Four Legs Good: In Memory of Lisa Bufano

Lisa Bufano (1972 - 2013)
 Photo by Gerhard Aba

www.lisabufano.com

Part Queen Anne table, part Louise Bourgeois spider, part Hans Bellmer doll, American performance artist Lisa Bufano remained at all times completely fabulous and wholly inspiring to those with or without prosthetic limbs. 

Born in Connecticut in 1972, Miss Bufano lost both legs below the knee (as well as her fingers) due to a bacterial infection at the age of twenty-one. As a bilateral amputee, she could have chosen to just sit on her arse and weep - as I suspect I would have done - but, instead, this former child gymnast and go-go dancing college student, decided to bravely explore the freaky possibilities opened up by disease and disability for corporeal experimentation.

Fascinated by a combination of elements that included the creepy, the cute, and the erotic, Bufano developed an uncanny valley aesthetic that was not only deeply disturbing at times, but also very beautiful and strangely seductive. Admired by the LGBT community for her work to do with sexual identity, she was also a pin-up for acrotomophiles and photographed by Gerhard Aba who has made a career from taking pictures of female amputees.  

Ultimately, despite her own terror and discomfort in being looked at, Bufano found it empowering to be a model and performer who used her body to produce a magnetic tension between herself and the audience. Exaggerating her physical difference and celebrating abnormality of form, she left us all open-mouthed and persuaded that whilst two legs aren't bad, in some contexts four can be even better.

On the Need for a New Enlightenment

"One should never miss an opportunity to celebrate the Enlightenment ..." 

Christopher Hitchens

 

What is Enlightenment? For over two centuries this has been a question central to modernity; one which philosophy has, according to Foucault, never quite been able to answer, but never quite able to ignore either. From Kant and Hegel, through Nietzsche to Habermas and, indeed, Foucault himself, hardly any serious thinker has failed to confront this question, directly or indirectly.

And still today, the question was ist Aufklärung continues to resonate; in fact, it might even be said to have renewed urgency in a world that some describe (either with triumphant glee or horrified concern) as not only postmodern, but post-secular; i.e. a world that seems to be creeping at pace towards a new age of fundamentalist stupidity, having rejected the exit from superstition and prejudice offered by reason.

Having, briefly, dared to think and to question, we are once more asked in all seriousness to place faith in those who claim spiritual authority and would rule by divine right. All that social, cultural, and political upheaval and transformation in Europe and the New World - all that great work by men of science and men of letters to liberate themselves from the moral absurdities and disgusting bigotries of religion - and we end up in 2014 having to worry about offending the sensibilities of those who call for the implementation of sharia law.

It's deeply depressing to say the least. But it's also why one is obliged, as an atheist and anti-theist, to fight once more on all the old grounds: Marx was right, criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism and they key to all freedom. To have done with the judgement of God is always the ultimate goal.

But, in order to achieve this objective, we need a new way of thinking and feeling, of acting and behaving - i.e. what the Greeks called an ethos - that in some manner refers back to the complex historical events that took place in the 18th century and which became known as the Enlightenment. 

This is not, as Foucault points out, a matter of subscribing slavishly to some kind of doctrine, or resurrecting a facile model of humanism; rather, it's the permanent reactivation of a philosophically critical and experimental attitude that interrogates everything and allows nothing to pass as self-evidently true (not even the Rights of Man).               

    

All Hail the New Flesh! (On D. H. Lawrence's Impure Pictures)

D. H. Lawrence: The Rape of the Sabine Women (1928)

D. H. Lawrence's great faith is in the flesh, to which he makes an insistent appeal throughout his writings. 

His paintings too, as critic Keith Sagar rightly points out, were a bold - not entirely successful - attempt to capture something of the meaty reality of the body and to make manifest the invisible flows that model and shape the flesh, sometimes cruelly, via a non-representational depiction of their effects. 

But Sagar is mistaken to think of this, as he does, in terms of an art of human anatomy. For in attempting to paint the fleshiness of the body and its forces, Lawrence does everything he can do to paint out those personal and ideal (all too human) aspects which overcode the corpo/real and establish the familiar hierarchical structures of the organism.

Lawrence does not wish to reduce his figures to the level of optical cliché; he is not trying to capture a likeness! Rather, he's attempting to express an objective (albeit intuitional) perception of substance. His painting is therefore, if nothing else, consciously post-Impressionist; a refusal, as he puts it, to be transmuted into the purity of light and colour.   

On occasion, it might be said (somewhat generously) that Lawrence almost pulls off what it is he believes only Cézanne amongst the moderns has achieved and what he terms appleyness - that is to say, the partial revealing of the thingliness of the thing, be it a piece of fruit, a wooden table, or the body of a naked woman.

