Fleurs du Mal

Obscenity (2015)
Photo by Stephen Alexander

The sight of a flower always gives a certain superficial joy in the appearance of things. 

But the symbolic language developed both to describe flowers and to express human emotions in floral terms is often entirely inadequate, limited as it is by cultural convention and oozing with sentimental cliché. Our love might be like a red, red rose, but a red, red rose is nothing like our amorous ideal.         

For at the core of every flower burns something obscene and evil like a tiny black sun that, in truth, poets and philosophers - who nearly all remain theo-humanists at heart - have never been very comfortable with. Georges Bataille is one of the few writers who dares to stare into the heart of vegetal darkness, affirming the inexpressible real presence of the plant and rejecting the symbolic descriptions traditionally offered as puerile absurdities that are sexless and sunless in character.

Flowers, admits Bataille, are undeniably beautiful at first glance. But, look closer, and you'll note that most of them are badly developed and barely distinguishable from foliage; "some of them are even unpleasant, if not hideous. Moreover, even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centres by hairy sexual organs."

The interior of a tulip for example, as pictured above, doesn't correspond with its exterior loveliness; tear away the petals and you're left with something sinister and alien. Even the most elegant of stamens is rather satanic and there are plants so diabolical that "one is tempted to attribute to them the most troubling human perversions".

In a passage that emphasizes just why it is that ultimately flowers are not an expression of some divine ideal, but, on the contrary, a base form of sacrilege, Bataille writes:

"Even more than by the filth of its organs, the flower is betrayed by the fragility of its corolla: thus, far from answering the demands of human ideas, it is the sign of their failure. In fact, after a very short period of glory the marvellous corolla rots indecently in the sun, thus becoming, for the plant, a garish withering. Risen from the stench of the manure heap - even though it seemed for a moment to have escaped it in a flight of angelic and lyrical purity - the flower appears to relapse abruptly into its original squalor: the most ideal is rapidly reduced to a wisp of aerial excrement."   

This, if you like, is the first aspect of the revenge of the flowers; they undermine and mock our emasculated idealism with their obscene reality, reminding us that beauty and desire have nothing to do with permanence or purity. And this is why metaphysicians prefer the never-fading blooms of heaven or the immortal pensées of some great thinker, to the delicate weeds that grow by the road side.       

See: Georges Bataille, 'The Language of Flowers', in Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl et al, (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 10-14. Note that the translation of the final paragraph quoted has been slightly modified.

An Interview with Malcolm McLaren (August 1984)

After recently going through a box of treasures from the past, I came across the above photo of myself with Malcolm McLaren and a copy of a taped interview recorded in the offices of Charisma Records, above the Marquee Club at 90 Wardour Street, back in the summer of '84. 

Malcolm was signed to Charisma at this time and I acting as an assistant to his very lovely Press Officer, Lee Ellen Newman, whilst (unsuccessfully) chasing a job as a presenter on a new cable and satellite TV channel. McLaren's new album, Fans, which fused opera with contemporary urban sounds was due for release in the autumn. 

As a means of marking the fifth anniversary of his death which passed earlier this month (April 8), I thought it might be nice to post an edited transcript of this short conversation with my mentor from over thirty years ago:

J: It's been a while since we've heard from you on record, but I'm pleased to know you have a new single out at the end of the month called Madame Butterfly. Would you like to say something about this song and the ideas behind it?

M: [Laughs] Oh dear! So what d'you wanna know then?

J: Just tell me anything about the single; or tell me a bit about opera ...

M: It's marvellous, opera. Because opera is about the most irrational art form ever in the sense that it gets to your emotions better than anything else. It combines drama with music - and it's live. It's one of the most difficult things to actually record. But it wasn't that which intrigued me, so much as the actual drama created with the music in someone's voice and I chose certain stories that were obvious classics, like Madame Butterfly, because they seemed to lend a certain emotion to people now that you could construct as something very sincere and without any cynicism.

