Upskirting with Francis Ponge

Photo of Lindsay Lohan, by Terry Richardson 

(Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles, 2012)

It's no great revelation that Frenchmen like to look up the skirts of pretty young girls; France, after all, is the country that gave us The Swing, the cancan, and the story of Melody Nelson being knocked off her bicycle.

Even so, it came as something of a surprise to discover prose poet Francis Ponge comparing the pleasure of viewing a frilly white carnation to that of glimpsing a pair of fine-cut lace knickers worn by a maid who attends to her linens. 

Ponge goes on to add - and here one is uncertain whether he refers to the flowers or the undergarments - that they continually emit the sort of distinct perfume that threatens such pleasure that one is brought to the verge of a violent spasm (such as a sneeze or an orgasm). 

And so we observe how panty-fetishism is a complex phenomenon involving not just the eyes, but also the nose - even if some snobby psychologists like to insist it's not a true paraphilia.   

    

Downblouse and Upskirt (Get a Good Look Costanza?)

 Seinfeld S4/17: The Shoes. Click here to view scene.

 

Downblousing and upskirting are both examples of pornified voyeurism that illustrate perfectly the objectifying nature of the male gaze. Both have blossomed in an age of smart phones, the internet, and rape culture, yet they continue to rank very differently on a scale of perviness.  

For when a man looks down a young woman's blouse it is in the hope of glimpsing breasts; a healthy, heterosexual desire for female flesh. If not quite the done thing within polite society, downblousing is nevertheless regarded as natural and relatively harmless behaviour; something we might even characterize as a bit of good clean fun and place within a comic context.      

But when a man looks up a girl's skirt it's in the hope of seeing her underwear; what excites is not the flesh per se and it's for this reason that upskirting is regarded as truly deviant behaviour - fetishistic, unwholesome, indecent, etc.    

Thus it is that most viewers laugh when George Costanza stares down the blouse of a fifteen year-old in an episode of Seinfeld and don't see it as an assault by a middle-aged man upon the dignity of a minor, nor a sordid invasion of her privacy. 

Would they feel quite as amused, however, had George been caught staring at her crotch rather than her cleavage?      

When D. H. Lawrence Met G. I. Jane

I wouldn't say that American action movie G. I. Jane (1997) is a great film, even though in Ridley Scott it undoubtedly has a great director. A box office success, it wasn't quite as much of a blockbuster as hoped for by the producers who had stumped up a $50,000,000 budget.  

Nor would I say that the star of the film, Demi Moore, is a great actress. Nevertheless, she's a better actress than many people wish to believe and undeserving of the Golden Raspberry Award for her performance as Lieutenant Jordan O'Neil.

What I would say, however, is that her G. I. Jane co-star Viggo Mortensen is not only a very fine actor, but also one of the most interesting figures in Hollywood. A poet, publisher, musician, photographer and painter - as well as a charismatic screen presence - Mortensen has given some excellent performances, particularly under the direction of David Cronenberg.

But what I really like about him is the fact that he was the one who suggested to Ridley Scott that his enigmatic and violent character, Command Master Chief John James Urgayle, would be made more interesting to an audience were his brutality offset by a love of literature - particularly D. H. Lawrence's poetry!

Thus it was that Urgayle recites the following lines to his new recruits:

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

At the end of the film, by which time O'Neil has proved she's not a lesbian, survived her training ordeal, and displayed real courage and ability under fire as a Navy SEAL, we see her leafing through a Penguin edition of Lawrence's Selected Poems that has been left in her locker. O' Neil reads the above verse with tears in her eyes, whilst Urgayle looks on affectionately. 

Her copy of the text, already annotated and well-thumbed, is doubtless Urgayle's own. But the book itself belonged to Mortensen and was not merely a prop bought for the scene. And that, for a Lawrentian, is pleasing to discover. 

Notes

Lawrence's verse, entitled 'Self-Pity', can be found in The Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, (Penguin Books, 1977), p. 467, or in Volume I of the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence's Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (CUP, 2013), p. 405.

