On Masturbation as Sex in the Head

I: Opening Remarks

Whilst archetypal psychologists such as James Hillman and pagan feminists such as Starhawk may pleasure themselves and fantasise about invoking Pan or calling up doubles, D. H. Lawrence rages against masturbation as a fatal form of idealism, or what he terms sex in the head.

In fact, for Lawrence, almost nothing is as evil as jerking off. Not only, he writes, does it harm the individual, but so too is it socially destructive; perhaps the deepest and most dangerous sexual vice that society can be afflicted with in the long run.           

Ironically, Lawrence's views are ultimately rooted in the same metaphysical beliefs as those of Hillman and Starhawk - which obviously makes them just as untenable and just as fallacious - but nevertheless it's interesting to see how and where he differs from the above and why he ends up in such stark opposition ...

II: It's All That Lady of Shalott Business

There's an extraordinary scene in Women in Love between Rupert Birkin and his then girlfriend, Hermione, in which he savagely condemns the latter for her pornographic desire to see all and to know all regarding her naked animal self.

Hermione suggests that children shouldn’t be stimulated into consciousness; that to do so leaves them emotionally crippled and incapable of spontaneity. It sounds like a perfectly respectable Lawrentian viewpoint, but it infuriates Birkin who rages:

"'Knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. You don’t want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary - and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism … Passion and instincts - you want them hard enough, but through your head, in your consciousness.'"

Birkin continues - tellingly in relation to the practices advocated by Starhawk: 

"'It’s all that Lady of Shalott business … You’ve got that mirror, your own fixed will, your immortal understanding, your own tight conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it. There, in the mirror, you must have everything.'"

Like Starhawk, Hermione thinks of herself as a woman of great sensitivity and passion, but she has exchanged real substance for shadows and falsehood:

"'Your passion is a lie … It isn’t passion at all, it is your will. It’s your bullying will. You want to clutch things and have them in your power. And why? Because you haven’t got any real body, any dark body of sensual life. You have no sensuality. You have only your will and your conceit of consciousness, and your lust for power, to know.'"

Birkin then goes on to dismiss the spontaneity claimed by Hermione and her kind:

"'You and spontaneity! You, the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled! You’d be very deliberately spontaneous … Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness … If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography - looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.'"

For Birkin, then, as for Lawrence, it is clear that genuine sensuality is an affair of the blood and belongs to the darkness; something that marks the death of our voluntary, day-time selves. Masturbation is the antithesis of this; idealistic and head-bound. A distinction can be drawn between sensual reality and being and mere sensuousness or sensationalism: the former involves letting go of what we are and what we think we are; the latter is an affair of wilful narcissism and acute self-awareness.

Sensationalists, like Hermione and Starhawk, are so conceited that "'rather than release themselves and live in another world, from another centre'", they prefer to masturbate before mirrors and fool themselves that they are working magic.


III: The Great Danger of Masturbation: Our Vice, Our Dirt, Our Disease

For Lawrence, modern man has fallen into collective insanity and a crucial aspect of this is the tendency of the individual to see himself as a little absolute. This has resulted in sexuality (whatever the mode) becoming a form of self-seeking, rather than an attempt to experience otherness:

"Heterosexual, homosexual, narcissistic … or incestuous, it is all the same thing … Every man, every woman just seeks his own self, her own self, in the sexual experience."

Lawrence encourages us to shatter the great mirror before which we all wank entranced and form new relations with the outside world and with one another. This clearly has particular pertinence to those practitioners of solo sex-magick and Lawrence cleverly reminds his readers of a famous occult image which shows a man standing, before a flat table mirror, which reflects him from waist to head. "Whatever it may mean in magic," writes Lawrence, "it means what we are today; creatures whose active emotional self has no real existence, but is all reflected downwards from the mind."

This introversion of the modern individual, in which the lower centres of psycho-sexual energy and being are aroused and dynamically polarized by the spiritual upper-voluntary centres of consciousness and will, seems to be precisely what Starhawk advocates. But the result of diverting the deeper sensual life of the body upwards is, first and foremost, acute self-consciousness.

"Then", writes Lawrence, "you get the upper body exploiting the lower body. You get the hands exploiting the sensual body, in feeling, fingering, and in masturbation. You get a pornographic longing with regard to the self … eyes and ears want to gather sexual activity and knowledge. The mind becomes full of sex …"

He continues:

"The thought of actual sex connection is usually repulsive. There is an aversion from the normal act of coition. But the craving to feel, to see, to taste, to know, mentally in the head, this is insatiable. Anything, so that the sensation and experience shall come through the upper channels. This is the secret of our introversion and our perversion today. Anything rather than spontaneous direct action from the sensual self. Anything rather than merely normal passion. Introduce any trick, any idea, any mental element you can into sex, but make it an affair of the upper consciousness, the mind and eyes and mouth and fingers. This is our vice, our dirt, our disease."

As much as Lawrence may loathe the phenomenon of sex-in-the-head, we should be clear, however, that he is not arguing for sexual ignorance; nor a return of what he terms the dirty little secret. He wants men and woman to be able to think sex "fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly" - even if it is impossible for them to act sexually to their complete satisfaction. Only when we learn how to both think and act our sex in harmony, neither interfering with the other, will we, says Lawrence, get to where we want to be; a state of accomplished bliss.

For Lawrence, this is a state of grace wherein we learn how to have "a proper reverence for sex, and a proper awe of the body’s strange experience"; neither fearing the body, nor going to the other extreme and treating it "as a sort of toy to be played with".

Lawrence, then, rejects the popular liberal line that posits masturbation as harmless, or positively a good thing for the health and well being of the individual. He writes that whilst in the young a certain amount of auto-erotic activity is inevitable, it becomes a destructive habit once formed and induces in the adult practitioner only a "secret feeling of futility and humiliation". In a particularly important passage, Lawrence argues:

"The great danger of masturbation lies in its merely exhaustive nature. In sexual intercourse, there is a give and take. A new stimulus enters as the native stimulus departs … And this is so in all sexual intercourse where two creatures are concerned, even in the homosexual intercourse. But in masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change, only a deadening. Two people may destroy one another in sex. But they cannot just produce the null effect of masturbation."

Lawrence also refutes the claim made by James Hillman and Starhawk that masturbation is a means of raising psychic energy which can then be put to creative usage:

"The only positive effect of masturbation is that it seems to release a certain mental energy, in some people. But it is mental energy which manifests itself always in the same way, in a vicious circle of analysis and impotent criticism, or else a vicious circle of false and easy sympathy ...”

We might conclude that the thing that characterizes the work of both Hillman and Starhawk is this mixture of conceit and egoism. As authors, they seem incapable of escaping from the lie of themselves and their writing is nothing more at last than an exercise in self-promotion.

