In Defence of Trivia

Thou, Trivia, goddess, aid my song: 

through spacious streets conduct thy bard along

  John Gay (1716)

This just in by email, with reference to a recently published post:

"It's bad enough when writers like you try to persuade us that superficial and boring phenomena, such as fashion, have great import or interest. But what is worse is that when you do decide to discuss serious topics, such as cultural appropriation, which involve issues of class and race, you invariably reduce them to questions of style or semantics in a manner that is disingenuous, disrespectful and disappointing. Surely philosophy - even of a postmodern variety - should do more than trivialise everything with an ironic smirk; particularly things that have real consequences for real people in the real world." 

There's obviously quite a lot here to which I might respond. But it's the idea of trivia that I think I'd like to address (briefly and obviously not in depth; nor with the appropriate gravitas that my critic seems to expect).

It's clear, is it not, that those who hate trivia do so from a moral position that is thought superior, but is in fact only snobbish and judgemental.

For what constitutes trivia after all other than forms of knowledge believed to be of lesser value or commonplace; fine for those of limited education or intelligence (and postmodernists), but not for those who have greater intellectual gifts and who, like my critic, prefer to discuss important issues from a serious perspective and not waste time playing language games or worrying about aesthetics.   

The Romans used the word triviae to describe where one road forked into two. And this too provides a vital clue as to why people such as my critic hate trivialisation.

For rather than being a reductive process, it's one that adds complexity and ambiguity; multiplying alternatives and proliferating difference; demonstrating that there is no single, super-smooth highway to truth, just a network of minor roads and what Heidegger terms Holzwege - paths that might very well lead nowhere and cause the seeker after wisdom to get lost. Ultimately, my critic is frightened of losing their way by leaving the straight and narrow. But I'm more like Little Red Riding Hood and prepared to take a risk; I might miss the point - but, on the other hand, I might meet a wolf (and there's nothing inconsequential about that).

Alternatively, I just might encounter a deity ...

For Trivia refers not only to fun-facts about popular culture or the minutiae of everyday life, but is the name of a goddess who, in Roman mythology, haunted crossroads and graveyards and was the mother of witchcraft and queen of ghosts, wandering about at night beneath the harvest moon visible only to the barking dogs who told of her approach. Again, one suspects all this rather frightens and repulses my critic, who would doubtless dismiss it as superstitious nonsense. But as the former editor of Pagan Magazine, the thought of encountering such a figure continues to secretly enchant.   

And so, in a nutshell, it's better to trivialise than to moralise and be forever bound by the spirit of gravity.
          

The Test on Miriam

Heather Sears and Dean Stockwell as Miriam Leivers and Paul Morel 

Sons and Lovers (dir. Jack Cardiff, 1960)

An anonymous member of the D. H Lawrence Society has emailed to complain that in a recent post I "inaccurately and unfairly portray the actions of Paul Morel towards Miriam as cruel and rather sordid".

If only, they continue, I "understood more about their relationship and the complex character of love", then I would be able to see that "Paul throws the cherries at the girl with affection in a teasing, playful manner" and his subsequent seduction of her in the pine woods is "an expression of phallic tenderness".

I think the only way I can answer this criticism is by looking closely at the text in question; Chapter XI of Sons and Lovers, entitled - tellingly enough I would have thought - 'The Test on Miriam'.   

Firstly, it's true that Paul feels real tenderness for Miriam. But although he courts her like a kindly lover, what he really wants is to experience the impersonality of passion. That is to say, he wants to fuck her dark, monstrous cunt oozing with slime, not stare into her lovely eyes all lit up with sincerity of feeling. Her gaze, so earnest and searching, makes him look away. Paul bitterly resents Miriam always bringing him back to himself; making him feel small and tame and all-too-human.    

And so, in my view at least, when he throws the cherries at her, in a state of cherry delirium, he does so with anger and aggression - not affection, or playfulness. He tears off handful after handful of the fruit and literally pelts her with them. Startled and frightened, Miriam runs for shelter whilst Paul laughs demonically from atop the tree and meditates on death and her vulnerability: so small, so soft.   

When, finally, Paul climbs down (ripping his shirt in the process), he convinces the girl to walk with him into the woods: "It was very dark among the firs, and the sharp spines pricked her face. She was afraid. Paul was silent and strange." Lawrence continues, in a manner which suggests that whatever else phallic tenderness may be, it isn't something that acknowledges the individuality, independence, or needs of actual women:

"He seemed to be almost unaware of her as a person: she was only to him then a woman. She was afraid. He stood against a pine-tree trunk and took her in his arms. She relinquished herself to him, but it was a sacrifice in which she felt something of horror. This thick-voiced, oblivious man was a stranger to her."

And thus Paul takes Miriam's virginity (and loses his own): in the rain, among the strong-smelling trees, and with a heavy-heart; "he felt as if nothing mattered, as if his living were smeared away into the beyond ..." Miriam is disconcerted (to say the least) by his post-coital nihilism: "She had been afraid before of the brute in him: now of the mystic."

Anyway, I leave it to readers to decide for themselves whether my portrayal of Paul - and my reading of Lawrence - is inaccurate and unfair. Or whether my anonymous correspondent and critic has, like many Lawrentians, such a partisan and wholly positive view of their hero-poet - and such a cosy, romantic view of his work - that they entirely miss the point of the latter and do the former a great disservice. 


See: D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron, (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

It is interesting to note that Lawrence makes the same connection between cherries, sex, cruelty and death in his poem 'Cherry Robbers', which anticipates the scene in Sons and Lovers described above. Click here to read the verse.

Mondongo

Mondongo: Blonde Teenie Sucking (2004) 

Black Series, biscuits on wood, 60 x 80 cm

Mondongo is an Argentinian art collective founded in 1999 by three artists in Buenos Aires: Juliana Lafitte, Manuel Mendanha, and Augustina Picasso. They typically create realistic images with  provocative content out of unusual materials including bullets, matches, nails and various food items (from dried meat to burnt toast).

For the so-called Black Series, the group transformed pornographic images taken from the internet into mosaics of cookies and crackers. The use of such base materials is intended, one assumes, to provide a critical commentary on the pervasive commodification of life within contemporary culture.

However, despite their laudable aim to produce a form of pop-art that retains a high level of aesthetic and theoretical integrity, this hasn't stopped them exploiting young bodies and producing portraits of the royal, rich and famous, just like other artists looking for patronage and well-paid commissions.

So whilst I admire some of their work, I take their radical political posturing with a pinch of salt. Soup is good food, but, as Nietzsche pointed out, ultimately no one is more corruptible than an artist ... 
  

