Johnny Rotten as an Abject Antihero (2)

Johnny Rotten as an Abject Antihero 

(SA/2024)

 

 

I. 

 

Following publication of a recent post on Johnny Rotten as an abject antihero, a young woman writes from France to accuse me of body shaming the former Sex Pistol: 

 

'If he wasn't larger-bodied than you and many others in our fatphobic society find acceptable, then I very much doubt you'd feel at liberty to ridicule Lydon and subject him to such unfair criticism.' 

 

Whilst I'd accept there's an element of truth in this, I think it misses the point of the post, which - as the opening reference to Julia Kristeva indicates - was essentially concerned with the state of abjection and what an abject individual may have to teach us, rather than with Rotten's weight per se (although his obesity obviously plays a role here). 

 

Perhaps I might offer a few further remarks in an attempt to clarify ... 

 

 

II. 

 

In critical theory, to be an abject individual is to exist outside of social expectations and moral standards in a manner that doesn't only challenge but unsettles conventional notions of identity. One isn't so much inhuman, as abhuman (i.e., not-quite-human and seemingly caught up in the process of becoming-monstrous). 

 

For Julia Kristeva, this can easily induce horror, particularly when one is confronted by an intrusion of corporeal reality into the symbolic order [1] - such as seeing Rotten on stage now whilst remembering him on stage back in the day. 

 

Being forced to face the abject truth is an inherently traumatic experience; like being asked to look at the decomposing corpse of a loved one. It's deeply disturbing and I understand how it can manifest in the desire not merely to look away, but do away with the abject subject. 

 

Learning how to accept others in their otherness - particularly when that otherness strikes us as repulsive - is to adopt what Roland Barthes describes as a politics of pure liberalism: I am a liberal in order not to be a killer [2]. 

 

 

III. 

 

The irony is that whereas in his punk period Lydon was merely pretending to be Rotten and a social outsider, he has now become truly abject. 

 

And yet, as I suggested at the close of the post we're referring to here, perhaps we should be grateful to him for this; for mightn't it be the case that Rotten, in his very abjectness, draws us unto him and not only grants us a perversely-morbid pleasure of some kind, but exemplifies a Christ-like level of passion by which we might all learn something important ...? 

 

I think so. 

 

And thus, I wasn't so much subjecting Rotten to 'unfair criticism', as my correspondent suggests, rather I was trying to find a way to view him in a positive light; recalling, for example, Jean Genet's insistence that it is only via a becoming-abject that the individual can achieve an existentialist form of sainthood (something that might appeal to the son of Irish Catholics who self-righteously believes himself to be the voice of Truth). 

 

 

IV. 

 

Ultimately, why Rotten does what he does now in the manner he chooses, is, I suppose, only something he can explain. 

 

Perhaps his speaking tour is not simply a commercial venture, but a method of public mourning; i.e., a form of catharsis via which he can express all his anger, sorrow, regret, etc. 

 

And perhaps his karaoke rendition of 'Anarchy in the UK', in which he invites the audience to clap and sing along as if they were the elderly residents of a care home, can be seen as a piece of abject performance art in which old ideals (such as artistic integrity) are devalued once and for all.

 

Or perhaps he's just become what he is (and what he formerly despised) ... 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press, 1982). 

 

[2] Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac, 1995), p. 117. My italics.

 

 

Johnny Rotten as an Abject Antihero (1)

Johnny Rotten: Now and Then

 

"Since he has nothing, since he is nothing, he can sacrifice everything." - Julia Kristeva [1]

 

 

Watching YouTube footage of 68-year-old Johnny Rotten on his latest speaking tour of the UK is profoundly troubling for anyone who once loved him [2].

 

For he appears to have morphed into an abject end-of-pier entertainer wearing a Ukipper tie, retelling old stories and performing karoake versions of his own songs whilst looking - if we might borrow a line from yesteryear - like a big fat pink baked bean.     

A once charismatic and amusing individual is now literally revolting; transporting us to a place where integrity collapses and memories of the past are confronted with the gross reality of the present. 

