On the Art of Death and Disappearance in the Case of David Bowie

Bowie makes good his disappearance in the video 

for Lazarus (dir. Johan Renck, 2016)

The poet and critic Simon Solomon is right to refer the case of David Bowie back to Sylvia Plath's notorious claim that dying is an art, like everything else. For there was something very beautiful and stylized about his passing (as indeed there was about Plath's own exit from this world).

But what most philosophically fascinates about his death, apart from its obvious vitality and aesthetic appeal, is the manner in which he effected a disappearance and grasped the opportunity to die liberated from every identity and free of all stereotypes, in this way accomplishing what we might term (for want of another, slightly less Heideggerian term) an authentic death.

That is to say, one that had been imagined and carefully coordinated in every detail; one in which the mortal subject claimed his death for himself and affirmed his own dark singularity, becoming, as Bowie says, a blackstar, exerting an invisible and irresistible attraction and influence.

Bowie, in other words, accepted the challenge of death. He knew what it involved and made a choice. And, to his credit, he died at the most difficult time of all - which is to say at the right time, before his ideas ran dry and he had nothing left to say. How many of his contemporaries and fellow performers shamefully linger on - already dead-in-life, like zombies, unhappily full of self-assertion.

These people will, of course, eventually die, but they'll die too late and with biological banality. Unlike Bowie, their spirit and their virtue will not shine darkly after death. And because they do not know how to die and remain unwilling to disappear, they will never rise like Lazarus out of the ash with red hair.    


Read: Sylvia Plath, 'Lady Lazarus', in Collected Poems, (HarperCollins, 1992): click here.

Play: David Bowie, 'Lazarus', from the album Blackstar (ISO Records, 2016): click here.

Carry On Cruising

www.azquotes.com

Unless one happens to be aboard a ship, the term cruising is usually understood in its urban-erotic sense - appropriated from gay slang - to refer to the random quest for anonymous, casual sex partners. 

But for homotextuals, the word has a further meaning given to it by Roland Barthes, who considers reading and writing primarily in terms of enjoyment freed from any moralizing imperatives.

Thus, for Barthes, cruising is a notion that can easily be transferred from the erotic realm to the literary arena, becoming in the process a search not for strange bodies as such, but certain surprising features of the text that might give pleasure in the blissful, perverse sense that effects a loss of subjective consistency.

Cruising, writes Barthes, is the voyage of desire. The amorous reader and lover of language is always on the lookout for chance encounters and to experience that first-time feeling: “As if the first time possessed an unheard-of privilege: that of being withdrawn from all repetition.”

This, above all, is the key: cruising is an act that might obsessively repeat itself, but it’s absolutely opposed to the cosy and reassuring return of the same; of convention, of stereotype, and of the ready-made self in all its staleness.

See: 'Twenty Key Words for Roland Barthes', from an interview by Jean-Jacques Brochier (Feb 1975), trans. by Linda Coverdale in Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, (University of California Press, 1991), pp. 205-32. The line quoted is on p. 231.

Think of the Children

Helen Lovejoy: The Simpsons 

Throughout the European migrant crisis, the Helen Lovejoys and Corbynistas of this world have continually beseeched us to think of the children in an attempt to negate all serious discussion of what is an urgent political problem without any easy solution. 

Via the use of distressing images and necro-emotive language, powerfully compelling in its stereotypic consistency, campaigners who wish to welcome all refugees into Europe have transformed a complex question into a simplistic moral issue about which right-minded people everywhere must surely be in agreement. 

Bereft of any argument as to how Europe might accommodate (never mind assimilate) millions of people from very different cultural backgrounds - many of whom are fundamentally opposed to the values (or lack of values) of the West - humanitarians have simply pointed to the suffering and demanded Europeans share in it and, indeed, accept a large part of the blame for it; we are expected to feel not only pity and compassion, but guilt.     

The strategic use, however, of sentiment and stereotype to fill the void in thought is always suspect and all forms of logical fallacy and opportunism should surely be exposed as such.

