Ecce Homo: How One Becomes as Queer as One Is

poetry.rapgenius.com

Written in 1888, Ecce Homo - Nietzsche's intellectual autobiography - wasn't published until 1908. It met with a hostile critical response and was dismissed by many as little more than a testament to the author's incipient madness. Throughout most of the twentieth century it continued to occupy a tenuous position in his works, often being held up as a prime example of both his stylistic strengths and weaknesses. It has only been during recent decades that the text has finally gained the readership and attention that it deserves.

       

Although Ecce Homo provides Nietzsche’s own important if somewhat idiosyncratic summary of his earlier writings, what I like most about this late work is that it is the book in which Nietzsche finally becomes what he always wanted to be: a comedian of the ascetic ideal. Via a mixture of mockery, parody, and paradox, Nietzsche teaches us mistrust of morality and all universal truth claims and he revels in his role as a philosophical joker.

But Nietzsche also concedes that he is a décadent – perhaps the first perfect décadent – and it is this mixture of comic persona with corruption which persuades me that whilst there is something Nietzschean in Oscar Wilde's Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, there is also something outrageously Wildean about Nietzsche and his aphorisms.

Although neither man knew of one another, they were, I think, more than mere contemporaries; they shared a common genius and had a similar ethical, intellectual, and erotic project; namely, the queering of modern European culture or what Nietzsche terms the revaluation of all values. 

       

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche finally throws off all restraint – not from madness, but from the joyful realisation that “life is much too important ever to talk seriously about it”. His final work is an extravagant exercise in style and subversion, combining gay science with elements of camp performance. He not only finally reveals the multifaceted-man that he has become, but, like Wilde, he demonstrates his ability as a writer to sum up “all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram” – even his own. 

And this is why he is so clever and writes such excellent books.

On Voluntary Human Extinction

Rupert Birkin's reassuring fantasy of a posthuman future expressed in Women in Love is a vision that is shared by several groups on the radical fringes of deep ecology whose members believe, like Birkin, that mankind is an obstruction and a hindrance to the future unfolding of evolution and that only man’s self-extinction will allow life to continue perfect and marvellous and non-human.

Foremost amongst such groups is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), who want people to live long, happy, childless lives and then die out peacefully, proud in the knowledge that their own decision not to breed has helped to secure the diversity of life on earth.

The movement was founded in 1991 by Les U. Knight, after he came to a very similar conclusion as Birkin; namely, that the world would be better off without us. He neither dreams of a cataclysmic destruction nor calls for genocide; rather, Knight advocates the voluntary adoption of a non-reproductive future, so that we might first reduce population levels and, eventually, disappear altogether as a species.

According to VHEMT literature, this gradual phasing out of humanity via a programme of universal non-breeding, represents a positive alternative to the continued exploitation and wholesale destruction of the bio-sphere. The myriad plant and animal species currently being pushed towards oblivion due to human activity will be given an evolutionary second chance by this benevolent act of selflessness. Further, once man is no more, as Birkin recognised, countless new life forms will be able to evolve from out of the unknown. Man’s non-existence thus promises to secure not only the present, but also the promise of the future. However, as long as there remains a single breeding pair of homo sapiens then this promise is threatened.

As VHEMT is neither a political party nor organization, it doesn’t have paid-up members. Rather, it simply has ‘supporters’ and ‘volunteers’. The former do not call for man’s extinction, but they accept that the continued rise in the level of human population is unsustainable and that reproduction is therefore irresponsible and unjustifiable at the present time. The latter, meanwhile, do support the VHEMT goal of total human extinction and have fully committed themselves to the dream of a childless future.

Unfortunately for VHEMT volunteers, whilst in some of the wealthier nations fertility rates have fallen below the level needed to sustain population numbers, in other poorer countries numbers continue to increase rapidly and Knight knows in his heart-of-hearts that his non-violent philosophy stands zero chance of popular adoption or success. Mankind, it seems, prefers to remain on its present path towards environmental catastrophe and the sixth species event. Nevertheless, Knight believes voluntary human extinction remains the morally right thing to advocate.

This moral component to Knight’s philosophy is often overlooked by opponents and commentators. Indeed, much of the media reportage on VHEMT has been sensationalist in nature, unfairly depicting it as a sinister suicide cult, despite Knight’s insistence that he and his supporters are not just misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster befalls humanity. Indeed, it might be argued that Knight is actually a type of pessimistic idealist acting in the name of love – even if zero population is an extreme development from the old idea of zero population growth.

Interestingly, when pressed, Knight admits to feeling a sense of sadness when contemplating the prospect of a posthuman world and the passing of a species of such fantastic potential, but which, in his view, has screwed everything up. This rather mournful confession contrasts sharply with Birkin’s sense of jubilation. However, Knight also writes that returning the Earth to its natural prehuman splendour is a happy thought and primarily he wishes to encourage a practice of joy before death, not sorrow.

In order to foster this cheerful approach to human extinction, Knight avoids the use of aggressive rhetoric and seeks to gain new supporters and volunteers via gentle persuasion, coupled to the hard facts concerning human impact upon the biosphere. He doesn’t want people to kill themselves individually in a state of despair, or move collectively towards a violent and terrible end via war, famine, or disease (as seems likely if we continue along the path we’ve chosen). Thus the VHEMT newsletter, These EXIT Times, calmly calls for an end to reproduction.

In other words, the goal is not to abort the human race, so much as prevent its future conception. And if they would like to establish anti-natal clinics, this doesn’t mean they are rabid baby-haters. On the contrary, VHEMT volunteers love babies – but they value young birds, beasts, and plants as much as human offspring. Their argument, in a nut-shell, is this: if life matters at all, then every life matters equally and human presence or non-presence doesn’t determine the ‘blessedness’ of anything. Again, the religious character of the language used here is conspicuous, as it is in Birkin’s speech in Women in Love.

