How Fascism Makes Killers Of Us All (With Reference to the Case of Stephan Hermlin)

Stephan Hermlin (1915-1997)

 

 

I.

 

One of the defining features of Hitler's Germany is that no one was ever left alone; the private citizen was effectively abolished and every man, woman and child was forced to participate and declare themselves as either for or against the Third Reich.

 

(One of the privileges of living in a lacklustre (pre-pandemic) liberal democracy, by contrast, is that the individual is free to abstain or remain apathetic.)  

 

Given this state of affairs, many Germans enthusiastically raised their arm and shouted Sieg Heil, whilst others put their hands up and surrendered to the Nazis as if resigning themselves to Fate. A courageous few actively took up arms against the regime. 

 

But saying nothing and doing nothing was not an option; everyone was politicised and mobilised for  the coming catastrophe; no one could simply ask to be excused. 

 

 

II. 

 

I was reminded of this whilst reading Síomón Solomon's new translation of Stephan Hermlin's short text 'Hölderlin 1944' [1].  

 

In this piece - described by Solomon as a memoir essay, though one wonders to what extent it's a fictionalised account that blurs reality and dream [2] - Hermlin recalls his time on the run in southwest-central France in early 1944, when resistance to the German occupation was at its height and hardly a day went by "without explosions, attacks, massacres" [3]. 

 

Warned by comrades that his situation was compromised and that the authorities were closing in on him, he agrees to be taken to a new (and safer) location - a solitary farmhouse in the middle of he knew not where:

 

"A farmer, still young, received us in a friendly manner [...] He was helping the Resistance with his wife and two adolescent children. But I would need to be aware, he explained to me in a whisper, that there was someone dangerous to me living on the farm, namely his old mother, who was a fanatical supporter of Pétain and would turn me over to the Germans in an instant should she discover my presence. If I kept quiet, I would be tolerably safe from her. [...] The farmer escorted me into the barn. I clambered up into the hayloft, which was to be my eyrie for some time." [4] 

   

Although the long days hiding in the hayloft could be monotonous, at least there was plenty of time for reflection and reading his volume of Hölderlin, about whom he decides to write an essay. But then, one day, an incident occurs that could have easily ended in a terrible and tragic manner ...

 

"It was around lunchtime when, at an unaccustomed hour, the door squeaked, and unknown footsteps and a reluctant muttering were heard. I guessed that the ominous old woman had entered the barn, and, when the ladder began to creak, I realised she was heading for the hayloft. [...] I pulled the hay silently over me, breathing as lightly as possible. In the same moment, I felt a strange cold fury. I knew that, in the instant of discovery, I would not hesitate to kill that nameless old woman, lightning quick and without a sound. At that moment, she was standing about three metres away from me; I had pulled myself back deep into the hay but could see her with one eye. A dangling piece of straw obscured my view, but for a few blurred seconds I beheld my potential victim, a haggard crone in a black dress, whom I had never seen before, would never see again. At that moment, she gave up her search and climbed, grunting, back down the ladder. I lay with my body over Hölderlin's verses, having not had to become a murderer." [5] 

  

Whether this actually happened or it's a homocidal fantasy, I don't know. But the point remains the same: fascism makes killers of us all - or, at the very least, it obliges us to recognise that we all have the potential to commit terrible deeds when forced to do so. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Síomón Solomon, 'Hölderlin 1944', in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), pp. 83-88. The original German text can be found in the Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 23, (1982/83), pp. 172-77.

   

[2] It's no secret that Hermlin reimagined the facts of his own life. He was certainly creative with the truth, shall we say, when it came to his experiences during the War; portraying himself as an anti-fascist hero who fought with the Resistance in France and the Republicans in Spain. His tendency to dissolve the genre distinction between life and literature is best exemplified in Abendlicht (1979). 