Ultimately, we should think of the children - though not in that sticky, ideal manner in which perceived vulnerability is equated with innocence. But this should also include children who are native Europeans and not just young migrants. For presumably they too have the right to a secure and prosperous future on a continent that has its own distinctive history, culture, and destiny.

One really doesn't want to fall back into the Nazi rhetoric of blood and soil - and Europe is, I think, more than an ethno-geographical space - but current events force one to think about race, demographics, territory, borders, identity and notions of otherness, etc. That is to say, all those politically contentious subjects that seem to come to the fore in times of crisis and Völkerchaos.  

Godwin's law is, it appears, far wider in its application (and has far greater explanatory power) than some people imagine. And, somewhat paradoxically, fascism marks not only the end of all serious debate, but the beginning too. It's certainly fair to say that most of the really provocative political thinking today is carried out by those on the far right.

And this, says Baudrillard, is precisely because everything moral, orthodox and conformist - everything which was traditionally associated with the right - has now passed to the once radical left, stripping the latter of its political and intellectual energy. You only pathetically think of the children when you have nothing better to do.  

On the Poetry and Politics of Modern Advertising

One of the more surprising things about Lawrence is his admiration for the writing skills of Jazz Age American advertisers, who discovered how to seduce consumers via a dynamic use of language. Anticipating by three decades Roland Barthes's mythology on detergents and Omo euphoria, Lawrence argues that some of the cleverest literature today is contained in ads for washing powders: 

"These advertisements are almost prose-poems. They give the word soap-suds a bubbly, shiny individual meaning which is very skilfully poetic, would, perhaps, be quite poetic to the mind which could forget that the poetry was bait on a hook."

He doesn't go so far as President Coolidge, who, in a speech three years earlier (1926), declared that advertising ministers to the spiritual side of trade and serves not merely to sell the American Dream, but inspire, ennoble, and redeem mankind, but Lawrence does concede that the commercial world has found a way to bring forth a genuinely imaginative reaction from its customers, just as modern poetry was losing its ability to do so.

Of course, Lawrence being Lawrence, he can't leave things there; can't resist - regrettably in my view - expressing his rather tired and tiresome contempt for the public who are, apparently, passively manipulated by advertising, failing to see or even feel the hook as it catches hold of them:

"The public, which is feeble-minded like an idiot, will never be able to preserve its individual reactions from the tricks of the exploiter. The public is always exploited and always will be exploited. The methods of exploitation merely vary. Today the public is tricked into laying the golden egg ... into giving the great goose-cackle of mob-acquiescence. ... The mass is forever vulgar, because it can't distinguish between its own original feelings and feelings which are diddled into existence by the exploiter."

This, as we now know, is a simplistic view of advertising and of the role played by the consumer. A view born of Lawrence's naive understanding of modern capitalism and the fact that he insists on subscribing to what Foucault terms a repressive hypothesis in which power is viewed negatively, in terms of oppression, rather than considered as a productive network which circulates throughout the entire social body and which is linked to pleasure by many complex mechanisms (not just poetry).  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', essay in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 233-53. Lines quoted are on p. 238.

See also: Roland Barthes, 'Soap-Powders and Detergents', in Mythologies, selected and trans. by Annette Lavers, (Paladin Books, 1973), pp. 40-2. In this short but brilliant piece, Barthes discusses the poetry, politics, and psychology of advertising.

On Reading between the Lines

Smart Women Read between the Lines: A Reader's Journal

by Julie Hellwich and Haley Johnson, (Chronicle Books, 2007)

A friend writes to say how much she enjoyed a recent post, but then adds that in order to understand it fully she was obliged to read between the lines - a skill which, apparently, smart women everywhere are highly accomplished in, but a notion which I find problematic.

For whilst I might be persuaded that the silence and purity of the blank page is the very space of literature and would certainly concede that all good writing has a symbolic aspect in which meaning is often wilfully disguised via the use of rhetorical techniques such as irony and insinuation, I’m nevertheless wary of those crypto-theologians who insist that the truth of each and every text is always concealed beneath the words themselves (esoterically addressed to that discerning reader who has managed to divine authorial intent).

