Film Kills (1): At the Pictures with D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence: Close-Up (Kiss), 1928

Cinema is the production of icons and the proliferation of moving images. From a biblical perspective, it is clearly sinful. 

But if the authors of Exodus are primarily concerned with the making of graven images of God and the worship of pagan idols, there seems to be something else, something deeper, troubling them too; namely, a genuine concern with the very notion of representation as it relates to questions of reality, truth, and appearance. 

We find the same concern amongst the ancient Greeks - Plato providing an obvious example. His insistence on presence and authenticity makes him suspicious of most art forms and his critique of writing as a pharmakon can easily be made also of film. Indeed, it's central  to D. H. Lawrence's criticism of cinema: because the actors on-screen are not physically present before us, this invalidates both their performance and our response to it. 

As a matter of fact, Lawrence says very little about the cinema, but when he does it's uniformly negative and hostile. In the poem 'When I Went to the Film', for example, Lawrence suggests that cinema is essentially - in its very form and function - an obscene and pornographic medium and that the content of the film is, therefore, in large part irrelevant. 

This is because, for Lawrence, film sensationally stimulates false feeling and counterfeit emotion. It is both ideal and ecstatic; projecting shadows of people as if onto the wall of Plato's cave on the one hand, whilst provoking masturbatory thrills on the other. It is the art form par excellence of what he refers to as sex-in-the-head: i.e., a desire on the part of hyper-conscious, visually-fixated individuals to experience everything in their minds and to exchange the sheer physical intensity of life lived in the flesh for a new piece of knowledge and a bucket of popcorn. 

Lawrence's concern is not that this results in a loss of soul, but in a denial of the body and corporeal reality: "The amazing move into abstraction on the part of the whole of humanity", he argues, "means we loathe the physical element ... We don't want to look at flesh-and-blood people ... We don't want to hear their actual voices" [1]. Rather, we wish only to interact with them mediated via technology.

In his novel of 1920, The Lost Girl, Lawrence privileges the dying art of the music hall over that of the newly emergent cinema, prioritizing live speech and presence over celluloid sensation. It's much the same argument as he makes in his poetry: film is cheap and easy and it costs the audience nothing apart from the price of a ticket: no feeling of the heart, no appreciation of the spirit is necessary - just wide open eyes and a desire to be titillated.

Whatever we might think of this critique - and it's far from convincing - there is no denying that our curiosity towards images is always erotically charged. Sex might not be the origin of the world as Courbet suggested, but it's certainly the origin of cinema and our insatiable will to knowledge. The faces of Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino "plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy ... one literally lost oneself in the human image" [2].

This cinematic jouissance - brilliantly theorized by Patricia MacCormack [3] - is a major concern for some people. For others, what matters is the violence that is done to the real; i.e. the fact that the production of images results in the murder of objects, not that it causes audience to moan from close-up kisses and simulated sex. I'll say more about this in part two of this post.

Notes: 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Men Must Work and Women as Well', Late Essays and Articles, (CUP, 2004), p. 283.
[2] Roland Barthes, 'The Face of Garbo', Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, (Paladin Books, 1973), p. 62.

[3] See Patricia MacCormack, Cinesexuality, (Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2008).

 

Zena (Written in the Manner of Michel Houellebecq)

Scattered across her bedside table like elements of despair

are the usual signs of life: soiled tissues and rabbit-headed

rings.

Texts from lovers old and new remind her that she's

desirable and her flesh remains firm: that it hadn't

passed its use by date.

Whenever she saw me she'd push her pelvis in my direction

with suggestive irony. I'd glance vaguely at the curve of her

breasts and the bareness of her arms.

On trips abroad she'd visit sex museums and marvel at the

polyamorous exploits of chimpanzees and the prospect of

being pleasured by robots.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

It's true that we learn from failure. But we don't learn how to succeed in the future, no matter what feeble-minded optimists like to believe. At most, we learn how to fail better, as Samuel Beckett informs us in a prose piece amusingly entitled Worstward Ho (1983).

Beckett is absolutely not telling us that if at first we don't succeed, we should try, try again in the hope and expectation that such endurance is bound to pay off. Rather, he's saying that no matter how hard you try, no matter how many times you fail, you will never succeed: that success is not even an option.

For we are fated to fail. We are destined to fail. We are doomed to fail. Such is the tragic character of our mortal being. The fact that Beckett affirms this and finds in it a source of darkly comic satisfaction, demonstrates that his is what Nietzsche would term a pessimism of strength (or, if you prefer, a Dionysian philosophy).

The fact that his words are to be found on a wide variety of motivational posters, mugs, and fridge magnets is also something that should cause laughter amongst Beckett enthusiasts, rather than despair and irritation. For as one commentator notes, observing corporate executives and New Age hippies draw comfort and inspiration from lines they have naively misunderstood is like watching someone innocently throw a stick for their dog, not realising that it is in fact a human shin bone they've just picked up in the park. 

