On the Death and Attempted Resurrection of the Author

The School of Postmodernism by Vittorio Pelosi (2009)

The conflict between traditional forms of literary criticism and postmodern approaches to the text is best captured in a work by Roland Barthes entitled Critique et Vérité (1966). In this short but brilliant book, Barthes responds with style to an aggressive and vulgar attack upon his reading of Racine by the classical literary scholar Raymond Picard. 

For Picard and his supporters, it was crucial to uphold not only their own interpretation of the 17th century dramatist, but to defend the wider truth and glory of French culture from a perceived philosophical assault by a number of new critics of whom Barthes was the best known. Contrary to Barthes, Picard argued that there are objective truths about an author and indisputable facts about a work of art on which everyone who has attained a certain level of education can manage to agree: thanks to the inherent certainties of language, critical consensus is both possible and desirable. To deny this and to contest the author's consciously exercised control over their own work (thereby dissolving the issue of intent), is to threaten this consensus of meaning.

Further, it brings into question the subject's ability to understand themselves and their world with any real confidence or certainty: things are simply no longer as clear cut as they used to be. And for traditionalists and positivists like Picard who value clarity above all else, this cannot be: not only should language strive for transparency, but sentences should be as concise and precise as possible; free from any difficult or unnecessary jargon. In this way, language reflects and furthers common sense - i.e. a form of knowledge that its adherents claim to be perfectly neutral and perfectly natural; free from all prejudice or ideology.  

Obviously, Barthes finds all this absurd. He points out how bourgeois ideology is characterized by its refusal to accept itself as an ideology and by its claims that its values and truths are universal (even whilst conveniently coinciding not only with common sense, but also a traditional middle-class model of good taste). For Barthes, those critics who believe that certain things can pass unquestioned (or go without saying) are simply upholding the status quo and the orthodox certainties not of language, but of the Academy.

Ultimately, such critics read badly because they fail to think either in a material manner (in terms of objects) or in an abstract and symbolic manner (in terms of ideas). Thus they are unable to comprehend how language might move beyond being merely communicative in a narrow, functional manner and become a medium in which people can construct new thoughts and images. Picard and friends, who devote themselves to defending the self-evidently Good, True and Beautiful - not to mention what they term the specificity of literature - succeed only in condemning life to an empty, sterile silence and reducing art to sheer banality.

Still, you might be thinking, this is all a long time ago and the new critics eventually won the day. Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, et al all had their work fully assimilated into intellectual culture and the death of the author was widely celebrated across the critical landscape - so why go over all this again?

Well, unfortunately, there are those working today to resurrect the author, or at least dig up and dress up the corpse. Vittorio Pelosi and his fellow Intentists have decided in the name of a new idealism and a new humanism that the reader's interpretation must again give way to authorial intention; that this is what determines the genuine value and meaning of a work. Thus it is that the war against stupidity continues and although Pelosi's poorly executed canvas entitled The School of Postmodernism (2009) reproduced above is "intended" to ridicule and belittle the figures depicted (including Barthes), it only makes me love them (and dislike him) more.      
    

A Deleuzean Approach to Literature

Portrait of Deleuze by Nicolas Cours-Barracq
www.behance.net

According to Deleuze, literature is not as an attempt to express the inexpressible, or impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience. 

Rather, to write in a literary manner - be it poetry or prose - is to move in the direction of the ill-formed or incomplete; to learn how to unexpress the expressible and to problematize everyday language which all-too-easily and all-too-often becomes sticky with familiar usage.  

Above all, Deleuze wishes to stress that literature should not become a form of personal overcoding; it is not an opportunity for an author to give the world a white face that somehow resembles their own. This is why any form of writing that is reliant upon the recounting of childhood memories, foreign holidays, lost loves, or sexual fantasies, is not only frequently bad writing - but dead writing; for literature dies from an excess of emotion, imagination, and autobiography, just as it does from an overdose of reality.

Literature, at its best - which is to say most inhuman - transports us from Oedipal structures and instigates a process of becoming; helping us locate zones of indiscernibility wherein we can lose ourselves and become-Other (think of Ahab's becoming-whale in Melville's Moby Dick, for example; or Gregor's becoming-insect in Kafka's Metamorphosis). 

And just as crucially, as I have indicated above, literature carries language away from itself and opens up a kind of foreign language within the writer's native tongue. It does this not by simply inventing neologisms, but by forcing a dominant and well-known language out of its usual syntactic conventions and thereby making it  stutter or scream and travel to its own external limits (limits which are not outside language, but are the outside of language).

And when a language is so unsettled and pushed to its limit, then ultimately it is obliged to confront a profound silence that doesn't signify there is nothing left to say, but, on the contrary, that there is still everything left to say. 

Return to Plato's Pharmacy

Say what you like about Socrates, but at least he didn't take any shit from poets.

This - of all things - was recently said to me - of all people (and in all seriousness) - by someone who really should have known better before offering not only a highly dubious defense of the spoken word, but what has become after Derrida a philosophically untenable privileging of the latter over the written text.

Who would have imagined that phonocentrism would still be making its voice heard in the digital age?

But, unfortunately, it is. And so we must return to ancient Greece once more and re-examine the Socratic prejudice against writing, which is conceived as a pharmakon - i.e., as a type of drug that has both beneficial and potentially lethal aspects.

According to Socrates, the gift of writing was one of many given by the Egyptian inventor-deity Theuth to the god-king Thamus. Theuth informs the latter that writing is useful as a powerful aide-memoire, but Thamus protests that its effect is likely to be quite the opposite; that whilst it might superficially remind people of the truth, it will not help them to genuinely remember and to know the truth as it essentially resides within the soul. In other words, writing creates the appearance or illusion of wisdom, but not the reality. The gift is thus returned and determined to be a grave danger rather than a great blessing (a poison, rather than a pleasure).