To some people, of course, to equate human life with that of other species is mistaken and offensive. Even Heidegger suggested that human being is uniquely rich in world and has a privileged relationship to Being. Others would assert that the desire for children is the most natural desire of all. Obviously, VHEMT supporters and volunteers would reject such claims and I have to confess that I would also regard any argument that relies upon anthropocentric conceit and/or the language of nature as being highly suspect and in need of careful but relentless deconstruction. VHEMT supporters and volunteers are right to say, after Darwin, that all life forms are ‘netted together’ and that there is no abyss of essence between us and other living beings. They are also right to claim that even if the desire to fuck is a ‘natural instinct’, the desire to procreate is culturally conditioned and enforced.

For just as there is an underlying moralism so too is there is a fierce logic to Knight’s position; a logic that contrasts tellingly with our frenzied consumption of resources and seemingly insane destruction of the natural environment. Knight’s ‘final solution’ might not be one many people will give serious consideration to, but surely most would concede that something has to be done in the face of climate change, loss of habitat diversity, and melting ice caps. Unfortunately, despite what our supermarket retailers tell us, recycling carrier bags and buying their fair trade coffee isn’t going to halt the Holocene extinction event; nor does environmental friendliness and acting locally slow population growth, or reverse global warming.

Activists and politicians who espouse ‘green technologies’ and increased government intervention as the key to saving the planet, are essentially liars or fantasists dreaming of universal harmony when the lion will at last lie down with the lamb. The fact is, we are not going to develop a cosy symbiotic relationship with all God’s creatures when there are ever-more of us demanding to be fed, housed, and accorded our right to shop and fly-drive round an air-conditioned world.

Like it or not, humanity is a walking environmental disaster: a violent and destructive parasite. Quite simply, Birkin was right: we have to go! And if Les Knight had been around to do so, whilst he might not have torpedoed the ark, he would certainly have encouraged Noah and his three sons to have post-flood vasectomies.

Enienay: Fashion Among the Ruins

English fashion designer Nina Davies

(not to be confused with the Canadian performance artist of the same name)

One must always be very grateful to fashion, says Nietzsche, for liberating within those who are subject to its law the energy and goodwill that is often paralysed by negative feelings of anxiety and low self-esteem; i.e. those feelings which are productive of drabness and conformity of appearance. Fashion, in other words, allows the individual to communicate confidence and joy in their own form. 

And so, without wishing to encroach too far onto the kind of territory best covered by the super lovely Nunzia Garoffolo in her smashing blog, Fashion Beyond Fashion, I would nevertheless like to say a few words in praise of the talented design queen of Spitalfields, Nina Davies, and her fashion label Enainay.

In her unique collection of womenswear, Ms Davies recycles and reconstructs old fabrics and abandoned garments into entirely new pieces by draping them round her trusty mannequin and then cutting, pinning, stitching and twisting with a mixture of madness, mockery, and love for all things motley.

She is, if you like, a designer amongst the ruins. By which I mean one who attempts to create something beautiful out of that which others have discarded as worn out or outmoded. Nina realises that because second-hand clothes have no intrinsic significance, any item might attain new meaning and new life by being incorporated into a novel vision of what constitutes elegance.

For those who like sartorial harmony and a wardrobe steeped in classical tradition, there might not be much to admire in her collection of fitted jackets, skirts, dresses and corsets. But for those who want to dress up to mess up and who desire clothes that display wit, warmth, and intelligence - as well as craftsmanship - in every asymmetric line, then I would highly recommend a visit to her shop.           


Enienay, at Seam, 14-16, Market Street, Spitalfields, London, E1. 
Open Mon-Fri 11am-7pm & Sat-Sun 10.30am-6.30pm.
Or visit: www.enienay.com 
 
 

In Praise of Sapphic Decadence

Renée Vivien (1877-1909): The Muse of the Violets

The perverse lesbian was a central figure within decadent literature. An object of endless fascination for writers such as Baudelaire and Swinburne, she might almost be thought of as nothing other than a figure of the male porno-poetic imagination; i.e., a creature of artifice and obscenity shaped by and within desire on the one hand and fear and loathing on the other.    

But perhaps she appears most beautifully - and most controversially - in the work of expatriate English poet and female dandy-bohemian Renée Vivien. 

In Vivien's text, if the lesbian remains a species of fleur du mal very much marked by the misogyny and homophobia that runs through the work of the above male authors, she is, at the same time, radically and paradoxically reconfigured through "a utopian politics of Sapphic revival" and in this way provides a more affirmative and naturalistic (though no less fictional) conception of liberated female sexuality. In other words, "Vivien's decadent Sapphist is a shimmering, negative embodiment of the utopian possibility contained within a modern world in decline".

- See Elisa Glick, Materializing Queer Desire, (SUNY Press, 2009), p. 12.

This negative dialectics which finds value - even hope - in decadence will remind some readers of Adorno and others of Nietzsche. The point is that sickness, corruption, and perversity often serve to advance us as a species and a culture; that we need our decadent individuals (including alcoholic, anorexic, suicidal, sadomasochistic, lesbian poets like Renée Vivien) and not merely those healthy-living normal types who eat breakfast, go to the gym, work hard and preserve the status quo.

Queens of the Wild Frontier

Lady Gaga             Princess Julia             Countess Alex Zapak

Female devotees of art-pop seem to have a fascination with aristocratic society and often assign themselves titles, constituting a false order of privilege, or what Adam Ant memorably described as a new royal family / a wild nobility.