I Love Cherries (But I'm Not a Royalist)

Cherries on a Pale Orange Background 
 SA/2016

Your tastes change as you get older, so they say. 

And, annoyingly - 'cos I hate it when experience lends support to anything that Das Man has to say - I've discovered this summer that I much prefer eating cherries to strawberries.

It's not that I've suddenly been seduced by the somewhat dodgy sexual symbolism of the former, subscribed to by writers including Lawrence (in Sons and Lovers, for example, Paul cruelly pelts poor Miriam with a handful of cherries from atop a very large tree hung thick with scarlet fruit, before then popping her cherry in the pine woods).

Nor is it merely that I find the sleek, cool-fresh cherries more aesthetically pleasing to look at in a bowl.

Rather, I now genuinely like the sophisticated sour sweet taste of them more than the simple sweetness of strawberries which, let's be honest, usually needs to be supplemented with sugar, or enhanced with cream.

So I suppose I should be grateful to Henry VIII who, when not having heads cut off or dissolving monasteries, ordered the introduction of cherries into England at Teynham, in Kent, having tasted them in Flanders.

But the words Thank you, Your Majesty will never pass my lips - not for all the cherries in the world! 

Reflections on My Shiny New Red Kettle

Morphy Richards Red Accents 
2.5 Litre Whistling Stove Top Kettle

As D. H. Lawrence often stressed, it's crucial that people form connections with the external objects that populate their world. Not just other men and women, but animals, plants and inanimate objects such as favourite items of clothing, pieces of furniture, works of art, toys, tools, or weapons.

Of course, for some people - including Lawrence, unfortunately - when it comes to these inanimate objects it seems that only old things invested with dignity by the passage of time and individually crafted by human hand rather than mass produced by machine, are truly worthy of our love and respect. 

But I think anything that enters into our lives and touches us in some manner - establishing a powerful circuit of exchange - whatever its age, status, or authenticity, deserves our affection. And so I'm pleased to report that my shiny new red kettle has arrived - and I love it!
 
Love it, that is to say, precisely in all its shiny red newness and don't need it to be - or even want it to be - saturated with my own magnetism - like Lawrence's boots!

As a matter of fact, I'm sick of being surrounded by things heavy with the dead weight of the past and covered in dirt, dust, cobwebs and indecency. I find things rich in history and steeped in tradition almost unbearable these days; things that literally drain the life - and the joy of life - from out of us.

And so Mellors can keep his rotten old iron kettle; Connie may have found it glamorous, but I'm happy with my stainless steel Morphy Richards ...

In Defence of Cultural Appropriation

Karlie Kloss on the catwalk for Victoria's Secret in 2012: 
So wrong, its right ...?

Cultural appropriation refers to the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of another culture. These elements range from fashions, hairstyles and dance moves, to spiritual beliefs and religious practices.

It is seen by its opponents as almost always illegitimate, particularly when elements of a minority, marginalised, or subordinate culture are appropriated by members of a dominant mainstream society outside of their original context of meaning in an inauthentic and insensitive manner.

When this occurs, say the critics, then cultural appropriation reveals itself as a disrespectful and aggressive form of colonialism - often inherently racist in character - in which native peoples are robbed of their essential self-hood and intellectual property rights, or reduced to the humiliated status of exotic other.

Now, it just so happens that I'm not entirely unsympathetic to these arguments. Indeed, as a youthful reader of Nietzsche, I used to subscribe to a form of cultural puritanism (and cultural pessimism) myself.

Having said that, such views increasingly strike me as not only untenable philosophically, but politically pernicious. Push comes to shove, I think I prefer modern barbarism with its chaos of styles and superficial artifice; I like the ironic use of symbols and a sacrilegious refusal to take anything too seriously.    

For unlike those who fetishize the notion of culture as something that has to be revered and preserved in its pure form - particularly if it happens to be ancient and non-Western in origin - I don't regard it as a sacred quality possessed by a people which developed organically from within the conditions of their existence and shaped their unique identity. Rather, I think it's basically a form of masquerade.

Members of the culture cult regard modern civilization as the coldest of all cold monsters; something fundamentally antagonistic to genuine cultures rooted in blood and soil; something that sucks the very soul out of indigenous peoples the world over and transforms Geist into that which can be commodified and made kitsch. They desire a world in which everybody keeps it real.

But I'm quite happy for people to fake it and cheerfully borrow or steal ideas and looks. Quite frankly, I'd rather live in a world of fashion models wearing feathered headdresses on the catwalk than Indian braves solemnly preparing for war. 


Note: those interested in reading another couple of perspectives on this topic might like to see:

'In Praise of Cultural Appropriation', by the sociologist and cultural commentator Frank Furedi (Spiked, 15 Feb 2016)

'Victoria's Secret's Racist Garbage Is Just Asking for a Boycott', by the writer and columnist for Indian Country Today Media Network Ruth Hopkins (Jezebel, 11/12/12)

Moloch

18thC German depiction of Moloch

During a memorial Mass for the murdered French priest, 85-year-old Father Jacques Hamel, the Archbishop of Paris accused the young men responsible of crying Allahu Akbar in order to disguise the fact that they actually worship at the altar of Moloch - the ancient pagan deity who gloried in human sacrifice.

Essentially an Old Testament take on the official line that acts of Islamic terrorism have nothing to do with Islam, Cardinal Vingt-Trois told the faithful not to be fooled by these self-proclaimed jihadists, whilst warning the latter that those who wish to serve and promulgate a god of death - one who demands bloodshed and promises paradise to those who slay the innocent - cannot expect all of humanity to surrender to their madness. In the face of evil, he concluded, Christians must do what they've always done; spread the Gospel of Jesus and find their strength, their courage, and their salvation in Almighty God, the God of Love.

   

Of course, this is as mendacious as everything else that comes out of the mouth of a religiously motivated speaker. For acts of Islamic terrorism have everything to do with Islam and, more widely, with Abrahamic monotheism in general; Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are apocalyptic spiritual traditions with a common origin and they share many beliefs, traditions, and moral teachings.

And so, just as there is very little difference between Yahweh and Allah - both are judgemental and jealous gods who demand submission and sacrifice from their followers - there is genuine theological kinship and continuity between the God of Love worshipped by the Archbishop of Paris and the Canaanite idol known as Moloch.

Indeed, reviving a medieval rabbinical tradition, both Georg Friedrich Daumer and Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany published influential works in 1841 arguing that Moloch and Yahweh were actually one and the same figure and that the cult of the latter developed out of that of the former. 

