Dementia: From Bad to Verse

People who leave the obscure and try to define 

whatever it is that goes on in their heads, are pigs.

 
Living Words is a therapeutic arts organisation, created in 2007 by the writer Susanna Howard, which works with people - like my mother - who are dealing with dementia and the accompanying loss of speech skills and other neuro-cognitive functions.

The belief is that even the most delirious babbling should be regarded as valid expression and that by recording and faithfully transcribing what is said, you might produce a form of poetry in which the truth of madness, as well as the inner world of the person, is revealed. This, says Howard, is her great mission.

Of course, as she admits, the process involves editing. But, Howard insists, there is nothing added and no meddling; the meaning of the text is present in the utterance of the speaker and simply allowed to shine forth on the page with transparent authenticity.

I am, of course, extremely skeptical about all this - to say the least.

It's not that I think it impossible to establish a dialogue with those who can but stammer imperfect words and noises without fixed syntax, or the recognised logic of language. And I certainly don't wish to abandon anyone to silent oblivion, if they still desperately desire to communicate (although, having said that, I must admit to finding something beautiful in the total silence of the object).

Rather, my main concern is that there's a real danger in the Living Words project of subscribing to the romantic myth of madness; particularly in relation to the (equally romantic) myths of art and creative genius. Howard is profoundly mistaken in believing that every single word or sound that falls from a madman's lips is worthy of respect and only needs to be sculpted by an artist-in-residence in order to produce poetry and truth.

For as Foucault was at pains to point out in the conclusion to his history of insanity in the Age of Reason, whilst the madness of Nietzsche, or Van Gogh, or Artaud belongs to their work, their work does not belong to madness. That is to say, madness is precisely the absence of art and its annihilation; "the point where it becomes impossible and where it must fall silent ..."

Foucault continues:

"Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition ... it draws the exterior edge, the line of dissolution, the contour against the void. ... Madness is no longer the space of indecision through which it was possible to glimpse the original truth of the work of art, but the decision beyond which this truth ceases irrevocably ..."

And - let's be honest here - the Living Words team are not dealing with figures such as Nietzsche, Van Gogh, and Artaud; the poets they encounter in the various hospitals and care homes have very little of any philosophical interest or artistic merit to contribute, be they sane, senile, or somewhere in between.

Of course, not that this really matters: Toute l'écriture est de la cochonnerie.


Notes

Michel Foucault; Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard, (Tavistock Publications, 1987). Lines quoted are on p. 287. 

Those interested in knowing more about the Living Words project should click here to visit their website.

Many thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this topic. 

Two Poster Designs for the 14th International D. H. Lawrence Conference (July 2017)

Having been asked to come up with a poster for the 14th International D. H. Lawrence Conference, which is being held here in London next summer, I thought it would be interesting to rework two classic punk designs. 

The first refers us back to the Clash album released in 1979, the front cover of which famously featured a photograph of Paul Simonon smashing his bass on stage taken by Pennie Smith. But it wasn't the photograph that interested. Rather, it was the pink and green lettering used by Ray Lowry in homage to Elvis Presley’s eponymous debut album of 1956.

The second and I suppose more controversial design (in as much as it ties Lawrence not only to a musical genre, but to a history of crime), is in the style of Jamie Reid's brilliant God Save ... series of images created for the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir, Julien Temple, 1980).

In both cases, the idea was to create an image that would indicate Lawrence’s own notorious and iconic status within the popular imagination: not only as a serious author, but also as an angry, working-class rebel who scandalised the authorities; a poet-provocateur whose work was often censored or banned; an urban Lawrence, more Edwardian hipster than Eastwood hippie, interested in causing chaos and defying social and literary convention, rather than in writing best-sellers; a Lawrence who knew, in the words of Malcolm McLaren, that it’s better to be a spectacular failure than a benign success; a Lawrence determined to live fast, die young, die game.

Note: the Conference Committee accepted the first idea and image, but rejected the second (make of that what you will).   

On Blasphemy (amb referència al cas de Dolors Miquel)

Photo of Dolors Miquel by Gianluca Battista

El Pais Catalunya (Feb 2016)

Blasphemy, as Richard Dawkins is fond of reminding us, is a victimless crime: for whilst God is obviously a real object of reference (and reverence) within human history and culture, he is not, of course, an actual entity.

And so, whilst you can certainly injure the feelings of his often hypersensitive followers, nothing that is said about or addressed directly to God makes the slightest difference to him. The most devout and beautiful of prayers as well as the most irreverent of insults, all fall on ears that are not even deaf.

Despite this being the case, there's a depressingly large number of countries that still retain - and vigorously enforce - blasphemy laws; including, of course, all the usual suspects in the Muslim world.

Shamefully, however, there are still Europeans who would also like nothing more than the opportunity to prosecute and punish those whom they accuse of bad-mouthing God; Christian reactionaries who envy Islamic militants and yearn for the good old days of Inquisition when they too could torture and murder blasphemers, heretics, atheists, witches, etc. in the name of Love and Divine Justice.

And so it doesn't really surprise to hear of the case of the poet Dolors Miquel being prosecuted - presumably under Article 525 of Spanish penal law - after publicly reciting her feminist version of the Lord's Prayer on stage in Barcelona, in which she redirects worship away from the figure of a bearded male towards that of a female deity: "Our Mother, who art in heaven / Hallowed be thy cunt."

The head of the Church in Catalonia immediately branded the verse as blasphemous and angrily dismissed the idea that it might better be understood as an ode to womanhood that celebrates fertility and life - just as he also quickly brushed aside arguments in defence of free speech.

My view - if it isn't already pretty clear - is that whist Dolors Miquel may not be the greatest poet in the world, she has every right to promote her vulva activism and gynaecological pride. The cunt isn't sacred, but neither is it blasphemous or obscene. And if phallocentric misogynists like to deny their maternal origin and wish to mutilate female genitalia rather than find happiness therein, well, that's something I find offensive ...