 

But perhaps we should be grateful to him for this: for mightn't it be the case that Rotten, in his very abjectness, draws us unto him and teaches a vital lesson? Indeed, does he not even grant us a perversely-morbid pleasure of some kind; a violent and painful passion? 

 

Has Rotten not merely become fat, old, and boorish, but Christ-like?     

Notes

[1] Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 19. 

[2] Click here to watch Rotten encourage an audience to sing and clap along to 'Anarchy in the UK' on his I Could Be Wrong, I Could Be Right spoken word tour (2024). The video was recorded by Dror Nahum at Albert Halls, Stirling, on 14 June and uploaded to his YouTube channel the following day. 

 

 

For a post that might be said to anticipate this one on Rotten, written over ten years ago, click here. 

 

And for a follow up post to this one, click here. 

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism

Nick Land (Gargoyle Philosopher)

Immanuel Kant (Architect of the Cathedral)

 

 

I. 

 

According to Nick Land [1], the dominant faith of the modern world is Universalism ...

Which is ironic, because if you examine the idea closely - historically - you'll discover that it's a very particular way of looking at the world that merely "asserts its own universal significance whilst ascending to a state of general dominance that approaches the universal".

 

In other words, Universalism - which determines the direction and meaning of modernity - is revealed "as the minutely determined branch or sub-species of a cultic tradition, descended from 'ranters', 'levelers', and closely related variants of dissident, ultra-protestant fanaticism". 

 

It owes very little to philosophers and their model of reason, which is why the Enlightenment can be understood more as a religious event than a philosophical one. 

 

Or, as Land notes, the world's ruling creed - radically democratic and egalitarian in character - is something that emerged amongst a specific people at a particular time and then spread "along identifiable historical and geographical pathways, with an epidemic virulence that is disguised as progressive global enlightenment". 

 

Land finds this all very amusing: "The unmasking of the modern 'liberal' intellectual [...] as a pale, fervent, narrowly doctrinaire puritan, recognizably descended from the species of witch-burning zealots, is reliably - and irresistibly - entertaining."

 

Not that he sees many others laughing; in fact, as the Cathedral extends and tightens its grip upon everyone everywhere, the response it triggers is often anything but humorous:

 

"More commonly, when unable to exact humble compliance, it encounters inarticulate rage, or at least uncomprehending, smoldering resentment, as befits the imposition of parochial cultural dogmas, still wrapped in the trappings of a specific, alien pedigree, even as they earnestly confess to universal rationality."

 

The Muslim world, for example, doesn't often stop to appreciate the irony of the situation. For them, Universalism is Western imperialism and they don't like it; they don't find the truths being foistered on them to be as self-evident as we do. "How could anybody who was not already a believer be expected to consent to such assumptions?", asks Land.  

 

Of course, those sophisticated globalists of the Cathedral are embarrassed when obliged to admit that their progressive political agenda has a religious origin; they pride themselves on their secularism and desperately seek to direct attention away from "the ethnically specific, dogmatic creedal content at its core".

 

As Land writes in a brilliant line: "Paleo-puritanism must be derided in order for neo-puritanism to flourish ..." [2]

 

 

II.

 

Obviously, I'm sympathetic to Land's neo-reactionary nominalism directed against the Cathedral and its project of Universal Enlightenment. In a sense, that's what the phrase torpedo the ark might be understood to mean; i.e., a rejection of the ideal fantasy that the entire human race might be caught up in single becoming: One World, One People, One Law.   

 

I instinctively hate this line of thinking and always have. 

 

One of the reasons that the notion of a dark enlightenment attracts is because it rejects the myth of progress (or the internal teleology) at work in the philosophy of those such as Kant and Hegel and opposes any attempt to centralise into oneness, encouraging rather what D. H. Lawrence would describe as "a vivid recoil into separateness" [3].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nick Land, the Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting from the fourth and final part of this online version.