      Solomon addresses this issue and provides some useful references to other critics who have been troubled (or amused) by Hermlin's tendency to project subjective experience into false historical context and tell true lies in part (ii) of his 'Translator's Introduction' to Hölderlin's Poltergeists. Unsurprisingly, since Solomon is himself a poet, he concludes sympathetically: 

"The hyperreal horror of the German menace and the continuous terror by which its paranoiac war machine infected the spirits of those it harassed and hunted down can hardly be underestimated, moreover, for the chaos it formented in curdling the contours of actuality, fantasy and memory. At the same time, poets are beings predisposed by definition to exercises of poetic licence. In the political interstices of Hermlin's own Vergangenheitsbewältigung, his reconciliation with his past, if he retrospectively massaged his own myth, he was surely in some measure just being himself." [21]

 

One work that Solomon doesn't refer us to, but which is certainly relevant to this discussion, is David Bathrick's 'Rereading Stephan Hermlin: Residues of Difference in the Post-Wall Public Sphere', in What Remains? East German Culture and the Postwar Public, ed. Marc Silberman, (American Institute for Contemporary German Studies / The John Hopkins University, 1997), pp. 90-100. To read as a pdf online, visit: https://www.aicgs.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/silberman.pdf

    

[3] Síomón Solomon, 'Hölderlin 1944', in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 85.

 

[4] Ibid., p. 86.

 

[5] Ibid., pp. 87-88.

 

 

For a related post to this one - on Síomón Solomon's fantasia of traslation in Hölderlin's Poltergeists - click here.   

Reflections on a Green Carnation

 

"When Oscar Wilde said that it is nonsense to assert that art imitates nature, because nature always imitates art, that is absolutely true of human nature."  [1] 

 

It might surprise some readers to discover that this is D. H. Lawrence writing in agreement with Wilde and his anti-mimetic philosophy. It might further surprise them to discover that in the same text he goes on to dismiss the notion of spontaneous human nature and attack the idea that our feelings arise from deep within of their own accord:

 

"The thing called 'spontaneous human nature' does not exist, and never did. Human nature is always made to some pattern or other. The wild Australian aborigines are absolutely bound up tight, tighter than a China-girl's foot, in their few savage conventions. They are bound up tighter than we are. [...]

      And this we must finally recognise. No man has 'feelings of his own.' The feelings of all men in the civilised world today are practicaly all alike. Men can only feel the feelings they know how to feel. The feelings they don't know how to feel, they don't feel. This is true of all men, and all women, and all children." [2]

 

And this, concludes Lawrence, is central to the agony of our human existence: "that we can only feel things in conventional feeling-patterns", rather than directly express the strange howlings of the yeasty soul [3].    

 

To do that, we must either give birth to a new humanity - perhaps what might even be described as a posthuman humanity - or we must find a way to become-animal, become-demon ... [4]    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction (version I) to The Memors of The Duc de Lauzan', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 89. 

      Lawrence is referring to Wilde's essay 'The Decay of Lying', in Intentions (1891) in which he writes: "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life [...] It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature also imitates Art." Of course, Wilde is by no means the first to advance such a thesis; Ovid, for example, anticipates the idea in Book III of Metapmorphoses. 

      

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction (version I) to The Memors of The Duc de Lauzan', in Introductions and Reviews, p. 89. 

    It might be argued that Lawrence is here reaffirming La Rochefoucauld's famous maxim: "Il y a des gens qui n'auraient jamais été amoureux s'ils n'avaint jamais entendu parler de l'amour." 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction (version I) to The Memors of The Duc de Lauzan', in Introductions and Reviews, p. 90. 

 

[4] See Deleuze and Guattari on the idea of becoming in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 

      In brief, becoming is an opening up to alien forces, but not so these can be filtered through the ego or experienced imaginatively. Becoming is not a fantasy; it is rather a real process involving events at the molecular level of forces. Deleuze and Guattari admire Lawrence as a writer precisely because he was able to tie his work "to real and unheard of becomings" [p. 244]. Becoming is diabolical in the sense that it fundamentally opposes the ontotheological belief in the immortal soul of Man as something fixed and essential. 

 

For an earlier post on Lawrence and Wilde, click here.       

 

 

On D. H. Lawrence and Oscar Wilde

 

 

I.

