Cocoon Above! Cocoon Below! Notes on Chapter 2 of Metamorphoses by Emanuele Coccia

Emanuele Coccia: Associate Professor at the  

École des hautes études en sciences sociales

 

 

What kind of man likes the idea of shutting himself up in a cocoon? Well, Emanuele Coccia, certainly seems excited by the thought: 

 

"I've often dreamt of it. [...] Cutting off all relations with the world and giving myself over entirely to the transformative workings of matter. Feeling my soul carving itself out and knitting itself together anew, in a new form." [a]   

 

This sounds a rather solipsistic fantasy to me and, personally, I could think of nothing worse than being cocooned in spun silk. 

 

But Coccia is right, however, to argue that metamorphosis is something greater than a conversion or revolutionary change; the two terms in which men (contra caterpillars) usually think transformation:

 

"In conversion it is only the subject that changes: their opinions, their attitudes, their way of being are transformed, but the world remains, and must remain, the same. Only a world left untouched by conversion can testify to the transformation. Conversion is often the outcome of an inner journey, full of trials and revelations, long periods of abstinence and asceticism. Such change presupposes absolute and total self-mastery.

      Nothing could be further from metamorphosis than a conversion." [47]

 

As for the second model of change, revolution:

 

"In this case it is the world that changes; the subject who causes this change and stands surety for the passage from one world to another, cannot themselves be transformed because they are the only witness to the transformation underway." [48]

 

Thus, in a sense, revolution is "as far removed from metamorphosis as conversion" [49]. 

 

So what then is metamorphosis - and what makes it so unique? Well, according to Coccia:

 

"In metamorphosis, the power that passes through us and transforms us is not a conscious and personal act of will. It comes from elsewere, it is older than the body it shapes, and it operates outside any decision. Above all, there is [...] no negation of a past or a former identity. On the contrary, a metamorphic being is a being that has renounced all ambition to recognize themselves in one face alone." [48]     

 

Unfortunately, whilst that's fine for insects - and Coccia writes a whole section in praise of insects [see pp. 50-54] - we're not metamorphic beings and the only people who renounce all ambition to recognise themselves in one face alone are actors, impressionists, and schizophrenics [b]. 

 

Just to be clear: I'm as interested in insects as the next man (unless they happen to be an entomologist). I've even written several posts on our six-legged friends: click here, for example, or here. 

 

But I find it hard to share Coccia's obsession with insect metamorphosis in its various stages and what he terms postnatal eggs (his term for the chrysalis or cocoon built by the larva), even though I do find intriguing his suggestion that to change form "means having the strength to turn one's body into an egg capable of creating and bearing a new identity" [63].  

 

I do worry, however, that this is Coccia's method for reviving the (slightly addled) idea of the mundane egg; a major symbol in creation myths around the world, which even some modern cosmologists have figuratively adopted [c]. The egg, writes Coccia, "is the emblem of the metamorphic state" [63], a line which could have come straight from a theosophical handbook. 

 

More interesting, to me at least, is Coccia's argument that the cocoon-as-postnatal egg must be understood as a question of technics and not simply as something natural or spontaneous; nor as a form of what Ernst Kapp termed Organsprojektion [d]:

 

"According to Kapp any technical object, any instrument, is merely the projection of an organic structure outside the body, in a perfectly isomorphic relationship. The extension of the organ, its projection out of the anatomical body, makes it possible to correct its defects [...] but above all to humanize the world. Thanks to the organ-projection, thanks to technics, the world becomes an extension of the human body." [72] 

 

As Coccia rightly points out, from this perspective, technics is something Allzumenschliches - as if other organisms couldn't possibly be technologically savvy. He's right also to say that in the idea of technics embodied by the cocoon, "the manipulation of the world becomes something that allows us to cast off our own nature, to change it from within rather than project it outward" [73].   

 

Coccia arrives at the interesting conclusion that every technical object is (potentially at least) a cocoon that enables metamorphosis:

 

"A computer, a telephone, a hammer, or a bottle are not just extensions of the human body. On the contrary, they are ways of manipulating the world that render possible a change of personal identity, ethologically if not anatomically. Even a book is a cocoon that makes it possible to reformulate one's own mind." [73]

 

The cocoon, then, for Coccia, is "the paradigm not only of technics, but of being-in-the-world in general" [80]; a kind of transcendental form not only of selfhood, but self-consciousnes, thus proving that "metamorphosis is above all the relationship we have with ourselves" [81] [my emphasis]. 

 

I somehow knew Coccia would say that, as he drifts back into a dream state, seeing cocoons everywhere and enjoying the sensation of being encased in "white, soft silk" [84] like a grub. Still, who am I to criticise if, like Samuel Beckett, his preoccupation with the eternally larval allows him to reimagine the human condition [e].  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses, trans. Robin Mackay, (Polity Press, 2021), p. 45. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the main body of text. 

      When Coccia, expanding upon his fantasy of becoming-unrecognisable, describes seeing wings sprout from his body one is reminded of something that Seth Brundle famously said: "I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over and the insect is awake." See David Cronenberg's 1986 film The Fly, starring Jeff Goldblum as Seth Brundle.  

[b] I suppose Coccia might argue that insects didn't originally possess the ability to metamorphose either - that this was something that evolved over time. And so perhaps people too, in some distant future, might be able to "condense within the formal plurality of a single individual existence the impulse towards the multiplication of forms", thereby making planetary biodiversity into "a question of personal virtuosity" [50]. 

      It should be pointed out, however, that in the absence of an exoskeleton, it seems highly unlikely that this will ever come to pass outside of fiction, such as Kafka's Die Verwandlung (1915) and George Langelaan's 'The Fly' (1957), although maybe certain religious-minded people who believe in reincarnation or metempsychosis might claim that metamorphosis is already a human reality.          

[c] Following Edwin Hubble's experimental observations of the universe's constant expansion in 1929, Georges Lemaître proposed that what he had earlier described as a primeval atom might better be thought of as a cosmic egg, from which the universe had hatched. Understandably, not all physicists welcomed the idea (not least because it created the need for a cosmic chicken). 

[d] See Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik, (1877), one of the first books on the nature of modern technology by a philosopher. It has recently been translated into English, by Lauren K. Wolfe, as Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, (Minnesota University Press, 2018).   

[e] For a prize-winning essay on Beckett's thinking on the eternally larval (as well as what he called the worm-state), see Rachel Murray, 'Vermicular Origins: The Creative Evolution of Samuel Beckett's Worm', in the Journal of Literature and Science, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2016), pp. 19-35. 