It's probably best, therefore, that Cardinal Vingt-Trois doesn't say anything else along this line in future; 'cos he's on a very slippery slope. Modern followers of the major religions are essentially no different from ancient pagans with their savage superstitions. Muslims and Christians, for example, are often just as willing to martyr themselves for their gods (and to kill others) without ever asking - or even caring - whether their gods are worthy of such fanatic devotion.

Bertrand Russell - not a philosopher I would normally turn to for support - sums this up nicely in the following paragraph:

"Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods ... The religion of Moloch - as such creeds may be generically called - is in essence the cringing submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain."

- Bertrand Russell, 'A Free Man's Worship' (1903)

Postmodern Approaches to Literature 3: The Pleasure of the Text (Part II)

 ... and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me 

so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart 

was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

I suppose that one of the more attractive things about approaching literature according to a principle of pleasure is that it means we can have done with judgement in the traditional terms of good and bad. This in itself is surely a relief of some kind and a significant break with the moral history of the West. For as Deleuze rightly points out: "From Greek tragedy to modern philosophy, an entire doctrine of judgement has been elaborated and developed".

Kant notoriously gave us a false critique of judgement. It was Spinoza and his heirs, such as Nietzsche, who really carried this out and Barthes follows in their footsteps, refusing either to accuse or justify, defend or condemn. Indeed, Barthes quotes Nietzsche in the very first fragment of The Pleasure of the Text: 'I shall look away, that will henceforth be my sole negation.' All that matters is whether his body finds something pleasurable or not. It's a Nietzschean - not a subjective - game of love and hate.

Of course, what Barthes's body loves and what Barthes's body hates, will not be the same as what the body of another reader might love and hate. In Roland Barthes he makes a list of things he likes and a list of things he doesn’t like; two lists which are apparently of no great significance. But, of course, they do in fact mean something vital; namely, that no two bodies are the same: "Hence, in this anarchic foam of tastes and distastes ... gradually appears the figure of a bodily enigma ..." [1995]

Because all bodies are different, a Society of the Friends of the Text would be a social grouping in which members had nothing in common: "for there is no necessary agreement on the texts of pleasure" [1990]. This calls for a certain liberalism, therefore, each person consenting to "remain silent and polite when confronted by pleasures or rejections which they do not share", or run the risk of homicidal irritation. “I am liberal in order not to be a killer” [1995], as Barthes confesses.

The key thing is that within the above sodality, difference and contradiction is accepted. There is no judgement and no demand for conformity with a categorical imperative governing universal good taste. Barthes is very clear about who would comprise enemies of such a society:

"fools of all kinds, who decree foreclosure of the text and of its pleasure, either by cultural conformism or by intransigent rationalism (suspecting a 'mystique' of literature) or by political moralism or by criticism of the signifier or by stupid pragmatism or by ... loss of verbal desire." [1990]

Picking up on this idea of the body that Barthes introduces, we may say the following: for Barthes, the text itself can be thought of as a "body of bliss consisting solely of erotic relations" [1990] and utterly distinct from the body known by anatomists and discussed within scientific discourse. This is not to reduce the pleasure of the text to some kind of physiological process or need, but it is to affirm that the pleasure of the text "is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas" [1990] and fully comes into its own as a site of what Nietzsche calls the greater intelligence.

This sounds at first precisely like the kind of mysticism which his critics accuse him of and which Barthes is eager to deny. Later in The Pleasure of the Text he will insist that his major aim is to materialize the text and its pleasure; making it into an object of pleasure like any other and thereby abolishing the "false opposition of practical life and contemplative life" [1990].

Jonathan Culler's commentary on this aspect of Barthes’s work is particularly insightful and thus worth quoting at length:

"Reference to the body is part of Barthes’s general attempt to produce a materialist account of reading and writing, but it has four specific functions. First, the introduction of this unexpected term produces a salutary estrangement, especially in the French tradition, where the self has long been identified with consciousness, as in the Cartesian cogito ...
      Second, structuralism has devoted much energy to demonstrating that the conscious subject should not be taken as a given and treated as the source of meaning but should rather be seen as the product of cultural forces and social codes that operate through it. ...
      Third, given structuralism's treatment of the subject ... Barthes could not talk about the subject’s pleasure without begging numerous questions ... Yet he needs a way of speaking that takes account of the empirical fact that an individual can read and enjoy a text ... the notion of the body permits Barthes to avoid the problem of the subject ...
      Fourth, replacement of 'mind' by 'body' accords with Barthes’s emphasis on the materiality of the signifier as a source of pleasure."

Of course, problems remain with this invoking of (and appeal to) the body. For even if one strives to avoid falling into mysticism or some form of biological essentialism, we’re still left with a word that seems to have a greater degree of authority and authenticity than other words; "a word whose ardent, complex, ineffable, and somehow sacred signification gives the illusion that this word holds an answer to everything" [1995] - i.e. what Barthes calls a mana-word.

Although aware that the word 'body' was functioning as such in his later writings, I’m not sure Barthes ever fully addresses this issue. He seems happy to use it, if only as deliberate provocation to the new intellectual orthodoxy - which, ironically, he had helped to create.

Further, if via his use of the term body Barthes allows a form of faceless subjectivity back into the Text, so too is he prepared to welcome back the author as a kind of spectral guest:

"If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters ... no longer privileged, paternal ... He becomes, as it were, a paper-author: his life is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work ..." [1977]

In The Pleasure of the Text, he expands on this theme: 

"As an institution, the Author is dead: his civil status, his biographical person have disappeared ... they no longer exercise over his work the formidable paternity whose account literary history, teaching, and public opinion had the responsibility of establishing and renewing; but in the text, in a way, I desire the author: I need his figure (which is neither his representation nor his projection), as he needs mine ..." [1990]

The reason for this necrophilia is easy to appreciate. Barthes desires the return of the author for the same reason that the text needs its shadow - "a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject" [1990] - and a painting its chiaroscuro: in order for it to become fertile. Those who would argue that we abandon all caution and strip a work of everything that we previously valued within it take us towards sterility and suicide.

As Deleuze and Guattari note, caution is the immanent rule of experimentation, whether one is producing an avant-garde artwork or building a body without organs: "if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing down the plane [of consistency] you will be ... plunged into a black hole, or ... dragged towards catastrophe".