Nietzsche and the Question of Race

Unpersuaded by the determining influence of environmental factors, such as sunlight, upon the production of melanin and ignorant of genetics, Nietzsche has a rather outlandish explanation for variations in human skin colour: starting from the assumption that the primal colour of man "would probably have been a brownish-grey", he suggests that blackness is the evolutionary result of anger and whiteness the result of fear.

Nietzsche thus speculates that racial difference is psychological in origin. "Could it perhaps not be", he muses, that blackness is the "ultimate effect of frequent attacks of rage (and undercurrents of blood beneath the skin) accumulated over thousands of years", whilst, on the other hand, "an equally frequent terror and growing pallid has finally resulted in white skin?" 

Section 241 of Daybreak would be embarrassing enough for readers and admirers of Nietzsche if this was all that he said. But, unfortunately, there's more - and idiosyncratic philosophizing on human biodiversity seems to betray (as is so often the case) an inherent racism. For Nietzsche goes on to explicitly link fearful white timidity to intelligence and violent black fury to animality. 

However, before Nietzsche is once more vilified as a fascist and critical opprobrium again directed towards his writing, it should be recalled that, for Nietzsche, cleverness is a trait he often associates with slave morality and men of ressentiment. Nobility, in contrast, is distinctly bestial in character and frenzied fits of passion are to be admired as a sign of underlying health and vitality.  

Thus, if Nietzsche seems to reinforce the classical ideal that equates what is good with fairness of complexion and what is bad with darkness of hair and skin, his notorious concept of the blond beast doesn't merely refer us to blue-eyed Europeans, but equally to those non-white peoples who also "enjoy freedom from every social constraint" and the good conscience of the wild animal.

In sum: when it comes to the question of race (as with the question of woman), Nietzsche is a complex, challenging, and controversial thinker whose work continues to disturb because it so aggressively refuses to conform with the moral and political standards and expectations of liberal humanism. Ultimately, he doesn't seek to enlighten, but to provoke.     

See: Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), IV. 241 and On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), I. 11. 

'A' Level Greek (with Reference to the Case of Lady Chatterley)

Constance Chatterley (2012) 

An image created by the digital artist Brian J. Davis 

using commercially available composite sketch software 

based on Lawrence's descriptions of the character. 

For this and other images by Davis go to thecomposites.tumblr.com

In order to reach what is termed her ultimate nakedness - a state of innocence and becoming - Connie is willing to be stripped of her clothes, her social status, and her personal self. She is also willing to be sodomised by her lover in order to free herself of all bad conscience concerning the body.

For it’s not enough within the Lawrentian universe for a woman to be vaginally penetrated by the phallus of the male in order to enter the realm of bliss. She might even be the best bit o' cunt left on earth, but if she wants to learn how to make “weird, wordless cries, like the animals”, then, apparently, she’s going to have to take it up the arse.

This might not quite be Lawrence’s answer to everything, but he certainly privileges it as an act within his sexual metaphysics and for Connie anal penetration serves much like a prince’s kiss, awakening her back into life and out of the semi-conscious, dreamlike state in which she drifted through the days without meaning, without substance, and with no gleam or sparkle in the flesh.

Not that she’s entirely comfortable with the act. Indeed, Lawrence writes that Connie is a little startled, and almost unwilling as Mellor’s enters her with no small degree of force, like a devil. But, with what Germaine Greer describes as a rapist’s mindset, Lawrence assures his readers that as the sharp, searing mixture of pain and pleasure forces its way through her bowels and burns her soul to tinder, it’s this phallic hunting out she really desired and needed after all – not love and the lies of poets and philosophers.

Indeed, as she tells Clifford one evening, intellectual pleasures and the life of the spirit mean nothing to a woman in love who has shamelessly experienced the greater reality of the body and discovered that she is not merely a creature of light and virtue, but also alive in corruption. Why read Plato or pray to Jesus when you can quiver like plasm and dance naked in the rain?

The only sin - suggests Lawrence - lies not in the knowledge of evil, or the experience of carnal delight, but in “turning away from the world, from chance, from the truth of bodies”.


See: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

Note, however, that the line quoted on the ‘weird, wordless cries’ of animals is from Lawrence’s Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 333, and the line quoted about the ‘truth of bodies’ is from Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone, (The Athlone Press, 1992), p. 73.

The Becoming-Mellors of Oliver Parkin (Lady Chatterley's Lover)

Richard Madden as Oliver Mellors in the BBC TV adaptation of 

Lady Chatterley's Lover, dir. Jed Mercurio (2015)

Lawrence famously completed three versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover and there are significant differences between the gamekeeper, Parkin, who appears in the first and second versions of the novel, and the gamekeeper Mellors who emerges with swift menace from out of the woods to fuck Connie in the third. 

Indeed, there are also significant variations in character between Parkin the first and Parkin the second (whom I'll refer to here as P1 and P2) and I shall touch on some of these as I trace out the becoming-Mellors of Oliver Parkin in terms of a becoming-woman and becoming-hors classe of the working man. 

There were two major problems presented by the stubborn, semi-literate, and class-bound P1: firstly, he doesn't make a very convincing lover for a woman like Connie; secondly, he doesn't make a very convincing advocate for a writer like Lawrence. Ultimately, both Connie and Lawrence seem frustrated and disappointed with P1, who ends the novel employed in a Sheffield steel mill and as secretary of the local communist party, having deteriorated into someone dreary and political.

And so P1 is replaced by the superior model, P2. Or, at any rate, a less angry and resentful figure; someone more concerned with preserving his own virile integrity, rather than promoting world revolution and killing the upper-classes. P2 wants to put his hands around the body of a woman, not round the throats of the rich. In other words, he's more of a lover than a militant and Lawrence repeatedly emphasizes his sensitivity and difference from other men. 