And, ultimately, I worry that, in reading between the lines and searching for an invisible logic, Miss Sherwood is simply taking what Henry James identified as the easier option. In other words, sometimes the careful analysis of what is actually written on the page is harder than the hermeneutic interpretation of the void between words, or the imaginative exploration of subliminal depths.

Picture This (On the Evil Genius of the Image)

There is a great affectation in ascribing meaning to the photographic image. 

To do so is to make objects strike a pose. - Jean Baudrillard

I have recently developed a liking for taking photographs, though perhaps it would be better to call the images produced visual fragments (or simply snaps). 

For photographs are taken by photographers and refer us to an aesthetic practice with its own history, and I'm not a photographer. Nor do I know much (or care much) about photography as an art form or technical pursuit. 

I simply enjoy taking random snaps of objects that have in some mysterious manner captured my attention and, as it were, revealed something of themselves. This aspect is crucial: I don't choose the objects or imagine the world (in the same way that I don't speak language). There's nothing imaginary about the production of images or subjectively predetermined.

Pictures - the very rare ones that work at any rate - are not merely representations of something else which can immediately be understood and discussed in conventional and critical terms. Rather, they are fatal objects in their own right which allow an impersonal and inhuman reality to shine through in a way that is untainted and unmediated; what Baudrillard refers to as the transparency of evil (the showing-through of the world as is, rather than as we would have it).  

When you see a picture of this kind, there's nothing to say about it, nothing to know. Any attempt to drape meaning over it or identify the author of the image as if that will tell you something essential, is futile and inappropriate. A great image, in other words, renders silent and is the site of disappearance (the fact that so much has been written on photography is therefore somewhat ironic). 

Now, this is not to say or imply that any of my snaps are rare in this sense. But, in their naivety and imperfection - in their lack of title and date - perhaps a small number have something diabolical about them ... 

On the Question of Ooze and Intelligence

The modern word ooze derives from an Old English noun (wōs) for a thick, often unpleasant liquid; at best, think tree sap - at worst, think pond scum or pus. 

Its use as a figurative verb, however, is more recent; people have only been oozing certain qualities since the period of late Middle English. Today, people are said to ooze all sorts of thing - confidence, charm, sex appeal ... - but I have never heard before this week someone say of another person that they oozed intelligence and I have to admit the idea has troubled me ever since. 

For I suppose, despite my libidinal materialism and background in Lawrence (who famously writes on this question in terms of blood), I've always thought of intelligence as a form of Geist or animating spirit that irradiates from an individual rather than oozes, lighting up their features and quickening their movements.

Now, I know that this is to reinscribe spirit back into an oppositional determination (and thus to fall back into metaphysics) - but there you go! Metaphysics invariably comes back to beset us whenever we attempt to address this question of mind or intelligence; Geist is always haunted by Geist, as Derrida puts it. 

I suppose, ultimately, the reason that I find the use of the word ooze objectionable in relation to intelligence is because I don't see the latter as some form of corruption and don't mistrust or dislike intelligent people - as I suspect the speaker does.

On the contrary, I'm very much attracted to individuals who are fast-thinking and quick-witted; men and women who are like little silvery streams racing over the rocks, rather than those clots who seem to pride themselves on their moral and intellectual stagnancy and ooze disdain for everything free-flowing and alive.     

Note: the image used for this post is taken from the cover of Ben Woodard's Slime Dynamics (Zero Books, 2012), a work that interestingly argues that slime is an essential element of a realist bio-philosophy free from anthropocentric conceit. For me, the image also illustrates how the stupid secretly conceive of intelligence; i.e. as something monstrous, threatening, and excrescent; something that might be said to ooze ... 

Blurred Lines (In Praise of Plagiarism)

Photo of Helene Hegemann by Leonie Hahn (2013)

I steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels my imagination … because my work and my theft are authentic as long as something speaks directly to my soul. It's not where I take things from - it's where I take them to that matters. 

The bourgeois concepts of intellectual property and copyright - not to mention the romantic fantasy of individual originality - are increasingly made to look ludicrous and untenable in this digital age of hyperlinks, file-sharing and promiscuous information exchange.

