Postcard from LA

Scientologists

Dreaming of L. Ron Hubbard

Sun their perfect tits 

As Foucault was at pains to point out, the Californian cult of the self that emerged in the 1960s combining an astonishing level of reactive narcissism with what can only be described as a form of zen fascism was - and remains - far removed from the Classical idea that one's principle duty is to care for the self via the disciplined application of aesthetic values to one's own life and existence.

Epimeleia heautou lies at the heart of Greco-Roman ethics and involves a multitude of complex techniques. But it doesn't mean simply being self-absorbed and self-attached and for Foucault our contemporary obsession with learning how to love our true selves or liberate our inner being from all that might otherwise prevent its unfolding via a combination of psychoanalysis, New Age religion, health foods, jogging, plastic surgery and lying by the pool, is diametrically opposed to what the Stoics might have had in mind for example.

The key difference is perhaps this: in antiquity, the self was an object to be fashioned or given style; in modern society it's a subjective identity to be discovered and in which we are imprisoned. Until we abandon the latter way of thinking based on the concept of soul-substance then we'll never really appreciate what it means to care for the self.   

 

Note: LA Haiku by Zena McKeown was sent on a postcard from Los Angeles dated 12 Aug 2013.

Letter to a Harsh Critic

Deleuze isn't the only one to receive mail from harsh critics containing a vicious mixture of aggression, accusation, and abuse. Almost everyday in my inbox there's something from someone or other outlining the weaknesses of my arguments and my personal shortcomings; i.e. a sort of celebration of my supposedly sorry condition. 

Thus, for example, I was recently informed by a correspondent - who shall remain nameless - that I'm a text-obsessed, theory-loving intellectual with no experience of actual events in the real world and that this - coupled to my continued support for radical feminism - makes me the kind of weak and unmanly figure who refuses to take a firm or fixed position and simply dances round the issues.

Obviously, these charges are meant to make me feel bad or guilty in some manner and are intended not just to provoke a response, but to wound and to shame. But, unfortunately for my finger-pointing and finger-wagging friend, they simply make me smile.

For one thing, it's true that I do love books. Indeed, I'd proudly identify myself as a homotextual. However, I must insist that reading and writing is not something abstract or ideal; rather, it's a fully material process that is itself an actual event in the real world. In other words, theory is a form of praxis. As an anti-dualist, I simply don't subscribe to the metaphysical model that places thinking on one side of a divide and doing on the other.

Further, I would advise my critic to be extremely wary of using the word 'intellectual' in a derogatory manner as if it were a term of abuse. For whilst there is a long tradition of anti-intellectualism, it's really not one that any decent individual should wish to belong to, originating as it does in French anti-Semitism (the term 'intellectual' having been coined by those who sought the conviction of Dreyfus to sneer at his supporters such as Zola). 

As for this idea of skirting or dancing around ideas like a woman ... Well, I can't see anything wrong with that either: I am openly transpositional and admire all those individuals who are light-footed as well as lighthearted and quick-witted. My critic seems to think that being flat-footed, iron-fisted, and pig-headed makes one manly and Nietzschean. But he's mistaken on both counts: it just makes boring. And stupid. As Zarathustra says, he would never make himself the enemy of young girls with fair ankles. Besides, what is all great writing - be it philosophical or literary in character - other than a process of becoming-woman?

One is tempted in closing to paraphrase Emma Goldman: If I can't dance, then I don't want to be part of your libertarian revolution! And just as Deleuze advises Michel Cressole so I would advise my critic: as charming, intelligent, and mischievous as you are, you might also try to be a bit kinder.


Disclaimer: The character appearing as my critic in the above post is of course entirely fictitious; a functional component of the text. As of course am I in my role as author and narrator. Any resemblance to actual persons outside of this textual space, living or dead, is purely coincidental. My apologies to those for whom this goes without saying.

Equus Eroticus (2): The Case of Alan Strang

Daniel Radcliffe: Photo by Uli Weber (2007)

If the combination of sex, religion, and horse-mania comes together even more disturbingly than in Lawrence's short novel St. Mawr, it is in Peter Shaffer's play Equus (1973). Shaffer claims that he was inspired to write the work after being told by a friend of an apparently senseless and horrific act of horse-ripping. Without knowing any of the specific details of the case, he set out to imaginatively interpret the event.