 

[2] Similarly, as Land goes on to note, neofascists of the New World Order can't be vocal enough in condemning white nationalism and other forms of what they call 'far-right extremism': 

      "Just as the ratchet progress of neo-puritan social democracy is radically facilitated by the orchestrated pillorying of its embryonic religious forms, so is its trend to consistently neo-fascist political economy smoothed by the concerted repudiation of a 'neo-nazi' (or paleo-fascist) threat. It is extremely convenient, when constructing ever more nakedly corporatist or 'third position' structures of state-directed pseudo-capitalism, to be able to divert attention to angry expressions of white racial paranoia ..."

[3] D. H. Lawrence, ‘Future States’, in The Poems, ed. Cristopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 526.

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse (5 July 2024): click here. 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse

 

'Democracy is as close to a precise negation of civilization 

as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into 

murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to).'

 

 

I. 

 

According to Nick Land [1], it's not only popular culture that ends up eating itself, but democracy too becomes self-devouring in what he refers to as the zombie apocalypse, which is why, as we saw in an earlier post, those who can are already searching for an exit and regard flight as a matter of imperative.

 

But what, exactly, does Land mean by this phrase; one that derives from a subgenre of horror fiction in which an overwhelming plague of undead zombies results in the total breakdown of society and leaves just a small group of individuals who have been unable to flee struggling to survive. 

 

That's what we are going to discuss here ...

 

 

II. 

 

If the idea of a zombie apocalypse entered the popular imagination thanks to George A. Romero's 1968 classic movie Night of the Living Dead, it's Land who places the idea within a neoreactionary political context [2] - although, it's true of course, that many other artists and theorists have used the phrase to metaphorically express various cultural anxieties and social tensions.   

 

Land - who, as a philosopher, is kind of a cross between Thomas Hobbes, Georges Bataille, and H. P. Lovecraft - conceives the dynamics of democratisation as fundamentally degenerative; "systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption". 

Bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, democratic governments and the people who elect them push one another further and further towards "ever more shameless extremities" including cannibalism. Idealists call this progress; neoreactionaries, however, see only voraciousness and fear that the authorities will ultimately be unable to "spare civilization from frenzied, ruinous, gluttonous debauch" - i.e., the zombie apocalypse. 

 

As the democratic virus works its way through society, says Land, then concern with the past and long-term planning into the future both die away and are replaced by "a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a 'reality television' political circus". As we are trapped in a perpetual present at the end of history, it makes perfect sense to "eat it all now". 

 

III.

 

Finally, to help readers understand how we got where we are today, i.e., stuck in an age of relentless state expansion, spurious human rights, and mind control ensuring defence of a universalistic dogma, Land provides a convenient guide to the main sequence of modern political regimes, that I think it worth reproducing here [3]:

 

 

Regime 1: Communist Tyranny 

Typical Growth: -0% 

Voice / Exit: Low / Low 

Cultural climate: Pyschotic utopianism 

Life is … hard but ‘fair’ 

Transition mechanism: Re-discovers markets at economic degree-zero 

 

Regime 2: Authoritarian Capitalism 

Typical Growth: 5-10% 

Voice / Exit: Low / High 

Cultural climate: Flinty realism 

Life is … hard but productive 

Transition mechanism: Pressurized by the Cathedral to democratize 

 

Regime 3: Social Democracy 

Typical Growth: 0-3% 

Voice / Exit: High / High 

Cultural climate: Sanctimonious dishonesty 

Life is … soft and unsustainable 

Transition mechanism: Can-kicking runs out of road 

 

Regime 4: Zombie Apocalypse 

Typical Growth: N/A 

Voice / Exit: High (mostly useless screaming) / High (with fuel, ammo, dried food, precious metal coins) 

Cultural climate: Survivalism 

Life is … hard-to-impossible 

Transition mechanism: Unknown 

 

 

IV.

 

The question, I suppose, is: How seriously should we take Land's thoughts on these matters? 

 

Well, when I first encouraged readers of Torpedo the Ark to accept the challenge of his writings on dark enlightenment back in October 2015 - click here - I have to admit that I didn't take them as seriously as I do now. 

 

The world has changed dramatically in the last decade, however, and changed in a manner which, it seems to me, only lends credence to Land's analysis. One worries more now about the fate of the West than one worried ten years ago  and it seems to me that offensive strategies are required urgently if we are to avoid a zombie apocalypse (that defensive strategies, such as quarantine, just won't do the trick).