 

One hundred years ago today - 26 April 1921 - D. H. Lawrence arrived in the German spa town of Baden-Baden, situated on the edge of the Black Forest, close to the border with France. He was on a visit to his mother-in-law, Frau Baronin von Richthofen. 

 

It had been, he tells one correspondent, a devil of a journey from Italy; one that left him feeling not quite right inside his own skin [1]. Perhaps the curious stillness and emptiness of the place intensified this feeling. And one can't imagine the cold northern air helped matters. 

 

Not surprising then that, although his wife hoped they would be staying for the entire summer, Lawrence is already thinking of leaving in a few weeks; "doubt I shall stand it more than a month" [2]. 

 

Interesting as all this is, what really caught my attention, however, was a remark made in another letter written on the 28th of April, this time to his London publisher: "Alfred Douglas is a louse." [3]  

 

 

II.  

 

Why this remark caught my attention is because, as a matter of fact, Lawrence makes very few references to Oscar Wilde and his circle, only one of whom, Reggie Turner, does he ever meet in person [4]. 

 

Why this is so, we can only guess ...

 

For one thing, of course, it's generational; the world has moved on and, despite being born in 1885, Lawrence belongs very much to the unfolding twentieth-century, rather than the fag end of the nineteenth. Like many others, he finds Wilde's work dated and describes the 1890s as a ridiculous decade - a mix of decadence and pietism [5]. 

 

But it's also a question of temperament. For one suspects that Lawrence - an English puritan at heart - would have found Wilde a little too Irish, a little too queer, a little too affected ... In brief, just a little too much all round. We find traces of this in his characterisation of Wilde as a grand pervert, i.e., someone full of ineffable conceit who tried to "intellectualise and so utterly falsify the phallic consciousness" [6].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Lawrence's letter to John Ellingham Brooks (28 April 1921), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 706.

 

[2] See Lawrence's letter to Robert Mountsier (28 April 1921), ibid., p. 707. In the event, Lawrence and Frieda stayed in Baden-Baden until mid-July.  

[3] See Lawrence's letter to Martin Secker (28 April 1921), ibid., p. 708. 

      Despite the harshness of his description, Lawrence had, when younger, admired some of Douglas's poetry in The City of the Soul (1899): "Alfred Douglas has some lovely verses; he is affected so deeply by the new French poets, and has caught their beautiful touch." 

      See his letter to Blanche Jennings (20 Jan 1909), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 107. 

      Lawrence being Lawrence, however, he can't resist also taking a bit of a pop at Douglas in the same letter immediately afterwards: "the fat-head [...] feels himself heavy with nothing and thinks it's death when it's only the burden of his own unused self". 

 

[4] Lawrence is introduced to Reginald Turner by Norman Douglas in 1919 and he partly bases the character of Algy Constable on Wilde's most loyal of friends in Aaron's Rod (1922).

      References to Wilde in Lawrence's work include, for example, 'The Proper Study', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 170, and 'Introduction [version I] to The Memoirs of the Duc de Lauzun', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 89.

 

 [5] See Lawrence's 'Review of Hadrian the Seventh, by Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo)', Introductions and Reviews, p. 239. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Aldous Huxley (27 March 1928), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 342. 

      Wilde finds himself in good company, as Lawrence also brands Goethe, Byron, Baudelaire, and Proust (among others) as grand perverts. 

 

 

For further refections on Lawrence and Wilde, click here.  

As for Lawrence ... He's a Moral Conservative

 

 

Perhaps one of the most surprising - and, for some, disappointing - things that D. H. Lawrence ever wrote is found in the Foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922):

 

"On the whole, our important moral standards are, in my opinion, quite sound [...] In its essential character, our present morality seems to me to offer no very serious obstacle to our living: our moral standards need brightening up a little, not shattering." [1]

 

Tell that to the followers of Nietzsche, for example, who call for a revaluation of all values ...! Indeed, this might almost be read as an explicit rejection of Zarathustra, who famously advocates the breaking of law tables [2]. 

