You Are Like a Beautiful Black Hole to Me My Love

Illustration by Emma Charleston

Sometimes, the longing arises to obscenely scrutinize the naked body of one's lover; to peer and probe like a technician of desire into their cunt or anus, as if hoping to locate the hidden truth of their being.

But clinical fascination soon gives way to impatience and frustration, as one realises that for all the mystery surrounding these secret places, there is nothing to see or discover; that the only truth revealed is the nihilistic truth of the void in which all values come crashing back down to nought. 

Of course, rather than despair or grow angry at this, we might choose to celebrate the body as a site of sheer loss in which to joyfully abandon all hope, as well as deposit semen. As so often, it's simply a question of interpretation. For whilst bodily organs and orifices can serve all kinds of functions, they are revered or despised entirely depending on the disposition of the subject performing the erotic autopsy. 

 

More than Just a Son and Lover

Today is the 100th anniversary of the publication of D. H. Lawrence's third and some would say greatest novel, Sons and Lovers. 

It was certainly highly acclaimed at the time and has long since remained popular with those readers who like to think of Lawrence first and foremost as a working-class collier's lad growing up amongst the haystacks and the Nottinghamshire coalfields and a bit smutty in every sense of the word: 'Our Bert' writing his semi-autobiographical fiction in a late nineteenth-century realist tradition, but with twentieth-century knobs on.

It's never been my favourite work (despite some fantastic scenes and passages of writing) and this is a characterization of Lawrence that I find particularly loathsome and depressing; an attempt to possess and limit and keep in place on behalf of the Bestwood mafia who continue to wield a powerful influence over Lawrence's reception. Oh, how they love to forever remind us of Lawrence's remark about the East Midlands being the country of his heart. But let them recall also how he wrote: 

"It always depresses me to come to my native district. Now I am turned forty, and have been more or less a wanderer for nearly twenty years, I feel more alien, perhaps, in my home place than anywhere else in the world. I can feel at ease in ... Rome or Paris or Munich or even London. But in Nottingham Road, Bestwood, I feel at once a devouring nostalgia and an infinite repulsion."

- [Return to Bestwood], Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (CUP, 2004), p. 15. 

This is the Lawrence I admire: nomadic, cosmopolitan, and refusing to belong to any class or people; refusing to be anyone's son or lover. A singular individual who is no longer their Bert - and probably never was.

Suicide by Tiger (The Case of Sarah McClay)

Tipu's Tiger (Victoria and Albert Museum)

In the news at the moment is the case of zookeeper Sarah McClay, who was killed by one of the big cats in her care. 

Although the police have ruled it out, the suggestion was made (much to the anger of her family) that the young woman could have entered the animals' enclosure with the intention of ending her own life: suicide by tiger, as it has been described.

I have to say, this idea is one that greatly appeals to me: not so much in a fetishistic manner - though, for the record, I've nothing against those vorarephiles who are aroused by the thought of being eaten alive by wild animals - but simply as a method of taking one's leave from this world.

Better, surely, to die in the jaws of a magnificent beast, than beneath the steel wheels of a tube train. One might imagine that one is passing directly back into life (quite literally becoming-animal) and derive a real element of joy from that.   

On Myth

Henri Matisse: Icarus (1947)

I recently heard someone point out that the wax holding Icarus's wings together would not have melted if he flew too high, because, as a matter of fact, it gets colder at altitude not hotter.

I know this is spectacularly besides the point, because, being a myth about hubris and a young man's folly, it is not meant to be read as a scientific account of early experiments in human aviation. Having said that, I understand how the temptation to prick the bubble of myth by simply speaking the truth and pointing to amusing inaccuracies and unverifiable bits of nonsense can sometimes be difficult to resist.

And, personally, I have no time for those critics who regard the 'disenchantment' of the world by the Enlightenment as a regrettable error and call for a radical re-mythologization.

When I see the new mythologists standing before the world of virtual reality and information technology articulating arguments that fundamentally still rely upon the language of Romanticism, I am reminded of those agrarian idealists who at the beginning of the industrial era sought to revive values associated with the rapidly disappearing feudal past and encourage people to take up handicrafts once more.

Postmodernity enables us to do many things - including the decoupling of thought from its dead relationship to old forms of thinking - but it does not allow us to simply reterritorialize upon a model of ancient culture and society, rediscovering their narratives as our own. Ultimately, life today no longer corresponds to a mythological framework and myth has simply lost its power to shape plausible identities (unless you happen to be a religious fundamentalist of some variety or other).

Ultimately, I agree with Baudrillard here: having passed beyond both the physical and metaphysical worlds we enter into a pataphysical era - but not a new mythological age. Things today no longer have an origin, an aim, or any end; they develop neither logically nor symbolically, but chaotically and randomly.

