for what is noble; without these feelings neither a state nor an individual can accomplish greatness or anything fine.  

                                                                                         - Plato, The Symposium, trans. Maria Thanassa, 2013.

So, whilst it's not for me to argue that it might be advantageous for adolescent youths to have mature male lovers overseeing their physical and intellectual development in the gymnasium, surely this is preferable to teenage gangs roaming the streets stabbing and shooting one another, or mugging their fellow citizens ...?

Of course, even to suggest this is controversial in an age that lacks social and sexual etiquette and the confidence to act with authority; not to mention a time which is as terrified by the thought of paedophilia as the ancient Greek world was of immoderate behaviour. Ultimately, there's no point fantasising the recreation of Classical culture, for we are, as Nietzsche says, no longer made of the right material. 

Too Old to Live, Too Slow to Die

Adam Ant has a new album out. It's his first in a very long time and it has a very long title. I wish him all the best with it, as I retain a lot of fraternal affection for Adam.

However, he's being slightly disingenuous when he pretends that rock 'n' roll is all about sex, style, and subversion, with a dash of humour for good measure. Because it is also about youth, speed, and untimely death. 

I'm not saying that's a good thing. But that's what rock 'n' roll is: a romantic and rebellious suicide cult in which spectacular failure is valued above benign success and dangerous excess is the rule, rather than a code of health and safety. An aged rock star - to paraphrase Nick Land writing about philosophers - is either a monster of stamina, or a charlatan.  

As it's you Adam, in all your punk-pirate splendour and your madness, I'm prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt ... You don't embarrass yourself and those who loved you in the manner that Rotten does.

  

The Boy Looked at Johnny ...

Some of the sweetest lines written about Rotten were penned by Sebastian Horsley in his 2007 memoir, Dandy in the Underworld:

"Johnny Rotten was Rimbaud reborn in Finsbury Park. He had all the unmistakable signs - the charismatic aura, the dandy's narcissism, the canny look of the holy tramp ... he even had the Gorgon's glare - the metaphor for the hypnotic power of vision, genius or madness." [57]

As Horsley rightly notes, Rotten was, in his punk heyday, flawless and blazingly beautiful: a true star who hated all other stars for failing to shine with his own intensity and integrity. Beneath the safety pins and the sarcasm, was a pure heart and a fierce intelligence and in the summer of '77, when he was being attacked in the streets of London by razor-wielding thugs acting in the name of queen and country, I hung on every word he said and adopted every gesture, every pose, every sneer. He articulated what a generation felt and he embodied how we wanted to look.

And for many years, I continued to hold Rotten in high regard and to have great affection for him; even though I was much closer in spirit to Malcolm and ultimately chose the latter's anarchic good humour and chutzpah over Lydon's increasing self-righteousness and self-indulgence.   

But it's got to the point today, I have to admit, where I can no longer stand to hear or see him. It's not merely that Rotten's lost his voice, his charm, and his sense of style; it's not even those butter adverts, his increasingly oafish behaviour, or that unseemly incident at the Mojo Awards in 2008 involving a young Welsh songstress.

For me, the final straw came with his embarrassing appearance on Question Time last year, in which he offered a few ridiculous platitudes and shamelessly played to the gallery as he looked to exploit popular sentiment. Rotten, sadly, has become the embittered, bullying, rambling and reactionary pub bore whom only morons could possibly find entertaining.

Where once we looked in awe and could not take our eyes off him, there is nothing to do now but look away ...  

The Banality of Evil

Yale University Press, 2010

I don't like Terry Eagleton: not as a literary critic, not as a cultural theorist, and particularly not as a Marxist theologian addressing the question of evil, which he thinks of as a metaphysical desire to negate being. 

This simple and straightforward definition of evil - rooted in Freud's notion of the death drive - is not one that I share. But then I'm one of those postmodern individuals whom Eagleton vehemently despises and so lack the moral depth to understand the "true destructiveness" [15] of evil, or appreciate the need for redemption. Nor do I believe that "Hell is the final victory of  nihilism over idealism" [78]; that there can be "no life outside God" [78]; or that there is "good reason to believe that the devil is a Frenchman" [93]. 

In fact, I find Eagleton's casual xenophobia, aggressive misogyny, and bluff-empiricism not only irritating, but offensive. He comes shamefully close at times to being a Little Englander, exasperated by clever foreigners who always complicate matters and terrified of "filth-dabbling feminists" [84] who "strike at the root of all social and sexual stability" [80].   

It's this - the phallocratic regime guaranteeing stability and the firmness of his erection - which Eagleton wishes to safeguard from evil; the latter now understood as that which emasculates and challenges all order. He tells us, for example, that the witches in Macbeth deserve to be burned because they practise a form of chaos magic, lacking in rhyme or reason and without any clear aim: "They are radical separatists who scorn male power ... whose words and bodies mock rigorous boundaries and make sport of fixed identities." [80-1]

As the above makes clear, it's not just social and sexual stability that Eagleton wishes to protect, but also ontological stability: he wants human being to be fixed and immutable. Such essential continuity is to be cherished rather than lamented, he writes, for only self-identical men and women are capable of leading lives rich with purpose, meaning, aspiration and achievement - unlike the damned who are decentred and incapable of finding fulfilment in life.

