Deleuze and the Philosophy of Slander

La philosophie est une introduction 

à un monde scandaleux

 

 

I. 

 

In his late work, Deleuze famously defines philosophy as the invention of concepts. But in a very early text from 1946, he suggests that philosophy is that which teaches us "to strip things and beings of their pejorative meaning" [276] and thus presumably defend them from defamation.

 

That's interesting: but isn't all meaning pejorative; i.e., doesn't all meaning essentially slander or disparage the object to which it is applied like a thick coat of doxa? We might even ask if, at some level, all language lies (and, if so, should that concern us) ...? 

 

 

II. 

 

Defined as the oral communication of a false statement in order to inflict damage, slander is a scandalous form of bad-mouthing - even hate speech - but it is not quite lying. It is, rather, a method of "designating beyond the facts" [280], albeit with malicious intent. 

 

Statements that have verifiable evidence to support them can still be hurtful, of course. But slander, in its pure form, is completely different and for Deleuze takes on metaphysical grandeur, becoming "a sort of supreme and spiritual insult" which seeks to "determine the essence" [285] of the one it causes to suffer and reveal a possible world unreliant upon accurate description (what we might term today the world of fake news).   

 

See: Gilles Deleuze, 'Words and Profiles', in Letters and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2020). Page numbers given in the post refer to this work. 

 

Readers interested in other posts that discuss the youthful writings of Deleuze can click here and here.   

Notes on the Youthful Writings of Gilles Deleuze 2: From Christ to the Bourgeoisie

 A young Deleuze pretending to read for the camera

 

 

I.

 

From Christ to the Bourgeoisie [a] was another very early text by Deleuze, first published in 1946, when he was twenty-one. It's central argument and conclusion is: "The relationship that connects Christianity and the Bourgeisie is not contingent." [275] Which is true, I suppose, though hardly an original insight.

 

Deleuze opens the essay by discussing the decline of spirit in our modern world, which critics and opponents of modernity and materialism often decry: "What they mean is that today, many people no longer believe in internal life, it doesn't pay." [266] 

 

Deleuze continues:

 

"To be sure, there are different reasons why the internal is disdained today. My first thoughts go to the revolutionary consciousness in an industrial and technological world. The greater the power of this technological world, the more it seems to empty people of all internal life like a chicken and reduce them to total exteriority." [266]

My first thought is that this seems rather unfair on chickens, which remain sacred birds within some cultures. One wonders how Deleuze might know anything about their internal life, or lack thereof? For whilst I'm sure this young French philosopher enjoyed many a dish of coq-au-vin, had he ever tried to form a relationship with a living bird? 

 

I'm doubtful: for despite what he might believe, they are intelligent and sensitive creatures, who display some degree of self-awareness (i.e., have a fairly complex inner life) [b].   

 

Personally, I'm with Lawrence on this point: I like to imagine that even a common brown hen is a goddess in her own rights and blossoms into splendid being, just as we do, within the fourth dimension and that we might form a vital (non-anthropocentric) relationship with her [c].     

 

But I digress ... And, to be fair, there's an ambiguity in what Deleuze writes here; he could be saying that chickens too are emptied of internal life (i.e. have their being negated) within techno-industrial society thanks to factory farming (Heidegger controversially suggests that there is a metaphysical equivalence between mechanised food production and the Nazi extermination camps).      

 

Anyway, let's move on ... And let's do so by immediately pointing out that Deleuze isn't necessarily complaining about this loss of soul - because, like Sartre, he hates moist interiority and regards the issue as a far more complex one than it is often characterised. For one thing, Deleuze suggests the possibility of a spiritual life outside of (and without reference to) any interiority and he believes in a revolution that takes place as a form of action and as an event in the world, rather than in us:

 

"The revolution is not supposed to take place inside us, it is external - and if we do it in ourselves, it is only a way to avoid doing it outside." [267]

 

Again, like Sartre whom he quotes, Deleuze suggests that ultimately everything is outside - including the self (l'existence précède l'essence, and all that jazz):

"'Outside, in the world, among others. It is not in some hiding-place that we will discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a human among humans.'" [268]

 

Interestingly, Deleuze finds this existentialism in the Gospel: Christ, he says, shows us a new possibility of life that is not lived posthumously in some kind of heaven, but in the external world. Only this, paradoxically, "is not a social, historical, localized world: it is our own internal life" [268].

 

Unfortunately, it's not this aspect of the Gospel that has triumphed and ultimately Christianity has been more bad news than good and brought about the disastrous "dissociation of Nature and Spirit" [268]. Deleuze continues:

 

"Some might say that the union did not exist at the time of the Greeks either. No matter. The identity of Nature and Spirit exists as nostalgia in the modern consciousness; whether it is defined in reference to Greece, to a state preceding original sin, or, if you prefer psychoanalysis, to a state prior to the trauma of birth, it matters little. Once upon a time there was a union between Nature and Spirit and this union formed an external world. Nature was mind and mind, nature; the subject was not involved except as an error coefficient." [268-69]  

 

Christianity subjectified both nature and spirit and ended up with a torn consciousness unable to grasp in itself "the relationship of natural life to spiritual life" [269]. Jesus as mediator came to fix this via the Gospel which is "the exteriority of an interiority" [269]. 

To be honest, I'm not sure I understand this. But let's see how Deleuze now relates this material to the bourgeois opposition between private life and the state ...

 

II.