And I agree also with Voltaire, that grand seigneur of the spirit as Nietzsche calls him, who was of the opinion that the study of myth is an occupation for blockheads.

Schizoanalysis Contra Psychoanalysis

The major difference between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis is that the latter is designed to deal with figures and images, signs and symbols, whilst remaining ignorant of the forces, flows, and units of production that the former concerns itself with. Thus, whilst schizoanalysis understands the unconscious as a factory of desire, humming with heavy machinery and entirely caught up with material and social forms of production, psychoanalysis thinks of it as the site of fantasy, myth, and dream.

Freud imagines this site as a cross between a nursery and a provincial theatre, but he can at least hear the sound of the desiring-machines in the background, even whilst maintaining an attitude of angry denial. Jung, on the other hand, mistakes the machinic rumble for the voice of God and if he breaks with Freud it is only so he can retreat into mysticism and build his own church. 

When Jung starts speaking about archetypes, he is searching for clues to what he thinks of as the fundamentally religious nature of mankind. It was never sexual anxiety and neurosis that interested him, but uncovering sacred truth. But the unconscious is no more archetypal than it is Oedipal; it doesn't symbolize any more than it imagines, expresses, or represents. Rather, it produces and invests in the real (even when the real has become increasingly artificial). 

For me, whilst taking Freud's work seriously has become problematic, even reading Jung has become impossible. It is to Freud's great credit that, despite his idealism, he continued to insist on libidinal forces and retain his atheism when colleagues all around him - including that snake in the grass, Jung - were shamefully preparing for a reconciliation with religion, so that they too might be able to remain believers and find wider public acceptance of their ideas.

And so, when all's said and done, give me psychoanalysis rather than analytical psychology. But give me schizoanalysis contra psychoanalysis, because I prefer the non-figurative and asignifying unconscious mapped out by Deleuze and Guattari (with the aid of various madmen including Nietzsche, Lawrence, Kafka and Artaud) to the mythic and all-too-human unconscious of both Freud and Jung.

However, I'm aware that D&G's machinic model of the unconscious based on desiring-production, is ultimately just as fanciful and as rooted in what Paul and Patricia Churchland term folk psychology as that invented within the work of Freud and Jung and a more revolutionary theory of mind begins only with scientific realism and neurobiology.  

Fragment from an Illicit Lover's Discourse

Does the reconstruction and redistribution of races and nationalities within the pornographic imagination betray an inherent fascism? It certainly appears to reinforce tired myths and stereotypes from the ethnocentric perspective of the white male with his Aryan eye, bright blue.

However, it's arguable that in hallucinating universal history and playfully exposing the artificial character of identity, eroticism helps deconstruct those things which nazis like to believe to be true about themselves and others: i.e. those racial and national differences on which they base their imperial pride; differences that are in fact powerful cultural fictions, rather than rooted in blood and soil.

The admirable thing about genuine lovers and perverts, like Casanova, is that they are untroubled by the thought of miscegenation; what does the notion of purity ultimately mean to them? Nothing: or, at most, it exists as something only to be sullied. They instinctively resist any attempt to restrict who (or what) they may fuck; a resistance born of libertinism, not liberalism.

D&G: What is Philosophy?

Image by Dick Whyte

One of the things I like about Deleuze is that he never gave up on philosophy. That is to say, he never had any problem with calling himself a philosopher and of happily subscribing to an intellectual tradition stretching back to the Stoics. 

This, by his own admission, didn't make him better than others of his generation who seemed slightly embarrassed by the title of philosopher, or felt guilty if their work too might be shown to belong to the history of Western metaphysics, but it did make him the most naive or innocent.

But what is philosophy for Deleuze? He answers this question very clearly and very beautifully in his final book written in collaboration with Félix Guattari, entitled - appropriately enough - What is Philosophy? In this text, Deleuze argues that philosophy, science, and art all have the essential task of mediating chaos and that each discipline does so in a manner specific to itself as a way of thinking and creating.

First and foremost for D&G, philosophy is neither concerned with the contemplation of ideas, or their communication; rather, it is concerned with the creation of new concepts. This is its unique role and why the philosopher might best be described not as the lover of wisdom, so much as the creator of concepts. 

This is not to deny that the sciences and arts aren't equally creative. But only philosophy creates concepts in the strictest sense of the term (as singularities or events, never as universals). In giving philosophy such a distinct history and role, D&G are not claiming any pre-eminence or privilege for their own work; they fully acknowledge that there are other equally important, equally profound ways of (non-conceptual) thinking. Science and art are not inferior modes of ideation, but they mediate chaos differently (with the latter defined not as a void of disorder, but a virtual realm of infinite possibilities).

