On Pareidolia and Prosopagnosia

Still from the classic silent movie Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902)

Torpedo the Ark means: Take that Man in the Moon!

Pareidolia is the psychological term for the all too human propensity to see ourselves - particularly our own grinning faces - in nature. A well-known example of this is the man in the moon phenomenon. 

In other words, pareidolia is the visual form of apophenia or the will to meaning that interprets purely random patterns or events as being in some way significant, thereby displaying evidence of intelligent design, or the hand of God. 

It's thus thanks to pareidolia in combination with other forms of apophenia - or what Michael Shermer has termed patternicity - that primitive mankind was able to organize chaos and make the universe not only intelligible, but also loving and divine; a manifestation of the sacred. Even today, there are believers who see the face of Jesus on a slice of burnt toast.        

And this is why torpedo the ark means rejecting all forms of correlationism and all attempts to locate agency, whether in heavenly bodies, or loaves of bread. In fact, I'm only half-joking when I say that the philosopher today is obliged not only to cultivate innocence and forgetfulness, but also prosopagnosia or face blindness. 

Perhaps then - and only then - will we be able to know objects as fully independent of ourselves.

Note: I am grateful to Azucena Gómez for suggesting this post and bringing some of the technical terminology to my attention.  

Love Unlocked

A happy couple on the Pont des Arts before the removal 

of the love locks on June 1st 

The decision taken by the municipal authorities to remove the hundreds of thousands of love locks from the Pont des Arts is a triumph of practical common sense over romance; evidence that even in Paris health and safety matters more than affairs of the heart. 

Having said that, there was something rather frightful about all that congealed weight of feeling (be it sincere or otherwise) and the obscene brass symbolism of l'amour. It reminded one of how gangrenous and burdensome love becomes when it is fixed in place and full of insistence. As one commentator wrote, the bridge was starting to groan under this display of collective egoism. 

But, on the other hand, one has to be careful not to be snobbish or superior here; I certainly don't pretend or wish to imply that love as I experience it is in some way more authentic, more noble and more beautiful because it doesn't come with a lock and key. Nor do I find the metal locks ugly as things in themselves; when glittering in the sunshine they constitute a rather pretty and impressive form of three-dimensional graffiti or folk art. 

So, in sum, I have mixed feelings about their removal. Probably, if it had been up to me, I would have left them and allowed the bridge to collapse in suicidal complicity, bringing this love story to the tragic conclusion that it deserves.  

Breast Ironing

Just as the Western world finds the courage and strength of conviction to confront the disgusting practice of female genital mutilation, news emerges of an almost equally horrific form of cultural cruelty originating in the Central African Republic of Cameroon.

Breast ironing is the attempt to suppress the development of breast tissue in pubescent girls by using hard and often heated objects to literally flatten any signs of such development. Usually, this is carried out by the girl's mother who does so in the belief that it will protect her child from sexual harassment, rape, and early pregnancy that would tarnish the family name and prevent the girl from completing her education. 

Thus, as so often with the moral stylization of the flesh, breast ironing is a bad act carried out with good intentions; i.e., a form of violent physical abuse inflicted in the name of love.

The most commonly used implement for breast ironing is a wooden pestle, normally reserved for the pounding of tubers. Sometimes, however, other tools are used, including coconut shells, grinding stones, and hammers that have first been heated over coals. It is widely practiced throughout Cameroon and is also found in neighbouring countries and millions of girls have had to endure this extremely painful torture which can have serious and lasting physical and psychological effects.

And now, thanks to mass immigration and multiculturalism, breast ironing is here in Europe too, imported by the Cameroonian diaspora keen to retain their native traditions. 

Ultimately, there's very little to be said - even though there is clearly an urgent need for something to be done. One might suggest that those parents who are so concerned about protecting the honour of their female offspring that they are prepared to crush budding breasts and/or mutilate genitalia shouldn't be allowed to have baby girls in their care. But this might only lead some to mistakenly think I'm condoning female infanticide, which is a whole other (if clearly related) problem.

It shouldn't be, but, unfortunately, the words It's a girl are often heard in many parts of the world as a license not only to maim, but to kill. 

Eve Teasing

blanknoise.org

So-called Eve teasing is a phenomenon by no means limited to South East Asia, but the men of this region have gained a particularly shameful and ugly reputation for sexually harassing and assaulting young women who have simply asserted their right to venture into a public space, catch a bus, or go to school. 

It might begin with a series of crude remarks, vulgar gestures, and inappropriate touching, but such behaviour fosters an intimidating environment in which far more serious acts of sexual violence can blossom. Indeed, I'm sympathetic to feminists who not only see a direct link between Eve teasing and rape, but classify the former as a minor form of the latter.

