Cinema Botanica (An Introduction to the World of Plant Porn)

Cinema Botanica, by Jonathan Keats (2009) 

As a floraphile, I have a certain interest in and admiration for the work of American artist and experimental philosopher, Jonathan Keats; particularly his attempt to create a Cinema Botanica that incorporates a pornography for house plants and suburban shrubs and bushes. 

I find it amusing that whilst the majority of people who like to look after plants feel they are doing their bit if they remember to water regularly and perhaps administer an occasional drop of Baby Bio, Keats has expressed his concern that plants in a domestic environment might be bored and in need of entertainment designed to cater for their tastes and desires. 

And so he has filmed explicit scenes of floral pollination by honeybees, using specialized techniques developed for organisms that whilst lacking eyes, are nevertheless sensitive to light and shade. These edited but uncensored scenes are then projected directly onto the foliage. For human beings, there is very little to observe other than a silent flickering of light and so their enjoyment is strictly limited. However, as Keats points out, Cinema Botanica was developed for the titillation of the plants and not those who tend them.

Note: Cinema Botanica was screened in San Francisco at the Roxie Theater on October 1st, 2009, as part of Arse Elektronika, the world's foremost sex and technology festival, organized by the international art and theory collective, monochrom, founded in 1993, in Vienna, by Johannes Grenzfurthner. 

For further details, see Of Intercourse and Intracourse, ed. Johannes Grenzfurthner, Guenther Friesinger, and Daniel Fabry, (RE/SEARCH, 2011), or visit the monochrom website: www.monochrom.at/english  

Nietzsche and Capitalism

Nietzsche's opposition to capitalism and his loathing of modern bourgeois society is present throughout his writings. In an early essay entitled 'The Greek State', for example, he argues that self-seeking, money-loving entrepreneurs and stateless corporate executives should be regarded as the enemy within, threatening as they do the stability and welfare of the community. 

Like Marx, Nietzsche is concerned by the manner in which the market determines the value of everything; including the value of all other values. The consequence of this is not only that all things become commodified and given price tags, bar codes, and registered trade marks, but that everything becomes permissible - providing, of course, that it's economically viable and can generate profit. Thus it is that, within liberal society, all types of commercial exchange and all modes of conduct are discreetly sanctioned; including those that many advocates of free trade like to publicly condemn and make illegal, but do nothing to actually prevent.

Like Marx, Nietzsche is concerned by the prospect of a world in which there is no connection between people other than shared greed and a desire to succeed at any cost. Such a world would be one suspended in a state of systematic anarchy and nihilism; a world in which an aggressive philistinism would effectively cancel out the possibility of culture as he conceives of it in a classical sense. 

The permanent substratum of money under everything in the modern world causes Nietzsche to experience a feeling of ugly disillusion; he rejects liberalism and democracy as forms of political degeneracy. As for the equality of opportunity that is said to be opened up by capitalism, he dismisses this as merely the freedom to buy and sell one another in a universal slave market. 

As an alternative, Nietzsche advocates a strong model of volksgemeinschaft that rests upon a bond of trust formed between rulers and ruled and an agreed series of duties and obligations. If this fails to guarantee the rights of the private individual, it will, he says, at least ensure the production of a small number of sovereign men and women and allow for cultural greatness (which is something other than material and scientific progress).

Of course there are problems with Nietzsche's thinking here as elsewhere; his views on politics, culture and society are never fully developed and often in need of radical revision and recontextualization. But one thing is surely clear: Zarathustra hates shopkeepers and there is nothing - neither property rights nor human rights - given to us by liberalism which fully compensates for what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the "meanness and vulgarity of existence that haunts democracies ... The ignominy of the possibilities of life that we are offered".

See Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, (Verso, 1996), pp. 107-08.   

Sensitive Hands on a Cyclops

Eric Drass: Nietzsche and the Horse (2011)
www.saatchionline.com

Pity in a man of knowledge seems ludicrous, says Nietzsche. Indeed, it can even tip a philosopher into madness and make them fling their arms round the neck of an old carthorse, causing a public commotion.

He should, of course, have known better: for Nietzsche warned repeatedly against the non-egotistical instincts and singled out the Christian virtue of pity as the most fundamentally dangerous of all such feelings; something that weakens the individual who surrenders to it and ultimately fails to benefit the one who is the object of their pity.

Pity, says Nietzsche, is anti-life: for pity attempts to preserve what is ripe for destruction or belongs in the knacker's yard. It is the great seduction into nihilism; the most sublime form of decadence. And yet one can't help loving Nietzsche for attempting to protect some nag from cruelty; for ultimately being just a little allzumenschliche and displaying a feminine incapacity to remain a passive spectator when confronted by the suffering of a fellow creature.

Becoming-hard like the diamond, does not mean becoming an insensitive moron who knows nothing of kindness or the politeness of the heart; rejecting the moral ideal of pity does not mean one should not feel compassion or sympathy in the noble sense. If it did, one would hardly bother to read Nietzsche.

O Superman

 Atanas Botev: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2004)

Nietzsche's great concept of the Übermensch remains something to ponder and to play with. But there are still those who just don't get it and insist on believing that the overman is merely a higher type of human being - a tendency that has not been helped by the unfortunate and misleading English translation of the original German term as 'superman'.

