Mono No Aware (Japanese Aesthetics Contra Teutonic Angst)

Birds and Flowers of Spring and Summer

One of a pair of six-fold screens by Kano Eino, 

Suntory Museum of Art, Tokyo

The Japanese have a very lovely term for the poignancy of passing time and the mixture of joy and sadness experienced when one reflects upon the transient nature of existence: mono no aware. 

Often translated as the pathos of things, it's more, I think, than simply an awareness of impermanence or a sensitivity to ephemera. It's also an aestheticized form of the ontological anxiety that for Heidegger characterized Dasein - i.e., the certain knowledge that everything dies and that all being is therefore a being-towards-death. 

But it would be precisely this aestheticization of onto-anxiety that would be problematic for the German philosopher. For according to Heidegger, our essential task as human beings is to accept the inevitability of death, affirm its necessity, and strive to retain the authenticity of our own passing and we don't do this by transforming Angst into a kind of genteel reflection on things in the shadow of their future absence.      

And so, whilst for the eighteenth century scholar and poet Motoori Norinaga mono no aware heightens our appreciation of beauty and enables us to comprehend the singing of the birds and the silence of the snake, this, for Heidegger, is not merely sentimental and besides the point, but risks inauthenticity. 

That is to say, mono no aware fails to profoundly disturb or discomfort; it lacks the weight of almost unbearable fatality that the Germans are so insistent upon. Thus, whilst it makes us smile wistfully and go 'Ah ...' with a knowing sigh, it doesn't fill us with a sense dread at the monstrous and inhuman nature of existence; it doesn't make us want to scream when confronted by the truth of extinction and non-being.

In the end, I suppose, one has to make a choice here: does one want to picnic beneath the cherry blossom, or brood amongst the pine needles; does one want to develop a practice of joy before death, or a custom of fear and trembling?

I know which I'd rather do ...   

On the Pleasure of Queer Nostalgia

The face and body of British glamour model Kate-Anne Cooper arouse a queer kind of nostalgia for a lost world of vintage porn, wherein women weren't shaved, pierced, tattooed, cosmetically-enhanced, or airbrushed into digital perfection; when they looked softer, hairier, uglier, and their cunts, although more threatening, were nonetheless full of life and the promise of a blissful return to nature. 

Probably she knows this: for her hair and make-up suggest a deliberate retro styling designed to trigger this wistful erotic longing not just for the girls of the late sixties and seventies, but for the period itself in all of its popular cultural manifestations.

Time, which is often cruel, is kind in this regard; it adds charm and a certain element of pathos to days and things gone by. It allows us to remember our own past fondly and to sentimentally gloss hardcore events and the grim material facts that historians and social theorists often choose to emphasise.

In doing this, we sacrifice critical complexity. But we gain pleasure. And that's not something we should have to apologise for; least of all to those who would eliminate all forms of fun from life and tie intellectual language exclusively to an endless series of moralizing imperatives.

Alien Spring

Alien Spring  (2015)

To me, all flowering plants look decidedly alien: by which I don't mean extraterrestrial, so much as completely other or inhuman. That is certainly what I meant when I captioned the above photograph Alien Spring and sent it to a number of friends. I wasn't making a point about the environmental danger posed by invasive species; nor, indeed, was I offering a covert remark about UK immigration policy!

What anyway - since the subject has arisen - is the threat level to indigenous flora presented by non-native plants that have found a way to root and bloom in this green and pleasant land? 

Well, according to recent research carried out by researchers at the University of York, the answer is pretty minimal (if not actually negligible). Where alien species thrive, so too do the local plants; where they don't, neither do the latter. And so Nigel Farage can rest easy in his bed at night, happy in the knowledge that no delicate British flower is being driven towards extinction by overly-competitive newcomers (even if they make up 20% of species recorded in 2007).

The fact is that, unlike invasive animal species, plants seem to get along just fine growing side-by-side in chaotic harmony. Thus whilst eco-nationalists will always object to foreign plants growing on British soil and fantasise about a more natural state of affairs in some imaginary past, we can turn a deaf ear towards them and offer up instead three cheers for biodiversity whilst looking forward to an alien spring.  

Psychasthenia

Cover of the 1930 pamphlet produced by Georges Bataille and others 
in response to André Breton's attack upon them in the 
Second Surrealist Manifesto (1929)

The more I read about that castrated old lion and false revolutionary André Breton, the more I dislike him. Not loving love as a moral absolute and not believing that the marvellous can exist separately from the morbid and the monstrous, means I can't possibly embrace his concept of surrealism either.

Does this mean that I too suffer, like Bataille, from a form of decadence or that which Breton, with his clinical background, delighted in identifying as psychasthenia (a mental disorder characterized by irrational phobias, obsessions, anxieties and, apparently, a love of flies)? 

