In Praise of Small Talk and Social Networking

Christians, who are passionately devoted to the Word, are equally fervent in their opposition to idle gossip and foolish chit-chat. Not only do they condemn blasphemous speech, but also irreverent babble, obscene joking and lighthearted nonsense. For all these forms of small talk are, they say, corrupting and lead people away from the Truth and into ungodliness. Matthew tells us straight: 

On the day of judgement people will be held to account for every careless word they have spoken. By your words you will be acquitted and by your words you will be condemned. [12:36-7]

Heidegger, who believed that the task of philosophy was to preserve the force of the most elementary words in which Dasein expressed itself, also had very little time for what he terms Gerede and by which he refers to the everyday chatter engaged in by average individuals leading alienated lives of relentless mediocrity in which all possibilities of authentic being are flattened.  

Nor was he taken with its written form, which he dismissed as 'scribbling' [Geschriebe]: a conventional and lazy form of writing, found in newspapers and popular fiction; often amusing and distracting, but banal and, like common speech, something which merely 'passed the word along' without import or meaning.

Today, in the digital era of social networking, when hundreds of millions of people around the world are constantly chatting, texting, tweeting, and posting on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (or on blogs such as this one), it's extremely difficult to even imagine what the problem for the above might be.

What those who share an almost phobic dislike for small talk and idle gossip fail to fully appreciate is that people love micro-forms of communication with friends, family, and, indeed, complete strangers all over the world in ever-widening circles of virtual intimacy and peripheral awareness (to borrow a phrase from Danah Boyd, if I may). 

Why? Not because they are sinful or superficial (though they might be both) and not because they are any more self-obsessed or narcissistic than people in the world before the internet and i-Phone revolutionised the way we live. Rather, it's because pointless electronic babble is a technological form of social grooming and bonding. In other words, it's a crucial 21st century skill. But, even more importantly, it's an informal, somewhat addictive pleasure that brings people into touch; abolishing not only interpersonal distance, but prejudice and provincialism. 

Reflections on Photography and Ethnoelephantology

Photo taken at London Zoo (Getty Images, 1971)   

I love this photograph: taken when girls wore hot-pants and were encouraged to pose provocatively with great beasts; when a trip to the Zoo was an opportunity for laughter and excitement rather than learning about conservation projects.

But it might be asked what it is about this photograph that so fascinates and moves me, apart from the obvious elements already mentioned (i.e. the nostalgia for times and fashions gone by and the none-too-subtle suggestion of eroticism as a crucial component of human-animal relations).

Well, firstly, I am struck by the fact that this photograph captures a real and unique moment which it faithfully reproduces to infinity. In other words, whilst the photograph mechanically repeats what can never be repeated existentially, the event itself is "never transcended for the sake of something else" [4].

Secondly, I am charmed by the posed element in the picture; that is to say the manner in which both girl and elephant invent new bodies and voluntarily transform themselves in advance into images, thereby lending themselves to the game of selfhood and representation. Today, in this digital age of smart phones, selfies and social networks, it's no big deal for people to be able to produce, manipulate and circulate their own image. But back in the early-1970s, when this picture was taken, there was still a great deal of nervous joy about having a photo taken and seeing the results (becoming the object of one's own gaze). And I think we see something of this innocence in this picture.
      
But still this isn't what makes me love the photo: there is still something else in it that provokes and seduces; something that Roland Barthes refers to in Camera Lucida as the punctum. For Barthes, the punctum is that element within the photo which produces an agitation of some kind and sends the viewer off on an imaginary adventure. It punctuates the conventional cultural elements that make up the photo's composition and which serve to produce a polite and predictable effect upon those who see it, reinforcing their views and tastes and beliefs about the world. And so, in this way, the punctum also pricks the viewer.

What pricks me then about this photo of an elephant and a girl and ultimately makes me love it so? There has to be some small detail which is there to be seen, but which initially escapes notice. Is it the bird flying overhead? No, it isn't that. Is it the lovely shape of the elephant's trunk as it embraces the young woman? No, it isn't that either. Nor is it the amusing look on her face, the fabric of her shorts, or the manner in which she knowingly grabs the elephant's tusk (described as an ivory reach around by my friend Z who has a talent for this kind of thing - providing apt descriptions that is, not symbolically jerking off elephants).  