Of course, some might say the same of Lawrence ...


Notes

The lines quoted from D. H. Lawrence were taken from the following works:

Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

Readers interested in James Hillman on masturbation and the invocation of Pan should click here.
Readers interested in Starhawk on the role of masturbation within the practice of sex-magick should click here.   

This post is a revised and edited extract from an essay on masturbation in The Treadwell's Papers 1: Sex/Magic (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). 

On Masturbation as a Form of Sex-Magick

According to Starhawk, a leading figure within the earth-based spirituality movement, esoteric teachings about sex identify a quality called polarity, the currents of which "are very powerful forces" and magical training "often focuses on learning to recognise and channel those currents".

The simplest polarity flow is between male and female principles and many Craft groups make this central to working magic. According to Starhawk, however, polarity can also be created internally within the individual via a process of magical masturbation. She writes: "If a woman creates an inner male, or a man creates an inner female, polarity can flow between the person and what we call the companion self".

Starhawk explains the procedure: Firstly, remove your clothes and stand naked before a full-length mirror. Secondly, study your reflection, taking pleasure in every part of your body; "do not diet or attempt to change the way your body looks", says Starhawk, "work on learning to love it the way it is" (for Starhawk the body is not only always beautiful, but also always innocent; a natural object outside of culture and history).
 
Finally, it's time to invoke the double by imagining one’s reflected image to be someone both to love and be loved by: "let a feeling of warmth and affection flow from you to your double", says Starhawk; "you can talk with your double, or, if you like, make love with him/her. When you are done, thank your double".

This process of amusingly courteous occult ritual and magical masturbation is taken a stage further when the double becomes a full companion self - no longer just a reflection, but a virtual other of the opposite sex. Again we are instructed to feel "affection and attraction for the person you have created in the mirror". Starhawk also suggests naming the companion self: "Have a conversation. Play. Make love."

She further advises that mutual masturbation between flesh-and-blood partners is also a valuable way of building a "deeper-than-superficial bond between lovers", before advocating a form of al fresco masturbation with plants that, apparently, enables us to get closer to the natural world. Let’s briefly examine each of these options in turn ...

Firstly, mutual masturbation between partners. Not only does Starhawk insist that a partner should be carefully chosen and preferably be someone with whom one has already established a close relationship built upon trust and affection (Starhawk doesn't approve of promiscuous, irresponsible, or anonymous sex), but she says that both parties involved should also "be familiar with the workings of polarity".

I have to say I find the latter point particularly curious. I can’t help wondering why it needs to be the case; either there’s a cosmic law of polarity that exists independently of man or there isn’t. How can knowledge or lack of knowledge of it make any difference to its working?

Anyway, let us return to our masturbating couple:

"Retire to a warm and private place. Sit opposite each other. Look into each other's eyes and call up the current you felt with your double or companion self … When you are ready, trade. Let your lover send while you receive. Lie down next to each other. Place your hands on each other’s bodies - in whatever places please both of you. Call up the current of polarity … Then you can both send and receive simultaneously. As the currents build, make sounds or movements that help them. Let the process reach its natural conclusion".

Although Starhawk doesn’t explicitly say what this natural conclusion is, we can only assume she means (in a rather banal and functional manner) orgasm. She also adds an amusing end note to the above in which she once again insists that magical masturbation works best “in a long-standing love affair or partnership”. Such curious moralizing is, alas, all too typical of many writers within the Wiccan world.

Having briefly discussed mutual masturbation in the context of sex-magick, it’s time now to examine outdoor auto-erotic activity or loving nature as Starhawk both euphemistically and all too literally puts it. Perhaps we find here elements of the invocation of Pan that archetypal psychologist James Hillman celebrates (click here). Writing in those short, often two-word non-sentences that she seems to favour, Starhawk instructs us to:

"Go outside. Find a plant (or you can do this with a tree … or some other natural object) … Call up the current you felt with your double or companion self … Let the current flow into the plant until you feel its energy radiating back. Enjoy it."

Again, rather coyly, she doesn’t actually use the word masturbate here - but what else can it be that one is encouraged to do but wank with the vegetation?

Now, let me say at this point that I have no problem with any of this; not the wanking, the floraphilia, or the elements of objectum sexuality. However, one does worry that what's being advocated here is no more than an intellectual game played with smoke and mirrors; a deliberate and wilful prostituting of the body to the mind or what Lawrence terms sex in the head. And for me, it's disappointing that pagan occultism should be complicit in exchanging the sheer intensity of libidinal pleasure for mere representation.

Disappointing, but not surprising. For as the great Gardnerian witch-queen Doreen Valiente readily admits: "Practitioners of magic have always emphasized that … in the last resort it is the mind that holds the power of magic".


See: 

Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark, (Beacon Press, 1982) 
Doreen Valiente, An ABC of Witchcraft, (Phoenix Publishing, 1988). 

Note: this post is a revised and edited extract from an essay on masturbation in The Treadwell's Papers 1: Sex/Magic (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). Readers interested in two related posts, also extracted from the above essay, should click here and here.

On Masturbation and the Invocation of Pan

According to archetypal psychologist James Hillman, masturbation is a universal practice which is legitimate as a form of sexual behaviour in its own right and not to be considered a poor substitute for coition. What's more, masturbation is not for Hillman merely a simple pleasure; it exemplifies rather the important relationship between mythology and pathology and is divinely sanctioned by the great god Pan whom it invokes and enacts within the flesh.

It would, of course, be easy to laugh at this line of thinking - a line that I know all too well and followed all too closely in my youth - but where I think Hillman is to be commended is in his insistence that masturbation is not an eruptive sexual urge and that the association with Pan is therefore not merely a means of dressing up the old idea of the uncontrollable beast in man.  

Despite the language used, Hillman's analysis is sophisticated enough to allow for the fact that both the will to masturbation and the will to inhibition which accompanies and diverts it, belong to the same instinctual matrix; i.e. that the latter is not merely socially constructed in order to frustrate a more primal desire.

Just as moralists mistakenly branded masturbation an evil because it seemed to serve no biological or social purpose, so too have sex radicals confused the shame which accompanies masturbation with an internalised authority in need of overthrowing. Hillman recognises the traditional moral standpoint to be misguided, but so too does he interrogate the attempt to liberate masturbation from the restraining prohibition which is such a crucial element of the compulsion itself. For Hillman, sex radicalism and secular humanism ultimately risk making masturbation meaningless:

"Deprived of its fantasy, shame and conflict, masturbation becomes nothing but physiology, an inborn release mechanism without significance for the soul".

