Supposing Truth to be a Woman ...

The title for this post was to have been the question of style. 

However - it is woman who will be my subject. Still, one might 

wonder whether that doesn't really amount to the same thing ... 

Indeed, like Derrida - who I'm paraphrasing here - we might easily decide there is a strong level of correspondence between women and style and, in turn, between the question of style and that of seduction. All three questions deserve to be thought philosophically; which is to say, in relation to politics, ethics, and notions of what constitutes Truth, developing Nietzsche's supposition concerning the latter along the way (i.e. feminizing what has traditionally been erected as an exclusively masculine concept). 

The first thing to establish is the following: if Truth is supposed to be a woman, then Truth would not love to go naked as Rousseau naively believed. Rather, Truth-as-woman would insist on being veiled: "And only through such a veil which thus falls over it could Truth become truth; profound, indecent, desirable." [59] 

In other words, her being is not a natural pre-given, but something artificially constructed and woman forms an indivisible unity with everything that serves to show off her beauty. Thus she understands not only the need for illusion, but practises the right to lie. It is therefore pointless to speak about the essence of woman, for she "distorts all vestige of essentiality, of identity, of property" [51] and this is why she's the very ruin of philosophy and politics as traditionally conceived in the grandiose and deluded terms of phallic stupidity.

This is not to deny - today of all days - the need for an "organized, patient, laborious" form of feminism, that takes account of "the real conditions in which women's struggles develop" [94]. However, as Derrida rightly points out, whilst these struggles often require the strategic maintenance of metaphysical presuppositions and forms of agency, anyone concerned with effecting radical change must eventually interrogate such ideals precisely because they belong to and uphold the very system one is attempting to deconstruct. 

A constant process of negotiation is therefore required between organized movements and those schizo-nomadic women of style who lay their own singularity on the line and appreciate that their strength relates not to agency, but to seduction, witchcraft, and the art of the dressing table.   

Note: all quotes are from Jacques Derrida, Spurs, trans. Barbara Harlow, The University of Chicago Press, 1979.

On Being a Bit of a Jew (Part Two)

As an American sit-com loving child of the 1970s, I grew up with Valerie Harper as Rhoda Morgenstern and mentioned her only a couple of days ago in a post. Which is why the news that she has been diagnosed with an incurable form of brain cancer and given only three months to live is so sad to hear.

Ms Harper was born in New York in 1939. She grew up with many Jewish friends and always regarded them as her chosen family. It's not surprising, therefore, that she'd be so convincing in the role for which she is famous and that she would not only win four Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe for her performance, but make so many young boys of my generation want to grow up and marry a nice Jewish girl.

Rhoda taught us that becoming-Jewish is something that affects Jews and non-Jews alike; that anyone can be deterritorialized culturally-racially, which is to say swept up and carried off along a line of flight towards a minoritarian position. In other words, in becoming-Jewish, one is removed from the majority (which refers not to a greater relative quantity, but, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, the determination of a norm or standard in relation to which everything else can be said to be minoritarian).

As Deleuze and Guattari also write, we can be thrown into a strange becoming by anything at all - a book, a piece of music, or even, as in this case, a TV show. But perhaps it always requires an element of love. That is to say, one doesn't deviate from the majority unless there is something (or someone) that attracts and captures ones desire and affection.

And so, like Valerie Harper, if I have become-Jewish it is in my heart as much as in my thinking.

Angela Carter and Lorenzo the Closet Queen

Portrait of Angela Carter by Tara Heinemann in which 

she brings out the almost spectral beauty of the subject

Used with permission

Since her death in 1992, there has, I think, been a marked falling off of interest in the work of Angela Carter amongst readers and critics - even those of a feminist persuasion. Tastes change and her writing now seems a bit too gothic and too queer; the language used is just too rich in an age of austerity (i.e. meanness and fear).

Of course, she still has her fans and loyal supporters and I might even be numbered amongst them, for her books meant a very great deal to me in my youth. But the fact remains that she's now a somewhat less mainstream and thus more marginal figure than she used to be and this is unfortunate, as she is not only a great novelist and teller of tales, but a brilliant journalist and critic.