  

On Poetry, Chaos and the Great Umbrella

Like Heidegger, Lawrence understands the essential task of poetry as safeguarding the mortal being of man in relation to the fourfold and, indeed, to all of those birds, beasts, flowers and silent objects which exist and unfold into being alongside us. 

Thus, like Heidegger, Lawrence crucially relates the duty to safeguard Dasein to the question of language and thought, with the latter understood not merely as the manipulation of already existent ideas, but the welling up of unknown life into consciousness. Poetry might thus be defined as an act of attention and the attempt to discover a new world within the known world.

But this discovery of a new world involves an act of violence; the slitting of what he terms the 'Umbrella' and by which he refers to all that is erected between ourselves and the forever surging chaos of existence (our ideals, our conventions, and fixed forms of every description). 

The poet is thus also a kind of terrorist; an enemy of human security and comfort.

But we needn't worry: for no matter how many times a poet manages to make a tiny hole in the painted underside of the Umbrella, the emergency services are on hand to ensure things are speedily repaired. The majority of us, if we're honest, prefer a patched-up reality and virtual chaos to the sheer intensity of lived experience.

And we prefer that poetry is annotated with notes that insist on the importance of form and technique, but discreetly remain silent about acts of vandalism and the mad desire for inhuman chaos.

Why I Love the Poetry of Paul Celan

In his essay 'The Hollow Miracle' (1959), George Steiner argues that the Nazis killed the German language. Or, at any rate, they murdered the poetry of the language. Post-war German, says Steiner, still makes a sound and it still allows for communication, but it creates no sense of communion.

This is a terrible indictment - and, clearly, it's meant to be. But is it strictly fair, or even accurate? For without wishing to dispute that something immensely damaging was done to German during the Nazi period, it might be argued that a process that had been underway for some time was simply taken to its fatal conclusion.

In fact, Steiner concedes that the death of the German language has a long and complicated history. Thus, even during the Second Reich, for example, there were worrying signs that German was in a bad shape, including an over-reliance on fixed metaphors, stock similes, and ready-made slogans. And as words and sentences started growing clumsy and bloated, it became ever more difficult to express new thoughts or feelings in a concise and cheerful manner (even Nietzsche struggles at times).  

It was the Prussians, therefore, not the Nazis, who replaced the genius of the language with cliché, vulgarity, and a fatal taste for sickly romantic pathos beneath which to conceal their own ressentiment; and it was the Prussians who showed a peculiar liking for the loud voice barking threats and commands, rather than that which spoke softly and with good humour.

Thus it was that the voices of Heine, Rilke, Kafka, and others were all drowned out by the those who knew how to turn the German tongue into a weapon of mass destruction and rob human speech of its integrity and tenderness. Steiner writes:

"Let us keep one fact clearly in mind: the German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism. It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Himmler happened to speak German. Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery. Hitler heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance."

- 'The Hollow Miracle', essay in Language and Silence, (Penguin Books, 1969), p.140.

Of course, all languages contain toxic reservoirs of hatred, but only in German did they bubble so closely to the surface of legitimate and everyday speech. Thus it was that German supplied evil with a tongue. And if under Bismarck it became the language of the modern state, under Hitler it became the language with which to administer Hell. 

Steiner concludes his essay on a pessimistic note, arguing that when a language has been used to conceive, organize, and justify genocide, then it has been fatally compromised; that something of the malevolence and malignancy sinks into the language and prevents it from ever being able to renew itself. Is there then no hope for German? Was Adorno right to assert there could be no poetry after Auschwitz? 

For me, Paul Celan provides this hope and proves Adorno wrong. Celan knew exactly what was needed of poetry after the Holocaust: first, it had to articulate the silence without breaking it; secondly, it had to find a way to 'bear witness from the inside of death'. Those critics who accused him of aestheticizing genocide were profoundly stupid and shamefully mistaken. Celan is the greatest post-War poet writing in German and those who love the language have him to thank for reinvesting it with Geist and freeing it from its congealment in blood and soil.

Say No to Female Genital Mutilation

 
Although some aspects of Mary Daly's work are problematic, I think she's fully justified in identifying female genital mutilation (along with other practices which serve to inscribe patriarchal values upon the body) as a re-enactment of goddess murder, or a symbolic form of gynocide.

This deeply depressing form of religious and cultural cruelty is still inflicted on large numbers of girls and young women throughout the world and, whilst it can take several forms, it's essentially a violent attempt to construct a model of passive female sexuality founded upon the deadening or destruction of the clitoris.

Why? Because the clitoris is understood to be an impure organ that not only lacks any reproductive function, but doesn't serve male purposes either. In fact, the clitoris exists exclusively as an organ of female pleasure and empowerment and so might be regarded as a challenge to the authority of the phallus. And clearly, that can't be allowed. 

