Wuthering Heights

No coward soul is mine / No trembler in the world's storm-startled sphere

"We're a long way from Wuthering Heights," as Michel Houellebecq rightly points out. Nevertheless, it remains one of the few truly great works of fiction and continues to implicate its readers in what Bataille calls the crime of literature and by which he refers to the fact that writing has a complicity with evil. For what literature reveals is the possibility of a form of sovereignty that does not negate or exclude morality, but which demands a hyper-morality existing beyond biblical injunction. 

What Charlotte regrets as the immature and immoderate faults in her sister Emily's novel are in fact what lend it such savage beauty and potency. And what is so admirable about the younger sister is that she has the courage to allow the demon to speak directly in her poetry and prose; Charlotte prefers to gently but firmly place her hand over the demon's mouth so that she may at all times speak for him. 

Thus Charlotte, when editing the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, not only changes the paragraphing and punctuation in an attempt to regularize Emily's idiosyncratic style, she also seeks to impose an element of contrived and conventional humanity into the work at the expense of that which is uniquely and diabolically inspired.  

Thankfully, the perversity, the cruelty, the madness, and the morbidity that characterize the novel continue to shine through and Wuthering Heights remains one of those books that readers weary of the narrow limitations imposed by moral or literary convention (not to mention interfering siblings) will continue to find of much value. Emily's understanding of love - based not on worldly personal experience, but impersonal inner intensity - not only linked sex to death, but suggested that each of these contained the essential truth of the other. Her novel thus illustrates the basic premise underlying authors such as Sade and Bataille: eroticism is the affirmation of life all the way to its fatal conclusion.

It is this disconcerting truth that lies at the heart of Wuthering Heights and which gives it an affinity with the great works of Greek tragedy; all of which ultimately concern the violation of the Law (be it divine, human, or natural in origin). Emily dreams of a sacred and transgressive form of violence via which lovers might regain paradise (or childhood innocence). If this was promised by Romantic literature in general, it is Wuthering Heights which most powerfully shows us the full horror of atonement and the tragic character of life (it bleeds, it suffers, it dies, it returns). This may not make it a holy book in a religious sense, but it certainly makes it a great work of art.

Should We Lose the Lads' Mags?

When the defenders of so-called lads' mags argue that there is nothing wrong or shameful about the naked female form, you know they are either willfully misunderstanding the arguments made against pornography, or that they are morons. 

Personally, I tend to think that they are cynical and slimy rather than stupid. Thus they know perfectly well that the objection of feminists like Kat Banyard is not to female flesh per se, but to the sexual objectification and exploitation of female flesh.  

And they understand - as we all understand - how the young girls who model in such magazines are obliged to adopt a familiar series of poses and display their nakedness within a recognizable erotic environment. Reclining bodies on a bed, or bodies crawling around on all fours sticking out parts for penetration are not simply unclothed. They are, rather, naked for a purpose within a context of meaning and they don't so much expose the flesh as promote its desirability and advertise its availability as a commodity.

This doesn't mean I automatically lend support to the UK Feminista and Object campaign to "lose the lads' mags" from the shelves of supermarkets, but it does mean that there remains an important debate to be had on the intimate relationship between pornography, sexism and capital. 

Arguably, porn has always been the secretly privileged discourse of bourgeois society ...

 

Necrophilia

www.hotdog.hu

The eroticised encounter with death is not something that many persons actively seek out. And those who do enjoy romancing corpses mostly do so in silence. And secrecy. And shame. Necrophilia remains one of the very few forms of love that still daren't speak its name and which hasn't been co-opted by mainstream society or made chic within the media.

The relationship between sex and death is, however, extremely intimate and long established and eroticism would be a fairly insipid state of affairs if this were not the case. For as Bataille points out, it is the latter that ensures the power of the former and only in conjunction do they constitute the tragedy of human existence. 

What do those who love long hair and sharp nails imagine excites them after all?

Orientalism

Even after Edward Said, I still can't help dreaming of the Orient: that radiant and mysterious utopia uncompromised by real geographical and historical determinants, which promises a degree of innocence and forgetfulness impossible in a Western world which one knows and is fatefully known by.

It is precisely the possibility of becoming-imperceptible via the donning of a kimono and submission to an alien sensibility which so seduces. The dream, says Barthes, is to undo our reality until everything Occidental in us totters and we can see the world with narrowed eyes. 

Prince Philip seemed to understand this when visiting China and speaking to some English students, but thought it was something to warn against. 

