On the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dickon Edwards, by Sarah Watson

In a brilliant and typically gnostic manner, Baudrillard observes: 

"In the end, all figures of otherness boil down to just one: that of the Object. In the end, all that is left is the inexorability of the Object, the irredeemability of the Object."

                           - The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 1996), p. 172

And so, at the close of Dorian Gray, all that remains is the picture. Having fulfilled its symbolic destiny and  taken its revenge, the portrait hangs upon the wall in immaculate triumph. Dorian lies dead because he mistakenly surrendered up all his secrets. But the picture-as-object remains an insoluble enigma outside of human reflection. 

Stare long enough at any image and it is not you who looks at it, but it which looks into you. Such is the abysmal nature of art: it exposes the illusory and superficial nature of subjectivity. Ultimately, despite all his crimes, passions, and perversities, Dorian bores us. The truth of the matter is that after many centuries of tedious and often painful self-confession and analysis, we know all that there is to know about the soul of man. There are no more mysteries of the human heart left to explore.

So it is that only the object excites our interest, as it leads us away from psychology towards a speculative materialism concerned not with feelings and desires, but the alien world of things, forces, and strange phenomena. We can forget human being and being human - or forms of literary analysis that talk endlessly about character and agency. 

It was - to reiterate - the picture of Dorian Gray that was the source of all that was most curious in Wilde's book. Only in the picture and in the actual events of the novel as events, were elements of genuine queerness assembled; not in the bi-curious world of Dorian, Basil and Lord Henry. 

And so, next time you take a picture of a friend or loved one, be honest enough to admit that what really excites you is the resolution of the image rather than their stupid smiling face. Dare to acknowledge that today, for us, identity is not something divided against itself as it was for the Victorians who worried endlessly about the beast or the queer within, but something to be produced, multiplied, circulated, broadcast, and consumed. 

For this is not an age of full-length portraits, or even mirrors. It is, rather, an age of screens and photoshopped personas encountered on-line. And so, if you really want to know all about someone, don't bother looking into their souls, or fingering their sex, just check out their Facebook profile and there they are in all their obscenity. 

Dogging

 Illustration by Captain Shame: redlionstreet.blogspot.co.uk 

The County of Essex, we are told, is a hot spot  for dogging; that peculiarly British pastime in which strangers meet up - often randomly and in masked anonymity - in fields, woodlands and lay-bys, in order to casually exchange sexual favours whilst observed by voyeurs happy to derive their own delight from the car shaking activities on display.

I'd perhaps not quite go so far as to describe dogging as idyllic, but, nevertheless, there is something romantic about such semi-pastoral (and semi-illicit) pleasures. 

Others, however, quickly resort to the language of moral outrage and tabloid journalism which, for some reason, has a particular penchant for words beginning with the letter 'd' - such as disgusting, degrading, and depraved, for example. 

And Lawrence too - for all his enthusiasm for alfresco eroticism - would also have been quick to condemn dogging I'm sure. One has only to recall what he wrote in his extraordinary essay on John Galsworthy to find evidence for this. Here, he vehemently attacks 'doggish amorousness' as something profoundly shameful and as a sign of social decadence. He writes:

"When the individual remains real and unfallen, sex remains a vital and supremely important thing. But once you have the fall into social beings, sex becomes disgusting, like dogs on heat. Dogs are social beings, with no true canine individuality. Wolves and foxes don't copulate on the pavement. Their sex is wild, and in act, utterly private. Howls you may hear. But you will never see anything. But the dog is tame. And he makes excrement and he copulates on the pavement ...

      The same with human beings. Once they become tame, they become, in a measure, exhibitionists ... They have no real feelings of their own. Unless somebody 'catches them at it', they don't really feel they've felt anything at all."

- D. H. Lawrence, 'John Galsworthy', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, CUP, 1985, p. 217 

How Bridges Love the Gap Between Objects

For many objectophiles, as for many Heideggereans, bridges remain privileged structures. Whilst they are not dwelling places, nevertheless they exist in the domain of our dwelling and we have great admiration and affection for them as buildings: buildings that are determined by dwelling and retain dwelling as a goal. Which means the following:

"The bridge ... does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. ... It brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighbourhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream."

