On the Verb to Elaborate (Or What I Have in Common With Jacques Derrida)

I.

One of the things I most disliked about presenting papers to an audience, was the fact that the latter invariably felt themselves entitled to ask questions afterwards.

And the most annoying of all questions was being asked to elaborate on some point ... Meaning, could I provide more details, or further examples. Could I - in other words - just work a little bit harder and, in answering their question, not only negate the carefully constructed ambiguity of the text, but effectively do their thinking for them.

I hate the expectation that things must be worked out and all problems solved, contradictions overcome, etc. Do people not see that to explain an idea is to level it and thus provide a safe foundation for thinking? As a Nietzschean, my aim was always to refine ideas to the point at which they become dangerous and unstable, shifting like desert sands ...


II.

Happily, I can find support for this from the king of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, who, in a filmed interview with Amy Ziering Kofman, says that one of the first things he noticed when teaching at an American university (back in 1956) was that people would quite casually ask one another - both in a social and an academic context - Could you please elaborate on X, Y, or Z? Here's a word - now get to work!

Students, for example, would visit his office and expect him to philosophise on the spot, as it were. Something, says Derrida, that just wouldn't happen at a French university; not because French students are more reserved or polite, but because the expectation that a thinker can and should always elaborate, doesn't exist in France.

Of course, that's not to say no one ever requests more information in France. But it's far less common and the people who do demand such tend to be manipulative journalists who are always in a hurry and looking to lead the interviewee into saying something rash or foolish. Derrida is scornful of individuals who think that because someone is a philosopher, they can ask them to speak about being at the drop of a hat, or act as if they can push a button and voila! be given an instant discourse on love. 

As he says, it simply doesn't work like that: any genuine philosopher will hesitate in answering even the most straightforward of questions. Not because they wish to appear vague or obscure, but because they have nothing ready-made. They're not comedians always happy to do a bit or perform a short routine; nor are they politicians who always stick to a script and thereby attempt to stay on-message.  


Note: Although, as far as I recall, the scene discussed here doesn't appear in the final edit of the movie, I'm assuming it was an outtake from  Derrida (2002), a documentary film dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman. Anyway, readers who are interested can click here to watch the interview; or here to watch the film in full.   

Two Blue Birds: D. H. Lawrence's Take on the Phenomenon of the Office Wife

A secretary offers the only kind of polygamy we 
recognize in this country. - Helen Gurley Brown

I.

Lawrence's short story of 1927 entitled 'Two Blue Birds' belongs to both a sociological history and a literary sub-genre all of its own. Certainly the idea of a love triangle between a man, his wife and his secretary wouldn't have been new or at all shocking. Indeed, what's most surprising here is that Lawrence desexualises the relationship.

From the day that women entered into employment alongside men, the idea that this would lead to extramarital affairs was present and the jokes, stories, and saucy postcards began to immediately circulate. The secretary quickly assumed her place within the pornographic imagination alongside other stereotypical female figures, such as the waitress and librarian, for example.   

The phrase office wife dates to the 1920s, so there's a good chance Lawrence would have known of it - particularly as he spent a good deal of time in the United States. What he could not have known, however, was the popular novel of this title by Faith Baldwin published in the year of his death; or the Warner Bros. movie, directed by Lloyd Bacon, based on Baldwin's novel and also released in 1930.

In brief, an office wife refers to a secretary with whom a man shares a very special relationship. As we shall see, Miss Wrexall becomes a second wife to her boss, Cameron Gee. Not only does she spend many long hours working closely with him, bur she intuitively understand his personal needs and the pressures he was under, genuinely caring for his health and happiness.

I think we might legitimately speak of the propinquity effect in this case. And of sublimated desire, that is channeled into their queer-platonic collaboration, much to the wife's disgust (like many women in her position, she could accept her husband having a sexual affair, but not the strange intimacy of his relationship with Miss Wrexall).      


II.

The handsome writer Cameron Gee asked his adoring secretary to do things "in that good-natured, confident voice of a man who knows that his request will be only too gladly fulfilled". Not that he ever asked her to do anything inappropriate. For whilst Miss Wrexall was quite young and quite good-looking - and whilst he absolutely depended on her - he didn't desire her in that way:

"They were just the young master and his secretary. He dictated to her, she slaved for him and adored him, and the whole thing went on wheels."