      See also Murray's fascinating book on the role of insects in modern literature; The Modernist Exoskeleton, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). A revised version of the above essay appears as chapter 4, following on from a chapter on Hilda Doolittle's experimental writings on the cocoon, in which the author contends (in a similar manner to Emanuele Coccia) that the latter not only has a protective function, but allows the self to respond to its surroundings in new ways. 

 

 

To read my notes on the Introduction and first chapter of Emanuele Coccia's Metamorphoses, click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter three ... click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter four ... click here.  To read notes on chapter five ... click here. 

Kill Me Now: Notes on the Introduction and First Chapter of Metamorphoses by Emanuele Coccia

(Polity 2021)

 

 

I. 

 

Emanuele Coccia has called his new book Metamorphoses. But he may as well have called it Pantheism, because what this book primarily affirms is the "unity of all living things [...] and the unity of the living being with the matter of the world" [a]. 

 

According to Coccia, pantheism is a hidden tradition with a repressed history within philosophy; a claim which, like many others in this book, is one I doubt the veracity of. For it might be argued, that philosophers simply prefer to use the less religious-sounding term monism to describe unity and the peculiar satisfaction that it gives some people to announce that All is One.

Anyway, let's get down to business ... 

As well as an Introduction and Conclusion, there are five chapters in this book: Births, Cocoons, Reincarnations, Migrations, and Associations. Here, in part one of the post, I'll discuss the first of these chapters and the Introduction.

 

 

II. 

 

Coccia opens his Introduction with a three-word phrase even more provocative than I love you: In the beginning ... 

 

Obviously, he knows this is the opening phrase of the Bible; a translation of the Classical Hebrew expression Bereshith [בְּרֵאשִׁית‎]. And whilst one hopes he's using it with a certain irony, I do worry that he's preparing the way for a religious narrative to follow. 

 

Anyhoo, in the beginning, says Coccia, "we were all the same living creature, sharing the same body and the same experience" [3]. I suppose that's true enough - banal, but true enough [b]. But we might wish to challenge Coccia's following sentence: "And things haven't changed so much since then." [3] 

 

For this is said as if the new forms and modes of existence which have proliferated in the 3.5 billion years since LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor), hardly matter; as if all that really counts is the life force which animates them. For life, clearly, is the essential for Coccia, who, I suspect, would like to write the word with a capital L if he dared.    

 

Coccia challenges his readers to accept the "deepest meaning of the Darwinian theory of evolution" [5] - the one that biologists (allegedly) don't like to think about, as it means regarding species as life games, i.e., "unstable and necessarily ephemeral configurations" [5], rather than substantial entities.     

 

Coccia also wants readers to come to terms with the fact that, as Nietzsche put it, being alive is only a rare and unusal way of being dead:

 

"There is no opposition between the living and the non-living. Not only is every living creature continuous with the non-living, it is its extension, metamorphosis, and most extreme expression." [5]

 

Again, that's true enough, but it's nothing very new; thanatologists, including myself, have been pointing this out for years now: click here, for example, to read a post based on an essay from 2006 in which I attempted to dissolve the distinction between life and death. 

 

And, what's more, some of us have also dared to draw the consequences from this fatal truth; we realise that if all life is essentially the same, then a human life has no more inherent value than that of a cockroach [c], and if there is no difference between living things and the world of dead matter, then there's no point crying over species facing extinction, for example.    

 

This - to use Coccia's own phrase - is the deepest meaning of nihilism and why Ray Brassier is right to argue that philosophy's destiny (and duty) is to acknowledge the fact that "thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of the living" [d].

 

  

III.

 

Does Coccia share this view? Maybe. Take a look at this sentence, for example:

 

"Our adult life form is no more perfect, no more 'us', no more human, no more complete than that of the bicellular embryo that comes directly after the fertilization of the egg ..." [8]  

 

Is Coccia making the metaphysical claim that the soul enters at conception? Is he demanding full rights for the unborn? Or is he suggesting, rather, that it would be fine with him were we to abort human beings at any stage of their development - even long after birth - since each and every form "has the same weight, the same importance, the same value: metamorphosis is the principle of equivalence between all natures" [9]. 

 

If all life is just a game of forms played out on the same plane - and that plane is material actuality (i.e. death) - then it makes perfect sense to say that an embryo is the same as a foetus, a foetus is the same as a baby, and a baby is the same as an adult. It just becomes a question of whether you think their value is inestimable or zero. 

 

 

IV.

 

Coccia makes a big deal of the fact that, like the rest of us, he was born to parents, who were themselves born of their parents, who were born ... well, you get the idea: "Birth is not simply the emergence of the new, it is also the erratic wandering of the future through a limitless past." [14] 

 

He thinks we are too forgetful of this, although the fact that there's a multibillion dollar birthday industry might suggest otherwise; as might the fact that Happy Birthday to You is the most sung song in the world [e].   

 

Coccia, the proud parent of a young daughter, Colette, to whom he dedicates this book, is clearly still in the flush of first-time fatherhood. Thus it is that everything about pregnancy, birth, and babies seems miraculous and makes him gush to his readers about how special his child is:

 

"She arrived barely five years ago and she has changed everything around her, and around me: she has lit up worlds through which she has travelled with a joy and a grace I had never before encountered. She knows all the secrets of metamorphosis - and she has revealed a few of them to me." [x]

If that's the case, then one rather wishes that Colette had written the book ... Perhaps if she had, we would've avoided being told in a section entitled 'Birth and Nature' that there is "nothing more universal" [19] than birth; something that makes me as impatient as it made Roland Barthes over sixty years ago. 

 

In 'The Great Family of Man', Barthes demythologises the idea that events such as birth and death can be understood outside of history:

"Birth, death? Yes, these are facts of nature, universal facts. But if one removes History from them, there is nothing more to be said about them; any comment about them becomes purely tautological. [...] For these natural facts to gain access to a true language, they must be inserted into a category of knowledge which means postulating that one can transform them, and precisely subject their naturalness to [...] criticism. [...] True, children are always born but in the whole mass of the human problem, what does the 'essence' of this process matter to us, compared to its modes which [...] are perfectly historical? Whether or not the child is born with ease or difficulty, whether or not his birth causes suffering to his mother, whether or not he is threatened by a high mortality rate, whether or not such and such a type of future is open to him [...]" [f] 

 

This is the sort of thing that Coccia's book might have usefully reminded us, instead of fobbing us off with lyricism surrounding the fact of birth: "To be born [...] is to experience being a part of the infinite matter of the world [...] It is always Gaia who says 'I' in us." [21] [g]

 

To which I can only say kill me now, or let's move on ... 