Daly quotes from an African tribal leader explaining to a Western anthropologist why clitoridectomy is a good thing for young women about to be married: when it has been removed, he says, they no longer feel the childish desire to masturbate and they discover that true happiness comes from vaginal penetration by a husband. Daly describes this piece of tribal wisdom as brutish and one-dimensional. 

But before we congratulate ourselves in the West for our more sophisticated thinking on the subject, we should remember that psychoanalysis also views female sexuality as infantile and polymorphously perverse; i.e., as something that refuses to circulate within designated coordinates and so remains disconcerting, if not actually threatening. Freud too - like the witch doctor - wanted to centre everything in the vagina, regarded as an absence awaiting to be filled by any available prick.    

And we might also mention the contemporary phenomenon of plastic surgery, which offers labia trimming, vaginal reshaping, and even hymen reconstruction. The clinics carrying out such procedures may speak about improving the look, feel, and function of female genitalia and pretend that such procedures are all about boosting a woman's confidence and self-esteem, but everyone knows that this manifestation of pornographic idealism is all about enhancing male pleasure, making money, and making women feel ashamed of their own bodies.

Ultimately, whether it's done with a rusty razor blade, or the latest laser technology, female genital mutilation is a form of sex abuse. 

I Love Everything That Flows

 Sarah Maple: Menstruate With Pride (2010-11)

Vaginal lubrication and menstrual blood; saliva, semen, and tears ... these bodily fluids all belong to love, even though such secretions are often subject to severe prohibition and taboo. It is feared that they possess magical properties which threaten to dissolve the solidity and rigidity upon which Man prides himself and bases his integrity. 

For the bone-dry moralists of patriarchal society, that which is soft, formless, and liquid is intrinsically evil: to be male is to be hard and firm of body and misogynists everywhere repeat after Heraclitus that, above all things, a dry soul is best. 

But for those of us fascinated by decadence and the corruption of the flesh, the moist cunt that waits like a carnivorous plant in the boggy marsh where insects and philosophers lose their way, is both a site of strange truths and the dissolution of all Truth with a phallic-capital T.

Feminism begins when one decides to reject the petrified and well-organized bodies produced by molecular fascism (bodies that daren't leak, or sweat, or even cry) and when one finds the courage to declare like Henry Miller: 'Yes, I too love everything that flows.'

Towards a Queer Democracy

Thomas Eakins: The Swimming Hole (1884-85)

If the great American poet Walt Whitman set out to chronicle one subject above all others, it was the flowering of democracy within the United States. But his vision of democracy passes far beyond conventional models of liberalism and is curiously eroticized.

The inherent queerness within Whitman's political thinking is now generally accepted by critics. But many still choose to quickly pass over this with a mixture of embarrassment and homophobic distaste. They tell us, for example, that Eros is to function as the glue within Whitman's democracy to come, but fail to specify the particular nature of this adhesive love. Whether they like it or not, however, physical tenderness between men remained crucial for Whitman and his thinking was not based on a purely abstract ideal of comradeship and solidarity. 

This flooding of the political sphere with manly love is something that Lawrence finds irresistible, although he is troubled by the exclusion of women from such a world. Thus, in his own model of democracy, Lawrence is keen to include both sexes and reinstate the male-female relationship as primary. That said, he continues to insist that vaginal intercourse isn't the great be-all and end-all that many people believe it to be:

"The vagina, as we know, is the orifice of the hypogastric plexus ... It is the advent to the great source of being ... But beyond all this is the cocygeal centre. ... Here, at the root of the spine, is the last clue to the lower body and being ... Here is the dark node which relates us to the centre of the earth, the plumb-centre of substantial being. Here is our last and extremest reality." 

- D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman' (Intermediate Version, 1919), Studies in Classic American Literature, (CUP, 2003), 365-66.

Thus it is that anal sex assumes vital importance within Lawrence's philosophy and throughout his fiction. If this is invariably heterosexual in character, the opportunity to discuss Whitman's work allows Lawrence to concede that homosexual coition is an equally valid form of interchange and establishes "the same perfection in fulfilled consciousness and being" [ibid., 366], as an act of heterosexual intercourse.

To conclude, then, both Whitman and Lawrence encourage us on an open road towards a queer model of democracy founded upon many forms of touch, including sodomy and the interpenetration of passionate love. That is to say, a democracy born from a new economy of bodies and their pleasures and not merely the inhuman flow of capital.

Better a Spectacular Failure ...

Malcolm was very fond of saying: Better to be a spectacular failure, than a benign success.

I always agreed with him on this, because, what it means in effect, is that it is as right to rebel, take risks, and show courage as it is admirable to resist doxa, stereotype, and convention. In Nietzschean terms, it means: love fate and live dangerously.