Science, for example, in contrast to philosophy, is concerned with inventing functions that are then advanced as propositions in discursive systems to be reflected upon and communicated as such. It wants to find a way to give chaos fixed points of reference and to slow things down; to make chaos a little more predictable and, if you like, a little more human. Philosophy might like to give style to chaos (i.e. a level of consistency) via the construction of a 'plane of immanence', but it is happy to retain the speed of birth and disappearance that is proper to chaos.

Again, this is not to denigrate the work of physicists and mathematicians and D&G are at pains to stress that they find as much admirable experimentation and creation within Einstein as within Spinoza.

As for art, it takes a different approach: if philosophy is all about concepts and science all about functions and their elemental components known as functives, then art is concerned with percepts, affects, and sensations. D&G write:

"Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent ... of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves ... They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work of art being a sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself."

- Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Graham Burchell & Hugh Tomlinson, (Verso, 1994), p. 164.

Obviously the work of art is created by the artist, but it stands or falls on its own; i.e. it exceeds the life of its own creator. Further, it draws the artist (and the viewer, reader, listener) into a strange becoming - producing them as much as they produce it and giving everyone a little chaos back into their lives.

If, as we have noted, philosophy adventures into chaos via the plane of immanence and science via a plane of reference, then art constructs a plane of composition: this, for D&G, is definitional of art. But by this they refer not merely to technical composition (which could just as well be the concern of science), but an aesthetic composition concerned with sensation. Thus art, like science and philosophy, is a unique way of thinking and of opening a plane within chaos. It is obviously related to science and philosophy, but should not be thought of as an aesthetic mish-mash of these practices. D&G conclude:

"The three routes are specific, each as direct as the others, and they are distinguished by the nature of the plane and by what occupies it. Thinking is thought through concepts, or functions, or sensations and no one of these ... is better than another ... The three thoughts intersect and intertwine but without synthesis or identification."

- Ibid., pp. 198-99. 

Ultimately, we should be grateful for the gifts that they bring us: unlike religion, which has done nothing except open a great umbrella between us and reality in an attempt to protect mankind from chaos. But that's another post ...

Towards a Doctrine of Non-Necessity

Whilst I'm perfectly happy for philosophers to discuss the concept of necessity (be it logical, empirical or transcendental in nature), or spend many long hours thinking through related ideas of determinism and contingency, it increasingly seems to me that many of the malicious and often murderous stupidities that confront us in this life are, for want of another word, completely unnecessary. 

Nationalism, racism, homophobia, misogyny, sectarianism and all those forms of what Nietzsche memorably termed "scabies of the heart" [GS 377] are things that we could happily do without and the absence of which would instantly make the world less ugly and unpleasant.

Hopefully it's clear that I'm not speaking here as a liberal idealist of some description. For as Nietzsche also says, one has to be "afflicted with a Gallic excess of erotic irritability" [GS 377] to dream of embracing all humanity with fraternal affection and, despite having been born in Paris, I'm simply not French enough.

So no, I do not love mankind. If anything, it's because I'm too indifferent and ultimately too uncaring to spend time hating that I'm led towards a nihilistic doctrine of non-necessity. It's insouciance and a certain cool irony that saves us from that violent rage and ressentiment that grips those who subscribe to a puffed-up politics of identity and self-assertion.    

The Tears of Zena X (Written in the Style of Roland Barthes)

Photo by Peter Zelei: gettyimages.com (158635665)

The slightest tremor of emotion, whether of happiness, anger, or disappointment, always brings her to tears. For she has a particular propensity to cry and even once wrote a prize-winning letter to Cosmopolitan defending her right to weep in the workplace. 

By releasing her tears without constraint, she follows the dictates of her little body, which is a body forever at the point of liquid expansion. She enjoys the feeling of tears running gently down her face: they are comforting not only to her heart, but delightful on her tongue.

Usually, when people cry, they are addressing their tears to someone else. By weeping, they want to capture attention and perhaps bring pressure to bear upon others. Tears can thus be a sign rather than an expression of feeling. But Zena often cries for her own reassurance; to prove to herself that she is still alive. 

And sometimes, late at night, when there is no one around to witness her grief, she finds herself upset by random objects and events, including the contents of her vegetable drawer. Indeed, she recently confessed: I once looked at a carrot and cried.

In Memory of Valerie Solanas

Mary Daly was right to say that anti-feminism is merely the political expression of misogyny. And doubtless the above is intended as a piece of anti-feminist polemic, although, ironically, it echoes the writings of Valerie Solanas fighting her one woman war against male power in the SCUM Manifesto.

Could it be that Pat Robertson is secretly part of the Men's Auxiliary, working diligently to undermine the credibility and authority of his own type? Sadly, probably not. 

But it's because of pricks like him that I support all women who desire to happily idle away their time in ways of their own choosing (including infidelity, infanticide, paganism, socialism, and lesbianism); women who know that sometimes you have to scream to be heard - and sometimes you just have to pull the trigger.