How Winston Wolf Lost His Bite

Harvey Keitel as Winston Wolf, courtesy of Miramax,

in a Saatchi and Saatchi ad for First Direct (2014)

There are many great performances and many unforgettable characters in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction: John Travolta as Vincent Vegas, Samuel L. Jackson as Jules, Uma Thurman as Mia ... Even Bruce Willis as Butch manages to stop smirking long enough to concentrate on his acting.

But for many fans of the film, it's Harvey Keitel as tuxedo-clad problem solver Winston Wolf who manages to steal the show. The Wolf is one of those rare characters who actually has character and is a man to whom self-respect and the respect of others clearly matters.

Unfortunately, twenty years on from the making of the movie, the same cannot be said of the now elderly actor happy to trade off past glory by prostituting Tarantino's Wolf character as part of a £40 million advertising campaign by Direct Line, one of the UK's  leading insurance companies, thereby causing no little distress amongst those of us who held him in high regard as an artist and loved his performance in the film.
        
I don't know why he did it. Presumably, not because he needed the money. Perhaps he simply thought it was a fun idea. But it's a shame. And whenever the ad comes on TV I find myself having to look away. I want to remember Winston Wolf in his prime - barking orders to gangsters and speeding off for breakfast in his silver Porsche accompanied by Monster Joe's daughter; I don't want to think of him as a silly old fool selling insurance to middle-class homeowners and guaranteeing them an instant replacement for their stolen goods.

Of course, Harvey Keitel is not the first Hollywood star to sell out and violate the memory of a beloved on-screen character and he won't be the last. But this doesn't make it any easier to accept.

One wonders what Quentin Tarantino thinks of it all ... Or am I simply being naive to ask this?

Is Strong the New Pretty ... or the Old Ugly?

 

Photo by Kate T. Parker of her daughter, Ella, aged 9, 

on the night before competing in her first triathlon.

From Strong is the New Pretty series of images.

Promoting an all-American model of athletic motherhood in a manner reminiscent of Walt Whitman, photographer Kate T. Parker is extraordinarily proud of her muscles, her fertility, and the products of her womb. 

Although not a fan of her work, a recent series of images featuring her young daughters and their friends entitled Strong is the New Pretty, did catch my attention. Parker wishes to encourage every girl to be a leader and able to run a marathon; to discover their strengths and own their power. 

But whilst I can see the aesthetic appeal of fierce-looking girls with toothless smiles, scraped knees, and messy hair - i.e. girls who don't care too much about their appearance, their personal safety, or being well-behaved - there's no need to implicitly denigrate those more delicate children who prefer to be gentle, kind, and polite. Nor is there any reason to sneer at girls who like to giggle and wear colourful dresses or choose to spend their time quietly reading in their bedrooms, avoiding sports of all kinds.        

   

Being loud, competitive, and good at ball games is fine and might indeed teach you how to rule the field. But rather than make pretty in a new less feminine fashion, being empowered as Parker imagines it might just make ugly in the old macho-fascist manner.   

Seeing with the Eyes of Angels (In Praise of Cubism)

Pablo Picasso: Girl with a Mandolin (1910)

Museum of Modern Art, New York

For Lawrence, one of the most admirable things about Cézanne was that he insisted upon the appleyness not only of the fruit itself, but of the bodies of men and women and, indeed, of all objects including inanimate ones, such as jugs or bottles of wine. That is to say, he acknowledged the thingliness of the thing and attempted to paint this (as far as possible), thereby introducing into our field of vision an ontological reality which exists independently of mind.   

This, says Lawrence, was a revolutionary move; an attempt to tear painting from its own history of idealised representation and radically differentiate it from photography which sees the world mechanically with Kodak accuracy. 

Deleuze goes further and argues that what truly great painters like Cézanne do is not simply liberate lines and colours on the canvas, but free the eye from its adherence to the organism. The eye, says Deleuze, becomes a polyvalent indeterminate organ that is capable of seeing the object-as-figure in terms of pure presence.

