In Praise of the Octopus

A serving of octopus at the Bar Celta - Barcelona's best pulperia

barcelta.com

We all remember Paul the Octopus, now sadly deceased, for his uncanny abilities of prediction during the World Cup 2010.

It was noted by commentators at the time that octopuses are highly intelligent and sensitive animals with complex thought processes, short and long-term memories, individual personalities, and able not only to learn by observation, but even use tools to solve problems and open jam-jars. In short, they are remarkable creatures.

Indeed, according to the latest findings of scientists mapping their genome, they are even more unique than previously realised; to the extent that we might almost think of them as an alien life-form. That said, they obviously share some features with other animals, including man, such as a closed circulatory system, for example. 

In uncovering their DNA sequence researchers found that octopuses have a similar set of genes (protocadherins) to those found in humans responsible for the forming of neural networks in the brain. This, it is thought, accounts for their ability to quickly adapt and learn from their environments.

But what's crucial to keep in mind is that the octopus - and not man or any other warm-blooded creature - was the first super-smart being on the planet; their primordial intelligence evolved more than 400 million years ago, i.e. 230 million years before mammals first stepped on the Earth.

And so, it's only right, surely, that octopuses are afforded some degree of protection under the law in the UK and other European countries; any experimental procedures that might cause pain may only be performed once the animal has been anesthetized, a kindness usually extended only to vertebrates.    

Ideally, of course, we should just leave them alone to live their lives happily beneath the waves. The problem, however, is that they are so delicious to eat when served with a sprinkling of sea salt, paprika, and olive oil, accompanied by a dry white wine from Galicia, that one suspects that, despite their psychic abilities and numerous other talents, they'll always be on the menu.  


This post is dedicated to my friend Carlos Machado - a great aficionado of catching and cooking octopus. 

On Militant Respectability

A gay protest outside the Pentagon (1965) 

Photo: Kay Tobin (New York Public Library)

Until recently, I had never heard of the strategy of protest termed by historian Marc Stein militant respectability. But now that I have, I'm intrigued by the idea.

For whilst there are times when one is obliged (politically and ethically) to break the law and resort to the use of force, what matters most is not whether a demonstration is violent or non-violent, legal or illegal, but whether it is effective; that is to say, whether it achieves its aims.

And there have been times when the most carefully choreographed, polite, peaceful, well-ordered and well-mannered of protests have been the most successful not in capturing, but in charming support from the public, the media, and, indeed, even opponents. For example, the demonstrations organized by Frank Kameny and the Washington branch of the Mattachine Society in the mid-1960s requesting (not demanding) that gay men and lesbians be given their full civil rights as American citizens, were absolutely carried out in the right manner and cleverly placed squarely within the tradition of lawful American protest. As David Johnson writes:

"Because they had long been seen as subversive and a threat to national security - perhaps even connected with the Communist Party - MSW members were exceedingly careful to highlight not only that they were homosexuals but that they enjoyed rights as American citizens ... suggesting that sexual identity and political rights were not incompatible."  

Wanting to be seen not only as upstanding citizens, but also as potential employees of the civil service, those who marched outside the White House and other government buildings, dressed appropriately; women in dresses, men in suits and ties:

"The MSW drew up strict regulations stating that 'picketing is not an occasion for an assertion of personality, individuality, ego, rebellion, generalized non-conformity or anti-conformity'. Dress and appearance were to be 'conservative and conventional'. Signs had to be approved, neatly lettered, and carried in a prearranged order. Talking among picketers, smoking on line, and acknowledging passers by ... were discouraged."

Militant respectability is thus an ordered and dignified - but also subversive and seductive strategy - rather than a chaotic and confrontational one. Those who do not see how this might at times be necessary and effective - those who think protesting must always be noisy and involve skirmishes with the police - are idiots (and useful idiots at that to the state and its security services).

Torpedo the Ark sometimes means: shut your mouth, smarten up, and put down the petrol bombs; because the 'ark' just might happen to be counterproductive revolutionary posturing, empty political rhetoric and ideological cliché.

Ultimately, if you want to be accepted and have your arguments heard, then you just might consider behaving in a socially acceptable manner and speaking in a pleasant tone of voice. Likewise, if you want to be accorded your rights, then face up to your duties and obligations as a citizen.      


Note: The lines quoted from  David K. Johnson are from The Lavender Scare, (University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 200-01.

On the New Barbarians

Riot police try to maintain order during a registration procedure on Kos. 