J: I'm sure Madame Butterfly is a moving story, but it all sounds a long way away from the Sex Pistols. Do you think that you've changed personally over the years - mellowed ...?

M: I don't think it's mellow. I think that what is great about opera and the story of Butterfly in particular is that it's so poignant; it's the absolute opposite to anything that's bland. Most emotions are packaged today in pop music and they don't have that kind of irrational element. That's what's so great about opera; you don't know why you're feeling what you're feeling, but it makes you cry and it makes your heart thump!
      That, combined with something black and tough and real rootsy - something I suppose that you could say is still happening in New York - is why the record is so great. It's the combination of those two forces; something tough and rootsy with something that's melodic and very majestic and full of emotion.
      When you listen in the discotheques today all you hear are lyrics that have very little meaning other than to get up and dance, or make love and have sex without any particular slant, or any real purpose. This record demonstrates that all that is, I suppose, very happy and schlocky. What's good about this record is that it doesn't have anything that schlocky in it.

J: In the past you've made some memorable videos, such as the ones for Buffalo Gals and Soweto, which are very fast and breathless. Is that how you think a good pop video should be and is that how the video for Madame Butterfly is going to be?

M: No, the video for Madame Butterfly is actually gonna be very cinematic and has no mimed playback whatsoever. I wanted to create a moment and an expression that would enhance the record and allow you to listen, rather than be bamboozled by a variety of images. I think the content is in the record and the content's in the vocals mainly. The vocals are what you want to listen to and you don't want to be completely disillusioned by seeing my face on screen and burst out laughing, so I've just opened it up to a lot of girls sitting about in a Turkish bath, waiting, and crying their eyes out.

J: Do you welcome the emergence of music TV which obviously relies on videos as much as records?

M: I don't know, I suppose it's a good thing in a way - but only if it actually has a different policy from Top of the Pops and some of the other more format programmes that exist on ordinary television. Cable is great only because perhaps it can be less censorial and allow a bit more experimentation. Also, it provides an opportunity to people who don't necessarily warrant being categorised as musicians or filmmakers. The great thing about video is that it's a technology that most people - who may be brilliant sellers of raspberries or great horse riders - can go off and use and I think cable TV may accept that more readily than the record industry or the national TV stations.
      I think what's happening today is that we're creating a very new way that people receive music and culture generally. The future really lies in technology being given to people that normally would not be able to make a record, play an instrument, or shoot a movie and that's the most exciting thing.

J: You mention the future: what else have you got lined up?

M: I'm just finishing off my commitments [laughs]. I made this record only because I was tired of making another straight ahead rock 'n' roll record. I don't think I've done too much of that, but I decided to venture into something that was, for me, badly needed; something more dramatic and emotional, more personal. The sort of record I've never made. I've either made very politically-orientated, sloganistic records - such as when I managed the Sex Pistols - or, thereafter, I started to get involved as a mercenary manager managing various pop groups and creating good antics and good visual ideas, but, at the end of the day, the delivery wasn't as profound as it should have been.
      When I finally made a record on my own, Duck Rock, that was really very much to do with ethnic music and the discovery of dance and looking at the world with the eye of rhythm. This time, I haven't thought about rhythm at all and have gone for what I would just declare emotion - it's purely emotional music.    

J: Finally Malcolm, why do you think I would make a perfect presenter on the Music Box?

M: [Laughs] Maybe because you're more daft than I think you are [laughs].
    

In Memory of Lorrie Millington (Artist, Model, Dancer, Writer)

Lorrie Millington: Artist-Model-Dancer-Writer

I first met Lorrie Millington in a tiny nightclub in the centre of Leeds city centre called Le Phonographique, famous for playing a fantastic mix of post-punk tunes by the likes of Bauhaus, The Psychedelic Furs, The Cramps, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Killing Joke, The Cure, Soft Cell, Theatre of Hate, and The Sex Gang Children. 

