Aparigraha and Adoxia (Notes on Yoga and Cynicism)

My confidante and muse, Zena, has newly qualified as a yoga teacher after an intensive period of study in the foothills of the Himalayas. She enjoys yoga as a physical and mental practice, but is also excited by it as a philosophy or system of spiritual beliefs, about which I’m naturally curious.

Thus I listened with interest when she told me about the Hindu virtue of aparigraha - an ethical concept that encourages non-attachment to material things, thereby countering the will-to-possess that can so often result in the vulgarity and the violence of greed.

Of course, what we in the West might term temperance is a crucial component of various religious traditions, not just Hinduism. For many people, the true life is not merely a simple life, but one in which poverty is believed to be a good thing and wealth something of a disadvantage for those who hope to enter the kingdom of heaven.

But - as far as I understand it - that's not quite the idea being advanced by the teachers of aparigraha.

Rather, as with the Stoics, the crucial issue is not so much having or not having money, but adopting an indifferent attitude towards riches, so that one does not become fixated by all the trappings of wealth, greedy for all the goods and services that money can buy, or overly worried by the prospect of one day losing one's power and status within society.

In other words, it remains perfectly possible to lead a virtuous and humble life and still have millions stashed in a secret bank account. All that matters is that these millions don’t really matter to you; that you remain morally aloof, so to speak, from your own wealth and unafraid of any reversal of fortune. By liberating the spirit and letting go in the mind, one needn't be deprived per se or physically destitute (which is certainly convenient for those religious leaders and gurus who like to wear Gucci loafers with their robes).

Now compare and contrast this with the real and radical poverty that the ancient Cynics actively sought out. Diogenes and his followers didn't just offer an effectively virtual moral teaching based upon a simple detachment of the soul; rather, they stripped existence of even the basic material components upon which it is usually thought to depend (including clothes and shelter). Thus, as Foucault notes:

"The dramaturgy of Cynic poverty is far from that indifference which is unconcerned about wealth ... it is an elaboration of oneself in the form of visible poverty. It is not an acceptance of poverty; it is a real conduct of poverty ... unlimited ... in the sense that it does not halt at a stage which is thought to be satisfying because one thinks one is ... free from everything superfluous. It continues and is always looking for possible further destitution."

- Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 258. 

In fact, the Cynics push their scandalous practice of poverty to the point that they end up leading lives full of dirt, dependency, and disgrace; they become the one thing worse than being a slave in Greek eyes - and that's being a beggar. For the Cynics, the key is not aparigraha - it's adoxia - the seeking out of a bad reputation and the systematic practice of dishonour.  

Now - just to be clear - I'm not saying that I approve of or advocate Cynicism; not encouraging those who have taken up yoga in order to find a certain degree of inner peace and wisdom to suddenly abandon their practices and start leading a naked, bestial life of shameless destitution - I'd hate it if Zena suddenly started barking like a dog and committing indecent acts in public.

Nevertheless, I am saying something and I suppose what I'm saying is that I find the core principles of yoga (the so called yamas, of which aparigraha is a key element) platitudinous; they lack any philosophical bite, or critical edge. Further, I worry that they can lead not only to good karma for the individual (whatever that is), but to a socially conservative politics that reinforces convention and the order of things.

In sum: I don't want to masturbate in the market place, but neither do I want to meditate cross-legged on a mountain top, surrendering myself to the higher power of the universe ...            

Dog Bites: On the Question of Man and Animal (and the Becoming-Animal of Man)

Photo by Eija-Liisa Ahtila from the eight part series 

of images entitled Dog Bites (1992-97)

Like Lou Carrington, I’ve always believed there must be something else to marvel at in humanity besides a clever mind and a nice, clean face and that we might term this something else animality.

And like Lou, I’ve always hoped that were we to conduct what Nietzsche terms a reverse experiment and resurrect the wild beast within us, then we might produce a type of man who would be “as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath”.

But now I’m not so sure about the desirability of this: for clearly there are dangers involved in the process of man’s becoming-animal and no one really wants to see werewolves prowling the streets.

Nor, for that matter, do I think it an attractive prospect to live like a dog, as Diogenes liked to live and as was central to the ancient philosophical practice of Cynicism. I don’t want to shit in the street or copulate in full view of others; don’t want to drink rainwater, growl at strangers, or eat raw meat. Like incest, these provocative acts might be perfectly natural and constitute secret pleasures, but they should only be indulged in with extreme caution.