For what is success, ultimately, if not the reward for conformity: a form of patronage? There's nothing noble in it, nor creative. And nothing particularly inspiring about being a winner, despite what our athletes like to think. Just as it is the small imperfections of a face that make it beautiful, so too it is the losers who really capture our imagination and our hearts.

The British have always understood this, even if the Americans never will. But today, sadly, within a culture largely determined by Simon Cowell, the fear of failure has never been greater and, in a wonderful phrase, Laurie Penny speaks of the 'desperate tyranny of aspiration' that results from the bullying and humiliation of the less able, less talented, and less successful which is now the key component of both Saturday Night television and government policy.

When an entire nation can only dream of having the X-factor or winning the lottery - and despises anyone who refuses to share this final hope - then you know things have got pretty grim.    

Better Penny Red than Dead

Let me say from the outset: I like Laurie Penny.

Anyone who can cheerfully provoke such astonishing levels of vitriol from left, right, and centre deserves not just begrudging respect and admiration, but genuine affection. Thus, although this post was originally intended as a critical commentary upon her Notes from the New Age of Dissent, it might in fact be better read as a passionate appreciation of both book and author.

Ultimately, it doesn't really matter if Ms Penny is right or wrong, or whether her work makes good sense or no sense. If, sometimes, she's spectacularly mistaken and naive in her assessment of what's unfolding within contemporary culture, I prefer her wrongness to all the orthodox banality and cowardice that usually passes for rightness in this world. The point, surely, of Penny Red is to accept the challenge that is being thrown down and engage - not nit-pick.

For a work concerned with politics and feminism, however, the nature of this challenge is rather unusual. Lacking as it does any kind of theoretical framework or point of reference, it's not so much a challenge to think, as to care - which, for those of us who philosophically affirm insouciance and irony (terms that will make Ms Penny splutter on her cup of tea) is quite a big ask.

However, such is the quality of the writing and the personality of the author, that one feels almost charmed into dropping the simulated apathy and indifference of my generation, for a while at least, in order to share her anger and enthusiasm. Even, at a push, I might also concede the importance of retaining a little hope.

That said, I'm certainly not about to scrabble around amongst the ruins looking for old values and ideals and something to believe in once more - not even for Ms Penny! Revolution should never be a question of faith: or, if it is, then you can be sure a time of terror and inquisition will follow.

Besides, as Nietzsche pointed out: No one is free to be a crab. Which means you can't just reterritorialize on models of self or society which you imagine as more authentic or more real. (Ms Penny does tend to fetishize these notions and there's a powerful sense of nostalgia throughout her writings which she might do well to interrogate at some stage, as it undermines her radicalism.)  

Anyway, I'll stop here, for fear of starting to sound like one of those pompous and patronising middle-aged men who always talk over women at dinner parties; or, worse, one of those academic dinosaurs who rudely like to jab fingers in the face of the young.

You Are Like a Beautiful Black Hole to Me My Love

Illustration by Emma Charleston

Sometimes, the longing arises to obscenely scrutinize the naked body of one's lover; to peer and probe like a technician of desire into their cunt or anus, as if hoping to locate the hidden truth of their being.

But clinical fascination soon gives way to impatience and frustration, as one realises that for all the mystery surrounding these secret places, there is nothing to see or discover; that the only truth revealed is the nihilistic truth of the void in which all values come crashing back down to nought. 

Of course, rather than despair or grow angry at this, we might choose to celebrate the body as a site of sheer loss in which to joyfully abandon all hope, as well as deposit semen. As so often, it's simply a question of interpretation. For whilst bodily organs and orifices can serve all kinds of functions, they are revered or despised entirely depending on the disposition of the subject performing the erotic autopsy. 

 

More than Just a Son and Lover

Today is the 100th anniversary of the publication of D. H. Lawrence's third and some would say greatest novel, Sons and Lovers. 

It was certainly highly acclaimed at the time and has long since remained popular with those readers who like to think of Lawrence first and foremost as a working-class collier's lad growing up amongst the haystacks and the Nottinghamshire coalfields and a bit smutty in every sense of the word: 'Our Bert' writing his semi-autobiographical fiction in a late nineteenth-century realist tradition, but with twentieth-century knobs on.

It's never been my favourite work (despite some fantastic scenes and passages of writing) and this is a characterization of Lawrence that I find particularly loathsome and depressing; an attempt to possess and limit and keep in place on behalf of the Bestwood mafia who continue to wield a powerful influence over Lawrence's reception. Oh, how they love to forever remind us of Lawrence's remark about the East Midlands being the country of his heart. But let them recall also how he wrote: 

"It always depresses me to come to my native district. Now I am turned forty, and have been more or less a wanderer for nearly twenty years, I feel more alien, perhaps, in my home place than anywhere else in the world. I can feel at ease in ... Rome or Paris or Munich or even London. But in Nottingham Road, Bestwood, I feel at once a devouring nostalgia and an infinite repulsion."