It was 1982 and everyone wore black clothes and eyeliner and had a penchant for the Gothic. That said, I was more often than not still dressed in tartan bondage trousers and Lorrie had her own unique look; one that made her well-known but unpopular with regulars at Le Phonographique some of whom called her 'Duck' because of her unusual dancing style. Others suspected her of being a transsexual.  

I didn't care; I thought she was beautiful and we were immediately attracted to one another. Unfortunately, we were also both very shy (she even had a slight stutter). And so it took a considerable amount of time before we plucked up the courage to speak. After our first brief conversation, she slipped me her card on which was written: 

Lorrie Millington 

Artist-Model-Dancer-Writer

I later found out her real name was Lorraine Gatford and that she was from York. She borrowed the name Millington from seventies porn star Mary Millington and had moved to Leeds to escape her mother and a boring job as a printer of some kind. As a child she had been run over and this left her with both physical and mental scars. She lived alone with just a mannequin for company called Lady Christabel and often signed the many letters and poems she sent me as the Girl in the Mystery Castle.

The first time she came to visit me at the house near Kirkstall Abbey that I shared with three friends and fellow students, she galloped around the kitchen on all fours mid-dinner pretending to be a horse. Although never officially dating, we became something of an odd couple. We would spend nights listening to an Ennio Morricone soundtrack and Adam and the Ants. I found no evidence to support the rumour that she was secretly a boy.

In 1984 she suffered a severe breakdown and was committed for several weeks to High Royds psychiatric hospital. I left Leeds for London in July of this year, but we kept in touch by mail for many years after this. The last time we met was, I think, in 1988 when she was pregnant and living with a bass guitarist called Keith. 

Sadly, most of the poems and letters and pictures she sent me over the years have been destroyed. And, tragically, her health continued to deteriorate as she grew older and, about ten years ago, our correspondence terminated. 

I don't suppose her daughter, Faye, who was given up for adoption, will ever read this post, but, if so, I'd like her to know that her mother was a funny, intelligent, talented young woman who I still think of often and very fondly.  

Mario Perniola: Il sex appeal dell'inorganico

 Mario Perniola: Professor of Aesthetics,

University of Rome

It soon becomes obvious when reading Mario Perniola's Sex Appeal of the Inorganic that what he most wants is to have his cock sucked for all eternity; that is to say, in a perpetual manner in which all feeling is suspended and orgasm forever deferred. 

For where other men would simply find frustration, Perniola hopes to locate the beginning of a new and neutered sexuality that is entirely divorced from nature and freed from all metaphysical notions of telos, or vital fantasies of carnal fulfilment. He neither wants to love like an angel, nor fuck like a beast. But most of all he doesn't want to come: "To free oneself of orgasmomania," he writes, "is the first step towards the neuter, suspended and artificial sexuality of the thing" which promises to open up a world "where the difference between the sexes, form, appearance, beauty, age and race no longer matter" [3].  

Other steps towards this pornotopia without a happy-ending include: 

(1) Reading philosophy, which Perniola interestingly characterizes as a form of speculative extremism (even if it still tediously refers back to Kant and Hegel). Above all, read Heidegger; Heidegger looks for Being not in Geist (like Hegel) or in Life (like Nietzsche), but in the thing (and the thingliness of the thing) and although he never directly speaks of sexuality in his work, it is only with Heidegger "that the path of thinking and the sex appeal of the inorganic ... reveal their essential belonging together" [108].    

(2) Understanding the body in terms not of flesh, but of clothing, furniture and upholstery; "the folds of the female sex are no different from the depressions of a seat cover, the skin that runs along the rod of the male sex is similar to the covering of an arm rest" [11]. I'm not sure that's the case, but Perniola insists: "As long as we remain prisoners of the idea that living bodies excite us more than clothes, we will never escape the organicistic aestheticism that considers sexuality in terms of life" [45].
      This sounds like fetishism, but Perniola is ambiguous on the subject of fetishism; if, on the one hand, it is the category via which modernity has traditionally thought the erotics of the object, on the other hand it constitutes a grotesque and extravagant "caricature of the sex appeal of the inorganic" [53].           