Barthes attempts to shatter the dead-grip of traditional criticism upon classical literature - not to destroy the latter. In his ‘Inaugural Lecture’ to the Collège de France, he declares:

"The old values are no longer transmitted, no longer circulate, no longer impress; literature is desacralized, institutions are impotent to defend and impose it as the implicit model of the human. It is not, if you like, that literature is destroyed; rather it is no longer protected, so that this is the moment to deal with it. ... Our gaze can fall, not without perversity, upon certain old and lovely things, whose signified is abstract, out of date. It is a moment at once decadent and prophetic, a moment of gentle apocalypse, a historical moment of the greatest possible pleasure." [1989]

Of course, whilst Barthes may retain a nostalgic fondness for these old and lovely things (works by Zola, Balzac, Proust et al) - and whilst they may still give him a great deal of plaisir - they cannot induce jouissance. For bliss comes only with the absolutely new; "for only the new disturbs (weakens) consciousness" [1990]. This is a rare occurrence and does not come easily. Often, what we take to be the new is merely "the stereotype of novelty" [1990].

The New, as Barthes conceives it, is then not simply the latest thing - it's a value. And it opposes all the old forms of encratic language (i.e. the language of power), which are founded upon repetition and stereotype; "all official institutions of language are repeating machines: school reports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology" [1990]. Barthes continues:

"The stereotype is the word repeated without any magic, any enthusiasm, as thought it were natural ... Nietzsche has observed that 'truth' is only the solidification of old metaphors. So in this regard the stereotype is the present path of 'truth'..." [1990]

Opposing the rule of the stereotype is the New and the exceptional pleasure of the New (which is bliss). But finding new ways to write and to speak is not easy and would seem to involve more than merely coining endless new terms or indulging in a kind of linguistic Saturnalia. Indeed, Nietzsche warns us against those innovators in language who constantly seek to supplement language, rather than bring greater style or discipline to it.

Heidegger also argues that whilst it’s right to identify the metaphysics of language, there is no need to abandon all grammatical convention. For a revitalizing of language does not result "from the fabrication of neologisms and novel phrases" [1994], but from a change in our relation to (and usage of) language. Even old words, worn out by convention and repetition, can be recontextualized, reinterpreted, and revalued.

Often, it’s case of transforming the Word back into the Flesh; that is to say, of giving back to language what Anaïs Nin described as the “bulginess of sculpture, the feeling of heavy material fullness” and perhaps our poets are best placed to lead the way here. But it’s philosophy, says Heidegger, which is ultimately responsible for preserving “the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself” [1998] and to protect language from being degraded by a common intelligibility into doxa, cliché, or sheer nonsense.

To allow language, in other words, the right to live and, equally important, the right to die. For what is the stereotype at last but the "nauseating impossibility of dying" [1990] - the rule of a world in which words become reified, fixed, undead.

The pleasure of the text, we might conclude, lies in its mortality ...


Bibliography

Roland Barthes, 'From Work to Text', essay in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath, (Fontana Press, 1977). 
Roland Barthes, 'Inaugural Lecture', trans. Richard Howard, in Barthes: Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, (Fontana Press, 1989).
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Blackwell, 1990).
Roland Barthes, ‘Twenty Key Words for Roland Barthes’, interview in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991), pp. 205-06.
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Miller, (Papermac, 1995).
Jonathan Culler, Barthes, (Fontana Press, 1990).
Gilles Deleuze, ‘To Have Done With Judgement’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, (Verso, 1998)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press,
Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language’, essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994).
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, (Blackwell, 1998).
Anaïs Nin, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, (Blackspring Press, 1985).
Mireille Ribière, Barthes: A Beginners Guide, (Hodder and Stoughton, 2002).

Note: this and the two related posts have been assembled from extensive notes made for a course entitled Postmodern Approaches to Literature, that I taught at Morley College, London, in the Spring of 2010. To read PAL 1 click here. To read PAL 2 click here. To read the first part of this post click here. 

This post is dedicated to Gail who asked 'Why read Barthes?'

Postmodern Approaches to Literature 3: The Pleasure of the Text (Part I)

Marilyn being pleasured by James Joyce

The Pleasure of the Text, published two years after 'From Work to Text', clearly picks up from where the latter left off. It offers us not a poetics, but an erotics of reading. And, also, a challenge to all forms of moral asceticism and militancy which have no time for sensual pleasure and despise the body. Barthes explained to an interviewer at the time:

"I felt that today’s intellectual language was submitting too easily to moralizing imperatives that eliminated all notion of enjoyment, of bliss. In reaction, I wanted therefore to reintroduce this word [pleasure] within my personal range, to lift its censorship, to unblock it, to un-repress it." [1991]

This, actually, was quite a daring thing to do and it lost Barthes many friends and supporters (even as it won him a new, wider readership). I suspect that a lot of the continued hostility aimed towards postmodern approaches to literature and to life is that they don’t take themselves too seriously and concern themselves with pleasure. Nothing enrages the puritan more than this - unless it's logical inconsistency and The Pleasure of the Text opens by imagining a figure who "abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple disregard of that old spectre: logical contradiction" [1990].

Over the course of some 46 fragments spread over 67 pages and arranged alphabetically by title (i.e. arbitrarily), Barthes speaks in favour of such an anti-Socratic hero who mixes every language and endures the mockery of moral-rational society without shame. And he reveals him to be "the reader of the text at the moment he takes his pleasure" [1990].

But for Barthes there are two types of pleasure; the pleasure of the text, which he terms jouissance and the pleasure of the work, for which he uses the common word plaisir. Of course, there is no absolute distinction between them and Barthes freely admits that his use of such an opposition is here, as elsewhere, purely provisional and strategic:

"The opposition 'pleasure/bliss' is one of those voluntary artificial oppositions for which I’ve always had a certain predilection. ... These oppositions shouldn’t be taken literally; for example, by asking if such and such a text belongs to the order of pleasure or of bliss. These oppositions are intended above all to clear more ground, to make headway - just to talk and write." [1991]

But, having said that, Barthes does then qualify this statement by adding: "the difference between the two words is still quite real ..." [1991]. What, then, is this real difference?

In ‘From Work to Text’ Barthes puts it this way:

"Certainly there exists a pleasure of the work ... I can delight in reading and re-reading Proust, Flaubert, Balzac ... But this pleasure, no matter how keen and even when free from all prejudice, remains in part (unless by some exceptional critical effort) a pleasure of consumption; for if I can read these authors, I also know that I cannot re-write them ... and this knowledge, depressing enough, suffices to cut me off from the production of these works ... As for the Text, it is bound to jouissance, that is to a pleasure without separation." [1977]

Throughout The Pleasure of the Text he expands upon and plays with this distinction, using a libidinally material and perverse language of gay desire; words such as cruise, for example, coming to prominence. The language used is also significantly informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Lacan, famously, the unconscious is structured like a language and the subject - thought of primarily as a desiring subject - is perpetually seeking out the lost object of their desire. As Mireille Ribière writes:

"The prime function of language, and hence literature, is to signify this fundamental sense of loss. Therefore, desire is the force that drives reader and writer endlessly to go from signifier to signifier in search of fulfilment and pleasure."