Nevertheless, his estranged wife despises Miss Wrexall, whom she regards as competent, but common. Naturally, this rather complicated matters. And like many secretaries before her, Miss Wrexall found herself at times having to manage not only her boss, but placate and reassure her boss's wife.

Ultimately, the two women are locked into a battle and the question is: Who does more for this clever, enigmatic and whimsical man? Perhaps the wife already knew the answer to this in her heart. She may technically have the husband, "but a husband is the mere shred of a man, compared to a boss, a chief, a man who dictates" and whose every word a secretary will faithfully take down.   

The wife grows increasingly resentful. All the lovers and long winter vacations in the world don't help her forget her husband dictating to Miss Wrexall for ten hours a day "with nothing but a pencil between them: and a flow of words".

Worse! The secretary had brought her mother and sister into the household: the former as a sort of cook and housekeeper; the latter as a sort of maid and valet-de-chambre. Both provided an excellent service and soon all three women knew their master's affairs and personal tastes. Best of all, they hardly accepted any wages.   

For the wife, of course, had helped push the man into debt. And it was up to Miss Wrexall, his secretary, to smooth things over whenever a creditor became dangerous and threatened to trigger a financial crisis. But the secretarial family still received the wife when she came home "with most elaborate attentions and deference", though this only made her feel ridiculous.

"Could anything be more impossible! They had the house spotless and running like a dream: how could an incompetent and extravagant wife dare to interfere, when she saw their amazing and almost inspired economy!"

The man, if not perfectly happy, was nevertheless perfectly comfortable. Only his wife suspects that such comfort is not good for him. Or his work. It wasn't so much the home-cooked food and a soft bed that were the issue; his comfort, rather, consisted of having "nobody, absolutely nobody and nothing, to contradict him". His secretary prided herself on the fact that she spared him any aggravation.

At night, the wife could hear her husband dictate and she "imagined the little figure of the secretary busily scribbling shorthand". Then, in the sunny hours of the following morning, "from another distance came that sharp insect-noise of the typewriter, like some immense grasshopper chirping and rattling".

The wife thinks to herself:

"That girl - she was only twenty-eight - really slaved herself to skin and bone. She was small and neat, but she was acually worn out. She did far more work than he did, for she had to not only take down all those words he uttered, she had to type them out, make three copies, while he was still resting."

And for what? A very poor salary - and she doesn't even receive his kisses (though whether his never kissing her made things better or worse for the secretary, the wife could not decide). But she and her family adored him and were devoted to him. Only such uncritical adoration and devotion was subtly undermining the quality of his writing: "His whole tone was going down, becoming commoner."

The wife felt she ought to do something to save him and his reputation as an author. She wanted to destroy the perfectly devoted secretarial family and "sweep them into oblivion". But what, really, could she do? There was nothing to be done. But still she had to do something ... things could not go on as they were.

The wife, with her long and shapely she-wolf legs, was determined to defeat the dark-haired little secretary with "the pretty but rather common little feet". The latter is rightly terrified by the "queer, powerful, elegant, wolf-like figure of the wife".

One day, in the garden, the wife challenges the secretary; she wants to know why she's so self-effacing and never considers her own needs - why it is she doesn't have the man pay her more heed. This is said in front of the husband, leaving him looking "pained and somewhat remote".

As for the secretary, she hung her head and felt indignant that the purity of her relationship with him had been insulted: "But soon she was veering downstream on the flow of his words, too busy to have any feelings, except one of elation at being so busy." 

Later, at teatime, the wife reappears in the garden and insists that Miss Wrexall join her and her husband for tea. Both women are wearing chicory-blue dresses. The wife again rather cruelly puts the secretary on the spot with her irony and her questions. Miss Wrexall knows very well that the wife is trying to embarrass her and make her feel foolish, despite the latter's insistence that this isn't the case and that nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.

Mrs. Gee teasingly suggests that her husband's books read as if they were not merely typed but actually written in large part by Miss Wrexall. This annoys him and Miss Wrexall finally finds the courage to speak up, accusing the wife of wanting to ruin the relationship between herself and the man:

"'You want to spoil what there is between me and him, I can see that,' she said bitterly.
       'My dear, but what is there between you and him?' asked the wife.
'I was happy working with him, working for him! I was happy working for him!' cried Miss Wrexall, tears of indignant anger and chagrin in her eyes.'"