 

Every now and then, we come to something that might be interpreted as a philosophical statement. For example; "multiplicity is not simply arithmetical, and it does not negate the profound unity [...] of all living beings" [27]. 

 

But isn't that just saying what Deleuze and Guattari reduced to a simple equation: Pluralism = Monism [h] ...?

 

This is the magic formula which Deleuze learns from his readings of Spinoza and Nietzsche and one might have hoped that Coccia would have at least referred to this. But he doesn't. I don't know why. Perhaps it's because he's worried about becoming trapped in "the enclosed courtyard of traditional books, subjects, and arguments, all sanctioned as 'properly philosophical' by an arbitrary and culturally quite limited canon" [i].    

 

Whatever the reason, Coccia seems unwilling to reference Deleuze; even when, later on in the chapter, he meditates on difference and repetition: "We are all a repetition of a past life. [...] Yet in being so expressed, the past is [...] rearranged, arbitrarily reconstituted, transfigured." [34] 

 

I would've thought this was the perfect opportunity to at least mention Deleuze's powerful critique of representation; one that develops concepts of difference and repetition that are metaphysically prior to any concept of identity [j].

 

Instead, Coccia chooses to discuss the symbolic theory of Sándor Ferenczi - "one of Freud's most brilliant and heterodox students" [34] - who offers such astonishing insights as this: "there is a 'symbolic identity of the womb with the sea and the earth on the one hand, and of the male member with the child and the fish on the other'" [36] [k]. 

 

I've said it before - and I very much suspect I'll be forced to say it again whilst reading this book - kill me now!

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses, trans. Robin Mackay, (Polity Press, 2021), p. viii. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the post. 

 

[b] Coccia's opening reminds me of D. H. Lawrence's Introduction to Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), in which he writes: "In the beginning was a living creature, its plasm quivering and its life-pulse throbbing." See Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 69.   

[c] This is not say that you can't value a human life above that of a cockroach, only that this is a matter of personal preference (or prejudice) and has no real foundation as the same life flows through both. The case of Gregor Samsor is obviously instructive here: click here for my take on Kafka's story.

      Later, in a section entitled 'Metamorphosis as Destiny', Coccia again says something that potentially has fatal consequences; namely, that every metamorphic being "is composed and inhabited by [an] otherness, which can never be erased" [38]. If that's the case - if we carry within us everyone and everything, including all other peoples and all other species, then why does it matter if we exterminate them? 

      In some ways, Coccia reminds me of Walt Whitman who has, as D. H. Lawrence would say, broken the mainspring of his own singular being and now asserts: I am everything and everything is me! as he attempts to become in his own person "the whole world, the whole universe, the whole eternity of time". He cannot accept that outside the egg of his Allness, there is genuine otherness, which he is not and cannot become. See the final version (1923) of Lawrence's essay 'Whitman', in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 148-161. The line quoted above is on p. 151.              

 

[d] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), p. xi.

[e] Later in the chapter, Coccia writes: "Our society is still based on the cult of the dead [...] Birth, on the other hand, remains a mystery and a taboo. [...] We barely talk about it or celebrate it [...]" [25]. This, however, is patently not true; a friend of mine has just had a baby and she never shuts up about the fact, both in person and on social media. And whilst Christian culture attaches great importance to the death of Christ, do we not also celebrate Christmas and Easter - his birth and resurrection?

      To be fair, Coccia, concedes that Christ's nativity is a familiar theme in European art, but argues that what is depicted "is no ordinary birth, but a unique, one-off, unnatural event" [30]. In other words, Christian theology places the birth of Christ outside of any naturalistic framework in order to emphasise its miraculous character.

      Like Nietzsche, who also holds Christianity responsible for throwing filth on the actual origins of life, Coccia argues that we need to liberate ourselves from "this two-thousand-year-old legacy" [32] and reverse its central teachings. However, whereas for Nietzsche this involves reviving the Dionysian mysteries, in order to ensure that every aspect of procreation, pregnancy, and birth awakens the most exalted and solemn feelings, for Coccia, we would do better to imagine that, if God participates in birth, then "he must be incarnated in any natural being whatsoever: an ox, an oak tree, an ant, a bacterium, a virus" [32]. Thinking along this pantheistic line obliges us to see every birth as "a transmission of the divine substance, but above all as a kind of metamorphosis of the gods" [32].

      See the section entitled 'Carnival of the Gods' in chapter one of Metamorphoses, pp. 30-33. And for Nietzsche's Dionysian take on this question, see section 4 of 'What I Owe to the Ancients', in Twilight of the Idols.

 

[f] Roland Barthes, 'The Great Family of Man', in Mythologies, selected and trans. Annette Lavers, (The Noonday Press, 1991), pp. 101-102. 

[g] For those who don't know, Gaia is the primordial Greek goddess and personification of the Earth; she whom all living beings call mother. As well as Ovid's Metamorphoses, Coccia openly admits that his book has been written under the influence of the Gaia hypothesis put forward by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis [182]. It's their work which he wishes to deepen and radicalise, with sentences like this: "Being born means that we are part of this world: we formally and materially coincide with Gaia, with her body, her flesh, her life force." [37]. Obviously, as a reader of Nietzsche, I'm extremely cautious of those who deify nature or believe the earth to be a living being; see The Gay Science, III. 109.      

 

[h] This formula can be found in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 20. Deleuze was also influenced in his thinking on this subject by the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus, from whom he borrowed (and adapted) the doctrine of ontological univocity.     

[i] Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants, (Polity Press, 2019), p. 167. 

      It's from sentences like this that Coccia attempts to draw what Foucault termed speaker's benefit. That is to say, sentences like this make him appear to be a bit of a rebel, or an outsider, challenging the established order, etc. Which is a bit rich, coming from a man who lectures at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), one of the most selective and prestigious educational establishments in all France. 

[j] I'm referring, of course, to Deleueze's Différence et Répétition, (Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), trans. into English by Paul Patton, (Columbia University Press, 1994).

 

[k] Coccia is quoting from Sándor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, tras. Henry Alden Bunker, (Norton, 1968), p. 45. 

To read my notes on chapter two of Emanuele Coccia's Metamorphoses, click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter three ... click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter four ... click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter five ... click here. 

Semen Terrorism

Jiří Petrbok: Semen Masks (1999)

 

 

Following a number of cases involving men secretly ejaculating on to women's belongings, politicians in South Korea are seeking to make what has become known - ludicrously - as semen terrorism into a punishable sex crime, rather than merely a form of property damage. 