For her part, Connie actively encourages P2 to develop his touchy-feely side and produce a molecular woman within his molar male subjectivity. It's not that she wants to feminize or emasculate her lover, but she wants him to explore and experience otherness. P2 concedes the importance of this, but he nevertheless speaks of his becoming-woman with intense bitterness on occasion and admits to finding the process terribly humiliating. For, unfortunately, he equates becoming-woman with a loss of manliness. This greatly angers and disappoints Connie - and so, just like P1, he has to go.

His replacement, Oliver Mellors, is an altogether different kettle of fish. Not quite a gentleman, but far more cultured and better educated than either P1 or P2, Mellors is able to move fairly freely through society and, indeed, move outside of class altogether. For Mellors shares Lawrence's view that ultimately it makes no sense to think or act in terms of class when the whole of mankind has today become robot. That is to say, a vast homogeneous body of slaves all integrated into the same system of capital. 

If there remains any theoretical opposition, it is no longer between classes as such, but between the robot mass of humanity and those very rare few who, miraculously, remain on the outside and might potentially sabotage the Machine; outlaws and outcasts such as Mellors who do not fit in (and who do not want to fit in); singular men and women who are not so much déclassé as hors-classe. 

If Mellors remains quite consciously afraid of the Machine that sparkles with malevolence and electric lights, he is nevertheless free from all sense of shame when it comes to sex. Lawrence tells us that Mellors had "No sense of wrong or sin: he was troubled by no conscience in that respect." He accepts that his affair with Connie will bring trouble his way - that the fatality of love invariably involves a new cycle of pain - but any post-coital anxiety is quickly replaced by a defiant joy and the desire to make the world anew, or, at the very least, protect the tenderness of life.  

This, ultimately, is all Mellors can hope to do; keep his peace of soul and abide by the little forked flame fucked into being between himself and Connie, whilst dreaming of a democracy to come in which people sing, dance, and walk naked and light along the Open Road. 

In Mellors, Connie finally finds a man whose child she is happy to bear. That said, she's not prepared to marry him in any hurry having just got rid of one husband ... 

See: D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).   

See also: Stephen Alexander, Outside the Gate, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), Part 4, chapter 12, from where the material for this post has been taken in an edited and revised form. 

The Art of Love

 Franz Von Stuck: Cupid at the Masked Ball (1887)

We have long endeavoured to make love identify itself to us; to have Eros speak his name and reveal the truth of sex. And, historically, there have been two main methods for achieving this; a scientific method (based on interrogation) and an aesthetic method (based on amplification of effects). 

I suppose, push comes to shove - and without wishing to suggest that these two methods are diametrically opposed - it's the latter which continues to most fascinate and which seems to hold out the most promise in a transsexual era described by Baudrillard as existing after the orgy.  

The promise not necessarily of producing still further truth, but of creating new pleasure understood as a practice that is not considered "in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility" [57], but only on its own terms (evaluated, that is to say, according to what is queer and kinky, rather than normalizing moral and medical standards).

What appeals about an ars erotica is that its most important elements are not to be found in the "humanist dream of a complete and flourishing sexuality" [71], nor in the obsession with orgasm. Rather, it involves playing a secret and sophisticated game with sign and symbol in which lovers wear masks, not because they are ashamed or because there's what Michel Foucault terms an element of infamy attached to love, "but because of the need to hold it in the greatest reserve" [57]. 

Ultimately, I don't want to reconsecrate love and make of it again our highest ideal. I may want to dress it up and disguise it, but I don't want to put Eros back on a pedestal. I am, if you like, a fetishist, not a priest of love. I want so-called desires to be deferred (or sublimated), not fulfilled. And I want any truths that are produced to be paradoxical.      

Note: Lines quoted are from Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998).  

Love Devalued (A Post for Valentine's)

When love becomes an ideal - when it becomes caught up in a system of values - then love becomes a problem. 

Not that you would know this to hear most people speak. For the majority, love remains a final solution, not something troublesome or in any way ambiguous; not even something particularly complex. Love is simply synonymous with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. 

I know this having attended a public debate on the subject last night at Richmond Adult Community College, chaired by Filiz Peach. Not only did members of the audience seem to agree that Eros should be forever bound by the altruistic values of Christian moral culture, but, shamefully, so did the panel of speakers (even if they referred us not only to Jesus, but to Plato, Darwin and Freud). 

Half-hearted attempts to suggest a biological or psychological basis for love, didn't disguise the fact that essentially they remained believers in and advocates of a non-narcissistic love of self and a non-exploitative love of the other; i.e. a pure love that is all-embracing, ontologically-rooted, and prepared to sacrifice anything (or anyone) to ensure its triumph. A love to live for, a love to die for, and, ultimately, a love to kill for.

This might appear to be a rather extreme interpretation of what was said by the speakers, but it is precisely because love as an ideal knows no limits that it ends by becoming suicidal and homocidal. The murderer, says Lawrence, is all too often a lover acting on the recoil. 

This is lethal enough at an individual level, but it becomes far more fatal on a collective level when love as an ideal is allowed to infect our social and political life. Fascism, communism, and liberal humanism all act in the name of love and all bring death in their wake.

We need, then, to rethink this question of love. To free Eros from his ideal chains and forced complicity within a system of moral values. To make of love a game and an art; a way of playfully giving style to our lives, not of discovering some profound meaning. When we resist the urge to make love definitive of the truth of our being, we might even find we can enjoy it again ...

  

Love and Hate in a Very Cold Climate

Katja Hietala: founder of the Sisters of Kyllikki

Photo: AFP/Sam Kingsley 

For idealists, driven by a will to love and insistent upon the notion of a universal humanity, the acceptance of strangers and embrace of foreignness is a desperate moral duty.  

Thus it is, for example, that the Sisters of Kyllikki in a determined effort to make migrants feel welcome and demonstrate what a kind and tolerant people the Finns are, have taken to the streets distributing smiles and heart-shaped cards that grant permission to hug and carry other positive messages. 

