Even the Dead Don't Rest in Peace

Georges Bataille was not mistaken when he spoke of death as a shipwreck into the nauseous and repeatedly emphasized the excremental nature of the corpse which, thanks to putrefaction, rapidly dissolves into noxious base matter. 

First to go, as home to the greatest number of bacteria, are the digestive organs and the lungs. The brain also soon liquifies, as it is nice and soft and easy to digest. The massively expanding numbers of bacteria in the mouth chew through the palate and transform grey matter into goo. Quite literally, it runs out of the ears and bubbles like snot from the nose; in this manner, we're all destined to lose our minds. 

After three or four weeks, all of the internal organs will have become soup. Muscle tissue is frequently eaten not only by bacteria, but also by carnivorous beetles. Sometimes the skin gets consumed as well, sometimes not. Depending on the weather and other environmental conditions, it might just dry out and naturally mummify. Whatever remains, however, will be obliged to lie in a stinking pool of organic filth, or a coffin full of shit. 

Burial might serve to prolong the process of decomposition, but it certainly doesn't prevent it or delay it indefinitely. As Mary Roach in her amusing study, Stiff (2003), writes: "Eventually any meat, regardless of what you do to it, will whither and go off." Only the skeletal structure beneath the soft pathology of the flesh will last for any significant period of time. But bones too - just like laws and monuments - are ultimately destined to crumble into dust.

Thus we have little real choice but to accept the biological fact that life dies. But is this the end of the story? No. The truth is, we never stop dying because, in a material, non-personal, inhuman manner, we never stop living. In other words, it's mistaken to confuse our individual death with non-being.

"Is it because we want to believe in the loyalty of our substance that we make this peculiar equation?" asks Nick Land.* Probably the answer to this is yes. But it's a somewhat shameful answer. 

For whether we like to believe it or not, matter is always struggling to escape essence and to abandon complex existence; always seeking to return to a state of inanimate and blissful simplicity. Our bodies have no allegiance to life and do not seek to stave off disintegration or shut out death. They grow into the embrace of the latter (we term this ageing) and our mass of atoms enjoy a veritable orgy of delight after having broken free from their temporary entrapment in life.

Unfortunately for them, they don't get to enjoy their freedom for long. For death proves to be but a "temporary refreshment ... before the rush back into the compulsive dissipation of life".* Which is to say, atoms are so vigorously recycled at death that they don't ever get to rest in peace. 

It further means that we, the living, all house and reincarnate the carbon atoms of the departed and in this way the souls of the dead might be said to re-enter and pervade the souls of the living. Thanks to the conservation of mass, we can legitimately declare ourselves to be 'all the names in history'.    

* See: Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992), p. 180. 

Lesbophobia

There's an astonishing exchange in Chapter XIV of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, in which Mellors reveals to Connie the short and unhappy history of his relationships with women, beginning with a schoolmaster's daughter who was pretty and romantic, but sexless; and ending with Bertha Coutts, his wife, who enjoyed sex, but could only achieve orgasm by grinding her own coffee. 

Mellors is contemptuous of the first type; the idealistic women who love everything about love, except  fucking. But it is the latter type whom he really hates and seems to fear; the active type like Bertha, that like to bring themselves off by wriggling and shouting and clutching at themselves. These women, says Mellors, who dare to seek clitoral stimulation and require more than vaginal penetration by the penis in order to come, are mostly lesbian:

"'And do you mind?' asked Connie.

'I could kill them. When I'm with a woman who's really lesbian, I fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her.'

'But do you think lesbian women are any worse than homosexual men?'  

'I do! Because I've suffered more from them. In the abstract, I've no idea. When I get with a lesbian woman, whether she knows she's one or not, I see red.'"

- D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (CUP, 1993), p. 203. 

This passage - one that has long troubled and rightly angered many female readers and critics of Lawrence - demonstrates why we are justified in using the term lesbophobia as something distinct from the more commonly theorized phenomenon of homophobia. 

Clearly, there is an added component of sexism in lesbophobia and, indeed, a violent element of misogyny. I think the only admirable thing about this passage is that it doesn't seek to disguise the latter. Rather, it explicitly demonstrates how quickly misogyny turns murderous. 

Sadly - shamefully - lesbophobia seems to be something that is increasing in our society; or, at any rate, something that it is increasingly OK to articulate. The fact that many gay men and straight women are also guilty of directing abuse or acting in a prejudicial and discriminatory manner towards lesbians is doubly sad and shameful.