 

Now, on the one hand, I'm sympathetic to the women who have had semen smeared on their clothes, for example, as this not only incurs dry cleaning expenses, but can, I imagine, cause distress as well as outrage and disgust. 

 

Ultimately, no one wants a stranger jizzing on them (or in their cup of coffee) without their knowledge and prior consent. I think we can pretty much all agree on that. However, on the other hand, I'm not sure this should be considered a sexual assault, even if it has sexualised overtones due to the nature of the substance used to despoil the property (or beverage).    

 

And in order to prove that these acts constituted a form of sexual violence, it would be important to show intent and that's tricky, because whilst the victim may feel they have been sexually humiliated, even violated, the perpetrator may have had no wrongdoing or malice in mind. 

 

Indeed, one might imagine rather lonely men who may regard the act of semen marking as generous and affectionate; an attempt to share something of themselves and to reach out to others. 

 

Or, perhaps, they are men of a more religious mindset, who regard semen as possessing magical or divine properties; this could be a method of putting the object of their affection under a spell, or secretly anointing them with what Jesus called living water. 

 

In other words, we might see this is a sacramental rather than a terroristic use of semen; an illicit act of love, rather than a hate crime ... (Although it's probably just another sign of the pornification of culture in general and the sexual objectification of women in particular.) 

In Memory of Una Stubbs

 Una Stubbs (1937-2021)
Dancer, actress, TV personality, and real cool cat

 

 

I didn't know Una Stubbs personally. 

 

And, to be honest, I don't really know a great deal about her, apart from the fact that she was one of those women who always made me happy whenever I saw her on screen; not just as Aunt Sally, in Worzel Gummidge, or clowing about with Lionel Blair on Give Us a Clue (before being replaced by Liza Goddard as a team captain), but even as far back as those black and white days of childhood when she played the lovely Rita Rawlings, in Till Death Us Do Part.  

 

The fact that Una was also the face of Dairy Box in 1958-59 and often referred to herself even in later life as the Rowntree's Chocolate Girl, only makes me love her more ... 

 

Originally launched in 1936, Rowntree's was looking to re-market Dairy Box in a manner that might appeal to the hip young things of the new jazz and pop age of the late 1950s, which was then thriving in the bars, clubs, and coffee shops of Soho. 

 

And who better to front such a campaign than 21-year-old dancer Una Stubbs, fresh from appearing on the TV show Cool for Cats. As the kids groove to the latest sounds of skiffle, Una delights in the soft centres: click here. 

 

It's a charming ad and makes one think that Una could possibly have been our Goldie Hawn, if only a film producer had recognised her zany comic potential and exploited it in full.          

 

 

Watching the World Turn Day-Glo: Welcome to the Plastisphere

Kristen Regan: Aurelia eviana  

Print on aluminium (20" x 20")

From the series Plastisphere

 

 

I. 

 

I've previously written about plastic eating bacteria [1], so torpedophiles will be aware of my interest in this subject and the manner in which, as Poly Styrene would say, the world turns day-glo [2] and organisms not only adapt to this fact, but are transformed by the increasing presence of phthalates, for example, in the (no longer quite so) natural environment [3].

 

No big surprise, then, that I should be fascinated by what is termed the plastisphere ... [4]

 

 

II.

 

The plastisphere is a term used to refer to an evolving marine ecosystem composed of various types of micro-organism that happily live in the artificial habitat created from plastic waste materials.   

 

In 2010, it was estimated that up to 12 million tonnes of plastic waste found its way into the oceans - and I shouldn't think things have improved much (if at all) since this date. Not great for fish or marine birds and mammals, perhaps, but autotrophs, heterotrophs, and symbionts, love this shit! 

 

Why? Because plastic debris differs from other floating materials that naturally occur; for example, being non-biodegradable, plastic provides a far more durable home and can transport the organisms living on it over extremely long distances, creating new opportunities. 

 

Even certain insects have been able to flourish in the plastisphere, whereas life on the ocean waves had previously not been an option for them - and larger creatures too, such as crabs and jellyfish, are taking advantage of this brave new world, by rafting on plastic waste and going with the flow. 

 

I don't know if this is a good thing. But it is an astonishing thing - the rapid evolution of a synthetic ecosystem or plasticised marine environment - and it's happening whether we like it or not. And who knows, maybe this new Eden and its microbial inhabitants will one day play a crucial role in life's survival on this planet ...     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See: Watching the World Turn Day-Glo: Notes on Plastic Eating Bacteria (19 April 2019): click here.

 

[2] I'm referring here to the classic punk single by X-Ray Spex, 'The Day the World Turned Day-Glo', from the album Germ Free Adolescents (EMI, 1978). Click here to watch the band - fronted by Poly Styrene who wrote the track - perform it on Top of the Pops.

[3] See the post: Plastic Ants (There Might Come a Day When They're Treading on You) (10 April 2021): click here.

 

[4]  The plastisphere was first described by a research team consisting of Dr. Linda Amaral-Zettler (from the Marine Biological Laboratory), Dr. Tracy Mincer (from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) and Dr. Erik Zettler (from the Sea Education Association). Using high-powered microscopes and DNA sequencing techniques, they identified the organisms colonising plastic samples gathered from multiple locations in the Atlantic Ocean. Since then, there has a been a huge amount of research published on this topic and it is now generally accepted that microbial diversity within the plastipshere is far greater (and more complex) than anyone might previously have imagined (particularly, it seems, on blue-coloured plastic).   

      See: Erik R. Zettler, Tracy J. Mincer, and Linda A. Amaral-Zettler, 'Life in the "Plastisphere": Microbial Communities on Plastic Marine Debris', Environmental Science and Technology, (June 2013), 47 (13), pp. 7137-7146. 

 

Notes on The Life of Plants by Emanuele Coccia

(Polity, 2018)

 

I. 

 

As torpedohiles will be aware, I'm a big fan of plants and trees. And interested also in the latest philosophical speculation concerning our CO2-loving friends. Thus, I'm delighted to have the opportunity to discuss - having finally read - a recent book by Emanuele Coccia, published in English as The Life of Plants (2019) [a]. 

 

One of Coccia's main points is certainly not new, but remains something that needs to be repeated as loudly and as often as possible: human exceptionalism is scientifically untenable - it's a theological prejudice. Thus, any system of rank that places mankind above all other animals is one that needs scrapping. 

 

Further, we should also abandon the idea that animals are a superior form of life than plants - or even radically distinct. 