The play opens with seventeen-year-old Alan Strang being admitted to a psychiatric hospital following his conviction for the blinding of six horses with a metal spike. This act of zoosadism obliges us to examine the human capacity for cruelty and sacrificial violence. It certainly forces the middle-aged doctor who is treating Alan to confront his own spiritual atrophy and question the value of a life lived in a world from which all gods are absent. At the end of the play Dr. Dysart shamefully confesses that he envies the ferocious passion and religious frenzy experienced by his young patient.

However, his friend Hesther Salomon, the local magistrate who sent Alan to him, isn't having any of this. She points out that the boy is in fact mentally ill and clearly suffering from delusions. Further, she makes the perfectly valid point that one does not need to gallop naked on horseback at midnight or indulge in grotesque acts of Dionysian madness in order to live a rich and fulfilling life: failure to torture and kill animals or children does not make one 'pallid and provincial' despite what religious lunatics like to believe.

There are certainly other ways in which one might experience intensity and become-centaur without engaging in sex with horses, or slashing them with a knife. The popular form of BDSM known as pony-play is one such method. It remains an erotic and ritualistic activity, but is far more refined and philosophically of interest. If only Lady Carrington and her husband could have followed a programme similar to the one set out by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, then maybe she wouldn't have needed to run off with St. Mawr. And if only Jill the stable girl could have seduced Alan Strang into the world of pony-play, then perhaps he would never have committed his terrible deed.

Just to be clear on this for those unfamiliar with pony-play: it's not a question of simply imitating a horse and submitting to the authority of a mistress or master. It is rather a question of exchanging forces. To be more precise, it's a question of destroying instinctive forces in order to replace them with transmitted forces. The equestrian ensures this conversion of forces and the inversion of signs. Deleuze and Guattari quote the following rather beautiful passages in which a masochist in the process of becoming-animal speaks to his mistress:

"'At night, put the on the bridle and attach my hands more tightly ... Put on the entire harness right away also, the reins and the thumbscrews, and attach the thumbscrews to the harness. My penis should be in a metal sheaf. Ride the reins for two hours during the day, and in the evening as the mistress wishes. Confinement for three or four days, hands still tied, the reins alternately tightened and loosened. The mistress will never approach her horse without the crop, and without using it. If the animal should display impatience or rebelliousness, the reins will be drawn tighter, the mistress will grab them and give the beast a good thrashing.'" 

"'Results to be obtained: that I am kept in continual expectancy of actions and orders, and that little by little all opposition is replaced by a fusion of my person with yours ... Thus at the mere thought of your riding boots ... I must feel fear. In this way, it will no longer be women's legs that have an effect on me, and if it pleases you to command me to receive your caresses, when you have had them and if you make me feel them, you will give me an imprint of your body as I have never had it before and never would have had it otherwise."

- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1996), pp. 155, 156.

Doesn't this sound far lovelier than the all-too-literal understanding of zoophilia we find in bestial pornography which continues to fixate on organs and acts of penetration? And surely fetishistic joy is better too than religious ecstasy which invariably results in horror and vile atrocity, rather than a new form of love.

Equus Eroticus (1): The Case of Lady Carrington

In his short novel St Mawr, Lawrence examines a young woman's erotic and pagan fascination for a golden-red stallion, with brilliant black eyes. The horse challenges her to find something within herself that can answer to his own four-legged combination of virility and divinity and from their first encounter Lou is transfixed, transfigured, and turned-on:

"She laid her hand on his side, and gently stroked him. Then she stroked his shoulder, and then the hard, tense arch of his neck. And she was startled to feel the vivid heat of his life come through to her ... So slippery with vivid, hot life! ... Dimly, in her weary young-woman's soul, an ancient understanding seemed to flood in."

What exactly is Lou Carrington thinking of here? When Lawrence writes of this primal experience flooding into her female soul, what conclusion are we invited to arrive at other than this is essentially a carnal form of knowledge? I don't believe I'm being crassly reductive or offering a provocatively crude interpretation to insist on this fact. Rather, I think that Lawrence is deliberately flirting with the possibility of a human-horse love affair in St. Mawr (as elsewhere in his work) and that this passage is an overtly bestial piece of writing. The reason that he stresses the potent and dangerous maleness of the horse is because there is an unspoken desire for penetration.