At first glance, says Deleuze, this latter opposition seems "very different from the Christian opposition between Nature and Spirit" [269]. But - surprise, surprise - it isn't:

 

"The bourgeois has been able to internalize internal life as mediation of nature and spirit. By becoming private life, Nature was spiritualized in the form of family [...] and Spirit was naturalized in the form of homeland [...] What is important is that the bourgeoisie is defined first by the internal life and the primacy of the subject. [...] There is bourgeoisie as soon as there is submission of the exterior to an internal order [...]" [269]

 

Deleuze expands:

 

"The bourgeoisie is essentially internalized internal life, in other words the mediation of private life and state. Yet it fears the two extremes equally. [...] Its domain is the golden mean. It hates the excess of an overly individualistic private life of a romantic nature [...] Yet it is no less fearful of the state [...] The domain of the bourgeoisie is the domain of the apparently calm humanism of human rights. The bourgeois Person is substantialized mediation; it is defined formally by equality [...] and materially by internal life. If formal equality is materially refuted, there is no contradiction in the eyes of the bourgeois nor is there a reason for revolution. The bourgeois remains coherent." [270]

Ultimately, they have no interest in the question of to be or not to be; they wish to have (to own, to possess); property rights are their concern - not ontological unfolding. But money - as an abstract flow - is problematic; it is not substantialized, "on the contrary, it is fluctuating [...] Whence the threat and danger" [271]. Anticipating his work with Félix Guattari written twenty-five years later, Deleuze notes: "Money negates its own essence [...]" [271] and capitalism inexorably moves towards its own external limit [d].

So, in sum: the fraudulent and secretive bourgeoisie internalise interior life in the form of property, money, and possession: "everything that Christ abhorred and that he came to fight, to substitute being for it" [273] - coming, in effect, not to save the world, but to save man from the world (in all its manifest evil). 

 

Having said that, I rather like the world in all its demirugal and external beauty and resent the idea of salvation, however you present it ...      

 

Notes 

 

[a] Gilles Deleuze, 'From Christ to the Bourgeoisie', Letters and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2020). All page numbers given in the above post refer to this work.

 

[b] See Lori Marino, 'Thinking chickens: a review of cognition, emotion, and behavior in the domestic chicken', Animal Cognition 20, (Jan 2017), pp. 127-147. Click here to read online. 

 

[c] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Him With His Tail in His Mouth', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 307-317. Lawrence discusses forming a relationship with his Rhode Island Red on pp. 313-316.  

[d] In Anti-Oedipus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari describe money as that which has been substituted by capitalism for the very notion of a social code and which has created "an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius". See Anti-Oeipus, trans. Robert Hurley et al, (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 33. 

 

Part 1 of this series on Deleuze's youthful writings - Description of Women - can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

Notes on the Youthful Writings of Gilles Deleuze 1: Description of Women

 Young man, there's no need to feel down

 

 

I.

 

The first text that French philosopher Gilles Deleuze ever published, in the autumn of 1945, when still a 20-year old student, was a contribution towards a gendered philosophy of the other entitled 'Description of Women'.

 

Although he later renounced the piece - as he did other writings prior to 1953 - it has now been re-published with the agreement of his wife and daughter, in order to counter the unauthorised (and sometimes error-strewn) versions already in circulation. An English translation, by Ames Hodges, can be found in Letters and Other Texts, the third and final volume of posthumous pieces, edited by David Lapoujade, (Semiotext(e), 2020). Page numbers given below refer to this edition.            

 

 

II.

 

This amusing (sometimes confusing) work opens in agreement with Sartre that Heidegger was mistaken to conceive of Dasein in asexual terms; a philosophical insufficiency that makes the youthful Deleuze uneasy. Why that should be, I don't know. But one imagines that Deleuze, like many young Frenchmen, found it difficult not to view everything through the prism of sex, including human reality or being, and would naturally, therefore, think it utterly monstrous to conceive of an asexual world. 

 

Deleuze wants gender to be marked in both the lover and the beloved and for it to be essentially distinct in each; not for the sexual identity of the latter to merely be a pale reflection of that of the former: "Phenomenology must be of the loved one" [254], which I think means that the loved one should not be thought of as merely another type of subject, but philosophically acknowledged in their otherness as those who express the possibility of an entirely different and external world.         

 

And how does this relate to the question of women? Well, according to Deleuze, "the description of women cannot be made without reference to the male-Other" [255]. But this male-Other is absolutely not to be confused with that seductive being who wears makeup and torments tender young men, such as himself: 

 

"You could search in vain for the expression of an absent external world on the face of this woman. In her, all is presence. The woman expresses no possible world; or rather the possible that she expresses is not an external world, it is herself." [255]

 

At best, this self-expressive woman acts as an intermediary beween "the pure object that expresses nothing and the male-Other, who expresses something other than himself, an external world" [255].     

 

I'm not sure if I entirely understand what Deleuze is saying here - and, to be honest, I kind of like the sound of the woman with her enormous presence who possibilizes herself in the "overflowing triumph of flesh" [256]. I think she secretly thrills Deleuze as well; why else would he quote from Jean Giono's Le Chant du monde about the blood-tingling appeal of a female body? 

 

Deleuze might pretend that what really turns him on is the paradoxical fact that "the more she plunges into materiality" [256], the more this woman becomes immaterial and is returned to the being she is and its possibility of expression, but I suspect he's still thinking of her softness of belly and what Giono describes as her two big headlights when lying in bed at night. Such a woman may have no external world to offer, but she's desirable and provides a "compressed internalized world" [257] to find pleasure within. 

 

Unlike the young Deleuze, I don't see it as particularly dangerous or unspeakably painful for a woman to lose her being and become "no more than a belly, an overflowing materiality" [257]. For if, on the one hand, becoming-object allows for the "prodigious sexual success of women" [257], on the other, it allows them to gain their revenge upon the male subject (with whom friendship remains impossible).  

