Torpedo the Ark - Fire 500! (Ibsen, Nietzsche, and the Question of Revolutionary Nihilism)

Henrik Ibsen (2014) 
A low-poly portrait by Taudalpoi

taudalpoi.wordpress.com

In 1869, the Scandinavian playwright Henrik Ibsen composed a short poem entitled 'To My Friend, the Revolutionary Orator'. It was addressed to a critic who had accused Ibsen, then aged forty-one, of betraying the radical promise of his youth and becoming increasingly conservative. 

In the verse, Ibsen not only wishes to refute the charge, but demonstrate that he remains a perfervid revolutionary; more - not less - radical than before; one who desires the total destruction of the old order. He's not interested, he says, in moving pawns about the chessboard, or in futile social reforms. He wants to make a clean sweep of things.

Becoming increasingly intoxicated by his uncompromising vision of a future founded upon absolute freedom and purity of being achieved via a purge of all existing life forms, Ibsen announces that, come a new flood, he will happily torpedo the ark.

Discontent with anything other than the dream of a new beginning and a new mankind, Ibsen finds it impossible to identify with any political parties or programmes. His extreme individualism leads him towards a form of anarcho-nihilism in which not just the modern state, but the world itself needs to be blown out of the water. 

For some, this might all sound rather like Nietzsche in his grand political mode when he imagines himself as dynamite; a sort of human bomb longing to explode and make a breach in the walls of whatever constrains and coordinates life. For it's true, there are elements of fascism in Nietzsche - particularly in the later works, as he grows ever-more frustrated and possessed by the spirit of revenge that elsewhere in his texts he deplores and seeks to combat.

We shouldn't overlook or deny this; but we should remember also the Nietzsche who wrote: "I do not love people who have to explode like bombs in order to have any effect at all" and advocates a politics of resistance rather than a politics of revolutionary redemption. The Nietzsche who also wrote:

"If change is to be as profound as it can be, the means to it must be given in the smallest doses but unremittingly over long periods of time! Can what is great be created at a single stroke? So let us take care not to exchange the state of morality to which we are accustomed for a new evaluation of things head over heels and amid acts of violence ..."

Of course, some will point out that this 'small doses' passage taken from his mid-period writings is no more indicative of the authentic Nietzsche, or any more quintessential than the later texts in which he fantasizes the seizure of history and evolution. And they'd be right to do so. However, it seems to me to offer a much more interesting and credible teaching than the lame and ludicrous notion of holy war and a return to Year Zero. 

I don't know if Ibsen ever had cause to regret his desire to implement a final solution - but shame on him, as an artist and as a man, if he never came to realise that the chick does not break the shell out of animosity against the egg (as Lawrence would say).

And I would hope, finally, after 500 posts, that the phrase torpedo the ark is understood to mean something very different in the context of this blog to what Ibsen meant by it ...


Notes:

Those interested in reading the Ibsen poem in which the line 'torpedo the ark' appears should click here.

The lines quoted from Nietzsche can be found in (i) The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), III. 218, p. 210, and (ii) Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), V. 534, p. 211.

 

Outsider Art and Beyond

 D. Hall: Teddy, ballpoint pen on paper, (2015)

The phrase outsider art was coined by critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English translation for the French term art brut invented by Jean Dubuffet to describe works created outside the boundaries of official culture by those who are often socially marginalized, such as those suffering with mental illness, for example.

Those labelled as outsider artists are typically self-taught and there is often a naive beauty or innocence to their work, which compensates for lack of technique or sophistication. Usually, outsider artists have no contact with the mainstream art world and make no attempt to exhibit or establish careers. In many cases their work, born of solitude and isolation, is discovered - if at all - posthumously and thus makes money only for others; outsider art having now become a successful marketing category within the art world, despite Dubuffet's hope that it would prove immune to this process.

Interest in the art of those who exhibit extreme states of neuro-cognitive disorder and diversity - as well as young children, native peoples, and animals - is, of course, nothing new. Modernism might almost be said to be nothing other than the brilliant (sometimes cynical, often ironic and subversive) imitation and assimilation of such work, rich in unconventional ideas, fantasy, and expressive power. It's certainly true that many important figures associated with the avant-garde were fascinated and inspired by madness and primitivism (and that some had their own very real mental health issues to deal with).   