The most erotic aspect of a text, for Barthes, is not found in any sexual description or pornographic representation as such, but in the language deployed and the very structure of sentences. This is what he loves most about the writings of Sade for example; the pleasure of reading him clearly proceeds from the fact that not only does he bring together different types of writing and create many new words and concepts, but that "pornographic messages are embodied in sentences so pure they might be used as grammatical models" [1990]. Emphasizing the erotic aspect of jouissance, Barthes concludes his fragment on Sade:

"The pleasure of the text is like that untenable, impossible, purely novelistic instant so relished by Sade’s libertine when he manages to be hanged and then to cut the rope at the very moment of his orgasm, his bliss."
[1990]

What Barthes is excited by then, is the thought of a limit or of an edge between two terms and the pathos of distance (or break) between them. He doesn’t want the destruction of culture or of narrative; he wants these things to be taken to the point at which they are lost and we too lose ourselves in some manner.

Can classic works promise us this experience of bliss or are they strictly tied to a form of pleasure which simply reaffirms cultural convention and our sense of self? Barthes, often thought of as a champion of the nouveaux roman, surprisingly still seems to have a lot of time for the works of the great 19thC authors. For he suggests that if we read them in a writerly manner - unconcerned with the integrity of the text - and at our own pace or rhythm - bypassing those passages or pages which we find boring - then we may yet find them newly pleasurable: "Thus what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again." [1990]

Of course, this has "nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself" [1990], but it does mean that we can develop an approach to literature which allows us still to read a work like War and Peace without nodding-off and having the book fall from our hands. Ironically, the only way to read the more avant-garde texts is to go slowly and carefully through them in a leisurely, aristocratic manner. Try to read a novel by Philippe Sollers or Maurice Blanchot quickly and it will become "inaccessible to your pleasure" [1990].

And so, to reiterate, we have two types of text: the text of pleasure that "comes from culture and does not break with it", linked to a "comfortable practice of reading" [1990]; and the text of bliss that "imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts ... unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language" [1990].

The reader can thus enjoy the satisfaction of plaisir which guarantees their subjective consistency, or the promise of its loss via jouissance.


Bibliography

Roland Barthes, 'From Work to Text', essay in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, 1977).

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990).

Roland Barthes, ‘Twenty Key Words for Roland Barthes’, interview in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991).

Mireille Ribière, Barthes: A Beginners Guide (Hodder and Stoughton, 2002).

Note: this and the two related posts have been assembled from extensive notes made for a course entitled Postmodern Approaches to Literature, that I taught at Morley College, London, in the Spring of 2010. To read PAL 1 click here. To read PAL 2 click here. To go to part two of this post click here.

This post is dedicated to Gail who asked 'Why read Barthes?'

Postmodern Approaches to Literature 2: From Work to Text

Rodrigo Oliveira: From Work to Text # 4 (2008)

Collage on Fabriano paper, acrylic resin, 146 x 210 cm

artfacts.net

S/Z is an important publication within Barthes's overall body of work. It marks a transitional stage between his structuralist and poststructuralist phases as Barthes the semiologist gives way to Barthes the hedonist. Indeed, Barthes himself will eventually protest that S/Z should not be thought of as a structural analysis, but as a textual analysis - i.e. one which is founded upon a theory of the Text born out of an encounter between structuralism, Marxism and psychoanalysis.

Initially developed by Julia Kristeva, the theory of the Text was embraced by Barthes who set out his thinking on the notion in a short essay entitled 'From Work to Text' which opens with the following claim: "It is a fact that over the last few years a certain change has taken place (or is taking place) in our conception of language and, consequently, of the literary work ..."

This change is due to the encounter between different disciplines in relation to an object - language - which is suddenly seen as crucial to their practice; including disciplines, such as politics, which, as Barthes points out, have not traditionally had any special interest in language: interdisciplinarity is born here. But, importantly, it is not accomplished "by the simple confrontation of specialist branches of knowledge". On the contrary, it requires the effective breaking down of traditional boundaries between genres if it is to be more than the "mere expression of a pious wish" for polite cooperation and intellectual unity.

As former divisions begin to dissolve and disciplines promiscuously consort, the classical idea of what constitutes a work begins to mutate and we are faced with a new object "obtained by the sliding or overturning of former categories" - the Text. This term, the sudden and widespread fashionability of which even Barthes seems a little embarrassed by, stands at the intersection of several key propositions concerning "method, genres, signs, plurality, filiation, reading and pleasure".

Barthes conveniently summarizes each proposition in turn:

1. "The Text is not to be thought of as an object ... It would be futile to try to separate out materially works from texts".

Essentially, the Text is a methodological field and/or a signifying practice; it can be demonstrated, but it can’t be displayed. Thus whilst the work can be held in the hand, the text is only ever held in language and exists in the movement of discourse that cuts across the work (or, indeed, across several works at once). In other words, "the Text is experienced only in an activity of production".

2. “In the same way, the Text does not stop at (good) Literature; it cannot be contained in a hierarchy, even in a simple division of genres. What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary (or precisely), its subversive force in respect of the old classifications.”

The Text is always that which takes writing to the limits (of rationality, readability, etc.). For Barthes, this makes it paradoxical in the literal sense that it is contrary to common sense and received opinion (doxa).

3. "The work closes on a signified. ... The Text, on the contrary, practices the infinite deferment of the signified ... its field is that of the signifier and the signifier must not be conceived of as 'the first stage of meaning’ ... but, in complete opposition to this, as its deferred action."

The signifier invites us to participate in a game that never ends; the symbolic game of language.

4. "The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings ... it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. The plural of the Text depends, that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric)."

This is why it can be undone, or why we can find ‘holes’ (aporia) in the fabric of the Text (in its internal structures, narratives, arguments, theories etc.) no matter how carefully and cleverly (no matter how tightly) it has been woven together. It is in its plurality that the Text offends and disturbs all those monomaniacs who look for One Truth, One Way, One God. For such people the Text is a form of Evil which declares its name to be Legion (Mark 5: 9) and the only good book is a work in which there is a single point of origin and authority: the Author. They have no time for the pagan or demonic plurality of the Text. But for those readers who read in a writerly fashion and who find their pleasure in the Text, the words of Nietzsche come back to them: Love of One is a form of barbarism and man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him.