No, the punctum is provided by the fact that the photographer has managed to catch the model's left hand at just the right degree of openness and happy abandonment; a few millimetres more or less and her body would no longer have been offered to the viewer, as to the beast, with benevolence and generosity.

It is doubtful that the photographer intended to do this. For as Barthes explains, the detail which pricks us is never strictly intentional and probably must not be so; "it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful; it does not necessarily attest to the photographer's art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object" [47].    

The punctum, then, is the unintended and unscripted detail; the off-centre element that disrupts the unary space of the photograph generated by what Barthes terms the studium and transports us as viewers into the realm of bliss (where objective interest gives way to that which is individually affecting).    


See: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, (Vintage, 2000). 
      

Fruity Shit

According to Lawrence, writing in one of his better known verses, it is the secretive fig that tells us most about the mystery of female flesh and the manner in which it too, having over-ripened, bursts apart showing crimson through the purple slit.

For according to Lawrence, the most beautiful women, just like the most beautiful plants, flower inwardly; unseen, and rejoicing in their covert nakedness. And they die only when they wilfully make an obscene display of their sex and sew together fig-leaves not to hide but to adorn their genitalia; affirming their delicious rottenness through moist, scarlet lips that laugh at the Lord's indignation.   

Lawrence thinks that these women have fatally forgotten that ripe figs won't keep. But mayn't it be that they simply don't care any longer about self-preservation, or submitting to models of femininity rooted in moral injunction? Perhaps they wish to make themselves attractive only to those for whom death is the most exquisite of all pleasures; men and women who dare to put their mouths to the crack and take out the flesh in one bite.

To live, that is to say, more as medlars and sorb-apples rather than secretive figs; with a touch of morbidity and sticky with the sweet essence of hell.

See: D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, (Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 280-84. 

 

Venus in Furs

Are you visiting Woman? Don't forget your whip! 

The masochistic lover  will often fall on his knees and passionately kiss the feet of the woman he adores as his mistress: she whose eyes sparkle with cruelty and who by virtue of her greater power is able to place a spiked heel nonchalantly on the neck of all mankind.

Whatever the truth of her actual status is irrelevant: fur transforms any woman wearing it into a superior creature; be she rich and wrapped in mink, or a simple peasant girl in clothes trimmed with rabbit skin (something that is forgotten in this graceless and charmless age of rubber and plastic).

The figure of the dominatrix obsesses, seduces, and captivates the masochist because she corresponds to his own refined tendencies and mirrors his particular nature; in discovering her, he learns how to paradoxically find and abandon himself.

If, initially, many women are reluctant to accept the adoration of a slave - finding the thought of their lover's submission as well as their own placement on a pedestal like a marble statue distasteful and degrading - nevertheless they know in their hearts that there is no equality or justice in the false virtue of love. 

And, having picked up the whip and experienced the grandeur of their own pale power sweeping over them, they are often more than happy to demonstrate precisely what it means to be at the mercy of a young and frivolous woman ... 

  

Reflections After a Visit to London Zoo

Photo of Guy the Gorilla by Wolf Suschitzky (1958)

When Georges Bataille visited London Zoo in the summer of 1927, he was overwhelmed to the point of ecstasy by the naked splendour of an ape's anal protuberance. In this obscene eruption of red raw flesh, smeared with excrement, he saw something that was not merely bestial, but radically opposed to all that is upright and human in a mankind whose own anal opening has secluded itself in a crack between the buttocks and seems destined never to bud or blossom.

As for me, I was delighted in a rather more innocent manner on my first visit to the Zoo as a young child by the sight of chimps taking tea with their keepers and thrilled most of all by the sounds and smells of wild animals caged at close quarters. 

For even in 1970, London Zoo remained a zoo in what is now thought of as the bad sense of the word: a place where big cats paced from side to side in cages with bars that you might stick your fingers through, sea-lions balanced balls on their noses whilst clapping their flippers together and elephants stood about in stone compounds with bales of hay, pissing and shitting, or waiting for a sticky bun to be thrown their way.