 

For example, I don't know if plants have consciousness as conventionally understood. But, as a Deleuzean, I can happily subscribe to the idea that there are forces working through them that constitute microbrains, enabling plants not only to process information and make decisions, but contemplate the world by contracting the elements from which they originate [b]. 

 

Anyway, let's now look at Coccia's book in more detail ...

 

 

II.

       

Plants - like a lot of other things - have mostly been overlooked in philosophy, "more out of contempt than out of neglect" [3]. 

 

So it's an encouraging development that there has lately been a bloom of interest in them by philosophers such as Coccia and Michael Marder, who reject the metaphysical snobbery that would keep plants "in the margins of the cognitive field" [3] and forever outside the gate. 

 

In other words, the return of the photosynthesising repressed is to be welcomed. I particularly like the fact that this represents a challenge to the chauvinism of the animal rights brigade and is one in the eye of holier-than-thou vegans, who never stop to question their own positing of animal life over plant life.   

For what is animalism if not merely "another form of  anthropocentrism and a kind of internalized Darwinism [which] extends human narcissim to the animal realm" [4] ...? 

 

Not that plants care - they just keep on doing their thing with sovereign indifference, living a form of life that is "in absolute continuity and total communion with the environment" [5]. To imagine that they are poor in world is laughable: 

 

"They participate in the world in its totality in everything they meet. [...] One cannot separate the plant - neither physically nor metaphysically - from the world that accommodates it. It is the most intense, radical, and paradigmatic form of being in the world." [5]

 

Ultimately, we need plants to live; but they don't need us: "They require nothing [...] but reality in its most basic components: rocks, water, air, light" [8], which they transform into life and into the world we inhabit. We call this god-like ability autotrophy - the capacity plants have "to transform the solar energy dispersed into the universe into a living body" [8].   

 

This is why it makes much more sense to worship a tree, than a deity made in our own image; we owe plants everything (something that the man next door, forever spraying weedkiller on his drive, should think about, as well as those who are wilfully destroying the world's rainforests). 

 

As Coccia writes, botany might be advised to "rediscover a Hesiodic register and describe all forms of life capable of photosynthesis as inhuman and material divinities [...] that do not need violence to found new worlds" [10]

 

 

III.   

For Max Bygraves, hands were crucial. 

 

But plants, as Coccia reminds us, don't have hands, they have leaves. But then plants don't need to brush away a tear or want to stop a bus, and the absence of hands "is not a sign of lack, but rather the consequence of a restless immersion in the very matter they ceaselessly model" [12] [c]. 

To think like this is, essentially, to revive the ancient Greek tradition of philosophy as a discourse not on ideas, but on nature [peri physeos]; i.e., philosophy staged as a confrontation with the objects of the natural world (something that plants do every moment of the day). 

People often like to say that nature is a cultural construct; but, actually, culture is a natural construct and, as readers of Nietzsche will recall, he always stressed that the former must be understood in terms of φύσις. 

 

For Nietzsche, culture possessed a spiritual quality, lacked by civilisation, which develops organically from within the conditions of existence and he affirms nature as a world of difference and constant becoming. As for man, the flower of culture: Der Mensch ist eine Mischung aus Pflanze und Geist ... [d]

 

Unfortunately, for centuries now - and certainly since the time of German Idealism - philosophy (with a few rare exceptions) stopped contemplating nature and left it up to other disciplines to speak of "the world of things and of nonhuman living beings" [18] [e].

 

Coccia, following Iain Hamilton Grant, calls this forced expulsion from philosophy of all traces of the natural world physiocide and suggests that it has had terrible consequences for philosophy, turning it into an "imaginary struggle against the projections of its own spirit" [19] and the ghosts of its past:

 

"Forced to study not the world, but the more or less arbitrary images that humans have produced in the past, it has become a form of skepticism - and an often moralized and reformist one at that." [19] 

 

Thus, Coccia's little book has a big goal: to rebuild philosophy as a form of cosmology via an exploration of vegetal life. In other words, he wishes to learn from the flowers, roots and - arguably the most important parts of the plant - the leaves ...  

 

 

IV.

As this passage makes clear, for Coccia leaves are key:

 

"The origin of our world does not reside in an event that is infinitely distant from us in time and space [...] It is here and now. The origin of the world is seasonal, rhythmic, deciduous like everything that exists. Being neither substance nor foundation, it is no more in the ground than in the sky, but rather halfway beween the two. Our origin is not in us - in interiore homine - but outside, in open air. It is not something stable or ancestral, a star of immeasurable size, a god, a titan. It is not unique. The origin of our world is in leaves [...]" [28]

 

But, on the other hand, Coccia also loves roots - "the most enigmatic forms of the plant world" [77] - which are hidden and invisible to most animals as they move across the surface of the earth. Interestingly, roots are relatively a recent development in the evolution of plant life, which seems not to need them "in order to define itself, exist, or at least survive" [78]. 

 

Indeed, for millions of years, plants lived perfectly happily without roots and their origin is obscure:

 

"The first fossil evidence dates back to 390 million years ago. As in all forms of life destined to last for millions of years, their origin is due to fortuitous invention and bricolage more than to methodical, conscious elaboration: the first kind of roots were functional modification of the trunk or horizontal rhizomes deprived of leaves." [78]

 

That is fascinating, I think, and it gives one a new interest in roots; particularly in their extremely variable morphology and physiology. 

 

I know Deleuze always hated roots - primarily because Plato and Aristotle thought of them as analogous to the human head (and hence reason) and this idea was to have "an extraordinary success in the philosophical and theological tradition from the Middle Ages and up to the modern period" [79] - but nous somme ne pas Deleuzean [f]. 

 

Thus, we are free to say that roots rock and are perhaps not as bad as we thought they were, although Coccia's suggestion that roots "make the soil and the subterranean world a space of spiritual communication", transforming the earth into "an enormous planetary brain" [81] is not something I would write and doesn't help matters.

 

Personally, I prefer it when Coccia reminds us that roots are ontologiclly nocturnal and "swarming under the surface of the soil, nauseating and naked like vermin", as Georges Bataille so memorably put it [g]. Flowers face heavenward; but roots have no superterrestrial dreams or hopes; they remain true to the earth:

 

"The root is not simply a base on which the superior body of the trunk is based, it is the simultaneous inversion of the push toward the upward direction and the sun that animates the plant: it incarnates 'the sense of the earth', a form of love for the soil that is intrinsic in any vegetal being." [85] [h]

V.