In other words, in seeking to make masturbation a harmless activity, we reduce the mystery of Pan - and for Hillman this is a bad thing. For Hillman wishes to re-enchant the world via a "re-education of the citizen in relation to nature". However, he's keen to stress that this re-education "goes deeper than the nymph consciousness of awe and gentleness" and that a Romantic love of the countryside is not enough:

"The re-education of the citizen would have to begin at least partly from Pan’s point of view … But Pan’s world includes masturbation, rape, panic, convulsions, and nightmares. The re-education of the citizen in relation to nature means nothing less than a new relationship with these ‘horrors’, ‘moral depravities’, and ‘madnesses’ which are part of the instinctual life …"

Rightly or wrongly, Hillman insists that by intensifying interiority with a complex mix of joy and shame, masturbation “brings genital pleasure, fantasy, and conflict to the individual as psychic subject" and ultimately opens the way towards a neo-pagan future ...    


See: James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare, (Continuum, 2000).

Note: this post is a revised and edited extract from an essay on masturbation in The Treadwell's Papers 1: Sex/Magic (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). Readers interested in two related posts, also extracted from the above essay, should click here and here.

Heidegger's 'Letter on Humanism'

If there's one essay by Heidegger to which I still regularly return, it's his Letter on Humanism. First published in 1947, Heidegger provides a robust and brilliant defence not only of his own thinking, but of all those authors with whom he shares philosophical affinities.

In a crucial section that could almost act as a foreword to this blog, he writes:

“Because we are speaking against ‘humanism’ people fear a defense of the inhuman and a glorification of barbaric brutality. For what is more ‘logical’ than that somebody who negates humanism nothing remains but the affirmation of inhumanity?
      Because we are speaking against ‘logic’ people believe we are demanding that the rigor of thinking be renounced and in its place the arbitrariness of drives and feelings be installed and thus that ‘irrationalism’ be proclaimed as true. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever speaks against the logical is defending the alogical?
      Because we are speaking against ‘values’ people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more ‘logical’ than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless?
     Because we say that the Being of man consists in ‘being-in-the-world’ people find that man is downgraded to a merely terrestrial being, whereupon philosophy sinks into positivism. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever asserts the worldliness of human beings holds only this life valid, denies the beyond, and renounces all ‘Transcendence’?
      Because we refer to the word of Nietzsche on the ‘death of God’ people regard such a gesture as atheism. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever has experienced the death of God is godless?
      Because in all the respects mentioned we everywhere speak against all that humanity deems high and holy our philosophy teaches an irresponsible and destructive ‘nihilism’. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever roundly denies what is truly in being puts himself on the side of nonbeing and thus professes the pure nothing as the meaning of reality?
      What is going on here? People talk about ‘humanism’, ‘logic’, ‘values’, ‘world’, and ‘God’. They hear something about opposition to these. They recognize and accept these things as positive ... they immediately assume that what speaks against something is automatically its negation and that this is ‘negative’ in the sense of destructive. ...
      But does the ‘against’ which a thinking advances against ordinary opinion necessarily point toward negation and the negative? This happens ... only when one posits in advance what is meant by the ‘positive’ and on the basis makes an absolute and absolutely negative decision about the range of possible opposition to it. ...
...
      To think against ‘logic’ does not mean to break a lance for the illogical but simply to trace in thought the logos and its essence, which appeared in the dawn of thinking ...
      To think against ‘values’ is not to maintain that everything interpreted as ‘a value’ ... is valueless. Rather, it is important to finally realize that precisely through the characterization of something as ‘a value’ what is so valued is robbed of its worth. That is to say, by the assessment of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object for man’s estimation. ... Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing.”

In other words, valuing does not let things be in their own right; it allows them only to be valid when useful to man. This is what Nietzsche thinks of as nihilism and what Lawrence describes as blasphemous living. It is this they challenge via their work and in this challenge one can locate a new ethic (of letting be); something that their critics claim it is impossible to find within an irrationalist ontology and/or an anti-humanist politics of evil.

Thus, despite what these critics say, there clearly can be a post-moral ethics - just as there was a pre-moral ethics in the ancient world. As Nietzsche says on a number of occasions, beyond good and evil does not mean there are no conceptions of what constitutes good (noble) and bad (base) conduct.

Indeed, there could even conceivably be post-moral or neo-pagan religions, should we desire to formulate such on the basis of a newly affirmative will to power. But Zarathustra insists that any such religion would have to be one that stays true to the earth and to the flesh. This is not to posit a spurious form of blut und boden idealism in the manner of the Nazis, rather, it is to acknowledge that “Mortals dwell in the way they safeguard the Fourfold in its essential unfolding”.

In other words, mankind secures its destiny by tending the earth, receiving the sky, awaiting the gods, and by initiating an unfolding into being. This may not be humanism in the classical sense, but, as George Steiner says: “There are meaner metaphors to live by.”


Notes

Heidegger's 'Letter on Humanism' can be found in his Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994).

The line on the dwelling of mortals comes from Heidegger's essay 'Building Dwelling Thinking', which can also be found in his Basic Writings. 

The line from George Steiner is taken from Heidegger, (Fontana Press, 1989), p. 150. 

Waiting for the Migrants (After Cavafy)

Portrait of C. P. Cavafy: the Onassis Cultural Centre

www.sgt.gr

More than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe by sea in 2015, sparking a crisis as countries struggled to cope with the influx. And, according to new figures published this week, the situation is only getting more desperate as the number of people seeking safety, shelter, and opportunity continues to rise ...

I don't know what can be done or what should be done about this. But, as a poet, I feel myself entitled to comment on events and express all kinds of thoughts and feelings which others might repudiate (though whether anyone should pay the slightest attention to the musings of a poet in a time of social and political upheaval is of course debatable).

And so here's a few lines of verse in relation to the above chaos of peoples; lines which rely upon (and play with) Cavafy's famous poem, Περιμένοντας τους Bαρβάρους.

I am grateful to Dr Maria Thanassa for providing me with a new translation of the original Greek text.


What are we waiting for gathered on the beach
and looking nervously out to sea?

Haven't you heard? The migrants are arriving today …

Why is nothing being done to stop them?
Why are the politicians arguing about quotas and not acting?

Because it’s already too late: what laws are they to pass now?
Besides, when the migrants arrive, they’ll legislate anew.

Why did Frau Merkel throw open the gates to Europe?
Who gave her the right to lecture others on their Christian duty?

I don’t know. But the migrants are arriving today  
and we must receive them with smiles and open purses.
We must bestow universal rights upon them.

Why have so many news crews arrived on the scene,
with solemn reporters pushing cameras into the faces
of crying women and children?

Because the migrants are arriving today
and journalists have a moral obligation to bring us their story ... 

Why are so many celebrities holding signs that read:  
Refugees Welcome?

Because the migrants are arriving today
and bleeding hearts have never looked better
than when stitched onto designer sleeves ...