 

Although, if I'm honest, I suspect it's already too late and the election of Keir Starmer's Labour government with a huge majority here in the UK hardly fills me with hope for the future ...

 

Notes

 

[1] See Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting from the first and third parts of this online version.

 

[2] Having said that, one might recall the 1940 film The Ghost Breakers (dir. George Marshall, 1940), starring Bob Hope as Larry Lawrence who delivers a hilarious line concerning zombies and democrats: click here. 

 

[3] Note that by Voice / Exit Land refers to freedom of speech contra the far more substantial autonomy of the sovereign individual (i.e., the freedom to act without state interference and the freedom to leave when state interference in and control over one's life becomes intolerable). And note also that for all regimes, growth expectations assume moderately competent population.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here.  

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present

Nick Land contemplates taking an exit provided 

by the photographer Florian Reinhardt [1]

 

 

I. 

 

According to Foucault, Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way; as an exit, a way out, or an escape route from the past, which he thinks of as marked by darkness, barbarism, and man's immaturity [2].

Funny enough, although Nick Land thinks of his own neoreactionary philosophy as an intrinsic contradiction to the process of enlightenment, he too is looking for ein Ausgang - only he wants an exit from modernity and from the age of Enlightenment [3]. 

 

Realising, however, that there can be no turning back, Land says that any form of conservativism is thus pre-emptively (and ironically) condemned to paradox – i.e., destined to become a kind of retrofuturism; projecting something vital - but also something lost, or forgotten, or denied that existed in the past - into the future.

 

 

II. 

 

D. H. Lawrence, who also sought an exit from the 20th-century and wished to step away from the light, understood this paradox better than most. His novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), for example, attempts to loosen the "aura of necessity and sanctity surrounding categories of the present" [4] and find some clue as to how we might live yesterday tomorrow.

 

Nietzsche too provides philosophical justification for taking what he calls a retrograde step once man has attained a certain level of enlightenment and emerged from superstitious fears and religious concepts. In other words, he has to recognise the importance that resided in old ideas and traditions and that "without such a retrograde step he will deprive himself of the best mankind has hitherto produced" [5].    

 

Good people - the enlightened, who are afraid of the dark - will say this lapsing back into old life-modes that have been surpassed is a form of evil. Whilst that mightn't worry a Nietzschean, Lawrence was at pains to stress that this wasn't a "'helpless, panic reversal'", [6] but was, rather, something performed consciously and with care.

 

And, to reiterate: it's not a return so much as an exiting of the present into the past in order to enter the future.   

 

 

III.

 

Returning to Land, we find a contemporary thinker who is prepared to express his disillusionment with the "direction and possibilities" of the democratic political order born of the Enlightenment. For Land, as for many neoreactionaries and libertarians, freedom - in the classical liberal sense - is no longer compatible with democracy and the expansion of a voracious welfare state. 

 

And many of these people have ceased to care; for them, "democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself" and they are now searching for "something else entirely: an exit".  

 

When you risk being eaten alive in what Land thinks of as a coming zombie apocalypse, then flight becomes the ultimate imperative. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] During a period of almost ten years, German filmmaker and photographer Florian Reinhardt snapped over a 1000 pictures on his iPhone of exit signs all over the world. Readers who are interested can find them in a book entitled Exit published byHatje Cantz (2021). Click here for further information on Reinhardt and his work; or here to visit his exit.art website. 

 

[2] See Michel Foucault's essay 'What is Enlightenment?' in The Foucault Reader, trans. Paul Rabinow (Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 32-50, in which he discusses Kant's 1784 essay 'Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?' (usually referred to in English simply as ‘What Is Enlightenment?’).   

 

[3] Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting here from the first part of this online version.  

[4] William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. ix. 

[5] Nietzsche, Human, all Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 1. 20, pp. 22-23. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 138.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here.  

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate

Hate, as Nick Land rightly says, is a word worth considering: one which "testifies with special clarity to the religious orthodoxy" [1] of an age obsessed with hate speech and hate crime. 