Photo: Alkis Konstantinidis / Reuters

From where will come the new barbarians, asked Nietzsche, rather wistfully. And it was a question that also troubled Lawrence. For despite the modern world being very full of people, there were no longer, he said, "any great reservoirs of energetic barbaric life", as in the ancient world. 

At one time, I also shared this romantic fascination for those who roamed outside the gates of Western civilization; peoples full of violent discontent and savage enthusiasm; cultured, but untamed. Men who still believed in their own gods, because they still believed in themselves.

But when one turns on the news and sees what is happening on the Greek islands, and in Sicily, or at the French port of Calais ... One can't help being disconcerted by these hundreds-of-thousands of refugees and asylum seekers - these new barbarians.

It would help, I think, if - despite their obvious desperation - they behaved in a rather more respectable fashion: would it kill them, for example, to queue in an orderly manner and to show at least a modicum of gratitude towards those among whom they would live and prosper?

Having escaped from war, persecution, and sectarian stupidity and made it to European shores, they need now to display the greatest degree of civility and overcome their own terrible and violent origins; not threaten to recreate the very conditions they have fled by importing chaos and resentment. 


Note: the line quoted from Lawrence is taken from Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (CUP, 2004), p. 189.        

Torpedo the Ark - Fire 500! (Ibsen, Nietzsche, and the Question of Revolutionary Nihilism)

Henrik Ibsen (2014) 
A low-poly portrait by Taudalpoi

taudalpoi.wordpress.com

In 1869, the Scandinavian playwright Henrik Ibsen composed a short poem entitled 'To My Friend, the Revolutionary Orator'. It was addressed to a critic who had accused Ibsen, then aged forty-one, of betraying the radical promise of his youth and becoming increasingly conservative. 

In the verse, Ibsen not only wishes to refute the charge, but demonstrate that he remains a perfervid revolutionary; more - not less - radical than before; one who desires the total destruction of the old order. He's not interested, he says, in moving pawns about the chessboard, or in futile social reforms. He wants to make a clean sweep of things.

Becoming increasingly intoxicated by his uncompromising vision of a future founded upon absolute freedom and purity of being achieved via a purge of all existing life forms, Ibsen announces that, come a new flood, he will happily torpedo the ark.

Discontent with anything other than the dream of a new beginning and a new mankind, Ibsen finds it impossible to identify with any political parties or programmes. His extreme individualism leads him towards a form of anarcho-nihilism in which not just the modern state, but the world itself needs to be blown out of the water. 

For some, this might all sound rather like Nietzsche in his grand political mode when he imagines himself as dynamite; a sort of human bomb longing to explode and make a breach in the walls of whatever constrains and coordinates life. For it's true, there are elements of fascism in Nietzsche - particularly in the later works, as he grows ever-more frustrated and possessed by the spirit of revenge that elsewhere in his texts he deplores and seeks to combat.

We shouldn't overlook or deny this; but we should remember also the Nietzsche who wrote: "I do not love people who have to explode like bombs in order to have any effect at all" and advocates a politics of resistance rather than a politics of revolutionary redemption. The Nietzsche who also wrote:

"If change is to be as profound as it can be, the means to it must be given in the smallest doses but unremittingly over long periods of time! Can what is great be created at a single stroke? So let us take care not to exchange the state of morality to which we are accustomed for a new evaluation of things head over heels and amid acts of violence ..."

Of course, some will point out that this 'small doses' passage taken from his mid-period writings is no more indicative of the authentic Nietzsche, or any more quintessential than the later texts in which he fantasizes the seizure of history and evolution. And they'd be right to do so. However, it seems to me to offer a much more interesting and credible teaching than the lame and ludicrous notion of holy war and a return to Year Zero. 

I don't know if Ibsen ever had cause to regret his desire to implement a final solution - but shame on him, as an artist and as a man, if he never came to realise that the chick does not break the shell out of animosity against the egg (as Lawrence would say).

And I would hope, finally, after 500 posts, that the phrase torpedo the ark is understood to mean something very different in the context of this blog to what Ibsen meant by it ...


Notes:

Those interested in reading the Ibsen poem in which the line 'torpedo the ark' appears should click here.

The lines quoted from Nietzsche can be found in (i) The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), III. 218, p. 210, and (ii) Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), V. 534, p. 211.

 

Outsider Art and Beyond

 D. Hall: Teddy, ballpoint pen on paper, (2015)

The phrase outsider art was coined by critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English translation for the French term art brut invented by Jean Dubuffet to describe works created outside the boundaries of official culture by those who are often socially marginalized, such as those suffering with mental illness, for example.