Of course, the wife protests (with simulated excitement) that she wants Miss Wrexall to go on being happy and to continue working for her husband. That the only issue she has is with him, for being an exploitative employer. But Miss Wrexall, being the perfect secretary - fiercely loyal and protective of her boss and full of what the Marxists call false consciousness - replies: "'But he gives me everything, everything!'"   

Naturally, the wife wants to know what this everything means and just how all-inclusive it is: "'I mean nothing that you need begrudge me,' said the little secretary rather haughtily. 'I've never made myself cheap.'"

This provokes the wife to explode with contempt: "'My God! [...] You don't call that being cheap? Why, I should say you got nothing out of him at all, you only give! And if you don't call that making yourself cheap - my God! -'"

However, Mrs. Gee has finally realised that the game is up and her sham marriage over; that it was time she left for good: "'I'm afraid no man can expect two blue birds of happiness to flutter round his feet: tearing out their little feathers!'"

And with that she walked away ...

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Two Blue Birds', The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 5-18. All lines quoted are from this edition of the text. An ebook version of the tale can be found online (thanks to the University of Adelaide) by clicking here.

For a secretarial sister post to this one, click here.

Notes on the Sexy, Secret, Stereotyped World of the Secretary

Select her carefully and she'll prove the loveliest 

and most valuable of all fringe benfits. - Helen Gurley Brown

I. 

As Derrida notes, the rise of the personal computer has made the figure of the secretary structurally redundant. Only those who wish to continue marking "the authority of their position" still insist on hiring a secretary, even when they could quite easily do the work themselves on their laptop. 

Why should that be? 

Well, partly, it's a sign of status to sit behind a machine-free desk and reconstitute the old-fashioned boss-secretary relationship, passing over hand-written notes to by typed, or dictating whilst some bright young thing practises her shorthand. As Derrida says, power in the workplace has to be mediated, if not delegated, in order to (be seen to) exist.

But, there's also something else going on; something to do with desire and the way in which it infiltrates and directly invests even the most formal and professional of workplaces as a kind of productive energy. 

The fact is, argue Deleuze and Guattari, sexuality is everywhere - not least in the offices and boardrooms of big business. It's in the way a bureaucrat fondles the files; an accountant analyses the financial data; and it's there in the relationship between a male boss and his female secretary ...          

Never shy of discussing sexual politics, D. H. Lawrence naturally had something to say about all this. In an article first published in the Sunday Dispatch in November 1928, Lawrence writes:    

"The business-man's pretty and devoted secretary is still chiefly valuable because of her sex appeal. Which does not imply 'immoral relations' in the slightest. Even today, a girl with a bit of generosity likes to feel she is helping a man, if the man will take her help. And this desire that he shall take her help is her sex appeal. It is the genuine fire, if of a very mediocre heat. Still, it serves to keep the world of 'business' alive. Probably, but for the introduction of the lady secretary into the business-man's office, the business-man would have collapsed entirely by now. She calls up the the sacred fire in her, and she communicates it to her boss. He feels an added flow of energy and optimism, and - business flourishes. That is perhaps the best result of sex appeal today - business flourishes."

I think that's a pretty astonishing passage for several reasons (not necessarily all the right reasons). For one thing, it anticipates Deleuze and Guattari's analysis in Anti-Oedipus - as it does Helen Gurley Brown's claim in Sex and the Single Girl that office romances have a positive effect on performance and productivity. For not only will a man up his game when trying to impress a woman, but a girl in love with her boss will exhaust herself 24/7 and still wish there was more she could do to help. 

 

II.

The term secretary is derived from the Latin secernere and has connotations of something private or confidential (the English word secret has the same etymological root). A secretarius was someone, therefore, who discreetly handled the personal (or business) affairs of a powerful individual. Over time, whilst the duties of the secretary have varied and expanded, essentially the role has remained the same.