 

With reference to the second of these things, Land writes: 

 

"Perhaps its most remarkable feature is its perfect redundancy, when evaluated from the perspective of any analysis of legal and cultural norms that is not enflamed by neo-puritan evangelical enthusiasm." 

 

That's true: for what is a hate crime - if any such thing exists - other than just an ordinary crime with the word 'hate' attached? 

 

And, one might also ask: "what is it exactly that aggravates a murder, or assault, if the motivation is attributed to 'hate'?" 

 

 

II. 

 

In response to these questions, Land says that, firstly, a hate crime "is augmented by a purely ideational, ideological, or even 'spiritual' element, attesting not only to a violation of civilized conduct, but also to a heretical intention."

 

Hate, in other words, is an offense against what Land and his fellow neoreactionaries term the Cathedral [2]; "a refusal of its spiritual guidance, and a mental act of defiance against the manifest religious destiny of the world".

 

Secondly, Land asserts that a hate crime is something that only those on the right can commit; the left is far too enlightened - or far too woke as we would say now - ever to hate; they are passionate about a cause, or morally outraged about an issue, or justifiably angry about some form of behaviour deemed offensive, but never hateful. 

 

For theirs is the politics of Universal Love; a decadent creed which "with its reflex identification of inequality with injustice, can conceive no alternative to the proposition that the lower one's situation or status, the more compelling is one's claim upon society, the purer and nobler one's cause". 

 

Being one of the wretched of this earth is thus a "sign of spiritual election [...] and to dispute any of this is clearly 'hate'". 

 

I think that's correct and I'd like to see Taylor Swift, or anyone else for that matter, just shake off the truth of Land's analysis of slave morality and the manner in which hate functions for some not merely as a form of political incorrectness or criminality, but as sin.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Press, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online - click here - from where I am quoting (see Part 3). 

 

[2] In brief, the Cathedral is an overarching body composed of universities, mainstream media outlets, and many other institutions.

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse (5 July 2024): click here. 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here. 

On the Crowning and Beheading of the Virgin Mary

Crowning - a sculpture of the Virgin Mary by Esther Strauss

Photo: St. Mary's Cathedral / Franz Wurzinger

 

 

I.

 

As a rule, I wouldn't normally support the vandalism or destruction of an artwork.

 

But I'm tempted to make an exception in the case of a sculpture by Esther Krauss [1] depicting the Virgin Mary giving birth and displayed in a cathedral in the Austrian city of Linz as part of an installation concerned with issues around women's roles and gender equality.

 

I'm not a Catholic and I don't think the work blasphemous or abominable. 

 

But it is undeniably obscene and its installation was deliberately designed in order to provoke - as the vicar for education, art and culture in the Linz diocese openly confessed [2] - so perhaps no surprise then that someone who takes their faith seriously and found the work grossly objectionable should take action.

 

 

II.

 

It's probably an age thing, but one grows increasingly weary of militants such as Ms. Krauss masquerading as artists who seem to believe their political convictions allow them to disregard the religious or cultural sensibilities of others. 

 

Arguing that whilst most works depicting the Blessed Mother have been made by men - and therefore often serve patriarchal interests - Krauss goes on to say that her intention was simply to emphasise the materiality of giving birth. 

 

For Krauss, removing the head from her sculpture was an act of brutal violence and "an expression of the fact that there are still people who question women's right to their own bodies" [3]. Ironically employing phallologocentric language, she has called for very firm measures to be taken and the police are now investigating.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] On her personal website - click here - Esther Strauß describes herself as a performance artist and writer, who, above all, loves to carry out light-hearted experiments; such as sleeping for a night on Anna Freud's couch at the Sigmund Freud Museum in London, or digging up the grave of her grandfather with her bare hands and then stripping naked so that she might cover herself with the excavated soil and mud. 

 

[2] Please give a slow handclap to the Rev. Johann Hintermaier. 

 

[3] Strauss was quoted in a Vatican City Associated Press report that was published in The Guardian (2 July 2024): click here. 

 

 

Meine Rosen

Meine Rosen (SA / 2024)

 

 

I. 