 

 

III.

 

So far, then, Deleuze has establised an opposition between woman and the male-Other. Only the latter  expresses a possible external world; to try and force the former into such a role compromises her internal life, with the latter understood as a union of contraries  - material and immaterial aspects - that combine together mysteriously to give woman her essential identity. 

 

Only a sadist would take pleasure in threatening this living interiority; the sort of man who imposes a mask of suffering on the woman, or who tells her: "Sit down and crease your forehead" [259].* 

 

Or the sort of man, perhaps, who would deny a girl her makeup kit (Deleuze is adamant that the supernatural art of cosmetics is crucial in the formation of a woman's essence); or her expensive shoes (Deleuze describes the ankles as an important site of womanly consciousness and so naturally favours high-heels).   

 

At this point, I'm sure there will be readers who will think I'm making this up - but I'm not; I'm doing my best to stick closely to the text. Deleuze really does, for example, write of eyeliner, lipstick, and nail varnish; he also discusses the problem of eyebrows (to pluck or not to pluck), beauty spots (of which we should be wary), and his penchant for freckles (a symbol of the interior): 

 

"I do not understand at all why women are ashamed of [...] freckles and combat them with makeup [...] It can only be explained by women being mistaken as to their own essence." [261]

 

This last line is, I would imagine, for many women - not just those who identify as feminists - particularly galling, coming as it does from a precocious young philosopher who concludes that secretive, lying women - whose place "is not outside, it is in the house" [259] - basically need a man to reveal their truth - and a lover to caress them:

 

"And if the lover can approach the essence of woman through the caress as act, it is because the woman herself is being as caress [...] The woman therefore needs a lover. A lover who caresses her, and that is all. [...] Her being only exists in the form of an act performed by another." [264-65]  

 

One wonders what Simone made of this if she read it ...?   

 

 

Notes

 

*I feel that some explanation is needed for this otherwise cryptic line: according to Deleuze, a wrinkle on the forehead of the male-Other is a good thing. For the forehead of the male-Other is made for long, well-defined lines, signifying the attempt to see and understand better. But a wrinkle on a woman's forehead - "Oh! [...] one could cry, it is ridiculous and touching" [259]. 

 

Part 2 of this series on Deleuze's youthful writings - From Christ to the Bourgeoisie - can be read by clicking here.

 

  

On Magical Names and the Nietzsche-Crowley Connection (A Post for Halloween)

Aleister Crowley aka Frater Perdurabo 

aka the Great Beast 666 

 

 

The practice of adopting a magical name or motto by a newly initiated member of an occult order - including members of the Golden Dawn, probably the best-known of all secret societies - has an amusing quaintness to it. 

 

The names, usually in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, are intended to express the neophyte's highest ideal towards which they aspire, or perhaps contain some esoteric allusion. Fellow members address them by their new identity so as to create a special bond and to help foster the feeling that they were leaving their old selves behind - even if those old selves were highly accomplished and respected in the everyday world. 

 

W. B. Yeats, for example, one of the foremost figures of twentieth-century poetry and a pillar of the Irish literary establishment, was still obliged to take on a new name when he joined the Golden Dawn by which he would be known; he initially chose the classical adage Festina Lente, though later changed his motto to Demon est Deus inversus. 

 

As for the Hermetic Order's most notorious member, Aleister Crowley - the wickedest man in the world and much despised by Yeats and other members of the Golden Dawn for his libertine lifestyle - he took the name Perdurabo when initiated by MacGregor ('S Rioghail Mo Dhream) Mathers, in November 1898. 

 

It's an interesting choice: and one wonders if Crowley was at all influenced by his reading of Nietzsche, for whom the idea of endurance was central to his Dionysian philosophy: 

 

"To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not - that one endures." [1]

 

We know that Crowley thought highly of Nietzsche, describing him as a Gnostic Saint, a prophet of the Aeon of Horus, and an avatar of Thoth, the god of wisdom. Crowley even wrote a short essay on Nietzsche (c. 1914-15), in which he attempted to vindicate the latter's work. 

 

So it's possible that Crowley was influenced by Zarathustra's incitement to become hard and learn how to endure like the diamond. I like to think so, at any rate ...

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), section 910, p. 481. 

 

It should be noted, of course, that this fragment by Nietzsche was published after Crowley joined the Golden Dawn; the first English translation of Der Will zur Macht came out in 1910 as part of the Oscar Levy edition. It's probably impossible to know for sure what books Crowley read by Nietzsche - and if he read them in the original German - but it's likely he was familiar with The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Anti-Christ. Readers who are interested in knowing more about the Nietzsche-Crowley (or, if you prefer, Crowley-Nietzsche) connection should visit the Thelemic Union website: click here. 

 

This post is for Christina.  

 

 

Perdurabo (Notes from a Hard Knock Life)

Becoming hard is the really distinctive sign 

of a Dionysian nature

 

 

One of the things I hate being asked - usually in relation to my role as a full-time carer for an elderly parent with Alzheimer's - is: How are you coping? 

 

It's a question that entirely misunderstands my situation and reveals that the questioner has failed to grasp the fact that, for me, this is not about finding a way to cope, but is, rather, all about endurance ...

 

What's the difference? 

 

Well, I suppose we might say - borrowing a term privileged by Nigel Baines - that coping is the attempt to stay afloat when feeling all at sea; i.e., learning how to deal effectively with a set of challenging circumstances in order to manage and minimise one's own stress and keep one's head above the water. 