Cutting and pasting, copying and sampling, and other forms of postmodern pastiche and plagiarism have changed the way a generation conceive of authorship and their own relationship to a text or image. In the utopia of cyberspace, everything is freely available and all lines between what is and is not permissible are blurred.

We live in a world of simulacra and simulation and I’m cool with it: I’m not concerned, as a writer, with presenting myself as a unique identity who speaks with a distinct and singular voice; I don’t see the problem with wearing masks and mimicking those writers I admire, trying on different personas and playing with ideas that I don’t necessarily understand or believe in. Artists have always been magpies, happy to steal things that catch their eye - that’s the very essence of inspiration. Even cave painters copied one another.

Those with a moral objection to plagiarism - such as publishers and professors - arguing, for example, that it promotes intellectual laziness and ultimately stifles creativity, are simply subscribing to what Malcolm McLaren termed a greengrocer mentality; they want to protect their own little patch and feather their own little nest, beneath a nice sign that proudly proclaims the family name. They want to sell their goods, not share them.

In sum: the creative process always involves some form of borrowing, theft, imitation, or recontextualization. Ideas don’t belong to anyone and there’s no such thing as an original thought; we all stand on the shoulders of others. The only proviso I would add is that when one takes an idea, one has a duty to do something new and interesting with it; mutate it, redirect it, produce a bastard child or a monster - not simply a clone.


Note: this post was suggested by Maria Thanassa to whom I am grateful. 

Taharrush Gamea

Milo Moiré protesting outside Cologne Cathedral. 

Her sign reads: Respect us! 

We are not fair game even when we are naked!!!

Taharrush gamea is an Arabic term [تحرش جماعي‎] that refers to the coordinated sexual harassment and public assault of young women by groups of men, involving verbal abuse, obscene gesturing, groping, violence, robbery and rape, that frequently takes place under the protective cover provided by large gatherings at mass events, including rallies, concerts, and public festivals.

It's a term and a practice which - like halal food, holy war, and sharia law - we in the West are suddenly having to familiarise ourselves with; not least of all the German police, who were so slow to react in Cologne (and elsewhere) to the outrageous incidents of New Year's Eve teasing carried out by mostly North African migrants.

If the German polizei were as unsure what it was they were witnessing and expected to deal with as everyone else on this occasion, including the news media, there can surely be no excuse (or attempted cover-up) next time. This imported phenomenon, which can legitimately be ascribed to rape culture, is one which needs to be addressed with full legal and political seriousness.

For alas, the courageous protest by Swiss performance artist, Milo Moiré, naked in front of Cologne Cathedral with a sign demanding that women be respected, will not be enough when dealing with thousands of men who do not care about women's rights, notions of consent, or the semantics of the word 'No' ...

On the Triumphant Return of Small Breasts

Good news for those who have an erotico-aesthetic preference for women with small, pert breasts and are troubled by tits grotesquely inflated with silicone which have dominated the cultural imagination for decades - there's been a sharp decline in the number of young women consenting to cosmetic surgery and conforming to an ugly porno-plastic ideal.

In fact, figures from the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons reveal a 20% fall in numbers of women having breast augmentation in 2015 compared to the year before. Even Jordan, the unofficial poster girl of implants, is downsizing and opting for a vaguely more natural look (in the hope, apparently, that she’ll be taken more seriously).

The era of boob-jobs is, seemingly, coming to an end. And this is, I think, a good thing - even if the cause is (from a feminist perspective) a little disappointing. For whilst one would like to believe it demonstrates increased female confidence - the realisation that self-esteem should rest on more than bra size and one’s attractiveness to men - it’s probably just a generational and a fashion thing; younger women no longer find it desirable or stylish to resemble a transsexual caricature of womanhood, instead they admire and want to look like those ‘A’ List celebrities who are also ‘A’ cup sized.

It's the triumph, we might say, of Kate Moss over Katie Price. Or, as the editors of numerous women's magazines would have it: small boobs rock! and bee-stung beauties are the hottest girls in the world right now.