Notes on the Case of Andrew Dobson and the Chinese Sex Doll

The doll in the Andrew Dobson case: 

thoughtfully pixelated by the British Press 

so as not to cause offence or arouse illicit desire    

Following the prosecution and jailing last month of 49-year-old Andrew Dobson for attempting to import a supposedly childlike mannequin - deemed to be an indecent object - into the UK from Hong Kong, moral and legal experts have been debating the ethics of non-consensual relations with increasingly sophisticated and apparently soon-to-be sentient sex dolls - particularly when designed to appear underage.

Seeing as this is a subject on which I have previously written at some length, I feel entitled to offer my own thoughts here ...

Firstly, I'd like to point out that - contrary to what's been claimed in some quarters - this is not the first time that an item of this nature have been stopped from entering the country. In fact, sex dolls were banned from doing so back in 1876 on the grounds that as objects used primarily to facilitate human sexual pleasure they were inherently obscene.

However, this ban was lifted in 1987 under European free trade agreements, so I'm not sure on what grounds border force officials at East Midlands Airport were entitled to intercept the doll addressed to Dobson and alert the police who subsequently arrested him at his home.   

Secondly, as Dobson's defence counsel Simon Parry pointed out during his trial at Chester Crown Court, although the prosecution insisted on describing the doll as childlike it was more accurate to describe it as child sized. Even the forensic physician and paediatric consultant who examined the doll on behalf of the prosecution, only agreed its size would be consistent with that of a girl aged between four and six were it a child - but, of course, it's not a child; it's a doll that hasn't been manufactured to a realistic adult scale.

Parry also mentioned the mitigating fact that there was nothing in the online promotional material or sales description, indicating that it should be thought of as a child sex doll.

Now - just to be clear - I'm not saying that Dobson isn't the twisted pervert that some in the media have made him out to be; he was discovered to have pornographic images of children on his computer and pleaded guilty to both making and possessing such images. However, I do not think buying a silicone doll on ebay for sexual gratification - be it in the form of a child, an animal, or an alien entity - should be a criminal offence.

Members of the Cheshire constabulary and tabloid journalists may find it sickening that some individuals choose to indulge dark masturbatory fantasies involving perverse acts and illicit paraphilias, but it's surely important to realise that real acts with objects simply aren't the same as actual acts with bodies.

Ultimately, I suspect that in addition to the legitimate concerns surrounding paedophilia there are other forms of puritanism and prejudice at play here. Thus it is, for example, that in closing Judge Nathanial Berkson said he was disgusted to think that such dolls even existed: "The user would be, in effect, able to simulate sex with a child" - and heaven forbid that should be allowed, for, as Baudrillard provocatively suggested, simulation is the gravest sin of all in the eyes of those defenders of the Real.

The authorities, in other words, find a self-consciously simulated act or virtual crime far more disconcerting and dangerous than a real one. If you rape a child, you clearly transgress the law and thus paradoxically reaffirm the criminal justice system. But if you simulate the rape of a child, it throws a spanner in the works and you expose the essential immorality - and absurdity - of a system that rests on a set of values that are ultimately null and void.

Of course, this doesn't mean the authorities won't respond exactly as if you committed a real crime - indeed, as Dobson has now discovered, they may very well come down even harder upon you.

And all the while I can hear David Bowie singing ... 

On the Art of Necro-Ornithology

Poor Dead Sparrow 

(on plastic orange background) 
Stephen Alexander (2017) 

As regular readers will know, I have had a persistent love for birds from early childhood; from cheeky house sparrows to menacing black crows. I love to watch them and I love to listen to them. 

I agree entirely with Luce Irigaray: Birds are our friends. They accompany us throughout our life, making happy and bringing comfort in times of crisis. Angels, one might suggest, not only have mighty wings, they also have sharp beaks.   

People who don't like birds, or would do them harm, obviously have something wrong with them. But, I have no objections to those individuals who find the dead bodies of birds an opportunity for art and lovingly transform feathered corpses into aesthetic objects of morbid curiosity.

Because whilst for birds, as for flowers, beasts and man, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive, the second best thing is to leave behind a beautiful corpse, or a fascinating image. 