Why all of a sudden is there such restlessness and such confusion?
Why are the streets and the squares emptying so fast, people heading
home in horror?

Because darkness has fallen.   

What shall become of us in a land occupied by immigrants?
We were told they'd provide a solution ...

Steve Taylor's Softness Contra Nietzschean Hardness

According to best-selling author and academic Steve Taylor - a man who prides himself on having a Ph.D in transpersonal psychology and the fact that for the last four years he's been included in a list of the world's most spiritually influential living people - we should allow ourselves to be soft in order to:

(i) avoid conflict with others or creating unnecessary friction -

(ii) make ourselves invulnerable "so that disappointments and insults don't bruise" and life is as painless as possible -

(iii) become a good liberal able to "pass through the world" without damaging anything.   

Amusingly, this is a man who - I'm told - once made a pilgrimage to Nietzsche's birthplace!

But Nietzsche didn't tell his readers to calm down and he sneered at philosophies about which the best that can be said is that they don't hurt anyone. Indeed, for Nietzsche, it is modern man's excessive sensitivity and decadence that lies at the heart of so many of the problems facing us today. Zarathustra famously speaks of the diamond who asks of the charcoal:

"Why so soft, so submissive and yielding? Why is there so much negation and abnegation in your heart? Why is there so little fate in your look?"

He insists that creators are of necessity hard; that they impose and impress themselves upon others and upon life with cruelty and innocence. And he laughs at the weaklings who think themselves good merely because their claws are blunt ... 


Notes 

Readers interested in Dr Taylor and his work should visit: stevenmtaylor.com 
His poem, Be Soft (for Russel Williams), Dec. 2015, can be found directly by clicking here. 

Readers interested in Nietzsche's thought can consult the digital critical edition of his complete works and letters based on the G. Colli and M. Montinari text, ed. by Paolo D’Iorio: click here. 

The above painting of Nietzsche, by Angela Vera Concha (2010), can be found here along with other interesting stuff.

Big Mac Amongst the Bramble

Nothing says Essex more than this image of a Big Mac box discarded amongst the bramble: the perfect juxtaposition of brash and noisy consumer culture and a largely lifeless countryside rendered silent beneath the onslaught of the former.

The futile attempt to keep Britain tidy has largely been lost in an age of litter. Indeed, paper bags, plastic bottles, tin cans, cigarette butts and other manufactured objects are now such an ever-present part of the natural environment that many people seem not to notice, or passively accept the fact.   

And whilst the fast food industry isn't entirely to blame for this, it's certainly a major producer of rubbish. Several recent studies have shown that packaging from their products is a significant percentage of national litter, with McDonald's the chief culprit. For despite priding themselves on their corporate efforts to ensure responsible disposal of trash, waste from McDonald's continues to make up almost a third of the junk food litter in the UK.

Beneath the Golden Arches and the promise of hamburger heaven lies a landfill site ... 

Reflections on the Death of a Rat

SA 2016

When exiled in Essex looking after an elderly parent in need of extensive and intensive care due to a serious neuro-cognitive impairment, it can quickly become isolating: friends fall away and family members stay away. And it's virtually impossible of course to communicate with the natives, or get to know the next door neighbours. 

And so, like Dr Doolittle, one turns to the animals for companionship; whistling to the little birds, observing the slugs and snails in all their soft beauty, and attempting to befriend a very timid but rather fierce looking local cat who likes to sit under a big bush at the top of my back garden, disappearing through a hole in the fence whenever he's approached. 

I've been leaving him a small tin of Gourmet Gold chicken and liver chunks in gravy at night for several weeks now, which, judging by the emptiness of the tin each morning, he seems to enjoy. Indeed, in what I like to interpret as a gesture of gratitude the cat today left a freshly killed (and semi-eaten) rat on the lawn for me to find.       

Now I know that many people find such feline behaviour gross, or might raise a moral objection to cruelty (it's amazing how many self-professed animal lovers are in denial about the murderous and carnivorous nature of reality). But I must admit to feeling rather touched by this attempt to reciprocate kindness and share food.     

I understand that domestic cats have an effect on wildlife numbers, killing many millions of birds, rodents, and other small creatures each year. However - and this might surprise many readers - there is no scientific evidence that predation by moggies is having any serious impact on other species here in the UK.

What the research does show, however, is that rapid loss of natural habitat due to human activity is the major factor in why biodiversity is shrinking; over 60% of British species have significantly declined in recent decades and 10% face extinction. And it's we - not our pets - who are to blame ...

Thoughts on D. H. Lawrence (Stephen Alexander in Conversation with David Brock)

                                   

Back in the far-off summer of 2014, I was interviewed by then Editor of the D. H. Lawrence Newsletter, David Brock, who wanted to know my thoughts on a number of questions that were then troubling him in relation to his hero poet.

As most torpedophiles are not members of the D. H. Lawrence Society and will not therefore have read the published interview, I thought it might be helpful to reproduce extracts of it here, thereby making my own rather ambivalent relationship to Lawrence a little clearer ... 


DB: In her guide to the life and work of D. H. Lawrence entitled The Country of My Heart (1972), Bridget Pugh argues that Lawrence looked deeper into the human soul than any of his contemporaries, concerned as he was with the hidden and unconscious sources of the self. Do you feel that any writers today look as deeply?

SA: Probably not. But then this metaphysical notion of subjective depth is no longer one that greatly troubles us in an essentially non-essential age of irony, inauthenticity, and insincerity. We are far more Wildean in this regard than we are Lawrentian and have become - in Nietzschean terms - superficial out of profundity. Personally, I think this is a good thing and much prefer Lawrence when he sticks to the surface, writing about the importance of fashion for example, than when he indulges in folk psychology and starts speculating about fundamental human desire, feeling, and belief.

DB: Bridget Pugh also writes that Lawrence "saw the invasion of the landscape by the ugliness of industrialism as a reflection of the destruction of natural man removed from his instinctive communion with the rest of the universe ..." Other than by reading and re-reading Lawrence, how do you feel we can regain that vital communion? What hope is there for humanity?

SA: Well, hope isn't something I cling to or seek to offer others; not only does it encourage optimism, but it's one of the three theological virtues upon which Christianity is founded and, like Lawrence, I am, in a sense, with the Anti-Christ, rather than with Jesus and all the saints and angels of heaven. As for humanity, that's something to be overcome, is it not? A form that is restrictive and no longer tenable. Sorry to be so Nietzschean about this once again.