 

Endurance, on the other hand, is the ability to withstand an extended period of trauma and fatigue; an affirmation of suffering and a willingness to go under - at the risk of drowning - in order to explore the depths and confront the horrors thereof.   

 

In other words, whilst coping is a psychological technique for self-preservation, endurance is a philosophical test of one's physical, mental, and emotional reserves in the face of danger. That's why Nietzsche valued only those individuals who could endure: 

 

"To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not - that one endures." [1]

          

That's a diamond-like teaching from Zarathustra's school of hard knocks. But perhaps my favourite quote in relation to this topic and the providing of care for a loved one, comes from a letter by the American writer Willa Cather to her younger brother in 1916:

 

"The test of one’s decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please." [2]

 

Precisely! And those charcoal souls - always planning how best to cope - will never understand this ... 

  

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), section 910, p. 481.   

[2] Willa Cather, letter to Charles Douglas Cather (8 July 1916), in A Calendar of Letters of Willa Cather: An Expanded, Digital Edition, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis P. Stout, The Willa Cather Archive: click here.    

 

Surprise musical bonus from the soundtrack of my life: click here. 

 

 

On Travel/Writing (with a Deleuzian Punchline)

 Have monogrammed trunk will travel 

 

To consider travel writing is one thing: but to conceive of literature as travel is something else; something a bit more philosophically interesting, a bit more Deleuzean ...

 

For Deleuze understood that penser c'est voyager and that the true nomad doesn't need to traipse around the world or migrate here and there; that they move even when standing still and that the most vital trips are in intensity, not space. 

 

Deleuze hinged his theory of travel upon observations from several writers, including: 

 

(i) Fitzgerald, who insisted that travelling - even to remote islands or the darkest jungles - never amounts to a real break if one takes along one's old beliefs, memories, and habits of thought ... 

 

(ii) Beckett, who described it as dumb to travel simply for the pleasure of travelling itself; there had to be a destination of some kind ...

 

(iii) Proust, who said that upon waking the true dreamer has to go and check things out in the world; i.e., what motivates their desire to travel is not to discover new lands, but to confirm the reality of their own nightmares and visions. [1]     

 

Deleuze was also a serious reader of D. H. Lawrence - and Lawrence was both a great traveller and a great writer, frequently overtaken by the necessity to move, although, amusingly, his own savage pilgrimage ultimately brought him to the conclusion that travel is a splendid lesson in disillusion. [2]

 

Of course, that hasn't stopped Lawrence scholars packing their suitcases and floating from international conference to conference, in order to endlessly discuss Lawrence's world tour and talk about his uncanny ability to connect with the so-called spirit of place. 

 

For as Deleuze once joked, that's how academics travel - by generating a lot of hot air ...   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Gilles Deleuze: 'Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel', Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 77-78.  

 

[2] Readers interested in knowing more about Lawrence's thoughts on travel can click here for a related post to this one.  

This post is for Adam Peter Lang.

 

 

On the Limits of Staying Afloat

 Flying Carp Books (2019)

nigelbaines.com

 

To be fair, Nigel Baines defines himself as a cartoonist and illustrator, rather than a writer, and his graphic memoir, Afloat, which documents his experience of caring for someone with dementia, interspersed with reflections on his childhood, gerontology, and the death of a beloved parent (in this case, the woman he refers to throughout as mum), is more successful as a pictorial project, than as a written work.   

 

Indeed, one wonders why he didn't simply produce a wordless book in the style of Frans Masereel or Lynd Ward: I think that might have worked better. 

 

For I sometimes found the narrator's voice intrusive and slightly flippant in tone. I also think that the silence of the text would have nicely echoed the silence that the demented subject often slips into. Further, as Baines himself notes, often the most important thing in graphic novels - as in life - happens in the spaces between panels and the silences between words; that's where stories unfold.  

 

Having said that, perhaps it's necessary to provide some autobiographical background and maybe the personal element is something that's all too often missing in my own musings on this topic.

 

However, you have to exercise caution with such material. Otherwise, as is the case here, you end up telling us too much about yourself and not enough about the ravishing violence of dementia. In his attempt to stay afloat, Baines misses the opportunity - at the risk of drowning - to really plumb the depths of pain, loss, and the other profoundly monstrous aspects of life lived in extremis.    

Notes

 

Thanks to Catherine Brown for kindly gifting me this book. 

 

For a follow up post to this one on coping contra enduring, click here. 

Welcome to Free Town (Beware of the Bears!)

(PublicAffairs, 2020)

 

 

I.

 

Although vaguely sympathetic to the principles of libertarian philosophy, I certainly wouldn't call myself a libertarian and think that even freedom becomes problematic when turned into an ideal: I can see why limits might be placed upon individual liberty and I accept the need for some form of minimal state. 

 

Thus it is that Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling's new book attracted my interest ... 

 

 

II. 

 

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear (2020) amusingly exposes the shortcomings of libertarian politics put in to practice; in this case, the attempt to establish a self-governing, small-town utopia in rural New Hampshire, in which everyone marches to the beat of a different drum and no one pays taxes. 

 

Twenty years ago, a group of self-styled free radicals came up with the Free Town Project; a plan to take over a small community of roughly a thousand souls and shape it in their own image. In 2004, they moved to Grafton, NH, a sparsely populated settlement with only one main road running through it and quickly took control - just like the corrupt New York City police officers who dominated Garrison, NJ, in the movie Cop Land (1997). 