But it might be asked if this ironic act of self-entitlement doesn't also betray a certain contempt for class.

For what we observe here is not simply nostalgia or a reactionary desire to return to a world in which everyone had a place and was expected to know their place, but an anarchic attempt to subvert all systems of hierarchy and caste; to construct a utopia in which breeding counts for nothing, miscegenation is celebrated, and everyone - whatever their origin - is allowed to sprinkle stardust in their hair.

     

Selfies and the Rise of the Look Generation

Early selfie by Anastasia Nikolaevna (1914)

Typically taken with a smart phone or webcam and then posted onto a social media website, the selfie is very much a contemporary phenomenon. 

This is not to say that it is entirely without precedent or lacking history. In fact, human beings have long enjoyed making and circulating photographic images of themselves and selfies have existed in non-digital form ever since the days of the Kodak Box Brownie. Thirteen year-old Anastasia Nikolaevna, for example, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, was one of the first girls to take her own picture, which she then mailed to a friend in 1914.

And so I have no wish to add my voice to those that suggest the selfie is evidence of either the empty narcissism of today's youth, or a sign that they have been pornified and suffer from low self-esteem. I understand the arguments put forward by concerned commentators, but fear that they often collapse into precisely the sort of moral hysteria that greets everything to do with technology, sex, and the play of images.

But what is worth pointing out is how Jean Baudrillard anticipated the rise of the selfie thirty years ago and nicely identified what is unique about this disenchanted form of mannerism, or pose without purpose.

In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Baudrillard discussed what he termed the 'Look Generation' and argued that we were rapidly moving towards a world in which it would be impossible to speak of alienation or inauthenticity; a world in which individuals could no longer hope "to come into existence in and through the eye of the other, for there is no longer a dialectic of identity" [41].

In such a world, everyone is required to make themselves visible as an image, but without worrying too much about being (or even being seen). It's all about the utopia of the look, rather than the empire of the gaze. In proliferating and posting a huge number of self-taken images - including explicit images - Baudrillard doubts there is even any desire to seduce; "for this would require that appearances were carefully worked on, stylized, according to a strategy of diverting the other in order to harness their gaze and lead them into loss" [41].

The selfie is simply saying: I exist, I am here, I am an image, look at me, look, look! This may or may not be a form of narcissism, but what it certainly involves is "exhibition without inhibition, a kind of ingenious publicity in which each person becomes the impresario of their own appearance, of their own artifice" [41].

The Look Generation, concludes Baudrillard, have discovered a new and ironic form of passion; "that of being devoid of all illusion about their own subjectivity ... about their own desires ... fascinated by their own metamorphosis" [41] into electronic and ephemeral images lacking in any particular significance. Lovers of selfies no longer worry about the social logic of distinction (as found, for example, in fashion pictures taken by professional photographers) and they no longer believe in coded difference, such as gender. Rather, they simply play with it; just as they play with singularity "without falling into dandyism or snobbery" [42].


See: Baudrillard Live, ed. Mike Gane, (Routledge, 1993), pp. 41-2.  

Cinema Botanica (An Introduction to the World of Plant Porn)

Cinema Botanica, by Jonathan Keats (2009) 

As a floraphile, I have a certain interest in and admiration for the work of American artist and experimental philosopher, Jonathan Keats; particularly his attempt to create a Cinema Botanica that incorporates a pornography for house plants and suburban shrubs and bushes. 

I find it amusing that whilst the majority of people who like to look after plants feel they are doing their bit if they remember to water regularly and perhaps administer an occasional drop of Baby Bio, Keats has expressed his concern that plants in a domestic environment might be bored and in need of entertainment designed to cater for their tastes and desires. 

And so he has filmed explicit scenes of floral pollination by honeybees, using specialized techniques developed for organisms that whilst lacking eyes, are nevertheless sensitive to light and shade. These edited but uncensored scenes are then projected directly onto the foliage. For human beings, there is very little to observe other than a silent flickering of light and so their enjoyment is strictly limited. However, as Keats points out, Cinema Botanica was developed for the titillation of the plants and not those who tend them.

Note: Cinema Botanica was screened in San Francisco at the Roxie Theater on October 1st, 2009, as part of Arse Elektronika, the world's foremost sex and technology festival, organized by the international art and theory collective, monochrom, founded in 1993, in Vienna, by Johannes Grenzfurthner. 

For further details, see Of Intercourse and Intracourse, ed. Johannes Grenzfurthner, Guenther Friesinger, and Daniel Fabry, (RE/SEARCH, 2011), or visit the monochrom website: www.monochrom.at/english  

Nietzsche and Capitalism

Nietzsche's opposition to capitalism and his loathing of modern bourgeois society is present throughout his writings. In an early essay entitled 'The Greek State', for example, he argues that self-seeking, money-loving entrepreneurs and stateless corporate executives should be regarded as the enemy within, threatening as they do the stability and welfare of the community. 

Like Marx, Nietzsche is concerned by the manner in which the market determines the value of everything; including the value of all other values. The consequence of this is not only that all things become commodified and given price tags, bar codes, and registered trade marks, but that everything becomes permissible - providing, of course, that it's economically viable and can generate profit. Thus it is that, within liberal society, all types of commercial exchange and all modes of conduct are discreetly sanctioned; including those that many advocates of free trade like to publicly condemn and make illegal, but do nothing to actually prevent.

Like Marx, Nietzsche is concerned by the prospect of a world in which there is no connection between people other than shared greed and a desire to succeed at any cost. Such a world would be one suspended in a state of systematic anarchy and nihilism; a world in which an aggressive philistinism would effectively cancel out the possibility of culture as he conceives of it in a classical sense. 