Having become intuitively aware of an object, an artist is able to see it all around at one and the same time and not just from a single perspective fixated on fronts and faces. Further, they allow us to effectively have eyes all over too - just like the cherubim of whom Ezekiel speaks.  

And this can't be a bad thing, surely. For as Nietzsche says, the more eyes and more various organs we have for seeing the same thing the better; for a multiple perspective enables us to form a more complete (and more objective) concept of the thing.

Clearly, Picasso and Georges Braque (inspired by Cézanne's late work) understood this and Cubism is without doubt the most significant and influential art movement of the 20th century. As John Berger says, it is almost impossible to exaggerate its importance.    

Surprisingly, Lawrence of all people failed to appreciate what was unfolding in the art world of his day and he dismissed Cubism along with other forms of avant-garde art that were moving towards abstraction as puerile and overly-intellectual. He simply couldn't grasp why it was that Cézanne would come to insist on the need to interpret the world geometrically, placing everything into perspective.

And for me, this is not only surprising, it's disappointing too ...

Never Mind the Bildungstreib Here's the Science

Blackmetal Kant (2007) by King of Porn 

deviantart.com

Kant famously insisted that base matter lacks spontaneity; that inorganic substance cannot spontaneously generate organic life. To think otherwise would be a logical paradox, since the essential character of non-living things is their complete inertia or lack of vital purpose. What makes living things so rare and unusual is precisely the fact that they can spontaneously self-organize thanks to the presence of a formative drive which mysteriously enlivens the material of which they are composed. Kant calls this vital force (after Blumenbach) Bildungstreib. Jane Bennett conveniently glosses the term for us:

"Bildungstreib ... names a non-material, teleological drive that imparts to matter its functional coherence, it's 'organic' quality ... Bildungstreib is what impels an undifferentiated, crude mass of matter to become an organized articulation of cooperating parts, the highest version of which is 'Man'".

To be clear, Kant does not mean by Bildungstreib something that common folk and theologians might mistakenly term a soul. For whereas a soul is a metaphysical principle that can exist even in a disembodied state, Kant's concept is always embodied and only exists in conjunction with the mechanical activities of matter and subject to the Newtonian laws of physics.

Having said that, Kant does insist that the workings of Bildungstreib can never become fully known to us; such a drive remains fundamentally inscrutable. At best, we can learn about it indirectly by studying its effects. And what these effects teach us is that this formative drive operates under an internal constraint or purposive predisposition which directs the organism towards some end goal, "thus linking its becoming to a stable order of Creation".

In other words, things become what they are meant to become; only man has a free will and can thus to some extent overcome his own determining. Thus Kant sought to make the case "not only for a qualitative gap between inorganic matter and organic life but also for a quantum leap between humans and all other organisms."  

What, then, are we to make of Kant's flirtation with vitalism and his attempt to combine teleological and mechanistic explanations of life?

Jane Bennett is obviously attracted to the notion of Bildungstreib. For her, it gestures towards the kind of inhuman and ahistorical form of agency that she needs to make her own model of vibrant matter feasible. Whilst for Kant any such drive would have to have a divine origin, Bennett thinks it "both possible and desirable to experiment with the idea of an impersonal agency integral to materiality as such". 

But for me, as for Daniel Dennett and others who happily subscribe to a mechanistic materialism and remain confident that science will eventually explain in a perfectly adequate manner how life emerges from dead matter thanks to a chemical process, vitalism is not a profound philosophical insight, but simply a failure of critical intelligence and imagination.

In fact, a new study published recently by researchers at the University of Colorado and University of Milan, hints at the spontaneous appearance of primordial DNA four billion years ago and shows how the self-organizing properties of these DNA-like molecular fragments - just a few nanometres in length - may have guided their own growth into repeating chemical chains long enough and stable enough to act as a basis for primitive life.