The first thing they did was cut public funding by 30 percent, negatively impacting the schoolhouse, the library, and the fire department. State and federal laws were still on the books, but no longer enforced. Citizens were free to carry whatever weapons they liked, ignore hunting regulations, and dispose of their own garbage however they saw fit.

 

Soon, with rubbish piling up and sensing an opportunity, the local bears decided to move into town and an ideologically-driven social experiment conducted by quirky individuals who had met over the internet in dubious chatrooms where they discussed Ayn Rand, came up against grizzly reality. 

 

It seems that autonomous individuals don't always self-regulate and assist one another - they don't even empty their bins! Living free often means living an impoverished existence in which one is always at risk - if not from bears and potholes, then from one's neighbours (New Hampshire has the highest per capita rate of ownership for fully automatic weapons). 

 

As Hongoltz-Hetling notes, despite all their best efforts, the 200-odd libertarians who had promised to create a robust and dynamic private sector, had instead made an already poor town much worse off - and overrun with aggressive and increasingly bold black bears, whilst those now in positions of authority argued whether they should or should not do something about it. 

 

(Surely it was up to each individual to defend themselves and their property? Isn't bear management just another statist attempt at control?)         

 

Ultimately, the New Town project failed because no one - or, at least, no one in their right mind - wants to encounter a huge hungry bear in their backyard. 

 

As Patrick Blanchfield concludes in an excellent review of Hongoltz-Hetling's book, whether libertarians wish to accept it or not, "when it comes to certain kinds of problems, the response must be collective, supported by public effort, and dominated by something other than too-tidy-by-half invocations of market rationality and the maximization of individual personal freedom."

 

 

 

    

See:

 

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, A Libertarian Walks into a Bear, (PublicAffairs, 2020).

Patrick Blanchfield, 'The Town That Went Feral', The New Republic, (Oct 13, 2020): click here to read online. 

Fowl, Strange, and Unnatural: The Case of Rehan and Haleema Baig

 

 

The recently reported case of Rehan Baig - a 37 year-old man from Bradford, West Yorkshire, involving the filmed sexual assault of some pet chickens - has, rightly, provoked many outraged (though often punning) headlines; for despite the perversely comic nature of the act, there's nothing very funny about animal cruelty and the zoosadistic pleasure that it provides.    

 

Having said that, there's nothing particularly novel either about a man having penetrative sex with a chicken; avisodomy is long established and widely practiced within human culture, not least of all because of the unique opportunity afforded to enjoy a post-coital roast dinner [1].

 

And I'm not just referring to ancient cultures where many people farmed the land and lived in close proximity with animals; several Parisian brothels in the modern period would offer clients the use of a chicken or turkey as a kind of erotic appetiser or feathered fluffer. The trick was to ring the bird's neck, or cut its throat, just prior to ejaculation, so that the spasms of the dying fowl intensified one's own orgasm [2]. 

 

Anyway, returning to the case of Mr Baig ... 

 

Having been found guilty of unspeakable acts of cruelty and sexual depravity, he was sentenced to three years in prison and banned from owning any animals in the future. His wife, Haleema, who pleaded guilty to three counts of aiding and abetting, avoided prison - receiving a six-month suspended sentence - because the judge believed she may have acted under coercion (though he noted she appeared to gain some pleasure from the acts recorded on video involving not only the brown and white chickens, but an unidentified dog).  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Due to the anatomical disparity between man and fowl, the latter will invariably be killed during intercourse, whereas larger animals with compatible sex organs - such as sheep and goats - can be penetrated without too great a risk of injury or death. It's somewhat surprising, therefore, that in many ancient cultures acts of bestiality committed with poultry were regarded as less serious than those carried out with mammals (presumably because birds rank lower in the order of life).

 

[2] I seem to remember that Sade describes the procedure in loving detail somewhere or other in his writings. And American pornographer Larry Flynt confesses in his autobiography to having sex with one of his grandmother's hens, aged nine, before wringing its neck and throwing the body into the local creek. Many years later, he would build a three-foot replica of the bird with whom he lost his virginity in memorial. See An Unseemly Man, (Bloomsbury Publishing, 1997).  

 

   

Je fixais des vertiges

 

I woke up this morning to discover that the room was spinning around and whilst Bataille might imagine vertigo as a pathway to the Void and a fall into ecstatic joy, I have no interest in touching the impossible or experiencing dizziness to the point of trembling, thank you very much. 

 

Right now, I just want to make the whirling world stand still, as Rimbaud would say ...

 

 

See: Rimbaud, 'Délires II: Alchimie du verbe', Une saison en enfer (1873): click here.

 

 

Reflections on the Killing of a Porcupine

Sterling silver brooch inspired by Wharton Esherick's 

woodcut illustration for D. H. Lawrence's  

Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (Centaur Press, 1925)

Wharton Esherick Museum

 

 

I.

 

Perhaps due to a lingering sense of shame, Lawrence somewhat disingenuously calls his essay 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine' [1], when, in fact, the animal in question was very deliberatey killed by his own hand ...   

When he first encounters a large porcupine [2] on his ranch in New Mexico, D. H. decides to leave the poor creature alone; despite finding him repugnant and full of the same squalor that he identifies in bugs:

 

"The animal had raised all its hairs and bristles, so that by the light of the moon it seemed to have a tall, swaying, moonlit aureole arching its back as it went. That seemed curiously fearsome, as if the animal were emitting itself demon-like on the air.

      It waddled very slowly, with its spiky spoon-tail steering flat, behind the round bear-like mound of its back. It had a lumbering, beetle's, squalid motion, unpleasant. I followed it into the darkness of the timber, and there, squat like a great tick, it began scrapily to creep up a pine-trunk. [...]