Her study, The Sadeian Woman, for example, remains one of the best exercises in cultural history and sexual politics produced by an English author and her pieces collected in Nothing Sacred (Virago, 1992) also deserve to be read and re-read; not least of all the essay 'Lorenzo the Closet Queen', which combines two of her great loves and two of my own obsessions, namely, the novels of D. H. Lawrence and the sociology of fashion. 

In the above, Carter offers an all-too-brief sartorial critique of Women in Love - a novel which, as she amusingly says, is "as full of clothes as Brown's". She also argues that if Lawrence catalogues the wardrobes of his heroines with such a loving eye for detail, he does so in order to convince his readers that he possesses a "hot line to a woman's heart by the extraordinary sympathy he has for her deepest needs, that is, nice stockings, pretty dresses and submission" [208].

This, she says, is a piece of literary fraudulence. And yet, as she goes on to add, Lawrence at the same time clearly enjoys being a girl and has a genuine and somewhat touching (if pathologically fetishistic) interest in female apparel. Lawrence, she writes, "is seduced and bemused by the narcissistic apparatus of femininity", even if he only wanted to be a woman "so that he could achieve the supreme if schizophrenic pleasure of fucking himself" [209].

As I noted in an earlier post, Lawrence is particularly fascinated in Women in Love by the thought of brightly coloured stockings and they become a kind of leitmotiv running throughout the novel. Carter writes:

"Stockings, stockings, stockings everywhere. Hermione Roddice sports coral-coloured ones, Ursula canary ones. Defiant, brilliant, emphatic stockings. But never the suggestion the fabric masks, upholsters, disguises living, subversive flesh. Lawrence is a stocking man, not a leg man. Stockings have supplanted legs; clothes have supplanted flesh. Fetishism.
      The apotheosis of the stockings comes right at the end of the novel, where they acquire at last an acknowledged, positive, sexual significance. ... Indeed, the stockings appear to precipitate a condition of extreme erotic arousal in Gudrun; she touches them with 'trembling, excited hands'." [209-10]

The question is, what is Lawrence playing at in this scene of camp ecstasy and girliness? Carter is in no doubt:

"I think what Lawrence is doing is attempting to put down the women he has created in his own image for their excessive reaction to the stockings to which he himself has a very excessive reaction indeed, the deep-down queenly, monstrous old hypocrite that he is." [210]

This seems a bit harsh: but deadly accurate. Lawrence allows himself the "licence to mock the girls for parading about in the grotesque finery he has forced them to don" [211]. He is at once fascinated by female dandyism and the seductive allure of fashion and repulsed by it. If he depicts Gudrun as a kind of whore, then Hermione is turned into a terrifying witch figure by the exotic, aristocratic and self-conscious strangeness of her dress.

Whilst Baudelaire loved women for their unnaturalness, Lawrence hates them for it and many of his female characters end up like drag queens, defined and confined by their own clothing. Carter concludes that for most of the time in Women in Love, Lawrence is like a little boy dressing up in his mother's clothes and attempting to fool us into thinking he writes with the hand (and the eye) of a woman:

"The con trick, the brilliant, the wonderful con trick, the real miracle, is that his version of drag has been widely accepted as the real thing, even by young women who ought to know better. In fact, Lawrence probes as deeply into a woman's heart as the bottom of a hat-box." [214]

On Being a Bit of a Jew

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

I think I know what she means. 

And I think that, like Sylvia, I might also confess to being a bit of a Jew. 

How could it not be so when I have spent a lifetime under the influence of (amongst others) Malcolm McLaren, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Derrida and Larry David and grew up believing Rhoda Morgenstern to be the most beautiful woman in the world?

As Susan Sontag notes, the Jews are (along with homosexuals) the greatest creative minority in contemporary urban culture; creative, that is, of a sensibility - an admittedly old-fashioned and problematic term, by which she means an emotionally and aesthetically informed way of looking at the world and thinking about the self. 

I suppose I would call this a style. And whereas Sontag identifies moral seriousness as being the crucial component, I think for me Jewishness is about an abrasive, provocative, sometimes vulgar often anarchic humour that is fundamentally anti-deutsch (with German also being understood as a style, characterized by a sluggish digestive system and an Aryan eye, bright blue).