However, at other times his less-than-subtle attempt to rub our faces in the obscene beauty of the flesh via a continuous parade of ample breasts, round buttocks, and giant limbs simply becomes tiring. Only one of his paintings is called Close-Up, but many of them lack what is usually considered appropriate perspective and their shocking character lies precisely in this as much as the actual content (as Lawrence was well aware).

His Rape of the Sabine Women, for example, ironically fails for much the same reason that he suggests Van Gogh's landscapes fail; too wilful and too much of a surging assault upon our sensibilities. Of course there's a certain comic aspect to this particular picture (made clear by the alternative title suggested by Lawrence: A Study in Arses), but this unfortunately fails to compensate for its somewhat repulsive subjectivity. 

This is not to say that painting shouldn't be joyous and even a little vulgar. Nor is it to argue that there is no place for ugliness and obscenity in art. Indeed, as Deleuze points out, it is never enough simply to reveal the flesh, one must ultimately push it in the direction of deformation and disfiguration, producing monsters and abstraction - and monsters of abstraction - in the process.

The Omphalos Hypothesis

The Omphalos hypothesis - named after the title of a mid-19th century work written by Philip Henry Gosse which proposed, in keeping with a biblical time scale of events, that God created the earth at some point within the last 10,000 years - is one that some creationists in our own time still bizarrely cling to.

Indeed, not only have they accepted Gosse's argument that natural indicators of a significantly more ancient world history, such as fossils, were faked by God, but they have also extended the argument to cover cosmic phenomenon - such as light originating from far-off stars and galaxies - that suggest the universe to be many millions of years old.

Despite the desperately insane aspect to Gosse's notion - which, as Stephen Jay Gould points out, is a classic example of an utterly untestable theory - I have to say I like the idea that the world is fundamentally false and based on appearance; that God, the father of all Truth, is also a great deceiver.

 

So too do I like Bertrand Russell's sceptical attempt to push the Omphalos hypothesis to its logical extreme, by proposing a five-minute hypothesis which argues that the universe could, in fact, have  just come into existence, with all human memory, all signs of history and all ancestral evidence included.

Oh those young earthers! In attempting to untie the geological knot, they have entangled themselves in all kinds of foolishness. It's cruel to mock them, but almost impossible not to: Forgive them Father, for they know not what they say ...

Fascism May Be Fascinating, But Do Not Become Enamoured of Power

Designed by Hugo Boss, who was an active party member and not simply a collaborator with the Nazi regime, the SS uniform was, as Susan Sontag writes, "stylish, well-cut, with a touch (but not too much) of eccentricity". 

Close-fitting and all black in colour, the uniform suggested not only malevolent authority and the legitimate exercise of violence, but also the aestheticization and eroticization of power. It was an outfit designed to make its wearer not only feel superior, but look supremely beautiful. 

Little wonder then that this menacing but seductive uniform - complete with various items of regalia, cap, gloves, and boots - has continued to have a place within both popular culture and the pornographic imagination; filmmakers, fetishists, and fashionistas, for example, are united in their fascination for this ultimate fascist ensemble.       

But of course, as Sontag also points out, most people who fantasise sexually about being dressed to kill and go a little weak at the knees when they see an SS uniform are not signifying their approval of what the Nazis did ("if indeed they have more than the sketchiest idea of what that might be"). They are simply interested in the staging of their own desire and the acting out of their own fears and obsessions.

And perhaps this is a good thing. For perhaps, as Foucault said, in order to rid our hearts and dreams of fascism it is necessary to say and do shameful, ugly things not because we believe in their truth, but so that we won't have to believe in their truth any longer. Perhaps the aim is not ecstasy, but innocence; the fantasy is not death, but freedom (from that which causes us to love power and revere authority in the first place).

Note: Susan Sontag's essay, 'Fascinating Fascism', from which I quote in the above post, can be found online at: www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/feb/06/fascinating-fascism/

The Joy of Hypertext

Hypertext Book Sculpture by Stephen Doyle

Why is it that people enjoy surfing between channels on TV and endlessly playing with the remote? The answer is because they are not concerned with what's on - but only with what's on next. 

Similarly, when reading online the pleasure is no longer in the content as such, but in the euphoric process of following and creating links. For whilst one rarely bothers looking at footnotes or checking references when reading a conventional work that exists in a traditional format, when reading a text online these things often matter more than the main body of writing; they certainly matter more than authorial intent. Indeed, the best ideas are frequently born not through loyalty, but through thinking of another when reading the one you love. Or, as Roland Barthes once said, the pleasure of the text is infidelity.

But what is text? Text is something outside of language even though it consists of language; something which exteriorizes the world's jargons "without taking refuge in an ultimate jargon" [1]. In fact, text liquidates the very idea of a primal metalanguage behind which booms the voice of God. For text has no soul or mystique and often undermines even its own canonical structures, such as lexicon and syntax. We engage with text like a fly buzzing around the room - suddenly zipping here, there, and everywhere in a kind of promiscuous frenzy.     