(3) Recognizing that addiction to opium-based drugs, such as heroin, provides an exemplary experience in dependency "analogous to the neutral feeling of becoming thing" crucial to the development of an inorganic sexuality [14].

(4) Moving beyond the BDSM crowd; it would be very much mistaken to consider Perniola's model of impersonal sexuality in terms of a master and slave relationship and even the apathy of the Sadean libertine or the peculiar mixture of coldness and cruelty so loved by the masochist, belong to an entirely different universe.

(5) Developing a taste for cybersex and science fiction, a genre that understands more than most "how the organic and inorganic, the anthropological and technological, the natural and the artificial overlap and blend in one another" [28]. Neutral sexuality can be considered both posthuman and virtual - not in the sense of simulated reality, but, more radically, a real simulation that offers access to an ontologically different order. Perniola further advises we study vampires as well as philosophical-cyborgs; for the undead also embody the sex appeal of the inorganic and provide access to another world which is "radically different from everyday life" [77].   

(6) Listening to rock music; a sexually inorganic form of sound that has nothing to do with "the sentimental conception of music, which considers it as the expression of an emotional interiority, and from the vitalistic one which sees in it the animal cry" [65]. Schelling would understand perfectly why it is that prog rock in particular "constitutes a paradigm for the cultural operations to come" [66]. He means it man! Frank Zappa rules!

(7) Exploring plastic landscapes and appreciating architecture as an inorganic art divorced from construction that brings into question all attempts to harmonize "form and function, nature and culture, country and city" [83]. Not only can architecture be compared to tailoring, but it can be understood as an erotics; as if drifting in and out of buildings or through the city streets was a sexual act not dissimilar to strapping a tiny camera to your penis and penetrating the interior landscape of the vagina, generating "a quite different excitement to the natural one" [90].
      As well as the internal spaces of the body, Perniola also gets excited by the possibility of entering cyberspace; a new dimension opened up by computer technology that "radicalizes contemporary architectural experience". But cyberspace, albeit a "spatialized visualization of information", must not be understood as "a dematerialization or, worse, a spiritualization of reality". Rather, it's the creation of a liquid environment that allows the cybernaut who navigates it to "perceive his own real body as a sentient thing not essentially different from the sentient landscapes of electronic architectures" [91]. 

(8) Rejecting all notions of desire. But - and this is important to note - neutral sexuality is not simply a form of erotic mysticism or a tantric practice to delay orgasm in order to thereby intensify the moment of climax. And unlike Zen Buddhism which aims at a state of spiritual elevation and detachment from the world, the sex appeal of the inorganic wants to abolish the distance between man and world; to absorb the human into the realm of things. Perniola writes:

"Neutral sexuality is not a state of inertia, of reducing excitement to zero, eliminating all tensions, is not Nirvana, or Freud's death drive, and not even lethargy ... Quietism, fatalistic and defeatist renunciation, paralysis, are more indirect affirmations of desire than actual suspensions of it. The sex appeal of the inorganic is more an after-desire than a without-desire." [98-9]        

(9) Privileging hermaphroditism over androgyny; the latter, says Perniola, is "as remote as one can imagine it to be from the sex appeal of the inorganic"; a victory for the metaphysical dream of organic unity. But hermaphroditism, on the other hand, "implies the best possible way in which the characteristic of both sexes are contained in a figure, namely a man with breasts or a woman with a penis" [115]. Rather than place emphasis on unification and the harmonious co-presence of masculine and feminine elements, hermaphroditism promotes indetermination and neutralization.
      However, even hermaphroditism fails to reach the sex appeal of the inorganic. For that you need to push on far beyond the sexual dichotomy of male and female - to sexual infinity in which there are an innumerable number of sexes. The inorganic lover loves the thought of endless division and of tearing into ever smaller pieces the dress worn by his bride on their wedding night and then carefully putting together one by one the tiny shreds on her naked body:

