Intimacy Issues

After a recent presentation at the 6/20 Club in which I discussed the seductive and disturbing character of Kawabata's sleeping beauties, I was informed by a woman who believes passionately in love, humanity, and her rights as a sexual subject, that my interest in object-oriented ontology and objectum sexuality betrays the fact that I have underlying intimacy issues. 

This has amused me all week: for the fact is that rather than manifesting an all-too-familiar psychological disorder, I'm advancing a far more radical philosophical objection to the very concepts of interiority, depth, and essential being, of which intimacy is but one aspect.

In brief, Vivienne, I don't think we have an authentic inner self in need of discovery, expression, or liberation; I don't think we have a soul to be saved, a sex to be proud of, or a psyche that is mysteriously unconscious and revealed only in dreams and secret desires in need of analytic interpretation by a therapist. 

To put this in even briefer Nietzschean terms, I remain, madam, superficial out of profundity ...

 

Ichthyophilia

Helena Bonham Carter with her fishy Valentine

 Photo copyright Camera Press/John Swannell/Fish Love 

English actress Helena Bonham Carter has apparently exchanged her fish phobia for something of a fish fetish, as evidenced by the above photo in which she poses nakedly embracing a big-eyed tuna. 

This is such a rare and unusual form of love that the only other celebrity I can think of rumoured to enjoy romancing - rather than merely consuming - denizens of the deep is Troy McClure whom readers may remember from such wildlife films as Earwigs - Eew! and Man Vs Nature: The Road to Victory.

Ms Bonham Carter was persuaded to strip and lend her support to a campaign by the Blue Marine Foundation that calls for the establishment of ocean reserves, in order to protect endangered species of fish and other marine life, by her friend and fellow thespian Greta Scacchi; someone who herself has recently been photographed naked with a large cod [click here].

It's a good thing, I think, to care for fish (and not only so that we might then catch them and eat them). And it's a good thing also to challenge the prejudice and stupidity surrounding human-nonhuman sexual relationships - so well done to all parties involved in the fish love project. 

For more information on the BMF campaign please visit: www.bluemarinefoundation.com  

And for many more pictures of nude celebrities with fish and other sea creatures - including stunning images by Rankin of Lily Loveless with an octopus and Lizzy Jagger astride a yellow-fin tuna - visit: www.fishlove.co.uk

 

Birthday Musings of an Aquarian

It is very easy to sneer at astrology, but perhaps the ancient heavens of the zodiac continue to offer us what D. H. Lawrence describes as a truly imaginative experience and the entry into another world of being; one that is vital and meaningful, even if it is a world of which our astronomers and physicists know nothing. Perhaps.

At any rate, without quite feeling the ecstatic sense of joy that Lawrence experiences when released into this other world of mytho-cosmic splendour, I have always been pleased that I was born under the sign of Aquarius like many of the figures I have at one time or other loved and admired (from Mozart to Malcolm McLaren).

However, although feeling blessed to be a child of the 11th House, I have never been very happy that Aquarius is symbolized by a water-bearer; certainly not when other signs of the zodiac have marvellous starry beasts to call upon and find totemic satisfaction in. Who wants someone with a jug, when there are lions, bulls, goats and even crabs on offer?

It doesn't even help to discover - as I have only recently discovered - that this someone with a jug happens to be the iconic gay figure of Ganymede; i.e. a beautiful boy who, when all's said and done, is but an eternal servant and sexual plaything of the gods, offering not only libation but soft lips, nimble fingers, and strong thighs.

Now, whilst I've no moral objection to the Greek social practice of paiderastía, I don't like the idea of any mortal down on their knees before the divine - particularly when they have been kidnapped, raped and forced into slavery.  

  

D. H. Lawrence's Dendrophilia

DHL sitting under an olive tree in Italy (1926)

Lawrence is very fond of trees and there are many trees in his writings. In fact, at times, he feels there are too many trees crowding round and staring at him, interfering with his attempts to think about subjects other than trees (such as human babies and the complicated story of their unconscious life). 

The trees, he says, seem so much bigger and stronger in life than we are; so overwhelming in their silence and rather sinister arboreal presences. Lawrence writes, for example, of the magnificent cruelty or barbarous nature of the huge fir trees that grow in the Black Forest:

"It almost seems I can hear the slow, powerful sap drumming in their trunks. Great full-bodies trees, with strange tree-blood in them, soundlessly drumming."

He continues:

"Suppose you want to look a tree in the face? You can't. It hasn't got a face. You look at the strong body of a trunk; you look above you into the matted body-hair of twigs and boughs; you see the soft green tips. But there are no eyes to look into, you can't meet its gaze."