In other words, it was still a place where animals were openly on display for human amusement and no one cared too much about their welfare, nutritional needs, or positioning on the list of endangered species. Now, however, everything's very different: London Zoo prides itself as a site of conservation and the whole place feels like a moralizing and sentimental animal rehab rather than an animal madhouse.

Doubtless the resident creatures are better fed, better housed, and better looked after. But in subjecting them to the milk of human kindness and charity, they seem to have lost something which the earlier animals still managed to retain, despite being maltreated and often humiliated for our entertainment: something that I'm tempted to call their bestial authenticity and which Bataille thought of as their divine or sacrificial wonder.

And so, whilst Kumbuka may live the good life and make an excellent 'species ambassador', he's not a patch on Guy the Gorilla. 

Proust Questionnaire

Portrait of the Artist Amongst the Flowers (Athens, 2012)

Whilst I prefer anonymity and the art of discretion to the endless self-promotion indulged in by the Facebook generation who delight in their own digital presence, nevertheless we all like to play games of interrogation and confession such as the one that Marcel Proust famously twice took part in and to which his name is now permanently attached.

And so, for my own amusement and for the instruction of you all torpedophiles out there, here are my answers to the Proust questionnaire. Note that I've amalgamated some of the original 19th century questions with those that appear in the popular Vanity Fair version of the format (available to play on-line). I have also added one or two of my own. 


What is your favourite colour?
Sky-blue.
What is your favourite flower?
Daisy.
What is your favourite bird?
Sparrow.
Where and when were you happiest?
Harold Hill in the early 1970s.
What is your greatest fear?
Suffocating/drowning.
Which historical figure do you most admire?
Oscar Wilde.
Which living person do you most admire?
Larry David.
Who has exerted the most influence over your life?
Malcolm McLaren.
Where would you like to live?
In a hotel suite in New York.
What would you describe as an essential aspect of paradise?
Pinkberry.  
What makes you saddest?
Not being able to hold the petals on to a dying relationship. 
What faults do you find it easiest to forgive?
Those small imperfections that make beautiful.
Who is your favourite philosopher?
Nietzsche.
Who is your favourite novelist?
D. H. Lawrence.
Who is your favourite poet?
Sylvia Plath.
What is your favourite TV show?
Seinfeld.
What quality do you most admire in another person?
Their sense of style.
What is your proudest achievement?
Embracing spectacular failure over benign success.
What is your most marked characteristic?
Ironic detachment (indifference).
What is your principal defect?
Inability to be cruel even when kindness demands it.
What do you dislike most about your appearance?
How a far-away look of remoteness in my eyes has been replaced with a look of ever-present sadness.
What is it you hate the most?
Fundamentalism.
What is one skill you would like to possess?
To be able to play the piano.
How would you like to die?
Unnaturally and in defiance of God's judgement.
What is your motto?
Torpedo the Ark.

Der Schrei der Natur

Edvard Munch, The Scream, (Version I, 1893) 

There are still some who believe that the figure in Edvard Munch's most famous picture is the one doing the screaming, but this is to radically misunderstand the truly terrifying aspect of the work. For rather than being the one who cries, the agonized figure is in fact the one who hears the inhuman shriek that comes from existence itself. Thus the German title for the image, given by the artist, Der Schrei der Natur. 

Munch elaborates upon this idea in a diary entry made shortly before he produced the first of his four compositions with this title in 1893 and a revised, slightly more poetic rendition of this note is hand-painted onto the frame of the 1895 pastel version of the work:

"I was walking along the road with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red. I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence ... my friends walked on, as I stood there trembling with anxiety and sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

I immediately thought of this as news broke that NASA's Voyager I was greeted by a strangely disturbing howl as it entered interstellar space. Scientists tell us that what instruments on board the craft actually detected was the 'sound' of dense plasma waves or ionized gas vibrating and nothing to be concerned about (although they later confessed they found the recordings creepy and somewhat ghostly). 