"In the transit that goes from the cloth to the skin, and from the skin to the cloth, one can re-establish the experience of a neutral and inorganic sexuality. It is sympathetic ... with an abstract excitement that never tires of operating infinite divisions on one's own body and that of one's partner." [120]       

(10) Learning to hear the expression inclusive metawriting as "more loaded with sexual intensity than most obscene words" [126]. Because - wouldn't you know it - it's philosophically-informed literature that is the crucial "accomplice of neutral and impersonal experience" [121]. Perniola is then, like Barthes, a homotextual. But whereas the latter affirms and delights in the pleasure of the text, Perniola hates pleasure and wants to free sexuality from such vulgarity. There is nothing in pleasure, he insists, that inevitably binds it to sexuality - and particularly not to a model of sexuality that is "not content with staying natural and organic" [132].

Follow these ten steps and you too can enter the inorganic realm. But don't think that this makes you in anyway superhuman; on the contrary, it might just betray the fact you are spiritually sick or physically disabled in some manner - perhaps thanks to the fact that you've read too much philosophy or written too much poetry!

It certainly signifies you're abnormal and perverse; someone who "derives excitement from inadequate stimulation ... such as concepts, numbers, sounds, spaces, objects, writings, all things that normal people keep immersed in a functional-utilitarian boredom, or in an aesthetic-formal tedium" [144].  


Mario Perniola; The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, trans. Massimo Verdicchio, (Continuum, 2004). All page numbers supplied refer to this edition.

How Winston Wolf Lost His Bite

Harvey Keitel as Winston Wolf, courtesy of Miramax,

in a Saatchi and Saatchi ad for First Direct (2014)

There are many great performances and many unforgettable characters in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction: John Travolta as Vincent Vegas, Samuel L. Jackson as Jules, Uma Thurman as Mia ... Even Bruce Willis as Butch manages to stop smirking long enough to concentrate on his acting.

But for many fans of the film, it's Harvey Keitel as tuxedo-clad problem solver Winston Wolf who manages to steal the show. The Wolf is one of those rare characters who actually has character and is a man to whom self-respect and the respect of others clearly matters.

Unfortunately, twenty years on from the making of the movie, the same cannot be said of the now elderly actor happy to trade off past glory by prostituting Tarantino's Wolf character as part of a £40 million advertising campaign by Direct Line, one of the UK's  leading insurance companies, thereby causing no little distress amongst those of us who held him in high regard as an artist and loved his performance in the film.
        
I don't know why he did it. Presumably, not because he needed the money. Perhaps he simply thought it was a fun idea. But it's a shame. And whenever the ad comes on TV I find myself having to look away. I want to remember Winston Wolf in his prime - barking orders to gangsters and speeding off for breakfast in his silver Porsche accompanied by Monster Joe's daughter; I don't want to think of him as a silly old fool selling insurance to middle-class homeowners and guaranteeing them an instant replacement for their stolen goods.

Of course, Harvey Keitel is not the first Hollywood star to sell out and violate the memory of a beloved on-screen character and he won't be the last. But this doesn't make it any easier to accept.

One wonders what Quentin Tarantino thinks of it all ... Or am I simply being naive to ask this?

Is Strong the New Pretty ... or the Old Ugly?

 

Photo by Kate T. Parker of her daughter, Ella, aged 9, 

on the night before competing in her first triathlon.

From Strong is the New Pretty series of images.

Promoting an all-American model of athletic motherhood in a manner reminiscent of Walt Whitman, photographer Kate T. Parker is extraordinarily proud of her muscles, her fertility, and the products of her womb. 

Although not a fan of her work, a recent series of images featuring her young daughters and their friends entitled Strong is the New Pretty, did catch my attention. Parker wishes to encourage every girl to be a leader and able to run a marathon; to discover their strengths and own their power. 

But whilst I can see the aesthetic appeal of fierce-looking girls with toothless smiles, scraped knees, and messy hair - i.e. girls who don't care too much about their appearance, their personal safety, or being well-behaved - there's no need to implicitly denigrate those more delicate children who prefer to be gentle, kind, and polite. Nor is there any reason to sneer at girls who like to giggle and wear colourful dresses or choose to spend their time quietly reading in their bedrooms, avoiding sports of all kinds.        