 

Finally, having discussed leaves and roots, we come to Coccia's theory of the flower, or, if you prefer, his erotics, which posits sex as "the supreme form of sensibility, that which allows us to conceive of the other at the very moment when the other modifies our way of being and obliges us [...] to become other" [100] - which is as boring a definition as you could wish for.

 

And the flower? A flower is a cosmic attractor - "an ephemeral, unstable body" - which allows the plant to "capture the world" [100]. And thanks to flowers, says Coccia, "plant life becomes the site of an explosion of colours and forms and of a conquest of the domain of appearances" [100]. 

 

Flowers are not only beyond good and evil, they are beyond any "expressive or identitarian logic: they do not have to express an individual truth, or define a nature, or communicate an essence" [100] - they just have to look pretty and smell nice.   

 

But the flower isn't, for Coccia, just sex on a stem: it is also reason; "the paradigmatic form of rationality" [110], echoing Lorenz Oken, a leading figure within Naturphilosophie in Germany in the early 19th-century who wrote: 

 

"If one wishes to compare the flower - beyond sexual relation - to an animal organ, one can only compare it with the most important nerve organ. The flower is the brain of plants [...] which remains on the plane of sex. One can say that what is sex in the plant is brain for the animal, or that the brain is the sex of the animal." [i]  

 

What does that mean? It means, says Coccia, that "anthropology has much more to learn from the structure of a flower than from the linguistic self-awareness of human subjects if it is to understand the nature of what is called rationality" [117]. 

 

And on that note, I think I'd like to close the post ... [j]  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari, (Polity Press, 2019). All page references given in the post are to this edition of the text.

 

[b] Even Darwin speculated that plants might have tiny brains in their roots; see The Power of Movement in Plants (John Murray, 1880). 

      Michael Marder, meanwhile, is adamant that plants do, in fact, have consciousness - albeit in a radically different way to ourselves; see Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013). Readers may recall that I published a three-part discussion of this book on Torpedo the Ark in November 2019: click here for part one and then follow links at the end of the post for parts two and three.

      Readers interested in this topic might also like to see F. Baluška, S. Mancuso, D. Volkmann, and P. W. Barlow, 'The "Root-Brain" Hypothesis of Charles and Francis Darwin', in Plant Signaling and Behaviour, 12 (Dec 2009), 1121-27. Click here to read online. 

 

[c] This is not to downplay the importance of hands; see my post of 1 June 2019: click here.

 

[d] See Zarathustra's Prologue, 3, in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.    

 

[e] Of course, it was Socrates who first insisted that philosophy should disregard the physical universe and confine itself to a rational study of moral questions.   

[f] In other words, Deleze has a metaphysical objection to roots, which, as Coccia notes, are often still thought of in ordinary speech as "what is most fundamental and originary, what is most obstinately solid and stable, what is necessary" [80] - i.e., the plant organ par excellence. And yet, as Coccia goes on to point out, roots are actually the most ambiguous part of the plant. 

[g] Georges Bataille, 'The Language of Flowers', Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr., (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 13. 

      An interesting post written by Michael Marder on Bataille and his vegetal philosophy, can be found on The Philosopher's Plant (his blog for the LA Review of Books): click here. 

 

[h] Having said that, Coccia warns against blind fidelity to the earth if that means forgetting the sun: "Geocentrism is the delusion of false immanence: there is no autonomous Earth. The Earth is inseparable from the Sun." [91] 

      That's true, of course, but I'm not sure I understand what he means when he goes on to argue that to "the lunar and nocturnal realism of modern and postmodern philosophy, one should oppose a new form of heliocentrism, or rather an extremization of astrology" [92] - with the latter understood as a universal science. Coccia seems to think there's a correlation between us and the stars; that because we are of an astral nature (and the earth a celestial body), that we can influence the stars (just as they influence us). 

      Predictably, this way of thinking very quickly leads to a theological conclusion: "Everything [...] that occurs is a divine fact. God is no longer elsewhere, he coincides with the reality of forms and accidents." [94] 

      Ultimately, it's important to realise that whilst Coccia loves plants, he's not an ecologist, he's a sky-worshipper. That is to say, for Coccia it's not the soil or the sea that is the ultimate source of our existence, it's the sky, and what plants teach us is not to remain true above all else to the earth, but to make life "a perpetual devotion to the sky" [94], whilst, of course, remaining rooted in the earth. 

      He concludes: "The cosmos is not the inhabitable in itself - it is not an oikos [a home], it is an ouranos [a sky]: ecology is no more than the refusal of uranology." [96]   

 

[i] Lorenz Oken, Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie, 3rd edition, (Friedrich Schultheisse, 1843), p. 218. Quoted by Emanuele Coccia in The Life of Plants, p. 108. The quotation is trans. Dylan J. Montanari.

  

[j] Readers should note that The Life of Plants does have an epilogue, consisting of two short chapters; the first on speculative autotrophy and the second on philosophy as a kind of atmospheric condition, rather than a distinct discipline. To be honest, as interesting as his remarks are, I'm not sure why he felt the need to add them to this particular text (unless attempting to fend off criticism of his work from more traditional philosophers).  

On Marriage, Adultery and Slut Shaming (With Reference to the Case of Lady Chatterley)

Illustration by Flavia Felipe for an article on 

slut shaming in Teen Vogue (3 June 2016)

 

 

I. 

 

Slut shaming is the practice of denigrating a young woman for acting in a manner that violates social norms regarding sexually appropriate behavior. 

 

It's not something I would normally condone or engage in, but, in the case of Constance Chatterley, who, arguably, is one of the most selfish and conniving figures in 20th-century literature, I'm prepared to make an exception ...

 

 

II. 

 

By the author's own admission, Lady Chatterley's Lover is "obviously a book written in defiance of convention" [a]. A book which not only elevates profanity to the level of a phallic language, but lends support to the idea that adultery is justified if at least one spouse is bored or sexually frustrated. 

 

"Far be it from me to suggest that all women should go running after [...] lovers" [b], says Lawrence. 

 

But, actually, that is precisely what he suggests. That because her marriage to Clifford is sexless, it is therefore an empty sham and Connie is entitled to seek her pleasure elsewhere and stage a passionate revolt against her wedding vows to love, honour and obey her husband, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, etc. 

 

This may or may not make her a slut - and, as indicated, it's not a word I would normally use (or feel comfortable using) - but it certainly places her amongst those who experience "an intense and vivid hatred against marriage [...] as an institution and an imposition upon human life" [c].  

 

Although, according to Lawrence, that's because Connie is one of those unfortunate modern women who only know counterfeit marriage, i.e., marriage that is personal rather than phallo-cosmic [d]. 