The permanent substratum of money under everything in the modern world causes Nietzsche to experience a feeling of ugly disillusion; he rejects liberalism and democracy as forms of political degeneracy. As for the equality of opportunity that is said to be opened up by capitalism, he dismisses this as merely the freedom to buy and sell one another in a universal slave market. 

As an alternative, Nietzsche advocates a strong model of volksgemeinschaft that rests upon a bond of trust formed between rulers and ruled and an agreed series of duties and obligations. If this fails to guarantee the rights of the private individual, it will, he says, at least ensure the production of a small number of sovereign men and women and allow for cultural greatness (which is something other than material and scientific progress).

Of course there are problems with Nietzsche's thinking here as elsewhere; his views on politics, culture and society are never fully developed and often in need of radical revision and recontextualization. But one thing is surely clear: Zarathustra hates shopkeepers and there is nothing - neither property rights nor human rights - given to us by liberalism which fully compensates for what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the "meanness and vulgarity of existence that haunts democracies ... The ignominy of the possibilities of life that we are offered".

See Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, (Verso, 1996), pp. 107-08.   

Sensitive Hands on a Cyclops

Eric Drass: Nietzsche and the Horse (2011)
www.saatchionline.com

Pity in a man of knowledge seems ludicrous, says Nietzsche. Indeed, it can even tip a philosopher into madness and make them fling their arms round the neck of an old carthorse, causing a public commotion.

He should, of course, have known better: for Nietzsche warned repeatedly against the non-egotistical instincts and singled out the Christian virtue of pity as the most fundamentally dangerous of all such feelings; something that weakens the individual who surrenders to it and ultimately fails to benefit the one who is the object of their pity.

Pity, says Nietzsche, is anti-life: for pity attempts to preserve what is ripe for destruction or belongs in the knacker's yard. It is the great seduction into nihilism; the most sublime form of decadence. And yet one can't help loving Nietzsche for attempting to protect some nag from cruelty; for ultimately being just a little allzumenschliche and displaying a feminine incapacity to remain a passive spectator when confronted by the suffering of a fellow creature.

Becoming-hard like the diamond, does not mean becoming an insensitive moron who knows nothing of kindness or the politeness of the heart; rejecting the moral ideal of pity does not mean one should not feel compassion or sympathy in the noble sense. If it did, one would hardly bother to read Nietzsche.

O Superman

 Atanas Botev: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2004)

Nietzsche's great concept of the Übermensch remains something to ponder and to play with. But there are still those who just don't get it and insist on believing that the overman is merely a higher type of human being - a tendency that has not been helped by the unfortunate and misleading English translation of the original German term as 'superman'.

Thus, amongst our transhumanist friends for example, we still find those who naively think of the idea exclusively in terms of genetic engineering and contrived evolutionary advance. But the metaphysical, moral and material overcoming of man is absolutely not the same thing as his biological self-preservation and enhancement.

To be fair, Zarathustra doesn't help matters by initially speaking about worms and apes and describing man as a rope fastened between animal and Übermensch. But he is later at pains to point out that his primary concern is not with what might or what should succeed mankind in the sequence of species and that his teaching is not a variety of Darwinism.

What then is the concept of the Übermensch all about?

For me, the best reading is developed in the work of Michel Foucault in terms of forces and forms; the latter defined as a compound of relations between the former. In this interpretation, our humanity is understood as a non-predetermined form which results when forces internal to ourselves as a species (such as imagination and memory) enter into a historical relationship with certain external forces (be they natural, artificial or virtual).

Thus Man - with a capital M and by which we mean the hu-man - has not always existed and will not exist forever. Our humanity is a contingent form and as internal and external forces as well as the relations between them change, so our form changes. This is why Foucault famously writes of Man being nothing but a face drawn in the sand that is destined to be erased by the incoming tide.

The Übermensch is thus simply another word for these external forces: the sea which receives us; the lightning that licks us with its tongue; the madness with which we might be cleansed. In other words, it is that which frees the life within us and reconfigures form in a manner that is not only posthuman, but genuinely transhuman and inhuman. 
   

Zarathustra and the Nightingale

One has to speak with thunder and heavenly fireworks to feeble and dormant senses, says Zarathustra.

If we interpret this injunction in a generous manner, it can be understood to mean that Nietzsche is interested in constructing a poetic post-metaphysical language that will enable the individual to break free from received conceptual schema and the moral-linguistic conventions of grammar and thereby find new ways of thinking and feeling. 

But, I have to say, it does sound a wee bit fascistic and shouty. Or, in a word, Wagnerian. The sort of thing that Dietrich Eckart might have had in mind when he created the Nazi battle slogan Deutschland Erwache!   

It also anticipates Heidegger, who claims in Being and Time that we must rediscover some form of primordial language from which to assemble a vocabulary of elementary terms that authentically speak Dasein. Philosophy's ultimate task, he says, is to preserve the force of these words and prevent them from being enfeebled and flattened within the common understanding.

I have to confess, there was a time when I found this kind of thing seductive if never entirely convincing: I wanted to believe that there was a universal (though secret) litany of magical words, letters, and phonemes that might somehow tear up the foundations of the soul and shatter eardrums and law tables alike, but I was never quite able to do so.

And what prevented me from embracing this mytho-religious idea of language was the following passage from Lawrence's Sketches of Etruscan Places:

"And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion, the nightingale will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup."

- Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis, (CUP, 1992), p. 36.