 

As is well known, Zarathustra often speaks cryptically.

 

Take the following sentence, for example, spoken when, walking through the forest with his disciples one evening, he came to a clearing where lovely maidens were dancing. Attempting to reassure the young women that he meant them no harm, he first praises their light-footedness before adding: 

 

'I am a forest and a night of dark trees: but she who is not afraid of my darkness will discover a bed of roses ...' [1]

What does that mean? 

 

It sounds like a rather elaborate chat-up line to me; i.e., a remark made both to initiate conversation and signal sexual interest. Of course, Zarathustra being Zarathustra, he can't help also displaying his intelligence and poetic sensibility (even as he openly admires the bare feet and fine ankles of the girls to whom he speaks).

 

 

II.

As Zarathustra is essentially Nietzsche's fictional mouthpiece, it's not surprising that the latter also liked to speak with pride about his roses ... 

 

Thus, in the poetic prelude to The Gay Science entitled 'Joke, Cunning, and Revenge' [2], Nietzsche includes a verse entitled Meine Rosen, which also combines the idea of rosy happiness or the promise of joy, with something a bit darker, a bit pervier, a bit more "malice-laden" as one translator has it [3].   

 

Below is my version of the poem; not exactly a translation, more a (somewhat prosified) reimagining, which, nevertheless, I think manages to make Nietzsche's point that those who want to find love and happiness - particularly as he understands these things - have to struggle and be prepared to take risks (i.e., engage in something that some might think of as edge play).

My Roses

 

Of course my happiness wishes to infect you - 

All joy is contagious! 

But if you'd like to smell my roses

 

You'll have to scramble first over rocky ledges

and cut through tangled thorny hedges,

pricking your tiny finger tips!

For my joy - it loves cruel teasing!

For my joy - it loves displeasing!    

Do you still want to pick my roses?

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II. 32.

[2] Nietzsche borrows this title from a libretto by Goethe: 'Scherz, List, und Rache'. Although the work was written in the 1780s (and published by the author in 1790), it was not set to music until 1881, when Nietzsche's young friend Peter Gast (Heinrich Köselitz) decided to undertake the task.

 

[3] I'm referring to Adrian Del Caro, whose translation of Nietzsche's poems in 'Joke, Cunning, and Revenge' can be found in the 2001 Cambridge edition of The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff. 

      Del Caro attempts to stay as closely as he can to the rhyme scheme (and rhythm) of the German; readers can decide if succeeds (or not) in the case of Meine Rosen by turning to p. 13 of the above text. For an alternative translation, see Kaufmann's effort - conveniently placed alongside the German original - in The Gay Science (Vintage books, 1974), pp. 44-45. 

 

What Was I Thinking? (28 June)

Images used for posts published on 28 June 

in 2018, 2022, and 2023

 

 

Sometimes - especially those times when, like today, I'm STILL working on an 8000-word essay to do with the Sex Pistols (and now have a deadline looming into view) - it's almost a form of relaxation to be able to look back and see what one was thinking on this date in years gone by. 

 

And so, let's make a jump to the left and a step to the right ... landing first of all in June 2018 for a post on the ultraviolence of chimps; then zipping forward to 2022 and a post on beatniks, before, finally, ending up in June of last year when it appears that the subject of glitch art was on my mind.

When I look back at old posts, I often want to significantly revise them (and in some cases even want to hit the delete button). But, as I feel relatively happy with all three of these posts, I offer them here pretty much as first published, with very little additional commentary. 

 

However, I have not reproduced the notes that came with them and readers who are interested in knowing more might care to consult the original posts and can do so by clicking on the titles.

 

 

A Clockwork Banana: On the Ultraviolence of Chimpanzees 

 

Despite what idealistic chimp-lovers like to believe, ape society is not some kind of simian utopia or one long tea-party. Indeed, researchers have conceded that chimps are natural born killers who enjoy inflicting cruelty and engaging in acts of savage (often coordinated) violence as much as man. 

 

This overturns the belief that their aggression was a consequence of being forced to live in an ever-restricted space due to the destruction of their natural habitat. 