Anyway, it's nice to once more discover life imitating art. And it's interesting to find out that whilst in space no one can hear you scream, in us, space itself can be heard to shriek. 

The Politics of the Face

The face has long held a privileged and determining place within Western metaphysics – as those who choose to veil, hide, or disguise the face are now beginning to discover. There is, we might say, an entire politics of the face.

We like to think that our face is individual and unique. But it isn’t. It’s essentially a type of social machine that overcodes not just the head, but the entire body, ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance. The smile and all our other familiar facial expressions are merely types of conformity with the dominant reality. It might be said that we love our faces with the same passion that slaves love their chains; who, after all, likes to lose face?

And yet Deleuze and Guattari insist that if men and women still have a destiny, it is to escape the face, becoming-imperceptible or clandestine in the process; something explored by D. H. Lawrence in the first version of his Lady Chatterley novel via the use of an item of clothing that has been made the focus of great concern in countries with a significant Muslim minority. One evening, Connie retires to her bedroom and places "a thick veil over her face, like a Mohammedan woman, leaving only her eyes" as she stands naked before her mirror, looking at her "slow, golden-skinned, silent body".

What is interesting is not merely that she is seeking out an impersonal self that might exist "apart from the face with all its complexities and frustrations and vulgarity!", but that Connie is prepared to become-minoritarian (non-White, non-Western, non-Christian) in order to do so. In other words, she is prepared to sacrifice her social status, her class and her ethnic and cultural identity, so that she might be effaced in some manner.

In the final version of the novel, however, Connie is no longer prepared to be quite so reckless. Wishing to retain her independence, she fears that effacement will result in becoming subservient. It is precisely this point that troubles those European politicians and commentators who have allowed themselves to become increasingly exercised over the wearing of a piece of cloth. Obviously, the debate relates not only to religion, but also to class, gender, and, perhaps most importantly, race. For as Deleuze and Guattari point out:

"The face is not universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks ... The face is Christ ... he invented the facialization of the entire body and spread it everywhere ..."

Thus the face is a culturally specific idea: it arises at the zero point of Western history, i.e. at the beginning of the Christian era. As Western moral culture has spread and exerted its power over the rest of the world, so too have other non-white, non-Christian, peoples been given faces and inscribed a place within the universal system. No one is allowed to deviate or to go unidentified, unsubjectified. No one is allowed the luxury of anonymity. In an important passage, Deleuze and Guattari write: 

"European racism ... has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation of someone else as Other ... Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavours to integrate nonconforming traits ... sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions ... sometimes erasing them ... From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime is not to be. ... Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out ..."

What this passage allows us to appreciate is that the issue over the veil is by no means a trivial one within white European culture: it might be articulated in the language of ‘women’s liberation’ and ‘human rights’, but what’s really at stake is the hegemony of a system that accords those freedoms, subjective identities, and happy white faces in the first place.

- D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (CUP, 1999), p. 18.
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996), pp. 176, 178.

Some Dark Solar Reflections on a Grey Morning in September

UV image of the sun taken by NASA

Everything starts with the sun. And everything will end with the sun. The sun is our alpha and omega. And God, we might say, is nothing other than a typical main sequence yellow dwarf star, approximately 93,000,000 miles away, composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Essentially a thermonuclear machine, the sun generates vast quantities of electromagnetic energy which is discharged into space without aim or design, providing the earth with all the light and heat needed to create and sustain that "feverish obscenity we call ‘life’".

Above all, the sun is big. In fact, the sun accounts for 99.8% of all mass in the solar system and, were it hollow, you could easily fit over a million earth-sized planets inside it. It’s the ultimate object and yet, ironically we can’t look at it without going blind or mad, or both. It’s like a woman’s cleavage: one peek and look away – that’s the rule; no staring. It’s different for flowers: they open to face the sun. But we must avert our eyes, for we are not flowers.