Those labelled as outsider artists are typically self-taught and there is often a naive beauty or innocence to their work, which compensates for lack of technique or sophistication. Usually, outsider artists have no contact with the mainstream art world and make no attempt to exhibit or establish careers. In many cases their work, born of solitude and isolation, is discovered - if at all - posthumously and thus makes money only for others; outsider art having now become a successful marketing category within the art world, despite Dubuffet's hope that it would prove immune to this process.

Interest in the art of those who exhibit extreme states of neuro-cognitive disorder and diversity - as well as young children, native peoples, and animals - is, of course, nothing new. Modernism might almost be said to be nothing other than the brilliant (sometimes cynical, often ironic and subversive) imitation and assimilation of such work, rich in unconventional ideas, fantasy, and expressive power. It's certainly true that many important figures associated with the avant-garde were fascinated and inspired by madness and primitivism (and that some had their own very real mental health issues to deal with).   

This interest in outsider practices among modern artists must, of course, be seen as part of a larger project; one that Nietzsche terms the revaluation of all values. Not that my mother, who is ninety and living with Alzheimer's, cares anything about any of this. She just doesn't know what else to do when alone and frightened and unable now to read the paper or follow her favourite programmes on TV other than pick up a pen and draw little pictures of familiar objects and faces.

And I don't think she's ever used the word art in her life or grasps it as a concept; her relation to art can hardly even be described as one of exteriority. In a sense, she's on the outside of that which is outside art and I have no idea what we might call that space ...    

On Hyperobjects and the Anthropocene

University of Minnesota Press, (2013)

Although - as far as I know - the term Anthropocene hasn't yet been formally adopted by geologists and others within the scientific community, it has nevertheless gained increasingly wide currency in various fields, including philosophy, since its coinage in the 1980s by the ecologist Eugene Stoermer and subsequent reworking and popularization by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen.

Put simply, the Anthropocene refers to the period when human activities begin to have significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems. For some, this starts with the Industrial Revolution; for others, it can be linked to much earlier developments, such as the birth of agriculture, or, if you want to be a bit Heideggerian about this, the fall of man into his technological enframing which denies Dasein the hope of experiencing the call of a more primal truth. 

Personally, I favour a later date - with the detonating of the first atomic device, for example, in 1945 - and would just as soon leave Heidegger out of this (for now at least).

One thing is for sure: just as determining a start date for the Anthropocene is tricky, so too the nature and extent of human impact is debatable and, for many, a highly controversial topic. But we can surely all be agreed that a marked effect has been made on the environment and, indeed, on evolution, thanks to the accelerated species extinction for which man is the primary causal agent.

For Timothy Morton, who has thought more than most about the Anthropocene - not least of all because he ironically recognizes how we are no longer able to think history as an exclusively human affair - the present era is an Age of Asymmetry characterized by hyperobjects that are beyond our cognition and control; real entities that are massively distributed in time and space and which are directly responsible for what he terms the end of the world, even as they bring us back down to earth with a bump and thereby take the necessary humiliation of mankind to its limit.

Lawrence referred to this as climbing down Pisgah and thought it would be voluntary. But it seems it will require a little non-human encouragement from things that are incomparably more vast and powerful than we are; things that - like gods - determine our fate and our future. 
    

Note: I am grateful to Dr Anna Barcz for encouraging me to read the above work by Morton.  

гомофобия: Vladimir Putin Versus the Gay Emoji

Russia, December 1917: the newly established revolutionary government repudiates all Tsarist laws against homosexuality; the Bolshevik regime declares a policy of absolute non-interference into the love lives of its citizens (so long as no other party is injured or has their rights and freedoms encroached upon). 

Sodomy, announce the Soviets, will henceforth be treated as no different from other supposedly more natural forms of intercourse. Having stormed the Winter Palace, they would now liberate the anus as a site of pleasure and gateway to the future.  

However, fast-forward to Russia in the summer of 2015 and what do we find? 

President Putin announces his intention to outlaw the use of all emojis depicting aspects of contemporary gay lifestyle, which, he says, corrupt and confuse children, undermine the sanctity of marriage, and, in this way, threaten both the family and the state. 

The so-called Young Guard - the youth division of Putin's political party, United Russia - have been instructed to keep an eye out for the sinister spread of gay emoji on social media and to report such at once. Supporters of the move claim that the cartoon figures are in clear breach of the country's ban on gay propaganda that Putin signed into effect in 2013.    

