On the Politics of Knitting

Matthew Dyck and Ayame Ulrich 

The Uniter (Volume 67, Number 13)

In an interview in which he discusses the delights (and importance) of idleness, Roland Barthes interestingly touches upon the question of knitting.

Knitting, says Barthes, is like amateur painting; "an absolutely gratuitous activity, corporal, aesthetic ... and truly restful at the same time". It's an authentic and affirmative form of laziness, "because there's no pride or narcissism involved".

In fact, knitting might be thought of as the epitome of euphoric idleness (unless of course one is gripped by utilitarian desire to actually finish a piece of work); a perfect example of a manual activity that opens up a simple yet successful form of freedom.

Unfortunately, knitting has been increasingly marginalized within our society. Something that is acceptable only if done by elderly women. Thus, as Barthes goes on to suggest (without too much irony), perhaps one of the most unconventional and, therefore, most scandalous things would be for a young person, particularly a young man, to pull out some needles in a public space and openly begin to knit.

Strangely enough, three decades after Barthes playfully imagined this revolt into handicraft, it came to pass as young punks, goths, and bearded hipsters suddenly became more interested in cross-stitch patterns and yarn bombing, than those more traditional activities associated with alternative lifestyles. (When they weren't busy baking, of course ...!)

Unsurprisingly, not everyone was amused or impressed by this development. The late Steven Wells, for example, wrote in a piece for The Guardian that the very idea of radical knitting is "as absurd as radical dusting or radical toilet cleaning" and that it signals the death not only of youth culture, but of feminism.

However, whilst it's true that Germaine Greer "didn't articulate her disgust with women's oppression by knitting a lavender and yellow toilet-roll holder" and that "Jimi Hendrix didn't take to the stage at Woodstock wearing a nice orange and puce cardigan", I think it just as ludicrous to propose sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll as being the revolutionary solutions to all life's problematic aspects - surely no one really believes this any longer, do they?

Ultimately, I don't care how people choose to articulate their lives and express their politics; it's all good, providing it's done with style, with humour, and without any trace of ascetic militancy. What I don't have time for is the attempt to establish hierarchies in which certain acts, arts, or pleasures are privileged and others denigrated and despised.


Notes

Roland Barthes, 'Dare to Be Lazy', from an interview conducted by Christine Eff, in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991), pp. 338-45. The lines quoted are on pp. 340-41.

Those interested in reading the Steven Wells Guardian article (14 June, 2008) should click here. 

This year's World Wide Knit in Public Day is on Saturday 18 June, 2016. Click here for details.  

This post is dedicated to CheyOnna Sewell and the women of The Yarn Mission.    

Roland Barthes's Enigmatic Individualism

It is often said that man is a social animal; that he's naturally gregarious. 

And, I suppose, that's true and that this herd instinct is not entirely a bad thing. I certainly wouldn't wish to dissolve all sense of solidarity and belonging with others in favour of a liberal idealism which posits the individual as a self-contained unit. I'd sooner be a sheep existing as part of a flock, than Rob Brydon's Small Man in a Box.       

Having said that, I'm wary of the fact that a vulgar and often aggressive will to conformity reigns in every herd. Thus the idea of individualism continues to attract and demands to be taken up in a new (non-bourgeois, non-romantic) manner. 

Some authors, like Nietzsche, think of this in terms of starry singularity and a speculative transhumanism. Others, such as Barthes, are perhaps not quite so optimistic and conceive of an alternative individualism as something equally radical, but more enigmatic. 

That is to say, a clandestine and ambiguous model related to the margins rather than the heavens; one that's non-militant in its discourse and its methods and doesn't directly contest or confront power, so much as subvert or seduce it via the creation of queer new styles of writing, desiring, dressing, etc. 

This is why fashion - perhaps even more than philosophy - provides a "privileged vantage point for observing how society functions" and why the question of individualism invariably leads us back to dandyism, that peculiarly modern and scandalous form of stoicism and self-creation.

Start with externals, as Lawrence says, and the rest will slowly follow ...


See: Roland Barthes, 'The Crisis of Desire', from an interview conducted by Philip Brooks (20 April, 1980), in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991), pp. 361-65. The line quoted from is on p. 362.

On Women in Love, Sea Devils and Sexual Dimorphism

Photo by David Shale of a deep-sea anglerfish (female) 

One of the most extraordinary passages in Lawrence's Women in Love opens chapter XVI and concerns the question of sexual dimorphism, or the polarised duality between men and women. 

Feeling sick of everything and vehemently hostile towards the old ideal of love proffered by Ursula, Birkin reflects upon what might take the place of a life lived together in the "horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction" [199]. Finding the thought of union - be it blissful or otherwise - repulsive, Birkin hopes for something cooler, clearer, and cleaner than the sticky intimacy enjoyed by couples:

"On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that turned man into a broken half of a couple ... And he wanted to be single in himself  ... not under the compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. ... And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him." [199-200]

Unfortunately, in Birkin's experience at least, women were unlikely to share in this dream of a post-sexual (post-human) future, in which there was a further conjunction beyond love between two pure beings, balancing each other "like two angels, or two demons" [199]. 

It seemed to him that "woman was always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant. Everything must be referred back to her ... the Great Mother ... out of whom proceeded everything and to whom everything must finally be rendered up." [200]

For Birkin, the maleness of men must be more than something supplementary or epiphenomenal. Otherwise, they are in danger of becoming sea-devils; a species of anglerfish that exhibit extreme sexual dimorphism (the male of the species being greatly different from the female in size, shape, structure and function).

This sounds at first as if the anglerfish have achieved what Birkin dreams of; i.e. pure polarised opposition between the sexes, where each is "free from any contamination of the other" [201]. But, as anyone who knows about these creatures is aware, this isn't the case at all.

Rather, when mature, the tiny male fish seeks out and attaches himself permanently to the body of a far larger female with his sharp, beak-like mouth. Releasing an enzyme that dissolves his own face and the flesh of her body, the male literally fuses with the female, merging circulatory systems. Having lost his head, his testicles swell in size and the male fish thus becomes not only parasitically dependent upon the female for all his nutritional needs, but a mere sexual appendage and sperm bank.

The female sea devil is then a fishy Magna Mater; she assimilates the male whom she has borne back into herself with pure assumption, filling Birkin and those men who would be free and singular beings, living a kind of starry existence beyond love (and beyond woman), with an almost insane fury.


See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 199-201.

And, if interested in the topic, see also Theodore W. Pietsch, "Dimorphism, parasitism, and sex revisited: modes of reproduction among deep-sea ceratioid anglerfishes (Teleostei: Lophiiformes)", in Ichthyological Research 52 (3): 207–236 (25 August, 2005).

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 ...