5. "The work is caught up in a process of filiation."

Simply, Barthes means here that the work - unlike the Text - looks for its parental origin and owner: its Author. It likes to discover its roots and its genealogical determination. The Text, on the other hand, is an orphan and happily deracinated. Barthes writes:

"Here again, the metaphor of the Text separates from that of the work: the latter refers to the image of an organism which grows by vital expansion, by 'development' ... the metaphor of the Text is that of the network; if the Text extends itself, it is as a result of a combinatory systematic ..."

This idea of the text as a network of alliances and connections rather than as a single living organism is interesting and deserves further commentary ...

Anticipating Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics, Barthes is suggesting that the Text-as-network can assume a wide - perhaps infinite - number of forms due to the fact that it can join together any one point with any other and has neither beginning nor end, but only a middle from which it expands and overspills. In contrast to an organism that has a nervous system and a brain acting as an hierarchical centre of communication and coordination, the Text-as-network is an acentred, anarchic, and non-coordinating system that dissolves and refuses any "tripartite division between a field of reality (the world), a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author)" [ATP].

This idea of Text-as-network has, perhaps not surprisingly, been as influential outside of literary studies as it has within it - particularly within the world of information technology and computer studies. The term hypertext, coined by Theodore Nelson in 1965 to refer to a radical new way of organizing information (i.e. non-sequentially), may not be Barthes’s, but as Mireille Ribière points out:

"Some hypertext specialists consider that Barthes’s definition of the 'writerly' text in S/Z ... precisely matched that of computer hypertext. They, therefore, see hypertext as the electronic embodiment of Barthes’s 'ideal' text and they see Barthes’s writings as offering a framework in which to discuss hypertext."

6. "The work is normally the object of consumption ... The Text (if only by its frequent 'unreadability') decants the work ... from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice. This means that the Text requires that one try to abolish ... the distance between writing and reading ..."

We noted earlier Barthes’s notion of reading in a writerly manner and this is simply a furthering of this idea, now coupled closely to the notion of play; a word which can be understood to refer to the Text itself which is ready to play like a machine with a play button and to the reader who can play the Text in the same fashion they might play a game or a musical instrument. The Text therefore requires a reader who will agree to an active collaboration and not be content simply to gobble down works of literature much as they do fast-food and other goods within so-called consumer culture. Barthes concludes:

"The reduction of reading to consumption is clearly responsible for the 'boredom' experienced by many in the face of the modern ('unreadable') text, the avant-garde film or painting: to be bored means that one cannot produce the text, open it out, set it going."

Finally, then, we come to the theme of pleasure, which I'll discuss in Part III of this post. It's clearly an important notion throughout Barthes’s writing, even if it is only in his later works where he developed it explicitly and at length as part of a new hedonistic aesthetics.


Bibliography

Roland Barthes, 'From Work to Text', in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath, (Fontana Press, 1977). All lines and passages quoted from Barthes are taken from this essay.

Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990). 

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996).

Mireille Ribière, Barthes: A Beginners Guide, (Hodder and Stoughton, 2002).

Note: this and the two related posts have been assembled from extensive notes made for a course entitled Postmodern Approaches to Literature, that I taught at Morley College, London, in the Spring of 2010. To read PAL 1 click here. To read PAL 3 (I) click here. To go to PAL 3 (II) click here. 

This post is dedicated to Gail who asked 'Why read Barthes?'

Postmodern Approaches to Literature 1: The Death of the Author

Just as Nietzsche's tragic proclamation concerning the death of God opened a new horizon for thought, so too does the death of the Author announced by Roland Barthes allow an experimental and joyous movement to be made from work to text and for the emergence of a new type of reading pleasure: jouissance.

Traditionally, the Author is seen as a central and all-important figure; in his person resides the very origin of the work and its ultimate truth. The Word belongs to him and he is the Word. Thus, as the Author, he can claim authorship of and authority over a text and its meaning. Readers who wish to give an authentic reading are obliged to know his intention and never allow their own interpretations to stray too far from this. The Author is the father of the text and readers, like children, should be seen to be obediently reading - not heard voicing their own opinions (which would be impertinent), or exposing their behinds in an act of comic defiance (which would be rebellious).

But for Barthes, to tie reading and criticism to the figure of the Author is not only lazy in its convenience, it's slavish in its wilful and passive surrender to authority. To assign an Author to a text is not only to impose a limit on the latter, but on ourselves. Thus to call for (and to celebrate) the death of Author is, like deicide or the beheading of the king, an act of political resistance to tyranny (although the naive belief that we might fully liberate the text and ourselves from power is one that Foucault makes us rightly suspicious of).

This death - and the subsequent move from work to text - allows for the birth of the reader as the source of meaning and the subject of desire. This really rather simple but very beautiful and important idea remains, almost fifty years on, very seductive. For writing (and reading in a writerly manner) cannot commence until this death has taken place. Writing is thus a posthumous activity.

And posthumous writing is also postmodern in the sense that the Author is very much a modern figure, developing, as Barthes argues, out of English empiricism, French rationalism and the unique value afforded the bourgeois individual. Within modern culture, the Author takes on greater and greater importance until, finally, he assumes total control over his work and we are no longer allowed to listen to language, but only to the monotonous voice of the Author confiding in us about "his person, his life, his tastes, his passions".

For Barthes, it was the poet Mallarmé who was one of the first to understand "the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner" and to restore to writing its impersonality - which is to restore also the status (and the pleasure) of the reader. This process of calling into question and ridiculing the authority of the Author continued in the work of Valéry, Proust, and the Surrealists.

However, it was linguistics which provided those interested in disposing of the Author "with a valuable analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors". Barthes continues:

"Linguistically, the Author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a 'subject', not a 'person', and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language 'hold together', suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it."

Acknowledging this, not only frees the reader and the text, but it also liberates the scriptor (Barthes's term for the writer who emerges after the death of the Author). The scriptor is not the father of the book, but a child of language; that is to say, he is not the past of his own work, but rather "born simultaneously with the text" in the immediacy of the present and is not "equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing".

Thus a postmodern approach to literature allows for a different understanding of time or temporality; one primarily concerned with the nowness of the moment and what Nietzsche designates as its eternal recurrence. And it means we have moved beyond the idea of literature as a form of representation. Instead, writing now designates a performative practice "in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered".