Phallic Tenderness

In the Classical world, the preferred size of the penis was small and delicate. The god Priapus, with his grotesquely large and ever-erect member, was regarded with mirth, not envy, and, arguably, the modern obsession with size and the desire to attain a longer, thicker, harder penis in line with the pornographic ideal is simply another sign of barbarism.

Of course, we all like to feel a penis rise against us with "silent amazing force and assertion" and to quiver as it enters into our softly-opened bodies with strange and terrible potency; penetrating with "the dark thrust of peace and a ponderous, primordial tenderness, such as made the world". But, like Connie, so too do we cherish the post-coital penis as it withdraws and returns to its flaccid and rather frail condition, with bud-like beauty and reticence.
 
See: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (CUP, 1993), pp. 173, 174. 

  

Crash (Towards a New Economy of Bodies and their Pleasures)

Nadja Auermann by Helmut Newton

I understand, philosophically, the attraction for scar tissue, amputation, and prosthetic limbs and how some are aroused by the prospect of bone, flesh, and metal forming an intimate alliance in a cyborg future.

And I would lend my support to those who - either from necessity or boredom - dream of morbid new sexualities, in which perverse pleasures and mutilated forms of beauty become possible for the first time; pleasures and forms unknown and unimaginable to the able-bodied and regular-featured who have been preserved by fate into normalized good health and a fully functioning organism.

To speak of such will require a new type of language, combining the clinical, the poetic, and the pornographic. Ballard calls it the language of invisible eroticisms and attempts to articulate the first terms in his brilliant novel Crash. 

The beautiful thing about this work is that it helps us transcend feelings of disgust, shame, or guilt and move beyond a crippling identification of ourselves with genital sexuality. It anticipates the emergence of new erogenous zones all over the body and characterizes vaginal and anal coition as forms of nostalgia. 

Is it really so immoral or unnatural to to want to find a new use for old organs? I don't think so. And it's rather a sweet thought, is it not, that we might find an air vent as inviting as the warmest organic orifice?   

There's a Whip in My Valise

The English Vice refers to the many varieties of corporal punishment practised in the bedroom, from spanking to flagellation. It's nice to see the buttocks of a loved one glow red like a sunset and it can be pleasurable to feel the sharp sting of the lash oneself. 

But as forms of sensual discipline such practices do more than simply give joy. For if carried out with genuine passion and erotic seriousness, then chastisement establishes a circuit of polarized communication which can result in a powerful flash of interchange between parties. Indeed, it might almost be regarded as a natural form of coition resulting in a violent readjustment between lovers and allowing, like a thunderstorm, for a sense of newness afterwards. 

Although idealists may not like to admit the fact, corporal punishment is a vital necessity because we do not live by kindness, kisses and cuddles alone: As long as a man has a bottom, says Lawrence, he must surely be whipped.

Life is Ugly in Flip-Flops

It's a hot summer and many young women have taken to wearing flip-flops, which is a shame, as they can make even the prettiest feet look flat, tired and unattractive.

It's not the bareness of the feet that's the problem. In fact, completely bare feet would be preferable (though, obviously, not as preferable as feet in a pair of shoes by Christian Louboutin provocatively displaying a little toe cleavage and magically elevating even quite ordinary plates into the realm of the fabulous). 

It's the politics of wearing flip-flops (not to mention the childishly onomatopoeic name itself) that so depresses; the wearers have not only surrendered to the heat and to primitivism, but they have placed comfort and convenience before style and elegance. They have become casualties of casual culture (i.e. universal dishevelment).

       

When you wear flip-flops, you not only announce a lack of pride in your own appearance, but also in a long and noble tradition of European craftsmanship. 

On the Transsexual Consummation of Foot-Fetishism

Illustration by John Bakerman on deviantart.com

Podophilia is apparently the most common form of fetish. And that's understandable: for what man doesn't - to a greater or lesser degree - desire to touch, kiss, or in some manner modify the feet of his beloved? 

(This modification might involve the simple joy of painting toe nails, or the rather more complex procedure of binding that the Chinese practised for many centuries in an attempt to cultivate the golden lotus.)

Clearly, therefore, podophilia very often has an aesthetic component. But it's not always about sex. Indeed, many a masochist wishes for nothing more than to find suprasensual satisfaction at the feet of a woman in submission, with no expectation or desire for a happy ending. We see this illustrated in Lawrence's novella The Ladybird. 