In other words, unlike the ancient Cynics - and unlike some of the more militant of the animal rights activists and environmentalists campaigning in our own time - I don’t wish to tie the principle of the true life exclusively to the domain of Nature and thus reject all social convention and civilized restraint.

Our humanity may well be something that needs to be reformulated and eventually overcome, but it remains nevertheless a magnificent accomplishment; one that was achieved only after a huge amount of suffering over an immense period of time.

Thus, to adopt a model of behaviour based upon that of our own animality (or, rather, what we imagine the latter to be) simply so we might lick our own balls in public and thereby scandalise those who pride themselves on all that distinguishes them as human beings, seems to me profoundly mistaken.


Notes

Lou Carrington is a character in D. H. Lawrence’s short novel St. Mawr. See St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). The line quoted is on p. 61.

For an interesting interpretation of the bios kunikos and why the Cynics prided themselves on living such see Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 242-43.

Chaturbate and the Question of Cynicism

Georg Viktor: Diogenes in der Tonne (Raku ceramic figure) 

www.viktor-ge.org

For those of you who don’t know, Chaturbate is a popular pornographic website where individuals live-stream themselves engaged in sexual activity, either solo or with a partner or partners. Performers can earn money in the form of tips from viewers, but they are essentially amateurs in the pure sense of the term; i.e. they do it because they love to live an unconcealed and shameless life; a life that is constantly under the watchful eyes of others and before the virtual gaze of the camera.

Some critics argue that such behaviour is unnatural and immoral and I’ll come to this philosophically naive charge shortly. Others suggest it constitutes a way of being that is unique to the age in which we live; one that can only be understood in terms of the technology that facilitates it. But, of course, despite what the posthumanists think, there’s nothing new under the sun, and even so-called cybersex might be seen as nothing more than a digital restaging of life in its libidinally material reality.

As such, Chaturbate constitutes a novel revival of an obscene and scandalous ancient practice - Cynicism. Diogenes masturbated in the market place and his disciple Crates liked to fuck his wife in public; our twenty-first century cynics do these things online. But far from being corrupt or perverse, it’s actually a form of the good life; a type of true love taken to the logical extreme. For as even Plato knew, true love never hides itself away; it’s that which is always happy to reveal itself before witnesses.

Now, this is not to say that Plato would have approved of Chaturbate. He may have taught that truth loves to go naked, but he also subscribed to traditional rules of Greek propriety. There were limits and it was best to exercise caution and moderation. For Plato, Diogenes was beyond the pale; he was a Socrates gone mad. And Plato knew that if you push ideals to their extreme, then you effect a kind of transvaluation.

What Michel Foucault writes of the Cynic dramatization of the unconcealed life, is precisely what we might say of Chaturbate’s interactive community of cam-girls and cam-boys and their attempt to love with complete openness: chaturbating is “the strict, simple, and, in a sense, crudest possible application of the principle that one should live without having to blush at what one does”.

But, as a result of this, all the rules, habits, and conventions of behaviour which this principle initially accepted and reinforced, are now overturned. Cynicism explodes the code of propriety and offers the possibility of a radically different (more brazen, perhaps more brutal) form of life: one that is watched over by the goddess Anaideia.

See: Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), The line quoted is on p. 255 of this paperback edition. 

On Queerness, Cynicism, and the Question of True Love

The notion of true love is central within Western culture. It's a concept founded upon the four values identified by Foucault as belonging to aletheia:

“True love is first, love which does not conceal ... because it has nothing to hide ... it is always willing to show itself in front of witnesses ... Second, true love is an unalloyed love ... in which sensual pleasure and the friendship of souls do not intermingle. Third, true love is love in line with what is right, with what is correct ... It has nothing contrary to the rule or custom. And finally, true love is love which is never subject to change or becoming. It is an incorruptible love which remains always the same.” [220-21]

You can find this ideal model of love developed in both Plato and what Nietzsche derided as Platonism for the people (Christianity). It’s a straight and straightforward form of love without subterfuge, disguise, or even curiosity; love that prides itself on its sincerity and its naturalness, rather than a sense of playfulness or sophistication. There’s simply nothing queer about it. It’s what normal, healthy, men and women share and upon which the sanctity of marriage is based.