- Heidegger, 'Building Dwelling Thinking', Basic Writings, (Routledge, 1993), p. 354

More than this, the bridge allows the waters that flow beneath it to do so beneath the heavens and for the men who cross it to do so before the gods; whether we explicitly think of their presence and give thanks, or whether we care only about crossing from A-B. The bridge, as Heidegger writes, "gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals" [355].

It is this gathering of the fourfold that constitutes the thingness of the bridge and which stops it from simply being a human construction serving a purely mundane purpose. Now, obviously, most people continue to think of the bridge primarily as something with functional convenience; and, after that, perhaps as some kind of symbol. I know that and have to accept it. However, to those rare men and women who are attuned to objects as things (and who perhaps take them as their lovers), the bridge is never just a mere bridge and it is always more than just a symbol: it's a gathering - and it's also a location. 

For just as the banks of the river do not exist prior to the bridge, neither does the location. As Heidegger notes:

"Before the bridge stands, there are of course many spots along the stream that can be occupied by something. One of them proves to be a locale, and does so because of the bridge. Thus the bridge does not first come to a locale to stand in it; rather, a locale comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge." [356] 

Similarly, the bridge doesn't take up space; on the contrary, just as it determines locales, so too does it allow for spaces. Building is the creation and joining of spaces and just as love bridges the gap between objects, so do bridges love the space between things.   

How Love Bridges the Gap Between Objects

Even when, in a gesture of democratic ontological realism, you accept that all objects can be posited on the same plane of existence, with no one object determining the being of any other object, still the problem remains of the essential gulf that exists between things.

Which is why the forming of relationships in a world of withdrawn and autonomous objects, each with their own unique powers and capacities, is not easy; it requires that all things discover a way in which to translate one another across the void that separates them. 

But translation is not the same as representation. Human subjects qua subjects might metaphysically relate to the world by attempting to form truthful representations of reality, but this all-too-human way of knowing things doesn't really interest me; even if it has been the central concern of philosophy since Descartes. I tend to agree with Levi Bryant that questions concerning objects are misconceived if they are turned into purely epistemological ones of how we might know them. 

In other words, philosophy must be more than a type of anthropocentric conceit and posthumanism, if there is ever to be such a thing, must begin with the admission that subjects are objects and that human being is not a privileged category to which everything can and must be referred. Further, it must be acknowledged that the gulf between us and other objects is not something uniquely significant; that there is equally such a gap between, for example, a pineapple and a knife, as there is between us and items of cutlery.

Thus, as I say above, all things need to find a way to translate one another, or relate across the ontological divide - which is something of an art, something of a science, and something of a mystery. How do objects translate other objects, especially when all objects remain constitutively withdrawn not only from one another but from themselves? 

The answer, perhaps, is via a form of onto-erotics, or what Baudrillard terms in an somewhat different context, the seductiveness of things. For withdrawal is never total and entities as entities always manifest and expose themselves to a greater or lesser degree; they like to tease one another with the staging of their appearance-as-disappearance. Objects, if you will, are like those lovers who know how to delight us with their presence and then torment us with their absence. Timothy Morton describes them as 'strange strangers' whose existence we can never anticipate and being we can never fully know.

Philosophical theories of ontological immanence and weird realism might help us to better translate these strange strangers by remaining open to the possibilities of seduction and surprise, but so too do we need our poets and our objectophiles to help us proliferate unnatural alliances and establish a democracy of touch between entities of all kinds (be they dead or alive, natural or artificial, actual or virtual). Ultimately, existence is fucked into being.

Behind the Red Fence

Objectum-Sexuality Internationale

Objectum Sexuality continues to fascinate me. In no small part, this is because I find human subjects ever-more boring and tiresome. One increasingly realises that happiness is to be found in the love that transcends humanity; the love of things that sparkle with their own thingly glamour. This might include objects that belong to the natural world, such as flowers and heavenly bodies, but it also includes the manufactured objects of everyday life, such as tables, chairs, and the red brick floor upon which they stand.