Thankfully, this is not Southern Africa and we do not witness the horror of corrective rape in the UK. But such vile hate crime flourishes when good people do and say nothing. Or when writers and intellectuals who should know better, appear to aggressively enforce heteronormative values and condone the gang rape and murder of women who don't wish to submit to male sexual power and phallic authority (women who want none of that). 

On Intuition

Intuition Card, by Linnea Vedder Shults (2009)

Last night, in discussion with an old musician and a young neuroscientist, the question arose of intuition.

Intuition, of course, is the favourite faculty of those who like to denigrate reason and act in accordance with what they believe to be an unmediated and direct perception of reality. For such people, knowledge is non-inferential and is mysteriously circulated in the blood, or located in the gut. They speak of inner wisdom and the unconscious. Sometimes they speak also of hearing voices and exercising psychic abilities. 

The young neuroscientist, Ms Camargo, whilst not wanting to abandon the idea of intuition as an untenable piece of folk psychology, was nevertheless far more comfortable speaking about the brain and physiological processes rather than soul, spirit, or other spooky stuff.

The old musician, however, Mr Van Hooke, was a convinced believer in spiritual powers and spoke not only of intuition, but also inspiration, originality, and creative genius for good measure. Indeed, such was his conviction that he seemed genuinely shocked and outraged when I mildly suggested that such notions might at the very least be open to interrogation. 

As, unfortunately, I didn't get the opportunity to explain to him my concerns with the superstitious notion of intuition on the night, I'd like to do so now.

  

For me, the common understanding of the mind is profoundly mistaken and once we develop a more accurate and non-metaphysical account, then popular notions like intuition and desire will prove to be as untenable as belief in the promptings of demons. At best, intuition is simply the retrieval of a memory.

Of course, I appreciate that we feel certain things strongly and that introspective or experiential evidence can seem very convincing. But can we trust it or assume it to be true? If it turns out to be as determined by society and culture as we now know our perception of the world to be, then it's likely that what we naturally intuit or instinctively feel to be the case is largely determined by doxa (i.e. received opinion expressed in a language based on agreed rules of grammar, syntax, and stereotype). 

Thus it's not coincidental that we understand what our inner voice tells us, because it conveniently speaks in sentences with a linguistic compositional structure that we recognise. However, as Patricia Churchland argues, it's extremely unlikely we're going to find anything that even remotely resembles the alphabet inside the structure of actual brains.

Mr Van Hooke, like many other people, passionately wants to defend the folk psychology with which he is so familiar and comfortable. And, to be fair, it has provided a very successful model of mental processes. But, as a philosopher, I'm aware that the success of a theory is no guarantee that it legitimately represents reality. Even attractive theories - of vitalism, for example - have to be laid to rest at some point in the name of intellectual integrity.

Eliminative materialism has unsettling consequences and I'm not pretending otherwise; not just for our conception of the mind, but for many other aspects of human activity. As Jerry Fodor once famously declared: "If commonsense psychology were to collapse, that would be, beyond comparison, the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of our species ..."

True, but so what? This doesn't constitute an argument against the naturalization of the mind, a task which demands and deserves to be accomplished, whatever the consequences. And who knows, perhaps out of such a catastrophe something good will come - that's my hunch anyway.

The Laugh of the Medusa

If you only dare to look at the Medusa face-to-face, you'll see she's not homicidal. 

She's beautiful and she's laughing.

The Laugh of the Medusa still echoes with many sympathetic readers concerned to ensure that the feminine is neither marginalised nor trivialised within the space of literature and the world of politics.

And it continues to resonate with those of us interested in a practice of writing that is above all else joyful. In which, as Roland Barthes says, everything is under assault and begins to come apart; in which language is a powerful flow of words that carries us away from old certainties and habits of thought and speech. 

It's nice to remember that you don't have to angry to be militant and that you don't have to be militant to be radical; that revolution is only ever a smile away and does not necessitate the turning of warm flesh into cold stone, or the hardening of hearts. 

In Defense of Vanilla

I'm so tired of hearing people use the term vanilla to deride those things, those acts, those people they think of as boring, conventional, unimaginative, and unadventurous. Particularly, when, as is usually the case, this is a judgement made within a sexual context. 

It's not merely that this shows a vulgar lack of appreciation for what is actually one of the most precious and sophisticated of spices - lacking in flavour only to those who lack subtlety of taste - but I suspect there's an underlying misogyny here too; in particular, an all-too-common hatred of female genitalia.

For not only does vanilla have a complex and seductive bouquet like the vagina (delicate, yet overpowering), but the word itself is of course the diminutive form of the latter.