Knowing nothing about taxidermy, however, and unable to draw for toffee, the best I can do is try to take an interesting snap with my iphone when encountering a poor dead sparrow lying on the front garden path (before gently wrapping the little body in kitchen paper and placing it in the bin). 

Note: readers interested in birds might like to see the earlier posts related to this one: Feathered Friends, On the Whistling of Birds at Midnight, and Necro-Ornithology (Study of a Dead Baby Bird).

In Praise of the Postcard and Correspondence Art (with Reference to the Work of Jack Logan and Kosmo Vinyl)

To and Fro: Correspondence Art  by Jack Logan and Kosmo Vinyl

The Lyndon House Arts Center, Athens GA, 

June 3 – July 29, 2017 

I. In Praise of the Postcard

There's always something intimidating and depressing about a letter sealed in an envelope. You just know it's going to make a demand upon you, even if it's from a loved one and has been sealed with a loving kiss (especially if it's from a loved one and has been sealed with a loving kiss).

But still today - in this age of tweets, texts, and emails - nothing makes happier than receiving a hand-written, hand-delivered postcard through the letterbox having completed its mysterious journey through time and across land and sea.

Back in the day, one could look forward to receiving numerous postcards - seemingly infinite in their variety - from friends with pleasing regularity. But now, it can be many months before a little fragment of open correspondence perfectly combining the visual and the textual lands on the mat.

Admittedly, I have fewer friends now. But, unfortunately, this doesn't account for the universal decline in the number of postcards going to and fro. The fact is, hardly anyone can be bothered to send 'em anymore - and that, I'm ashamed to say, includes me (although, in my defence, it could be argued that these short texts published here are a form of postcard - they even have a little picture - though I'm sure ardent deltiologists would dispute this).    

So, hats off then to those rare few individuals who keep the practice of making and sending postcards going and, indeed, raise it to the level of a minimalist art form; individuals such as the NYC based artist and former Clash City Rocker Kosmo Vinyl and his correspondent Jack Logan, a cartoonist and recording artist based in Athens, Georgia.   

Their joint exhibition of around fifty postcards with an amusing pop-cultural frame of reference and aesthetic, is currently showing at the Lyndon House Arts Center (Athens, GA) and I encourage all readers who can go, to go and show their support.  


II. On the Politics of Correspondence Art (aka Mail Art)

Of course, whilst the works of Logan and Vinyl are original, mail art itself is nothing new and what they're doing is by no means unique. Ray Johnson, for example, began posting small prints of abstract drawings inscribed with poetry to friends and key figures in the art world during the mid-1950s, giving rise to what eventually became known as the New York Correspondence School.

During the following decade, many artists began sharing work in a subversively generous manner, creating networks of free exchange rather than exhibiting or selling their art in the conventional fashion. This cheap and cheerful practice grew into a global phenomenon and expanded to include telegrams, faxes, emails and blog posts as well as postcards and packages.

Sadly, by the 1990s, mail art had peaked in terms of real world activity. Not only was the price of stamps becoming ridiculous, but many artists saw the new forms of digital communication and social media as where the future lay.

And, to be fair, the internet does allow a faster dissemination of ideas and encourage the involvement of a much larger number and greater diversity of people, thereby realising the egalitarian promise of mail art, which is all about openness, inclusion and an anarchic spirit of anything goes. Indeed, even in its virtual incarnation, mail art remains vehemently opposed to all forms of regulation, judgement, and censorship, so one can well understand its attraction for punks like Kosmo Vinyl.

Ray Johnson's remark that mail art has no history, only a present, is absolutely true. For whilst it's a utopian movement, its utopianism is what Deleuze would describe as immanent - i.e., it exists now/here rather than no/where - and is to be found precisely in the bonds of friendship that are formed between correspondents.

It's this fraternal model of democracy that artists like Logan and Vinyl who work and play within the eternal network, invoke every time they send postcards to and fro. As Chuck Welch would say: "Their shared enterprise is a contribution to our common future."


Notes

See: Chuck Welch, Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology, (University of Calgaray Press, 1995). 

Readers interested in knowing more on this subject should visit the web page of the International Union of Mail Artists (IUOMA): click here. 