To view on YouTube the recital of Lawrence's poem by Master Chief Urgayle (as played by Viggo Mortensen) click here. To see the touching final scene of G. I. Jane click here.  

Give a Girl the Right Shoes ...

Photo by Mario Testino for Vogue

Mario Testino's stunning photograph of Suki Waterhouse, Cara Delevigne, and Georgia May Jagger in the new edition of Vogue (April 2015) obviously owes a great deal to Antonio Canova's sculpture The Three Graces, in which the beautiful young daughters of Zeus are shown huddled together in naked embrace.

What excites most about Testino's photograph, however, is not the obvious sexual allure of the models but the fabulous faux-fur heel sandals they're wearing, designed by Sophia Webster for Shrimps (SS15), the playful fashion label created by Hannah Weiland.

Miss Webster, a graduate of the London College of Fashion and the Royal College of Art, presented her first collection of footwear in SS13, after having worked as a design assistant to Nicholas Kirkwood. She has rightly been recognised within the British fashion industry as a genius and received several prestigious awards for developing a unique but nonetheless commercially viable aesthetic that, like Canova's sculpture or Testino's picture, combines beauty, charm, and joy in a modern, sophisticated, slightly subversive manner that one is almost tempted to term neon-classical.

As Marilyn Monroe famously said: Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world.      
 

The Conspiracy against the Human Race

Hippocampus Press, (2011)

Thomas Ligotti is a contemporary American writer of supernatural horror with philosophical pretensions. He is often described as a cult author, which is a way of saying that he is little known and little read, but much loved by those few who are familiar with him and his work.

For the record, I'm not one of these. And, having just finished reading his first full-length work of non-fiction which comes with an admittedly intriguing title and somewhat creepy cover, I'm not about to become a Ligotti fanboy in the foreseeable future. 

The Conspiracy against the Human Race is pessimistic, nihilistic, and anti-natalist. Unfortunately, it's also badly written. His one big idea, which is repeated and capitalised throughout the book - that life is MALIGNANTLY USELESS - may very well be true, but there are far worse and more shocking things than this; such as producing books that are MIND-NUMBINGLY TEDIOUS.   
 
Ray Brassier should, in my view, be embarrassed to have provided even the briefest of brief forewords; one that attempts to fig-leaf over the obvious shortcomings of the book by suggesting that Ligotti, thanks to his status as an artist, is liberated from the conventional demands placed upon a writer of critical theory and unencumbered by the "cringing deference towards social utility that straightjackets most professional philosophers" [10].

This is just bluster and it disappoints almost as much as the text that follows. As for Brassier's hyperbolic claim that Ligotti "sets out what is perhaps the most sustained challenge yet to the intellectual blackmail that would oblige us [humanity] to be eternally grateful for a 'gift' [life] we never invited", this is saved from being laughable only by strategic use of the qualifying adverb perhaps.

Having said all this, there is one passage in the final chapter of Ligotti's book with which I fully agree; a thanatological dismissal of that most overrated faculty called upon by poets and others of whom we should always be suspicious:

"Without death - meaning without our consciousness of death - no story of supernatural horror would ever have been written, nor would any other artistic representation of human life have been created for that matter. It is always there, if only between the lines or brushstrokes, or conspicuously by its absence. It is a terrific stimulus to that which is at once one of our greatest weapons and greatest weaknesses - imagination. Our minds are always on the verge of exploding with thoughts and images as we ceaselessly pound the pavement of our world. Both our most exquisite cogitations and pour worst cognitive drivel announce our primal torment: We cannot linger in the stillness of nature's vacuity. And so we have imagination to beguile us. A misbegotten hatchling of consciousness, a birth defect of our species, imagination is often revered as a sign of vigor in our make-up. But it is really just a psychic overcompensation for our impotence as beings." [218].  

On The Horror of Living in the Moment

I used to celebrate the idea of living in the moment. That is to say, of enjoying the very nowness of time with neither memory of the past, nor anticipation of days to come.