In 1870, Sir Isaac Pitman founded his famous school for would-be secretaries. Originally, much like the profession itself, it only admitted male students. But with the invention of the typewriter more and more women began to train as secretaries and by 1919 the role was primarily associated with the fairer sex. 

The period between 1945 and 1980 can probably be regarded as the golden age of the secretary. After this date, new technology and new office politics increasingly saw the role decline or transform. Secretaries became office managers, or personal assistants, or, indeed, bosses themselves and the work place became a boring, sterile environment: no fags, no booze, no flirting, no fun. 

Obviously, no one wants to write in support of sexual discrimination or sexual harassment. But, I have to admit that I find the new puritanism and political correctness just as concerning. Over the last fifty years our attitude towards the erotics of the workplace has moved from bawdy delight and Benny Hill to stern disapproval and the Time's Up movement.

Glancing down blouses and upskirts, making risqué remarks and double entendres, is now strictly forbidden or even legislated against. Some companies, apparently, have even introduced solemn love contracts for employees to sign, outlining what is and is not appropriate behaviour and who they can and cannot date.

It's all a very long way from the world of Mad Men. And if, in many respects, that's a good thing, in some ways it's a bit of a pity, because, as indicated earlier, some men and women work better and with real joy when they feel themselves attractive and subject to the charged flow of desire. Lawrence writes:

"If only our civilisation had taught us how to let sex appeal flow properly and subtly, how to keep the fire of sex clear and alive, flickering or glowing or blazing in all its varying degrees of strength and communication, we migh all of us have lived [and worked] all our lives in love, which means kindled and full of zest, in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of things. Whereas what  a lot of dead ash there is to life now!"  

Notes 

Jacques Derrida, 'The Word Processor', Paper Machine,  trans. Rachel Bowlby, (Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 29-30. Click here to read online.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 293.

Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl, (Bernard Geis Associates, 1962).

D. H. Lawrence, "Sex Appeal', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 147-48.

See also: Julie Berebitsky, Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire, (Yale University Press, 2012), which offers a more critical and in-depth analysis on this subject than I've been able to offer here. 

Click here to view George Costanza's (failed) attempt to do the right thing and stay out of trouble when hiring a secretary in the Season 6 episode of Seinfeld entitled 'The Secretary', dir. David Owen Trainor, written by Carol Leifer and Marjorie Gross (original air date 8 Dec 1994). 

And click here to view the trailer for the 2002 film Secretary, dir. Steven Shainberg, starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson based on the short story (of the same title) by Mary Gaitskill.

Reflections on the Typewriter 3: Nietzsche and His Golden Writing Ball

Nietzsche's Typewriter. Photo: Dieter Eberwein

Copyright: The Goethe and Schiller Archive, Weimar

Whilst Heidegger never learned to love the typewriter and Derrida did so only after overcoming much resistance to the idea, Nietzsche was a fan from the get-go; in fact, he was the first great philosopher to own a typewriter and even composed a four-line poem in which he compared himself to his machine:

THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: MADE OF IRON
YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS.
PATIENCE AND TACT ARE REQUIRED IN ABUNDANCE
AS WELL AS FINE FINGERS TO USE US. 

Initially, one might be surprised by this - for whilst he's never as suspicious of machines as Heidegger, Nietzsche's unable to affirm the development of science and technology without reservation, regarding it as fundamentally nihilistic in character and incapable of serving as a foundation for culture.

However, the dramatic deterioration of his vision obliged him to reconsider his reading and writing regime. As any prolonged use of his eyes caused him great distress and suffering - and by prolonged we mean for more than twenty minutes at a time - he had to find a new way to work. And so, in 1882, he purchased a portable typewriter: the Malling-Hansen Writing Ball ...

Invented in 1865 and shown at the 1878 Paris Universal Exhibition to great acclaim, the Writing Ball was the closest thing to a 19th-century laptop; small, light, fast, and easy to operate. It was also cheaper than the American typewriter manufactured by Remington.

Unfortunately, despite his initial excitement, Nietzsche never really mastered his Writing Ball and he soon got fed-up with his new contraption - particularly after it was damaged and he was unable to get it properly repaired.

Media theorist Friedrich Kittler has some interesting things to say about all this in his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999), characterising Nietzsche as the first mechanized philosopher who produced a kind of écriture automatique without even having to read (or even look at) the page (thereby saving his poor eyes from further strain).