This interest in outsider practices among modern artists must, of course, be seen as part of a larger project; one that Nietzsche terms the revaluation of all values. Not that my mother, who is ninety and living with Alzheimer's, cares anything about any of this. She just doesn't know what else to do when alone and frightened and unable now to read the paper or follow her favourite programmes on TV other than pick up a pen and draw little pictures of familiar objects and faces.

And I don't think she's ever used the word art in her life or grasps it as a concept; her relation to art can hardly even be described as one of exteriority. In a sense, she's on the outside of that which is outside art and I have no idea what we might call that space ...    

On Hyperobjects and the Anthropocene

University of Minnesota Press, (2013)

Although - as far as I know - the term Anthropocene hasn't yet been formally adopted by geologists and others within the scientific community, it has nevertheless gained increasingly wide currency in various fields, including philosophy, since its coinage in the 1980s by the ecologist Eugene Stoermer and subsequent reworking and popularization by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen.

Put simply, the Anthropocene refers to the period when human activities begin to have significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems. For some, this starts with the Industrial Revolution; for others, it can be linked to much earlier developments, such as the birth of agriculture, or, if you want to be a bit Heideggerian about this, the fall of man into his technological enframing which denies Dasein the hope of experiencing the call of a more primal truth. 

Personally, I favour a later date - with the detonating of the first atomic device, for example, in 1945 - and would just as soon leave Heidegger out of this (for now at least).

One thing is for sure: just as determining a start date for the Anthropocene is tricky, so too the nature and extent of human impact is debatable and, for many, a highly controversial topic. But we can surely all be agreed that a marked effect has been made on the environment and, indeed, on evolution, thanks to the accelerated species extinction for which man is the primary causal agent.

For Timothy Morton, who has thought more than most about the Anthropocene - not least of all because he ironically recognizes how we are no longer able to think history as an exclusively human affair - the present era is an Age of Asymmetry characterized by hyperobjects that are beyond our cognition and control; real entities that are massively distributed in time and space and which are directly responsible for what he terms the end of the world, even as they bring us back down to earth with a bump and thereby take the necessary humiliation of mankind to its limit.

Lawrence referred to this as climbing down Pisgah and thought it would be voluntary. But it seems it will require a little non-human encouragement from things that are incomparably more vast and powerful than we are; things that - like gods - determine our fate and our future. 
    

Note: I am grateful to Dr Anna Barcz for encouraging me to read the above work by Morton.  

гомофобия: Vladimir Putin Versus the Gay Emoji

Russia, December 1917: the newly established revolutionary government repudiates all Tsarist laws against homosexuality; the Bolshevik regime declares a policy of absolute non-interference into the love lives of its citizens (so long as no other party is injured or has their rights and freedoms encroached upon). 

Sodomy, announce the Soviets, will henceforth be treated as no different from other supposedly more natural forms of intercourse. Having stormed the Winter Palace, they would now liberate the anus as a site of pleasure and gateway to the future.  

However, fast-forward to Russia in the summer of 2015 and what do we find? 

President Putin announces his intention to outlaw the use of all emojis depicting aspects of contemporary gay lifestyle, which, he says, corrupt and confuse children, undermine the sanctity of marriage, and, in this way, threaten both the family and the state. 

The so-called Young Guard - the youth division of Putin's political party, United Russia - have been instructed to keep an eye out for the sinister spread of gay emoji on social media and to report such at once. Supporters of the move claim that the cartoon figures are in clear breach of the country's ban on gay propaganda that Putin signed into effect in 2013.    

Whilst ludicrous and laughable, this development is also both deeply disturbing and depressing; an indication of just how petty - as well as how widespread and violent - homophobia in Russia has now become (and been officially encouraged to become).    

Perhaps the only good thing is that it helps to dispel the myth of progress: human affairs neither move forward nor backwards; rather we are forever caught up in perpetual spirals of power and pleasure and obliged to fight the same battles against stupidity over and over again to no end whatsoever. There can be gains, but no victory; losses, but no defeat.   

