In Praise of Vintage Fashionistas (With Reference to the Case of Anastasiia Grigoruk)

Miss Anastasiia Grigoruk

Vintage fashion model

I.

Vintage fashion is an attempt to harvest the glamour of the past by wearing the clothes, accessories, hairstyles and makeup from a previous era, sometimes creating an entirely new look by mixing and matching styles and periods. Nietzsche might describe the latter chaos of styles as a form of barbarism, but as someone with a punk background this doesn't greatly trouble me.

That is to say, whilst I want people to invest care in their sartorial ensembles, I don't demand absolute authenticity and I'm happy to see non-vintage elements added, including retro designs that merely imitate the originals.  

II.

I'm particularly smitten with some of the vintage fashionistas who go to extraordinary lengths to create a stylish and sovereign model of agency and find a new mode of relating to contemporary reality and the passing of time; of capturing something of the eternal feminine that is not beyond the present but still immanent within it.

Those puritans who criticise these young women for being vacuous and conceited and sneer at their constant posting on social media, are simply not Greek enough to understand what their passion for artifice and things of the surface tells us.

Such moralists think it's just a silly game of dressing up and recycling appearances; a nostalgic exchange of real history for hopeless fantasy. But the revolt into vintage style, like other forms of dandyism, signifies something philosophically important; for it transgresses the principle of utility and seriousness to which the grey-beards would keep the world tied and affirms instead gay insouciance.

III.

What's more, to be successful within the terms set by such an elaborately mannered ethic requires admirable self-discipline; thus one might even suggest there's an element of stoicism within the world of vintage fashion. Again, the idea of building and maintaining a lifestyle is often derided, but people who think it's easy obviously haven’t tried it.

In order to become who she is, a girl like Anastasiia Grigoruk has to spend many long hours before her mirror and display an almost fetishistic obsession with the smallest of details. The adding of style to one's nature is much more demanding than accepting a pre-given way of being. It demands sustained activity and knowledge of what Foucault terms the arts of existence and techniques of self:

"those intentional and voluntary actions by which [individuals] not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria."


IV.

Finally, I'd like to close by commenting on the notion of community within the world of vintage fashion; for it strikes me that amongst those who devote themselves to such there's a good deal of shared kindness and mutual support. 

If, first and foremost, vintage fashionistas are driven by a will to create a singular existence, they nevertheless seem to instinctively understand: (i) this is not something that can be carried out in isolation - that giving birth to the dancing star of the self is not an experiment in solitude, but a true social practice; and (ii) that when a line of narcissistic flight collapses into the black hole of solipsism, this is a sign of failure. For being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with, as Heidegger says. 


See: Foucault, The History of Sexuality 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1992), pp. 10-11.

For a sister post to this one on the fabulous French vintage fashion model Miss Alba Banana, click here. 

The Queer Case of Barry Jeans (aka The Menace)

One of the most charismatic - and yet also least vital - characters in literature is Barry Jeans, aka The Menace: Daphne du Maurier's movie heart-throb: "someone with wide shoulders and no hips" who, like most tough guys, doesn't say much or betray any hint of emotion. Women around the world adored the little scar on the side of his temple "that suggested a brush with a rhino or a knife thrown in a Shanghai joint [...] But above all it was the mouth, firm and decisive above that square jaw with the cleft in the chin, which maddened millions".

Commentators often discuss his apparent asexuality: the fact that he felt no interest in making love to women - including his wife - and would never dream of making a pass at a beautiful broad. This becomes starkly evident when Barry is taken by his all-male entourage, known as the boys, to Poncho beach, in order to revive his libido. Unfortunately, not even a parade of naked teens or the young lovelies at the Silver Slipper can do the trick; all Barry can think about is having his porridge. 

But what many readers of the tale fail to pick up on is the reason for Barry's lack of interest in conventional pleasures of the flesh: the fact that he prefers to direct his tenderness towards objects rather than human beings, with a special fascination for cars and sail-boats. In other words, The Menace is an objectum sexual and once one has discovered the seductive charm of inanimate objects, then, as du Maurier writes: "It makes ordinary romance seem so trivial." 