Kittler argues that by integrating a machine into his writing process, it profoundly changed not only his style of composition, but ultimately impacted upon his thought as well; he moved from fully developed arguments and lengthy essays comprised of logically arranged propositions to aphorisms and fragments of text that displayed a perversely non-systematic manner of thinking.

In other words, the Malling-Hansen Writing Ball enabled Nietzsche to become the postmodern philosopher - or practitioner of die fröhliche Wissenschaft - we know and love. His idiosyncratic text emerged partly from his own philosophy of language, partly from his near-blindness, and partly from his willingness to explore the horizon of possibility that new technologies afford us.        


Visit: the Malling-Hansen Society website for further details on the case of Nietzsche and his Writing Ball: click here. 

See: Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, (Stanford University Press, 1999). The entire text can be found online: click here. 

Play: Leroy Anderson, The Typewriter (1950), a short musical composition which famously features a typewriter as a percussion instrument. The piece received its premier on September 8, 1953 during a recording made by Anderson and the Boston Pops Orchestra in NYC for Decca Records. To watch the Brandenburg Symphony Orchestra perform their version, in 2012, click here. 

To read part one of this post on Heidegger, click here. 

To read part two of this post on Derrida, click here.

Reflections on the Typewriter 2: How Derrida Put Down His Pen and Learned to Love a Keyboard

He may have bought a computer, but nothing 

could convince Derrida to get a desk lamp

Photo: Joel Robine / Staff AFP

Derrida certainly takes a more relaxed position on the question of handwriting and technology than Heidegger and, as we shall see, his experience of moving from pen to Mac via a typewriter, is a familiar one.

Whilst conceding that Heidegger's reaction to the typewriter is perfectly understandable within the context of his philosophical project, Derrida also describes it as dogmatic and makes two very obvious points that Heideggerians might like to consider:

Firstly, when writing in a traditional manner we are still using technology - be it a pen, pencil, or piece of chalk. And secondly, typing is also a manual activity and using a typewriter or laptop doesn't, therefore, negate or bypass the hand. Have anyone's fingers ever moved with more joy and speed and than those of a skilled touch-typist?

It might therefore be argued that typing doesn't diminish thinking, degrade the word, or threaten being to the extent that Heidegger asserts and that the typewriter is not some kind of doomsday machine.*

Finally, Derrida makes the following (rather touching) confession: 

"I began by writing with a pen, and I remained faithful to pens for a long time [...], only transcribing 'final versions' on the machine, at the point of separating from them [...] Then, to go on with the story, I wrote more and more 'straight onto' the machine: first the mechanical typewriter; then the electric typewriter in 1979; then finally the computer, around 1986 or 1987. I can't do without it any more now, this little Mac, especially when I'm working at home; I can't even remember or understand how I was able to get on before without it."

Apart from the dates, this is essentially the story of my own progression in writing. It took me a long time to make the transition from pen and paper to screen - I wrote a Ph.D. thesis and made over half-a-million words of notes in the old-fashioned manner before I bought my first laptop - but, like Derrida, I eventually came to love the machine for both the amazing amount of time it saves and the freedom it brings "that we perhaps wouldn't have acquired without it".

I'm not sure I agree with Derrida, however, when he says that working on a computer doesn't fundamentally change what is written, even if it does modify the way of writing - and I must admit this remark surprises me, suggesting as it does that we can separate content and style and that the former is somehow resistant to mechanical transformation.

If, as Derrida also says, we know very little, if anything, of the internal demon of the new writing-machines, how can we know what changes they are capable of instigating?

*Note: Heidegger himself concedes that "the typewriter is not really a machine in the strict sense [...] but is an 'intermediate' thing, between a tool and a machine". Having said that, however, he does also note that it's production is conditioned by machine technology. See: Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 1992). 

Jacques Derrida, 'The Word Processor', in Paper Machine, trans. by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 19-32. Click here to read as a pdf online.

To read part one of this post on Heidegger, click here. 

To read part three of this post on Nietzsche, click here.