But now, having witnessed how Alzheimer's traps and isolates a person precisely in a perpetual present, I know that this is actually a petrifying prospect. One might become innocent, in a Nietzschean sense of the term (i.e. as a concept closely tied to forgetfulness), but one becomes less than human rather than overhuman and increasingly without world, as Heidegger would say.

In other words, to live in the moment is to inexorably turn to stone ...         

Moments of Wonder

Illustration of (Diane Morgan as) Philomena Cunk 

by Jack Hughes for Gallery 1988

http://jackmrhughes.tumblr.com/ 

Wonder, says Socrates, is the mark of a true philosopher. 

In fact, philosophy has no other origin but this dizzying sense of astonishment before the universe and the manifold things that compose it. Thus, in attempting to understand the latter, one must expect one's head to spin; for objects, although alluring, are ultimately alien and perplexing in nature, rather than familiar and reassuring.   

Sadly, this disconcerting, vertigo-inducing sense of wonder is, according to Ian Bogost, "all but eviscerated in modern thought". Some people speak of scientific wonder but this is founded upon a form of logic that merely furthers the will to knowledge and human conceit.  

However, there remains at least one woman sick with wonder in a way that invites a detachment from ordinary logics; a woman who is permanently puzzled and beautifully bemused by the world around her - Philomena Cunk - and any torpedophiles who have not yet watched her brilliant (and hilarious)  Moments of Wonder are encouraged to do so ... (begin by clicking here).

Notes

Diane Morgan is an actress, comedian and writer best known for playing Philomena Cunk: dianemorgan.co.uk

Jack Hughes is a London-based, freelance illustrator: jack-hughes.com

       

Can't We Talk About This?

John Keane, The Death of Theo Van Gogh (2007)

www.johnkeaneart.com

In November 2004, Dutch filmmaker and provocateur Theo Van Gogh was brutally slaughtered on an Amsterdam street for his part in the making of a short film entitled Submission; a film which, primarily, examined the relationship that exists between Muslims and their God and asks how necessary reform of Islam might be possible when Allah demands absolute obedience to his laws, with no room for doubt or critical dissent amongst his worshipers.   

Having shot his victim multiple times, Van Gogh's devout assailant then cut his throat and attempted to decapitate him in front of horrified witnesses, before finally plunging the knife deep into the dead man's chest. Apparently, among the last words spoken by Van Gogh to his killer were: Can't we talk about this?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Van Gogh's friend and collaborator on Submission - writes: 

"It was so Dutch, so sweet and innocent. Theo must have thought there was some kind of misunderstanding that could be worked out. He couldn't see that his killer was caught in a wholly different worldview. Nothing Theo could have said to him would have made any difference."

- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel, (Pocket Books, 2008), p. 321   

I recount this deeply depressing incident by way of a response to a presentation recently given by John Holroyd on the topic of Islam.

Holroyd, a Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens hating crypto-theologian, teaches philosophy and religious studies at a London college and is a man for whom these subjects are perfectly compatible, if not, indeed, one and the same thing. His paper, in essence, called for still greater dialogue between the West and the militant forces of Islamic extremism, thereby strangely echoing Van Gogh's naivety in the face of those who hate us, hate all that we love and hold dear, and mean to do us mortal harm.

Now, whilst I concede that it might be good to talk - and that loving one's enemies might be the Christian thing to do - sometimes, unfortunately, there's really nothing further to discuss and inasmuch as this loving of enemies can lead to a reluctance to actively combat the forces of murderous and reactionary violence, then Jesus's teaching might be said to result in immorality and risk the triumph of evil.   

Thus, rather than listen to Jesus, I'd sooner heed Michel Foucault who argued that fascism - whether it be political or religious in nature and whether found in the hearts and minds of others or, indeed, in our own acts and pleasures - must be vigorously resisted as an essential aspect of living an ethical life.