Thus, it's not his lost love Pinkie and her rice puddling that rekindles Barry's fire and gets his Force rating up from a G to an A, it's the fact that, knowing his erotic penchant for furnishings as well as modes of transport, she takes him back to her apartment and "made him lie down on the settee in the living room and take his ease" [my italics].   

I'm reading this idiomatic expression as a euphemism for masturbate and I think the piece of newspaper she gives him "so that he did not spoil the new covers" is not intended to go under his feet. While she made him some breakfast in the kitchen, Barry stretched out his long legs and "settled himself more comfortably on the cushions".

Yes, he enjoys looking at Pinkie's photos of her family and reminiscing about the past. But it's the opportunity to romance the settee with her blessing (and perhaps even with her watching) that really moves and excites him: "'I can't tell you, Pinkie,' he said, 'what this has meant to me.'" Before leaving and giving her a perfunctory kiss goodbye, Barry washes (the semen off) his hands.

Obviously, this is a speculative and rather queer reading of the tale by du Maurier. But it's not, as we have seen, one without some textual support - and nor is it one I feel she'd be shocked by or unhappy with. 

Note: the image, by Chester Gould, is of Dick Tracy, but it's how I imagine The Menace would also look from du Maurier's description of him. 

See: Daphne du Maurier, 'The Menace', in The Breaking Point, (Virago Press, 2009), pp. 200-39. All lines quoted are from this edition. 

I have written several recent posts on tales from The Breaking Point - click here and here, for example. I have also written previously on objectum sexuality and encourage readers interested in this topic to click on the appropriate label.    

Toilettenphilosophie

"[There are] three different attitudes towards excremental excess: 

an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; 

a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way."

- Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (1997)

I.

Faced with a 48-hour (non-figurative) shitstorm, I've come to the conclusion that there's really nothing funny about anorectal dysfunction and that bowel incontinence is not only beyond the pale, but beyond a joke.

Scatological humour might solicit laughter, but I agree with Cindy LaCom that this laughter is always rather hollow and "limited in its power to diminish public shame around the biological fact of shit".

Indeed, we might think of such gross-out comedy as a nervous defence mechanism designed to reduce anxiety and distance ourselves from the grim - often disgusting - reality of bodies subject to chaotic violence (bodies that have lost all integrity and self-control).     


II.

If the obscene is a loss of perspective that renders aesthetic judgement impossible, then horror might be defined as a shattering of taboo that results in a loss of illusion; i.e., it's the way in which the world rubs our noses in our own filthy mortality and its own base materialism. No matter how idealistic you are, you can't polish a turd. And you can't stop it stinking. 

Thus, even if there's nothing to laugh about when a frail and demented old woman shits her pants seven times in a weekend (the consequence of prescribing an aggressive laxative administered during a month long stay in hospital), there is something philosophically important to reflect upon ...


III.

Whilst clearly understanding the complex psycho-cultural reasons behind coprophobia, Georges Bataille and D. H. Lawrence both affirm the fact that human beings shit. Indeed, rather than seeing the act of defecating as something shameful, they think it should be acknowledged and celebrated.

Thus, in Lady Chatterley's Lover, for example, Mellors famously tells Connie as he strokes her soft sloping bottom and fingers the two secret openings to her body - "'An' if tha shits an' if tha pisses, I'm glad. I don't want a woman as couldna shit nor piss.'" 

I understand the point that Lawrence is trying to make here: he wants the human mind to free itself of its fear of the body and the body's potencies. For in his view, "the mind's terror of the body has probably driven more men mad than ever could be counted" and it's monstrous that anyone should be made to feel morally ashamed of their natural bodily functions.

That's fine. But I can't help wondering whether Mellors would be quite so un-Swiftian if Connie experienced a catastrophic loss of bowel control during the night of sensual pleasure ... Further, I have to admit - following recent experiences - that perhaps we need our illusions, our taboos, our lies surrounding the body.