But Lou would be right to be worried by the prospect of such. For as Bodil Joensen once warned in an interview, being fucked by a horse is always a risky business, even for those who are experienced in the practice. For not only can these powerful creatures bite and kick and suddenly thrust when excited, but at orgasm the glans of a horse's penis swells considerably and this can cause serious - if not fatal - internal damage.

Of course, having said this, Lou doesn't simply have the hots for St. Mawr. When she touches his body she feels herself brought mystically into connection with another world and another way of being; the horse answers to her need for some sense of religious wonder, as well as her desire for sexual fulfilment. When St. Mawr looks at her from out of the everlasting darkness, Lou feels he has uncanny authority over her and that she must worship him like some splendid god or demon.

In comparison, she finds her human relationships trivial and superficial; including her relationship with Rico, her husband, who is himself horse-like in his sensitivity, but forever "quivering with a sort of cold, dangerous mistrust" and fear that he attempts to mask with an anxious form of love and a clever niceness that is slowly driving Lou insane and into the hooves of St. Mawr.   

Unsurprisingly, therefore, Lou abandons Rico and runs off with her horse dreaming of a time to come when men might regain their animal mystery and nobility and become-centaur. 

- D. H. Lawrence, St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (CUP, 1983).

Ophidicism

 Karen Heagle: Woman with Snake, (2008)

The ancient and formerly widespread practice of ophidicism, or sex with snakes, is poorly understood if the serpent is simply thought to be a phallic substitute.

For the joy of having a large python between your legs, or of feeling a small viper wriggle free from your vagina is real enough in and of itself. It is no more than human male conceit to imagine that a woman always needs a man's penis for her pleasure and fulfilment.

This is not to advocate zoophilia, or encourage women to insert limbless creatures into their bodies. But, having said that, life is short, pleasures are limited and there are certainly worse things that one might do (and worse sexual partners one might have).

Indeed, it might be argued that if we are to overcome our bad conscience and enter into a post-moral paradise in which the snake curls in peace about the ankle of Eve at last, then we will need a new understanding of our humanity and our intimate relationship with other species.

Perhaps ophidicism might play a small but vital part in this revaluation of values. And perhaps Lawrence was right to say that it will be a sign of bliss when we are finally reconciled with the serpent and brought to the fateful realization that there is nothing in this world and this life to be ashamed of.

Pegging

Many heterosexual men are disconcerted by the thought of a woman with a dildo. For not only can she penetrate herself with such, but she can penetrate them. Only with great reluctance would they submit to a partner with a strap-on who challenges conventional notions of who does what to whom. 

Their unease is related not just to the homophobic fear of accepting a cock into their anus (albeit a rubber one), but also to the wider concern with passivity which, in the male mind, is often thought of as humiliating and castrating. 

It's an old problem: one that greatly troubled the ancient Greeks. But Sade laughs at such moral anxiety and prejudice, insisting that not only are both classes of intercourse - active and passive - perfectly legitimate, but that it is the latter which ultimately affords the greatest pleasure: since one enjoys at a single stroke the sensations of before and behind.

Odysseus

Like all sirens, her love contains the salt-water certainty

of death for those who leave the safety of the shore,

or foolishly scuttle the little boat of their own

happiness.

But who would want to live a life dependent upon 

bees wax and old rope?

With his bourgeois longing for home and his

hatred of the sea, Odysseus ... disappoints!

On Sadism and the Case of Ian Brady

For a genuine sadist any form of legality is anathema and deserving of contempt; they are simply not aroused out of flaccid indifference and apathy by the thought of a consensual exercise of sexual violence. This is what makes such an individual far rarer, far more dangerous, and far more philosophically problematic than a masochist for whom cruelty is always contracted, rather than criminal.

And so it is that whilst the latter hangs about looking slightly ludicrous and self-conscious at the local fetish club, the former is out burying the bodies of murdered children on Saddleworth Moor. 

What I'm conceding here is that Simon Thomas was perhaps - perhaps - right to insist that Ian Brady cannot be ignored or dismissed simply as a bad reader.