  

Black Noise (On the Poetry of Francis Ponge)

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square (1915) 

Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

I'm not sure I fully understand what physicists and audio engineers mean by the term black noise - I think it refers to a noise whose frequency is located close to zero (or what is commonly known as silence) on a spectrum of sound - but I like how philosopher Graham Harman uses the same term within his work to describe the background hum of mysteriously muffled objects hovering at the fringes of human intelligibility.  

Perhaps it's this gentle and virtually-inaudible sound of things that the French prose-poet Francis Ponge was able to attune his ear to ...

Known as the poet of things, Ponge explored the fascinating universe of actual entities - from pebbles to cigarettes, and flowers to bars of soap - in the (admittedly anthropocentric) belief that all objects, whilst remaining fundamentally withdrawn, nevertheless yearn to express themselves and await the coming of a speaking-subject who might hear them and find some way to articulate their near-silence, thereby revealing something of their hidden depths and weird, inhuman otherness.

What I love about Ponge - apart from his object-oriented ontology - is the fact that he avoided all the tired conventions of poetry; such as empty symbolism and allegory, self-indulgent lyricism, or obvious appeals to emotion. He declared himself an enemy of both the drabness of the dictionary and the transcendent posturing of poetry and sought to combine description and definition with the power and purity of elementary language.

His principle aim, therefore, was to defeat the Stereotype and to do so with a form of speculative realism and something extremely rare amongst artists - intellectual integrity.  

Notes

Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics, (Open Court Publishing Company, 2005).

Francis Ponge, Le parti pris des choses (1942). This collection of 32 short to medium length prose poems is available in several English translations, including, most notably, those by Lee Fahnestock, Robert Bly, and Beth Archer Brombert. 

D. H. Lawrence's Becoming-Bat

Lawrence doesn't like bats, but this doesn't stop him writing about them in his poetry in a manner of real philosophical interest. For rather than anticipate Thomas Nagel's question and attempt to say what it's like to be a bat, Lawrence allows a proto-Derridean play of différance to infuse his writing, constructing a dummy creature with a mask-like face which parodies and subverts the very notion of an essential batness.

In the short poem, 'Bat', for example, Lawrence first confuses them for swallows flying late in the Italian twilight and sewing the shadows together. But then he realises his mistake:

Swallows?

Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop ...
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in the flight 
And serrated wings against the sky,
Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,
And falling back.

Never swallows!
Bats!The swallows are gone.

This realisation that he's watching bats and not birds flitting about the Ponte Vecchio and flying overhead, gives Lawrence an uneasy creeping in his scalp. He thinks of them as little clots of darkness with wings like bits of umbrella:

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.
Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!

They may very well be symbols of happiness and good fortune in China, but not so for this former resident of Eastwood.

In the much longer and more amusing poem 'Man and Bat', Lawrence develops his chiroptophobia whilst again doing something of philosophical and literary import. The impure frenzy with which a bat flies round and round his room in mad circles of delirium disgusts and disconcerts him, but it also allows Lawrence to demonstrate not merely how experience might be transfigured into art and given poetic expression, but how writing is inseparable from a process of becoming.

Lawrence, that is to say, establishes what Deleuze terms a zone of proximity with the bat, just as he does elsewhere with various other birds, beasts and flowers. He becomes-bat as the bat in turn becomes-rag or old umbrella. This is not something which is easy to accomplish. But to affect a becoming of this kind is something which all great writers must achieve. Indeed, this is the very mark of literary greatness.  


Notes

For an excellent reading of Lawrence's poetry in terms of différance and intertextuality, see Amit Chaudhuri's study, D H. Lawrence and 'Difference', (Oxford University Press, 2003). I am grateful to Chaudhuri for showing how - contrary to the conventional view - Lawrence is not a simple-minded nature lover concerned with understanding the beauty and essence of real animals, but, rather, in artificially constructing creatures in and on his own terms.

'Bat' and 'Man and Bat' may be found in Volume I of the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence's poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (CUP, 2013), pp. 294-300.