For love (should we choose to continue using the term) is fundamentally a question of forming ever-changing relationships; not just with people or other living beings such as next door's cat, but with objects of all kinds, be they inorganic, artificial, or virtual. And the duty of art, philosophy, or science is ultimately one and the same; to reveal the relation between us and the world of which we are an intrinsic part - but not a determining factor. For the relationship between us and the universe is not based upon some form of correlation between consciousness and being; the world exists as a mind-independent reality with or without Man or God as witness. 

Whether this relationship needs to be erotic in character, as objectophiles seem to believe, is debatable. But I can't see why it shouldn't be conceived of as such within the framework of a perverse materialism. Certainly it's a form of touch first and foremost and not an abstract or ideal relation. Love allows us to feel the world and not just think it - to know it in a carnal sense via what Lawrence would term 'direct vibrational contact'. 

And so, as I said in an earlier post, whilst I have problems with some of the statements made by  those within the OS community, still I feel they have something important to teach  any one hoping to develop an object-oriented ontology and a find a new form of happiness. For just as the American author Dana learnt how to attune himself to a non-human reality during his two years before the mast, so too has Erika Eiffel achieved something similar. Thus we might paraphrase what Lawrence writes of the former in order to say this of the latter (in tribute):

Erika's soul is not human in the ordinary sense. She is not looking for human things, nor listening to human sounds. Her adventure is not an adventure of a being among beings: it is an adventure into the material universe. In this twilightly place where integral being ceases, she stares lovingly at the Tower and encounters it in all its reality, abandoning her personal self in order to experience the joy of loving a non-living yet amazingly potent object.

Sexual Solipsism

Clive Barker, The Happy Masturbator, (1997)

Recently, I attended a very interesting research seminar at Senate House. The paper, presented by Professor Marco Wan of Hong Kong University, examined the obscenity trial that resulted from publication of Paul Bonnetain's novel Charlot s'amuse in 1883 - the story of a serial masturbator told in a naturalist style much influenced by Zola. 

Despite causing a huge scandal at the time, the work is little read today outside of French literary circles and the author, who died in 1899 aged just forty-one, is mostly a forgotten figure. Interestingly, however, 130 years after Charlot s'amuse, the subject of masturbation is one that still attracts moral condemnation from philosophers who place themselves in a feminist Kantian tradition in order to critique pornography; philosophers such as Rae Langton, for example.

Langton has two main concerns, which she relates to the question of pornography: the first is the sexual objectification of women (pre-given as a bad thing per se in her work); the second is the sexual solipsism that men, as the primary consumers of pornography, fall into via the solitary vice of masturbation. In brief, Langton argues that in a pornified world of objectified women, men too pay a heavy price; i.e. by mistaking women for things and substituting things for real women, they ultimately isolate and dehumanise themselves.

Now it could be that there is something in this argument. But Langton overlooks the fact that men are not quite alone in a world of objectified women. For not only do they still have one another to form relations with of a social, fraternal, and, indeed, sexual nature if they so desire, but they also have their animal companions and, as everybody knows, a man's best friend is his dog. 

Further, as Simone de Beauvoir was obliged to concede, not all men would regard an isolated and solipsistic existence as problematic. Indeed, for many it would be a more attractive option than a supposedly authentic relationship with another human being. The world of the masturbator may not be deeply fulfilling, but it's by no means unhappy and perhaps a little superficial physical pleasure means more today than vague promises of spiritual satisfaction and the soul's consummation via union with another.  

Langton, however, insists - and this is never a good sign in someone who claims to be a philosopher - that there has to be an escape from solipsism, as if it were the worst kind of trap to fall into. And she insists that in order to make this escape "some of the beings with whom one interacts must be people (not things); and one must treat them as people (not as things)" [Sexual Solipsism, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 312]. 