Reflections on the Typewriter 1: The Case of Martin Heidegger

Heidegger at his desk sans typewriter 

I mentioned in a note to a recent post that Heidegger was no fan of the typewriter; that he believed it tore writing away from the domain of the hand, which, along with the word from which it sprang, is the essential distinction of Dasein.

It is neither coincidental nor accidental, says Heidegger, that modern man - enframed as he is by technology - should sit before a keyboard and write with a machine (first the typewriter, then the computer). Now the word is no longer able to come and go by means of the writing hand; it's processed and passed along by mechanical forces, becoming merely an item of information and communication. This not only endangers thinking, it threatens the destruction of the world. 

Today, says Heidegger, the handwritten text is not only regarded as antiquated, it is undesirable; something which, full of individual character, disturbs the homogeniety of the professional and commercial world and disrupts the ability of the reader to read quickly with the eye alone. The person who still writes by hand today is seen as either a loser, a madman, or a rebel; carrying a pen is almost as suspect as carrying a concealed weapon.

When writing was withdrawn from the origin of its essence, concludes Heidegger, and transferred to the machine, "a transformation occurred in the relation of Being to man" - and this wasn't a change for the better, no matter what advantages or conveniences were gained.

Should we, therefore, abandon the typewriter and the computer and the mobile phone with which we text and tweet and begin again to write by hand? Or is it not already too late; has technology not become so entrenched in our history and evolution - so much part of ourselves - that it is now of little or no importance that a few eccentrics choose to renounce and avoid it?

See: Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 80-81 and 85-86. Click here to read the relevant sections online. 

To read part two of this post on Derrida, click here. 

To read part three of this post on Nietzsche, click here.  

Instasham

Credit: Instagram

When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I remember that having a digital watch with LED display was suddenly de rigeur amongst my classmates. Lee Flavell, Neil Attree, and Greg Mason, all sported these clunky, futuristic, hi-tec timepieces on their wrists, as if they'd stepped straight off the set of Tomorrow's World.

It was about the same time that electronic calculators became must haves and school-children everywhere discovered to their delight what an amusing number 80085 was. Indeed, if I remember correctly, you could even get a digital watch that included a calculator ...   

However, being full of punk scorn for any attempt by straight people to try and look cool - and contemptuous of anything deemed trendy - I obviously despised digital watches and, in order to demonstrate my implacable opposition, I cut a picture of one out from an ad in the newspaper and sellotaped it to my wrist. 

Why do I think of this now, over forty years on? Because I read in the press recently of the anti-rich kids who have taken to Instagram to mock those who post photos in order to flaunt their privileged lifestyles and display their designer wardrobes.

How do they do this? They fake things - including expensive watches. Pranksters from around the world have shared images, under the hashtags #NotARichKidOfInstagram and #BudgetLife, of their amusing attempts to both replicate and ridicule the good life as conceived within consumer society.  

Whilst I obviously can't claim to have inspired this, I do like to think I anticipated it with my own actions back in the day (and demonstrated an early dislike for the digital age about to dawn). 

In Praise of Denial

Mike Brennan: Denial 

(Acrylic on canvas, 24" x 30")

mikebrennan.me

It will surprise no one to discover that Shakespeare is the most oft-quoted of all English writers.

Whilst it's probably impossible even for literary scholars to definitively say what his greatest lines are, the good people at No Sweat Shakespeare have kindly provided a list of 50 famous quotes, beginning with To be, or not to be and ending with What light through yonder window breaks.*

It's not the worst list in the world, but it's hardly an imaginative or controversial selection. And, what's more, it doesn't include my own favourite line from Shakespeare: I know thee not, old man ...

This line, from Act 5 Scene 5 of Henry IV, Part 2, has particular resonance to me at this time and deserves much greater critical attention, because the need to deny - our elders, our loved ones, our teachers, our leaders, and, ultimately, ourselves - is an absolutely crucial requirement in the process of becoming what one is.** 

Prince Hal, upon assuming the crown and becoming king, knew it; Zarathustra, who instructs his followers that they must ultimately lose all masters and learn to hate their friends, knew it; and even Jesus, who accepted the kiss from Judas and predicted Peter's triple denial, knew it.

Indeed, Christ himself denied his own mother, when he notoriously put the question to her: Woman, what have I to do with thee? As a reader of Lawrence, I have long viewed this remark made to Mary as a sign of failure. But now - in the position of a long term, full-time carer for an elderly mother with dementia - I'm rather more sympathetic.