Radically democratic, text breaks down traditional boundaries and thereby enables greater intellectual contact and cooperation. As genre distinctions become meaningless, we are left only with text as a signifying practice; one that can be demonstrated and displayed on-screen as a movement of discourse that cuts across and links up an infinite number of works and is experienced as a shared activity of production.

For Barthes, text thus takes thinking to the limits of its own rationality. It doesn’t mark a dumbing-down, as some critics suggest, so much as the becoming paradoxical of language and the deferral of meaning. Text is played – like a pinball machine, or a musical instrument – beyond filiation or the search for origins. For the text is an orphan. And the text grows not by vital expansion or organic development, like a living thing, but rather as a network of temporary alliances and artificial constructions which extend as a result of a combinatory systematic. 

In other words, the text-as-network is an acentred, anarchic, and non-coordinating system that dissolves and refuses any division between a field of reality and its digital or virtual recreation.  

Perhaps not surprisingly, this Barthesian notion of text-as-network has been as influential outside of literary studies as it has within it. No more so than within the world of information technology and computer studies. The term hypertext, coined by Ted Nelson in 1963 to refer to a non-sequential way of organizing information, may not be Barthes's, but many commentators see hypertext as the digital embodiment of the latter's theory. For it too allows the individual to exercise choice and to find his or her pleasure by being playful with units of information (including images and sounds and not just the written word), chasing from link to link not in search of some final meaning or ultimate Truth, but simply for the sheer fun of it.

Of course, it might be asked - and raised as a concern - if this doesn’t result in a certain solipsism; for if each body is unique and has its own idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, how can we ever communicate with others? Isn't the joy of hypertext a masturbatory and profoundly anti-social pleasure?

The answer, of course, is that even the most creative and self-contained individuals do not form their own private languages expressive only of unique individual experiences. Communication with others remains (even in a virtual realm) a shared act, shaped by history. For as Wittgenstein once pointed out, even when describing our most personal and private of feelings our language is tied to social phenomena at every point.

And so hypertextual joy does not spell the end of society. In fact, perhaps it marks the birth of a new type of society, based upon a non-essential solidarity; a society in which members have very little in common but consent to "remain silent and polite when confronted  by pleasures or rejections which they do not share"

Barthes names this immanent utopia the Society of the Friends of the Text, but perhaps we might also think of it as a democracy of virtual touch. 

Notes: 

1: Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 30.

2: Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, (Papermac, 1995), p. 117. 

Lady Chatterley's Body

Photo of Kate Moss by Tim Walker for
Love Magazine, issue 9 (S/S, 2013)

According to a recent tweet from Lawrence scholar Catherine Brown, Wetherspoon's are opening a new pub in Eastwood to be called The Lady Chatterley Arms. I've no objection to this, but think it ironic that the pub is to be named after the one part of her anatomy that Lawrence didn't detail (or fetishize) in his descriptions of Connie. 

We know, for example, she had a ruddy complexion, with soft brown hair, big blue eyes (often full of tears) and a slow, soft voice with an underlying wilfulness. We know too she was golden-skinned and if her navel was rather withdrawn and sad-looking, nevertheless her waist retained its flexibility and her loins their voluptuous curve. 

We also know that whilst Connie wasn't tall and had a somewhat stocky build, she nevertheless had a good figure: she wasn't fat, as Lawrence non-too-subtly puts it. That said, neither was her physique quite fashionable. 

Further, despite having a certain fluid proportion, her body had somehow failed to ripen; her breasts were rather small and drooping pear-shaped, her belly somewhat slack and meaningless. Her thighs, meanwhile, were heavy and inert, whilst her back, her hips and buttocks had lost their distinction and were no longer so gay-looking or sensitive in outline as in her Dresden days (i.e. before her marriage to Clifford).

Nevertheless, these were still the parts of her that seemed most alive; the beautiful, long-sloping hips and the buttocks with their round, heavy contour so full of female energy. It was just the front of her body that made her feel miserable, as it seemed to be making the leap straight from girlhood to old age, without ever knowing its mature perfection. Depressed by this realisation, Connie dramatically loses her appetite and briefly becomes as thin as a rail, with dark shadows under her eyes.

Her affair with Mellors, however, restores her body to its full health and vitality. For he finds her body lovely to touch and to marvel at and this makes her feel beautiful and desirable. Her thighs and belly and hips all perk up and she feels a sort of dawn come into her flesh; even her breasts begin to tip and to stir once more.

Mellors particularly likes her soft, golden-brown pubic hair (in which he ties forget-me-nots) and her silky inner-thighs. And, if he is to be believed, not only does she have the nicest of all arses, but she's also the best bit o' cunt left on earth. 