Dying Game

We regret to announce the death of Mr. D. H. Lawrence, novelist and poet, which occurred 83 years ago today in Vence, in the South of France.  

  

Mr. Lawrence was a writer who exercised a more potent influence over my youthful imagination than any other and I have continued to find inspiration and interest in his work to this day, even if I tend to use him as a leaving point, rather than as a figure of ultimate authority.

For I realise now that his was not the final word and that one best expresses loyalty to his memory via acts of infidelity and deconstructive criticism. Lawrence challenges his readers in precisely the same manner as Zarathustra challenges his listeners: to lose him, so that they might find themselves. But losing a teacher does not mean forgetting all that they have taught and I will never forget above all the courage that Lawrence showed in the face of suffering and death: 

"One wishes things were different. But there's no help for it. One can only do one's best, and then stay brave. Don't weaken or fret. While we live, we must be game. And when comes the time to die, we'll die game too."   

- Letters, V. 3951

Notes on the Lolita Case

Lolita, it is often said, is a beautiful book about an ugly thing. Nabokov writes in a manner so as to groom and demoralize his readers, making us complicit in the crimes that the novel describes. Thus, as Martin Amis says, Lolita leaves us 'ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent'.

But just what is it that we say Yes to: deceit, murder, and child abuse; or simply to the event of literature?

It's arguable that, ultimately, we are encouraged to say Yes to all of the above - and to everything - as belonging to what Nietzsche terms a general economy of the whole. For the world is as it is and the strongest individuals are those who not only accept it, but affirm it, as it is; embracing the tragic character of life and loving fate.

That said, from somewhere comes a growing dislike for Humbert Humbert and an increased sympathy not only for the girl-child, but for her mother, the Haze woman. One doesn't want to become John Ray Jr., full of paper mâché pieties, but perhaps Richard Rorty might have a point when he suggests that Humbert is a monster not only of perversity and of cruelty, but of incuriosity. 

That is to say, Humbert is not merely nymphet-desiring, but intensely self-obsessed and self-idealizing; he is very little interested in the thoughts and feelings of others, even those he claims to love. Thus, writes Rorty, despite the author's insistence to the contrary, the novel does have a moral in tow:

"But the moral is not to keep one's hands off little girls but to notice what one is doing, and in particular to notice what people are saying. For it might turn out, it very often does turn out, that people are trying to tell you they are suffering." 

                                           - Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (CUP, 1989), p. 164. 

(Of course, Sade might well point out that there is no good reason why someone else's suffering should in any way infringe upon or prevent one's own pleasure; indeed, it might usefully serve to heighten the latter. Or, as Nietzsche would say: pain is not an argument.)

Alice in the Empire of Signs

The loss of personal identity and of those things that secure such is central to the story of Alice. But if she loses her name, her face and even her body (Deleuze insists that to pass through the looking glass is to become incorporeal), still, just like the Cheshire Cat, she leaves something behind; not a smile in this case (Alice hardly ever smiles), but a look. 

And this is why Alice remains a crucial fashion icon and why Kiera Vaclavik's current research project is of such great interest. For if, somewhat naively, she isn't entirely ready to abandon her analysis of the fictional girl-child in relation to conventional notions of age, gender, and biology, she seems nevertheless to appreciate that what really matters is the fact that Alice can be best understood as a question of style.

That is to say, Alice can be separated from all of those attributes that are usually understood to exist as natural pre-givens, but not from her hooped stockings, blue dress, white apron, and hair band. These items of adornment do not simply serve to make her look pretty, but to display her non-essential essence; they conceal the fact that there is nothing to conceal beneath appearance. Alice forms an indivisible unity with her own image.

It's an image, however, that many have chosen to adopt (and adapt) as their own; not least those breathtakingly beautiful and super-stylish Japanese girls who, around the area of Harajuku, have created their very own Wonderland, free from any weight of meaning or moral seriousness. In this empire of empty signs and artifice, fashion, forms and femininity are triumphant and Alice is Lolita Queen.          