Eagleton speaks at length about these evil ones who lack souls and move around like zombies,"leeching life from others in order to fill an aching absence" [71] in themselves. Thus his language insistently draws upon (and reinforces) all the old metaphysics of presence, plenitude, and authenticity. Evil is now characterized as a form of lack or deficiency of being and its "seductive allure is purely superficial" [123].

Again, it's depressing and disappointing stuff from one of 'Britain's foremost intellectuals'. One can't help but wonder if, in his intellectual dotage, he even cares any longer about serious critical thinking - or even, for that matter, the problem of evil. For at the end of chapter two he suddenly makes the unexpected confession that evil "is not something we should lose too much sleep over" [130]. If only his publishers had been bold enough to put this line on the cover they'd have saved us all a lot of time and effort.

Eagleton should probably have concluded his study at that point. Instead, he adds a third and final chapter and it's here that we get to watch with wide-open eyes of amused astonishment as he oscillates frantically between two poles of delirium: Christianity and Marxism.

Eagleton cannot decide whether he believes in Salvation or Revolution - or both - because he can never quite decide whether people are essentially good, or originally sinful. As a Marxist, he wants to believe that men and women are conditioned into evil by a system of "vested interests and anonymous processes" [143]. But as a Catholic he can't help reaffirming the view that that evil is "a condition of being as well as a quality of behaviour" [152].

And so, whilst we are determined by historical forces and therefore innocent at a certain level, Eagleton also maintains we are corrupt and that any revolutionary optimism must be tempered by religious pessimism. What we need, he decides, is a new political faith founded upon a more realistic reality principle (not too sanguine, not too gloomy); one that will finally enable the passing of "reliable moral judgement on the human species" [153].

This, of course, is Eagleton's ultimate fantasy - to establish a tribunal over which he and his God can preside and pass verdict. It's this disgusting mania to judge and to find guilty that, ironically, I think we could characterize as evil. And the noble task of philosophy and literature remains what it has always been: to have done with judgement.  

In Praise of the Supermodel

It is often said by critics of the fashion industry that a young woman on the catwalk provides a bad role model in allowing herself to be commodified as a hollowed-out object, trading on her looks.

But perhaps woman-as-beautiful-object has found a way to turn her own emptiness and reification not only into something that works to her material advantage, but ultimately provides a symbolic form of resistance to the phallocratic order, by subtly exposing how all notions of essence, truth, and identity are based upon deceit and delusion.  

        

For the supermodel is neither an ideal being, nor a natural phenomenon. She is, rather, an artificial creature born of mirrors and make-up, whose mask-like face expresses neither sensitivity, nor true feeling. On the contrary, "her presence serves to submerge all sensibility and expression ... beneath the ecstasy of her gaze and the nullity of her smile" [Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, p. 95].

Rather like the leading ladies from Hollywood's golden age, Linda, Cindy, Naomi, Claudia, and Christy are no ordinary women of flesh and banal sexual status, but mythological beings "around whom crystallized stern rituals and a wasteful profusion which turned them into a generation of sacred monsters" [ibid]. They don't enchant us because of their talent or intelligence, but because of their remoteness and frigidity. Their lack of human warmth and ever-changing appearance, ensures they remain unknown and unlovable; like mysterious and elusive lesbians.

Thus it is that the supermodel is never really with us: she just suddenly appears, struts her stuff, pouts and strikes a pose, turns, and then vanishes - immediately eclipsed by the girl who follows.      

The Greatest Joy of All

One of my favourite scenes in Lawrence's Women in Love comes towards the end of the book, when Gudrun presents her sister with three pairs of the coloured silk stockings for which she was notorious.

Ursula, as one might imagine, is rapturous to receive such a beautiful gift: 'One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely stockings', she says, and Gudrun echoes this sentiment. This comes as no big surprise, as throughout the novel the Brangwen sisters often discuss clothes with the same intensity of excitement as they recount their latest experiences of the heart. 

What is surprising, however, is that Lawrence will later chastise George Bernard Shaw for his remark that clothes arouse our desire and not the exposure of flesh, which, in many cases, has quite the opposite effect. For Lawrence, this reveals Shaw to be a flippant and vulgar thinker and he sternly declares: "The man who finds a woman's underclothing the most exciting part about her is a savage."

But actually, Shaw has a point and an important point at that; one developed by Roland Barthes who argues that woman is desexualized "at the very moment when she is stripped bare". It is only via a whole spectrum of adornment (i.e. the furs, the gloves, the shoes, the frilly underwear, the expensive stockings, the jewellery, etc.) that the living body can be projected into the symbolic category of  erotic objects and thereby made magical and alluring.

Thus, far from 'savagery' - and I'm assuming here that Lawrence means by this primitive naivety - fetishism is a sign of human sophistication; a happy exchange of nature for artifice. And so whilst the simplest of men may admire a woman's bare and blotchy legs, the more cultured are likely to admire her legs only when they are made lustrous by nylon. As for those rare individuals who are refined to the point of perversity, such persons are interested only in the stockings themselves and have no real concern for limbs.

Lawrence would probably describe the first type as healthy; for they have naturally directed their desire towards the nakedness of woman. The second type he would doubtless think of as having their sex in the head - though this would surely have to include the Paul Morel type, the Mellors type and, indeed, his own type.

As for the third class, i.e. those who - like the Brangwen sisters - get the greatest joy of all out of a pair of really lovely stockings and whom Lawrence thinks of as crude and savage, well, personally, I have nothing but the highest regard for them. It might just be that those who have recognised that passion not only ends in fashion, but begins there as well, have something to teach us all.