Hot Gypsy Girls 3: On Carmen and Her Seduction of a Famous German Philosopher

I'm a free spirit, men love me / I'll drink, I'll dance but do not forsake me

For my magic will end in flames and / Your heart will burn out my name

I: L'amour est un oisseau rebelle

The character of Carmen, a young Spanish gitana, is the perfect embodiment of the Hot Gypsy Girl stereotype. Bizet's opera, composed in four acts and first performed in 1875, is the tragic story of how a respectable army officer, Don José, is drawn in to her dangerous world in all its oriental otherness and infectious immorality.

His mad obsession with Carmen and vain belief that he might possess her love, costs him everything; his honour, his dignity, and his masculine pride. Although it is she - not he - who ends up in a pool of blood on the floor, having been murdered by his hand: Ah! Carmen! ma Carmen adorée! he cries, having stabbed her in a jealous rage.  

But whilst it's Carmen who is ultimately the victim of a terrible crime, it's Don José with whom the audience are expected to sympathise; seeing him as the victim of her duplicity and guile. And that, of course, is exactly how racism, misogyny and class discrimination works. It's also how a work of art that openly exploits a Hot Gypsy Girl's appeal in order to titilate its audience and appear outrageously unconventional, implicitly reaffirms the bourgeois order at the same time.

As Adriana Helbig rightly notes:

"Don José's transformation and Carmen's murder embodied a strong message to the 19th-century middle-class audience: ­ Carmen's deviant, immoral actions would not be tolerated and any contact with her would lead to pain and eventual social, spiritual, and moral ruin."

This being the case - Carmen being an essentially moral and reactionary tale - one is surprised that Nietzsche loved it so - but loved it he did! Indeed, he claimed to have seen it twenty times (coincidentally the same number of performances that Brahms also claimed to have attended) and that each occasion left him feeling happier and more alive than the last.

Perhaps we might briefly explore why that was the case - why, if you like, even a famous German philosopher should fall under the spell of a Gypsy Girl in all of her Andalusian hotness ...


II: L'amour est enfant de bohème

A real man, says Zarathustra, wants two things above all others: Gefahr und Spiel. For this reason, he desires a woman like Carmen; for within the pornographic imagination the Hot Gypsy Girl is one of the most dangerous playthings on earth. And so, perhaps, at some level, in boasting of his love for Carmen and her animal vitality, Nietzsche is affirming his own masculinity following his failed relationship with Lou Salomé.

But there are, of course, other reasons why Nietzsche was drawn to this opera and proclaimed Bizet a genius - not least to piss off the Wagnerians, although it should be noted that Wagner himself greatly admired Carmen, having attended the very successful first production in Vienna, six years before Nietzsche first saw it in Genoa, in 1881.       

For Nietzsche, Carmen identifies the tragi-comic essence of love, which Oscar Wilde famously summarizes: Each man kills the thing he loves. But, more than this, it accomplishes a much-needed Mediterraneanization of music, by which Nietzsche means it makes music gay and free-spirited once more; giving wings to thought and - as he also hints - putting lead in pencil.

In other words, Bizet makes horny; giving one that feeling of power that is, in Nietzschean ethics, the source of happiness and, ultimately, goodness. For Nietzsche, Carmen makes one a better man and a better philosopher - and this is why he is happy to throw himself at the feet of a Hot Gypsy Girl in Seville ...


Notes

Bizet's Carmen (1875) was based on a novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée, written and first published in 1845. Amongst other sources, Mérimée drew upon George Borrow's book The Zincali (1841) for material on the Romani living in Spain; a work largely responsible for the Spanish components of the Hot Gypsy Girl stereotype. 

Adriana Helbig, 'Gypsies, Morality, Sexuality', The New York City Opera Project: Carmen (2003). Click here to read. 

Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1967). 

For an interesting essay on Carmen as Nietzsche's muse, by Traian Penciuc, click here. Pencuic rightly argues that Nietzsche's affinity for Bizet's opera is anything but whimsical.  

To read part one of this post - On the Racial and Sexual Stereotyping of Romani Women - click here. 

To read part two of this post - Esmeralda: Trope Codifier and Fraud - click here.

Hot Gypsy Girls 2: Esmeralda - Trope Codifier and Fraud

Maureen O'Hara as Esmeralda 

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)

Esmeralda is the teen Gypsy in Victor Hugo's famous Gothic novel, Notre Dame de Paris (1831). Able to bewitch men of every description, including handsome soldiers, lecherous priests, and hunchbacked bell-ringers with her dancing, she is rarely seen without her faithful goat Djali by her side.