The sun is also pretty bright as stars go and has been shining brilliantly for around 4.6 billion years. And as it gets older, it gets hotter. In a billion years from now, it’ll be so bright and so hot that there’ll be no water left on the surface of the earth and life as we know it will be compromised. Eventually, the sun will enter its red giant phase and the earth will be engulfed entirely. It will then shrink back down in size to live out its days as a white dwarf. At such a time, as Nietzsche says, the clever animals who invented knowledge will be no more.

D.H. Lawrence, whose cosmology is idiosyncratic to say the least, is right in at least one respect; the sun is not simply a ball of blazing gas with a few spots. For it also has a dark and complex internal structure. And the visible surface, known as the photosphere, is by no means where the real action is taking place. It’s at the core where things really heat up and molecules of hydrogen are fused into helium at a rate of 620 million tons per second.

If you like, it is this invisible sun, this dark sun, that philosophically most interests. We are bored of Plato’s Ideal sun that serves only to empower and enlighten mankind; “a sun which is the very essence of purity, the metaphor of beauty, truth and goodness”. It’s the black sun of Lawrence, or the rotten sun of Bataille that induces solar delirium and acts of sacrificial madness, that most interests and disconcerts:

"From this second sun – the sun of malediction – we receive not illumination but disease ... The sensations we drink from the black sun afflict us as ruinous passion, skewering our senses upon the drive to waste ourselves."

- Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992).

This is the sun the Aztecs knew. And we might ask of Lawrence’s sun-women what they might demand in the end of those men who dared to love them: semen or blood? Would they bring forth children from their sun-opened wombs, or obsidian knives? For in belonging to the sun, they ultimately belong to death.

Lady Chatterley's Postmodern Lover

Contrary to Lawrence, to whose writings he makes direct reference, Foucault argues that the metaphysical notion of sex as the great clue to being cannot be allowed to pass without close critical examination.

For rather than simply being an ideal anchorage point that supports the various manifestations of what we term sexuality, sex, says Foucault, is a complex and tyrannical type of agency formed by regimes of power. The belief that it somehow eludes and resists power and resides deep within us over and above the material reality of bodies and possessing its own intrinsic properties and laws, is simply a piece of modern romance. 

Of course, this isn't to deny that the convenient fiction of sex hasn't proved to be extremely useful; or that it will cease to function in the immediate future. As Nietzsche pointed out, God's shadow is still to be seen long after his death. Thus, likewise, sex will continue to be thought of as a great causal principle long after novelists and lovers have abandoned older ideas of the soul as mere superstition.

For the fact is, a very great number of men and women have made their very intelligibility dependent upon their sex and it provides them with their most precious forms of identity. To such people, sex is something sacred and worthy of sacrifice. We find this form of sex worship in Lawrence; not least in his final novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover.

But it gets tedious, does it not? One is tired of having to treat sex with reverence and bored of the austere monarchy of sex ruling over all our thoughts and actions. Even Lawrence admits in an essay written shortly after the above novel, that there has been so much repetitious sexual activity that he longs for the peace that comes of fucking and the accomplishment of chastity.

And yet, having said that, he still can't help insisting that the vital task for a people to come is to realize sex in full consciousness. But what would that mean other than an acceleration of one of the most effective operating principles established by the deployment of sexuality; namely, the great desire for sex-in-the-head: "to have access to it, to discover it, to liberate it, to articulate it, to formulate it in truth" [156].

Despite the popular belief that there have been centuries of repressive silence and shame surrounding the subject, sex has in fact been the most obsessively talked about thing of all. What is peculiar about modern societies, suggests Foucault, is not that they kept sex locked away in darkness, "but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret" [35]. 

In other words, what really distinguishes the world we live in is a polymorphous and increasingly pornographic incitement to discourse about sex. Those who are genuinely interested in libidinal pleasures might do best not to naively call for freedom or vainly attempt to extract further confessions from a shadow, but show how sex is - and has always been - a purely speculative element within the historical process of human subjectification.  

In a postmodern future - that is to say, in a time after the orgy - people will be unable to fathom our sex mania. And they will smile, says Foucault, when they recall that there were once a people who believed that in sex resided a truth "every bit as precious as the one they had already demanded from the earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought" [159].


See Michel Foucault; The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 1998).