Ultimately, for Langton, this is a matter of moral duty: one must not fuck dolls, or jerk off over on-line images. Rather, one must seek out a real lover to hold in one's arms. For when sex is something you do with a thing, you reduce your own ontological status and become self-objectified. Kant has no sympathy for those 'worms' who violate themselves in this manner. And neither does Langton much care for those who remain shut up inside their own heads, alone with their own fantasies, when they could (and should) be sharing with others in a paradise of love and total transparency.

And here, we arrive at the crux of the matter: for Langton, there is a fundamental human need to unburden the heart and communicate the self. To articulate the body, she says, rather than masturbate it, "enables us better to learn what we think and feel and desire" [361].

This, in my view, is not only optimistic and naive, it is also highly sinister. For we know now how confession serves ultimately to better enable correction; that we have been encouraged to speak the self  historically in order that our thoughts and feelings may be judged and corrected by others. Humanists like Kant and Langton always promise to lead us out of our solipsistic and fallen condition into communal bliss, but they just as invariably end up marching us into drab social conformity and ugly moral convention.

And so there is, I think, something to be said for those who want to keep themselves to themselves and indulge private fantasies behind closed doors; better the solipsist and the solitary masturbator than the fascist who compels speech, or the moral exhibitionist exposing themselves in the name of Love.  

Raise the Scarlet Standard High

Sartre declared that anyone who isn't a communist is a filthy swine. 

I don't think that's true. However, it's undeniably the case that there is shit in the hearts of all Tories, extending from members of parliament to those who vote for them or offer financial support.

And it also includes those useful idiots in the Liberal Democrats who collaborate with and, indeed, maintain the present government and its shameful policies.   

David Bowie

One of the people I've always quite liked but have never quite allowed myself to quite like, is David Bowie. I was perhaps just a little too young to fully appreciate the artful androgyny of Ziggy Stardust and had no concept of a concept album as a nine-year-old.

But there was also something else. No matter how alien and avant-garde he attempted to make himself, he never quite convinced and his stage show was too theatrical for my tastes. The make-up, the costumes, the choreography, were simply too much; by which I don't mean too outrageous or excessive, but full of drama school pretension. 

Even as a child, I never liked what I perceived to be pretension - particularly in pop stars - and so I  was attracted more to the glam-rock silliness of Marc Bolan rather than Bowie and cared more for Sweet than the Spiders from Mars. 

However, it's all a long time ago and I have since revised my views somewhat. Thus I'm now happy to admit that, for a while, in the early-mid seventies, Bowie was the most beautiful man on the planet who managed to achieve a  rare moment of perfection - but I still prefer Gary Glitter.

The Escaped Cock

The Escaped Cock is Lawrence's revaluation of the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. He provides a convenient summary of the first part of the tale in a letter to Earl Brewster:

"I wrote a story of the resurrection; where Jesus gets up and feels very sick about everything, and can't stand the old crowd any more - so cuts out - and as he heals up, he begins to find out what an astonishing place the phenomenal world is, far more marvellous than any salvation or heaven - and thanks his lucky stars that he needn't have a 'mission' any more."  

- The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, VI. 4009, CUP, 1991.

So far, so blasphemous. But it's in the second part of the tale, however, that Lawrence attempts something far more daring and philosophically profound; namely, the transformation of the man who died via desire and sexual contact with a pagan priestess into a potent and affirmative man of flesh and an entirely different type of man-god assemblage to the Christ-figure given us by St Paul.

The man who died, we might say, gets back his body and rises into anonymity and forgetfulness by coming down from the Cross, losing the face of the pale Galilean, and surrendering his Crown of Thorns. Lawrence effectively subsumes Jesus into a much wider tradition of sacrificed gods; one which would include Dionysus and which, as Keith Sagar points out, has none of Christianity's bitterness towards the earth and fear of the flesh.

By so doing, Lawrence teaches us all a lesson: we must each be willing to let go of our own egos and histories; must each be willing to accept that resurrection into new life can only follow once we have been dipped into oblivion. This is a hard lesson, but such a thanatological teaching can be found in many great thinkers, including Heidegger, for example, who insists on the vital importance of Dasein facing up to its own mortality, if it is to have full access to the meaning of being and discover its own authenticity.