Whatever else it is, Eve teasing is certainly not just a type of harmless flirtation - although, arguably, it might be characterized as a form of courtship disorder, endemic in societies in which female independence directly challenges sexist norms, patriarchal traditions, and misogynistic values.

And this, it is important to note, by no means just refers us to Muslim societies. In fact, in a recent poll conducted amongst gender specialists around the world, the country that  was nominated as the worst place to be a woman amongst the G20 nations was not Saudi Arabia, as one might have thought, but India.
  
Further, following several high profile cases involving tourists, several countries, including China, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Russia and the United States, have issued advisory notices to their citizens alerting them to the rape epidemic across this country so loved (and so romanticized) by so many. The UK government posts this on its website:

"Women should use caution when travelling in India. Reported cases of sexual assault against women and young girls are increasing: recent sexual attacks against female visitors in tourist areas and cities show that foreign women are also at risk. British women have been the victims of sexual assault in Goa, Delhi, Bangalore and Rajasthan and women travellers often receive unwanted attention in the form of verbal and physical harassment by individuals or groups of men."

It further warns: 

"If you are a woman travelling in India you should respect local dress codes and customs and avoid isolated areas, including beaches, when alone at any time of day. Avoid travelling alone on public transport, or in taxis or rickshaws, especially at night."

This not only causes me to wonder why any woman would choose to go there at this time, but also think it might be worthwhile re-examining the case of Miss Adela Quested and the young Indian doctor, Aziz. Was her charge that he sexually assaulted her in the Marabar Caves really just the hysterical fantasy of a silly, self-absorbed girl, as the majority of (mostly male) critics have insisted ...?


Notes: 

Those interested in knowing more about the growing resistance amongst the women of India to Eve teasing and other forms of sexual violence might care to visit the Blank Noise website: click on the address beneath the image above.

Those interested in reading the full advice given by Her Majesty's Government on issues of safety and security to persons who plan on visiting India, click here. 

Those interested in knowing more about the controversial case of Adela and Aziz should see E. M. Forster's 1924 novel, A Passage to India. 

Dinggedicht

Trümmerfrau by Max Lichnit

What is this thing?

This thing that doesn't eat, doesn't sleep, doesn't speak, doesn't clean,
but continues to drag itself around, hanging-on, with tears in its eyes.

This thing that sits touching its face, as if seeking familiarity
with its own crumbling features.

This thing that fears silence, fears solitude, fears darkness, fears death,
and yet doesn't remember how to live.

This thing, this ruin, that is and is not meine Mutter.


SA

Why the Dalai Lama is Just Another Holy Fool

 

I wouldn't say I hate the Dalai Lama with the same degree of intensity as, for example, I hate Mother Teresa or Gandhi, but there's certainly something about him that I dislike and mistrust: the ghastly monastic robes; the perpetually smiling face (memorably described by James Snell as that of a dozy kitten); the fact that he likes to endorse the spiritual pretensions of Hollywood celebrities and hold the hands of royalty; the cynical manner in which he mixes Bambi-morality with calls for a return to a brutal theocratic feudalism under his own semi-divine leadership, etc.

Not surprisingly, Christopher Hitchens brilliantly outlines the case against him. But an equally interesting critique is by Pascal Bruckner, in which he contrasts Mr Tenzin Gyatso's astonishing success as a master of public relations and self-promotion, with his relative failure politically: 

"Coming out of exile like an Asian Moses descending from his Himalayas to reveal the essential truths ... he has transformed himself into a worldly guru ... a sort of peddler specializing in ... amiable twaddle precisely calibrated to the taste of European  and American audiences." 

He came to champion the cause of his people suffering under Chinese occupation and to impart the wisdom of the East, but, whilst the Dalai Lama succeeded in making a meek and mild version of Buddhism fashionable, he emptied the former of any real urgency or history.

Being generous, one might conclude not that he sold out or betrayed the Tibetan people, but that he was, as Bruckner suggests, overly keen to be a performer in our own image.

  
 
See: Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria, trans. Steven Rendall, (Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 59-61.

 

Lovely Lesbians

 Photo of June Miller by Brassaï (c. 1933)

Henry Miller's posthumously published novel Crazy Cock, was originally entitled Lovely Lesbians - this with reference to his beautiful second wife, June, and her lover, the somewhat mysterious figure of Jean Kronski, fictionally portrayed by Miller in the above work as the arts-loving and rather dapper dyke, Vanya.

Miller met June in 1923, when she was still only 21 and working as a dancer in New York. He immediately fell in love and abandoned his first wife and child in order to be with her. They married in the summer of the following year and their relationship is central to much of his work, including the two Tropic books and his semi-autobiographical trilogy, The Rosy Crucifixion.     