Returning home after having been badly injured at the front during the Great War, Basil greets his wife, Daphne, with a mixture of nervousness and a will to worship:

"He suddenly knelt at her feet, and kissed the toe of her slipper, and kissed the instep, and kissed the ankle in the thin black stocking. 

      ... 'I knew if I had to kneel, it was before you. I knew you were divine ... I knew I was your slave. I knew. It has all been just a long initiation. I had to learn how to worship you.'

      He kissed her feet again and again, without the slightest self-consciousness, or the slightest misgiving. Then he went back to the sofa, and sat there looking at her, saying:

      'It isn't love, it is worship. Love between me and you will be a sacrament, Daphne. That's what I had to learn. You are beyond me. A mystery to me. My God, how great it all is. How marvellous!'"

- D. H. Lawrence, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (CUP, 1992), p. 193.

Naturally enough, Daphne was a little frightened and somewhat horrified by this declaration. But she was also a little thrilled and flattered and "really felt she could glow white and fill the universe like the moon", inflated with the grandeur of her own pale power over the man who adored her rather than just amorously desired her. She was ready to assume the pedestal upon which he wished to place her and accept him as her devotee.

But of course, this comes at a price: Daphne gains a worshipper, but loses a husband. For eventually Basil's interest in her as a flesh-and-blood woman fades; the excitement of physical desire leaves him just as he imagines himself closer to her than ever, spiritually speaking. 

Ultimately, you can't fuck the one you idealise; to even think of doing so becomes a kind of desecration. And that's the great danger or the transsexual consummation of fetishism, depending on how you view these things.

Two Postcards from Catalonia

Blanes

How queer it is in February -

the snow-still month of my birth -

to stroll beneath the orange trees

and through the cactus groves

whilst the souls of Spanish sailors

fly overhead and far out to sea

in search of little fish.

Sitges

Black rocks
housing cats with sea-spray on their whiskers
and forming catwalks for homosexual lovers
strolling hand-in-hand.

Sex on the Beach

Many people seem to be excited by the thought of sex on the beach, despite the gritty reality of sand. But considerably fewer people desire to have sex with the beach.

And yet, the latter seems infinitely more pleasurable and full of possibility than having to penetrate another human body with all the usual built-in features: the same limbs, the same organs, the same expectations and responses. How dreary even love becomes when it never flickers or wavers or changes and becomes a mechanical exercise in pure repetition: in-out, in-out and shake it all about. If that's what sex is all about then, frankly, it's hardly worth the effort.

But, of course, sex needn't be so limited and repetitive: so human, all-too-human. It can become bestial, or object-oriented, elemental or even cosmic in character. I know of a woman, for example, who took the sun as a lover. And in The Trespasser, Lawrence describes with all his usual perverse brilliance the inhuman and purifying erotics of sun, sea, and sand.

Although ostensibly on a short holiday on the Isle of Wight with his young mistress in order that they might spend some time together and momentarily forget about his domestic entanglements, Siegmund seems to get more satisfaction from the beach than he does from the body of Helena. One day, whilst the latter frolics in the waves, Siegmund swims off to explore a tiny hidden bay, inaccessible from the land:

"He waded out of the green, cold water  ... Throwing himself down on the sand ... he lay glistening wet ... The sand was warm to his breast and and his belly and his arms. It was like a great body he cleaved to. Almost, he fancied, he felt it heaving under him in its breathing. Then he turned his face to the sun, and laughed. All the while, he hugged the warm body of the sea-bay beneath him. He spread his hands upon the sand: he took it in handfuls, and let it run smooth, warm, delightful, through his fingers.
      ... And he laid his hands again on the warm body of the shore, let them wander, discovering, gathering all the warmth, the softness, the strange wonder of smooth, warm pebbles, then shrinking from the deep weight of cold his hand encountered as he burrowed under the surface, wrist-deep. In the end, he found the cold mystery of the deep sand also thrilling. He pushed in his hands again and deeper, enjoying the almost hurt of the dark, heavy coldness. For the sun and the white flower of the bay were breathing and kissing him dry ... holding him in their warm concave, like a bee in a flower ...
      Siegmund lay and clasped the sand and tossed it in handfuls till over him he was all hot and cloyed. Then he rose and looked at himself and laughed ... and began to rub himself free of the clogging sand. He found himself strangely dry and smooth. He tossed more dry sand, and more, over himself ... Soon his body was dry and warm and smooth ... his body was full of delight and his hands glad with the touch of himself. He wanted himself clean. ... He went painfully over the pebbles till he found himself on the smooth rock bottom. Then he soused himself, and shook his head in the water, and washed and splashed and rubbed himself with his hands assiduously. ... It was the purification. ... He felt as if all the dirt of misery were soaked out of him ... So white and sweet and tissue-clean he felt, full of lightness and grace."