Thus, we might conclude, in The Escaped Cock, Lawrence carries the death and resurrection of Jesus to its highest point; for he offers us an interpretation in the profound sense that Nietzsche means by the term; i.e. not merely a development of uninterrupted symbol with which, according to Deleuze, the dialectic invariably confuses interpretation.

Further, Lawrence provides us with a philosophical fiction that is both truer to the spirit of the gospels and to the great pagan traditions out of which Christianity in part grew. Indeed, so successful is Lawrence in what he does, that I would suggest that were his tale of the man who died to be accepted and taught within our churches and schools, it would serve not only as an important foundation for a wider revaluation of values, but also, ironically, as a means by which Christianity could achieve its own self-overcoming and resurrection.

Of course, this is unlikely to happen: the Church of the Crucified prefers to go on funking and wilfully perverting the story of Jesus, preventing us from knowing him as a bringer of glad tidings and nailing us all to the Cross for all eternity. Still, you never know: the world is full of surprises and if I can't hope for resurrection and the life of the Greater Day at Easter then when might I do so?

Apocalypse Now

Lawrence's relationship to Christianity, like Nietzsche's, grows ever less ambiguous and ever more hostile over the years; he moves from simply thinking Jesus mistaken with his monomaniacal insistence on Love, to explicitly siding with the anti-Christ.

Thus it comes as no surprise that in his final work, Apocalypse, Lawrence takes up Nietzsche's opposition to the Crucified as his own. Lawrence, however, chooses to pin the blame for the negation of the gospels on John of Patmos rather than St Paul and argues that it is only in the Book of Revelation that we hear at last the cry of slave revolt and discover the hidden power-spirit within Christianity which lusts for final judgement and world destruction.

In Revelation, there is no longer thought of forgiveness or of developing a Christianity of tenderness; this has been supplanted once and for all by hatred and a Christianity of self-glorification on behalf of anarcho-nihilists masquerading as the meek and humble. The noble and almost Stoical teachings of Jesus, meant for the ears of the discerning individual, are substituted by a form of moral idealism aimed at the masses - or 'Platonism for the people', as Nietzsche amusingly describes it.

Central to this hideously mutated popular Christianity, is the lie of personal immortality. This, along with the conceit of equality of all souls, serves only to flatter those who imagine themselves to be the great measure and meaning of the entire universe. Lawrence argues it is a mixture of fear and egoism that sits behind this exaggerated inflation of the person and positing of an immortal I. The Church, shamelessly, manipulates this fear and does what it can to intensify it whilst promising salvation to those who accept its authority.

The enemy, therefore, is not Jesus nailed to the Cross, but those who would keep him there as bait and who find in this grotesque symbol a sign of their own triumph and moral superiority. The last book of the Bible is their book; a book of lies which is full of the "vast anti-will of the masses" [69]. Deleuze describes it as an example of zombie theology and he's right; it's an obscene work by and for the unclean, the unforgiving, and the undead.

And yet, due to John the Divine's decision to reactivate and redirect certain pagan symbols and forces, Lawrence can't help having a degree of sympathy - even admiration - for the author and the book. This, however, in no way lessens his horror for a work that displays an almost insane desire for cosmic annihilation and the "reign of saints in ultimate bodiless glory" [146].

Unfortunately, there are still religious lunatics in the world today who long for the end of days. And that is why Lawrence's Apocalypse remains an important text. But it is not merely a crucial insight into the politics and psycho-pathology of ressentiment, it is also one last glad tiding in its own right, as Deleuze notes. For Lawrence's posthumously published final work is a passionate call for a new way of living that stays true to the earth and the body.

God is dead, taught Nietzsche. But we are not, says Lawrence. And so we might, if we wish, find a way to develop an entire range of new ideas and feelings, beyond good and evil. Obviously, this cannot be achieved overnight; the revaluation of all values is a project of generations. But the key word remains the great word of the unborn day: Resurrection.