Homosexuality, on the other hand, is, at its best - that is to say, at its most defiantly queer - the love that refuses to speak its name; the love that likes to stick to the shadows and hide in closets; the love that finds pride in its perverse, plural, and promiscuous character; an ironic, gender-bending, form of love that delights in artifice and in camp; a love that doesn’t conform to the heteronormative rule, or give a fig either about the judgement of God or what Nature dictates.

One might describe this queer radical style of homosexuality, as separatist. It certainly doesn’t want to fit into straight society and doesn’t keep banging on about equal rights; doesn’t long for a lifestyle involving monogamous marriage and the prospect of breeding. It isn't even particularly gay ...

In fact, we might best characterize it as Cynical in the ancient philosophical sense. That is to say, a type of practice which has a very militant idea of what constitutes the truth (of love and of life) and which has been “stamped by a scandal which has constantly accompanied it, a disapproval which surrounds it, a mixture of mockery, repulsion, and apprehension in reaction to its presence and manifestations” [231].

If Cynicism was the disgrace of ancient philosophy, then queer-cynical homosexuality is the travesty of true love; holding up a funfair mirror before Eros so that the latter can recognise himself, whilst, crucially, at the same time see himself outrageously distorted and made multiple.

See: Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Page numbers given refer to this paperback edition.

It's a Gay Life - But is it also a Good Life?

After recently presenting a paper on the politics and psychopathology of homophobia, somebody emailed to ask if I could provide a more philosophical explanation why gay men and lesbians are often viewed negatively by those who identify as heterosexual and belong to the straight majority.

In order to do this, we need to think back to a much older question - one that is central both to ancient philosophy and Christian spirituality - namely, the question of what constitutes a good life. The answer, of course, is all to do with one’s relationship to the truth (aletheia).

For the good life is also the true life, which means that the respectable citizen is one who not only speaks the truth, but manifests it in their daily existence (in what they do and don’t do). This crucial idea is one that has deeply ingrained itself within Western culture and continues to shape our thinking today. Thus we are obliged to ask - as Pilate famously asked Christ - what is truth?

If I remember correctly, Jesus replied that he was the truth, which doesn’t really answer the question. Michel Foucault, however, rather more helpfully supplies us with four key components: the truth is that which is unconcealed, unalloyed, unchanging, and - most significantly for us here - perfectly straight. The true life is never bent or crooked; never deviates from a direct and narrow path to God in accordance with what is revealed, pure, eternal, and upright.

And so it quickly becomes clear why those men and women who are thought to lead secretive, mixed-up, and irregular lifestyles - who are said to be either inherently queer or wilfully perverse - can never be fully trusted or respected within a heteronormative (and heterosexist) society; for they can never lead a good life or a true life.

Nor, for that matter, can they lead a natural life, in the Classical or Christian-moral sense. For the gay life, having historically been lived on the margins of society and in defiance of certain laws, conventions and agreed customs, is also a life which undermines a value system indexed to Nature. 

Thus, homosexuality is doubly false and doubly threatening to those who, rightly or wrongly, pride themselves on being straight and who see the world in black and white, rather than as rainbow-coloured. 

Happy Birthday to the Hai Karate Girl

Valerie Leon as Paula Perkins in Carry On Girls (1973)

Valerie Leon is an actress who imposed her curvaceous figure onto British popular culture and the pornographic imagination throughout the sixties and seventies. 

Appearing in Bond films, Carry On comedies, Hammer horror movies and numerous classic TV shows of the period, she is perhaps best remembered - and much loved - for her role as the girl in the ads for Hai Karate aftershave (be careful how you use it).  

Born on November 12, 1943, Miss Leon worked as a trainee fashion buyer at Harrods after leaving school, before becoming a chorus girl and eventually making her West End debut alongside Barbara Streisand in Funny Girl at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1966. She then, as indicated, went on to become a regular and alluring screen presence.

Never quite a star - although she memorably took the lead role in Blood from the Mummy's Tomb as a reincarnated Egyptian queen - Miss Leon is something rarer and, in a way, far more interesting; what is often described as a cult figure; a fetishistic icon amongst those in the know and fully deserving of the many fan letters she receives from around the world.

I wish this glamourous and intelligent woman a very happy birthday.


Note: those readers interested in knowing more about Miss Leon and finding out about her present activities should visit www.valerieleon.com

On the Metaphysics of the Soul Contra the Aesthetics of Existence

In the end, as a philosopher, one has a choice to make: to concern oneself either with inner being, or outer beauty; the metaphysics of the soul, or the aesthetics of existence. 