In other words, contrary to everything Kant and the vitalists who have followed him like to believe, these new findings provide further evidence for the non-biological origins of nucleic acids, which are the building blocks of living organisms.  


Notes

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, (Duke University Press, 2010). All lines quoted were taken from the sub-section of chapter 5 entitled Bildungstreib, pp. 65-69.

For those interested in reading at length what Kant has to say on this subject, see his Critique of Judgement (1790), available in numerous English translations, including the one by Werner Pluhar, (Hackett, 1987), cited by Jane Bennett in her text. 

For those interested in the reading more about the new scientific study I refer to above, click here.  

Vibrant Matter

Jane Bennett is a Professor of Political Theory at John Hopkins University. She is the author of several books on nature, ethics, and modernity, but it's her most recent study, Vibrant Matter (2010), that most interests as she shifts her focus from people to the role played by nonhuman forces in events (what she likes to term after Bruno Latour actants). 

In a nutshell, her book is a call for a form of material vitalism (or vital materiality) that moves beyond the work of Hans Driesch and Henri Bergson, whilst nevertheless utilizing their insights in a somewhat Deleuzean manner. Bennett attempts, in other words, to affect a re-enchantment of the world and to give to things a degree of agency and spontaneity (an uncanny combination of "delight and disturbance").

As an object-oriented philosopher, her project obviously attracts me; whether it also convinces me is another question.

For one thing, I remain profoundly hostile to and suspicious of any form of vitalism. Secondly, I don't really endorse Bennett's eco-ethical goal which is to mend the shattered concord between man and world thereby not only ensuring our survival as a species, but increasing human happiness. I can't help recalling Ray Brassier's devastating response to such soppy idealism: Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of life - and particularly not human life!

Why highlight "what is typically cast in shadow"; why advocate "the vitality of matter"; why promote "more attentive encounters between people-materialities and thing-materialities", if all you're really concerned about is reviving the humanities and saving mankind? It hardly seems worth the effort and risks falling back into the anthropocentric conceit or hubris which Bennett wants so desperately to escape. 

That said, she writes in a lucid and appealing manner and I fully support her aim of having done with judgement by reconfiguring notions of agency. And, like Bennett, I also wish to "dissipate the onto-theological binaries" that have constrained thinking for so long.

Clearly, hers is not a vitalism in the traditional sense - there's no notion of an independent life force or spiritual supplement that mysteriously animates matter - but, even so, there's a wilful element of romantic naivety in this book and a determined optimism that I simply cannot share. Her positive formulations ultimately betray her own attempt to think philosophically; i.e. in a relentlessly inhuman manner. 


See: Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, (Duke University Press, 2010). All lines quoted are taken from the Preface to this text. 

D. H. Lawrence and the Prickly Politics of Vitalism

Woodcut design by Wharton Esherick for D. H. Lawrence's 

Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (1925)

In a notorious but often celebrated essay, 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine' (1925), Lawrence provides us with some very beautiful descriptive passages of an actual event involving a dog and the shooting of a porcupine. Unfortunately, these are followed by some very ugly didactic passages that are not merely moralizing metaphysical nonsense, but tied to a pernicious political vitalism that asserts an anthropocentric, aristocratic, and racist hierarchy of life.

Life - ha! what is life? 

One might say in philosophical agreement with Nietzsche that it's really just a form of prejudice; an extremely rare and unusual way of being dead that is grossly overvalued by the living. 

Lawrence, however, offers a very different definition: life is that which "moves in circles of power and of vividness, and each circle of life only maintains its orbit upon the subjection of some lower circle." And this vital truth, as Lawrence imagines it, is not something to lament, nor seek to challenge or reform. On the contrary, the only thing to do "is to realise what is is higher, and what is lower, in the cycles of existence"  and accept this as a law of creation.