As for the quotation from Bridget Pugh, I'm afraid that doesn't interest me in the least. That's not to say it's wrong: Lawrence clearly subscribed to certain romantic and neo-pagan narratives regarding nature, industrialism, and the vital character of the cosmos. But it's very difficult for us to share his beliefs without sacrificing intellectual integrity. We can have an immensely exciting understanding of the universe we inhabit - thanks to modern science - but we cannot enter again into any kind of religious communion with the earth and stars in good faith. Or, as Lawrence concedes when face to face with the religious rituals of Native America: Sorry, I can no longer cluster at the drum. This might seem like typical English reserve in the face of genuine otherness, but it is rather one of the most honest admissions that Lawrence makes anywhere in his writings. He knows there’s no going back to an earlier way of being.

DB: As Lawrentians, Stephen, how do we justify our joy and our continual celebration of his creative genius? Would Lawrence prefer to have loyal readers, or active followers who put his ideas into practice?

SA: Nietzsche once said that there was only ever one Christian and that he died on the Cross; that for others to call themselves Christians was a fatal misunderstanding. I think we can - and should - feel something similar whenever the term Lawrentians is used. Thus I would answer your question this way: we don’t need to justify our pleasure in reading his books and celebrating his life; there’s no need for apology or explanation here. Those who seek to make others feel guilty about their pleasures are the kind of censor-morons sitting in judgement on life that Lawrence despised and so courageously fought against.

Lawrence would prefer unashamed readers, rather than loyal ones. Like Zarathustra, he would quickly lose patience with followers and tell them that ultimately their task is simply this: Lose me and find yourselves. That’s the key. Unashamed readers must be prepared to challenge Lawrence and recontextualise his ideas; which isn’t the same as simply putting them into practice as if Lawrence supplied a convenient set of dos and don’ts. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze - who happens to be one of Lawrence’s great readers - says the task is to pick up the arrow that he fired into the world and then shoot it anew into the future, in a new direction and at a new target. As a reader - particularly as a reader of a writer like Lawrence - you remain loyal by an act of infidelity.

DB: Do you think that Lawrence Society members should oppose factory farming and care about animal rights?

SA: In principle I’m tempted to say yes. Obviously the question of the animal and its suffering is an important one, although I’m not sure it’s one that is best addressed in terms of ‘rights’. I’d like to think we might develop an altogether different relationship with non-human forms of life - and it’s here that Lawrence might perhaps prove useful.

To be clear on this: I don’t think we should plead the case for animal liberation, or argue that they have specific interests that give rise to certain moral claims; rather, I’m interested in the becoming-animal of man and undermining the singular status of the human. We need to find a post-metaphysical way of thinking man and animal both; one that does away with anthropocentrism and deconstructs the violent hierarchy that places us in opposition to the animal and accords us superiority.

Having said this, whilst you have every right to imagine Lawrence as an ardent animal activist, I’m not sure you’re entitled to imply that those members of the Lawrence Society who don’t concern themselves with the exploitation of animals and who don’t think meat is murder, are somehow morally deficient or missing the point of his work. It should always be remembered that Lawrence was primarily a writer and his concern was language and thus, even when seemingly celebrating the otherness of the animal, be it a bat, snake, or fish, it might be argued that Lawrence is really still just playing textual games on the page. Amit Chaudhuri makes a very powerful argument that even in the famous poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers Lawrence doesn’t accurately describe such things at all, or directly touch on them as things in themselves. Rather, he recreates and imitates them for his own amusement and that of his readers, assembling an exhibition of stuffed creatures; “his collection of textual mannequins, his pantomime of nature”.

DB: You once reminded me that Lawrence thought there was nothing romantic about madness - that it was a tragic waste of sane consciousness. Do you consider that we have an insane and romantic view of the importance of human life and are we wasting our consciousness in this respect?

SA: We certainly have a conceited and somewhat sentimental view of our own importance and one of the things I love most about Lawrence is that, for the most part, he avoids (and combats) anthropocentric vulgarity. Unfortunately, he doesn’t go far enough in his attempt to thoroughly dehumanize nature and remains trapped within what Quentin Meillassoux terms correlationism - i.e., Lawrence continues to make a link between thinking and being and so can never quite accept the possibility of a mind-independent reality.

This is a great shame and a great failing in his work; one which keeps him within a theo-humanist tradition. Ultimately, he’s not really interested in the stars, animals, trees, or other objects, but only in their relation to man, who, in turn, cannot be considered outside of his relation to the world. That’s the contradiction or paradox at the heart of his writing. For whilst he repeatedly insists that he wants to know the great outside - that inhuman space of the savage exterior - like all critical thinkers after Kant Lawrence too is fundamentally more interested in consciousness and language and these concerns keep him tied to a form of correlationism. 

DB: Despite all Lawrence's best efforts, one has a strong sense that most people are still only half alive. Should this concern us, do you think?

SA: No, I don’t think so. As is perhaps clear from some of the earlier answers, I’m not a vitalist and don’t fetishize or privilege being alive over being dead. As Nietzsche pointed out, being alive is only a rare and unusual way of being dead. Death is ultimately a welcome return to material actuality and an escape from complexity and, as Heidegger argued, all being is a being-towards-death. I think Lawrence recognised this as is clear in his late poetry.

Perhaps the undead fascinate more, philosophically-speaking, than the half-alive. The zombie, for example, embodies the Derridean notion of undecidability which so threatens the traditional foundations of Western metaphysics and so-called common sense. Like the vampire, or, more recently, the cyborg, the zombie cannot be classified as either alive or dead. Rather it belongs to the indeterminable realm of the neither/nor whilst also being, paradoxically, both at once.

Zombies not only indicate the limits of our thinking on life and death, but help to subvert all of those other binary oppositions upon which we establish conceptual coherence and build a stable world - but also a world of violent inequality. It might be stretching things a bit, but might we not read the story of The Man Who Died as a piece of zombie fiction?

In Defence of the Slug

I knew the slugs in the garden ate the vegetation and had a particular liking for Maria's flowers (much to her chagrin and my amusement). But until last week I didn't know they feasted also on the dead baby birds that occasionally litter the lawn after a summer downpour.

In other words, whilst I was vaguely aware these naked snails whom many gardeners delight in killing with salt and pellets played a crucial role in the ecosystem by disposing of decaying plant matter, I had no idea they were carrion feeders. Nor did I discover until very recently that some species of slug are predatory and necro-cannibalistic; devouring not only earthworms, but even their dead brethren.               

Nevertheless, I remain sympathetic towards these slimy-bodied hermaphrodites as I am to other animals deemed to be horticultural pests by human beings. Slugs, it seems to me, are more sinned against than sinning, mercilessly preyed upon as they are by a multitude of better-loved garden creatures including frogs, newts, blackbirds, and hedgehogs.      

So leave 'em alone Little Greek: we can always grow new daisies ...

On Non-Referential Aesthetics and the Politics of Silence

Lawrence writes that, as a novelist, it's his primary task to conduct a molecular exploration of the feelings and not comment on molar politics and the great social issues of the day. Besides, other people understand these things much better than him. 