Of course, as digital pilgrim James Walker reminds us, Lawrence was a mass of contradictions - elsewhere in his work he explicitly rejects the idea of standards of any kind - and so maybe we shouldn't take what he says in Fantasia too seriously after all ...? [3]

 

It could be, for example, that Lawrence was simply being contrary in the face of one critic who suggests that he seeks a "'revision of moral standards such as will remove artificial bars to the escape of each person from the isolation which is his most intolerable hardship'" [4]. 

 

That would explain why - again to one's bemusement - Lawrence even challenges the idea that isolation is an intolerable form of hardship for the individual. And yet, it's precisely such solitary confinement - leading ultimately to self-enclosure or solipsism - that Lawrence elsewhere rages against:

 

"For it is only when we can get a man to fall back into his true relation to other men, and to women, that we can give him an opportunity to be himself. So long as men are inwardly dominated by their own isolation [...] nothing is possible but insanity more or less pronounced. Men must get back into touch." [5]

 

If it isn't his contrary nature that explains this surprising defence of the present moral order, then, I suppose, we might just have to consider the possibility that Lawrence was fundamentally more conventional and conservative than many of his readers like to believe [6]; thus his support for traditional marriage, capital punishment, and the censorship of pornography. 

 

And thus his contempt for those writers and artists who wore jazz underwear and didn't subscribe to his central teaching that the "essential function of art is moral." [7]  

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 60.  

[2] The line I'm thinking of is found in Zarathustra's Prologue (9) and is translated by Adrian Del Caro as: "'Look at the good and the just! Whom do they hate most? The one who breaks their tablets of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker - but he is the creative one.'" 

      See the Cambridge University Press edition of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2006), ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin. The line quoted is on p. 14.   

 

[3] See the related post to this one - As for Lawrence ... A Reply to James Walker - click here.

 

[4] L. L. Buermyer, writing in the New York Evening Post Literary Review (16 July 1921), quoted by Lawrence in Fantasia, p. 60. 

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 336. 

      It's worth noting that whilst Lawrence says there's no need to shatter moral standards, he does argue here for the shattering of the ideal of a standardised (or normalised) humanity. 

 

[6] This might help explain why Lawrence is increasingly popular in conservative (and even neo-reactionary) circles; see for example Micah Mattix, 'Reconsidering D. H. Lawrence', The American Conservative, (9 Oct 2020): click here.  

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 155. 

      See also the essay 'Art and Morality' in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 161- 168, which opens: "It is part of the common clap-trap, that 'art is immoral.'" In this short text, Lawrence expresses his loathing for those artists whose only aim was to épater les bourgeoisie.      

As for Lawrence ... A Reply to James Walker

James Walker: Senior Lecturer School of Arts and Humanities

Nottingham Trent University: full profile click here. 

 

 

I. 

 

As torpedophiles will be aware, digital storyteller James Walker is someone I have a fair degree of time for, even if his political views often strike me as all-too-predictably prim and proper. 

 

His graphic novel (co-produced with Paul Fillingham), Dawn of the Unread (2014-16), which celebrates Nottingham's literary heritage, was amusing and his current transmedia project which aims to build an online Memory Theatre inspired by D. H. Lawrence's global wanderings, also promises to be of interest.    

 

A member of the D. H. Lawrence Society Council, Walker assembles and edits a monthly bulletin that is emailed to members of the Society, thereby demonstrating his commitment to circulating all the latest news of Lawrence, but without becoming an uncritical follower of the latter. 

 

Indeed, Walker often seems to regard Lawrence primarily as a figure of fun, rather than as a novelist and poet who might actually have something important to teach us. This helps explain his remark left in a comment to a recent post published here on Torpedo the Ark:          

 

"As for Lawrence, he's a mass of contradictions who needs to be read in context. I wouldn't take quotes from Fantasia too seriously, although at least he was honest enough to call it what it was: this 'pseudo-philosophy of mine'."

 

It's a remark I thought we might examine a little more closely ...

 

 

II. 

 

Firstly, it's true that Lawrence is a mass of contradictions and that there is little point in searching for a coherent or consistent philosophy in his work. Like Nietzsche, Lawrence makes no attempt to systematise his ideas - something which betrays a lack of integrity according to the former. However, he does offer a very distinctive style which is characterised by plurality, difference, and insouciance.