Ultimately, perhaps it's preferable to have stars rather than shit in our eyes and not so unforgivable to find comfort in the reassuring smell of bleach ...

Notes

Cindy LaCom, 'Filthy Bodies, Porous Boundaries: The Politics of Shit in Disability Studies', Disability Studies Quarterly, Winter/Spring 2007, Volume 27, No.1-2. Click here to read online. 

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 223 and 309.  

To read a related post to this one from March 2015, click here. 

The Trapeze Artist

He flies through the air with the greatest of ease,

That daring old fraud on his flying trapeze.

Someone I know recently claimed that he was a trapeze artist in the circus of life and, at first, it amused me to think of him as an aerial acrobat performing amazing feats of daring; a kind of postmodern Jules Léotard.* 

Nietzsche would certainly approve: the way in which one extracts the sweetest pleasure from existence is, he says, to live dangerously and whilst Zarathustra doesn't - as far as I recall - encounter a trapeze artist on his wanderings, he does meet a tightrope walker, who is surely a kindred spirit.

And when the funambulist falls to the ground thanks to the malicious actions of a fool, Zarathustra comforts the dying man by allaying his fear of damnation and assuring him that he has lived a noble and worthwhile life: 'You made danger your vocation and there is nothing shameful in that.' 

The thing with my friend, however, is that he hasn't really made danger his vocation; for he performs at all times with a (financial) safety net provided by his parents. This protects him in case of a fall and, in so doing, removes mortal risk from the equation.

No one can deny his skills. But there's something a little disingenuous (almost deceitful, almost cowardly) about his performance. Real courage is always displayed in the face of real danger.

* Note: Jules Léotard (1838 - 1870) was the French acrobatic performer and aerialist who developed the art of trapeze. He also popularized the one-piece outfit that now bears his name and inspired the song 'The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze' (1867), written and sung by the popular Victorian music hall entertainer George Leybourne (aka Champagne Charlie).  

See: Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book IV, Section 283 and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, Section 6. 

Miss Alba Banana: What's Not to Love?

 Paris and Petticoats   

She's French ☑

She lives in Paris ☑

She loves vintage fashion ☑

She's very beautiful ☑

She has an amusing name ☑

She appreciates that truth is a sophisticated play of appearances  ☑

She knows, like Nietzsche, that the greatest and rarest of arts is to give style to one's character ☑

In sum: Miss Alba Banana ticks all my boxes. 

Notes on Nietzsche's Philosophical Naturalism

Nietzsche (detail) by Robberto

from the personal collection of Naima Morelli

click here for more details 

I think it's fair to characterise Nietzsche's philosophy as a kind of augmented naturalism, that is to say, one that comes with some surprising additional features; or what my mother would describe as naturalism with knobs on.

This is why Nietzsche can never quite bring himself to fully endorse modern science or accept that there is an objective, mind-independent reality governed by natural laws, etc. Hard realism and mechanical materialism aren't quite frölich enough for his tastes.      

Nevertheless, Nietzsche does like to speak of translating man back into nature [BGE 230] and to conceive of culture in terms of physis. So he's basically a 19th-century naturalist and both his atheism and his monism (the world is will to power - and nothing besides) are rooted in this intellectual tradition. 

What's interesting, however, is how Nietzsche relates his naturalism to his wider project of revaluation. Arguing that morality is a method for exercising power over wild nature - including the animal man - he suggests that we can now use the same method to elevate and strengthen, rather than tame and make sickly.    

In other words, having gained mastery of the earth and produced the human being, we can now begin work on the creation of an enhanced nature and a transhumanity: Übernatur und Übermensch, with the latter conceived as a strange and exquisite plant.

In sum, Nietzsche's moral naturalism is an attempt to translate values that many philosophers like to think of as transcendent ideals back into the world as a monstrous phenomenon of will to power and to life in all its splendid immorality. It is preferable, he says, to live as a satyr rather than a saint - and homo natura comes with horns upon his head rather than a halo of light floating above it.