In other words, like Richard Somers, the apolitical protagonist of his novel Kangaroo, Lawrence wants to fight out something with mankind in order to make an opening into the future, but he doesn't want to become hopelessly entangled in history and great events.

Thus Lawrence comes to an understanding that - as a man of letters - his alienation from public life is something he has no choice but to actively sustain; particularly if he wishes to secure a degree of intellectual freedom and transmit in his thinking something that does not and will not allow itself to be codified within conventional political discourse.

Of course, Lawrence is not the only author to display ironic indifference (or insouciance as he calls it) to the world at large. Jane Austen is another novelist whom I admire precisely because she chose to write about the micropolitics of daily life and affairs of the heart whilst staying wonderfully silent on the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, or the massive upheaval caused by industrialization. 

Push comes to shove, I'd rather re-read Pride and Prejudice than War and Peace. And hopefully this explains why I've not written a post on the EU referendum being held in the UK today ...       

Quizás, Quizás, Quizás

Nietzsche: Philosopher of the Perilous Perhaps

I have just read a rather ridiculous article on Yahoo to do with words that make the speaker sound stupid. For the most part it was a predictable list with few surprises; we can all agree, for example, that only a moron uses the word awesome.

However, I was intrigued to see the list included the word maybe on the grounds that it showed the speaker to be unsure of his own views or unable to make up her own mind (i.e. to lack intellectual confidence and decision making ability).

For maybe is perhaps one of my favourite words; just as perhaps functions as the most privileged of all qualifiers in my philosophical lexicon. For the term perhaps doesn't express my uncertainty, so much as create unease in the listener via a suggestion of ambiguity when there was an everyday expectation of clarity and coherence.

It thus subverts and, more radically, deconstructs an entire system of metaphysics based upon a fundamental belief in the opposition of values and an eternal game of either/or (Either you love me or you don't, goddammit!)

For those who believe in the truth - and who believe, what's more, that they know the truth when they hear it - everyone is expected to speak truthfully (i.e. with sincerity, conviction, and logical coherence). Only liars, cheats, swindlers, women, poets, and Continental philosophers refuse to call a spade a spade and like to beat about the bush.

Philosophers such as Nietzsche, for example, who eagerly anticipated the arrival of a new style of thinker; one who has a very different taste and inclination to the adherents of the Truth as a categorical imperative. He calls such thinkers to come philosophers of the dangerous Perhaps.       


See: Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990). Part I, Section 2. 

On the Politics of Beach Body Readiness

D. H. Lawrence wrote a series of poems sneering at modern sunbathers in all their beach body readiness. Yes they looked fit and healthy (healthy, healthy, healthy). And yes, they even looked good enough to eat. But somehow their flesh lacked meaning and vitality; their great inert thighs leading nowhere.  

So, far from feeling bad about his own emaciated and disease-ravaged physique when confronted with those bodies deemed biologically admirable, Lawrence defiantly affirmed his own contrasting quickness.  

I thought of this last year when there was a great hoo-ha over a poster for Protein World's weight-loss collection featuring a perfectly formed bikini-clad model (Renee Somerfield). The Advertising Standards Authority received almost 400 complaints from those who found the campaign objectifying and socially irresponsible. There was also a protest in Hyde Park and an online petition that attracted more than 70,000 signatures.   

Eventually, the fuss died down and everyone either forgot about the case, or found something else to get het up over. But now this issue of body shaming is back in the headlines thanks to the new London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, who has said he will ban all ads on the Tube and bus network that might offend commuters or make them feel pressured to conform to an ideal body type.

Speaking as a father of two teenage daughters, Khan warned that images such as the above demeaned women and caused confidence issues among young people. It is high time, he said, that such advertising came to an end.         

Obviously, this is an astonishing and, to my mind, rather worrying development. For it means that the Mayor is making policy on the basis of a Helen Lovejoy approach to decision making; one that effectively turns all Londoners into Sadiq's little girls in need of daddy's protection and wise authority.    

Ultimately, I'm no more beach body ready than Lawrence. But nor am I ready for Khan's progressive paternalism which offers a soft form of sharia and censorship in the name of feminism and thinking of the children.   

Elephants Can Be Murderous Too

Illustration from An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon (1681), by Robert Knox

I have received an email from someone who read the recent series of elephant posts published on Torpedo the Ark: the tragic tales of Tyke, Topsy, Mary and Chunee.

Describing themselves as an elephant lover and a passionate supporter of animal rights, they write to thank me for displaying "compassion with innocent, gentle and highly intelligent creatures forced to suffer needless cruelty at the hands of man".

Now, whilst it's true that I do sympathise with wild things in captivity and dislike all forms of cruelty to animals, I think it should also be mentioned that elephants - which are undeniably intelligent - are not always so gentle. And I'd never describe them as innocent; certainly not in the way in which I suspect my correspondent is using the term.

For not only are wild elephants - particularly the young males - prone to violent and aggressive behaviour (in India, they regularly enter villages at night, damaging property and causing human fatalities), but beasts co-opted into human society have long been complicit in warfare and capital punishment.

Execution by elephant, for example, was once common throughout SE Asia; the supposedly gentle giants happily crushing, dismembering, or impaling prisoners with weaponised tusks. The animals were not only smart and versatile enough to be trained in the sophisticated art of torture, but seemed to derive pleasure from the opportunity to exercise power, inflict pain and test out their deadly skills on unfortunate victims.

The point is this: you can throw someone to the wolves or to the lions if you simply want them to be torn to pieces; but if you really want to extend their suffering and have them murdered by an animal rather than merely killed, then you're going to have enlist the help of an elephant.    


Note: the spectacle of elephants executing captives both horrified and fascinated European travellers and there are numerous written accounts. The practice was eventually suppressed by the colonial powers that controlled the region in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

On the Dog's Bollocks and the Loss of a Penile Bone in Human Males

One of the things my friend Catherine loves most about her new puppy dog is the soft, subterranean nature of his penis, which she characterizes rather nicely as rhizomatic.

"It runs parallel to and just under the surface of the skin (you can see the bulge), with just the very end of it projecting out into the world, like a lipstick."

She adds: "The balls are also mainly under the surface, just at the far end of the semi-submerged penis", though I think she may have mistaken the spherical knot of erectile tissue known as the bulbis glandis for the dog's testicles (not that I'm an expert in canine genitalia).

Catherine concludes with a confession of aesthetico-sexual preference: "I think it so much nicer to have a secret, shy little organ hidden away, rather than a perpendicular penis."

Were I female, I suspect I might very well feel likewise; there is something displeasing about a large dangling dick. But, being male, what really fascinates me about a dog's penis is the fact that it contains a bone (the baculum); a feature common to many placental mammals which provides sufficient stiffness to enable non-erect penetration and allow for an extended period of coition.