Of course, it may be that these questions are constantly linked. But there is no necessary relationship; rather, it's contingent and variable. Thus, push comes to shove, one is obliged to think the care of self primarily as a question of ontology, or as a question of style; two very different projects, even if they have a common starting point and common goal (what is known as the good life). 

Broadly speaking, those who choose to be soulful naturally tend towards mysticism and notions of God and immortality. They often allow their asceticism to flourish negatively as a contempt for the body and things belonging to the material world and this is why they frequently end up badly dressed, marginalized from society and prone to violent fundamentalism. Like Jesus or Osama Bin Laden.    

Those who choose to be stylish, on the other hand, tend towards materialism and notions of artifice and superficiality; they have no time for thinking about the soul when there are flowers to look at, wardrobes to furnish, and bodies to penetrate. However, they often allow their cynicism and irony to make them apathetic, which is why they can end up looking good, but devoid of feeling or enthusiasm, and this can make them attracted to cruelty and perversion. Like Sade or Dorian Gray.

There are dangers, therefore, in either affirming the soul as an ontological reality distinct from physical existence, or affirming the latter - bios - as something to be shaped and disciplined according to a set of elaborate procedures. But each attempt to account for the self takes a certain courage; those who choose to live in desert caves are not to be sneered at, but nor are those who prefer to practice their philosophy either in the bedroom or on the catwalk.

Having said that, I obviously prefer the libertine or the dandy and their modality of truth-telling, to the prophet or holy fool who would sacrifice the entire world for the sake of saving his own precious soul.        

         

Margaret Nolan: Artist, Actress, Object

Margaret Nolan (IMDB)
Photo © 2011 Silver Screen Collection 
Courtesy of gettyimages.com 

The case of Margaret Nolan, the London-born glamour model turned actress become artist, interests for a number of reasons, not least of all because she is a woman who has struggled to take control of her own image and personally confront the issue of sexual objectification.

Miss Nolan started her career - as many aspiring young actresses do - by stripping for the camera and she soon became a popular pin-up within the amorous imagination of the early 1960s, often featuring in magazines under the name of Vicky Kennedy (her pseudonym serving to disguise her identity, preserve her modesty, and distance her from the industry in which she worked; she wasn't a nude model per se, but merely playing the part of such).

Gradually, her more legitimate acting roles increased in number and importance and she appeared in many theatre productions, films, and television shows, under her real name. This famously included playing a masseuse called Dink in the James Bond movie Goldfinger (1964).*

For some of us, however, Miss Nolan is most fondly remembered for her roles in several of the Carry On films, including Carry on Girls (1973), in which she (predictably) plays the buxom beauty Dawn Brakes and is involved in a rather convincing - and at the time controversial - catfight with the Barbara Windsor character, Hope Springs.

But of course, such scenes are now long behind her. Today, Miss Nolan works as a visual artist, producing interesting (sometimes vaguely disturbing) images assembled from cut-up publicity pictures; a somewhat naive attempt to deconstruct the socio-sexual stereotype she embodied and challenge the male gaze to which she was made subject throughout her modelling and acting career. Naive, but something for which she should nevertheless be applauded.

Margaret Nolan: My Divided Self 

This and other works can be found on her official site: 

margaretnolan.co.uk 

* It might also be noted that it was Miss Nolan - and not Shirley Eaton - who appeared in the film's title-sequence by Robert Brownjohn, wearing a bikini and painted gold. This image immediately became iconic within popular culture, but, unlike some (mostly male) art critics and film theorists, Miss Nolan denies there was - or is - anything liberated or liberating about it. The fact that it served simply to secure her a shoot for Playboy would seem to confirm her view.

On the Art of Speaking Without Speaking

A speaker presenting work in an approved manner; i.e., staying resolutely 
with the script and making no attempt to engage or interact with the audience

Although I frequently present work in public, as a rule I never speak without notes and prefer where possible to read without deviation or interruption from a carefully prepared text - much to the annoyance of members of the audience who subscribe to the metaphysics of presence and feel they are entitled to my fully being there in the capacity of speaker. 

I do this for a philosophical reason; namely, to counter the Socratic prejudice that speech is superior to writing and that thinkers should pride ourselves on their ability to memorize information and chat freely in an impromptu manner, thereby demonstrating a lively intelligence and an essential depth of true knowledge or wisdom. 