      I stood near and watched, disliking the presence of the creature. [...]

      And he watched me. When he had got nearly the height of a man [...] he hesitated, and slithered down. Evidently he had decided, either that I was harmless, or else that it was risky to go up any further, when I could knock him off so easily with a pole. So he slithered podgily down again, and waddled away with the same bestial, stupid motion of that white-spiky repulsive spoon-tail. He was as big as a middle-sized pig: or more like a bear.

      I let him go. He was repugnant. He made a certain squalor in the moonlight of the Rocky Mountains. As all savagery has a touch of squalor, that makes one a little sick at the stomach."     

 

What's interesting here is how Lawrence uses the language of repulsion in order not merely to express his feelings at the time, but to justify his later action. Indeed, although he lets the porcupine go, he is already considering killing the animal: "Everyone says, porcupines should be killed; the Indians, Mexicans, Americans all the same. [...] It is a duty to kill the things." 

 

The only reason he didn't do so is because "it seemed almost more squalid to pick up a pine-bough and push him over, hit him and kill him". In other words, "the dislike of killing him was greater than the dislike of him".

 

Eventually, however, Lawrence overcomes what some would characterise as squeamishness and others see as an ethical disdain for violence and, on another clear moonlit night, he makes his first kill among the grasses and wildflowers: 

 

"There he lumbered, with his white spoon-tail spiked with bristles [...] His long, long hairs above the quills quivering with a dim grey gleam, like a bush.

      And again I disliked him."  

 

 After first seeking approval from his wife, Frieda, Lawrence goes to get his rifle from the house:

 

"Now never in my life had I shot at any living thing: I never wanted to. I always felt guns very repugnant: sinister, mean. With difficulty I had fired once or twice at a target: but resented doing even so much. Other people could shoot if they wanted to. Myself, individually, it was repugnant to me even to try.

      But something slowly hardens in a man's soul. And I knew now, it had hardened in mine. I found the gun, and with rather trembling hands, got it loaded. Then I pulled back the trigger and followed the porcupine. It was still lumbering through the grass. Coming near, I aimed."

 

Unfortunately, the trigger sticks - or, at any rate, Lawrence tells us that it sticks, perhaps for dramatic effect. So he has to release the trigger, aim and fire again. However, whilst the gun goes off with a bang this time, he misses, and the porcuine goes scuttling away:

 

"I got another shell in place, and followed. This time I fired full into the mound of his round back, below the glistening grey halo. He seemed to stumble on to his hidden nose, and struggled a few strides, ducking his head under like a hedgehog."    

 

The gun being empty and having no more shells to hand, Lawrence runs to fetch a wooden pole: "The porcupine was lying still, with subsiding halo. He stirred faintly. So I turned him and hit him hard over the nose; or where, in the dark, his nose should have been. And it was done. He was dead."

 

After again seeking reassurance from Frieda that he did the right thing, Lawrence concludes: "Things like the porcupine, one must be able to shoot them, if they get in one's way. One must be able to shoot [...] and to kill."   

 

 

II.

 

So, what then are we to make of this hardening of the soul and this volte-face on the question of killing animals, rather than simply let them be and acknowledge their right to life? I have to admit, I'm kind of disappointed ...

 

I much prefer the Lawrence who rejects the voices in his head telling him that real men feel no compunction about killing animals; the Lawrence who felt honoured by the presence of a snake drinking at his water-trough, for example [3]; or the Lawrence who mourns the death of a mountain lion killed by hunters: "What a gap in the world, the missing white-frost face of that slim yellow mountain lion!" [4] 

 

And I like the Lawrence who mocks Italian hunters in their velveteen corduroys, striding around the countryside shooting little birds - sparrows, robins, finches, etc. - in order to display their virility [5], rather than the one who mocks Buddhists for only eating rice and refusing to devour animals; or the Lawrence who talks about the need for man to establish himself upon the earth via the subjugation and/or destruction of "the lower orders of life".

As for the poor porcupine, he wasn't even eaten by the Lawrence's. Instead, they buried it, only for some other wild animal to dig up the body and consume it; "for two days later there lay the spines and bones spread out, with the long skeletons of the porcupine-hands". Soon, another porcupine - bigger and blacker-looking - appears at the tiny ranch: "That too is to be shot", writes Lawrence.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', in Refections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 347-63. Lines quoted are on pp. 349, 352, 353, and 354.    

[2] The North American porcupine is a large, stocky rodent, usually dark brown or black in colour with white highlights. Short-sighted and slow-moving, its most distinguishing feature, of course, is a thick coat of quills, which can number up to 30,000 in a fully-grown animal and which cover its entire body except for face, feet and underbelly. Quills are essentially modified hairs formed into sharp, hollow spines and are used defensively (although, like skunks, porcupines can also produce a distinctively unpleasant odour to warn off would-be predators). Contrary to popular legend, they cannot shoot their quills. Porcupines are solitary herbivores and largely nocturnal. They range all over North America and usually make their homes in hollow trees or dry rocky areas. They are preyed upon by wolves, bears, mountain lions, and fishers. Many farmers and ranchers continue to consider them a pest.     

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Snake', The Poems Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 303-05. Admittedly, Lawrence throws a log at the snake in order to scare him away, but he immediately regrets it: "I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!"  

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Mountain Lion', The Poems Vol. I, ibid., pp. 351-52.

[5] D. H. Lawrence. 'Man is a Hunter', in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 217-21.

To read an earlier (related) post on the prickly politics of Lawrence's vitalism in the above essay, click here.  