Unfortunately, the so-called os penis is absent in man, although present in other primates including chimpanzees and gorillas. Thanks to a malevolent and mocking God removing such from Adam in order to make Eve, human males have never known the joy and reassurance of a true boner and have had to rely on haemodynamics and the vagaries of desire for hardness.


Note; I am grateful to Catherine Brown for suggesting the subject of this post and for allowing me to quote from her correspondence in which we discussed it. Readers interested in Catherine's further views on man and dog should click here. 

Notes on the Material Remains of My Father

I respect and admire the fact that my father walked naked and light his entire life; owning nothing and leaving nothing behind when he died; no great legacy, no treasured possessions, not even an urn full of ashes.

In fact, his material remains pretty much amass to no more than a few black and white photographs, an old radio (or wireless, as he always called it), a pack of playing cards, and some rusty little tins in the garden shed covered in cobwebs containing assorted nails, tacks, and screws.

What's astonishing about these objects - particularly the old tobacco tins - is how powerfully they resonate when I draw close to them. Even though just humble, everyday, mass-produced items they have an authenticity to them, or a thingness, that any Heideggerean would instantly recognise and appreciate.    

Lawrence describes this as quickness - a quality that can be contrasted to deadness, but which doesn't only belong to living, organic or natural objects. That is to say, even a rather ridiculous-looking iron stove, for example, can be quick. Or, as in this case, an old tin of 2" nails.

Why? Because it exists in perfect relationship to its environment and to the rest of the things in the shed; a pair of garden gloves, a rake, a crack in the wall, a box of matches, a house-spider ... etc.

Further, the tobacco tin has had what Lawrence terms soft life invested in it via years of use and transferred touch. It has become one of those lovely old things that sparkles with magical allure and which remains warm with the spirit of a kind and quiet man who loved a smoke.  

True Lies

For those who adhere to moral-rationalism, truth is the highest virtue. And all forms of deception inherently diabolical. Such sincere souls live in fear of being lied to, or led astray into falsehood; they hate ambiguity, concealment, illusion. 

This may make them good parents, good people, or good policemen. But, unfortunately, it means they'll never be great poets.

For it's not simply the case that deception is an art, but, more radically, all art is deception; a game of creative immorality and evil genius which not only delights in untruth, but regards the truth itself to be metaphorical in character and all too human in origin.

Something, in other words, that has been enhanced, transposed, and embellished; something which after long years of obligatory usage seems firm, fixed, and authentic - the veritable Word of God.    

(It's worth recalling at this point that before Nietzsche finally pronounced him dead, God was brilliantly conceived by Descartes as not only omnipotent but malevolent and mendacious: the Deus deceptor.)  


See:

Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense', essay in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Penguin Books, 1976).

Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. and ed. John Cottingham, (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Denise, Denise (In Memory of My Childhood Sweetheart)

Neil Levenson wasn't the only one to have a childhood sweetheart called Denise. My primary object of affection also went by this name and although I didn't write a doo-wop song in her honour, I've never forgotten the happy days we spent together, as here, feeding the deer at Bedford's Park in the summer of '69.

Some clever people with cold hearts sneer at sentimentality and dismiss early forms of love as puppyish. They fail to appreciate what Scott Fitzgerald described as the undesirous medley of joy and innocence that belongs to immature romance and think the experiences and emotions of childhood are best grown-out of and forgotten. Almost they seem embarrassed by such feelings and infatuations and reject nostalgia as indecent or in some way reactionary and escapist.

But Freud knew the crucial nature of first love and acknowledged the psychic importance of returning to the past. Our greatest poets also possess not only a distinct memory of childhood, but retain fidelity with its promise.

Those who believe that paradise can only be re-entered via an act of socio-sexual transgression might like to consider whether such doesn't begin with Lady Chatterley and her lover, for example, but with two anonymous six-year-olds holding hands under the desk, or unashamedly agreeing to show one another their genitalia behind the bushes ...                

Asspresso: A Brief History of Coffee Enemas

I like coffee. Most people like coffee. Coffee is one of the most popular drinks in the world. But very few people choose to squirt coffee into their lower bowel by way of the rectum in the belief that it has miraculous cleansing and healing properties.

The history of enemas or colonic irrigation is a long and well-lubricated one, stretching at least as far back as the ancient Egyptians who, like the Greeks, believed that non-specified toxins accumulate in the gastrointestinal tract causing various health problems.

This theory of auto-intoxication was not finally discredited by medical science until the early twentieth century. But it still has many believers who faithfully stick rubber tubes up their bottoms and in this manner seek to purify the body and enhance their well-being, even though there is no evidence that such a procedure is either necessary or has any beneficial effect - and even though purging may in fact cause serious harm.   

Most practitioners use water; sometimes with added herbs, a slice of lemon, or a saline solution. But some, as I have said, choose coffee and it's this that particularly fascinates (and amuses) me. One has to ask: why coffee? Why not a nice cup of tea?

The answer is because coffee - first conceived as a clyster in 1917 - was said by German physician and alternative therapist Max Gerson to do so much more than merely cleanse; it could also play a vital part in treating (and, indeed, curing) chronic degenerative conditions, including tuberculosis and cancer. Provided, of course, that the coffee was injected anally several times a day in sufficient quantities to stimulate the liver and not merely sipped over breakfast.                       

There's little point in my attempting to explain this claptrap further, as there's no credible evidence to support the claim that someone suffering from an acute illness or terminal condition can regenerate cells and radically improve tissue health, immunity, and circulation by the regular administration of coffee enemas. I'm not even convinced that they help to relieve pain, nausea, and depression, as Gerson's disciples and adherents also insist.  

Indeed, as already indicated, coffee enemas can in fact have some pretty nasty side-effects, including sepsis, colitis, electrolyte imbalance, and heart failure. And of course, if the coffee is inserted too quickly or is too hot, it can burn or result in rectal perforation.

Ouch!


Note: readers who are interested in this topic might enjoy the related post on the death of a wellness warrior: click here.

And No Birds Sing

This could be heaven ...

Having moved back to my childhood home, it's forgivable to be feeling a little nostalgic for a time and a place - and even a people - now vanished. For although Harold Hill remains Harold Hill, it's not the Harold Hill I remember with such fondness. It's changed. And not for the better.

To be honest, it was never a pretty place. A large, post-War estate on the far fringes of Greater London, Harold Hill was developed on 850 acres of formerly private land to house ex-servicemen like my father and those cockneys (as my mother always called them rather disparagingly) looking to leave behind the bombed-out ruins of the East End and start a new suburban life in leafy Essex. 