Why the Internet is a 21st Century Tower of Babel

Surely one of the more shocking episodes in the Old Testament (from which there are many to choose) is described in Genesis 11 and concerns the building by humanity and destruction by God of the Tower of Babel. For those of you unfamiliar with this passage, but too lazy to Google it, here it is, in full, with some very slight modifications made to the text as it appears in the edition of the Bible cited:

"At this time the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Babylonia and settled there. 

      They said to each other, 'Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly.' They used these bricks instead of stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.  

      But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that men were building. And he said, 'If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us confuse their language so they will not understand each other.'

      So the Lord scattered mankind once more over all the earth and their attempt to build a great city was abandoned. That is why it was called Babel - because the Lord confounded the language of the world."

- The Holy Bible, New International Version, (The Bible Societies in Association with Hodder and Stoughton, 1984).

From this we certainly get a further insight into the psychopathology of the Almighty. Not to make too fine a theological point of this, it's clear that God, like all tyrants, is a cunt: petty, paranoid, violent and vindictive.

His concern here is unambiguous; namely, that a united mankind, speaking and working as one, using materials of their own invention to build a safe and secure home for themselves post-flood, are empowered by their own technological ingenuity and feel an element of pride in their own mortal achievements.

Clearly, God can't have that. That is to say, he can't allow a self-sufficient humanity to threaten his omnipotence, or to realise its full potential as a species. And so, quite deliberately, he sows discord and confusion amongst a people where once there was fraternity and mutual understanding.

Of course, it might be argued that it's a good thing to generate cultural and linguistic difference. Though such an argument, when it comes from the mouths of the faithful who usually insist monomaniacally upon Oneness, seems ironic to say the least. In fact, anyone who reads Genesis 11 and comes to the conclusion that it shows us a God who is pro-difference and plurality is being more than a little disingenuous. For what it really betrays is the ugly and divisive nature of religion as it reinforces tribalism, nationalism, sectarianism; things that have caused immense misery in the modern world.     

Happily, in this digital age, we have decided to defy this judgement of a dead deity and build not a tower of bricks via which we might storm an imaginary heaven, but a global electronic network via which we might instantly connect and communicate with friends, family, and strangers all over the world, exchanging images and ideas, important news and mundane chit-chat.

Ultimately, the Good Book has been defeated by Facebook ...
     

In Praise of Small Talk and Social Networking

Christians, who are passionately devoted to the Word, are equally fervent in their opposition to idle gossip and foolish chit-chat. Not only do they condemn blasphemous speech, but also irreverent babble, obscene joking and lighthearted nonsense. For all these forms of small talk are, they say, corrupting and lead people away from the Truth and into ungodliness. Matthew tells us straight: 

On the day of judgement people will be held to account for every careless word they have spoken. By your words you will be acquitted and by your words you will be condemned. [12:36-7]

Heidegger, who believed that the task of philosophy was to preserve the force of the most elementary words in which Dasein expressed itself, also had very little time for what he terms Gerede and by which he refers to the everyday chatter engaged in by average individuals leading alienated lives of relentless mediocrity in which all possibilities of authentic being are flattened.  

Nor was he taken with its written form, which he dismissed as 'scribbling' [Geschriebe]: a conventional and lazy form of writing, found in newspapers and popular fiction; often amusing and distracting, but banal and, like common speech, something which merely 'passed the word along' without import or meaning.

Today, in the digital era of social networking, when hundreds of millions of people around the world are constantly chatting, texting, tweeting, and posting on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (or on blogs such as this one), it's extremely difficult to even imagine what the problem for the above might be.

What those who share an almost phobic dislike for small talk and idle gossip fail to fully appreciate is that people love micro-forms of communication with friends, family, and, indeed, complete strangers all over the world in ever-widening circles of virtual intimacy and peripheral awareness (to borrow a phrase from Danah Boyd, if I may). 

Why? Not because they are sinful or superficial (though they might be both) and not because they are any more self-obsessed or narcissistic than people in the world before the internet and i-Phone revolutionised the way we live. Rather, it's because pointless electronic babble is a technological form of social grooming and bonding. In other words, it's a crucial 21st century skill. But, even more importantly, it's an informal, somewhat addictive pleasure that brings people into touch; abolishing not only interpersonal distance, but prejudice and provincialism. 

Reflections on Photography and Ethnoelephantology

Photo taken at London Zoo (Getty Images, 1971)   

I love this photograph: taken when girls wore hot-pants and were encouraged to pose provocatively with great beasts; when a trip to the Zoo was an opportunity for laughter and excitement rather than learning about conservation projects.

But it might be asked what it is about this photograph that so fascinates and moves me, apart from the obvious elements already mentioned (i.e. the nostalgia for times and fashions gone by and the none-too-subtle suggestion of eroticism as a crucial component of human-animal relations).

Well, firstly, I am struck by the fact that this photograph captures a real and unique moment which it faithfully reproduces to infinity. In other words, whilst the photograph mechanically repeats what can never be repeated existentially, the event itself is "never transcended for the sake of something else" [4].

Secondly, I am charmed by the posed element in the picture; that is to say the manner in which both girl and elephant invent new bodies and voluntarily transform themselves in advance into images, thereby lending themselves to the game of selfhood and representation. Today, in this digital age of smart phones, selfies and social networks, it's no big deal for people to be able to produce, manipulate and circulate their own image. But back in the early-1970s, when this picture was taken, there was still a great deal of nervous joy about having a photo taken and seeing the results (becoming the object of one's own gaze). And I think we see something of this innocence in this picture.
      