Thus it's pointless staring at a tree in an attempt to know it. All you can do is "sit among the roots and nestle against its strong trunk" in a form of insouciant tree worship and fantasise about becoming-tree, full of root-lust but completely mindless. 

If, at one time, he were frightened of the trees and felt them to be primeval enemies, now Lawrence says they are his "only shelter and strength" and that he is happy to lose himself amongst them and to be with them "in their silent, intent passion and great lust", feeding his soul with their non-human life and indomitable energy. He concludes this rather beautiful (and somewhat erotic) meditation on trees by saying:

"One of the few places that my soul will haunt, when I am dead, will be this. Among the trees here near Ebersteinburg ... I can't leave these trees. They have taken some of my soul."

But we should note, however, that Lawrence's trees - here, and most certainly in his poetry - are not simply natural phenomena; they are also ornamental figures of Gothic resistance forming part of an allegorical landscape that, as Amit Chaudhuri points out, "brings together the natural and the unnatural". 

Ultimately, Lawrence's thinking on trees (and flowers) owes more to Ruskin than to Wordsworth ...

Notes:

The quotations from Lawrence are from Chapter IV of Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). pp. 85-88.

The quote from Amit Chaudhuri is from D. H. Lawrence and 'Difference', (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 208.

Just Saying Something on Subjects and Objects

 

Cambridge Professor of Philosophy, Rae Langton, makes it very clear why she values people over objects. For whilst conceding that the former are a part of the phenomenal world of things, she insists that human beings (as subjects) have a uniquely rich inner life and a moral-rational capacity to make choices. To be an object, she writes, is to be something which isn't free; something that is stabilized and whose movements are all-too-predictable. She continues: 

"It is to be something incapable of the activities of knowledge, communication, love, respect. It is to be something that is merely a sensory appearance, something whose qualities are exhausted by how it can look, feel, sound, and taste to a perceiver. It is to be merely a body, something solid and extended in space. It is to be a tool, something whose value is merely instrumental, something which is a potential possession."

Obviously, as an object-oriented philosopher, I don't agree with this. For me, it's an anthropocentric conceit to believe that we belong to a superior ontological order to all other entities; be they organic or inorganic, natural or artificial, real or virtual objects. For me, our subjectivity is really just a peculiar way of being an object - much as life is simply a rare and unusual way of being dead (to paraphrase Nietzsche if I may). 

The question, I suppose, is why do so many thinkers like Rae Langton continue with this conceit? That is to ask, why do they continue to think of the object with such contempt and dogmatically privilege the position of the human subject?

Baudrillard, who has a far more interesting and philosophically provocative view of the object, provides us with a convincing explanation. Those who continue to support the fiction of an autonomous subject do so because it has "an economy and a history which is quite reassuring; it is the equilibrium between a will and a world ... the balancing principle of the universe". 

If we are more than mere objects, then we are not delivered up helplessly to a monstrous and chaotic universe of chance. Nor are we simply the unfortunate victims of surrounding forms or fascinating and fateful events that exist beyond our control.

In other words, to believe in ourselves as free-wheeling and free-willing subjects makes us feel safe and secure, as well as significant. That's comforting, but it's a lie. Perhaps a necessary lie that allows us to live and which it would be nihilistic to expose as such, but a lie nonetheless.

I'm just saying ...

Notes

Lines quoted from Rae Langton and Jean Baudrillard can be found in:

Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism, (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 329. 

Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski, (Pluto Press, 1999), p. 112.

Sleep and Dreams

D. H. Lawrence says some very amusing things about sleep and dreams in his brilliantly crackpot work of 1922, Fantasia of the Unconscious, which - following another sleepless night - I thought it might be interesting to re-examine here.

For Lawrence, sleep is a phenomenon that relates both to his cosmology and his thanatology; the moon being not only the centre of our individuality and the pole that governs nighttime activities, but a meeting place for cold, dead, angry souls. Each time we lie down to sleep, says Lawrence, we constitute within ourselves a body of death and this body of death is laid in line by the activities of the earth's magnetism or gravitation - what he terms the circuit of the earth's centrality: "It is this circuit which is busy in all our tissue removing or arranging the dead body of our past day."

In other words, for Lawrence, there is a kind of cleansing and terrestrial current moving its way through our nerves and our blood as we sleep; "sweeping away the ash of our days' spent consciousness towards one form or other of excretion". This earth-current, however, whilst an active force, is not strictly speaking a vital one; rather it is death busy in the service of life and which, as it sweeps, stimulates in the primary centres of consciousness "vibrations which flash images upon the mind". 