Maybe. 

But anyone who has read Nietzsche knows that these things are advantageous traits in an artist or philosopher (that whilst strength preserves, only sickness advances). Indeed, better death, as Deleuze says, than the good health we have been given and which is so valued by the bourgeois. 

And better even Bataille's excremental philosophy than Breton's angelic surrealism that is ultimately suited only to mystics, poets, and idealists.       

Everything Ends in Shit

Salvador Dali: The Lugubrious Game (1929)

Unlike Bataille, obsessed with making an all-out assault upon human dignity and aesthetics in the name of a base materialism, I don't feel compelled as a thinker to become-porcine and to dig deep into forms of heterogeneous matter with my snout in order to uproot everything with repugnant voracity.

I don't even want to toss rose petals like the Marquis de Sade into a madhouse latrine. In other words, I'm not what André Breton would describe as an excremental philosopher.

But, having said that, one is obliged to concede that everything ends in shit; life terminating as a shipwreck in the nauseous.       

The Ghost of Alexander McQueen

Jellyfish ensemble and Armadillo shoes, Plato's Atlantis, (SS10)

Model Polina Kasina. Photo © Lauren Greenfield/INSTITUTE

 

The ghost of Alexander McQueen will continue to haunt the British fashion industry for decades to come, as the current exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum evidences. Savage Beauty is the first major retrospective of McQueen's work to be presented in Europe, but it certainly won't be the last. 

Why? Because he was a fucking genius whose clothes didn't simply make heads turn, but spin with a mixture of astonishment and repulsion until sick and dizzy with disconcerted pleasure. Quite literally, one feels overawed by his designs and many of the dresses displayed are as difficult to view as they would be to wear and as they undoubtedly were to create and manufacture. 

The devil is in the detail, they say, and McQueen's clothes are so detailed that their exquisite beauty and fine craftsmanship doesn't disguise their malevolent and sinister qualities. All fashion designers attempt to give style to the body and this, of necessity, involves an element of cruelty. But McQueen takes this further than anyone; his dark romanticism and gothic queerness occasionally hint at a brutal and austere futuristic even fascist aesthetic, rather than a playful fetishism or an ironic sado-masochism. 

McQueen wanted the women who wore his clothes to look powerful and terrifying; like alien beings from another time and another world. He wasn't interested in simply provoking tabloid outrage or scandalising the middle-classes; rather, he wanted to instill elements of fear in the human heart in the hope it might beat a little faster. 

Notes

I have chosen an image from McQueen's Plato's Atlantis collection (SS10), not because I think it's his best work, but it was his final collection, presented just before his death in February of that year. Inspired not only by the myth of Atlantis, but also Darwin's theory of evolution, it featured fabulous footwear; including the infamous Armadillo shoes. Click here to see the catwalk show.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty runs at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) from 14 March - 2 August 2015. For further information, including ticket prices and opening times, visit the Victoria and Albert Museum website (click here).     

Panchira

Panchira by dw817 on deviantart.com

Panchira is a Japanese term for what is doubtless a universal practice; looking up the skirts of young women in the hope of glimpsing what perverts always like to term panties.

Because panchira is a well-established convention within comics, cartoons, and other aspects of popular culture, generations of Japanese men are reared to regard the fetishistic obsession with female undergarments as perfectly natural; they are normalised, in other words, into a pornified worldview that encourages the belief that it is an acceptable and harmless pastime to sneak a peek or take a snapshot up the skirt of any woman in a public space, with or without her consent.

Ironically for a practice that is often regarded as a national sport, the phenomenon of panchira in contemporary Japanese society can probably be traced back to its Westernization following American occupation at the end of the Second World War. As elsewhere, during the fifties and sixties there was a relaxing of taboos as new ideas and fashions began to circulate.

One crucial catalyst to the emerging craze of panchira seems to have been the release of the Billy Wilder movie The Seven Year Itch (1955). The iconic scene in which Marilyn Monroe has trouble with her skirt as she stands on a subway grate, excited the pornographic imagination of the Japanese public even more than the rest of the world. The practice of scoring a glimpse up young women's skirts became extremely popular at this time and many magazines ran articles advising men of the best places where they might view panties.   

What, then, are we to think of this? Obviously, panchira can be analysed psychologically as a form of voyeurism and - from a feminist critical perspective - as an example of what is termed the imperial male gaze (an immobilizing glance by which a woman is both sexually objectified and fixed in place).

But could it not alternatively be argued that it is the male subject who is effectively seduced and made helpless (almost idiotic) before a panty-clad crotch: that panchira thus results in a revenge of the object ...?         

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.