How Kindness Gives Way to Cruelty

That's gotta hurt! 

 

 

I. Man and Mutt

 

One of the most harrowing scenes in D. H. Lawrence's work appears not in his fiction, but in 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine' ...

In this extraordinary essay, Lawrence tells of how one day a "big, bushy, rather handsome sandy-red dog" wandered on to his New Mexican ranch, clearly in distress, having had an encounter with a porcupine: "his whole muzzle set round with white spines, like some ghastly growth; like an unnatural beard".

 

Lawrence continues:

 

"He waited while I went up to him, wagging his tail and whimpering, and ducking his head, and dancing. He daren't rub his nose with his paws anymore: it hurt too much. I patted his head and looked at his nose, and he whimpered loudly. 

      He must have had thirty quills, or more, sticking out of his nose, all the way round: the white, ugly ends of the quills protruding an inch, sometimes more, sometimes less, from his already swollen, blood-puffed muzzle. 

    [...] Then the fun began. I got him in the yard: and he drank up the whole half-gallon of the chicken's sour milk. Then I started pulling out the quills. He was a big, bushy, handsome dog, but his nerve was gone, and every time I got a quill out, he gave a yelp. Some long quills were fairly easy. But the shorter ones, near his lips, were deep in, and hard to get hold of, and hard to pull out when you did get hold of them. And with every one that came out, came a little spurt of blood and another yelp and writhe.

      The dog wanted the quills out: but his nerve was gone. Every time he saw my hand coming to his nose, he jerked his head away. I quieted him, and stealthily managed to jerk out another quill, with the blood all over my fingers. But with every one that came out, he grew more tiresome. I tried and tried and tried to get hold of another quill, and he jerked and jerked, and writhed and whimpered, and ran under the porch floor."

 

As one might imagine, it was "a curiously unpleasant, nerve-trying job", with the dog whimpering and jerking his head this way and that. And so, after struggling for a couple of hours and extracting some twenty quills, Lawrence gave up: 

 

"It was impossible to quiet the creature, and I had had enough. His nose on the top was clear: a punctured, puffy blood-darkened mess; and his lips were clear. But just on his round little chin [...] was still a bunch of white quills, eight or nine deep in.

      We let him go, and he dived under the porch, and there he lay invisible: save for the end of his bushy, foxy tail, which moved when we came near. Towards noon he emerged, ate up the chicken food, and stood with that doggish look of dejection, and fear, and friendliness, and greediness, wagging his tail.

      But I had had enough.

      'Go home!' I said. 'Go home! Go home to your master, and let him finish for you.'"

      

Unfortunately, the dog doesn't want to go - and it's at this point kindness is superseded by cruelty:

"He was not going to leave the place. 

      And I! I simply did not want him.

      And so I picked up a stone. He dropped his tail, and swerved towards the house. I knew what he was going to do. He was going to dive under the porch, and there stick, haunting the place.

      I dropped my stone, and found a good stick under the cedar tree. [...] 

      I could not bear to have that dog around any more. Going quietly to him, I suddenly gave him one hard hit with the stick, crying  'Go home!' He turned quickly, and the end of the stick caught him on his sore nose. With a fierce yelp, he went off like a wolf, downhill, like a flash, gone. And I stood in the field full of pangs of regret, at having hit him, unintentionally, on his sore nose."

        

 

II. Mann und Mutter

 

I thought of this scene the other morning when attending to my mother, for whom I care. 

 

Admittedly, she's not a big bushy dog and has never required my assistance in removing a face full of porcupine quills. But she is 94 and in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's, thus fully dependent upon my help. And she is now inarticulate, like an animal, only able to offer a continuous series of moans and groans and shout out gibberish. 

 

And whilst her nerve hasn't gone, her mind has, making it impossible for me to reason with her, when, for example, trying to wash her, or feed her, or change her dressings and - like the poor creature Lawrence writes of - she won't shut the fuck up and she won't stay still, constantly babbling and twisting this way and that, turning the provision of care into a curiously unpleasant, nerve-trying job ...

 

And there are times when, like Lawrence, I feel I have reached the end of my tether and can't bear to be around my mother; times, even, when I too feel like picking up a large stone or a good stick ...  

 

And that, whilst a terrible confession, is an important realisation: in the end, kindness will always give way to cruelty - which is why abuse is rife within care homes, hospitals, and other institutions in which vulnerable individuals are housed. The suffering of others can trigger violence as a kind of defence mechanism and, ironically, the most inhumane acts are often a sign that one is too sensitive, not that one lacks compassion. 

 

 

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 350-52.   

A Brief Note on the Question of Scale in the Work of D. H. Lawrence

Okay, one last time: these are small, 

but the ones out there are far away.

 

 

As a mortal being, man is a creature of time and space. That is to say, one bound by certain limits and defined by certain coordinates and measurements. Man, therefore, is not so much the measure of all things, as measured by all things and Lawrence insists on the importance of man knowing his limits; of accepting that he ends where his fingers and toes stop. 

 

Having said that, Lawrence also asserts that man has a transcendent quality and is like a rose; "perfected in the realm of the absolute, the other-world of bliss" [RDP 9]. When we blossom into singular being, we do so off the scale; "absolved from time and space" [RDP 9]. 

 

That’s why Lawrence hates talk of the average man or woman, perfectly cut to size, and rejects ideals of equality and social perfection. The average, he says, is a pure abstraction; "the reduction of the human being to a mathematical unit" [RDP 63]. 