 

Until recently, primatologists would watch on as a group of males patrolling the forest battered the brains out of any outsider unfortunate enough to have strayed on to their patch and insist that it was a sign of human impact and social breakdown. But now they admit that grotesque acts of ultra-violence, including cannibalism, are how chimpanzees actually maintain their brutal social order. 

 

It seems that lethal violence is an evolved tactic or adaptive strategy that improves fitness amongst those animals with no qualms about using any means necessary to ensure their survival and group status by giving them increased access to food and reproductive opportunities. 

 

Thus, when I read an email sent to me which suggested that humans were uniquely evil animals who would benefit greatly by rediscovering their inner-ape, I had to smile. For some chimps would make even Danny Dyer's deadliest men look like choir boys in comparison. 

 

Having said that, it's worth noting that in the original Planet of the Apes film series chimpanzees - in comparison to war-like and savage gorillas - were portrayed as peace-loving intellectuals who specialised in the sciences.      

 

 

A Brief Note on Beatniks

 

Did anyone ever actually describe themselves as a beatnik? Or was the term purely a media invention; a way of reducing members of the Beat Generation to a cool but cartoonish stereotype? 

 

That's the question I asked at the start of this post and, although it was written only two years ago, I really can't remember how I answered it - though I suspect that, like the term punk, it was not something that those involved in the scene cared for. 

 

Indeed, I seem to recall now that Ginsberg wrote to The New York Times in 1959, deploring the use of the word beatnik and that his pal Jack Kerouac wasn't pleased either to see their philosophy become just another fad. Both authors feared that a generation of illuminated hipsters, would be replaced by brainwashed fashionistas interested only in looking the part. 

 

Indeed, so exasperated was Kerouac by the popularity of the term that he declared to a reporter in 1969 (shortly before his death in October of that year): 'I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic.'

 

Like the punk generation, the beat generation was very much concerned with authenticity - but I ask you: Is there anything squarer than wanting to keep things real? 

 

Glitch: The Art of of Error and Imperfection (With Reference to the Photography of Julia Margaret Cameron) 

Thanks in large part to Jews working in the American entertainment industry, a fair few words of Yiddish origin have been adopted by English-speakers: chutzpah, klutz, mensch, schlep, schmooze, shtick ... etc. But my favourite such word is the rather impish-sounding glitch, which first entered everyday English during the period of the Space Race (1955-1975). 

 

Whilst it now refers to a temporary technical issue or a short-lived fault in a system that eventually corrects itself, glitch is derived from a Yiddish word for that which slides, slithers, or causes one to slip or skid, which is interesting; might one refer to a patch of black ice as a glitch in the road? 

 

Apart from NASA engineers ad those working within the computing and electronics industries, the term glitch is also used by those in the world of art to refer to the contemporary practice of using errors for aesthetic purposes, either by corrupting digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices. As well as glitch imagery and film, there is also glitch music (a genre of experimental electronic sound that many people simply call noise). 

 

Of course, whilst such 'errors' can be random effects, they are more often the result of deliberate manipulation and so not really errors at all. Numerous artists have posted online tutorials explaining the techniques they use to make their work and produce (pseudo) glitches on demand. 

 

Personally, however, I prefer real errors and genuine glitches to those distortions and deviations that are the result of intention. But, either way, you can end up with some amusing results, which is why glitch art is increasingly common in the world of design. And of course, there's even an app allowing those who like to edit their pics on social media to produce an instant glitch effect. 

 

Let's not pretend, however, that there's anything remotely subversive (or even all that original) about this phenomenon. Artists have played with light, sound, and colour and been aware that beauty often lies in small imperfections - that failure is often more instructive than benign success - long before the digital age or anyone was using the term glitch. 

 

Consider the case, for example, of the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, whose controversial images were lambasted by the critics  and jeered at by her contemporaries for being smudged, smeared, or out of focus, but which are now regarded as brilliantly ahead of their time. 