- D. H. Lawrence, The Trespasser, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield, (CUP, 1981), pp. 88-89.

When was the last time you felt like that after a quick fuck on the beach with some local picked up in a bar? 

Aux armes et caetera

 Photo of Serge Gainsbourg by Jean-Jacques Bernier (1985)

Allons enfants de la Patrie / Le jour de gloire est arrivé! 

It's Bastille Day - one of the few dates in history genuinely worth celebrating.

I pretty much love all things French: the wine, the women, the food, the literature, the philosophy, the fashion, the music, the arrogance, the joie de vivre and the je ne sais quoi. But most of all I love Serge Gainsbourg who, somewhat ironically, most beautifully and brilliantly embodied the very essence of France and the spirit of 1789.

And perhaps my favourite Gainsbourg story (amongst several possible contenders) concerns his reggaefied version of the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, which so outraged and disgusted the paramilitary forces of the French far-right. It was an obvious provocation, with affinities to both the Jimi Hendrix version of The Star Spangled Banner and the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen and there were calls made for Gainsbourg to be stripped of his citizenship. 

Events came to a head when Gainsbourg went on tour with his Jamaican musicians to promote his new album, Aux Armes Et Caetera (1979). In Strasbourg, an ex-paratrooper presented the mayor with a petition demanding that the show be cancelled and threatening violence if it went ahead. 

Despite this - and in courageous defiance of the forces of reaction and racism - Serge took to the stage, alone, and sang the anthem in its original version, much to the confusion and consternation of those in the crowd who had come to disrupt proceedings, before walking off with a gesture of 'Fuck you!'

Two years afterwards, just to ensure he would have the final word in the affair, Gainsbourg purchased the original manuscript of La Marseillaise by Rouget de Lisle. It almost bankrupted him to do so, he said, but it was a question of honour.

Vive la France! Vive la Revolution! Et vive Gainsbourg! 

A Short Sermon on Anti-theism

The creeping religiosity of everyday life here in the UK - not to mention the appalling acts of violent atrocity carried out by the faithful all over the world - means that it unfortunately becomes necessary to voice a view on the subject. 

And so, for the record, my view is this:

(1) All the world's major religions wholly and often wilfully misrepresent the origins of the cosmos and of life on earth. Where they don't get things wrong due to the ignorance of their founders and prophets, they lie due to the desire of their priests and spiritual leaders to keep everyone else ignorant. 

(2) All the world's major religions are based upon anthropomorphic conceit and human arrogance and yet they all aim to make men, women and children subservient and fearful.

(3) All the world's major religions are forms of cruelty that exercise power over the mind by punishing and torturing the flesh via practices that include sexual repression, blood sacrifice, and genital mutilation.   

(4) All the world's major religions are nihilistic death cults that fantasise and call for the end of the world so that they might then establish a reign of saints and zombies afterlife, or achieve a state of total non-being. 

(5) Inasmuch as points 1-4 are true - and it seems to me that they are irrefutable - then we might legitimately conclude that all the world's major religions (and not just the monotheisms of Abrahamic origin) are forms of violent psychosis, or a hatred of the real. 

Thus, in my view, it is not sufficient to declare oneself agnostic on the question of religion, although, obviously, it is always preferable that an individual honestly admits their ignorance, rather than absurdly claim to know God's will. Nor is it enough, today, to simply call oneself an atheist: one has to actively declare an interest and take up the challenge by affirming nothing short of anti-theism in the courageous manner of Christopher Hitchens, for example, who wrote:

"I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effects of religious belief, is positively harmful."

- Letters to a Young Contrarian, (2001)

Like Hitchens, I think religion poisons everything and has been the one great curse upon mankind. If I could, I'd happily tear down every church, mosque, synagogue, temple, shrine or holy place and build schools, science museums, libraries, observatories, art galleries, theatres, gymnasia, dance academies and botanical gardens on the sites.  

As I am unable to do so, however, I simply encourage everyone to keep reading, keep thinking, keep laughing, and keep challenging all those who would establish earthly authority in the name of heavenly power.

On the Stuttering of Language

I recently had an interesting and enjoyable evening at Europe House, where bilingual Spanish/English writers Isabel del Rio and Susana Medina were discussing their work and promoting new books.