In October 1926, at June's insistence, Jean moved in with them. This allowed her to cultivate an intensely close relationship with the latter and she seemed to enjoy Jean's affections more than her husband's, much to Miller's chagrin. Not surprisingly, things soon came to a head and in April 1927 June and Jean left for Paris together.

Unfortunately, things didn't work out very well for the lovely lesbians and June returned to her old life with Miller in New York just three months later. As for Jean Kronski - if that was in fact her name - she is thought to have committed suicide in an insane asylum c.1930.

Now, I'm no expert on Miller, so I don't really know what he meant by the phrase lovely lesbians - one suspects he was using it in a sardonic manner, as I can't imagine he was entirely happy about the affair between his wife and Miss Kronski (though, that said, he didn't seem to mind later sharing June with Anaïs Nin, who was as sexually and creatively obsessed with her as Miller himself) - but it appeals very much because, for me, there is always something lovely about lesbians, wherever they are on the Sapphic spectrum; from the most feminine of lipstick lesbians, to the most butch or bullish of dykes.      

    

Does saying this make me a malesbian perchance? Not really. For this is a problematic term, for several reasons. Let's just say it demonstrates that I'm very much oriented towards women, feel happier in their company than in the company of men, and that Torpedo the Ark is an openly feminist blog which shares the view subscribed to by American poet and activist Audre Lorde that feminism fundamentally emerges out of a lesbian consciousness, whether or not one actually sleeps with women.

Cocksuckers and Communists

As everybody knows, the witch-hunts in Cold War America during the early 1950s, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, were not directed against individuals who liked to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight, but those who were - or were suspected of being - communists or left-leaning fellow-travelers.

But what is rather less well known is that McCarthyism was not merely a paranoid political response to the perceived Soviet infiltration of the US, but also manifested a phobic concern with homosexuality as an equally threatening and related form of subversive deviance.

Thus it was that the Second Red Scare was also tinted with lavender. In fact, the so-called Lavender Scare resulted in far more people being persecuted and hounded out of their jobs (or worse) than the more widely reported anti-communist campaign.

Both queers and reds were regarded as profoundly Un-American - that is to say, anti-God, anti-family, and anti-wholesomeness or what we might term apple-pie morality. They were believed to be actively conspiring to bring about a revaluation of sexual and cultural values and the overthrow of government.

For McCarthy and his supporters, someone such as Harry Hay was virtually the embodiment of evil and the link between political radicalism and perversion was proven beyond any shadow of a doubt. On one occasion McCarthy even brazenly announced to reporters that anyone who opposed him had to be either a communist or a cocksucker.

Happily, those of a lavender persuasion not only survived this ugly period in American history, but were strengthened by it. For ironically, the forerunners of today's LGBTQ movement came out of the McCarthy era; the Mattachine Society was founded in 1950, for example, followed by the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955.

As for old Joe, he died a broken man aged forty-eight, in 1957, from acute hepatitis (exacerbated by alcoholism), having been censured by the Senate three years earlier and seen his power and influence dramatically wane. As President Eisenhower is believed to have quipped, McCarthyism had become McCarthywasm. 


Notes

See: David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare, (University of Chicago Press, 2004). 

A feature-length documentary by Josh Howard based on the above work is presently in post-production.

The Case of Leopold and Loeb

The shocking case of Leopold and Loeb continues to haunt the cultural (and criminal) imagination - not least of all when one has just re-watched Hitchcock's 1948 film, Rope, which was an adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's 1929 play of the same title, inspired by their sorry tale.
    
For those unfamiliar with the case, the salient facts are these: Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were highly gifted students at the University of Chicago, from extremely privileged backgrounds. In an attempt to demonstrate their intellectual and moral superiority, they set out to commit the perfect crime. This involved the kidnap and murder of fourteen year-old Bobby Franks in May 1924. 

Leopold, born in 1904, was the son of a wealthy Jewish family who had emigrated from Germany. A child prodigy with an outrageous IQ who spoke several languages fluently, he had by the time of the murder already completed his undergraduate degree at Chicago with honours and was planning to study law at Harvard. His partner in crime - and lover - Richard Loeb, born in 1905, was also exceptionally bright. Despite this, he was regarded by his tutors as lazy and overly interested in pulp fiction. 

Although the two boys knew each other whilst growing up in the same affluent neighbourhood, their relationship only really blossomed at the University of Chicago; particularly after discovering that they shared a mutual love of crime stories and an interest in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Leopold was particularly fascinated by the latter's concept of the Übermensch and imagined himself as someone destined to pass beyond good and evil. In a letter to Loeb, he wrote that superior individuals are, on account of certain inherent qualities, exempted from the laws which govern the lives of ordinary men.