That said, it might still reasonably be asked what is meant by higher and how might we correctly assign each life-form its proper place within a natural order of rank? Again, Lawrence is extremely forthright in his answer (despite the fact that his logic is tautologous): by higher he means more vividly alive. And each life-form earns its own place within a natural order of rank by out competing and, indeed, often devouring, the lesser lives below it. He writes: 

"In the cycles of existence, this is the test. From the lowest form of existence to the highest, the test question is: Can thy neighbour finally overcome thee? If he can, then he belongs to a higher cycle of existence. This is the truth behind the survival of the fittest."

Lawrence then conveniently lists some examples of higher and lower forms drawn from his own hierarchy of vividness in terms of species and race:

"Life is more vivid in the dandelion than in the green fern, or than in a palm tree.
Life is more vivid in a snake than in a butterfly.
Life is more vivid in a wren than in an alligator.
Life is more vivid in a cat than in an ostrich.
Life is more vivid in the Mexican who drives the wagon, than in the two horses [who pull the wagon].

Life is more vivid in me, than in the Mexican who drives the wagon for me."

Obviously, the final assertion is for most readers today the most controversial and offensive; but Lawrence insists that the subjugation and exploitation of one race by another (his own) is another inescapable law of nature and existence. Or, if you prefer, an inexorable law of life based upon a fourth dimensional form of ontological energy which he terms vitality (the determining factor in the struggle for existence).

What, really, are we to make of all this?

I think it shows how a philosophy of vitalism can very easily lend itself to a highly undesirable form of politics. Of course, this needn't always be the case - one thinks of Hans Driesch's principled resistance to the Nazi attempt to co-opt his idea of entelechy - but, unfortunately, it very often seems to be the case that vitalism + pessimism + romanticism = fascism.   

The political theorist Jane Bennett, who has developed her own model of vital materialism, addresses this problematic issue with a reassuring degree of sensitive intelligence and insight. She writes:

"I do not think that there is any direct relationship between, on the one hand, a set of ontological assumptions about life ... and, on the other, a politics; no particular ethics or politics follow inevitably from a metaphysics. But the hierarchical logic of God-Man-Nature implied in a vitalism of soul easily transitions into a political image of a hierarchy of social classes or even civilizations."
 
Thus, if like Lawrence you believe that life is radically different from (and irreducible to) matter; that human life is qualitatively different than all other forms of life; that this human uniqueness indicates a divine origin or special relationship with the gods; and there's a natural order of existence with yourself at the top, then you will probably also be tempted to flirt with the kind of politics that wages war in the name of the highest idealism in order to fulfil some form of national, cultural, or racial destiny.    

My advice is - when it comes to politics - never trust a hippie, never trust a poet, and never trust a vitalist.


Notes

D. H. Lawrence; 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 347-63.

Jane Bennett; Vibrant Matter, (Duke University Press, 2010), p. 84. And see sub-section of chapter 6 entitled 'A Natural Order of Rank' , pp. 86-89 which is particularly pertinent to this discussion.

D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of Sacrifice

In a short series of related poems Lawrence explored the idea of sacrifice. 

Initially, he seems quite keen: the sacrifice of an animal in what he thinks of as the splendid pagan manner is an act of vital necessity to which he enthusiastically lends his support:

"... blood of the lower life must be shed

for the feeding and strengthening of the handsomer, fuller life."

This is an active practice of sacrifice that is about affirming mortal existence and giving thanks to the gods; it is not about atoning for sin (a concept Lawrence explicitly repudiates), or seeking to appease a God who forever sits in judgement upon us:

"There is no such thing as sin.

There is only life and anti-life.

And sacrifice is the law of life which enacts

that little lives must be eaten up into the dance and splendour

of bigger lives, with due reverence and acknowledgement."

But, unfortunately, this old, pre-Christian idea of sacrifice as life affirmation has given way to one that invariably takes place within the shadow of the Cross and is fatally tied to disastrous notions of self-sacrifice, joy in suffering, and martyrdom. Lawrence wants nothing to do with these things. Self-sacrifice, he writes, is an ethically objectionable and mistaken idea - particularly when it involves the slaying of what is best in us:

"It cannot be anything but wrong to sacrifice

good, healthy, natural feelings, instincts, passions or desires ..."