Both women seemed keen to advance the idea that by writing in two languages simultaneously they were evolving a new literary genre that was beyond simple translation. Although their argument was coherent and their experimental practice of writing in the space between different cultures perfectly commendable, I'm afraid I wasn't convinced that anything radically new was on offer.  

In fact, I agree with Deleuze that great writers always and already inhabit their native languages like foreign agents and bring writing to a crisis in some manner by carving out a nonpreexistent language within their own tongue:

"This is not a situation of bilingualism or multilingualism. We can easily conceive of two languages mixing with each other, with incessant transitions from one to the other; yet each of them nonetheless remains a homogeneous system in equilibrium, and their mixing takes place in speech. But this is not how great authors proceed ... they do not mix two languages together, not even a minor language and a major language .... What they do, rather, is invent a minor use of the major language within which they express themselves ... They are great writers by virtue of this minorization: they make the language take flight ... ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium .... They make the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur."

- Gilles Deleuze, 'He Stuttered', Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael E. Greco, (Verso, 1998), pp. 109-10. 

Language Death

 Language Death, by Orooo on deviantart.com

Is English just a language like any other? 

I don't think so: rather, it seems to me that English is a kind of monstrous metalanguage. Even we might think of it as a kind of voracious black hole into which other tongues collapse and die, leaving behind a few words like seeds, which will blossom as part of an ever-expanding global English or übertongue.

And this is why English-speakers are notoriously monolingual: for they already speak every other language under the sun. 

  

Dr Bayard's Cough Drops

Some of the things that make happiest in life are small and inexpensive pleasures carried forward from and reminiscent of childhood. Such as a bag of sweets. 

The very names are often enough to trigger delight: black jacks, sherbet pips, kola cubes, love hearts, lemon bonbons, strawberry bonbons, pear drops, glacier mints, jelly tots, wine gums, humbugs ... the list is a long and delirious one of lip-smacking, gob-stopping wonder. 

Heaven, it seems, is sugar-rich and full of artificial colours.  

But these days, having succumbed to middle-age, I must almost shamefully confess that my confectionery of choice happens to be a very smooth aniseed-flavoured cough drop invented by a French physician in 1949 and still made to his original secret recipe at a factory in Portugal. 

Recommended by pharmacists the world over, Dr Bayard's cough drops are more than just medicinal wonders; they are also - like Ferrero Rocher - a welcome addition to any social occasion. Or so we are told by the manufacturers in their rather charming attempt at English: "Even in a friends gathering they're always a success!" 

If they lack the anarchic and childlike character of the best of British sweets and trade instead on grown-up bourgeois credentials, they remain eccentric enough in a European manner to make one smile and delicious enough to ensure I keep sucking them. I do worry though that I'm on a slippery slope towards Werther's Originals.

Storming the Angel-Guarded Gates

There has been such a long and intimate relation between philosophy and anal sex that one might almost wonder if there isn't some level of causality involved; does the perverse love of wisdom result of necessity in a desire for the apples of Sodom?

What even those who shy away from such a conclusion cannot deny is that the history of the former might easily be conceived in terms of the latter, as happily confessed by Deleuze, who tells us that his own early method of doing philosophy involved the taking of an author from behind and in this way producing monstrous offspring.
 

D. H. Lawrence also values the anus as a site of libidinal and philosophical experimentation. Indeed, he boldly suggests that it might provide a gateway to paradise and several of his novels contain scenes in which buggery is promoted as a way of overcoming organic shame and rediscovering a kind of bestial innocence.  

It requires a cock in the arse, decides Connie, even to purify and quicken the mind.

We Belong to our Bacteria

Thanks to recent discoveries in microbiology, it is now known that we are composed of 90% bacteria. Thus, in cellular terms, we are just 10% human. 

This means we are not quite the self-contained, self-sufficient individuals made in the image of God that we pride ourselves on being. Rather, we are germ collectives and might do best to think of our bodies as elaborate vessels specially evolved for the growth and spread of our bacterial inhabitants, rather than designed to house an immortal soul.      

For creationists and other believers in human uniqueness, this must surely be a challenge to their faith. It was tricky enough when they simply had our genetic closeness to apes and a single common ancestor to contend with. Now they have to deny - or explain - the presence of 100 trillion bacteria, on our skin, in our mouths and intestines, or swimming across the surface of our eyes, many of which serve in the vital business of sustaining our life, but some of which, given half-a-chance, will kill us.

Have pathogens also been designed by a loving God? It's unlikely.