However, we should note that the breeding of such a figure would require cultural and social conditions that are entirely alien to our age, which is why Nietzsche's politics cannot easily be squared with liberal humanism and why to think beyond good and evil remains such a dangerous (and intriguing) proposition.

Note: I also discuss Nietzsche's concept of translating man back into nature (with reference to the work of contemporary artists Willy Verginer and Orly Fayer) in two other recent posts: click here and here.
  

This post is dedicated to Keith Ansell-Pearson for 25 years of Nietzschean inspiration, friendship and support.  

Further Thoughts on the Art of Translating Man Back Into Nature (with Reference to the Work of Orly Faya)

Image by Orly Faya 
orlyfaya.com 

Italian sculptor Willy Verginer - whom I recently wrote of here - isn't the only artist to have made an all-too-literal interpretation of Nietzsche's idea of translating man back into nature ...

Orly Faya, for example, is a body-painting visionary, ecotherapist, and activist from Down Under who also wishes to facilitate some sort of healing of mankind by reminding us that the source of all wellbeing and creativity is the Earth itself.

How does she aim to do this?

By asking models to strip so that she might then merge* them into the natural environment with a clever use of colour; a process she describes as a transformation into the transpersonal - which sounds like fun and philosophically quite intriguing, until we realise this simply means affording individuals the opportunity to discover themselves as authentic human beings via an experience of otherness.

In other words, Ms Faya encourages us to lose ourselves so that we may at last find our true selves; become-other so that we may broaden - not shatter or dissolve - our intellectual and cultural horizons. There's no real abandonment of identity or becoming here - and no real translating of man into nature, which, for a Nietzschean, means rather more than camouflaging subjects into the landscape, be it a forest, desert, or beach.**

Ultimately, rather than transport us beyond good and evil, Orly offers us the same old hippie idealism - born of anthropocentric conceit and middle class privilege - that we encounter all too often in the art world. And that's disappointing to say the least ...   

Notes

*According to Ms Faya's website:  "Merging Ceremonies are a Unique Opportunity to become ONE with yourself and the earth in a multi-dimensional, multi-sensory way [...] to experience ourselves beyond the physical body, unified with nature [...] internalised with light and love and eternalised via photographic art." So it's not just about getting naked, having a quick paint job and then posing for a slightly saucy snap.   

**It's important to understand that when Nietzsche writes of translating man back into nature he is not advocating a Romantic or reactionary return to some primal and pristine state of being, so much as the future overcoming of man as interpreted within modern history and society. In other words, it's a call for a creative rescripting of the self via a becoming-woman rather than a becoming-animal or becoming-plant - for, paradoxically, homo natura is ultimately a question of style. See Beyond Good and Evil, section 230.

Traducendo l'uomo nella Natura: Thoughts on the Work of Willy Verginer

Willy Verginer: Komm, lieber Mai, und mach ... (2015)

Lindenwood and acrylic colour (147 x 107 x 60 cm)

The carved wooden works of Italian sculptor Willy Verginer, with their often dramatic zones of colour, certainly arouse my interest, but, not knowing very much about him, I hesitate to say what his philosophical project is.

It seems, however, to involve translating man back into nature, if I might borrow a phrase from Nietzsche. That is to say, he wishes to show how human being and human culture and society - even at its most technologically advanced - remains part of the natural world.

Verginer does this by demonstrating how vibrant colour can be born from industrial grayness and how, as Lawrence writes, even iron can put forth. Further, Verginer imagines a future in which young bodies begin to (quite literally) blossom in new and different ways, forming delicate contacts between themselves and evolving an intuitive sensitivity, as they become plant.

This idea of a floral or botanical becoming perhaps explains why the faces of Verginer's figures look so blank; for whilst plants have passions and desires, they're not human passions and desires and, as Wilde noted, the beauty of flowers is ultimately rooted in the fact they have no souls. 