 

In other words, it's a style that enrages the puritan who not only expects but demands logical seriousness and dependability. 

 

Arguably, Lawrence anticipates the figure imagined by Roland Barthes who "abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple disregard of that old spectre: logical contradiction" [1]; that anti-Socratic hero who mixes every language and endures the mockery of moral-rational society without shame. 

 

For me, this is one of Lawrence's strengths and at the heart of his appeal; but do I sense a trace of disappointment and/or irritation in Walker's As for Lawrence remark? Does he secretly hope that by reading Lawrence in context - something he says needs to be done, although he doesn't specify what constitutes this context - his work might not only be better understood but, as it were, coordinated within a wider framework of meaning which is clear, coherent, and woven into Truth?

 

Secondly, one might wonder just how seriously Walker would have us take Lawrence's work in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). Not too seriously, he says, but what exactly does that mean; who determines what is and is not a serious piece of writing and what is and is not an appropriate reader response? 

 

Again, I might be mistaken, but I get the impression that Walker secretly thinks Lawrence a clown and his work ludicrous. I also suspect he thinks Lawrence something of a fraud. This is why he is quick to remind us of Lawrence's own use of the phrase pseudo-philosophy to describe his thinking in Fantasia. And why he commends Lawrence for his honesty here, as if elsewhere in the book he is flagrantly dishonest and peddling falsehoods.

 

The ironic thing is that Lawrence's pseudo-philosophy remark is one that is usefully read within a wider context; namely, the Foreword to Fantasia in which Lawence amusingly answers his critics, including Mr. John V. A. Weaver of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, who reviewed Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious and coined the term Pollyanalystic which Lawrence then rewrote as pollyanalytics in order to describe his own philosophy.

 

Read within this context, it becomes clear that Lawrence neither regards his own thinking as a pseudo-philosophy nor a "wordy mass of revolting nonsense" [2]. He is using this phrase - as he's using pollyanalytics - in an ironic (rather weary) manner in the face of past criticism and anticipated future criticism. 

 

It also becomes clear that Lawrence takes his philosophical inferences - deduced from the novels and poems -  seriously and he challenges his readers to do so also if they wish to fully understand his work. For Lawrence, underlying all art is a philosophy upon which it is utterly dependent:

 

"The metaphysic or philosophy may not be anywhere very accurately stated" [3] - it may contain a mass of contradictions or be wearing woefully thin - but it is of primary importance and not to be scornfully dismissed as something unworthy of serious consideration.    

 

 

Notes

  

[1] Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 3. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 62.  

[3] Ibid., p. 65. 

 

For a follow-up post to this one - in which it seems James Walker might have a point after all and we examine Lawrence's moral conservativism - click here.

On Olaf Stapledon's Moral Rationalism

Promotional image for the 2020 film adaptation of Olaf Stapledon's novel 

directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson and narrated by Tilda Swinton

Click here to view the trailer 

 

 

Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) [1] sets out the future history of mankind divided into eighteen distinct species of human being across a period of some 2000,000,000 years. The narrator of the work is supposed to be channelling a text dictated to him by one of the last men. 

 

If Stapledon's cyclical (whilst progressive) theory of history, complete with rising and falling civilisations, owes something to Spengler and the Hegelian dialectic, his theory of a universal supermind (i.e., a consciousness composed of many telepathically linked individuals) arguably has its origins in religious mysticism.

 

That's bad enough. But, in a sense, my main problem with this essay in myth creation, is that, ironically, it remains very much of its own time. Stapledon is clearly not all that interested in a posthuman future; his real concern is with the politics of the post-War world and the "earnest movement for peace and international unity" [xv] that he hopes will triumph. 

 

At its core, then, this work is less one of speculative fiction and more a piece of propaganda on behalf of universal moral rationalism. A form of communism, which helps explain its aggressive anti-Americanism. As more than one critic has pointed out, this is what makes the book - particularly in its opening chapters - seem "awkward and naive" [2].        