No-Pan Kissa

Whatever the problematic sexual politics of such places, there was something undeniably charming about the Japanese coffee shops known as no-pan kissa that flourished in the 1980s, where the waitresses wore short skirts without underwear and served drinks and snacks to customers fascinated by what they saw reflected on the mirrored floors. 

Alas, such establishments rapidly declined in number as their owners made the fatal error of moving ever-further in the direction of naked truth and full-exposure: this trend terminating in the vaginal cyclorama wherein nude women would sit on the edge of a platform with their legs apart, inviting their male admirers to closely inspect their genitalia. 

As Baudrillard writes, all forms of seduction and traditional striptease pale before this spectacle of absolute obscenity and visual voracity that goes far beyond erotic playfulness towards extreme pornographic idealism. The men who pay to push their faces between open thighs and stare with mortal seriousness, never smiling or trying to touch, are participants within an orgy of realism.

The cunt, meanwhile, made monstrously visible, has simply become another empty sign in a hypersexual realm of simulation. That is to say, the object of desire is itself lost in close-up just as myopic voyeurs end by staring themselves blind. Without a little distance and ambiguity, a little secrecy and even, yes, a little romance (i.e. a metaphorical dimension) there can be no gaze, no seduction, and no sex.

Obscenity means nothing other than that the body and its sex organs are literally and often brutally shoved in your face; there is, says Baudrillard, a total acting out of things that ought to be subject if not to privacy, then to dramaturgy, a scene, a game between lovers.  

 

Bad Romance

The Fall of the House of Usher, by Kristyla at deviantart.com

What was it about incest that so obsessively fascinated the Romantics? 

Although only Byron had experience of it as a practice, the theme was imaginatively explored by many other poets, including Wordsworth and Shelley, for whom it seemed to function as a spiritual principle of absolute identification of the self with the non-self or other. 

The tragic psychodrama of Wuthering Heights, is founded upon an incestuous bond formed between Catherine and Heathcliff. For whilst they are not blood-siblings, they are nevertheless brought up as brother and sister within the Earnshaw family home. Thus their mad striving for an impossible union is somehow shocking and toxic; giving off a kind of 'chthonian miasma', as Camille Paglia writes, which infects and corrupts the social world.        

Like Emily Bronte, Edgar Allan Poe is also concerned with love, the limitations of love, and the fatal transgression of those limits. For whilst we might live by love, we die or cause death if we take love too far; be it in either a spiritual or a carnal direction. Thus, whilst it's perfectly legitimate to be interested in the object of one's affection and quite natural to want to know a good deal about the person one is perhaps planning to marry, it's profoundly mistaken to totally identify with another and attempt to suck the life out of that being. Each of us kills the thing we love most when we love with the terrible intimacy of the vampire.

In his brilliant reading of Poe, Lawrence writes:

"When the self is broken, and the mystery of the recognition of otherness fails, then the longing for identification with the beloved becomes a lust. And it is this longing for identification, utter merging, which is at the base of the incest problem."

                                                

- D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe' (Final Version 1923), Studies in Classic American Literature, (CUP, 2003), p. 75.

Via incest, lovers can achieve sensational gratification with the minimum of resistance. But it gradually leads to madness, breakdown and death - as we see with Heathcliff and Catherine, or Roderick and Madeline in Poe's classic tale, The Fall of the House of Usher. Both Catherine and Madeline die having had the life and the love sucked out of them, whilst still unappeased. And so both return from the dead in order to drag their lovers with them into the grave:

"It is lurid and melodramatic, but it really is a symbolic truth of what happens in the last stages of inordinate love, which can recognise none of the sacred mystery of otherness, but must unite into unspeakable identification ... Brother and sister go down together, made one in the unspeakable mystery of death."

- D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe' (First Version 1918-19), Studies in Classic American Literature, (CUP, 2003), p. 238. 

Both Poe and Emily Bronte were great writers, doomed to die young. Was it, one might ask, the same thing which ultimately killed them? For both experienced the same heightened consciousness of desire taken to its furthest extreme as they entered what Lawrence describes as the 'horrible underground passages of the human soul', grimly determined as they were to discover all that there is to know about the obscene disease that ruins so many idealists: Love.