Somewhat surprisingly, these dream-images should not be a matter of any great concern to us. Indeed, Lawrence views them as purely arbitrary; "as disconnected and as unmeaning as the pieces of paper which the street-cleaners sweep into a bin fro the city gutters at night". They are not prophetic of the future, even if pregnant with the past. Dreams are merely "heterogeneous odds and ends of images swept together accidentally by the besom of the night-current, and it is beneath our dignity to attach any real importance to them". Lawrence continues:

"It is always beneath our dignity to go degrading the integrity of the individual soul by cringing and scraping among the rag-tag of accident  and of the inferior, mechanic coincidence and automatic event. Only those events are significant which derive from or apply to the soul in its full integrity. To go kow-towing before the facts of change, as ... fortune-readers and fatalists do, is merely a perverting of the soul's proud integral priority, a rearing up of idiotic idols and fetishes."

Having said that, Lawrence then concedes that there are in fact some dreams that matter. But this is only when something threatens us from the material world of death: "When anything threatens us from the world of death, then a dream becomes so vivid that it arouses the actual soul. And when a dream is so intense that it arouses the soul - then we must attend to it."

The knack is to distinguish these death-dreams that stimulate and haunt the soul, from the purely mechanical images that often result from some temporary material obstruction in the physical body; perhaps because we have eaten cheese before bedtime, or too many pancakes. 

Finally, Lawrence ends his short meditation on sleep and dreams with a warning against staying up late at night and not rising early enough in the mornings; the twin dangers that threaten us today, for we have, we moderns, "made the mistake of turning life inside out: of dragging the day-self into night, and spreading the night-self over into the day." This is a self-destructive form of evil; an impoverishment of the blood. Unless it's an afternoon nap - Lawrence speaks positively about a quick snooze after lunch; for this is just a necessary readjustment in the blood's chemical constitution and vibration.

But the long hours of morning sleep are very harmful and result in inertia and automatism; we get up feeling shattered before we have even done anything. Thus it is that:

"Every man and woman should be forced out of bed soon after the sun has risen: particularly the nervous ones. And forced into physical activity. Soon after dawn the vast majority of people should be hard at work. If not, they will soon be nervously diseased."

This may or may not be true. Either way, it's disappointing to observe how Lawrence ultimately uses his madly imaginative metaphysics to simply justify a conventional work ethic.      

See: D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (CUP, 2004).  

In an Age of Courtship Disorder

Kurt Freund (1914-1996)

Courtship disorder is a theory first put forward in the 1980s by Kurt Freund; a sexologist who, until then, was best known for his pioneering work in the field of phallometry or PPG.

According to the theory, certain paraphilias are best understood when viewed as related forms of aberrant courtship behaviour in human males. In other words, they should not be examined independently of one another as conditions in their own right, but rather as symptomatic of a single underlying syndrome. These paraphilias are voyeurism, exhibitionism, frotteurism, and biastophilia (or what Freund terms preferential rape) and they can be seen as anomalous expressions of the following species-typical courtship phases: 

(i) looking to find someone to love and making an initial appraisal of their suitability as a partner 

(ii) attempting to catch the eye of the one you fancy via pre-tactile interaction (smiling, flirting, etc.)    

(iii) becoming physically intimate (kissing, cuddling, petting, etc.) 

(iv) engaging, finally, in full sexual intercourse. 

Now, whether perverts with a penchant for the above paraphilias lack the skills to participate in what is often a long and sophisticated game of seduction played between would-be lovers - or simply lack the patience - I don't know.

It might even be that they regard conventional courtship rituals as a form of dishonesty and deceit and therefore see their own behaviour as an attempt to openly bypass social hypocrisy; cutting to the chase by, ironically, cutting out the chase. Again, I don't know.

However, it should be pointed out that their activities are not merely forms of impatience and anti-social behaviour, but also illicit and lacking in any consideration of those whom they perv upon non-consensually and - in the case of the paraphilic rapist - violently.

Having said that, it might be argued that within our pornified culture of Tinder, twerking, and Chatroulette, courtship disorder is now the new norm ... 

Auschwitz and the Question of Evil

Auschwitz by Tana Schubert (2014)

tana-jo.deviantart.com 

This week marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, allowing commentators in the news media to put on their most solemn faces, mouth a series of clichés and broadcast all-too-familiar images, thereby constructing a lazy moral narrative around a place and an event that demands and deserves far more than sanctimonious inanity. 

For a start, we need to face up to the fact that, as Baudrillard points out, the Nazi genocide was not the extermination of a people by evil, but, rather, the attempted extermination of evil by a people acting in the name of Love; the murderous outcome of idealism and an insanely logical order.  