   

Being loud, competitive, and good at ball games is fine and might indeed teach you how to rule the field. But rather than make pretty in a new less feminine fashion, being empowered as Parker imagines it might just make ugly in the old macho-fascist manner.   

Seeing with the Eyes of Angels (In Praise of Cubism)

Pablo Picasso: Girl with a Mandolin (1910)

Museum of Modern Art, New York

For Lawrence, one of the most admirable things about Cézanne was that he insisted upon the appleyness not only of the fruit itself, but of the bodies of men and women and, indeed, of all objects including inanimate ones, such as jugs or bottles of wine. That is to say, he acknowledged the thingliness of the thing and attempted to paint this (as far as possible), thereby introducing into our field of vision an ontological reality which exists independently of mind.   

This, says Lawrence, was a revolutionary move; an attempt to tear painting from its own history of idealised representation and radically differentiate it from photography which sees the world mechanically with Kodak accuracy. 

Deleuze goes further and argues that what truly great painters like Cézanne do is not simply liberate lines and colours on the canvas, but free the eye from its adherence to the organism. The eye, says Deleuze, becomes a polyvalent indeterminate organ that is capable of seeing the object-as-figure in terms of pure presence.

Having become intuitively aware of an object, an artist is able to see it all around at one and the same time and not just from a single perspective fixated on fronts and faces. Further, they allow us to effectively have eyes all over too - just like the cherubim of whom Ezekiel speaks.  

And this can't be a bad thing, surely. For as Nietzsche says, the more eyes and more various organs we have for seeing the same thing the better; for a multiple perspective enables us to form a more complete (and more objective) concept of the thing.

Clearly, Picasso and Georges Braque (inspired by Cézanne's late work) understood this and Cubism is without doubt the most significant and influential art movement of the 20th century. As John Berger says, it is almost impossible to exaggerate its importance.    

Surprisingly, Lawrence of all people failed to appreciate what was unfolding in the art world of his day and he dismissed Cubism along with other forms of avant-garde art that were moving towards abstraction as puerile and overly-intellectual. He simply couldn't grasp why it was that Cézanne would come to insist on the need to interpret the world geometrically, placing everything into perspective.

And for me, this is not only surprising, it's disappointing too ...

Never Mind the Bildungstreib Here's the Science

Blackmetal Kant (2007) by King of Porn 

deviantart.com

Kant famously insisted that base matter lacks spontaneity; that inorganic substance cannot spontaneously generate organic life. To think otherwise would be a logical paradox, since the essential character of non-living things is their complete inertia or lack of vital purpose. What makes living things so rare and unusual is precisely the fact that they can spontaneously self-organize thanks to the presence of a formative drive which mysteriously enlivens the material of which they are composed. Kant calls this vital force (after Blumenbach) Bildungstreib. Jane Bennett conveniently glosses the term for us:

"Bildungstreib ... names a non-material, teleological drive that imparts to matter its functional coherence, it's 'organic' quality ... Bildungstreib is what impels an undifferentiated, crude mass of matter to become an organized articulation of cooperating parts, the highest version of which is 'Man'".

To be clear, Kant does not mean by Bildungstreib something that common folk and theologians might mistakenly term a soul. For whereas a soul is a metaphysical principle that can exist even in a disembodied state, Kant's concept is always embodied and only exists in conjunction with the mechanical activities of matter and subject to the Newtonian laws of physics.

Having said that, Kant does insist that the workings of Bildungstreib can never become fully known to us; such a drive remains fundamentally inscrutable. At best, we can learn about it indirectly by studying its effects. And what these effects teach us is that this formative drive operates under an internal constraint or purposive predisposition which directs the organism towards some end goal, "thus linking its becoming to a stable order of Creation".