Those individuals who enjoy other scents, other tastes, other points of entry to the human body are at perfect liberty to do so as far as I'm concerned - but, seriously, we can all do without kinky condescension and eurotophobia.  

The Bluebird

A bird came down the walk - he did not know I saw - 

he bit a little worm in half and ate the fellow, raw.

I like the colour blue: apart from navy blue, obviously. I also like most birds and yet I've woken up today with an intense dislike for the bluebird. 

Not the actual creature, but the symbol of hope and happiness who flies over rainbows and white cliffs, optimistically promising peace and freedom; a bird whose wings are so laden with schmaltz I'm surprised it can even get off the ground.

As Christopher Hitchens rightly said, any vision of Utopia is not only founded upon spurious moral sentiment, but is futile and dangerous in the long term. Idealistic ornithologists and songwriters might do well to remember that even the bluebird preys on spiders, grubs and other insects.

Film Kills (2): On Images, Objects and Speculative Realism

In a digital age, the making, distribution, and consumption of images is perhaps our most fundamental activity. It deserves, therefore, to be carefully thought about from a philosophical perspective and, for me, Jean Baudrillard does a better job than most at this. 

For Baudrillard, iconography is not innocent. In fact, it plays a complicit role in what he terms the perfect crime and by which he refers to the extermination of singular being via technological and social processes bent on replacing real things and real people with a series of images and empty signs.

Ironically, in this world of simulacra and simulation the image can no longer even imagine the real, because it has itself become the real: "It is as though things had swallowed their own mirrors and had become transparent to themselves ... full in the light and in real time ... forced to register on thousands of screens" [1] in high definition.

When this happens, we pass beyond representation towards obscenity; a state wherein everything and everyone is "uselessly, needlessly visible, without desire and without effect" [2]. People who indecently expose themselves in this game of cyber-exhibitionism are left without secrets, without shadows, without charm. They become, if you like, ghosts in the machine, forced to confront the possibility that life can no longer be experienced except within the emotional parameters of Facebook. 

But maybe, when everything has finally been put on view, we'll realise that there was nothing to be seen after all. Maybe, those who live by the image will die by the image. And maybe we'll find a way to overcome our own narcissistic and voyeuristic image-fetishism; to smash a great hole in the Universal Screen and experience the wild chaos that lies beyond in the world of objects and actual entities.

Doubtless, this will require a certain innocence on our part and the development of what has been termed speculative realism. That is to say, a philosophy that insists there is more to the world than a play of appearances and that objects have a mind-independent reality; i.e. they exist regardless of whether we are thinking or observing them.

Iconographers and idealists believe there is a permanent correlation between reality and its representation. They become sceptical about anything outside the world of their own making - it is unthinkable, they say, that the unfilmable might exist! And yet, things-in-themselves do exist and there's a mysterious, partly invisible or withdrawn world of such things that constitute a reality that is completely indifferent to our existence and vain attempts to conceptualize it.

Why vain? Because the attempt to visualise and transcendentally guarantee the world in a manner entirely for our own convenience, is fundamentally an attempt to deny reality in all its inhuman and malevolent reality. An image is thus always a kind of anthropocentric conceit, or caricature. That's why a photograph of a horse, for example, is not the same as an actual horse that we might feed sugar lumps to, or be kicked in the head by: "the camera can neither feel the heat of the horse ... nor smell his horsiness", it merely captures "one dreary bit of ... his static external form" [3].

Even at its best, cinema never really encounters the world; it just puts a filmy-imaginative veneer over reality, or what might be described as a "luminous but impoverished plane of explicit awareness" [4].

The good thing is that herein lies hope: for what we learn from this is that the world is inexhaustible and objects virtually indestructible, because essentially unknowable. The image kills - but only partly; it deadens, but does not make dead. And so for all the attempts to dissolve the world and rid it of substance, objects (including human beings) stubbornly refuse to be abstracted away or transmuted into pure light and colour. 

Ultimately, matter returns in all its solidity and menace and the object extracts its revenge.

Notes:

[1] Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 1996), p. 4.

[2] Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner, (Berg, 2005), p. 94.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, (CUP, 1992), pp. 127, 128.

[4] Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, (Zero Books, 2010), p. 112.

Film Kills (1): At the Pictures with D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence: Close-Up (Kiss), 1928

Cinema is the production of icons and the proliferation of moving images. From a biblical perspective, it is clearly sinful. 

But if the authors of Exodus are primarily concerned with the making of graven images of God and the worship of pagan idols, there seems to be something else, something deeper, troubling them too; namely, a genuine concern with the very notion of representation as it relates to questions of reality, truth, and appearance. 