- [Return to Bestwood], Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (CUP, 2004), p. 15. 

This is the Lawrence I admire: nomadic, cosmopolitan, and refusing to belong to any class or people; refusing to be anyone's son or lover. A singular individual who is no longer their Bert - and probably never was.

Suicide by Tiger (The Case of Sarah McClay)

Tipu's Tiger (Victoria and Albert Museum)

In the news at the moment is the case of zookeeper Sarah McClay, who was killed by one of the big cats in her care. 

Although the police have ruled it out, the suggestion was made (much to the anger of her family) that the young woman could have entered the animals' enclosure with the intention of ending her own life: suicide by tiger, as it has been described.

I have to say, this idea is one that greatly appeals to me: not so much in a fetishistic manner - though, for the record, I've nothing against those vorarephiles who are aroused by the thought of being eaten alive by wild animals - but simply as a method of taking one's leave from this world.

Better, surely, to die in the jaws of a magnificent beast, than beneath the steel wheels of a tube train. One might imagine that one is passing directly back into life (quite literally becoming-animal) and derive a real element of joy from that.   

On Myth

Henri Matisse: Icarus (1947)

I recently heard someone point out that the wax holding Icarus's wings together would not have melted if he flew too high, because, as a matter of fact, it gets colder at altitude not hotter.

I know this is spectacularly besides the point, because, being a myth about hubris and a young man's folly, it is not meant to be read as a scientific account of early experiments in human aviation. Having said that, I understand how the temptation to prick the bubble of myth by simply speaking the truth and pointing to amusing inaccuracies and unverifiable bits of nonsense can sometimes be difficult to resist.

And, personally, I have no time for those critics who regard the 'disenchantment' of the world by the Enlightenment as a regrettable error and call for a radical re-mythologization.

When I see the new mythologists standing before the world of virtual reality and information technology articulating arguments that fundamentally still rely upon the language of Romanticism, I am reminded of those agrarian idealists who at the beginning of the industrial era sought to revive values associated with the rapidly disappearing feudal past and encourage people to take up handicrafts once more.

Postmodernity enables us to do many things - including the decoupling of thought from its dead relationship to old forms of thinking - but it does not allow us to simply reterritorialize upon a model of ancient culture and society, rediscovering their narratives as our own. Ultimately, life today no longer corresponds to a mythological framework and myth has simply lost its power to shape plausible identities (unless you happen to be a religious fundamentalist of some variety or other).

Ultimately, I agree with Baudrillard here: having passed beyond both the physical and metaphysical worlds we enter into a pataphysical era - but not a new mythological age. Things today no longer have an origin, an aim, or any end; they develop neither logically nor symbolically, but chaotically and randomly.

And I agree also with Voltaire, that grand seigneur of the spirit as Nietzsche calls him, who was of the opinion that the study of myth is an occupation for blockheads.

Schizoanalysis Contra Psychoanalysis

The major difference between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis is that the latter is designed to deal with figures and images, signs and symbols, whilst remaining ignorant of the forces, flows, and units of production that the former concerns itself with. Thus, whilst schizoanalysis understands the unconscious as a factory of desire, humming with heavy machinery and entirely caught up with material and social forms of production, psychoanalysis thinks of it as the site of fantasy, myth, and dream.

Freud imagines this site as a cross between a nursery and a provincial theatre, but he can at least hear the sound of the desiring-machines in the background, even whilst maintaining an attitude of angry denial. Jung, on the other hand, mistakes the machinic rumble for the voice of God and if he breaks with Freud it is only so he can retreat into mysticism and build his own church. 

When Jung starts speaking about archetypes, he is searching for clues to what he thinks of as the fundamentally religious nature of mankind. It was never sexual anxiety and neurosis that interested him, but uncovering sacred truth. But the unconscious is no more archetypal than it is Oedipal; it doesn't symbolize any more than it imagines, expresses, or represents. Rather, it produces and invests in the real (even when the real has become increasingly artificial). 

For me, whilst taking Freud's work seriously has become problematic, even reading Jung has become impossible. It is to Freud's great credit that, despite his idealism, he continued to insist on libidinal forces and retain his atheism when colleagues all around him - including that snake in the grass, Jung - were shamefully preparing for a reconciliation with religion, so that they too might be able to remain believers and find wider public acceptance of their ideas.

And so, when all's said and done, give me psychoanalysis rather than analytical psychology. But give me schizoanalysis contra psychoanalysis, because I prefer the non-figurative and asignifying unconscious mapped out by Deleuze and Guattari (with the aid of various madmen including Nietzsche, Lawrence, Kafka and Artaud) to the mythic and all-too-human unconscious of both Freud and Jung.

However, I'm aware that D&G's machinic model of the unconscious based on desiring-production, is ultimately just as fanciful and as rooted in what Paul and Patricia Churchland term folk psychology as that invented within the work of Freud and Jung and a more revolutionary theory of mind begins only with scientific realism and neurobiology.  