Emphasizing the material nature of writing as marks on a surface and the physical aspect of a hand that dances with a pen across a piece of paper, Barthes both echoes and anticipates Derrida. He writes:

"Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe ... that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that consequently ... he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form. For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin – or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which calls into question all origins."

Barthes also echoes and anticipates the work of Julia Kristeva and her key concept of intertextuality, writing:

"We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."

This notion of the text as intertext, obviously helps to further erode the old idea of literature as either representative of a non-linguistic reality, or expressive of the author's original ideas or unique being. The scriptor understands that he or she can only play with and within the field of language and "only imitate a gesture" that is pre-given and pre-rehearsed. They ought also to realise that they essentially work with a "ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words".

Barthes concludes his crucial essay in a series of passages worth quoting at some length:

"Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred."

"Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author ... beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is 'explained' - victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism ... is today undermined along with the Author. In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law."

"Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the text is constituted."

We see how Barthes disentangles a text and runs threads of meaning in his fetishistically detailed structural analysis of Balzac's novella Sarrasine. In S/Z, Barthes demonstrates how even what might appear to be a conventional readerly work written by a classical author can become a renewed source of perverse pleasure once it has been read in a writerly manner and transformed into a complex and ambiguous text.

I’ll say more about this movement from work to text (and the resulting pleasure of the text) in Part II of this post.


See: Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 142-48. All lines and passages quoted are taken from this essay.
 
Note: this and the two following posts have been assembled from extensive notes made for a course entitled Postmodern Approaches to Literature, that I taught at Morley College, London, in the Spring of 2010. To go to PAL 2 click here. To go to PAL 3 (I) click here. To read PAL 3 (II) click here. 

This post is dedicated to Gail who asked 'Why read Barthes?'     

Roland Barthes: Essays and Interviews Vols. 1-5

Roland Barthes, chez lui, en 1970

I once wrote a little verse about how, like a lover at the graveside, I would often go into bookshops and gently straighten up the volumes of work by Roland Barthes assembled on the shelves; vainly hoping for one last word to be forthcoming; one previously unpublished text to magically appear.

Little did I realise at the time just how much material was in fact still to come; articles, essays, interviews, letters and lecture notes which had been available to a French audience ever since the expanded edition of Barthes's Oeuvres complètes, ed. Éric Marty, appeared in 2002 (Éditions du Seuil), but which remained relatively inaccessible and unknown to readers in the anglophonic world. 

So I'm extremely grateful to Seagull Books who have just published the fifth and final volume in their Essays and Interviews series, drawn from the above, and translated (by Chris Turner) into English for the first time.

I strongly recommend to all readers of this blog that they buy, steal or borrow the following:
 
1. Roland Barthes, A Very Fine Gift and Other Writings on Theory, trans. Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2015).

2. Roland Barthes, The Scandal of Marxism and Other Writings on Politics, trans. Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2015).

3. Roland Barthes, Masculine, Feminine, Neuter and Other Writings on Literature, trans. Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2016).

4. Roland Barthes, Signs and Images: Writings on Art, Cinema and Photography, trans. Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2016).  

5. Roland Barthes, Simply a Particular Contemporary: Interviews 1970-79, trans. Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2015).


Notes 

Those readers interested in my poem, 'In the Bookshop', can find it in Abraxas, Issue 3, ed. Christina Oakley Harrington and Robert Ansell, (Fulgur, 2013).  

Those readers interested in a recent interview with Chris Turner in which he discusses his work translating Barthes and other French writers, including Baudrillard, should click here. 

On the Pleasure of the Text and the Politics of Reading

Ever since a young child, I have loved reading and would define myself as a homotextual. That is to say, someone who derives their primary pleasure from books, not from people, and accepts that reading in what Barthes terms a living sense (i.e. homogeneous with a virtual writing) is always perverse in nature and immoral in character.     

I remember at primary school we had to line up and slowly make our way towards the teacher's desk, book in hand. The splendidly named Mrs Horncastle would ask each pupil in turn what page they were on and then request that they read a short paragraph to her.

She was, I suppose, a good woman attempting to be a good teacher. But I fear she understood only dead readings in which the printed word was recognised and mechanically repeated, but failed to produce an inner text or deterritorialize the subject. Her concern was with improving comprehension, not intensifying pleasure or bringing children's relationship with language to a crisis of some kind. 

Once, the line moved so slowly that I finished reading the Ladybird Book I'd been assigned before I'd reached the front of the class. And so, when asked: 'What page are you on Stephen?' I placed the closed work onto her desk and replied proudly: 'I've read it Miss!' in anticipation of praise and a possible gold star.

Maybe she didn't believe me - or maybe she wanted to punish what she regarded as impudence - but I was unjustly sent to the back of the line and told to begin the book again from page one. This taught me an important early lesson about the exercise of authority and that within a culture of institutionalised stupidity, it doesn't pay to be too clever ...              
 

Post 666: Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia

As numerical phobias go, fear of  666 - the number of the Beast - is certainly right up there within the cultural imagination; perhaps only the number 13 frightens or discomforts more people.    

Let those who have understanding reckon with this number, entreats the author of Revelation. And trying to puzzle out the precise nature and identity of the Beast has been something generations of scholars, theologians, artists and occultists have spent their lives doing. Aleister Crowley famously declared himself to be the Beast 666 and the number is key within his magickal system of Thelema.

According to Crowley, it's an important solar number; though whether this refers to the Ideal sun of Plato radiating Truth, Beauty and Goodness, or the malevolent sun of Bataille that decays and incites acts of sacrificial madness, I don't really know and, if I'm honest, don't really care - 'cos Crowley always rather bored me.     

Thus if, when young, I painted the number 666 on the collar of a shirt emblazoned with the words I am an anti-Christ / I am an anarchist, I was being more Rotten than Beastly ...       

On Writing

I have often been asked: Why write? 

I don't think there's a definitive answer to this. Ultimately, each writer is free to offer their own reasons for picking up a pen. But it seems to me that Roland Barthes is right to emphasise the need for pleasure. Writing isn't always easy or a great deal of fun, but it does strangely gratify (which is why it's essentially an erotic activity and not a moral or scientific one).     

And it does this both in a negative fashion - by warding off boredom, for example, or provoking enemies - and in a more positive manner; writing pleases because it enables one to become-other. By decentring language and deterritorializing the individual, writing produces not only new meanings, but new selves.

Writing, therefore, has a crucial task to perform; it generates difference and contributes to smashing the Stereotype and the hell of the Same (i.e. society's fixed symbolic order). Writing lets us lose face, waste time, and think dangerous new thoughts. 