Quite what the women of Cologne and other German cities who were assaulted on New Year's Eve think of this one can only wonder. But I do know that despite what the Sisters of Kyllikki may believe, not everyone wants to be assimilated into a coercive system of reciprocated emotion in which they have no choice but to love and be loved; a system which is happy to generate superficial difference and cultural diversity, but which refuses to conceive of genuine otherness. That is to say, a form of radical alterity that may very well be violently antagonistic. 

Why can't privileged white liberals ever quite accept that not everyone wants to be like them? That many feel an almost visceral aversion towards them and what they represent, decisively rejecting what they have to offer. This feeling of hate might be rooted in class, race, religion or a combination of these things. But it's a profound and authentic form of passion that makes our own feelings and values look pale and feeble in comparison. 

Baudrillard understands the hate of the un-Enlightened Other better than anyone. In an interview with François Ewald, he says:

"There's something irremediable, irreducible in this. We can offer them all the universal charity we are capable of, try to understand them, try to love them - but there is in them a kind of radical alterity that does not want to be understood, and that will not be understood."

Ominously, Baudrillard warns:

"I have the impression that the gulf is hardening and deepening between a culture of the universal and those singularities that remain. These people cannot allow themselves offensive passions; they don't have the means for them. But contempt is still available to them. I believe they have a profound contempt for us; they dislike us with an irreducible feeling of rejection." 

    

Islamic terrorism is only the most extreme and overt form of this contempt; "a passion of radical vengeance, a kind of absolute reversion that's not about to subside" anytime soon. But, I would suggest, the imported phenomenon of taharrush gamea can also be analysed from the theoretical perspective of hate.      

Thus, despite the good offices of Angela Merkel and the huggy women of Finland, one suspects things are going to become increasingly ambiguous in Europe as we wake up to the fact that the world is governed not by a principle of Love and Unity, but by the irreconcilability of evil.


See: Jean Baudrillard, 'Hate: A Last Sign of Life', interview with François Ewald, trans. Brent Edwards, in From Hyperreality to Disappearance, ed. Richard G. Smith and David B. Clarke, (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 132-42. Lines quoted are on pp. 133-34.

On the Politics of Knitting

Matthew Dyck and Ayame Ulrich 

The Uniter (Volume 67, Number 13)

In an interview in which he discusses the delights (and importance) of idleness, Roland Barthes interestingly touches upon the question of knitting.

Knitting, says Barthes, is like amateur painting; "an absolutely gratuitous activity, corporal, aesthetic ... and truly restful at the same time". It's an authentic and affirmative form of laziness, "because there's no pride or narcissism involved".

In fact, knitting might be thought of as the epitome of euphoric idleness (unless of course one is gripped by utilitarian desire to actually finish a piece of work); a perfect example of a manual activity that opens up a simple yet successful form of freedom.

Unfortunately, knitting has been increasingly marginalized within our society. Something that is acceptable only if done by elderly women. Thus, as Barthes goes on to suggest (without too much irony), perhaps one of the most unconventional and, therefore, most scandalous things would be for a young person, particularly a young man, to pull out some needles in a public space and openly begin to knit.

Strangely enough, three decades after Barthes playfully imagined this revolt into handicraft, it came to pass as young punks, goths, and bearded hipsters suddenly became more interested in cross-stitch patterns and yarn bombing, than those more traditional activities associated with alternative lifestyles. (When they weren't busy baking, of course ...!)

Unsurprisingly, not everyone was amused or impressed by this development. The late Steven Wells, for example, wrote in a piece for The Guardian that the very idea of radical knitting is "as absurd as radical dusting or radical toilet cleaning" and that it signals the death not only of youth culture, but of feminism.

However, whilst it's true that Germaine Greer "didn't articulate her disgust with women's oppression by knitting a lavender and yellow toilet-roll holder" and that "Jimi Hendrix didn't take to the stage at Woodstock wearing a nice orange and puce cardigan", I think it just as ludicrous to propose sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll as being the revolutionary solutions to all life's problematic aspects - surely no one really believes this any longer, do they?

Ultimately, I don't care how people choose to articulate their lives and express their politics; it's all good, providing it's done with style, with humour, and without any trace of ascetic militancy. What I don't have time for is the attempt to establish hierarchies in which certain acts, arts, or pleasures are privileged and others denigrated and despised.


Notes

Roland Barthes, 'Dare to Be Lazy', from an interview conducted by Christine Eff, in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991), pp. 338-45. The lines quoted are on pp. 340-41.

Those interested in reading the Steven Wells Guardian article (14 June, 2008) should click here. 

This year's World Wide Knit in Public Day is on Saturday 18 June, 2016. Click here for details.  

This post is dedicated to CheyOnna Sewell and the women of The Yarn Mission.    

Roland Barthes's Enigmatic Individualism

It is often said that man is a social animal; that he's naturally gregarious. 

And, I suppose, that's true and that this herd instinct is not entirely a bad thing. I certainly wouldn't wish to dissolve all sense of solidarity and belonging with others in favour of a liberal idealism which posits the individual as a self-contained unit. I'd sooner be a sheep existing as part of a flock, than Rob Brydon's Small Man in a Box.       

Having said that, I'm wary of the fact that a vulgar and often aggressive will to conformity reigns in every herd. Thus the idea of individualism continues to attract and demands to be taken up in a new (non-bourgeois, non-romantic) manner. 

Some authors, like Nietzsche, think of this in terms of starry singularity and a speculative transhumanism. Others, such as Barthes, are perhaps not quite so optimistic and conceive of an alternative individualism as something equally radical, but more enigmatic. 

That is to say, a clandestine and ambiguous model related to the margins rather than the heavens; one that's non-militant in its discourse and its methods and doesn't directly contest or confront power, so much as subvert or seduce it via the creation of queer new styles of writing, desiring, dressing, etc. 

This is why fashion - perhaps even more than philosophy - provides a "privileged vantage point for observing how society functions" and why the question of individualism invariably leads us back to dandyism, that peculiarly modern and scandalous form of stoicism and self-creation.