And so it's probably best if we put aside the bible and forget notions of intelligent design. Even we might finally decide to abandon the idea of Almighty God and learn to love our bodies in all their alien complexity: I, for one, welcome our microbial overlords.

Even the Dead Don't Rest in Peace

Georges Bataille was not mistaken when he spoke of death as a shipwreck into the nauseous and repeatedly emphasized the excremental nature of the corpse which, thanks to putrefaction, rapidly dissolves into noxious base matter. 

First to go, as home to the greatest number of bacteria, are the digestive organs and the lungs. The brain also soon liquifies, as it is nice and soft and easy to digest. The massively expanding numbers of bacteria in the mouth chew through the palate and transform grey matter into goo. Quite literally, it runs out of the ears and bubbles like snot from the nose; in this manner, we're all destined to lose our minds. 

After three or four weeks, all of the internal organs will have become soup. Muscle tissue is frequently eaten not only by bacteria, but also by carnivorous beetles. Sometimes the skin gets consumed as well, sometimes not. Depending on the weather and other environmental conditions, it might just dry out and naturally mummify. Whatever remains, however, will be obliged to lie in a stinking pool of organic filth, or a coffin full of shit. 

Burial might serve to prolong the process of decomposition, but it certainly doesn't prevent it or delay it indefinitely. As Mary Roach in her amusing study, Stiff (2003), writes: "Eventually any meat, regardless of what you do to it, will whither and go off." Only the skeletal structure beneath the soft pathology of the flesh will last for any significant period of time. But bones too - just like laws and monuments - are ultimately destined to crumble into dust.

Thus we have little real choice but to accept the biological fact that life dies. But is this the end of the story? No. The truth is, we never stop dying because, in a material, non-personal, inhuman manner, we never stop living. In other words, it's mistaken to confuse our individual death with non-being.

"Is it because we want to believe in the loyalty of our substance that we make this peculiar equation?" asks Nick Land.* Probably the answer to this is yes. But it's a somewhat shameful answer. 

For whether we like to believe it or not, matter is always struggling to escape essence and to abandon complex existence; always seeking to return to a state of inanimate and blissful simplicity. Our bodies have no allegiance to life and do not seek to stave off disintegration or shut out death. They grow into the embrace of the latter (we term this ageing) and our mass of atoms enjoy a veritable orgy of delight after having broken free from their temporary entrapment in life.

Unfortunately for them, they don't get to enjoy their freedom for long. For death proves to be but a "temporary refreshment ... before the rush back into the compulsive dissipation of life".* Which is to say, atoms are so vigorously recycled at death that they don't ever get to rest in peace. 

It further means that we, the living, all house and reincarnate the carbon atoms of the departed and in this way the souls of the dead might be said to re-enter and pervade the souls of the living. Thanks to the conservation of mass, we can legitimately declare ourselves to be 'all the names in history'.    

* See: Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992), p. 180. 

Lesbophobia

There's an astonishing exchange in Chapter XIV of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, in which Mellors reveals to Connie the short and unhappy history of his relationships with women, beginning with a schoolmaster's daughter who was pretty and romantic, but sexless; and ending with Bertha Coutts, his wife, who enjoyed sex, but could only achieve orgasm by grinding her own coffee. 

Mellors is contemptuous of the first type; the idealistic women who love everything about love, except  fucking. But it is the latter type whom he really hates and seems to fear; the active type like Bertha, that like to bring themselves off by wriggling and shouting and clutching at themselves. These women, says Mellors, who dare to seek clitoral stimulation and require more than vaginal penetration by the penis in order to come, are mostly lesbian:

"'And do you mind?' asked Connie.

'I could kill them. When I'm with a woman who's really lesbian, I fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her.'

'But do you think lesbian women are any worse than homosexual men?'  

'I do! Because I've suffered more from them. In the abstract, I've no idea. When I get with a lesbian woman, whether she knows she's one or not, I see red.'"

- D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (CUP, 1993), p. 203. 

This passage - one that has long troubled and rightly angered many female readers and critics of Lawrence - demonstrates why we are justified in using the term lesbophobia as something distinct from the more commonly theorized phenomenon of homophobia. 

Clearly, there is an added component of sexism in lesbophobia and, indeed, a violent element of misogyny. I think the only admirable thing about this passage is that it doesn't seek to disguise the latter. Rather, it explicitly demonstrates how quickly misogyny turns murderous. 