 

And that's why she's justified in cheating on Clifford and running off with another man; because her marriage is false (based on an affinity of mind and shared interests), whereas her relationship with Mellors is authentic (based on fucking and shared passion).   

 

 

III.

 

Constance Chatterley is the sort of privileged young woman who, when considering the terrible consequences of the war, only thinks of how it brought the roof crashing down on her hopes for the future. 

 

Never mind the forty-million casulties, including her own husband, Clifford, who was shipped back to England from Flanders more or less in bits and paralysed from the waist down. After all, he could wheel himself about quite happily - but what was she going to do? For she was still young and despite her teenage love affair with a sulky musician in Dresden before the war -  twang-twang! - her body was full of unused energy ... 

 

And so this bonny Scotch trout with big blue eyes and "rather strong, female loins" [e] finds herself a lover; a successful young Irish playwright, called Michaelis, whom she fucks in her parlour at the top of the house, then seeks his assurance that he'll not let on to Clifford - because what her husband doesn't know can't hurt him. At no time does Connie consider her adulterous behaviour immoral.  

 

Connie and Mick meet whenever possible after this for what in modern parlance is known as a quickie - and it is quick, because he was "the trembling, excited sort of lover whose crisis soon came, and was finished" [29]. 

 

Thus, Mick fails to satisfy Connie (even though she eventually learns how to keep him inside her after he has come, just long enough so that she can achieve her own orgasm) and they soon break up (even though he does ask her to divorce Clifford and marry him, promising a good time). 

 

After their final act of illicit coition, however, Michaelis turns on Connie and attempts to shame her for bringing herself to climax after he has already ejaculated:

 

"When at last he drew away from her, he said, in a bitter, almost sneering little voice:

      'You couldn't go off at the same time as a man, could you? You'd have to bring yourself off! You'd have to run the show!'" [53]

 

Unsurprisingly, this shocks and humiliates Connie; she was "stunned by this unexpected piece of brutality" [54] - especially as it was due to the unsatisfactory nature of his own performance that she was obliged to be active [f]. If she's a slut, then he's something far worse and Connie is well-shot of this irritating little prick. 

 

Her next lover is her husband's gamekeeper - Oliver Mellors; the ultimate Lawentian bad boy who despite having certain physical advantages over Clifford and Michaelis - and able to write a fine letter when he wants to - remains a thoroughly bad son, bad husband, bad father, bad employee, bad citizen, and - unless one likes it rough and Greek style - a bad lover [g].          

 

 

IV.

 

Connie's affair with Mellors is so-well known, that I needn't go into explicit detail here. Although we are told that, after Michaelis, Connie's sexual desire for any man collapsed, it isn't long before she seeks out a bit of rough in the woods, initially engaging in a spot of voyeurism as she spies on Mellors washing himself, "naked to the hips, his velveteen breeches slipping down over his slender loins" [66]. 

 

This, apparently, is a visionary experience for Connie; one that hits her in the middle of her body and which she receives in her womb. And so, that night, she takes off her clothes and stands naked before the huge mirror in her bedroom, admiring her bottom - where life still lingered - but mostly feeling sorry for herself and resentful of Clifford. She was unloved and old at twenty-seven and married to a man with crippled legs and a cold heart. The injustice of it all! 

 

And so to the keeper's hut ... where she seduces Mellors with her tears, allowing him to fuck her on an old army blanket spread on the floor. Then she hurries home in time for dinner, with no real afterthought about what she's done. 

 

The next evening, she returns to the woods and to Mellors, telling him that she doesn't care about anything; her marriage, her status, her reputation ... She just wants him to fuck her again - and quickly, so she can be home once more in time for dinner.

 

The affair blossoms and Connie begins to weave her web of deceit; something that isn't too difficult for a woman to whom lying comes "as naturally as breathing" [147]. Only Mrs. Bolton guesses what's going on and she's full of admiration for Connie being able to lie to Clifford with such brazen nonchalance.

 

Before long, Connie's pregnant; which, arguably, had been her intention all along - Mellors simply being a convenient means to this end, like a stud animal (which he suspects, but Connie denies; see p.169).  

 

Connie plans a trip to Venice, partly to provide a cover story for her pregnancy; Clifford can believe she had an affair with a wealthy gentleman abroad, or her old artist friend Duncan. Her sister, Hilda, is told about Mellors - much to her outrage. She tells Connie: "'You'll get over him quite soon [...] and live to be ashamed of yourself because of him'" [238] [h].

 

Ironically, when Hilda meets Mellors, he tries to make her feel bad about herself as a woman, telling her, for example, that whilst a man gets "'a lot of enjoyment'" [245] out of a woman like her sister, she would fail to sexually satisfy any man, being, he says a sour crab-apple, in need of proper graftin'. Until then, he adds, she deserves to be left alone. 

 

Afterwards, even Connie complains that he was rude to Hilda, but Mellors is unapologetic. In fact, he suggests that what Hilda had needed was not only a good fucking, but a beating: "'She should ha' been slapped in time'" [246] to stop her becoming so wilful. 

 

One might have expected Connie to object to this remark also. But, actually, she finds his anger and violent misogynistic fantasies sexy and obediently retires to the bedroom at his suggestion, allowing Mellors to fuck her up the arse in order that she may discover her ultimate nakedness and overcome all sense of shame:

 

"It was a night of sensual passion, in which she was a little startled, and almost unwilling [...] Though a little frightened, she let him have his way, and the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations [...] burning the soul to tinder. 

      Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places. [...]

      [...] She would have thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the shame died. [...] She felt, now, she had come to the real bed-rock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked and unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory!" [247]

Now, I used to think that was unquestionably a good thing; that Nietzschean innocence involves the defeat of all bad conscience (i.e., involves becoming-fearless, guilt-free and devoid of shame). But now, living in a brazen, barefaced, shameless society that has forgotten how to blush, I'm not so sure. 

 

Shame may be an unpleasant and negative emotion, but perhaps it's a vital one after all if it enables us to act with restraint and a little modesty; enables us, paradoxically, to take pride not only in what we are and what we do, but in what we're not and what we don't do. To transgress boundaries and violate norms isn't always admirable; it can, in fact, just be despicable and dishonourable behaviour 

 

This is not to say that Connie should have a scarlet letter A sewn on her clothing à la Hester Prynne, but I'm not sure she should be held up as a role model either; she's selfish, narcissitic, snobbish, deceitful, and shameless.   

Even so, Clifford goes a bit far when Connie finally reveals the true details of her affair; telling his wife, for example, that she ought to be "'wiped off the face of the earth!'" [296] and despairing of the "'beastly lowness of women!'" [296].