Fragment from an Illicit Lover's Discourse

Does the reconstruction and redistribution of races and nationalities within the pornographic imagination betray an inherent fascism? It certainly appears to reinforce tired myths and stereotypes from the ethnocentric perspective of the white male with his Aryan eye, bright blue.

However, it's arguable that in hallucinating universal history and playfully exposing the artificial character of identity, eroticism helps deconstruct those things which nazis like to believe to be true about themselves and others: i.e. those racial and national differences on which they base their imperial pride; differences that are in fact powerful cultural fictions, rather than rooted in blood and soil.

The admirable thing about genuine lovers and perverts, like Casanova, is that they are untroubled by the thought of miscegenation; what does the notion of purity ultimately mean to them? Nothing: or, at most, it exists as something only to be sullied. They instinctively resist any attempt to restrict who (or what) they may fuck; a resistance born of libertinism, not liberalism.

D&G: What is Philosophy?

Image by Dick Whyte

One of the things I like about Deleuze is that he never gave up on philosophy. That is to say, he never had any problem with calling himself a philosopher and of happily subscribing to an intellectual tradition stretching back to the Stoics. 

This, by his own admission, didn't make him better than others of his generation who seemed slightly embarrassed by the title of philosopher, or felt guilty if their work too might be shown to belong to the history of Western metaphysics, but it did make him the most naive or innocent.

But what is philosophy for Deleuze? He answers this question very clearly and very beautifully in his final book written in collaboration with Félix Guattari, entitled - appropriately enough - What is Philosophy? In this text, Deleuze argues that philosophy, science, and art all have the essential task of mediating chaos and that each discipline does so in a manner specific to itself as a way of thinking and creating.

First and foremost for D&G, philosophy is neither concerned with the contemplation of ideas, or their communication; rather, it is concerned with the creation of new concepts. This is its unique role and why the philosopher might best be described not as the lover of wisdom, so much as the creator of concepts. 

This is not to deny that the sciences and arts aren't equally creative. But only philosophy creates concepts in the strictest sense of the term (as singularities or events, never as universals). In giving philosophy such a distinct history and role, D&G are not claiming any pre-eminence or privilege for their own work; they fully acknowledge that there are other equally important, equally profound ways of (non-conceptual) thinking. Science and art are not inferior modes of ideation, but they mediate chaos differently (with the latter defined not as a void of disorder, but a virtual realm of infinite possibilities).

Science, for example, in contrast to philosophy, is concerned with inventing functions that are then advanced as propositions in discursive systems to be reflected upon and communicated as such. It wants to find a way to give chaos fixed points of reference and to slow things down; to make chaos a little more predictable and, if you like, a little more human. Philosophy might like to give style to chaos (i.e. a level of consistency) via the construction of a 'plane of immanence', but it is happy to retain the speed of birth and disappearance that is proper to chaos.

Again, this is not to denigrate the work of physicists and mathematicians and D&G are at pains to stress that they find as much admirable experimentation and creation within Einstein as within Spinoza.

As for art, it takes a different approach: if philosophy is all about concepts and science all about functions and their elemental components known as functives, then art is concerned with percepts, affects, and sensations. D&G write:

"Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent ... of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves ... They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work of art being a sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself."

- Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Graham Burchell & Hugh Tomlinson, (Verso, 1994), p. 164.

Obviously the work of art is created by the artist, but it stands or falls on its own; i.e. it exceeds the life of its own creator. Further, it draws the artist (and the viewer, reader, listener) into a strange becoming - producing them as much as they produce it and giving everyone a little chaos back into their lives.

If, as we have noted, philosophy adventures into chaos via the plane of immanence and science via a plane of reference, then art constructs a plane of composition: this, for D&G, is definitional of art. But by this they refer not merely to technical composition (which could just as well be the concern of science), but an aesthetic composition concerned with sensation. Thus art, like science and philosophy, is a unique way of thinking and of opening a plane within chaos. It is obviously related to science and philosophy, but should not be thought of as an aesthetic mish-mash of these practices. D&G conclude:

"The three routes are specific, each as direct as the others, and they are distinguished by the nature of the plane and by what occupies it. Thinking is thought through concepts, or functions, or sensations and no one of these ... is better than another ... The three thoughts intersect and intertwine but without synthesis or identification."

- Ibid., pp. 198-99. 

Ultimately, we should be grateful for the gifts that they bring us: unlike religion, which has done nothing except open a great umbrella between us and reality in an attempt to protect mankind from chaos. But that's another post ...

Towards a Doctrine of Non-Necessity

Whilst I'm perfectly happy for philosophers to discuss the concept of necessity (be it logical, empirical or transcendental in nature), or spend many long hours thinking through related ideas of determinism and contingency, it increasingly seems to me that many of the malicious and often murderous stupidities that confront us in this life are, for want of another word, completely unnecessary. 