D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo and Some Transpolitical Musings

Garry Shead, Lawrence and Kangaroo, (1992)

Although I'm interested in politics and regard my work as politically informed, I am not one of those individuals who could ever belong to a political party or follow a party line.

I suppose, primarily, this has something to do with wishing to safeguard my reputation as a nomadic thinker; i.e. one who cares for those ideas that don't allow themselves to easily be codified or coordinated by an ideology, or made subject to authority. For this reason, I'm very sympathetic to Richard Somers, protagonist of Lawrence's novel Kangaroo (1923).

For Somers too is something of a Nietzschean free spirit, struggling to rid himself from all forms of dogma and doxa, desperately trying to reinvent each gesture and finally find a way in which to say something in his own name without asking permission (albeit a name which designates no ego whatsoever).

Thus, although he writes essays on social questions - and although he flirts with parties on both the far-left and far-right of the political spectrum, fantasizing about being a revolutionary man of action - Somers ultimately chooses to stand aside and stand alone, remaining loyal to his own demon (no matter how wilfully perverse this makes him look in the eyes of others) and exercising what Foucault describes as a decisive will not to be governed.

He very early on in the novel makes his transpositional position clear when he states that politics isn't his real concern and that he'd rather wander in a homeless fashion without a friend in the world than belong to any nation, church, or cause. Somers knows and comes to accept that he is fated to be one of those who must remain silent, lonely, and resolute - individuals content to engage in invisible activities outside the gate.

Heidegger talks about the need for such people engaged in reverent contemplativeness which might keep open the slim hope of a new revealing for man; a form of transcendence that has been purged not only of its conventional ties to morality and metaphysics, but also to the very possibility of direct action.

Ultimately, despite what militant political fanatics and religious terrorists believe, the greatest events are not our loudest or bloodiest but our stillest hours and "The world revolves not around the inventors of new noises, but around the inventors of new values; it revolves inaudibly."

Like Zarathustra, Richard Somers knows in his heart that change takes time and begins with a new feeling. Thus whilst the commentator Mac Daly is right to suggest that Kangaroo unfolds within a nihilistic universe, he is mistaken to argue that Somers's problem is that he cannot summon up sufficient faith in any cause that might give his life meaning. This, in fact, is Somers's strength and saving grace; it is what prevents him from deteriorating into something dreary and political like a communist or a fascist. It is his lack of faith and his inability to believe in anything or anyone that, paradoxically, is a sign of his spiritual superiority.

For Somers knows that whilst life can be made to march in step with the limited movements of the body politic and mouth empty slogans, it at the same time exceeds these and goes far beyond them: for life makes no absolute statement and sensitive, intelligent men and women don't need metanarratives and remain incredulous before them. If they do think their way into a political party or a faith, so too do they think their way through and out the other side, back into the open, like worms through a rotten apple. 

Kangaroo is a great novel precisely because it encourages us not to belong; to keep moving and abandon all attachments; to understand that it's merely Christian to love your enemies, whilst the really crucial but difficult thing is learning how to hate your friends and betray your masters.      


Notes:

D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, edited by Bruce Steele with an Introduction and Notes by Macdonald Daly, (Penguin Books, 1997).  

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969). The line quoted is from the section in part two entitled 'Of Great Events', pp. 153-54.  

See also Stephen Alexander, Outside the Gate, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), II. 6, pp. 127-45, for a further discussion of this topic with reference to Kangaroo and Aaron's Rod. 

Homophobia: Mixing Desire With Disgust

In their classic study, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White argue that the bourgeois subject defines himself through an act of exclusion. In other words, his identity is not merely founded upon self-affirmation: I am X, but also negation of otherness: I am not Y. 

For example, I am male / I am not female; I am straight / I am not gay. In this manner he constructs an entire system of binary oppositions that are as tedious as they are restrictive. While one term is highly valued as the good and noble, the other is seen as a form of worthless evil; that which is base, dirty, repulsive, and corrupting.