In other words, things become what they are meant to become; only man has a free will and can thus to some extent overcome his own determining. Thus Kant sought to make the case "not only for a qualitative gap between inorganic matter and organic life but also for a quantum leap between humans and all other organisms."  

What, then, are we to make of Kant's flirtation with vitalism and his attempt to combine teleological and mechanistic explanations of life?

Jane Bennett is obviously attracted to the notion of Bildungstreib. For her, it gestures towards the kind of inhuman and ahistorical form of agency that she needs to make her own model of vibrant matter feasible. Whilst for Kant any such drive would have to have a divine origin, Bennett thinks it "both possible and desirable to experiment with the idea of an impersonal agency integral to materiality as such". 

But for me, as for Daniel Dennett and others who happily subscribe to a mechanistic materialism and remain confident that science will eventually explain in a perfectly adequate manner how life emerges from dead matter thanks to a chemical process, vitalism is not a profound philosophical insight, but simply a failure of critical intelligence and imagination.

In fact, a new study published recently by researchers at the University of Colorado and University of Milan, hints at the spontaneous appearance of primordial DNA four billion years ago and shows how the self-organizing properties of these DNA-like molecular fragments - just a few nanometres in length - may have guided their own growth into repeating chemical chains long enough and stable enough to act as a basis for primitive life.

In other words, contrary to everything Kant and the vitalists who have followed him like to believe, these new findings provide further evidence for the non-biological origins of nucleic acids, which are the building blocks of living organisms.  


Notes

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, (Duke University Press, 2010). All lines quoted were taken from the sub-section of chapter 5 entitled Bildungstreib, pp. 65-69.

For those interested in reading at length what Kant has to say on this subject, see his Critique of Judgement (1790), available in numerous English translations, including the one by Werner Pluhar, (Hackett, 1987), cited by Jane Bennett in her text. 

For those interested in the reading more about the new scientific study I refer to above, click here.  

Vibrant Matter

Jane Bennett is a Professor of Political Theory at John Hopkins University. She is the author of several books on nature, ethics, and modernity, but it's her most recent study, Vibrant Matter (2010), that most interests as she shifts her focus from people to the role played by nonhuman forces in events (what she likes to term after Bruno Latour actants). 

In a nutshell, her book is a call for a form of material vitalism (or vital materiality) that moves beyond the work of Hans Driesch and Henri Bergson, whilst nevertheless utilizing their insights in a somewhat Deleuzean manner. Bennett attempts, in other words, to affect a re-enchantment of the world and to give to things a degree of agency and spontaneity (an uncanny combination of "delight and disturbance").

As an object-oriented philosopher, her project obviously attracts me; whether it also convinces me is another question.

For one thing, I remain profoundly hostile to and suspicious of any form of vitalism. Secondly, I don't really endorse Bennett's eco-ethical goal which is to mend the shattered concord between man and world thereby not only ensuring our survival as a species, but increasing human happiness. I can't help recalling Ray Brassier's devastating response to such soppy idealism: Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of life - and particularly not human life!

Why highlight "what is typically cast in shadow"; why advocate "the vitality of matter"; why promote "more attentive encounters between people-materialities and thing-materialities", if all you're really concerned about is reviving the humanities and saving mankind? It hardly seems worth the effort and risks falling back into the anthropocentric conceit or hubris which Bennett wants so desperately to escape. 

That said, she writes in a lucid and appealing manner and I fully support her aim of having done with judgement by reconfiguring notions of agency. And, like Bennett, I also wish to "dissipate the onto-theological binaries" that have constrained thinking for so long.

Clearly, hers is not a vitalism in the traditional sense - there's no notion of an independent life force or spiritual supplement that mysteriously animates matter - but, even so, there's a wilful element of romantic naivety in this book and a determined optimism that I simply cannot share. Her positive formulations ultimately betray her own attempt to think philosophically; i.e. in a relentlessly inhuman manner. 


See: Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, (Duke University Press, 2010). All lines quoted are taken from the Preface to this text. 