Thus, amongst our transhumanist friends for example, we still find those who naively think of the idea exclusively in terms of genetic engineering and contrived evolutionary advance. But the metaphysical, moral and material overcoming of man is absolutely not the same thing as his biological self-preservation and enhancement.

To be fair, Zarathustra doesn't help matters by initially speaking about worms and apes and describing man as a rope fastened between animal and Übermensch. But he is later at pains to point out that his primary concern is not with what might or what should succeed mankind in the sequence of species and that his teaching is not a variety of Darwinism.

What then is the concept of the Übermensch all about?

For me, the best reading is developed in the work of Michel Foucault in terms of forces and forms; the latter defined as a compound of relations between the former. In this interpretation, our humanity is understood as a non-predetermined form which results when forces internal to ourselves as a species (such as imagination and memory) enter into a historical relationship with certain external forces (be they natural, artificial or virtual).

Thus Man - with a capital M and by which we mean the hu-man - has not always existed and will not exist forever. Our humanity is a contingent form and as internal and external forces as well as the relations between them change, so our form changes. This is why Foucault famously writes of Man being nothing but a face drawn in the sand that is destined to be erased by the incoming tide.

The Übermensch is thus simply another word for these external forces: the sea which receives us; the lightning that licks us with its tongue; the madness with which we might be cleansed. In other words, it is that which frees the life within us and reconfigures form in a manner that is not only posthuman, but genuinely transhuman and inhuman. 
   

Zarathustra and the Nightingale

One has to speak with thunder and heavenly fireworks to feeble and dormant senses, says Zarathustra.

If we interpret this injunction in a generous manner, it can be understood to mean that Nietzsche is interested in constructing a poetic post-metaphysical language that will enable the individual to break free from received conceptual schema and the moral-linguistic conventions of grammar and thereby find new ways of thinking and feeling. 

But, I have to say, it does sound a wee bit fascistic and shouty. Or, in a word, Wagnerian. The sort of thing that Dietrich Eckart might have had in mind when he created the Nazi battle slogan Deutschland Erwache!   

It also anticipates Heidegger, who claims in Being and Time that we must rediscover some form of primordial language from which to assemble a vocabulary of elementary terms that authentically speak Dasein. Philosophy's ultimate task, he says, is to preserve the force of these words and prevent them from being enfeebled and flattened within the common understanding.

I have to confess, there was a time when I found this kind of thing seductive if never entirely convincing: I wanted to believe that there was a universal (though secret) litany of magical words, letters, and phonemes that might somehow tear up the foundations of the soul and shatter eardrums and law tables alike, but I was never quite able to do so.

And what prevented me from embracing this mytho-religious idea of language was the following passage from Lawrence's Sketches of Etruscan Places:

"And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion, the nightingale will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup."

- Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis, (CUP, 1992), p. 36.

Why the Internet is a 21st Century Tower of Babel

Surely one of the more shocking episodes in the Old Testament (from which there are many to choose) is described in Genesis 11 and concerns the building by humanity and destruction by God of the Tower of Babel. For those of you unfamiliar with this passage, but too lazy to Google it, here it is, in full, with some very slight modifications made to the text as it appears in the edition of the Bible cited:

"At this time the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Babylonia and settled there. 

      They said to each other, 'Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly.' They used these bricks instead of stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.  

      But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that men were building. And he said, 'If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us confuse their language so they will not understand each other.'

      So the Lord scattered mankind once more over all the earth and their attempt to build a great city was abandoned. That is why it was called Babel - because the Lord confounded the language of the world."

- The Holy Bible, New International Version, (The Bible Societies in Association with Hodder and Stoughton, 1984).

From this we certainly get a further insight into the psychopathology of the Almighty. Not to make too fine a theological point of this, it's clear that God, like all tyrants, is a cunt: petty, paranoid, violent and vindictive.

His concern here is unambiguous; namely, that a united mankind, speaking and working as one, using materials of their own invention to build a safe and secure home for themselves post-flood, are empowered by their own technological ingenuity and feel an element of pride in their own mortal achievements.

Clearly, God can't have that. That is to say, he can't allow a self-sufficient humanity to threaten his omnipotence, or to realise its full potential as a species. And so, quite deliberately, he sows discord and confusion amongst a people where once there was fraternity and mutual understanding.

Of course, it might be argued that it's a good thing to generate cultural and linguistic difference. Though such an argument, when it comes from the mouths of the faithful who usually insist monomaniacally upon Oneness, seems ironic to say the least. In fact, anyone who reads Genesis 11 and comes to the conclusion that it shows us a God who is pro-difference and plurality is being more than a little disingenuous. For what it really betrays is the ugly and divisive nature of religion as it reinforces tribalism, nationalism, sectarianism; things that have caused immense misery in the modern world.     

Happily, in this digital age, we have decided to defy this judgement of a dead deity and build not a tower of bricks via which we might storm an imaginary heaven, but a global electronic network via which we might instantly connect and communicate with friends, family, and strangers all over the world, exchanging images and ideas, important news and mundane chit-chat.

Ultimately, the Good Book has been defeated by Facebook ...
     

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 ...