Despite being the codifier for the trope of the Hot Gypsy Girl (i.e., a kind of template that all other examples of the type then follow), Esmeralda is actually something of a fraud. The illegitimate child of a prostitute and a handsome young nobleman, she was of French origin, not Romani. Christened with the name Agnès when born - meaning pure or chaste - she was kidnapped by Gypsies who left the hideously deformed infant Quasimodo in her place.

This explains why even after having grown up amongst the Gypsies, Esmeralda retains an innocence about her; she is more the sweet-natured, kind-hearted ingénue than the worldy young pricktease that her suitors might have expected and hoped for. Her swaggering, hand-on-hip sluttishness is always countered by her innate virtue.

And, ironically, as with Sade's Justine, it's her virtue that leads to her misfortune and an untimely death upon the scaffold for a crime she didn't commit. A canny young Gypsy girl would never have got herself into such a compromised - and fatal - situation; never have allowed herself to be the hapless victim of men and circumstance (even if, as a Romani, she'd happily be a lover of fate). And a true Hot Gypsy Girl would never go the gallows wearing a white dress; she'd be defiantly dressed in gold and scarlet for sure!

No wonder then that Disney were able to so easily co-opt the figure of Esmeralda and turn this faux-Gypsy girl into a caring-sharing social justice warrior, whose greatest wish was to see social outcasts like Quasimodo and persecuted ethnic minorities like the Romani accorded equal rights (something almost guaranteed to make male viewers lose their erections). 

To read part one of this post - On the Racial and Sexual Stereotyping of Romani Women - click here.

To read part three of this post - On Carmen and Her Seduction of a Famous German Philosopher - click here. 

Hot Gypsy Girls 1: On the Racial and Sexual Stereotyping of Romani Women

I feel her, I see her, the sun caught in her raven hair 

is blazing in me out of all control!

It would not be unreasonable to argue that the pornographic imagination is founded upon, circulates, and sustains a wide range of racial and sexual stereotypes, including that of the Hot Gypsy Girl ...

With her dusky complexion, fiery dark eyes and loose black hair, wearing a low-waisted long skirt split to the thigh that she hitches up flamenco style to dance barefoot in public pieced with a low-cut, midriff-baring blouse that invites more than just navel-gazing, she is not only exotic in her sultry good looks and colourful appearance, but animal-like in her wild and overt sexuality.

Many men desire her, but most would be too scared to approach her. For like the true temptress, she spells trouble and threatens danger as well as offering the promise of unbridled passion; the Hot Gypsy Girl knows how to use a knife - and I don't mean in table-mannered conjunction with a fork.

This porno-romantic construction of free-spirited and strong-willed femininity that is found in much of the art, music, and literature of the 19th century, stands in direct opposition to the Victorian ideal of buttoned-up womanhood that held sway across Europe at the time; white-skinned, fair-haired, mild-mannered, kind-hearted, chaste and - above all - submissive to the male authority of their husbands and fathers.

Puritanical commentators who dislike stereotypes, will point out that there's very little empirical evidence to support this fantasy of the Hot Gypsy Girl. But, even if not based in actual fact, she's a real figure nonetheless with her own alluring truth and there are numerous examples to be found within modern popular culture.

Two names, however, immediately present themselves: Esmeralda and Carmen ... 


Notes

The image used above is of the Gypsy assassin Mejai, from the Franco-Belgian comic book series Le Scorpion, written by Stephen Desberg and illustrated by Enrico Marini. It's taken from the main page of the Hot Gypsy Woman entry on TV Tropes: click here. 

Those interested in reading further on this subject should see Ian Hancock, 'The "Gypsy" Stereotype and the Sexualization of Romani women', in Gypsies in Literature and Culture, ed. V. Glajar and D. Radulescu, (Palgrove-Macmillan, 2007), pp. 181-91. This essay can also be found on the RADOC site: click here.

To read part two of this post - Esmeralda: Trope Codifier and Fraud - click here. 

To read part three of this post - On Carmen and Her Seduction of a Famous German Philosopher - click here.  