That is to say, I'm tempted - in order to preserve my own health and sanity - to turn my back and walk away, because too much love and loyalty to another, or to the past, can be deadly and anyone who wishes to live and fulfil their own destiny has to offer a seemingly cruel denial of someone or something at sometime or other, regardless of the consequences or the pain caused.  

We deny and must deny, says Nietzsche, because something in us wants to live and affirm itself.

There is even, we might suggest, an existential imperative to sell out (i.e., to compromise one's integrity and betray one's principles); not necessarily for personal gain, but in order to leap into the future and carry forward the banner of life. A creative individual must repudiate the familiarity of the past (including old relationships) if he or she is to adventure onward into the unknown.

But this isn't easy: far easier to martyr oneself and to shrivel away inside an old life; a victim of that moral poison and great depressant called pity.  

Notes

 
* Readers interested in the full list of quotes provided by No Sweat Shakespeare should click here.

** Obviously, I'm not talking about denial here in psychological terms, i.e., as a coping mechanism used to avoid confronting an emotionally disturbing truth, or denialism in the political sense of denying historical or scientific fact.

The line from Jesus can be found in John 2:1-5 and the line from Nietzsche in The Gay Science, IV. 307.

You Need Hands

Single release from The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1979)

I.

In his 1925 essay 'Why the Novel Matters', D. H. Lawrence challenges the mind/body superstition by musing on his hand in the act of writing. Why, he asks, should it be regarded as "a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it".  

Why indeed. For it is the hand which - animated with a life all its own - forms direct knowledge of the strange universe that it touches, grasps, and handles. And it is the hand which plays with a pen upon the page, slipping gaily along and jumping "like a grasshopper to dot an i".*

The hand, says Lawrence, is also capable of rudimentary thought and experiences boredom if obliged to engage in the same activity for too long. Ultimately, it has just as much ontological reality as the brain: "Why should I imagine that there is a me which is more me than my hand is?"    

Why indeed. In fact, the philosopher Martin Heidegger gives the human hand special significance, believing as he does that it is what distinguishes man from all other beasts, including the great apes. Thus, as noted in a recent post on simian aesthetics, whilst Heidegger would readily admit that a chimp possesses prehensile, multi-fingered appendages capable of holding and manipulating objects - including paintbrushes - he would not allow that a chimp has hands in the unique (Daseinesque) manner that human beings have hands.

For Heidegger, there's an ontological abyss between the hand of Picasso, for example, and the hand of Pierre Brassau, that is not simply based on evolved anatomical difference. Derrida, however, has interrogated Heidegger's thinking on the hand and animality and argues that his insistence that apes have no hands (only organs that can grasp) is simply dogmatic speciesism which, as with all such oppositional thinking (or dualism), serves to land him back in the metaphysical soup so to speak.    

II.

Those interested in knowing what Heidegger says in more detail are encouraged to read What is Called Thinking? (1951-52). In this crucial late text Heidegger addresses the question of the human and what defines our unique existence or way of being in the world (i.e., what puts the Da- in Dasein and sets man apart from all other species).

Not wanting to fall back into the ontotheology that sustains traditional humanism, his answer isn't the mind or anything to do with the soul, it is, rather, die Hand; man is a kind of signifying monster who seems to be desperately trying to articulate something and the hand is the organ par excellence with which he gestures, points, and indicates - as well as reaches, receives, carries and welcomes.

Or, as Max Bygraves once wrote:

You need hands 
To hold someone you care for 
You need hands
To show that you're sincere **

You also need hands, as Bygraves goes on to suggest, to wipe away a tear, to hold a new born baby, and to give thanks to God in prayer. I don't know if Heidegger knew this very popular song (a German version entitled Deine Hände by Gerhard Wendland was released in July 1959), but I think he may have liked it (then again, maybe not).   

Insisting that thought is not a disembodied or merely cerebral process, Heidegger argues that man only really thinks when he creatively engages with the world with his hands. If he (somewhat predictably) writes of carpenters and cabinet-makers working away in some hamlet on the edge of the Black Forest, we are surely encouraged to extend what he says to include all people - but not Koko the gorilla or Congo the chimp.