We find the same concern amongst the ancient Greeks - Plato providing an obvious example. His insistence on presence and authenticity makes him suspicious of most art forms and his critique of writing as a pharmakon can easily be made also of film. Indeed, it's central  to D. H. Lawrence's criticism of cinema: because the actors on-screen are not physically present before us, this invalidates both their performance and our response to it. 

As a matter of fact, Lawrence says very little about the cinema, but when he does it's uniformly negative and hostile. In the poem 'When I Went to the Film', for example, Lawrence suggests that cinema is essentially - in its very form and function - an obscene and pornographic medium and that the content of the film is, therefore, in large part irrelevant. 

This is because, for Lawrence, film sensationally stimulates false feeling and counterfeit emotion. It is both ideal and ecstatic; projecting shadows of people as if onto the wall of Plato's cave on the one hand, whilst provoking masturbatory thrills on the other. It is the art form par excellence of what he refers to as sex-in-the-head: i.e., a desire on the part of hyper-conscious, visually-fixated individuals to experience everything in their minds and to exchange the sheer physical intensity of life lived in the flesh for a new piece of knowledge and a bucket of popcorn. 

Lawrence's concern is not that this results in a loss of soul, but in a denial of the body and corporeal reality: "The amazing move into abstraction on the part of the whole of humanity", he argues, "means we loathe the physical element ... We don't want to look at flesh-and-blood people ... We don't want to hear their actual voices" [1]. Rather, we wish only to interact with them mediated via technology.

In his novel of 1920, The Lost Girl, Lawrence privileges the dying art of the music hall over that of the newly emergent cinema, prioritizing live speech and presence over celluloid sensation. It's much the same argument as he makes in his poetry: film is cheap and easy and it costs the audience nothing apart from the price of a ticket: no feeling of the heart, no appreciation of the spirit is necessary - just wide open eyes and a desire to be titillated.

Whatever we might think of this critique - and it's far from convincing - there is no denying that our curiosity towards images is always erotically charged. Sex might not be the origin of the world as Courbet suggested, but it's certainly the origin of cinema and our insatiable will to knowledge. The faces of Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino "plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy ... one literally lost oneself in the human image" [2].

This cinematic jouissance - brilliantly theorized by Patricia MacCormack [3] - is a major concern for some people. For others, what matters is the violence that is done to the real; i.e. the fact that the production of images results in the murder of objects, not that it causes audience to moan from close-up kisses and simulated sex. I'll say more about this in part two of this post.

Notes: 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Men Must Work and Women as Well', Late Essays and Articles, (CUP, 2004), p. 283.
[2] Roland Barthes, 'The Face of Garbo', Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, (Paladin Books, 1973), p. 62.

[3] See Patricia MacCormack, Cinesexuality, (Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2008).

 

Zena (Written in the Manner of Michel Houellebecq)

Scattered across her bedside table like elements of despair

are the usual signs of life: soiled tissues and rabbit-headed

rings.

Texts from lovers old and new remind her that she's

desirable and her flesh remains firm: that it hadn't

passed its use by date.

Whenever she saw me she'd push her pelvis in my direction

with suggestive irony. I'd glance vaguely at the curve of her

breasts and the bareness of her arms.

On trips abroad she'd visit sex museums and marvel at the

polyamorous exploits of chimpanzees and the prospect of

being pleasured by robots.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

It's true that we learn from failure. But we don't learn how to succeed in the future, no matter what feeble-minded optimists like to believe. At most, we learn how to fail better, as Samuel Beckett informs us in a prose piece amusingly entitled Worstward Ho (1983).

Beckett is absolutely not telling us that if at first we don't succeed, we should try, try again in the hope and expectation that such endurance is bound to pay off. Rather, he's saying that no matter how hard you try, no matter how many times you fail, you will never succeed: that success is not even an option.

For we are fated to fail. We are destined to fail. We are doomed to fail. Such is the tragic character of our mortal being. The fact that Beckett affirms this and finds in it a source of darkly comic satisfaction, demonstrates that his is what Nietzsche would term a pessimism of strength (or, if you prefer, a Dionysian philosophy).

The fact that his words are to be found on a wide variety of motivational posters, mugs, and fridge magnets is also something that should cause laughter amongst Beckett enthusiasts, rather than despair and irritation. For as one commentator notes, observing corporate executives and New Age hippies draw comfort and inspiration from lines they have naively misunderstood is like watching someone innocently throw a stick for their dog, not realising that it is in fact a human shin bone they've just picked up in the park.