But still this isn't what makes me love the photo: there is still something else in it that provokes and seduces; something that Roland Barthes refers to in Camera Lucida as the punctum. For Barthes, the punctum is that element within the photo which produces an agitation of some kind and sends the viewer off on an imaginary adventure. It punctuates the conventional cultural elements that make up the photo's composition and which serve to produce a polite and predictable effect upon those who see it, reinforcing their views and tastes and beliefs about the world. And so, in this way, the punctum also pricks the viewer.

What pricks me then about this photo of an elephant and a girl and ultimately makes me love it so? There has to be some small detail which is there to be seen, but which initially escapes notice. Is it the bird flying overhead? No, it isn't that. Is it the lovely shape of the elephant's trunk as it embraces the young woman? No, it isn't that either. Nor is it the amusing look on her face, the fabric of her shorts, or the manner in which she knowingly grabs the elephant's tusk (described as an ivory reach around by my friend Z who has a talent for this kind of thing - providing apt descriptions that is, not symbolically jerking off elephants).  

No, the punctum is provided by the fact that the photographer has managed to catch the model's left hand at just the right degree of openness and happy abandonment; a few millimetres more or less and her body would no longer have been offered to the viewer, as to the beast, with benevolence and generosity.

It is doubtful that the photographer intended to do this. For as Barthes explains, the detail which pricks us is never strictly intentional and probably must not be so; "it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful; it does not necessarily attest to the photographer's art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object" [47].    

The punctum, then, is the unintended and unscripted detail; the off-centre element that disrupts the unary space of the photograph generated by what Barthes terms the studium and transports us as viewers into the realm of bliss (where objective interest gives way to that which is individually affecting).    


See: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, (Vintage, 2000). 
      

Fruity Shit

According to Lawrence, writing in one of his better known verses, it is the secretive fig that tells us most about the mystery of female flesh and the manner in which it too, having over-ripened, bursts apart showing crimson through the purple slit.

For according to Lawrence, the most beautiful women, just like the most beautiful plants, flower inwardly; unseen, and rejoicing in their covert nakedness. And they die only when they wilfully make an obscene display of their sex and sew together fig-leaves not to hide but to adorn their genitalia; affirming their delicious rottenness through moist, scarlet lips that laugh at the Lord's indignation.   

Lawrence thinks that these women have fatally forgotten that ripe figs won't keep. But mayn't it be that they simply don't care any longer about self-preservation, or submitting to models of femininity rooted in moral injunction? Perhaps they wish to make themselves attractive only to those for whom death is the most exquisite of all pleasures; men and women who dare to put their mouths to the crack and take out the flesh in one bite.

To live, that is to say, more as medlars and sorb-apples rather than secretive figs; with a touch of morbidity and sticky with the sweet essence of hell.

See: D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, (Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 280-84. 

 

Venus in Furs

Are you visiting Woman? Don't forget your whip! 

The masochistic lover  will often fall on his knees and passionately kiss the feet of the woman he adores as his mistress: she whose eyes sparkle with cruelty and who by virtue of her greater power is able to place a spiked heel nonchalantly on the neck of all mankind.

Whatever the truth of her actual status is irrelevant: fur transforms any woman wearing it into a superior creature; be she rich and wrapped in mink, or a simple peasant girl in clothes trimmed with rabbit skin (something that is forgotten in this graceless and charmless age of rubber and plastic).

The figure of the dominatrix obsesses, seduces, and captivates the masochist because she corresponds to his own refined tendencies and mirrors his particular nature; in discovering her, he learns how to paradoxically find and abandon himself.

If, initially, many women are reluctant to accept the adoration of a slave - finding the thought of their lover's submission as well as their own placement on a pedestal like a marble statue distasteful and degrading - nevertheless they know in their hearts that there is no equality or justice in the false virtue of love. 

And, having picked up the whip and experienced the grandeur of their own pale power sweeping over them, they are often more than happy to demonstrate precisely what it means to be at the mercy of a young and frivolous woman ... 

  

Reflections After a Visit to London Zoo

Photo of Guy the Gorilla by Wolf Suschitzky (1958)

When Georges Bataille visited London Zoo in the summer of 1927, he was overwhelmed to the point of ecstasy by the naked splendour of an ape's anal protuberance. In this obscene eruption of red raw flesh, smeared with excrement, he saw something that was not merely bestial, but radically opposed to all that is upright and human in a mankind whose own anal opening has secluded itself in a crack between the buttocks and seems destined never to bud or blossom.

As for me, I was delighted in a rather more innocent manner on my first visit to the Zoo as a young child by the sight of chimps taking tea with their keepers and thrilled most of all by the sounds and smells of wild animals caged at close quarters. 

For even in 1970, London Zoo remained a zoo in what is now thought of as the bad sense of the word: a place where big cats paced from side to side in cages with bars that you might stick your fingers through, sea-lions balanced balls on their noses whilst clapping their flippers together and elephants stood about in stone compounds with bales of hay, pissing and shitting, or waiting for a sticky bun to be thrown their way.

In other words, it was still a place where animals were openly on display for human amusement and no one cared too much about their welfare, nutritional needs, or positioning on the list of endangered species. Now, however, everything's very different: London Zoo prides itself as a site of conservation and the whole place feels like a moralizing and sentimental animal rehab rather than an animal madhouse.

Doubtless the resident creatures are better fed, better housed, and better looked after. But in subjecting them to the milk of human kindness and charity, they seem to have lost something which the earlier animals still managed to retain, despite being maltreated and often humiliated for our entertainment: something that I'm tempted to call their bestial authenticity and which Bataille thought of as their divine or sacrificial wonder.

And so, whilst Kumbuka may live the good life and make an excellent 'species ambassador', he's not a patch on Guy the Gorilla. 