 

But, actually, the end of the work is just as ridiculous: the Last Men, we are told, have finally achieved "spiritual maturity and the philosophic mind" [xviii] - a sort of mix of Socrates and Jesus, whom the Last Men think highly of, as the very first page of chapter one makes clear:

 

"Socrates delighting in the truth for its own sake and not merely for practical ends, glorified unbiased thinking, honesty of mind and speech. Jesus, delighting in the actual human persons around him, and in the flavour of divinity which, for him, pervaded the world, stood for unselfish love of eighbours and of God. Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionte intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other.

      Unfortunately both these ideals demanded of the human brain a degree of vitality and coherence of which the nervous system of the First Men was never really capable. For many centuries these twin stars enticed the more precociously human of human animals, in vain. And the failure to put these ideals in practice helped to engender in the race a cynical lassitude which was one cause of its decay." 

 

It's passages like this that, unfortunately, make it impossible for me to read this novel from start to finish - even though I've tried to do so numerous times - and which kind of make me happy to discover at the end of the work that the sun is about to explode!

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, (Gollancz, 2004). All page references to this edition will be given directly in the text. 

[2] Gregory Benford, Foreword to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, ibid., p. ix. 

      As Benford reminds us, Stapledon was a Marxist with a strong dislike of capitalism - particularly American capitalism. Unfortunately, this causes him to give a reading of his own times and the near future that has proved to be completely mistaken. Thus Benford advises readers to skip the first four chapters. 

 

What if the Shoe Were on the Other Foot?

Photo by Chris Buck for O - Oprah Magazine (May 2017)

chrisbuck.com

 

 

New York based photographer Chris Buck is known for his unconventional portraits of various celebrities and politicians - and celebrity politicians - including Presidents Obama and Trump. His arresting images have appeared in many top publications and he has been involved with a number of high profile commercial campaigns, including the controversial Be Stupid campaign for Diesel. 

 

Like many people, however, I know of him primarily for his pictures in the May 2017 edition of O - The Oprah Magazine, which played with the idea of a reversal of class and race roles, in which whiteness was suddenly disprivileged, at best, if not subject to systemic discrimination in this alternative universe.

 

The photos - which quickly went viral - were for the most part positively received, though, predictably, some found them offensive. Buck claims that his pictures were intended to stimulate questions, but not necessarily provide answers and that he's pleased to know that different people had different reactions:

 

"I want everyone to feel like they can vocalize their feelings about it, whether they’re positive or negative. More talk about this is a good thing. I’d rather people not get upset or offended, but if that’s their reaction then I think that’s totally fair too." *

 

For me, they illustrate something I think we all know at heart: that given the opportunity, everyone is capable of behaving as a cruel, selfish, exploitative arsehole who doesn't give a shit about those who are regarded as inferiors. 

 

In other words, no one is innocent. And those currently oppressed or subject to injustice and violence would behave just as appallingly - if not worse - given the upper hand. Slave morality - for all its fine words - is, let us not forget, a resentment-fuelled desire for revenge; a reactive expression of will to power. 

 

And so, even if the shoe were on the other foot, it would still mean a kick in the face for someone ... Is the solution then that we must all learn to go barefoot (were such a thing possible)?

 

* Note: I'm quoting from an interview with Chris Buck by Jennifer Berry. See: 'The Real Story Behind the O Pics That Have Been All Over Your Feed', Flare, (23 May, 2017): click here.  

On Private Language and Post-Truth (Or How D. H. Lawrence Opens the Way for Donald Trump)

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence opens his 1929 essay on pornography and obscenity by claiming that there is no consensus of opinion regarding a definition of the former: "What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another". And that, similarly, nobody knows what the word obscene means: "What is obscene to Tom is not obscene to Lucy or Joe" [1].  

 

I suspect it's this line of thinking which lies behind James Walker's claim that "any attempt to define obscenity is itself obscene" [2], by which I think he means that the attempt to impose shared meaning (or common values) on the individual and their lived experience is something he finds offensive.  

 

But I'm not entirely sure that's what he means: for by the logic of his own argument - which seems to subscribe to a solipsistic fantasy of purely personal feeling and, indeed, a purely private language - how could I ever be certain of understanding what he's saying?    