D. H. Lawrence and the Prickly Politics of Vitalism

Woodcut design by Wharton Esherick for D. H. Lawrence's 

Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (1925)

In a notorious but often celebrated essay, 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine' (1925), Lawrence provides us with some very beautiful descriptive passages of an actual event involving a dog and the shooting of a porcupine. Unfortunately, these are followed by some very ugly didactic passages that are not merely moralizing metaphysical nonsense, but tied to a pernicious political vitalism that asserts an anthropocentric, aristocratic, and racist hierarchy of life.

Life - ha! what is life? 

One might say in philosophical agreement with Nietzsche that it's really just a form of prejudice; an extremely rare and unusual way of being dead that is grossly overvalued by the living. 

Lawrence, however, offers a very different definition: life is that which "moves in circles of power and of vividness, and each circle of life only maintains its orbit upon the subjection of some lower circle." And this vital truth, as Lawrence imagines it, is not something to lament, nor seek to challenge or reform. On the contrary, the only thing to do "is to realise what is is higher, and what is lower, in the cycles of existence"  and accept this as a law of creation.

That said, it might still reasonably be asked what is meant by higher and how might we correctly assign each life-form its proper place within a natural order of rank? Again, Lawrence is extremely forthright in his answer (despite the fact that his logic is tautologous): by higher he means more vividly alive. And each life-form earns its own place within a natural order of rank by out competing and, indeed, often devouring, the lesser lives below it. He writes: 

"In the cycles of existence, this is the test. From the lowest form of existence to the highest, the test question is: Can thy neighbour finally overcome thee? If he can, then he belongs to a higher cycle of existence. This is the truth behind the survival of the fittest."

Lawrence then conveniently lists some examples of higher and lower forms drawn from his own hierarchy of vividness in terms of species and race:

"Life is more vivid in the dandelion than in the green fern, or than in a palm tree.
Life is more vivid in a snake than in a butterfly.
Life is more vivid in a wren than in an alligator.
Life is more vivid in a cat than in an ostrich.
Life is more vivid in the Mexican who drives the wagon, than in the two horses [who pull the wagon].

Life is more vivid in me, than in the Mexican who drives the wagon for me."

Obviously, the final assertion is for most readers today the most controversial and offensive; but Lawrence insists that the subjugation and exploitation of one race by another (his own) is another inescapable law of nature and existence. Or, if you prefer, an inexorable law of life based upon a fourth dimensional form of ontological energy which he terms vitality (the determining factor in the struggle for existence).

What, really, are we to make of all this?

I think it shows how a philosophy of vitalism can very easily lend itself to a highly undesirable form of politics. Of course, this needn't always be the case - one thinks of Hans Driesch's principled resistance to the Nazi attempt to co-opt his idea of entelechy - but, unfortunately, it very often seems to be the case that vitalism + pessimism + romanticism = fascism.   

The political theorist Jane Bennett, who has developed her own model of vital materialism, addresses this problematic issue with a reassuring degree of sensitive intelligence and insight. She writes:

"I do not think that there is any direct relationship between, on the one hand, a set of ontological assumptions about life ... and, on the other, a politics; no particular ethics or politics follow inevitably from a metaphysics. But the hierarchical logic of God-Man-Nature implied in a vitalism of soul easily transitions into a political image of a hierarchy of social classes or even civilizations."
 
Thus, if like Lawrence you believe that life is radically different from (and irreducible to) matter; that human life is qualitatively different than all other forms of life; that this human uniqueness indicates a divine origin or special relationship with the gods; and there's a natural order of existence with yourself at the top, then you will probably also be tempted to flirt with the kind of politics that wages war in the name of the highest idealism in order to fulfil some form of national, cultural, or racial destiny.    

My advice is - when it comes to politics - never trust a hippie, never trust a poet, and never trust a vitalist.


Notes

D. H. Lawrence; 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 347-63.

Jane Bennett; Vibrant Matter, (Duke University Press, 2010), p. 84. And see sub-section of chapter 6 entitled 'A Natural Order of Rank' , pp. 86-89 which is particularly pertinent to this discussion.