Construction of over seven-and-a-half thousand new homes began in 1948 and was completed ten years later. The development, however, was fairly low density; mostly two or three bedroom houses built of brick with lots of open spaces, including woodland, parks, greens and, perhaps most crucially, gardens at both front and back that the original residents not only delighted in but prided themselves upon.  

Needless to say, most of the playing fields and wild areas have now been built on. But it's the loss of the front gardens which has, I think, dealt a mortal blow to any sense of community and reduced the estate to stony silence.

It's not simply a case of no birds singing - a prospect which has long troubled poets from John Keats to John Lydon - but also of no insects buzzing, no flowers blooming, no frogs spawning, no hedgehogs hiding, no lawnmowers gently humming, no neighbours chatting, and no children laughing ...

The idyllic world above has been buried alive under concrete and gravel in order that the nation's 35 million vehicles can have space to park.

Beneath the crazy-paving stones lies the past. And future hope lies with the weeds that defiantly grow between the cracks ...

O Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology (Part II)

"What is dangerous", writes Heidegger, "is not technology. ... The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger." Developing this crucial point, he writes:

"The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence. The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth."

In other words, the essence of technology - something that exists long  before the modern machine age - is a way of revealing so monolithically powerful and expansionist that it threatens to overwhelm man and prevent him from discovering any other possible becoming. Heidegger calls this revealing Ge-stell, a term commonly translated into English as ‘enframing’. He argues that this revealing that rules with technology doesn’t allow anything to come forth in its own right. Rather, it acts as a ‘challenging’ or ‘provocation’ [Herausfordern] “which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such”.

Thus, for example, a tract of land “is challenged in the hauling out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district”. But, more than this, it also reduces man to the status of ‘human resource’ or ‘standing reserve’ [Bestand] in service to technological purposes.

Interestingly, Lawrence also illustrates his thinking on the question concerning technology with reference to the coal mining industry. In Women in Love, for example, Gerald Crich acknowledges his destiny as someone caught up in an ideal-material struggle “with the earth and the coal it enclosed ... to turn upon the inanimate matter of the underground, and reduce it to his will”.

Prior to this, in The Rainbow, we encountered Tom Brangwen, another coal boss of the view that men belong entirely to their jobs and that outside of the great social-industrial machine of work man had become “a meaningless lump – a standing machine”.

Ursula, fundamentally hostile to her uncle's thinking and keen to imagine a different human future, nevertheless understands the horrible fascination of lives subjected to technology and the power of money; aware that there is a perverse satisfaction  to be gained from such subjection. Even, it is suggested, via machinic servitude man achieves his consummation and immortality, Lawrence arguing not that technology makes us less human, but, on the contrary super-human. Thus it is that Gerald Crich is transformed into a modern Prometheus and fulfils the great promise of science; namely, that man too can attain infinite power (or, perhaps more accurately, infinite knowledge, which, for modern man, is one and the same thing).

The question becomes: what will man do with this unlimited power-knowledge? Will he use it to transform himself and his world, or destroy himself and the natural environment? On the level of utility and abstraction we have made ourselves into lords of production, but we have also arrived at the very edge of an abyss: “Present-day man is of the lowest rank", writes Blanchot, "but his power is that of a being who is already beyond man: how would this contradiction not harbour the greatest danger?”

It is for this reason that Nietzsche predicts that modern nihilism will result in great wars and violent upheaval on an unprecedented scale. However, oblivious or indifferent as men like Gerald Crich are to such dangers, they press on in their quest to see life entirely dominated by mind and a will that is negative in direction and composed of predominantly reactive forces seeking the ego’s triumph over all that lies external to it. By bringing everything into the realm of knowledge and reducing the world to information, Gerald is able to master and manipulate existence, determining its truth via reference to his own learning. Thus, in this manner, as George Steiner correctly notes, the self becomes “the hub of reality and relates to the world outside itself in an exploratory, necessarily exploitative way”. 

But no matter how much Gerald knows, still he feels strangely empty; “as if the very middle of him were a vacuum”. And as this feeling becomes increasingly acute, his voraciousness grows: “And to stop up this hollowness, he drags all things into himself”. Such rampant egoism and greed is condemned repeatedly in the writings of both Nietzsche and Lawrence and yet it remains almost definitional of modern man who, it seems, will not rest content until he has “killed the mysteries and devoured the secrets”.

Clearly, if a change is to be made to a new mode of living then modern man must find someway to overcome his conceit and what Keith Ansell-Pearson describes as his “paranoid and phobic anthropocentrism”. To do so will not be easy and will involve a self-overcoming and a confrontation with our deep-rooted idealism. And yet, to return to Heidegger’s text concerning the question of technology, we have already seen how hope lies precisely where and when we might least expect it; the hope of a radically different revealing to the one that presently holds sway.

Heidegger names this with the Greek term poiēsis and indicates by this a revealing that brings forth without provocation, having, as it does, an entirely different relation to matter. It is a revealing that may enable us to confront the essential unfolding of technology and survive our prolonged flirtation with nihilism.

However, to reiterate, it is the supreme danger of the above unfolding and flirtation which harbours the possible rise of the saving power. Thus instead of simply gaping at the technological as that in which we see our own diabolical genius reflected, we must attempt to glimpse that which is ambiguous and other contained in the essence of technology.

Of course, to simply catch sight of this does not mean we are thereby ‘saved’ - but we are “thereupon summoned to hope in the growing light of the saving power” and we are reminded that there was once a time and a place (i.e. ancient Greece) when poiēsis was also understood as belonging to technē and the fine arts, undifferentiated from any other technical ability, “soared to the supreme height of the revealing granted them”.

For Heidegger, as for Nietzsche, it was the arts that uniquely allowed the Greeks to enter into a direct relationship with the world of being and not merely a world of knowledge and representation; the arts which allowed them to dwell poetically on the earth and not merely live prosaically.

Can they do so again, now, for us? Heidegger is uncertain.

But, despite his pessimism, he seems to remain hopeful that one day the arts may once again be granted this highest possibility. Providing, that is, that there are still profound thinkers who remain astounded by and before this other possibility and who, via their questioning, may be able to incite a new becoming.

And so there remains a vital task for philosophy. For whilst the latter cannot itself provide the new, it can prepare the conditions under which the new might emerge. And whilst philosophy is neither able to predict or guarantee the future, still it allows for the possibility “that the world civilization that is just now beginning might one day overcome its technological-scientific-industrial character as the sole criterion of man’s world sojourn”.

Bibliography

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life, (Routledge, 1997). 

Maurice Blanchot, 'The Limits of Experience: Nihilism', essay in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison, (The MIT Press, 1992).

Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1994).

Martin Heidegger, 'The End of Philosophy and the Task for Thinking', essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994). 

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', essay in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

George Steiner, Heidegger, (Fontana Press, 1989).

Note: Part one of this post can be read by clicking here.