Whilst ludicrous and laughable, this development is also both deeply disturbing and depressing; an indication of just how petty - as well as how widespread and violent - homophobia in Russia has now become (and been officially encouraged to become).    

Perhaps the only good thing is that it helps to dispel the myth of progress: human affairs neither move forward nor backwards; rather we are forever caught up in perpetual spirals of power and pleasure and obliged to fight the same battles against stupidity over and over again to no end whatsoever. There can be gains, but no victory; losses, but no defeat.   

D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo and Some Transpolitical Musings

Garry Shead, Lawrence and Kangaroo, (1992)

Although I'm interested in politics and regard my work as politically informed, I am not one of those individuals who could ever belong to a political party or follow a party line.

I suppose, primarily, this has something to do with wishing to safeguard my reputation as a nomadic thinker; i.e. one who cares for those ideas that don't allow themselves to easily be codified or coordinated by an ideology, or made subject to authority. For this reason, I'm very sympathetic to Richard Somers, protagonist of Lawrence's novel Kangaroo (1923).

For Somers too is something of a Nietzschean free spirit, struggling to rid himself from all forms of dogma and doxa, desperately trying to reinvent each gesture and finally find a way in which to say something in his own name without asking permission (albeit a name which designates no ego whatsoever).

Thus, although he writes essays on social questions - and although he flirts with parties on both the far-left and far-right of the political spectrum, fantasizing about being a revolutionary man of action - Somers ultimately chooses to stand aside and stand alone, remaining loyal to his own demon (no matter how wilfully perverse this makes him look in the eyes of others) and exercising what Foucault describes as a decisive will not to be governed.

He very early on in the novel makes his transpositional position clear when he states that politics isn't his real concern and that he'd rather wander in a homeless fashion without a friend in the world than belong to any nation, church, or cause. Somers knows and comes to accept that he is fated to be one of those who must remain silent, lonely, and resolute - individuals content to engage in invisible activities outside the gate.

Heidegger talks about the need for such people engaged in reverent contemplativeness which might keep open the slim hope of a new revealing for man; a form of transcendence that has been purged not only of its conventional ties to morality and metaphysics, but also to the very possibility of direct action.

Ultimately, despite what militant political fanatics and religious terrorists believe, the greatest events are not our loudest or bloodiest but our stillest hours and "The world revolves not around the inventors of new noises, but around the inventors of new values; it revolves inaudibly."

Like Zarathustra, Richard Somers knows in his heart that change takes time and begins with a new feeling. Thus whilst the commentator Mac Daly is right to suggest that Kangaroo unfolds within a nihilistic universe, he is mistaken to argue that Somers's problem is that he cannot summon up sufficient faith in any cause that might give his life meaning. This, in fact, is Somers's strength and saving grace; it is what prevents him from deteriorating into something dreary and political like a communist or a fascist. It is his lack of faith and his inability to believe in anything or anyone that, paradoxically, is a sign of his spiritual superiority.

For Somers knows that whilst life can be made to march in step with the limited movements of the body politic and mouth empty slogans, it at the same time exceeds these and goes far beyond them: for life makes no absolute statement and sensitive, intelligent men and women don't need metanarratives and remain incredulous before them. If they do think their way into a political party or a faith, so too do they think their way through and out the other side, back into the open, like worms through a rotten apple. 

Kangaroo is a great novel precisely because it encourages us not to belong; to keep moving and abandon all attachments; to understand that it's merely Christian to love your enemies, whilst the really crucial but difficult thing is learning how to hate your friends and betray your masters.      


Notes:

D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, edited by Bruce Steele with an Introduction and Notes by Macdonald Daly, (Penguin Books, 1997).  

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969). The line quoted is from the section in part two entitled 'Of Great Events', pp. 153-54.  

See also Stephen Alexander, Outside the Gate, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), II. 6, pp. 127-45, for a further discussion of this topic with reference to Kangaroo and Aaron's Rod. 

Homophobia: Mixing Desire With Disgust

In their classic study, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White argue that the bourgeois subject defines himself through an act of exclusion. In other words, his identity is not merely founded upon self-affirmation: I am X, but also negation of otherness: I am not Y. 

For example, I am male / I am not female; I am straight / I am not gay. In this manner he constructs an entire system of binary oppositions that are as tedious as they are restrictive. While one term is highly valued as the good and noble, the other is seen as a form of worthless evil; that which is base, dirty, repulsive, and corrupting.