Why Was I Not Made of Stone Like Thee? (Notes on the Hunchback of Notre Dame)

Charles Laughton as Quasimodo in 
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)

It's interesting to recall that when Victor Hugo wrote his great Gothic novel, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), he was - as the title indicates - more concerned with celebrating the Cathedral and preserving medieval architecture from modern redevelopment, than with the romantic story of poor Quasimodo, a deaf, half-blind, inarticulate hunchback and Esmeralda, a beautiful young Gypsy with a heart of gold and the power to enchant handsome soldiers, lecherous clergymen, and monstrous bell-ringers alike.   

But modern movie-going audiences didn't give a damn about the work's magnificent setting or Hugo's views on the aesthetics and politics of building design; they paid to see a freak crowned King of the Fools and swing down on a rope in order to save the sexy Gypsy girl as she is being led to the gallows for a crime she didn't commit ...

As most readers will be aware, there've been many adaptations for the cinema over the years, including, for example, the 1923 version starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo and Patsy Ruth Miller as the lovely Esmeralda - a production that became Universal's most successful silent movie. But probably the most famous film version was released in 1939, starring the classically trained English actor Charles Laughton and the Irish-born beauty Maureen O'Hara. It's certainly the case that whenever I think of Quasimodo, it's Laughton's pug-ugly mug that comes to mind.

Mention should also be made of the 1956 Franco-Italian version starring Anthony Quinn as a far less monstrous Quasimodo and Gina Lollobrigida as a far more voluptuous Esmeralda than previously imagined. It was the first film adaptation of the story to be made in colour and also one of the very few that remains faithful to Hugo's original ending set in the graveyard where Quasimodo goes to be with the body of his beloved Esmeralda - joining his corpse bride in a deathly embrace (an ending that the 1996 Disney version unsurprisingly chose not to go with).

For me, however, the attempt to downplay Quasimodo's deformity and disability in this production is fundamentally mistaken. For as Zarathustra says, if you taketh the hump from the hunchback, you rob him of his soul.       


See: Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Book II, section 42.

Even the Moon's Frightened of Me! (Philosophical Reflections on the Case of the Invisible Man)

 Claude Rains as The Invisible Man

(Universal Pictures, 1933)

"We'll begin with a reign of terror, a few murders here and there; murders of great men, murders of little men - 

just to show we make no distinction." 

I: The Invisible Man and the Ring of Gyges

The Invisible Man is one of the most philosophically interesting fictional characters within the cultural imagination. First appearing (and disappearing) in a short novel by H. G. Wells in 1897, he challenges us to address important ethical questions, including the following: Is virtuous behaviour dependent upon observation?  
 
In order to answer, we might refer back to Plato's Republic and the Ring of Gyges ...

The Ring of Gyges, for those unfamiliar with the above text, is a magical object which granted its owner the power to become invisible at will. In the Republic, Plato's brother Glaucon doubts that any man is so naturally good that he'd resist the temptation of performing wicked deeds were he invisible:

"No man would keep his hands off what was not his own if he could safely steal what he liked from the market, or enter houses and fuck with any one at his pleasure, kill, or release from prison whom he wished and in all respects be like a god among men."

This proves, he argues, that morality is a social construct - not an inherent trait - whose foundation is a desire to maintain one's reputation and avoid public shame or punishment. If, however, there was no danger of that thanks to an ability to become invisible, then one's moral character would also soon vanish and the just man would be indistinguishable from the unjust. 

Glaucon concludes that all men know in their hearts that crime pays and that anyone who had the power of invisibility but failed to exploit it fully would be thought to be an idiot by others. Thus he's obliged to take personal advantage of the power in order not to seem stupid. In other words, whilst the man who can be seen protects his public image by being virtuous, the man who becomes imperceptible only keeps face by behaving in an immoral fashion.

It takes him a while, but Socrates eventually addresses this argument and reaffirms his belief that moral virtue is divine in origin rather than social and that it's ultimately always in the individual's best interest to be just rather than unjust, because the gods love the former and will reward them accordingly if not in this life then in the next.

Those who would abuse the gift of invisibility, are, says Socrates, enslaved by their own base appetites; only the man who freely chooses not to use such power remains master of himself and is therefore truly happy.      