 

Error, we might say, was the hallmark of her style; Cameron deliberately left the flaws that others would have attempted to disguise or eliminate, affirming an art of imperfection and happy accident and rejecting the idea of photography as a scientific practice via which one aimed at a perfect representation of the world, or an accurate and precisely detailed rendering of the human subject. 

 

Using an extremely messy - and slippery - process that involved coating glass with an even layer of collodion, sensitising it with a bath of silver nitrate, and then exposing and developing the plate whilst still wet, Cameron was, arguably, the Cindy Sherman of her day and elements in her work are not only postmodern as some commentators claim, but distinctly glitchy. 

 

Five Brief Notes on Rockism, Poptimism, and Authenticity (With Reference to Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols)

Cover by Jamie Reid for the Sex Pistols' single 'Silly Thing' 

released from the album The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle 

 (Virgin Records, 1979) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Those elderly punks who maintain that Never Mind the Bollocks is the only true Sex Pistols album are clinging desperately to an ideal of authenticity that is central to what has become known as rockism.

 

 

II.

 

This neologism, coined in 1981 by the musician Pete Wyley, soon became a pejorative used enthusiastically by music journalists such as Paul Morley [2], who were sick and tired of the idealistic fantasy that rock music matters - and matters more than other genres of popular music - because the performers really mean it man and just 'one great rock show can change the world.' [3]

 

Perhaps my favourite definition of rockism was provided by the critic Kelefa Sanneh, in 2004: 

 

"Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher." [4]

 

 

III.

 

In contrast to the above, there are those think pop music - even at its most commercial and ephemeral - is just as worthy of serious consideration as hard and heavy rock. 

 

Now, whilst I wouldn't describe myself as a poptimist - and don't particularly worry about progressive values of inclusivity, etc. - my sympathies increasingly lie with those who prefer music that makes happy - makes you want to dance and singalong - to music that is overly earnest and makes miserable.

 

 

IV.

 

Funny enough, one of the reasons that Malcolm McLaren disliked Julien Temple's The Filth and the Fury (2000) was because in its downbeat revisionism it made the Sex Pistols' story seem a very sombre affair: 

 

"'I don't remember punk rock being like that. [...] I always remember it as a ticket to the carnival for a better life.'" [5]             

 

No wonder that The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle takes us to Rio de Janeiro and explores many different musical styles; from disco and punk pop to bawdy drinking songs. Whatever people like to think about McLaren, he was never one to take things too seriously.

 

 

V.

 

And yet, paradoxically perhaps, McLaren always retained a notion of authenticity; as something to be found beneath the ruins of culture in a similar manner that the beach is to be found beneath the paving stones. 

 

It's a non-ideal model of authenticity, however, invested with chaos and which, in his words, is dirty, horrible, and disgusting [6]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The single version, released on 30 March 1979, features Steve Jones on vocals; the album version, however, recorded in the spring of 1978, has Paul Cook on vocals. Click here to play the former, which reached number 6 in the UK Singles Chart. Or click here to see the unique interpretation given to the song by Legs & Co. on Top of the Pops (BBC1 12 April 1979).  

 

[2] See Paul Morley's article 'Rockism - it's the new rockism', in The Guardian (25 May 2006): click here. Interestingly, Morley warns here that when poptimism simply becomes another form of proscriptive ideology, it's little different from rockism. 

      See also Michael Hann's article 'Is Poptimism Now As Blinkered As the Rockism It Replaced?' for The Quietus (11 May 2017): click here.

 

[3] I'm quoting a line by the character Dewey Finn, played by Jack Black, in School of Rock (dir. Ricard Linklater, 2003).   

 

[4] Kelefa Sanneh, 'The Rap Against Rockism', in The New York Times (31 Oct 2004): click here. Unfortunately, it's difficult to argue with Sanneh's claim that rockism is ultimately "related to older, more familiar prejudices" of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

[5] Malcolm McLaren speaking with Geoffrey McNab, 'Malcolm McLaren: Master and Servant', Independent (31 May 2002): click here. Cited by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable 2020), p. 718.  

 

[6] See the 1999 interview with Malcolm McLaren by Jefferson Hack; 'Another Malcolm McLaren Moment', in Another Magazine (7 May 2013): click here.