 

However, Lawrence certainly believes in a scale of values and what Nietzsche termed an order of rank. Every man and every woman may be a star, but they exist in relation to one another and must fall into place according to their status: "The small are as perfect as the great, because each is itself and in its own place. But the great are none the less great, the small the small. And the joy of each is that it is so." [RDP 103] 

 

Thus, there’s a very real social scale operating within the Lawrentian universe, only he insists that it’s a natural hierarchy. There must, says Lawrence, be a system of some sort and there must be different classes; "either that, or amorphous nothingness" [RDP 111]. And the individual’s place within this system is determined by the degree of power - or life - that they manifest in the world: "The only thing to do is to realise what is higher, and what is lower, in the cycles of existence." [RDP 352] 

 

This has nothing to do with size or even physical strength, but everything to do with vitality or what Lawrence sometimes calls vividness. A tiny ant, for example, belongs to a higher cycle of existence than a giant redwood because it is more alive and, if it comes to a contest, "the little ant will devour the life of the huge tree" [RDP 357]. 

 

Similarly, this is why Hepburn is right to insist to Hannele – much to her irritation – that, ultimately, he is greater than even the tallest mountain [Fox 137-38].

 

 

See:

D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Lines quoted are from the following four essays: 'Love', 'Democracy', Education of the People', and 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine'.

 

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 

 

 

Notes 

 

The image is from an episode of Father Ted entitled 'Hell' [S02/E01], dir. Declan Lowney, written by Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, in which Ted uses some toy cows to try to explain issues of scale and perspective to Dougal whilst on holiday in a caravan. The episode originally aired on 8 March 1996. Click here to watch the iconic scene on YouTube.  

 

This post was inspired by Catherine Brown's presentation - 'D. H. Lawrence and the Sense of Scale' - to the D. H. Lawrence Society (14-10-20).

In Memory of Martin White: the Man Who Loved Butterflies

Martin White inspecting a homemade butterfly breeding pod

Photo: Fabio de Paola / The Guardian (2020)

 

 

Patrick Barkham's piece in The Guardian yesterday on Martin White - a butterfly devotee and maverick rewilder who, sadly, died earlier this week - was both fascinating and moving to read: click here.   

 

White was a man prepared to break the law and place himself at odds with the scientific establishment in order to help the beautiful insects he loved and singlehandedly try to reverse the rapid extinction of British wildlife. One can't help admiring his efforts, despite concerns raised from opponents who feel that whilst well-intentioned, White's methods are counterproductive and potentially do more harm than good.  

 

For clearly, as Barkham points out, whilst the experts in nature conservation have had some success, broadly speaking, they've failed - big time:  

 

"Britain has lost more of its nature than most other countries in the world. Almost every species or measurable wild habitat produces a graph plummeting downwards. Over the last 70 years, 98% of wildflower meadows in England and Wales have been destroyed; three-quarters of ponds and heaths have vanished; half the remaining fragments of ancient woods have been obliterated. The creatures inside this habitat have gone too: since 1970, more than half of Britain's farmland birds have disappeared, while a quarter of mammals are endangered and three-quarters of butterfly species have declined. Overall one in 10 species are threatened with extinction; 500 species have already disappeared from England." 

 

This dramatic and depressing loss of biodiversity - which has only accelerated in the 21st century - shows that whatever it is we've been doing to save wildlife and protect (what remains of) the countryside clearly isn't working. 

 

So perhaps we need aurelians like Martin White breeding native butterflies in their backyards for (re-)introduction at suitable sites around the country. I respect professional conservationists and understand the importance of data gathering and habitat management, but something else - something more - needs to be done at this point, otherwise none of us will ever see a mazarine blue or purple emperor ... 

 

 

 

Of Bakers and Ballerinas (We Are All Prostitutes)

 

Such was the vociferous outcry in reaction to the above ad trying to encourage more young people to retrain and find employment in cyber security, that it was almost immediately withdrawn. 

 

And it wasn't just the usual suspects in the arts taking offense on social media; even the Culture Secretary found it crass and a Downing Street spokesperson described it as inappropriate, although, actually, Fatima's next job might be in this field and, like many of us, she may very well be blissfully unaware of where life will eventually take her.

 

And so, we might ask, what's the problem here? 

 

How many aspiring ballet dancers actually succeed and fulfil their ambition? I believe that the average figure for those who actively pursue a career and become full-time professionals is around ten percent. So nine-out-of-ten are probably going to be disappointed and have to earn their living some other way at some point - maybe even Fatima; and maybe even in cyber security!

 

And the same is true, of course, for all those would-be singers, actors, poets, and professional athletes out there. To succeed in the arts, or in showbiz, or in the world of sport, requires extraordinary talent, dedication, and a network of support. And probably a fair degree of luck. 

 

Those critics who say that the CyberFirst programme is all about denigrating the arts and crushing the hopes and dreams of young people are, I'm afraid, overreacting. And this, tweeted from the shadow mental health minister, Rosena Allin-Khan, is just laughably absurd in all its wokery: "Fatima, you be you. Don't let anyone else tell you that you aren't good enough because you don't conform to their preconceived social norms."      

Interestingly, the ad is now being run with a picture of a baker and so far, there are no complaints ... What does that tell us about the world we live in? I mean it's true, man does not live by bread alone, but I don't see why the skilled artisan who makes my croissants in the morning should be valued less than a dancer pirouetting on stage to the delight of mostly wealthy spectators. 

 

In the end, as someone once sang many years ago, we are all prostitutes ...    

Note: the image of 'Fatima' is a detail from a photograph by Krys Alex featuring Desire'e Kelley, a dancer at the Vibez in Motion Dance Studio, Atlanta, Georgia, published on Instagram in July 2017.