Start with externals, as Lawrence says, and the rest will slowly follow ...


See: Roland Barthes, 'The Crisis of Desire', from an interview conducted by Philip Brooks (20 April, 1980), in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991), pp. 361-65. The line quoted from is on p. 362.

On Women in Love, Sea Devils and Sexual Dimorphism

Photo by David Shale of a deep-sea anglerfish (female) 

One of the most extraordinary passages in Lawrence's Women in Love opens chapter XVI and concerns the question of sexual dimorphism, or the polarised duality between men and women. 

Feeling sick of everything and vehemently hostile towards the old ideal of love proffered by Ursula, Birkin reflects upon what might take the place of a life lived together in the "horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction" [199]. Finding the thought of union - be it blissful or otherwise - repulsive, Birkin hopes for something cooler, clearer, and cleaner than the sticky intimacy enjoyed by couples:

"On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that turned man into a broken half of a couple ... And he wanted to be single in himself  ... not under the compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. ... And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him." [199-200]

Unfortunately, in Birkin's experience at least, women were unlikely to share in this dream of a post-sexual (post-human) future, in which there was a further conjunction beyond love between two pure beings, balancing each other "like two angels, or two demons" [199]. 

It seemed to him that "woman was always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant. Everything must be referred back to her ... the Great Mother ... out of whom proceeded everything and to whom everything must finally be rendered up." [200]

For Birkin, the maleness of men must be more than something supplementary or epiphenomenal. Otherwise, they are in danger of becoming sea-devils; a species of anglerfish that exhibit extreme sexual dimorphism (the male of the species being greatly different from the female in size, shape, structure and function).

This sounds at first as if the anglerfish have achieved what Birkin dreams of; i.e. pure polarised opposition between the sexes, where each is "free from any contamination of the other" [201]. But, as anyone who knows about these creatures is aware, this isn't the case at all.

Rather, when mature, the tiny male fish seeks out and attaches himself permanently to the body of a far larger female with his sharp, beak-like mouth. Releasing an enzyme that dissolves his own face and the flesh of her body, the male literally fuses with the female, merging circulatory systems. Having lost his head, his testicles swell in size and the male fish thus becomes not only parasitically dependent upon the female for all his nutritional needs, but a mere sexual appendage and sperm bank.

The female sea devil is then a fishy Magna Mater; she assimilates the male whom she has borne back into herself with pure assumption, filling Birkin and those men who would be free and singular beings, living a kind of starry existence beyond love (and beyond woman), with an almost insane fury.


See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 199-201.

And, if interested in the topic, see also Theodore W. Pietsch, "Dimorphism, parasitism, and sex revisited: modes of reproduction among deep-sea ceratioid anglerfishes (Teleostei: Lophiiformes)", in Ichthyological Research 52 (3): 207–236 (25 August, 2005).

On the Art of Death and Disappearance in the Case of David Bowie

Bowie makes good his disappearance in the video 

for Lazarus (dir. Johan Renck, 2016)

The poet and critic Simon Solomon is right to refer the case of David Bowie back to Sylvia Plath's notorious claim that dying is an art, like everything else. For there was something very beautiful and stylized about his passing (as indeed there was about Plath's own exit from this world).

But what most philosophically fascinates about his death, apart from its obvious vitality and aesthetic appeal, is the manner in which he effected a disappearance and grasped the opportunity to die liberated from every identity and free of all stereotypes, in this way accomplishing what we might term (for want of another, slightly less Heideggerian term) an authentic death.

That is to say, one that had been imagined and carefully coordinated in every detail; one in which the mortal subject claimed his death for himself and affirmed his own dark singularity, becoming, as Bowie says, a blackstar, exerting an invisible and irresistible attraction and influence.

Bowie, in other words, accepted the challenge of death. He knew what it involved and made a choice. And, to his credit, he died at the most difficult time of all - which is to say at the right time, before his ideas ran dry and he had nothing left to say. How many of his contemporaries and fellow performers shamefully linger on - already dead-in-life, like zombies, unhappily full of self-assertion.

These people will, of course, eventually die, but they'll die too late and with biological banality. Unlike Bowie, their spirit and their virtue will not shine darkly after death. And because they do not know how to die and remain unwilling to disappear, they will never rise like Lazarus out of the ash with red hair.    


Read: Sylvia Plath, 'Lady Lazarus', in Collected Poems, (HarperCollins, 1992): click here.

Play: David Bowie, 'Lazarus', from the album Blackstar (ISO Records, 2016): click here.

Carry On Cruising

www.azquotes.com

Unless one happens to be aboard a ship, the term cruising is usually understood in its urban-erotic sense - appropriated from gay slang - to refer to the random quest for anonymous, casual sex partners. 

But for homotextuals, the word has a further meaning given to it by Roland Barthes, who considers reading and writing primarily in terms of enjoyment freed from any moralizing imperatives.

Thus, for Barthes, cruising is a notion that can easily be transferred from the erotic realm to the literary arena, becoming in the process a search not for strange bodies as such, but certain surprising features of the text that might give pleasure in the blissful, perverse sense that effects a loss of subjective consistency.

Cruising, writes Barthes, is the voyage of desire. The amorous reader and lover of language is always on the lookout for chance encounters and to experience that first-time feeling: “As if the first time possessed an unheard-of privilege: that of being withdrawn from all repetition.”

This, above all, is the key: cruising is an act that might obsessively repeat itself, but it’s absolutely opposed to the cosy and reassuring return of the same; of convention, of stereotype, and of the ready-made self in all its staleness.

See: 'Twenty Key Words for Roland Barthes', from an interview by Jean-Jacques Brochier (Feb 1975), trans. by Linda Coverdale in Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, (University of California Press, 1991), pp. 205-32. The line quoted is on p. 231.

Think of the Children

Helen Lovejoy: The Simpsons 

Throughout the European migrant crisis, the Helen Lovejoys and Corbynistas of this world have continually beseeched us to think of the children in an attempt to negate all serious discussion of what is an urgent political problem without any easy solution. 