But here's the thing: the latter, whilst excluded, is nonetheless internalized under the sign of negation and so disgust always retains the imprint of desire - just as, conversely, desire forever keeps an element of disgust. So it is, that whenever one reads the obscene rantings of the homophobe one is struck not only by the level of hate, but also the obsessive and perverse fascination for those practices and those people which are so despised. 

To be clear: I'm not simply saying there's always a secret longing on behalf of the homophobe for an experience of gay sex - although doubtless this is often the case - but that there is, to quote Jonathan Dollimore, "an additional structural interdependence of desire and disgust". 

And so: "even when homophobia is not obviously a projection of repressed desire, being more a hostile response to the intolerably different, even then, the homosexual, through condensed association, may be one on whom is projected the repressed disgust inherent in desire."

  

Notes

Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, (Oxford University Press, 1991). Lines quoted are on p. 247.

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, (Cornell University Press, 1986). 

     

What Big Extraterrestrial Eyes You Have

Matilda the Cat is something of an internet sensation, with thousands of followers on social media. But, despite her appearance, she's actually a perfectly normal moggie. The poor thing does suffer, however, from a rare condition in which the lenses of her eyes have spontaneously detached, causing blindness, and giving her the look of an alien being. 

Those who are interested in reading more about her case should visit: aliencatmatilda.com - her official website. Because, fascinating as her story is, what I really wish to discuss here is the origin of the idea that aliens - particularly those known as Greys - have large, black, glassy-looking eyes. 

Obviously it doesn't come from the actual world, because there are no entities from out of space visiting planet Earth on a regular basis and abducting large numbers of human beings in order to probe them and fuck with their minds. Many people - mostly Americans - might believe contrary to this and insist that there's a global conspiracy covering up the facts, but, alas, it is of course complete nonsense; a mad fantasy on behalf of the needy, the lonely, and the fearful. A bit like the belief in a loving - but vengeful - God. 

For God, like ET, is a convenient fiction. Not surprisingly therefore, we find that our idea of what an alien looks like first comes from literature: H. G. Wells to be precise, who, as long ago as 1893 was already imagining futuristic grey-skinned beings with big heads and large eyes. Then, in 1901, he depicted the natives of the moon (Selenites) in very similar terms. 

He was followed in this belief that alien races would conform closely to a certain body type, by the Swedish writer Gustav Sandgren who, in 1933, under the pen name of Gabriel Linde, published a sci-fi novel translated into English as The Unknown Danger. Here, once again, a race of aliens were described as chinless wonders possessing big bald heads, large gleaming eyes, and small mouths. 

Thirty years later and press reports of the Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction case described those doing the abducting in this identikit manner. All stereotypes are grey; but by now all Greys were stereotypical.

Spielberg unimaginatively gave us more of the same in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). And then, in the 1990s, Mulder and Scully chased very familiar looking aliens for nine seasons, The X-Files firmly establishing the link in the paranoid imagination between Greys and the military-industrial complex of the New World Order.

As Oscar Wilde once said, Life imitates art far more than art imitates life. The disappointing thing is how few people realise this (and how tragic the consequences can be).

On the Idea of Manning Up

Image from the You Don't Say campaign

Click here for details

 

Despite what some students at Duke University might argue, the phrase man up is ambiguous enough in meaning for us to let it pass.

Not that I'd personally feel comfortable using it and I certainly understand how it might be interpreted as demanding conformity with a sexist, homophobic, and ultimately untenable model of hyper-masculinity. 

And I've no doubt that many of those who tell others to man up also tell them to grow a pair and stop being a pussy. But whereas these expressions are clearly and crudely rooted in biology, to man up just might be seen as an ethical imperative that can be addressed to any individual regardless of their sex or gender and which basically means act with a degree of self-control and a little courage; recognise your responsibilities and don't blame others when things go wrong. 

In other words, to man up, is to behave in a virtuous and noble manner; to never explain, never complain. It is not to behave like a macho brute or emotional retard, flexing muscles and prejudices. It is, as a Jewish friend says, simply to be a mensch (not a schmuck or a superman).

Strangely, it sounds so much more acceptable in Yiddish ...