II: The Invisible Man and the Helm of Darkness

If Plato helps explain why Dr Griffin's invisibility triggers his criminality, it doesn't answer why we find him so much more disturbing and unheimlich than other masked maniacs, such as the Phantom of the Opera, for example. Why is it that the latter exposing his facial disfigurement doesn't unnerve us as much as when the former strips away his bandages to reveal no face at all?

To help answer this, we must again turn to the ancient Greeks and consider the Helm of Darkness worn by Hades ...

In Greek mythology, the Helm of Darkness is a helmet that enables the wearer to become invisible. Zeus has his lightning bolt; Poseidon has his trident. But it's Hades, the chthonic god, who possesses the magical helmet which gained him his title of the Unseen One.    

It's because of this link between invisibility and the Underword - i.e., between invisibility and the gloomy realm of death - that the Invisible Man continues to unsettle as a figure. For no one wants to be reminded of the death that awaits them; an undifferentiated state devoid of all personal characterization into which all mortal things eventually vanish.  

Certainly the ancient Greeks didn't. To them, Hades was a fearsome figure and they avoided even mentioning his name if possible (indeed, around the 5th century BC they began to refer to him by the more positive-sounding name of Pluto) and when they made a sacrifice to him (often of a black sheep) they always made sure to hide or avert their faces - as if making themselves invisible before him.  

In sum, in as much as the Invisible Man triggers some kind of mythological memory of Hades, this is why he creeps us out. He particularly upsets those who refuse to confront the ontological truth that Dasein rests upon the void of non-being (sein Nicht-mehr-dasein, as Heidegger writes). It's this that produces horror in those egoists who, as D. H. Lawrence says, dare not die for fear they should be nothing at all.


See: Plato, The Republic, 2:358a-2:360d and 10:612b. 

The Phantom of the Opera: Monstrous of Face, Monstrous of Soul

The Phantom with mask on the cover of a 1920 French edition of the novel 
and sans mask in the 1925 Hollywood film starring Lon Chaney

    

The Phantom of the Opera, written by Gaston Leroux and first published as a single volume in 1910, was partly inspired - so it's said - by real events at the Paris Opera.

It's essentially the tale of a queer love affair between a young Swedish soprano, Christine Daaé, and the masked Phantom whom she mistakenly believes to be the angel of music sent by her dead father to help nurture her talent. Things take a sinister and violent turn for the worse after the Phantom fails to secure Christine the lead role of Marguerite in a new production of Faust and extracts revenge upon the theatre managers by dropping a crystal chandelier onto the heads of several unfortunate members of the audience seated below.

The Phantom, whom we learn is called Erik, then forcibly abducts Christine from her dressing room and keeps her imprisoned in his creepy subterranean hideaway built beneath the opera house. Here, to her horror and his great embarrassment and shame, she unmasks him and exposes his grotesquely disfigured face.

In the classic 1925 film adaptation of the book, dir. Rupert Julian and starring Lon Chaney in the title role and Mary Philbin as Christine, this is a particularly lurid and sensational scene for which Chaney famously devised his own ghoulish make-up; darkening his eye-sockets, for example, to suggest a skull-like appearance.

Chaney also pinned back the tip of his nose and enlarged the nostrils with black paint to further this cadaverous impression. Jagged false teeth and a combover completed the look, as described by Leroux in his novel. Audiences were said to have screamed and fainted in terror when they first caught sight, like Christine, of the Phantom's face.

Crucially, it should be noted that this silent Phantom's facial disfigurements are congenital in origin and not the result of an acid attack, as suggested in later films that attempt to solicit a greater degree of sympathy for Erik and transform him into a more tragic and romantic figure; i.e., to break the link between criminality and ugliness, challenging the long held belief taken as a moral fact amongst the ancient Greeks that those who were monstrum in fronte were also - without question - monstrum in animo ...            

A Letter to Heide Hatry (Parts III-V)

Heide Hatry

III. The Truth of Masks

I don't want to appear dim, but I'm not sure I understand this opening sentence from your third text: "whatever sort of opposition one might want to level against the subject-object/presence-absence dichotomy ... it, too, will be inherently fissured by its origins".

In as much as I do understand it - you're saying that both terms in a binary originate, circulate and ultimately coincide within the same conceptual schema or identity - I agree. That's why I try not to engage in oppositional thinking and why I'm not interested in Hegelian dialectics, nor in simply inverting terms (even if this can be fun and may well be a necessary first step in a more profound deconstruction, as Derrida concedes). 