 

 

II.  

 

The idea of a private language was, of course, made famous by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), where he explained it thus: "The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know - to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language." [3]

 

However, no sooner does Wittgenstein introduce this idea of a language conceived as ultimately comprehensible only to its individual originator - because the things which define its vocabulary are necessarily inaccessible to others - than he rejects it as absurd. 

 

Naturally, there has been - and remains - considerable dispute about this idea and its implications for epistemology and theories of mind, etc.

 

Not that the validity or falseness of the idea will bother Lawrentians, for whom inner experience and (their own) singular being is everything. They'll simply repeat after their master: If it be not true to me / What care I how true it be [4] - surely the most intellectually irresponsible lines Lawrence ever wrote, showing disdain for facts, evidence, and reasoned debate and, ironically, opening the way for figures that James Walker certainly doesn't approve of ...

 

 

III. 

 

Arguably, Lawrence anticipates the post-truth world we live in today; one in which shared objective standards and meanings have dissolved into thin air; one in which Tom, Lucy, and Joe all get to define words however they like, à la Humpty Dumpty. Knowledge is confused with opinion and belief; fact is replaced with feeling; intelligence gives way to intutition.

 

It all sounds very liberal, but it isn't. Indeed, historian Timothy Snyder argues, post-truth is pre-fascism:

 

"When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions [...] Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth." [5]  

If it be not true to me / What care I how true it be ... This could so easily have been tweeted by Donald Trump!

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence. 'Pornography and Obscenity', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 236. 

      Lawrence appears to think that a shared meaning or commonly accepted definition of a word is inherently inferior and that only the individual meaning of a word has poetic power and rich symbolism. Even the simplest of words, he says, never mind those that are complex or controversial, has both a mob-meaning and an imaginative individual meaning. And these two categories of meaning are, apparently, forever separate. The problem, however, as Lawrence sees it, is that most people are unable to preserve integrity and private thoughts and feelings become corrupted by those which come from outside: "The public is always profane, because it is controlled from the outside [...] and never from the inside, by its own sincerity." [238] Such thinking is, of course, completely untenable.            

 

[2] James Walker, writing on his Digital Pilgrimage Instagram account: click here. See the post published on 13 April 2021, concerning Peter Hitchens and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

   

[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. Anscombe, (Macmillan, 1953), §243. It's crucial to stress that a private language is not simply a language understood by one person, but a language that, in principle, can only be understood by one person. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 70. 

[5] Timothy Snyder, 'The American Abyss, The New York Times, (9 Jan 2021): click here. 

Reflections on Milo Moiré's PlopEgg Painting (With a Note on Heide Hatry's Expectations)

Milo Moiré: PlopEgg (2014)

Photo by Peter Palm

milomoire.com

 

 

I. 

 

British art critic Jonathan Jones really doesn't like performance art and he wants the world - or at any rate his Guardian readership - to know it:  

"Performance art is a joke. Taken terribly seriously by the art world, it is a litmus test of pretension and intellectual dishonesty. If you are wowed by it, you are either susceptible to pseudo-intellectual guff, or lying." [1]

Obviously - and by his own admission - he's overstating things for polemic effect. But still it's clear that he's not a fan of contemporary performance art which, in his view, lacks power, fails to take any real risk, and reveals the extent to which today's practitioners are distanced from "real aesthetic values or real human life". 

 

Practitioners, for example, such as Swiss artist Milo Moiré, whom followers of Torpedo the Ark will recall I have discussed in earlier posts which can be found here and here. 

 

 

II. 

 

Performed at Art Cologne 2014, Moiré's PlopEgg, involved the expelling of paint filled eggs from her vagina on to a canvas, thus creating an instant abstract work of art. At the end of the performance, the canvas was folded, smoothed, and then unfolded to create a symmetrical image resembling one used in a Rorschach test.    

 

Dismissing Moiré as simply "the latest nude egg layer from Germany" [2], Jones denies that PlopEgg is an interesting feminist statement about female nudity, fertility and creativity; it is, rather, "absurd, gratuitous, trite and desperate". 