Via the use of distressing images and necro-emotive language, powerfully compelling in its stereotypic consistency, campaigners who wish to welcome all refugees into Europe have transformed a complex question into a simplistic moral issue about which right-minded people everywhere must surely be in agreement. 

Bereft of any argument as to how Europe might accommodate (never mind assimilate) millions of people from very different cultural backgrounds - many of whom are fundamentally opposed to the values (or lack of values) of the West - humanitarians have simply pointed to the suffering and demanded Europeans share in it and, indeed, accept a large part of the blame for it; we are expected to feel not only pity and compassion, but guilt.     

The strategic use, however, of sentiment and stereotype to fill the void in thought is always suspect and all forms of logical fallacy and opportunism should surely be exposed as such.

Ultimately, we should think of the children - though not in that sticky, ideal manner in which perceived vulnerability is equated with innocence. But this should also include children who are native Europeans and not just young migrants. For presumably they too have the right to a secure and prosperous future on a continent that has its own distinctive history, culture, and destiny.

One really doesn't want to fall back into the Nazi rhetoric of blood and soil - and Europe is, I think, more than an ethno-geographical space - but current events force one to think about race, demographics, territory, borders, identity and notions of otherness, etc. That is to say, all those politically contentious subjects that seem to come to the fore in times of crisis and Völkerchaos.  

Godwin's law is, it appears, far wider in its application (and has far greater explanatory power) than some people imagine. And, somewhat paradoxically, fascism marks not only the end of all serious debate, but the beginning too. It's certainly fair to say that most of the really provocative political thinking today is carried out by those on the far right.

And this, says Baudrillard, is precisely because everything moral, orthodox and conformist - everything which was traditionally associated with the right - has now passed to the once radical left, stripping the latter of its political and intellectual energy. You only pathetically think of the children when you have nothing better to do.  

On the Poetry and Politics of Modern Advertising

One of the more surprising things about Lawrence is his admiration for the writing skills of Jazz Age American advertisers, who discovered how to seduce consumers via a dynamic use of language. Anticipating by three decades Roland Barthes's mythology on detergents and Omo euphoria, Lawrence argues that some of the cleverest literature today is contained in ads for washing powders: 

"These advertisements are almost prose-poems. They give the word soap-suds a bubbly, shiny individual meaning which is very skilfully poetic, would, perhaps, be quite poetic to the mind which could forget that the poetry was bait on a hook."

He doesn't go so far as President Coolidge, who, in a speech three years earlier (1926), declared that advertising ministers to the spiritual side of trade and serves not merely to sell the American Dream, but inspire, ennoble, and redeem mankind, but Lawrence does concede that the commercial world has found a way to bring forth a genuinely imaginative reaction from its customers, just as modern poetry was losing its ability to do so.

Of course, Lawrence being Lawrence, he can't leave things there; can't resist - regrettably in my view - expressing his rather tired and tiresome contempt for the public who are, apparently, passively manipulated by advertising, failing to see or even feel the hook as it catches hold of them:

"The public, which is feeble-minded like an idiot, will never be able to preserve its individual reactions from the tricks of the exploiter. The public is always exploited and always will be exploited. The methods of exploitation merely vary. Today the public is tricked into laying the golden egg ... into giving the great goose-cackle of mob-acquiescence. ... The mass is forever vulgar, because it can't distinguish between its own original feelings and feelings which are diddled into existence by the exploiter."

This, as we now know, is a simplistic view of advertising and of the role played by the consumer. A view born of Lawrence's naive understanding of modern capitalism and the fact that he insists on subscribing to what Foucault terms a repressive hypothesis in which power is viewed negatively, in terms of oppression, rather than considered as a productive network which circulates throughout the entire social body and which is linked to pleasure by many complex mechanisms (not just poetry).  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', essay in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 233-53. Lines quoted are on p. 238.

See also: Roland Barthes, 'Soap-Powders and Detergents', in Mythologies, selected and trans. by Annette Lavers, (Paladin Books, 1973), pp. 40-2. In this short but brilliant piece, Barthes discusses the poetry, politics, and psychology of advertising.

On Reading between the Lines

Smart Women Read between the Lines: A Reader's Journal

by Julie Hellwich and Haley Johnson, (Chronicle Books, 2007)

A friend writes to say how much she enjoyed a recent post, but then adds that in order to understand it fully she was obliged to read between the lines - a skill which, apparently, smart women everywhere are highly accomplished in, but a notion which I find problematic.

For whilst I might be persuaded that the silence and purity of the blank page is the very space of literature and would certainly concede that all good writing has a symbolic aspect in which meaning is often wilfully disguised via the use of rhetorical techniques such as irony and insinuation, I’m nevertheless wary of those crypto-theologians who insist that the truth of each and every text is always concealed beneath the words themselves (esoterically addressed to that discerning reader who has managed to divine authorial intent).

And, ultimately, I worry that, in reading between the lines and searching for an invisible logic, Miss Sherwood is simply taking what Henry James identified as the easier option. In other words, sometimes the careful analysis of what is actually written on the page is harder than the hermeneutic interpretation of the void between words, or the imaginative exploration of subliminal depths.

Picture This (On the Evil Genius of the Image)

There is a great affectation in ascribing meaning to the photographic image. 

To do so is to make objects strike a pose. - Jean Baudrillard

I have recently developed a liking for taking photographs, though perhaps it would be better to call the images produced visual fragments (or simply snaps). 

For photographs are taken by photographers and refer us to an aesthetic practice with its own history, and I'm not a photographer. Nor do I know much (or care much) about photography as an art form or technical pursuit. 

I simply enjoy taking random snaps of objects that have in some mysterious manner captured my attention and, as it were, revealed something of themselves. This aspect is crucial: I don't choose the objects or imagine the world (in the same way that I don't speak language). There's nothing imaginary about the production of images or subjectively predetermined.