Proust Questionnaire

Portrait of the Artist Amongst the Flowers (Athens, 2012)

Whilst I prefer anonymity and the art of discretion to the endless self-promotion indulged in by the Facebook generation who delight in their own digital presence, nevertheless we all like to play games of interrogation and confession such as the one that Marcel Proust famously twice took part in and to which his name is now permanently attached.

And so, for my own amusement and for the instruction of you all torpedophiles out there, here are my answers to the Proust questionnaire. Note that I've amalgamated some of the original 19th century questions with those that appear in the popular Vanity Fair version of the format (available to play on-line). I have also added one or two of my own. 


What is your favourite colour?
Sky-blue.
What is your favourite flower?
Daisy.
What is your favourite bird?
Sparrow.
Where and when were you happiest?
Harold Hill in the early 1970s.
What is your greatest fear?
Suffocating/drowning.
Which historical figure do you most admire?
Oscar Wilde.
Which living person do you most admire?
Larry David.
Who has exerted the most influence over your life?
Malcolm McLaren.
Where would you like to live?
In a hotel suite in New York.
What would you describe as an essential aspect of paradise?
Pinkberry.  
What makes you saddest?
Not being able to hold the petals on to a dying relationship. 
What faults do you find it easiest to forgive?
Those small imperfections that make beautiful.
Who is your favourite philosopher?
Nietzsche.
Who is your favourite novelist?
D. H. Lawrence.
Who is your favourite poet?
Sylvia Plath.
What is your favourite TV show?
Seinfeld.
What quality do you most admire in another person?
Their sense of style.
What is your proudest achievement?
Embracing spectacular failure over benign success.
What is your most marked characteristic?
Ironic detachment (indifference).
What is your principal defect?
Inability to be cruel even when kindness demands it.
What do you dislike most about your appearance?
How a far-away look of remoteness in my eyes has been replaced with a look of ever-present sadness.
What is it you hate the most?
Fundamentalism.
What is one skill you would like to possess?
To be able to play the piano.
How would you like to die?
Unnaturally and in defiance of God's judgement.
What is your motto?
Torpedo the Ark.

Der Schrei der Natur

Edvard Munch, The Scream, (Version I, 1893) 

There are still some who believe that the figure in Edvard Munch's most famous picture is the one doing the screaming, but this is to radically misunderstand the truly terrifying aspect of the work. For rather than being the one who cries, the agonized figure is in fact the one who hears the inhuman shriek that comes from existence itself. Thus the German title for the image, given by the artist, Der Schrei der Natur. 

Munch elaborates upon this idea in a diary entry made shortly before he produced the first of his four compositions with this title in 1893 and a revised, slightly more poetic rendition of this note is hand-painted onto the frame of the 1895 pastel version of the work:

"I was walking along the road with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red. I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence ... my friends walked on, as I stood there trembling with anxiety and sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

I immediately thought of this as news broke that NASA's Voyager I was greeted by a strangely disturbing howl as it entered interstellar space. Scientists tell us that what instruments on board the craft actually detected was the 'sound' of dense plasma waves or ionized gas vibrating and nothing to be concerned about (although they later confessed they found the recordings creepy and somewhat ghostly). 

Anyway, it's nice to once more discover life imitating art. And it's interesting to find out that whilst in space no one can hear you scream, in us, space itself can be heard to shriek. 

The Politics of the Face

The face has long held a privileged and determining place within Western metaphysics – as those who choose to veil, hide, or disguise the face are now beginning to discover. There is, we might say, an entire politics of the face.

We like to think that our face is individual and unique. But it isn’t. It’s essentially a type of social machine that overcodes not just the head, but the entire body, ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance. The smile and all our other familiar facial expressions are merely types of conformity with the dominant reality. It might be said that we love our faces with the same passion that slaves love their chains; who, after all, likes to lose face?

And yet Deleuze and Guattari insist that if men and women still have a destiny, it is to escape the face, becoming-imperceptible or clandestine in the process; something explored by D. H. Lawrence in the first version of his Lady Chatterley novel via the use of an item of clothing that has been made the focus of great concern in countries with a significant Muslim minority. One evening, Connie retires to her bedroom and places "a thick veil over her face, like a Mohammedan woman, leaving only her eyes" as she stands naked before her mirror, looking at her "slow, golden-skinned, silent body".

What is interesting is not merely that she is seeking out an impersonal self that might exist "apart from the face with all its complexities and frustrations and vulgarity!", but that Connie is prepared to become-minoritarian (non-White, non-Western, non-Christian) in order to do so. In other words, she is prepared to sacrifice her social status, her class and her ethnic and cultural identity, so that she might be effaced in some manner.

In the final version of the novel, however, Connie is no longer prepared to be quite so reckless. Wishing to retain her independence, she fears that effacement will result in becoming subservient. It is precisely this point that troubles those European politicians and commentators who have allowed themselves to become increasingly exercised over the wearing of a piece of cloth. Obviously, the debate relates not only to religion, but also to class, gender, and, perhaps most importantly, race. For as Deleuze and Guattari point out:

"The face is not universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks ... The face is Christ ... he invented the facialization of the entire body and spread it everywhere ..."

Thus the face is a culturally specific idea: it arises at the zero point of Western history, i.e. at the beginning of the Christian era. As Western moral culture has spread and exerted its power over the rest of the world, so too have other non-white, non-Christian, peoples been given faces and inscribed a place within the universal system. No one is allowed to deviate or to go unidentified, unsubjectified. No one is allowed the luxury of anonymity. In an important passage, Deleuze and Guattari write: 

"European racism ... has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation of someone else as Other ... Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavours to integrate nonconforming traits ... sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions ... sometimes erasing them ... From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime is not to be. ... Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out ..."