As for the question of the face, maybe you're right and I need to rethink it. Certainly there are faces I love to look at. What Barthes felt about the face of Greta Garbo, I feel about the face of Marlene Dietrich for example; it's a pure and perfect object that appears to be untouched by time or finger-tips, unmarked by traces of emotion. It's a face that belongs to art, not to nature and which has all the cold and expressionless beauty of a mask; a face that has not been painted so much as sculpted. An archetypal and totemic face. A fetish object.

"And behind a mask there is still an identity, an identity that has chosen a mask ..."

No, sorry, I don't agree with this. The truth of masks is far more radical and disconcerting than that; it's the truth that masks don't hide faces or disguise identities, they mask the fact there's nothing behind them. That's why the invisible man is a more interesting and, to those who fear the thought of non-being, a more terrifying figure than the phantom of the opera. When the latter removes his mask he merely reveals scars. But when the former strips away his bandages, Dasein is obliged to confront the ontological truth that it rests upon the void of non-being (sein Nicht-mehr-dasein, as Heidegger writes).

It's this that produces Angst - particularly in those egoists who "dare not die for fear they should be nothing at all" [D. H. Lawrence] and in those who hope to still find a smiling face beneath the bandages, behind the mask, or in the ashes.


IV. The Lugubrious Game

As for the base material from which you compose your "micro-mosaics", my friend, the poet and translator Simon Solomon, is planning to write of ghost, of flame, and of ashes in the manner of (and with reference to) Derrida and I don't wish to anticipate his remarks. However, you might like to read my Reflections from a Sickbed, in which I muse on the problem of corpse disposal and what to do with cremains.

I think, were I an artist, I might be tempted to mix ashes with excrement and smear the combination across a large white canvas to show how what we leave behind us when we die - when we become that shipwreck in the nauseous - is not a face, but a slimy and disgusting residue, as when a snail or slug passes by. Or, to put it more crudely, a shit stain. (Obviously, I'm thinking back to Bataille here and to Dalí's 'The Lugubrious Game'.)

You say that human remains can be "ennobled by art" and maybe they can. But, for me, it's not the job of art to elevate anything belonging to mankind; on the contrary it should bring us back down Pisgah with a bump and remind us of our mortality and material nature; to make us grunt like pigs before the canvas, rather than sigh like angels full of smug self-satisfaction. It's important to realise that when Nietzsche says art is the great anti-nihilistic force par excellence, he implies also that it's a form of counter-idealism; for nihilism is not simply the negation of all values, it's the positing of ultimately hollow ideals in the first place.  


V. Iconography is Never Innocent

I'm glad to hear you don't intend to "freeze the dead in a permanent subordination" to an image. Though it's difficult for me to imagine this won't be an unintended consequence of producing icons in ash that are so realistic in their facial representation and reconstruction. Do you remember how some tribal peoples used to worry that the camera stole their soul? Well I have similar concerns. Indeed, I even have some sympathy with the authors of Exodus warning against graven images and the making of idols etc.

I certainly agree with Baudrillard that, whatever else it may be, iconography is never innocent. In fact, it plays a complicit role in the perfect crime by which he refers to the extermination of singular being via technological and social processes bent on replacing real things and real people with a series of images and empty signs. When this happens, we pass beyond representation (or, in the case of the dead, commemoration) towards obscenity; a state wherein everything and everyone is "uselessly, needlessly visible, without desire and without effect".

I worry, Heide, that those who are indecently exposed in a game of posthumous exhibitionism (you describe it in terms of self-expression and self-revelation) are left without secrets, without shadows, without charm. They become, if you like, ghosts caught up in a commercial art machine ...

Finally, I smiled when you wrote "if, as you seem to contend, the 'goal' or 'desire' of life ... is to merge back into material indifference, we might as well be dead already" - for don't you see that, in a very real sense, we are dead already ... 
 
Yours with respect, admiration, and affection,

Stephen Alexander


To read parts I and II of this letter to Heide Hatry, please click here. 

To read Heide Hatry's extensive series of comments please see the posts to which they are attached: Heide Hatry: Icons in Ash and On Faciality and Becoming-Imperceptible with Reference to the Work of Heide Hatry.