In other words, to sacrifice what Nietzsche would term our innocence is the vilest cowardice:

"But what we may sacrifice, if we call it sacrifice, from the self,

are all the obstructions to life, self-importance, self-conceit, egoistic self-will ..."

Lawrence develops this theme in a later verse:

"Oh slay, not the best bright proud life that is in you, that can be happy,

but the craven, the cowardly, the creeping you, that can only be unhappy ..."

"Oh sacrifice, not that which is noble and generous and spontaneous in humanity

but that which is mean and base and squalid and degenerate ..."

If we learn how to shed those things which poison the blood - rather than our blood itself - then we might perhaps find a way to live beyond good and evil and free from bad conscience. And that would make a pleasant (and profound) change would it not ...

Notes

See the following four poems by D. H. Lawrence: 'Self-Sacrifice', 'Shedding of blood', 'The old idea of sacrifice' and 'Self-sacrifice'. They can be found in The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Vol. I, pp. 585-87. The lines quoted are taken from these verses.  

On the Crucifixion of Sebastian Horsley

Naturally, at Easter, one's thoughts turn to the Cross and the crucifixion of Sebastian Horsley, the Soho Kristos ...

In 2000, Horsley flew to the Philippines, accompanied by fellow-artist Sarah Lucas and the photographer Dennis Morris. Having decided that he wished to paint scenes of the Crucifixion, but only ever really able to paint what he himself had experienced directly, Horsley was heading for the small village of San Pedro Cutud, outside of San Fernando, in the province of Pampagna.    

Here, during Holy Week, locals hold an annual orgy of self-flagellation and mortification of the flesh, culminating in several devotees being willingly lashed to crosses with nails driven through their hands and feet in imitation of Christ. Officially, the Church does not approve, but the local tourist industry has no qualms about promoting the event (retailers selling religious nick-knacks alongside cans of Coke).   

This re-enactment of the Passion, has been going on for many years. Pseudo-martyrs tend to be young Filipino men hoping to experience the divine and produce some sort miraculous effect. Foreign participants were banned after a Japanese man marketed footage of himself being crucified as a sadomasochistic porn video. However, after months of negotiation (and payment of a significant fee) it was agreed that Horsley would be able to stage his own private ceremony.    

The hope was to heighten his artistic sensibilities via extreme suffering. In the event, however, he passed out from the intense and overwhelming degree of pain. Worse, the small platform supporting his feet broke, as did the straps around his wrists and arms supporting some of his weight, and Horsley, dramatically - if also somewhat embarrassingly - fell from the cross! (The malicious act of a God in whom he didn't believe but was happy nevertheless to mock, as Horsley reasoned afterwards.)

Some of the villagers ran away screaming; Sarah Lucas fainted; and Dennis Morris continued to snap pictures as anxious officials attempted to resurrect the artist, lying pale and unconscious, but strangely serene, as if a figure in a painting by Caravaggio. Afterwards, Horsley by his own admission felt humiliated and full of a sense of failure. Soon, however, this was replaced with a sense of quiet pride.

An exhibition of new works based on the event opened in the summer of 2002 and film footage shot by Sarah Lucas, entitled Crucifixion, was screened at the ICA in June of that year. The British press, unsurprisingly, were less than impressed:  'Art Freak Crucifies Himself', screamed the front page of the News of the World. Perhaps more surprisingly - and certainly more disappointingly - the art world was also distinctly cool (and sometimes sneering) in its reception.

Horsley, as ever, puts a brave face on this in his disarming and often highly amusing memoir, Dandy in the Underworld (2007):  "Jesus was crucified to save humanity. I had been crucified to save my career. Neither of us had much success."


Note: For those interested, Crucifixion can be viewed (in two parts) on YouTube by clicking here and here. 

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.