What this passage allows us to appreciate is that the issue over the veil is by no means a trivial one within white European culture: it might be articulated in the language of ‘women’s liberation’ and ‘human rights’, but what’s really at stake is the hegemony of a system that accords those freedoms, subjective identities, and happy white faces in the first place.

- D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (CUP, 1999), p. 18.
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996), pp. 176, 178.

Some Dark Solar Reflections on a Grey Morning in September

UV image of the sun taken by NASA

Everything starts with the sun. And everything will end with the sun. The sun is our alpha and omega. And God, we might say, is nothing other than a typical main sequence yellow dwarf star, approximately 93,000,000 miles away, composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Essentially a thermonuclear machine, the sun generates vast quantities of electromagnetic energy which is discharged into space without aim or design, providing the earth with all the light and heat needed to create and sustain that "feverish obscenity we call ‘life’".

Above all, the sun is big. In fact, the sun accounts for 99.8% of all mass in the solar system and, were it hollow, you could easily fit over a million earth-sized planets inside it. It’s the ultimate object and yet, ironically we can’t look at it without going blind or mad, or both. It’s like a woman’s cleavage: one peek and look away – that’s the rule; no staring. It’s different for flowers: they open to face the sun. But we must avert our eyes, for we are not flowers.

The sun is also pretty bright as stars go and has been shining brilliantly for around 4.6 billion years. And as it gets older, it gets hotter. In a billion years from now, it’ll be so bright and so hot that there’ll be no water left on the surface of the earth and life as we know it will be compromised. Eventually, the sun will enter its red giant phase and the earth will be engulfed entirely. It will then shrink back down in size to live out its days as a white dwarf. At such a time, as Nietzsche says, the clever animals who invented knowledge will be no more.

D.H. Lawrence, whose cosmology is idiosyncratic to say the least, is right in at least one respect; the sun is not simply a ball of blazing gas with a few spots. For it also has a dark and complex internal structure. And the visible surface, known as the photosphere, is by no means where the real action is taking place. It’s at the core where things really heat up and molecules of hydrogen are fused into helium at a rate of 620 million tons per second.

If you like, it is this invisible sun, this dark sun, that philosophically most interests. We are bored of Plato’s Ideal sun that serves only to empower and enlighten mankind; “a sun which is the very essence of purity, the metaphor of beauty, truth and goodness”. It’s the black sun of Lawrence, or the rotten sun of Bataille that induces solar delirium and acts of sacrificial madness, that most interests and disconcerts:

"From this second sun – the sun of malediction – we receive not illumination but disease ... The sensations we drink from the black sun afflict us as ruinous passion, skewering our senses upon the drive to waste ourselves."

- Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992).

This is the sun the Aztecs knew. And we might ask of Lawrence’s sun-women what they might demand in the end of those men who dared to love them: semen or blood? Would they bring forth children from their sun-opened wombs, or obsidian knives? For in belonging to the sun, they ultimately belong to death.

Lady Chatterley's Postmodern Lover

Contrary to Lawrence, to whose writings he makes direct reference, Foucault argues that the metaphysical notion of sex as the great clue to being cannot be allowed to pass without close critical examination.

For rather than simply being an ideal anchorage point that supports the various manifestations of what we term sexuality, sex, says Foucault, is a complex and tyrannical type of agency formed by regimes of power. The belief that it somehow eludes and resists power and resides deep within us over and above the material reality of bodies and possessing its own intrinsic properties and laws, is simply a piece of modern romance. 

Of course, this isn't to deny that the convenient fiction of sex hasn't proved to be extremely useful; or that it will cease to function in the immediate future. As Nietzsche pointed out, God's shadow is still to be seen long after his death. Thus, likewise, sex will continue to be thought of as a great causal principle long after novelists and lovers have abandoned older ideas of the soul as mere superstition.

For the fact is, a very great number of men and women have made their very intelligibility dependent upon their sex and it provides them with their most precious forms of identity. To such people, sex is something sacred and worthy of sacrifice. We find this form of sex worship in Lawrence; not least in his final novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover.

But it gets tedious, does it not? One is tired of having to treat sex with reverence and bored of the austere monarchy of sex ruling over all our thoughts and actions. Even Lawrence admits in an essay written shortly after the above novel, that there has been so much repetitious sexual activity that he longs for the peace that comes of fucking and the accomplishment of chastity.

And yet, having said that, he still can't help insisting that the vital task for a people to come is to realize sex in full consciousness. But what would that mean other than an acceleration of one of the most effective operating principles established by the deployment of sexuality; namely, the great desire for sex-in-the-head: "to have access to it, to discover it, to liberate it, to articulate it, to formulate it in truth" [156].

Despite the popular belief that there have been centuries of repressive silence and shame surrounding the subject, sex has in fact been the most obsessively talked about thing of all. What is peculiar about modern societies, suggests Foucault, is not that they kept sex locked away in darkness, "but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret" [35]. 

In other words, what really distinguishes the world we live in is a polymorphous and increasingly pornographic incitement to discourse about sex. Those who are genuinely interested in libidinal pleasures might do best not to naively call for freedom or vainly attempt to extract further confessions from a shadow, but show how sex is - and has always been - a purely speculative element within the historical process of human subjectification.  

In a postmodern future - that is to say, in a time after the orgy - people will be unable to fathom our sex mania. And they will smile, says Foucault, when they recall that there were once a people who believed that in sex resided a truth "every bit as precious as the one they had already demanded from the earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought" [159].


See Michel Foucault; The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 1998).