         

A Cinderella Moment

Sophia Mechetner in a dress by Raf Simons for Dior

Photo: Yannis Vlamos / Indigitalimages.com

According to Natasha Bird, Senior Editor of Yahoo Lifestyle and a woman who prides herself not only on her knowledge of fashion and beauty, but her ability to be sarcastic about those involved in an industry off of which she makes her living, calling the catwalk debut of 14-year-old Israeli model Sophia Mechetner a "Cinderella moment" is a bit creepy.

This time, according to Ms. Bird, those monsters at Dior have gone too far! 

For whilst accepting and delighting in the fact that the fashion industry has always pushed what she calls the moral boundaries (without telling us what these limits are and how designers might be thought to challenge such, although it seems to involve nipple baring, skeletal frames, and overtly sexual posturing), Ms. Bird insists that the appearance of  Miss Mechetner on the runway oversteps the threshold between what is interesting and discomforting. 

In other words, whilst she likes to be intellectually titillated and perhaps just a little scandalized, she doesn't actually want to engage in the dangerous - and yes, often troubling - business of thinking cultural values and social norms, particularly those which revolve around the body of the young girl. 

It's so much easier just to tell us that there was something a little untoward about Miss Mechetner closing (and stealing) the Dior show in what she ludicrously describes as essentially a nightdress - whilst at the same time happily reproducing images of the model in her beautiful sheer white gown that she finds so distasteful. Ms. Bird continues, in a passage full of false outrage and faux concern:

"Even more distasteful, one might argue, is the way some media outlets chose to ignore 14-year-old Mechetner's bare breasts, calling her debut "a Cinderella moment". We can probably all agree, this isn't a Cinderella moment, it's a Lolita moment and it's one that should probably be addressed going forwards"

Ms. Bird seems incapable of imagining that others might have genuinely found Miss Mechetner's debut enchanting. And that others might actually be interested in the clothes and not share her seeming obsession with young flesh and exposed nipples. 

To find something obscene or perverse in Miss Mechetner's debut is in itself a little obscene and perverse. And when the real horrors of child sexual abuse (be it within a pornographic or indeed a religious context) still remain largely unaddressed, one finds it depressing that an undoubtedly intelligent and well-educated woman such as Ms. Bird wastes her time writing such prudish and piss-poor articles.       

Note: For those who might be interested, Natasha Bird's online piece can be read in full by clicking here. 

Artificial Intelligence and the Question of Racism (The Case of Jacky Alcine)

Jacky Alcine and Friend - laughing and posing for selfies 

in a manner that is all too human 

One of the more disconcerting stories doing the digital rounds at the moment concerns Google's amazing new picture service which lets you store (and edit) unlimited images online. So far, so good. 

But Google Photos also automatically stores the images under a wide but predetermined variety of category headings using the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence to identify objects. And this is where the problems begin; including the problem of racism as an inbuilt feature of technology.  

Thus, embarrassingly for Google, the case of Jacky Alcine, an African American, and his female friend, also black, who were both labelled as gorillas! 

Now, whilst there's nothing essentially wrong or shameful with looking like an ape - we are apes! - of course this issue needs to be understood within the cultural context and long history of racism. This is what makes this case of mistaken identification in the words of a Google executive, "100% not okay". 

To their credit, Google acted swiftly to rectify the situation, apologised to Mr. Alcine and his friend, and issued a statement expressing their genuine sorrow at the upset caused. But still the question tweeted by Mr. Alcine, himself a computer programmer, not of how this happened, but why, remains discreetly passed over in silence. 

For whilst we can all understand glitches in the technology involved and accept that more work needs to be done, the key question concerns the kind of image data that was collected and used by Google in the first place. It's here that an unconscious cross-race effect enters in. For when engineers attempt to teach a machine what a human being looks like by showing it the happy white faces that belong to the majority of their fellow employees in Silicon Valley, then unintended (but nonetheless real and just as offensive) racist consequences follow.

Somewhat depressingly, though unsurprisingly perhaps, it seems that just as the White Man is modelled in the image of God, so is Sonny made in the image of his pale-faced creator and comes with bias built in as standard ...