We know then a good deal about Lady Chatterley's body - perhaps even more than we know about her character. But, as I said earlier, we know nothing about her arms ...

On the Myth of Atlas

 Atlas, by Lee Lawrie (1937)

One of the most depressing and hateful works of art in the world is Lee Lawrie's seven ton, four-story high, art deco bronze sculpture of Atlas, which stands in front of the Rockefeller Centre in midtown Manhattan. The work, installed in 1937, depicts the ancient Greek Titan holding the heavens forever separate from the earth upon which he stands (it's a common misconception that he supports the latter on his mighty shoulders).

This eternal task or burden - assigned to Atlas as a punishment for his role in the war of the Titans against the gods of Olympus - makes my back ache just to think about it. I'm reminded of how Lawrence once joked that, similarly, it was time for Christ to come down from his Cross and give his poor arms a rest. I must confess, therefore, that the idea of Atlas having done with the judgement of Zeus - of simply shrugging his shoulders and walking away in an act of titanic irresponsibility - very much appeals. 

But, of course, for Ayn Rand and her objectivist-libertarian followers, this sculpture symbolizes something rather different. Atlas is not understood as a primeval deity or immortal giant, but as a more contemporary and more bourgeois figure; namely, a capitalist superman. And the conceit is that such a figure supports an ungrateful humanity on his back through his hard work, entrepreneurial genius and his tax dollars. If he were to simply shrug and shut-up shop, then as the protagonist of Rand's appalling fantasy John Galt says, the engine of the world would grind to a halt.  

This, of course, is an outrageous inversion of the fact that it is he and his tiny parasitic class who feed off the labour and the lives of the vast majority. The rich and powerful think they stand prior to, apart from, and above the rest of humanity, refusing to see how their own success is entirely dependent upon an intimate network of support (is a social phenomenon and not an individual accomplishment).

It's because the Randroids have so completely taken over the Atlas myth and made it their own that I find Lawrie's sculpture so compromised and objectionable: that and its fascistic execution in the first place.

Ayn Rand: The Mme. Blavatsky of Wall Street

Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

Any figure whose work is scorned and amusingly dismissed by both Dorothy Parker and Lisa Simpson probably doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. And yet, depressingly, Ayn Rand continues to be read by a large number of people, many of whom seem to genuinely regard her as a visionary philosopher rather than a novelist of what Christopher Hitchens described as transcendent awfulness.

Her big idea of Objectivism asserts that rational self-interest should determine all human relations. In practice, this means an unqualified acceptance of laissez-faire economics and idealizing the heroic individual fighting for freedom and human greatness against the State and its regulations, as well as the hordes of resentful parasites (some of whom have facial hair) reliant upon his tax dollars in the form of welfare handouts and publicly-funded programmes of education and healthcare.

Not surprisingly, therefore, she has exerted a significant and somewhat sinister (almost cultish) influence on a number of conservative and libertarian figures; her first major literary success, The Fountainhead (1943), serving in Miss Simpson's words as "a bible for right-wing losers".

As for her fourth and final effort in the field of fiction, Atlas Shrugged (1957), considered by many to be her magnum opus, well, I cannot better Miss Parker's brilliant review which concludes: "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force".

I'm sorry Antoine, but your affection for this woman compromises my affection for you ... 

Why Atheism is a Non-Precarious Way of Living

 Ahn Jun: Self-Portrait (2011)

ahnjun.com

There's an irony in the fact that those who seek moral and existential certainty often pray to God to provide such; just as there's an irony in the fact that the Italian atheist philosopher Federico Campagna posits a concept of precariousness (or what he terms precarity) as part of his radical ethics and politics; or rather as a postmodern temporal condition which makes such an ethics and a politics both possible and necessary. 

In the case of believers seeking the assurance of truth - i.e. some form of solid foundation upon which to build and thus to find shelter and safety - the irony is that they make this entirely dependent upon God's will and God's grace; something to be obtained by entreaty. In other words, it's contingent upon the divine favour of an often unpredictable and spiteful deity who provides no guarantee whatsoever that mortal prayers will be answered.

The religious quest for certainty thus paradoxically places the faithful in an entirely precarious position. And so, despite what Nietzsche thought, living dangerously seems to involve living with and not without God.

The irony of an atheist philosopher subscribing to a concept of precariousness is thus also exposed. For not only is it essentially a religious notion, but it robs atheism of its one great advantage; namely, that it doesn't allow for doubt or uncertainty. As an atheist, you can know for sure that your prayers will never be answered and that there's no mercy, no justice, and no salvation.

(And you can know for sure what happens if you skip too close to the edge and fall from a tall building ...)   

Note: those interested in Federico Campagna's thinking might like to read The Last Night: Anti-Work, Atheism, Adventure, (Zero Books, 2013).