Putting theory into practice, the two friends engaged in a series of petty crimes in order to demonstrate their contempt for and rejection of bourgeois society. Emboldened by their success at evading capture, they progressed to ever more serious acts, including arson. Disappointed, however, with the lack of media coverage they felt their crimes deserved, they decided to up the stakes in order to capture public attention and confirm their status as superior individuals: thus the killing of Bobby Franks, a second cousin of Loeb's described by Leopold as a 'cocky little son of a bitch'.

Unfortunately, the so-called crime of the century was solved by police in just a matter of days. Leopold and Loeb were arrested and both confessed during interrogation (although each blamed the other for delivering the fatal blows to the head of the young victim with a chisel). Both men also declared that they were motivated by a sense of philosophical investigation; this was murder as an intellectual exercise or moral-aesthetic experiment - as justifiable, said Leopold to his lawyer, as the killing of a beetle by an entomologist.

At the end of their month long trial, both were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder, plus an additional 99 years for the kidnapping. The two maintained their intimate relationship behind bars until Loeb was brutally slashed with a razor in the showers by another inmate, James Day, in January 1936. Although taken directly to the prison hospital, his life couldn't be saved. Leopold was allowed to wash his friend's body as a final act of affection.     

Following this incident, Leopold went on to become a model prisoner and he made many significant contributions to improving conditions at Stateville Penitentiary before his release in 1958. He then went on to become a model citizen, working in healthcare and social services and studying bird-life as he searched for a halo in Puerto Rico. He died in 1971, aged 66.

The Franks murder has since inspired many works of fiction, film, and theatre. I think what really interests about the case of Leopold and Loeb is also what most depresses: when you strip away the lavender trappings and philosophical pretension all you are left with is a rather squalid act that demonstrates what Hannah Arendt famously termed the banality of evil. In other words, for all the sensational and transgressive aspects of murder, it results finally in a feeling of numbness and terminal boredom.

One might have hoped and expected something else, something more, from such gifted young men. Why do so many self-confessed Nietzscheans disappoint?     

The Joy of Buttons - A Guest Post by Christian Michel

I

When the success of Lolita allowed him to live in the luxury he had been accustomed to in his childhood before the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Nabokov complained after the long-serving and much-loved lift man at the Montreux Palace was replaced by an automated system of buttons.

Nabokov doesn't elaborate, but his concern seems unrelated to the misery of unemployment or the human cost of further advances in machine technology. Rather, it was more to do with his own desire for recognition as a respected patron of the hotel. Buttons, alas, do not meet this need.

The lift operator - educated, well-mannered, and at ease around the rich and powerful - was, if not quite a gentleman in his own right, nevertheless a true professional who understood perfectly how society is founded upon mutual respect and recognition between its members, even across divisions of class. The sordid topic of coin does not - or at least should not - be allowed to disrupt this.      

Certainly in the well-ordered environment of a grand hotel, members of staff are not regarded as abject inferiors and whilst they must certainly not be overly-familiar or forward, neither are they expected to be obsequious or servile. It's a question of balance; of being relaxed, but not informal or discourteous. This, in turn, impels the guests of the hotel to be polite and, hopefully, generous with tips. Thus all actors in this disciplined artificial utopia perform in accordance with social expectation and custom.  

Of course, this social model may not appeal very much to a modern, democratic sensibility. But isn't it more human and, indeed, more humane than a world wherein we are all required to push our own elevator buttons? 

II

Having said this, perhaps Nabokov and those who subscribe to an idealised world of masters and servants miss something crucial: we moderns love pressing buttons and interacting with technology and that is why the machine has triumphed and the old order given way.

Perhaps our daily use of and reliance upon mighty machines and smart devices has somewhat dulled the pleasure, but imagine our ancestors joy at realising that they could suddenly achieve miracles at the touch of a button, or the flick of a switch. To get anything done at all used to require hard labour and dirty, dangerous, tedious hours of endless toil. And the result was often hardly worth the effort!

It is only after the industrial revolution ushers in the Age of the Machine and, later, information-technology, that work becomes honourable and life becomes more than merely a short, brutal form of meagre existence that is scratched out from the dirt on a day-to-day basis. What is more beautiful than being able to press a button in order to power up and light up the world? Or indeed, destroy it. 

Nabokov neglected or chose to ignore this aspect. And so, whilst I agree with him that individuals need the recognition and respect of their fellows, we don't want to be deprived of the joy, the convenience, and the privilege of pressing buttons.


Christian Michel is a London-based, French political theorist and activist; un homme de lettres et un homme de la ville. He teaches courses on economics and is regularly asked to speak at international events as a leading figure within the libertarian movement. Christian also organizes a twice-monthly salon at his West London home known as the 6/20 Club and facilitates the Café Philo at the Institut français on Saturday mornings.      

Christian appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for his kind permission to revise and edit - and not merely reproduce - the above text which has previously appeared elsewhere in a longer, somewhat different version.