 

The thing is, even if Jones is right, and Moiré's conceptual work uniting painting and performance is all these things and succeeds only in perfectly capturing "the cultural inanity of our time", what's wrong with that?            

 

And, actually, Jones is not right: PlopEgg resonates in many ways on many levels for many of us; we think, for example, not just of female genitalia as represented in the history of art and of relatively recent contributions to this tradition by Judy Chicago, Annie Sprinkle, Jamie McCartney, et al, but also of Bataille's astonishing novella L'histoire de l'œil (1928) and the famous scene in which Simone inserts a soft-boiled egg into her cunt (as she does later with a raw bull's testicle and, finally, a priest's eyeball). 

 

We think also of Leda, the Aetolian princess, who was raped by Zeus in the form of a swan; the union resulting in an egg plopping out of her vagina, from which the beautiful Helen was hatched. And we even recall with a smile the beautiful jade eggs that Gwyneth Paltrow encourages women to insert in order that they may gain a greater experience of ther own bodies and increase their feminine energy [click here].      

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Jonathan Jones, 'The artist who lays eggs with her vagina - or why performance art is so silly', The Guardian (22 April, 2014): click here to read the article in full online. All quotes that follow from Jones are taken from this piece.  

 

[2] Jones doesn't specify who else he is thinking of when he refers to these egg layers from Germany, but one possible candidate might be Heide Hatry and her ambiguous performance piece entitled Expectations (2006-08), in which she too squeezes an egg out of her vagina. 

      In one variation of the work, Hatry, dressed as a businesswoman and carrying a laptop, throws the egg directly at the lens of the camera which is filming her, almost as if she wants the viewer to look foolish or feel embarrassed by what they're waching (i.e. to know what it's like to have egg on their face). To discover more about this work, click here. 

 

  

Reflections on the Goop Jade Egg

 

Goop Jade Egg

goop.com

 

 

I.

 

Launched in 2008, Goop is a wellness and lifestyle brand founded by actress Gwyneth Paltrow that aims - a bit like Torpedo the Ark - to operate from a place of curiosity and nonjudgment in order to make interesting connections and challenge conventional models of thinking.

 

Unlike Goop, however, Torpedo the Ark doesn't encourage followers to nourish the inner aspect, nor does it offer a range of wellness products, such as the nephrite Jade Egg, which women are invited to purchase - it presently retails at $66 - and then place into their vaginas. 

 

The Egg, which some believe to possess mysterious crystal power, is designed to enable women to experience a greater connection with their own bodies. Having first washed the rather lovely looking object with soap and water, the trick is to insert, hold it there for a while, and then squeeze and release. It is recommended that the Egg is also cleaned after use and stored in a sacred space - or at least one that has good vibes. 

 

Over time, this Kegel-like practice with the Jade Egg may bring increased happiness and well-being.           

II.

Strip away the new age nonsense and pseudoscience and ultimately what you're left with is something that you may or may not wish to buy and play with. I shouldn't think there are any dangers, but doubt there are any real health benefits either - though, if I were a woman, I'd sooner pop a Jade Egg inside than experiment with vaginal steaming. 

 

Finally, it should be noted that the Jade Egg (and fifty other Goop products) became the centre of a lawsuit in 2017, filed by the consumer advocacy group Truth in Advertising, who were concerned about false and misleading claims. This resulted in the company agreeing to pay a $145,000 settlement in September 2018 and issuing full refunds to customers who wished for such. 

 

Of course, Goop continued to sell their Jade Eggs, they simply toned down the language re: the benefits of using them; no more promises of increased vaginal muscle tone or greater feminine energy.* 

 

Ultimately, I've not much sympathy for those women wealthy enough and foolish enough to buy into the Goop philosophy. And, as I've indicated before on this blog [click here], I rather admire Miss Paltrow who possesses a winning combination of intelligence, beauty, talent, and chutzpah. Which is why she always seems to have the last laugh over her critics.  

 

 

* Note: at the time of the settlement Goop had sold around 3,000 vaginal eggs.