 

Her desire to marry Mellors and bear his child proves, says Clifford, that Connie is abnormal and not in her right senses: "'You're one of those half-insane, perverted women who must run after depravity, the nostalgie de la boue.'" [296] 

 

Which is perhaps the last word in slut shaming insults ...     

 

     

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover', in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 334. 

 

[b] Ibid., p. 308. 

  

[c] Ibid., p. 319. 

 

[d] Although Lawrence suggests that "at least three-quarters of the unhappiness of modern life" can be blamed on marriage, he then goes on to make a passionate defence of it, agreeing with those who consider marriage the greatest contribution to social life made by Christianity. 

      Crucially, however, he wishes to re-establish marriage as a sacrement "of man and woman united in the sex communion" and place it back within a phallo-cosmic context, so that the impersonal rhythm of marriage matches the rhythym of the year. For there is no marriage, asserts Lawrence, which is not "basically and permanently phallic, and that is not linked up with the sun and the earth, the moon and the fixed stars and the planets [...] that is not a correspondence of blood" (blood being the substance of the soul within Lawrence's philosophy). 

      On the other hand, there is counterfeit marriage; marriage that takes place "when two people are 'thrilled' by each other's personality: when they have the same tastes in furniture or books or sport or amusement, when they love 'talking' to one another, when they admire one another's 'minds'". This is "an excellent basis of friendship between the sexes, but a disastrous basis for marriage". Such personal marriages, lacking blood-sympathy, always end in "startling physical hatred".    

      See 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover', op. cit., pp. 319-326.

[e] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, op. cit., p. 19. Note that future page references to the novel will be given directly in the post. 

[f] Later, however, this complaint against modern women as either frigid or sexually wilful, is repeated by Mr. Tenderness himself, Oliver Mellors, in an infamous and prolonged rant against his ex-wife and former girlfriends, that leaves Connie in no doubt about his views on female sexuality: women should be sexually receptive (though not passive) and at other times active, though not too active and certainly shouldn't grind their own coffee; they shouldn't be too pure, but neither should they be like old whores with beaks between their legs; they shouldn't make a man come too soon or in the wrong place (the vagina being the only right place to ejaculate); and, finally, they should absolutely never ever display any signs of lesbianism, either consciously or unconsciously. See chapter XIV, pp. 200-203. One imagines that Connie must have been mortified to hear all this and reminded of what Michaelis had said to her, although she simply says: "'You do seem to have had awful experiences of women'" [204].  

[g] See the lengthy character analysis of Oliver Mellors published on Torpedo the Ark on 6 July 2020: click here.

[h] This is an interesting remark. For it shows that it's not only men who practice slut shaming as a form of regulatory criticism; women will also slut shame a peer or, as in this case, sister, if they dress a little too provocatively, behave a little too promiscuously, or otherwise transgress accepted codes of conduct or boundaries of class, for example. Thus Hilda later tells Connie: "'But you'll be through with him in a while [...] and then you'll be ashamed of having been connected with him. One can't mix up with the working people." [240]

      Without wishing to oversimplify matters, we might say that when men slut shame, they are usually just being sexist pigs playing a game of double standards which benefits them; when women do it, however, it seems to betray some form of intrasexual competitiveness and be a more visceral reaction. Perhaps this is why Connie is so happy to escape the dominion of other women: "Ah! that in itself was a relief, like being given another life: to be free of the strange dominion and obsession of other women. How awful they were, women!" [253].     

Gone Fishing

Recreational cruelty: Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse 

proudly showing off a catch on their popular TV show, 

Gone Fishing, as the poor carp struggles to breathe 

 

 

All of a sudden, there seem to be a shoal of programmes on TV that involve the gentle art of fly fishing, with even elderly comedians Mortimer and Whitehouse getting in on the act [1]. 

 

Only it's not such a gentle art - certainly not for the fish, who is subject to the violence of being hooked, reeled in, and manhandled. Despite recent research indicating that these beautiful and intelligent creatures experience fear and react to pain in similar ways to birds and mammals [2], there are still anglers who dispute or deny the cruelty involved in their recreational pursuit [3].  

 

We don't keep the fish out of the water for long and always put them back unharmed, is the familiar line of argument. But this ignores the trauma that the fish suffers and overlooks the fact that the hook used to catch them often causes damage to the mouth, thus making it difficult (and painful) for the fish to feed after their release.

 

Of course, Nietzsche would point out that just because something causes suffering that's no reason not to do it; i.e., the fact that pain hurts is not an argument [4]. Further, there might even be wisdom to be found in pain (as in pleasure); fish, for example, might have learnt something from the experience of being caught over the centuries by anglers which has ultimately helped them survive as a species. 

 

But surely fish experience enough danger in their daily life under the water to keep them on their guard, without human beings adding to their fear, stress, and suffering. Nietzsche makes a good case for the non-alleviation of natural hardship and danger, but that doesn't mean we should go out of our way to increase or intensify the pain felt by other animals.  

 

Otherwise, we must say yes to badger-baiting, fox hunting, and bullfighting as well as what Byron described as the cruellest, the coldest, and the stupidest of pretend sports - fishing [5].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] To watch episodes of Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing go to BBC Online: click here. 

      The series has received widespread praise for its warmth, charm, and gentle humour. Many critics even find it poignant as the two comics reflect on their own mortality (both men having recently undergone heart surgery). No one, as far as I can see, stops to give a thought to the fish whose participation in the show, whilst central, is non-consensual and one might ask if the real joy of the show is listening to two old friends reminisce about the good old days, whilst contemplating the beauty and tranquility of their surroundings, then why do they need to also catch fish for our entertainment.   

[2] Whether fish experience pain in the same way that we do is a contentious issue (especially amongst those who subscribe to some form of human exceptionalism). But it seems fairly obvious, both from observation and from knowing what we do about their brains and nervous system, that they certainly don't like having sharp metal hooks pierce their mouths and being hauled out of the water into an environment in which they cannot breathe (and which can cause their gills to collapse).   

 

[3] It's worth remembering that fishing litter left behind by careless anglers also presents a danger to other forms of wildlife, including birds and small mammals.  

 

[4] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, IV. 318. 

[5] For the record, I'm not - unlike members of PETA - arguing for fishing to be outlawed. But I do think people should be actively encouraged to treat fish with care and respect, even if - as D. H. Lawrence says - we may never know their gods. I develop this idea in a post published last year on the intelligence of fish: click here. 

 

Thanks to David Brock for inspiring this post.