Nationalism, racism, homophobia, misogyny, sectarianism and all those forms of what Nietzsche memorably termed "scabies of the heart" [GS 377] are things that we could happily do without and the absence of which would instantly make the world less ugly and unpleasant.

Hopefully it's clear that I'm not speaking here as a liberal idealist of some description. For as Nietzsche also says, one has to be "afflicted with a Gallic excess of erotic irritability" [GS 377] to dream of embracing all humanity with fraternal affection and, despite having been born in Paris, I'm simply not French enough.

So no, I do not love mankind. If anything, it's because I'm too indifferent and ultimately too uncaring to spend time hating that I'm led towards a nihilistic doctrine of non-necessity. It's insouciance and a certain cool irony that saves us from that violent rage and ressentiment that grips those who subscribe to a puffed-up politics of identity and self-assertion.    

The Tears of Zena X (Written in the Style of Roland Barthes)

Photo by Peter Zelei: gettyimages.com (158635665)

The slightest tremor of emotion, whether of happiness, anger, or disappointment, always brings her to tears. For she has a particular propensity to cry and even once wrote a prize-winning letter to Cosmopolitan defending her right to weep in the workplace. 

By releasing her tears without constraint, she follows the dictates of her little body, which is a body forever at the point of liquid expansion. She enjoys the feeling of tears running gently down her face: they are comforting not only to her heart, but delightful on her tongue.

Usually, when people cry, they are addressing their tears to someone else. By weeping, they want to capture attention and perhaps bring pressure to bear upon others. Tears can thus be a sign rather than an expression of feeling. But Zena often cries for her own reassurance; to prove to herself that she is still alive. 

And sometimes, late at night, when there is no one around to witness her grief, she finds herself upset by random objects and events, including the contents of her vegetable drawer. Indeed, she recently confessed: I once looked at a carrot and cried.

In Memory of Valerie Solanas

Mary Daly was right to say that anti-feminism is merely the political expression of misogyny. And doubtless the above is intended as a piece of anti-feminist polemic, although, ironically, it echoes the writings of Valerie Solanas fighting her one woman war against male power in the SCUM Manifesto.

Could it be that Pat Robertson is secretly part of the Men's Auxiliary, working diligently to undermine the credibility and authority of his own type? Sadly, probably not. 

But it's because of pricks like him that I support all women who desire to happily idle away their time in ways of their own choosing (including infidelity, infanticide, paganism, socialism, and lesbianism); women who know that sometimes you have to scream to be heard - and sometimes you just have to pull the trigger.

W.I.T.C.H.

In his reading of The Scarlet Letter Lawrence offers an interesting theory of how women like Hester Prynne become witches and fall into a state of moral and sexual corruption, or what religious people call sin.

According to Lawrence, when the female soul "recoils from its creative union with man", it becomes possessed by malevolent forces and starts to exert an invisible and insidious influence in the world. The woman herself may remain "as nice as milk" in her daily life and continue to speak only of her love for humanity, but she becomes subtly diabolic and sends out "waves of silent destruction" that undermine the spiritual authority of men and their social institutions. 

Thus it is, continues Lawrence, that our forefathers were not altogether fools in their fear of witchcraft and the burning of witches not altogether unjustified.   

 

What do I think of this curious contribution to sexual politics? Not much. It's obviously untenable and hateful in its misogyny. One is reminded of the televangelist Pat Robertson, who also claims that women who desire autonomy and independence are intent on practicing witchcraft, smashing capitalism and becoming lesbians. 

The only difference is that Lawrence recognises that evil is as necessary as goodness and that we ultimately need witchcraft as a power of malevolence in order to destroy "a rotten, false humanity" that wallows in its own idealism and phallocratic stupidity.   

Note: for quotes from DHL see Studies in Classic American Literature, CUP, 2003, pp. 89 and 93.

On Taking Flight

Scott Fitzgerald was right about at least one thing: a clean break is something you can never return from as it effectively abolishes the past. And to flee, I would suggest, is to endeavour to make a break of this kind; to leap like a demon from one world into another.

Unfortunately, a lot of people don't seem to understand this idea very well and so fail to value it very highly. They mistakenly believe, as Deleuze points out, that fleeing is a cowardly avoidance of commitments and responsibilities, or marks some sort of retreat into a fantasy life. 

But nothing could be further from the truth and, ultimately, nothing is more active than flight. Furthermore, despite what the good people say, it also takes courage to paint your wagon rather than accept the comforts of home. 

It should be understood, however, that nothing I have just written necessitates travelling to faraway lands, or even having to move: lines of flight involve journeys in intensity and, if you know how, you can run even when standing still.

There's simply no point in heading for a tropical paradise if you are going to be yourself when you get there. And yet leaving your job, your car, and even your friends and family behind, is far easier than abandoning one's own precious ego and losing or escaping from the face.        