This is why writing is also a distinctive politico-philosophical activity; it lends substance to the idea that there is greater value in playful poetic musing or posting bits of theory-fiction on a blog, than there is in an honest day's work.

Notes on the Kelvin MacKenzie and Fatima Manji Controversy

Let me say at the outset: I really don't like Kelvin MacKenzie. He's the sort of red-faced, reactionary bigot who brings British journalism (and white masculinity) into such disrepute.

Let me also say that I have nothing but respect and admiration for the Channel 4 reporter Fatima Manji, who's the kind of intelligent, courageous young woman that I find particularly attractive. If I were to be shipwrecked on a desert island or trapped in a lift with one of the above, it wouldn't be the former editor of The Sun that I'd choose for company. 

However - and it pains me to say this - I think Mr MacKenzie has a fair point when he objects to a hijab-wearing woman (i.e. one who proudly identifies herself as a Muslim) being deliberately used to front the news of yet another terrorist outrage (the Nice massacre) carried out by someone who also declares himself to be a member of her faith.

I understand perfectly the politics at play here and certainly don't think it was done "to stick one in the eye of the ordinary viewer" as MacKenzie suggests. It was, rather, a clumsy and patronising attempt by C4 to show unity and demonstrate that there are plenty of good Muslims, like the lovely Miss Manji; not an attempt at malicious provocation or insult.

And yet, in truth, there was something inappropriate about her staged appearance; in the same way that, for example, it wouldn't have been quite the done thing to have news of an IRA bombing reported by a newsreader dressed as a leprechaun, or to be told during the Blitz of another Luftwaffe attack by a reporter wearing lederhosen. It's a question of semiotics; of being sensitive to the ambiguity of signs and meaning.

It's also a question of style and the language of fashion, since it wasn't Miss Manji's onscreen presence as such that caused unease in certain viewers, but the fact that she was wearing a veil, thereby overtly signifying where her ultimate loyalty lies; not to the men, women and children killed in Nice, but to a God who is at best indifferent to human suffering and at worst fully complicit with it.

It would have been touching I think - and incredibly powerful as a symbolic gesture - if Miss Manji had dispensed with her hijab for one night and read the news as a woman of flesh and blood and not a woman of faith.            

The Case of Qandeel Baloch

How em looking?

The murder of 26-year-old model and social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch by a sibling attempting to restore and secure his family's honour, has succeeded only in elevating her status and bringing genuine shame onto himself, his religion and his nation.   

Whether by accident or design, Miss Baloch transformed herself from just another Kim Kardashian wannabe and pouting selfie-queen, into a political activist and pop-feminist icon within the deeply depressing Islamic dystopia that is Pakistan today.    

Her death, far from being senseless - as some liberal commentators like to claim - actually makes perfect sense within the misogynistic logic of a phallocratic regime. As Afiya Zia writes, it's simply a continuation of the "historic and routine act of eliminating female bodies that are defiant of the male-defined socio-sexual order".

She continues: "The more threatening that fitna-potent women in Muslim contexts are, the more chances that they will be physically eliminated to prevent rupture of the order." There was, thus, a grim inevitability that Miss Baloch's fate would be a tragic one. And hardly surprising that it would be at the hands of a close male relative. 

Obviously, something needs to change: we need to stop thinking of young girls as symbols of family honour, or pieces of family property; we need to dispel the fear and loathing that continues to surround female bodies; and, as Afiya Zia, suggests, we need "more women like Qandeel to scale up the discomfort of those privileged hypocrites and morality-mongers who fear sexual women more than murderous men".


Note: I am grateful to Pakistani feminist and critic Afiya S. Zia for sharing her recently written and as yet unpublished article, 'A Problem Called Qandeel', with me and consenting to my quoting from it.

 

Reflections after the Atrocity in Nice

Marianne à bout de souffle face à la terreur ...

swahacartoons.blogspot.co.uk 

After Nice, a lot of people are calling for something to be done beyond putting out the candles and teddy bears once more or creating caring hashtags on social media; some are even calling for an act of reprisal not just against the Islamists, but the wider Muslim community itself. 

Such an act would, of course, not only violate international law, but effectively mark the end of how we in the West morally define ourselves; as Christians who forgive and turn the other cheek; as liberals who subscribe to notions of due process and human rights; as modern individuals who pride themselves on being such and having abandoned ancient notions of collective responsibility and collective punishment.  

This has nothing to do with Islam means, among other things, that we - as ideal individualists - find it barbarous to associate causal responsibility and guilt with an impersonal and collective form of agency. We want to hold individual terrorists to account, not blame an entire religion, because we need to believe in the autonomous subject who exercises moral choice and free will.  

But perhaps we should examine more closely the group mindset of a people who identify (and act) primarily as Muslims, unconditionally submitting to a faith in which God's will matters a whole lot more than free will. This is not to incite hatred or provoke violence. It is merely to raise the crucial question whether a whole community can be held - at least in part - responsible for the harms produced by particular members. It seems unfair, but that doesn't necessarily means it's illegitimate.

I have a Jewish friend, for example, who insists that it's entirely appropriate to hold all Germans responsible for the Holocaust, not just those who were high-ranking and fanatic members of the Nazi Party. Like Karl Jaspers, he's not really concerned with who did what, but with assigning Kollectivschuld on the basis of what one is.*

And, like Jaspers, he argues that if you belong to a group - be it a race, a class, or a religion - that is committing atrocities in your presence or with your knowledge - though not necessarily with your approval or support - then you too are tainted by association and, at some (metaphysical) level, responsible.  

I have to admit, the above argument is deeply troubling to me; where can it lead other than to a principle of Sippenhaft, i.e. group liability and brutal collective punishment? I know that some philosophers argue that punishment might take the relatively mild form of reducing the strength of group bonds or de-institutionalizing group norms, but I also know that it can become terroristic in its own right and lead to acts of genocide.

So ... what to do then, after Nice?

Well, I don't think we should simply mourn and then carry on regardless. And I certainly don't think we should resign or even accustom ourselves to such events. If we choose to reaffirm the values of the Enlightenment that France embodies - including, let us not forget, laïcité - then let us do so actively ...        

* See: Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. by E. B. Ashton, (Fordham University Press, 2001). 

Be Kind to Bees

Yesterday, struggling along the garden path, came an exhausted bee ...

Fond as I am of honey-producing insects, I decided to try and revive the poor thing with a spoonful of sugar dissolved in water. Happily, after a few sips of this simple but remarkably effective remedy the little creature seemed to perk up, so I left it to crawl among the flowers ...

In a world of climate change, habitat loss, disease, pesticide and colony collapse disorder, we should all be kind to bees ...