Tentacle Erotica

I was thinking again the other day of that rather queer exchange in Women in Love when Birkin tells Gerald about his experience of wrestling naked with a Japanese housemate in Heidelberg, presumably during his student days:

"He was very quick and slippery and full of electric fire. It is a remarkable thing, what a curious sort of fluid force they seem to have in them, those people - not like a human grip - like a polyp ... They are very repulsive when they are cold, and they look grey. But when they are hot and roused, there is a definite attraction - a curious kind of full electric fluid - like eels." [WL, CUP, 1987, 268-69]

This - as far as I'm aware - is as close as Lawrence comes to exploring the interesting world of what is now commonly termed tentacle erotica and which refers to a type of pornography, popular in Japan, in which people engage in sexual activity with monsters who have come from either the ocean depths or outer space and either are or resemble octopuses, squids, and similar though unrelated creatures, such as eels and sea-serpents.

Although sometimes the sexual activity is of a consensual nature, frequently the horror is intensified due to the non-consensual elements and shokushu goukan or 'tentacle rape' is frequently a key component of the genre, particularly when there is a woman involved. 

Whilst most tentacle erotica tends to be animated, there are a number of live action films for those who like this kind of thing. It's a theme, however, that can be traced back in Japanese porn long before cinema, anime, or manga. Doubtless, the best known illustration of such is that by Katsushika Hokusai entitled The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (1814). 

This image, taken from the book kinoe no komatsu, which has since been reworked by many Western artists, is really rather beautiful I think, even for those of us who don't share the sexual fascination for lecherous cephalopods. And, crucially, it would seem that the woman, a pearl diver, has not fallen victim to a pair of sexually predatory octopuses, but is rather fully enjoying their attention - just as Birkin enjoyed his naked wrestling with a hot and roused Japanese gentleman.     

In Memory of Malcolm McLaren

Just as when my father passed away, when Malcolm died it was appropriately enough my mother who rang to tell me. For, in a sense, as Julie Burchill once rightly acknowledged, we are all his children; he was the man who spawned an entire generation.

I miss him. And it has taken me almost three years to finally find the heart to make the trip to Highgate Cemetery in order to pay my respects at the graveside of a man who ordered the first champagne I ever tasted, encouraged me to smash a window in L'Escargot, taught me the importance of narrative in interpersonal relations, and once suggested that I should move to Paris in order to seduce the novelist Amélie Nothomb.

When Serge Gainsbourg died, flags in France were flown at half-mast and President Mitterand gave a eulogy in which he described the singer as a poet who elevated the pop song to the level of art. Perhaps the same or something similar could be said of Malcolm; he transformed the ugly into something beautiful and base matter into gold. 

But there was no state recognition for McLaren, who died, like his hero Oscar Wilde, in exile and, in a sense, in the failure he always celebrated over and above any benign success. Instead, there was a rather crass and vulgar funeral in which his life was reduced to a few slogans and several of those who genuinely loved him were either not invited, or told to stay away. 

And now there's just a grave without flowers, a contested will, and Dame Vivienne selling her story to The Mail on Sunday ...   

Why I Love Joan Miró's Woman and Bird

Dona i Ocell (1983) 

There are doubtless many reasons to love Joan Miró's 22-metre high concrete sculpture known in English as 'Woman and Bird' and located in the park named after the artist in his hometown of Barcelona, not far from the Plaça d'Espanya; not least of all the brightly coloured ceramic tiles added by his friend and collaborator Joan Gardy Artigas. 

But for me, what interests and amuses most is that this work deconstructs conventional gender binaries as well as the phallogocentric pretension and arrogance of the steel and glass office blocks that have since been erected by the architects of global capitalism across from where Miró's now tiny-in-comparison sculpture stands in all its pagan and primitive - yet modernist - perfection. 

The Repsol Building (1993), the Allianz Tower (1993), and the Edificio Tarragona (1998) might all be taller and shinier - and they are certainly more functional - than Miró's final piece of public sculpture, but they lack the fourfold unity that Heidegger identifies as belonging to the really great works of art.

Miró's Dona i Ocell gathers together earth and sky, divinities and mortals, and it sets something free within us in a way that the aforementioned sky-scrapers do not. For they simply bring together a work force and liberate flows of money. If they tell us something about the truth of commerce, they don't tell us much, if anything, about the truth of being.

That said, Miró was certainly not averse to accepting paid commissions from big business, as his famous logo for "La Caixa" illustrates.