On Therianthropes and Furverts

If we ignore the genetic possibilities that are beginning to present themselves, we are left with only two options in our quest to transplant man back into nature and become-animal. 

The first is to experiment with the molecular bestiality outlined in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari which is conducted at the level of forces rather than form, but which is nevertheless a real procedure which has nothing to do with fantasy (even if it's very often tied to literature).

The second, is to continue at the molar level to investigate possibilities of animal transformation subscribed to by those for whom metamorphosis is crucial. For many pagans, for example, this idea is central within the magical world of shamanic religious practise; whilst for many fetishists, costumed pet-play is a popular niche activity within the erotic arena. 

If, in the former realm the sexual element is sometimes played down in order that the spiritual aspect can be emphasized, nevertheless in both these worlds we find people who like to dress up and imitate animal behaviour, often in a heavily stylized and ritualistic manner.

Whatever we might think of this acting out, the key is it seems to enable participants to temporarily escape from the confines of their humanity - and, indeed, their underwear; metamorphosis seems to be a sweaty and somewhat uncomfortable process that invariably involves the violent discarding of clothes at some point.

To transform into an animal is thus not only liberating in that it allows one to live momentarily without bad conscience and to do things that are normally forbidden or frowned upon, but it promises also an altered state of being. Thus some therianthropes take animal transformation very seriously indeed, insisting that they genuinely possess the spirit or soul of an animal and that shape-shifting is far more than a type of role-play.

For me, I have to say, it all gets a bit much. And if, on the one hand, I admire the courage and mania of those who travel to the very limit of what it is to be human and defiantly declare themselves to be beasts, on the other hand I can do without the asceticism and judgemental snobbery of those therianthropes who regard other members of the furry community as frivolous sexual deviants lacking in respect for the animals they like to dress up as. 

When push comes to shove, I'd sooner hang about with those individuals content to make animal noises in the bedroom, rather than those who howl at the moon. That is to say, I prefer those with zoosexual tastes rather than occult leanings; furverts rather than therianthropes. 

Proposition 7

Wovon man nicht spechen kann, 

darüber muß man schweigen 

 

Many years ago, when I used to be harangued on a weekly basis at a pub in Chiswick by an ardent  Wittgensteinian, I used to believe that the aphoristic-sounding proposition 7 of the Tractatus was profoundly true. If any logical tautology came close to the beauty of poetry, this was surely it.

But now I feel very differently and I view proposition 7 as a religious prohibition which is no more subtle than a hand placed over the mouth. Wittgenstein attempted not only to close his own work with this line, but shut down any further philosophical investigation into the manifest 'mystery' of the world. 

In other words, like Kant before him, Wittgenstein sought to preserve a space for faith. As Ray Brassier argues, his attempt to identify and enforce the limits of language and knowledge is ultimately nothing more than a thinly veiled exaltation of mystico-religious illumination over conceptual rationality.

Like Heidegger, that other great crypto-theologian of twentieth century philosophy, Wittgenstein makes so much unthinkable, unspeakable, unquestionable, and hence unanswerable - except to those who receive divine inspiration in such matters - that we can read proposition 7 as no more than a succinct rephrasing of something found in an ancient Hebrew text, the Wisdom of Sirach:  

Do not seek knowledge of the sublime; do not look into things that are hidden from you and are not of your concern; pay heed only to that which is taught unto you by the law-givers.  

- Sirach 3: 21-2 

 

The Human Body Does Not Exist

Chelsea Charms (2009) 

I have been thinking again of Marc Quinn's sculptures of individuals who have magnificently transformed their flesh, their sex, and their humanity via techniques including plastic surgery, hormone treatment, and cosmetic enhancement (tattooing, piercing, skin bleaching, etc). 

If fascinating and rather beautiful as neo-classical objects - particularly those worked in marble of Thomas Beatie and Chelsea Charms - they nevertheless fail to amaze as much as the real bodies upon which they're based. Ultimately, those who have turned themselves into living works of art have little need for statues to be erected in their honour.

That said, Quinn's work nevertheless succeeds in obliging the viewer to consider important questions not simply to do with biology, gender, and sexual artifice, but also celebrity and race: the Michael Jackson pieces, for example, remind us that he was the first truly transracial as well as transsexual superstar - "better able even than Christ to reign over the world and reconcile its contradictions", as Baudrillard put it.

Perhaps understandably, Quinn was keen at the time of his exhibition (SS 2010) that it not be thought of as simply a postmodern freak show. But surely it was the physical abnormality and inherent queerness of his subjects that prompted Quinn to ask them to pose in the first place and Catman, Dennis Avner, now sadly deceased, happily worked within this tradition as a performer.

For me, the only illegitimate response came from those who insisted that the point of Quinn's exhibition was to show that, despite everything, we're all the same under the skin.