Secondly, we must reconsider the piles of rotting corpses and accept that they are, technically speaking from a camp commandant's perspective, besides the point and profoundly problematic. For the final solution essentially aimed not at the monstrous production of dead bodies; rather, it was an attempt to systematically process death and transform wretched human flesh into bars of glistening, pure white soap. As Nick Land writes:

"We simplify out of anxiety when we conflate the mounds of emaciated bodies strewn about the camps at the point of their liberation - the bodies of those annihilated by epidemics during the collapse of the extermination system - with the reduced ash and shadows of those erased by the system in its smooth functioning. The uneliminated corpse is not a submissive element within this or any other 'final solution', but an impersonal resistance to it, a token of primordial community."

In other words, it is only because our bodies are weak and prone to disease - only because our flesh is mortal and life is fundamentally immoral - that fascism of whatever variety can never triumph: Evil makes free.

In Memory of Egon and Wally

 Egon Schiele, Portrait of Wally (1912)

 © Leopold Museum, Vienna

One of the most heartless lines ever written was written by the painter Egon Schiele in a note to a friend  in February 1915: 'I intend to get married advantageously. Not to Wally.'

And so it was that on June 17th of that year, despite opposition from her family, Schiele wed the socially superior and more acceptable figure of Edith Harms, rather than his young model, muse, and girlfriend, Wally, whom he had met in Vienna in 1911 when she was just seventeen, and who had inspired some of his most beautiful and erotically striking pictures. 

Apparently, Schiele was hoping to retain Wally as a mistress after his marriage to Edith - suggesting, for example, that they might go on holiday together once a year - but she was having none of this and, having been cruelly informed of his plan to walk down the aisle with another woman, she immediately abandoned him and decided to start her life anew, training as a nurse. Sadly, they never saw one another again; she dying of scarlet fever on Christmas day, 1917, and he succumbing to a flu pandemic the following year.

Walburga ('Wally') Neuzil was born in August 1894, in the small town of Tattendorf. She was the daughter of a labourer and a school teacher. After the family moved to the Austrian capital following the premature death of her mother, Wally became a model for Schiele's mentor, Gustav Klimt, before becoming fatefully involved with the younger artist, to whom she was clearly devoted. 

Thus when, for example, Schiele was thrown in jail in April 1912, for seducing a girl below the age of consent (a charge that was eventually thrown out of court - although he was found guilty of producing and exhibiting obscene works likely to corrupt minors), Wally stuck by him. Not only did she regularly visit her lover in prison, but she supplied him with painting materials and fresh fruit (Schiele noted in his diary that an orange, given to him by Wally, provided his only happiness during his 24 days in custody awaiting trial).  

 

Such loyalty makes me very fond of Wally. On the other hand, however, I'm rather disappointed in Schiele; who would have thought he'd have been such a little shit worried about marrying to his own advantage and content to social climb in this manner?

But then, as Nietzsche points out, there's nobody more corrupt and more conventional at heart than an artist!

Anja Niemi: Photography Degree Zero

 

 'The Terrace', Darlene and Me, by Anja Niemi (2014)

Norwegian photographer, model and stylist, Anja Niemi, has a new exhibit of work at The Little Black Gallery, here in London, entitled Darlene and Me and this is simply a short post to encourage torpedophiles to visit if they have the opportunity to do so as she's a talent greatly deserving of attention. 

Her flawless compositions leave one breathless, not only because of their beauty, their coldness, and their cruelty, but due to their vacuum packed, entirely self-contained character; what we might call their lack of atmosphere. 

In other words, Ms Niemi has a genius for creating a unique photographic space about herself (in both senses of the phrase); one that is anonymous, alien and uninviting. Lovely scenes to look at, but not to step into or dream of inhabiting. (Besides, the last thing anyone in her pictures is looking for is a little company.)

There is, somewhat regrettably, a narrative tacked onto each series of photos, including this one; Darlene is an unsuccessful salesgirl and beauty counselor ... Darlene is carrying around a case full of unsold lipsticks and make-up samples ... Darlene is living in a rented house in sixties California ...  Blah, blah, blah.

None of this matters and, thankfully, the images don't merely seek to communicate an all-too-human story, or invite a banal interpretation. For this is photography degree zero; an ironic and indifferent exercise in style that is neither defined by nor confined within a conventional social or ethical context of meaning.  

Note: Darlene and Me is exhibited at The Little Black Gallery, 13A, Park Walk, London, SW10 0AJ until March 10th, 2015. Admission free. Opening hours: Tuesday and Thursday 11am - 1pm and 2 - 6pm. Saturday 11am - 4pm, or by appointment.