Pictures - the very rare ones that work at any rate - are not merely representations of something else which can immediately be understood and discussed in conventional and critical terms. Rather, they are fatal objects in their own right which allow an impersonal and inhuman reality to shine through in a way that is untainted and unmediated; what Baudrillard refers to as the transparency of evil (the showing-through of the world as is, rather than as we would have it).  

When you see a picture of this kind, there's nothing to say about it, nothing to know. Any attempt to drape meaning over it or identify the author of the image as if that will tell you something essential, is futile and inappropriate. A great image, in other words, renders silent and is the site of disappearance (the fact that so much has been written on photography is therefore somewhat ironic). 

Now, this is not to say or imply that any of my snaps are rare in this sense. But, in their naivety and imperfection - in their lack of title and date - perhaps a small number have something diabolical about them ... 

On the Question of Ooze and Intelligence

The modern word ooze derives from an Old English noun (wōs) for a thick, often unpleasant liquid; at best, think tree sap - at worst, think pond scum or pus. 

Its use as a figurative verb, however, is more recent; people have only been oozing certain qualities since the period of late Middle English. Today, people are said to ooze all sorts of thing - confidence, charm, sex appeal ... - but I have never heard before this week someone say of another person that they oozed intelligence and I have to admit the idea has troubled me ever since. 

For I suppose, despite my libidinal materialism and background in Lawrence (who famously writes on this question in terms of blood), I've always thought of intelligence as a form of Geist or animating spirit that irradiates from an individual rather than oozes, lighting up their features and quickening their movements.

Now, I know that this is to reinscribe spirit back into an oppositional determination (and thus to fall back into metaphysics) - but there you go! Metaphysics invariably comes back to beset us whenever we attempt to address this question of mind or intelligence; Geist is always haunted by Geist, as Derrida puts it. 

I suppose, ultimately, the reason that I find the use of the word ooze objectionable in relation to intelligence is because I don't see the latter as some form of corruption and don't mistrust or dislike intelligent people - as I suspect the speaker does.

On the contrary, I'm very much attracted to individuals who are fast-thinking and quick-witted; men and women who are like little silvery streams racing over the rocks, rather than those clots who seem to pride themselves on their moral and intellectual stagnancy and ooze disdain for everything free-flowing and alive.     

Note: the image used for this post is taken from the cover of Ben Woodard's Slime Dynamics (Zero Books, 2012), a work that interestingly argues that slime is an essential element of a realist bio-philosophy free from anthropocentric conceit. For me, the image also illustrates how the stupid secretly conceive of intelligence; i.e. as something monstrous, threatening, and excrescent; something that might be said to ooze ... 

Blurred Lines (In Praise of Plagiarism)

Photo of Helene Hegemann by Leonie Hahn (2013)

I steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels my imagination … because my work and my theft are authentic as long as something speaks directly to my soul. It's not where I take things from - it's where I take them to that matters. 

The bourgeois concepts of intellectual property and copyright - not to mention the romantic fantasy of individual originality - are increasingly made to look ludicrous and untenable in this digital age of hyperlinks, file-sharing and promiscuous information exchange.

Cutting and pasting, copying and sampling, and other forms of postmodern pastiche and plagiarism have changed the way a generation conceive of authorship and their own relationship to a text or image. In the utopia of cyberspace, everything is freely available and all lines between what is and is not permissible are blurred.

We live in a world of simulacra and simulation and I’m cool with it: I’m not concerned, as a writer, with presenting myself as a unique identity who speaks with a distinct and singular voice; I don’t see the problem with wearing masks and mimicking those writers I admire, trying on different personas and playing with ideas that I don’t necessarily understand or believe in. Artists have always been magpies, happy to steal things that catch their eye - that’s the very essence of inspiration. Even cave painters copied one another.

Those with a moral objection to plagiarism - such as publishers and professors - arguing, for example, that it promotes intellectual laziness and ultimately stifles creativity, are simply subscribing to what Malcolm McLaren termed a greengrocer mentality; they want to protect their own little patch and feather their own little nest, beneath a nice sign that proudly proclaims the family name. They want to sell their goods, not share them.

In sum: the creative process always involves some form of borrowing, theft, imitation, or recontextualization. Ideas don’t belong to anyone and there’s no such thing as an original thought; we all stand on the shoulders of others. The only proviso I would add is that when one takes an idea, one has a duty to do something new and interesting with it; mutate it, redirect it, produce a bastard child or a monster - not simply a clone.


Note: this post was suggested by Maria Thanassa to whom I am grateful. 

Taharrush Gamea

Milo Moiré protesting outside Cologne Cathedral. 

Her sign reads: Respect us! 

We are not fair game even when we are naked!!!

Taharrush gamea is an Arabic term [تحرش جماعي‎] that refers to the coordinated sexual harassment and public assault of young women by groups of men, involving verbal abuse, obscene gesturing, groping, violence, robbery and rape, that frequently takes place under the protective cover provided by large gatherings at mass events, including rallies, concerts, and public festivals.

It's a term and a practice which - like halal food, holy war, and sharia law - we in the West are suddenly having to familiarise ourselves with; not least of all the German police, who were so slow to react in Cologne (and elsewhere) to the outrageous incidents of New Year's Eve teasing carried out by mostly North African migrants.

If the German polizei were as unsure what it was they were witnessing and expected to deal with as everyone else on this occasion, including the news media, there can surely be no excuse (or attempted cover-up) next time. This imported phenomenon, which can legitimately be ascribed to rape culture, is one which needs to be addressed with full legal and political seriousness.

For alas, the courageous protest by Swiss performance artist, Milo Moiré, naked in front of Cologne Cathedral with a sign demanding that women be respected, will not be enough when dealing with thousands of men who do not care about women's rights, notions of consent, or the semantics of the word 'No' ...