Apes lack hands because they do not dwell within language (and so can never sing along with Max), concludes Heidegger, displaying the same problematic anthropocentrism that has characterised so much Western philosophy.

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Why the Novel Matters', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 193. 

Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, (Harper and Row, 1968). Originally published as Was Heißt Deken? (Max Niemeyer Verlag,1954), the book consists of a series of lectures given by Heidegger in 1951-52 at the University of Freiburg. To read online as a pdf, click here.  

Jacques Derrida, 'Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand', trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., in Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis, (University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 161-96. To read online as a pdf, click here. 

* Like Lawrence, Roland Barthes also liked to muse upon the physical act of writing - or what he termed scription - i.e., "the action by which we manually trace signs". Ultimately, for both men, writing is the hand and, in a wider sense, the body: "its impulses, controlling mechanisms, rhythms, weights, glides, complications, flights ..." It hardly needs to be said that Barthes had no time for the typewriter or word processor (in this he has much in common with Heidegger who believed it tore writing away from the essential domain of the hand and mechanically passed the word along, turning it into an element of commerce and communication). See Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980, trans. Linda Coverdale, (Northwestern University Press, 2009), p. 193.

** Max Bygraves, You Need Hands (Decca, 1958). Written by Max Bygraves (under the name Roy Irwin). Performed by Max Bygraves with The Clarke Brothers and Eric Rogers and his Orchestra. Lyrics © Lakeview Music Publishing Co. Ltd. Click here to play on YouTube. For me, the song has special interest due to the fact that Malcolm chose to record it for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and his performance of the song with Helen of Troy, in Highgate Cemetery, is one of the more touching scenes in Julien Temple's 1980 film: click here.

Simian Aesthetics 2: The Case of Pierre Brassau

Pierre Brassau (aka Peter the Chimp) 
seen here in his studio

Having discussed the case of Congo in the first post in this two-part series on simian aesthetics, I'd like here to say something on the amusing tale of Pierre Brassau - aka Peter the Chimp - and his fraudulent foray into the art world ...  

Peter, a four-year-old West African chimpanzee who resided at a zoo in Sweden, was at the centre of a 1964 hoax perpetrated on the art world by the tabloid journalist Åke Axelsson, who came up with the idea of exhibiting a series of paintings made by a monkey under the pretence that they were by a previously undiscovered (human) artist called Pierre Brassau.

Axelsson sought to demonstrate that contemporary art critics were full of shit and wouldn't be able to tell the difference between canvases daubed with paint by a great ape and those produced by leading members of the avant-garde.

(Axelsson, of course, thereby betrays his own prejudices: he's a sneering reactionary who dislikes (because he doesn't understand) modern art and he's full of anthropocentric conceit in that he doesn't for one moment consider the possibility that a chimp might be able to produce art that is of genuine interest and value.)

Having enlisted the help of his keeper, Axelsson gave Peter painting materials and encouraged him to express himself. Unfortunately, at first Peter seemed to prefer eating the oil paints - particularly the cobalt blue - rather than using them to decorate a canvas. However, he eventually got the hang of it and produced a number of abstract works. 

Axelsson then selected what he believed to be the four best and arranged for their exhibition at a gallery in Gothenburg, alongside works by an international array of artists.

Praise for Brassau's work was almost unanimous, with one critic, Rolf Anderberg, writing that whilst most of the canvases on display were ponderous, those of Brassau were painted with powerful strokes that twisted with furious fastidiousness and determination. Brassau, concluded Anderberg, "is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer".

After the hoax was revealed, Anderberg - to his credit - refused to change his opinion and insisted that, ape or not, Peter's work was still by far the best at the exhibition. A private collector, Bertil Eklöt, seemed to agree and purchased one of the works (albeit at the bargain price of just $90).

As for what happened to Peter once his brief career as an artist came to an end, I don't know. He was transferred to Chester Zoo, in 1969, and, presumably, he lived out the rest of his life happily eating bananas in anonymity.


For more detail and images, visit the Museum of Hoaxes website: click here.

For the first post in this two-part series on simian aesthetics, click here.

A Pierre Brassau original 

(untitled, 1964, oil on canvas)