Sadly - shamefully - lesbophobia seems to be something that is increasing in our society; or, at any rate, something that it is increasingly OK to articulate. The fact that many gay men and straight women are also guilty of directing abuse or acting in a prejudicial and discriminatory manner towards lesbians is doubly sad and shameful.

Thankfully, this is not Southern Africa and we do not witness the horror of corrective rape in the UK. But such vile hate crime flourishes when good people do and say nothing. Or when writers and intellectuals who should know better, appear to aggressively enforce heteronormative values and condone the gang rape and murder of women who don't wish to submit to male sexual power and phallic authority (women who want none of that). 

On Intuition

Intuition Card, by Linnea Vedder Shults (2009)

Last night, in discussion with an old musician and a young neuroscientist, the question arose of intuition.

Intuition, of course, is the favourite faculty of those who like to denigrate reason and act in accordance with what they believe to be an unmediated and direct perception of reality. For such people, knowledge is non-inferential and is mysteriously circulated in the blood, or located in the gut. They speak of inner wisdom and the unconscious. Sometimes they speak also of hearing voices and exercising psychic abilities. 

The young neuroscientist, Ms Camargo, whilst not wanting to abandon the idea of intuition as an untenable piece of folk psychology, was nevertheless far more comfortable speaking about the brain and physiological processes rather than soul, spirit, or other spooky stuff.

The old musician, however, Mr Van Hooke, was a convinced believer in spiritual powers and spoke not only of intuition, but also inspiration, originality, and creative genius for good measure. Indeed, such was his conviction that he seemed genuinely shocked and outraged when I mildly suggested that such notions might at the very least be open to interrogation. 

As, unfortunately, I didn't get the opportunity to explain to him my concerns with the superstitious notion of intuition on the night, I'd like to do so now.

  

For me, the common understanding of the mind is profoundly mistaken and once we develop a more accurate and non-metaphysical account, then popular notions like intuition and desire will prove to be as untenable as belief in the promptings of demons. At best, intuition is simply the retrieval of a memory.

Of course, I appreciate that we feel certain things strongly and that introspective or experiential evidence can seem very convincing. But can we trust it or assume it to be true? If it turns out to be as determined by society and culture as we now know our perception of the world to be, then it's likely that what we naturally intuit or instinctively feel to be the case is largely determined by doxa (i.e. received opinion expressed in a language based on agreed rules of grammar, syntax, and stereotype). 

Thus it's not coincidental that we understand what our inner voice tells us, because it conveniently speaks in sentences with a linguistic compositional structure that we recognise. However, as Patricia Churchland argues, it's extremely unlikely we're going to find anything that even remotely resembles the alphabet inside the structure of actual brains.

Mr Van Hooke, like many other people, passionately wants to defend the folk psychology with which he is so familiar and comfortable. And, to be fair, it has provided a very successful model of mental processes. But, as a philosopher, I'm aware that the success of a theory is no guarantee that it legitimately represents reality. Even attractive theories - of vitalism, for example - have to be laid to rest at some point in the name of intellectual integrity.

Eliminative materialism has unsettling consequences and I'm not pretending otherwise; not just for our conception of the mind, but for many other aspects of human activity. As Jerry Fodor once famously declared: "If commonsense psychology were to collapse, that would be, beyond comparison, the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of our species ..."

True, but so what? This doesn't constitute an argument against the naturalization of the mind, a task which demands and deserves to be accomplished, whatever the consequences. And who knows, perhaps out of such a catastrophe something good will come - that's my hunch anyway.

The Laugh of the Medusa

If you only dare to look at the Medusa face-to-face, you'll see she's not homicidal. 

She's beautiful and she's laughing.

The Laugh of the Medusa still echoes with many sympathetic readers concerned to ensure that the feminine is neither marginalised nor trivialised within the space of literature and the world of politics.

And it continues to resonate with those of us interested in a practice of writing that is above all else joyful. In which, as Roland Barthes says, everything is under assault and begins to come apart; in which language is a powerful flow of words that carries us away from old certainties and habits of thought and speech. 

It's nice to remember that you don't have to angry to be militant and that you don't have to be militant to be radical; that revolution is only ever a smile away and does not necessitate the turning of warm flesh into cold stone, or the hardening of hearts. 

In Defense of Vanilla

I'm so tired of hearing people use the term vanilla to deride those things, those acts, those people they think of as boring, conventional, unimaginative, and unadventurous. Particularly, when, as is usually the case, this is a judgement made within a sexual context. 