Developing this theme, Socrates tells his young companion, Phaedrus, that a written text is not to be trusted because, unlike an actual speaker, it lacks living, breathing presence and cannot answer questions or defend itself. A true lover of wisdom will always wish to address an audience in person and have his words heard directly by the ears of his listeners, rather than make use of the external marks of writing to be seen by the eyes of unknown (and perhaps unworthy) readers in private. Or, if a philosopher does succumb to the temptation to inscribe his thoughts, he will nevertheless be ready and willing to defend them in discussion with others; affirming his paternity or authorship of the text whilst at the same time having the decency to concede that his writings are derivative and of little value in comparison to his spoken words.

Derrida would have none of this Ideal nonsense and he rejects the myth of presence and the privileging of the voice and ear over the hand and eye. His reading of the Phaedrus is exemplary I think - despite predictable objections coming from some quarters. Without either agreeing or disagreeing with the arguments put forward by Socrates, Derrida exposes their gaps and instabilities, deconstructing the very logic upon which the Socratic method is founded. In other words, Derrida shows how Plato's attempt to casually insert writing into a system of metaphysical dualism fails because writing's status as a pharmakon means it cannot be fixed or stabilized; rather, it remains a play of possibilities that moves in, out, and across all oppositions slowly but surely infecting or polluting the entire system.

In the end, suggests Derrida, if you wish to understand language, then you need to acknowledge that it rests upon a model of arche-writing - and not the spoken word. This is not to advance an empirical assertion to the effect that writing emerged chronologically earlier than speech. That would be silly and factually incorrect. But writing is not secondary nor some kind of parasitic supplement to speech.

And the poet is not simply a poor relation to the philosopher ... 

On the Joy of Text

Picasso: Two Girls Reading (1934)

Since I feel in a generously pedantic and somewhat indulgent mood today, let me try to clarify for a friend who seems puzzled by the concept how the term text is used by writers such as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes.

Firstly - and crucially - it does not simply refer to words on a page containing some fixed and authoritative truth. In other words, the text is not simply a piece of writing that has been signed and sealed and which can be explained by a literary critic schooled in the art of hermeneutics. A book can be held in hand; but a text can only ever be held in language and experienced as a signifying practice which takes language to its paradoxical limit. 

Or, to put it another way, the text is a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original and drawn from innumerable sources, promiscuously and pleasurably come together not to express an extra-linguistic reality or give birth to meaning, but, rather, to ensure the constant deferral and systematic exemption of the latter.

In the text, everything is to be disentangled and nothing deciphered. As a reader, one cruises the surface without ever imagining that one might delve beneath it, or step beyond it. For there is nothing beneath the text, nothing behind the text, and nothing outside of the text: signs point only to other signs and never towards a transcendental signified. To presuppose the category 'world' as existing prior to and as the origin of the text, is simply to fall back into onto-theology. 

Having said that, there are small holes (aporia) in the fabric of the text, no matter how tightly or carefully it has been woven together and, like Alice, we can conveniently disappear down these. The fact that the text is a tissue of lies and stereographic plurality is precisely what offends those who believe that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God, etc.

Finally, as I have already hinted, the text allows for an erotics of reading that is linked to jouissance rather than the dull pleasure of consumption. We don't discover ourselves in the text, we lose ourselves and find that our cultural and psychological assumptions are unsettled; i.e., the subjective consistency of our tastes, values, and memories is brought to a crisis of some kind.  

And so - as confessed in a recent post - I'm happy to declare myself a homotextual. That is to say, someone who affirms difference, contradiction, and ambiguity; but who sees no need for divine judgement and makes no demand for conformity with a categorical imperative determining universal good taste. 

Those who oppose the text and call for its foreclosure, either in the name of morality or rationalism, have effectively placed themselves outside of desire. And this not only means they lack a sense of intellectual playfulness, but that they're physically a bit dead and sexless too: you wouldn't want to think like them and you wouldn't want to sleep with them.  

Let Them Eat Mussels

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, estimated personal fortune of £150 million, has been speaking of his struggle to understand poverty in the UK and the liking for ready-meals and wide-screen TVs amongst those on low-incomes.

Without wishing to be judgemental, he encourages the poor in this country to learn from Sicilian street-cleaners how to live happily and eat healthily on a diet of shell-fish, pasta and cherry tomatoes. 

In doing so, he becomes not only front-runner for this years' Marie Antoinette Award, but places himself firmly in a long tradition of self-loathing Brits who drool over all things Italian and wish that England could be a land of lemon gardens, olive groves, and smiling peasants working the soil beneath eternal blue skies. 

Lawrence too would sometimes unfavourably contrast his homeland and his compatriots with the ancient Mediterranean world and the peoples thereof. But, just before he toppled over into romantic idealism, he would pull back and offer solidarity with his native land and the working-class to which, at some fundamental level, he still belonged: 

"I feel I hardly know any more the people I come from ... They are changed, and I suppose I am changed. I find it so much easier to live in Italy. ... At the same time ... They are the only people  who move me strongly, and with whom I feel myself connected in deeper destiny. It is they who are, in some peculiar way 'home' to me."

- D. H. Lawrence, [Return to Bestwood], in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (CUP, 2004), p. 22.

Lawrence might often become exasperated with his own people and rage against their apparent resignation to how things are ordered politically and socially, but he never insults or patronises them. And he would never in a million years dare to say let them eat mussels ...!

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.