On the Triumphant Return of Small Breasts

Good news for those who have an erotico-aesthetic preference for women with small, pert breasts and are troubled by tits grotesquely inflated with silicone which have dominated the cultural imagination for decades - there's been a sharp decline in the number of young women consenting to cosmetic surgery and conforming to an ugly porno-plastic ideal.

In fact, figures from the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons reveal a 20% fall in numbers of women having breast augmentation in 2015 compared to the year before. Even Jordan, the unofficial poster girl of implants, is downsizing and opting for a vaguely more natural look (in the hope, apparently, that she’ll be taken more seriously).

The era of boob-jobs is, seemingly, coming to an end. And this is, I think, a good thing - even if the cause is (from a feminist perspective) a little disappointing. For whilst one would like to believe it demonstrates increased female confidence - the realisation that self-esteem should rest on more than bra size and one’s attractiveness to men - it’s probably just a generational and a fashion thing; younger women no longer find it desirable or stylish to resemble a transsexual caricature of womanhood, instead they admire and want to look like those ‘A’ List celebrities who are also ‘A’ cup sized.

It's the triumph, we might say, of Kate Moss over Katie Price. Or, as the editors of numerous women's magazines would have it: small boobs rock! and bee-stung beauties are the hottest girls in the world right now.

In Praise of Sleep

Man Ray: Sleeping Woman (1929) 

Museum of Modern Art, New York

What can one do, asks Nietzsche, when one succumbs to ennui and feels sick and tired of everything and everyone, including oneself -?

Some recommend drugs; others a stroll in the park. Still others say you should turn to Jesus.

Nietzsche, however, believes the best thing to counteract that awful mixture of boredom, fatigue, and depression is plenty of sleep – both real and metaphorical. Philosophy, a discipline born of idleness, teaches the importance of knowing how to nod off, in either sense, at the right time and in the right way.

Speaking as someone who has regularly compromised their sleep over the years, let me also affirm the vital necessity of a good night’s rest - and, indeed, of daytime naps. Sleep not only sharpens the mind and the senses, as neuroscientists confirm, but it makes happier, healthier, and more creative.

I was once rather disparaging about Tom Hodgkinson (click here), but I agree entirely with him that it’s an absolute certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.

Notes 

Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1982), IV. 376.

Tom Hodgkinson, How to be Idle, (Penguin Books, 2005); see in particular the sections on morning lie-ins, afternoon naps, and the joy of finally retiring to bed at the end of each day. 

The Case of Thomas Townsend (Germ Free Adolescent)

Your deodorant smells nice ...

An inquest into the recent death of 16-year-old Thomas Townsend found that he died from the effects of butane inhalation, following excessive use of spray-on deodorant.

The Kent teenager, concerned about body odour but unwilling to shower, used multiple cans of deodorant in order to stay fresh smelling, if not actually clean. Investigators at the scene of his death found over forty aerosols in his room, many of them empty.

The inquest heard that Thomas, a resident of a children’s care-home in Kent, was troubled and had a history of self-harm, but had expressed no desire to take his own life. Nor had he shown any interest in substance abuse (pathologists found no drink or drugs in his system). He simply didn’t want to stink as nature intended, nor be reliant upon such a primitive and bothersome solution as soap and water. And so he turned to science to counteract the bacterial breakdown of perspiration.

Recording a verdict of accidental death, the coroner declared that Thomas had simply succumbed to the effects of the gas. But surely we might say a bit more than this. For, if nothing else, his case illustrates perfectly the modern obsession with hygiene as a form of commercial and cosmetic artifice which, when taken to an extreme, becomes fatal; something which punk rocker Poly Styrene was singing about almost forty years ago and which Jean Baudrillard also often commented on with characteristic brilliance.

In the words of the X-Ray Spex front woman, Thomas aspired to be a germ free adolescent - one who, sadly, allowed his teenage anxieties and antiseptic fantasies to get the better of him to the point that he literally sprayed himself out of existence, leaving behind nothing but a nice smelling corpse.


Note: Those readers who wish to hear Germ Free Adolescents, by X-Ray Spex, should click here, for a TOTP recording from 1978 conveniently uploaded to YouTube.   

Like the Circles That You Find in the Windmills of Your Mind

According to recent research, how you see the above geometric shape reveals your political personality: if you see it as a circle (more or less), you are inclined to be liberal in your thinking (inclusive, tolerant, non-judgemental, etc.); if, on the other hand, you see it as it is and describe it as such - an imperfect or irregular ellipse - then you are more likely to be conservative in your thinking (sensitive to difference, wary of deviance, disturbed by things that don't quite fit, etc.).

This tells us something crucial about moral humanists and how they view the world - mistakenly. Or, more accurately and ultimately more dangerously, they see things not as they are, but as they would ideally wish them to be. Liberals are almost wilfully blind to any facts that don't coincide with or reinforce their own political wisdom and moral prejudice. 

And this, as Rod Liddle notes in his own inimitable manner, means they suffer from a severe mental impairment - one that effectively makes them self-deluded morons. 

I was reminded of this when, shockingly - but not surprisingly to those of us who don't fantasise a great Family of Man all happily holding hands in a circle - news began to slowly emerge of the New Year's Eve events in Cologne, involving large gangs of non-German males systematically and violently assaulting young women. 

Because idealists like Mrs Merkel refused to listen to those who voiced legitimate concerns about admitting over a million immigrants from the Islamic world and refused to acknowledge that not everything in this world is perfectly smooth, perfectly round, and perfectly compatible with life in a modern, secular society, female friends of mine in cities across Germany now feel concerned for their safety and for the future. And, to be honest, I don't blame them ...


Notes

For those interested in reading the study by Tyler G. Okimoto and Dena M. Gromet on how 'Differences in Sensitivity to Deviance Partly Explain Ideological Divides in Social Policy Support', should pick up a copy of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, (American Psychological Association, Nov. 16, 2015).  

For those interested in reading Rod Liddle's article in The Spectator (2 Jan 2016) in which he discusses the 'political wisdom of people who don't even know what a circle is', click here.