Of course, there will be those who will not only find the idea strange and insane, but point to the paradox of translating man into nature via a series of unnatural participations.

As Deleuze and Guattari argue, however, such queer nuptials and unholy alliances are in fact fundamental to nature; for nature should not be thought of as a united kingdom, but rather a perverse multiplicity made up of heterogeneous terms and combinations (or interkingdoms).

verginer.com

Notes

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), section 230.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Almond Blossom', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 259.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996).

For a follow up post to this one, click here.

The Silver-Studded Blue Butterfly Post

If there's one thing I love almost as much (perhaps even more) than a blue flower, it's a blue butterfly: from the smallest of small blues to the largest of large blues, and including the common blue, holly blue and the brilliant Adonis blue, I find them all extraordinarily beautiful to behold (even if only ever seen in photographs).    

I think my favourite, however, is the silver-studded blue (Plebejus argus), found gaily dancing amongst the heather during the long summer months and befriending the black ants that protect their eggs and larval young. Although the females are far less splendid than the male - blueness giving way to a drab brown colour - they do retain the distinct silver spots on their hindwings.

Of course, numbers of both sexes have undergone a major decline during recent decades across most of its (restricted) range in the UK, thanks to all the usual causes; habitat loss, agricultural practice, landscape development, etc.
  

This, to me at least, is a genuinely depressing fact. I really don't think I would want to live in a world without blue butterflies, blue flowers, blue birds, and what Lawrence terms the blueness of the Greater Day that, in a sense, these things embody and symbolise, existing as they do beyond the everyday beauty of things that belong solely to the yellow sun.  

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Flying-Fish', Appendix II, St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

For a sister post on the blue flower, click here.

The Blue Flower Post

I.

Even though some floraphiles like to parade their knowledge of its modern Latin name - derived from the Greek terms mēkōn and opsis - and insist that the Himalyan blue poppy is not a true poppy at all, it's always been one of my favourite flowers and there's surely no denying the beauty (and authenticity) of its colour. 

In fact, I'm very fond of all blue flowers - from the palest of pale forget-me-nots and delicate little alpine plants that glory in the snow, to those large Bavarian gentians that Lawrence described as darkening the day with a smoky-blueness belonging to the underworld.   


II.

Simon says all this reveals the Romantic aspect of my character. And perhaps he's right: for the Romantics were certainly enchanted by die blaue Blumen and gave it crucial symbolic meaning within their aesthetics and wider philosophy.

Novalis, for example, the 18th-century German poet and mystic who preached a Liebesreligion based on his reading of Fichte, used the symbol of the blue flower in his unfinished novel entitled Heinrich von Ofterdingen based on the life of the fabled Middle High German poet of that name.

In the book, the blue flower betokens man's metaphysical striving for the infinite whilst also symbolising the importance of remaining true to the natural world, for, according to Novalis, the development of the human self - and the ideas and emotions experienced by that self - is also a form of miraculous flowering. 

III.

Having conceded my own Romanticism, it's important to note that, ultimately, I'm not a Romantic; that I am, in fact, anti-Romantisch. I wouldn't go so far as to shout: Schlagt die Germanistik tot, färbt die blaue Blume rot!, but I agree with Walter Benjamin that it's become impossible to share the intense longing for transcendence that marked the true Romantic, or remain an uncritical devotee of the blue flower (as a symbol, not as an actual blossom).         

As Benjamin nicely noted: "No one really dreams any longer of the Blue Flower. Whoever awakes as Heinrich von Ofterdingen today must have overslept."

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Bavarian Gentians', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 610-11. This verse can be read online by clicking here. 

Friedrich von Hardenberg, (aka Novalis), Heinrich von Ofterdingen, unfinished work written in 1800 and first published a year after his death in 1802. An English translation of this work is available to read as a Project Gutenberg eBook by clicking here.   

Walter Benjamin, 'Dream Kitsch', in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others, (Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 236. Click here to read the essay online. 

For a sister post on the silver-studded blue butterfly, click here.