It's not merely that this shows a vulgar lack of appreciation for what is actually one of the most precious and sophisticated of spices - lacking in flavour only to those who lack subtlety of taste - but I suspect there's an underlying misogyny here too; in particular, an all-too-common hatred of female genitalia.

For not only does vanilla have a complex and seductive bouquet like the vagina (delicate, yet overpowering), but the word itself is of course the diminutive form of the latter.

Those individuals who enjoy other scents, other tastes, other points of entry to the human body are at perfect liberty to do so as far as I'm concerned - but, seriously, we can all do without kinky condescension and eurotophobia.  

The Bluebird

A bird came down the walk - he did not know I saw - 

he bit a little worm in half and ate the fellow, raw.

I like the colour blue: apart from navy blue, obviously. I also like most birds and yet I've woken up today with an intense dislike for the bluebird. 

Not the actual creature, but the symbol of hope and happiness who flies over rainbows and white cliffs, optimistically promising peace and freedom; a bird whose wings are so laden with schmaltz I'm surprised it can even get off the ground.

As Christopher Hitchens rightly said, any vision of Utopia is not only founded upon spurious moral sentiment, but is futile and dangerous in the long term. Idealistic ornithologists and songwriters might do well to remember that even the bluebird preys on spiders, grubs and other insects.

Film Kills (2): On Images, Objects and Speculative Realism

In a digital age, the making, distribution, and consumption of images is perhaps our most fundamental activity. It deserves, therefore, to be carefully thought about from a philosophical perspective and, for me, Jean Baudrillard does a better job than most at this. 

For Baudrillard, iconography is not innocent. In fact, it plays a complicit role in what he terms the perfect crime and by which he refers to the extermination of singular being via technological and social processes bent on replacing real things and real people with a series of images and empty signs.

Ironically, in this world of simulacra and simulation the image can no longer even imagine the real, because it has itself become the real: "It is as though things had swallowed their own mirrors and had become transparent to themselves ... full in the light and in real time ... forced to register on thousands of screens" [1] in high definition.

When this happens, we pass beyond representation towards obscenity; a state wherein everything and everyone is "uselessly, needlessly visible, without desire and without effect" [2]. People who indecently expose themselves in this game of cyber-exhibitionism are left without secrets, without shadows, without charm. They become, if you like, ghosts in the machine, forced to confront the possibility that life can no longer be experienced except within the emotional parameters of Facebook. 

But maybe, when everything has finally been put on view, we'll realise that there was nothing to be seen after all. Maybe, those who live by the image will die by the image. And maybe we'll find a way to overcome our own narcissistic and voyeuristic image-fetishism; to smash a great hole in the Universal Screen and experience the wild chaos that lies beyond in the world of objects and actual entities.

Doubtless, this will require a certain innocence on our part and the development of what has been termed speculative realism. That is to say, a philosophy that insists there is more to the world than a play of appearances and that objects have a mind-independent reality; i.e. they exist regardless of whether we are thinking or observing them.

Iconographers and idealists believe there is a permanent correlation between reality and its representation. They become sceptical about anything outside the world of their own making - it is unthinkable, they say, that the unfilmable might exist! And yet, things-in-themselves do exist and there's a mysterious, partly invisible or withdrawn world of such things that constitute a reality that is completely indifferent to our existence and vain attempts to conceptualize it.

Why vain? Because the attempt to visualise and transcendentally guarantee the world in a manner entirely for our own convenience, is fundamentally an attempt to deny reality in all its inhuman and malevolent reality. An image is thus always a kind of anthropocentric conceit, or caricature. That's why a photograph of a horse, for example, is not the same as an actual horse that we might feed sugar lumps to, or be kicked in the head by: "the camera can neither feel the heat of the horse ... nor smell his horsiness", it merely captures "one dreary bit of ... his static external form" [3].

Even at its best, cinema never really encounters the world; it just puts a filmy-imaginative veneer over reality, or what might be described as a "luminous but impoverished plane of explicit awareness" [4].

The good thing is that herein lies hope: for what we learn from this is that the world is inexhaustible and objects virtually indestructible, because essentially unknowable. The image kills - but only partly; it deadens, but does not make dead. And so for all the attempts to dissolve the world and rid it of substance, objects (including human beings) stubbornly refuse to be abstracted away or transmuted into pure light and colour. 

Ultimately, matter returns in all its solidity and menace and the object extracts its revenge.

Notes:

[1] Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 1996), p. 4.

[2] Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner, (Berg, 2005), p. 94.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, (CUP, 1992), pp. 127, 128.

[4] Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, (Zero Books, 2010), p. 112.