Put simply, I don't want to speak from the heart, or reveal the secrets of my soul. Like Derrida, I think it's perfectly legitimate - and important - to challenge the privileging of speech over writing (something that remains crucial to the structural presuppositions of philosophy). Indeed, if I had my way I'd use one of those voice synthesizers made famous by Stephen Hawking to depersonalize the whole performance still further and counter the pernicious stupidity of phonocentrism in this manner.

Thus, for me, writing is never a mere supplement to speech and the spoken word is not sovereign, or in a superior (because in a more direct and immediate) relationship to thought itself. And, although I'm quite happy to read a script in public, if invited to do so, I insist on my right to somehow absence myself from the whole event (cloaked, as it were, in anonymity, ambiguity, and invisibility) and to speak in a voice that is not necessarily my own.

I'm not then what might be thought of as a parrhesiast - a free-speaker of the truth without concealment. Nor am I one who says what he means and means what he says. Rather, I offer perspectives, not personal opinions or beliefs, and I attempt to move about in a transpositional manner without attaching myself anywhere.

That said, I would like to think that, as a philosophical provocateur, I share something with the parrhesiast and that is the courage to risk offending my listeners; of irritating them, of making them angry and provoking them to conduct which may be abusive (You're worse than Hitler) or even violent.

In sum: there's no fundamental bond between what I say and what I may (or may not) think, but I am prepared to piss people off. Mine is a modality not of truth-telling per se, but of enigmatic provocation. Or perhaps - as one woman said following a presentation at The Hospital Club - a form of mental illness ...        

         

On Owing a Cock to Asclepius (The Death of Socrates)

The Death of Socrates - Jacques Louis David (1787)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY)

I have long accepted Nietzsche’s interpretation of the last words of Socrates in The Gay Science (IV 340); accepted, that is to say, that the latter passes a final terrible judgement on life characterized as a disease from which one is cured by death. This despite the fact that such an interpretation obliges one to overlook everything else that Socrates said, or suspect that beneath his cheerfulness he was secretly a pessimist and a decadent.

But Foucault has persuaded me to reconsider this issue and give Socrates the benefit of the doubt; to accept that the above interpretation simply doesn’t hold good philosophically, even if it’s a wicked and polemical pleasure to think it true. If we examine the textual evidence carefully, then we simply cannot go along with Nietzsche and imagine that Socrates has, at the very last moment, broken down and suddenly revealed his hidden nature.

Rather, Socrates is affirming what has always been manifest in his teaching: the disease for the cure of which Asclepius is owed a cock, is that of false (often popular) opinion – not life; a disease of thinking that corrupts the soul. He tells his friends and followers who ask for posthumous instruction: ‘Don’t do anything new or different, just do what I’ve always told you to do: take care of yourselves.’

But then he adds one further remark; acknowledging his debt of gratitude to Asclepius and the need for the sacrifice of a cock. Contra Nietzsche, Foucault reads it thus: Socrates wants to give thanks for the god’s assistance, as a healer, to all those who have undertaken care of the self “For we should not forget ... that if we are concerned about ourselves, it is to the extent also that the gods have shown concern for us.” 

In an important and persuasive (rather moving) passage, Foucault continues:

“So you can see that Socrates’s death, the practice of his parrhesia which exposed him to the risk of death ... the practice of his truth-telling, and finally this devotion to inducing others to take care of themselves just as he took care of himself, all form a very closely woven ensemble ... whose threads come together for the last time in the sacrifice of the cock. It is the mission concerning the care of oneself that leads Socrates to his death. It is the principle of ‘caring for oneself’ that, beyond his death, he bequeaths to the others. And it is to the gods, favourable towards this care of oneself, that he addresses his last thought. I think that Socrates’s death founds philosophy ... as a form of veridiction ... peculiar precisely to philosophical discourse, and the courage of which must be exercised until death as a test of the soul ...” 

  - Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 113-14. 

However, there are of course many other readings of the final section (section 118) of the Phaedo - including that by Eva C. Keuls, who, in her 1985 study of sexual politics in ancient Greece entitled The Reign of the Phallus, understands the last words of Socrates as a crude joke; a reflection upon one final death-defiant erection, caused by the action of the poison, that he uncovers to the amusement of his friends.

If Nietzsche's is the most malicious and Foucault's the most touching, perhaps this interpretation by Keuls is the most amusing and in keeping with Socrates's reputation as a bit of a satyr.