But here's the thing: the latter, whilst excluded, is nonetheless internalized under the sign of negation and so disgust always retains the imprint of desire - just as, conversely, desire forever keeps an element of disgust. So it is, that whenever one reads the obscene rantings of the homophobe one is struck not only by the level of hate, but also the obsessive and perverse fascination for those practices and those people which are so despised. 

To be clear: I'm not simply saying there's always a secret longing on behalf of the homophobe for an experience of gay sex - although doubtless this is often the case - but that there is, to quote Jonathan Dollimore, "an additional structural interdependence of desire and disgust". 

And so: "even when homophobia is not obviously a projection of repressed desire, being more a hostile response to the intolerably different, even then, the homosexual, through condensed association, may be one on whom is projected the repressed disgust inherent in desire."

  

Notes

Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, (Oxford University Press, 1991). Lines quoted are on p. 247.

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, (Cornell University Press, 1986). 

     

What Big Extraterrestrial Eyes You Have

Matilda the Cat is something of an internet sensation, with thousands of followers on social media. But, despite her appearance, she's actually a perfectly normal moggie. The poor thing does suffer, however, from a rare condition in which the lenses of her eyes have spontaneously detached, causing blindness, and giving her the look of an alien being. 

Those who are interested in reading more about her case should visit: aliencatmatilda.com - her official website. Because, fascinating as her story is, what I really wish to discuss here is the origin of the idea that aliens - particularly those known as Greys - have large, black, glassy-looking eyes. 

Obviously it doesn't come from the actual world, because there are no entities from out of space visiting planet Earth on a regular basis and abducting large numbers of human beings in order to probe them and fuck with their minds. Many people - mostly Americans - might believe contrary to this and insist that there's a global conspiracy covering up the facts, but, alas, it is of course complete nonsense; a mad fantasy on behalf of the needy, the lonely, and the fearful. A bit like the belief in a loving - but vengeful - God. 

For God, like ET, is a convenient fiction. Not surprisingly therefore, we find that our idea of what an alien looks like first comes from literature: H. G. Wells to be precise, who, as long ago as 1893 was already imagining futuristic grey-skinned beings with big heads and large eyes. Then, in 1901, he depicted the natives of the moon (Selenites) in very similar terms. 

He was followed in this belief that alien races would conform closely to a certain body type, by the Swedish writer Gustav Sandgren who, in 1933, under the pen name of Gabriel Linde, published a sci-fi novel translated into English as The Unknown Danger. Here, once again, a race of aliens were described as chinless wonders possessing big bald heads, large gleaming eyes, and small mouths. 

Thirty years later and press reports of the Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction case described those doing the abducting in this identikit manner. All stereotypes are grey; but by now all Greys were stereotypical.

Spielberg unimaginatively gave us more of the same in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). And then, in the 1990s, Mulder and Scully chased very familiar looking aliens for nine seasons, The X-Files firmly establishing the link in the paranoid imagination between Greys and the military-industrial complex of the New World Order.

As Oscar Wilde once said, Life imitates art far more than art imitates life. The disappointing thing is how few people realise this (and how tragic the consequences can be).

On the Idea of Manning Up

Image from the You Don't Say campaign

Click here for details

 

Despite what some students at Duke University might argue, the phrase man up is ambiguous enough in meaning for us to let it pass.

Not that I'd personally feel comfortable using it and I certainly understand how it might be interpreted as demanding conformity with a sexist, homophobic, and ultimately untenable model of hyper-masculinity. 

And I've no doubt that many of those who tell others to man up also tell them to grow a pair and stop being a pussy. But whereas these expressions are clearly and crudely rooted in biology, to man up just might be seen as an ethical imperative that can be addressed to any individual regardless of their sex or gender and which basically means act with a degree of self-control and a little courage; recognise your responsibilities and don't blame others when things go wrong. 

In other words, to man up, is to behave in a virtuous and noble manner; to never explain, never complain. It is not to behave like a macho brute or emotional retard, flexing muscles and prejudices. It is, as a Jewish friend says, simply to be a mensch (not a schmuck or a superman).

Strangely, it sounds so much more acceptable in Yiddish ...

         

A Cinderella Moment

Sophia Mechetner in a dress by Raf Simons for Dior

Photo: Yannis Vlamos / Indigitalimages.com

According to Natasha Bird, Senior Editor of Yahoo Lifestyle and a woman who prides herself not only on her knowledge of fashion and beauty, but her ability to be sarcastic about those involved in an industry off of which she makes her living, calling the catwalk debut of 14-year-old Israeli model Sophia Mechetner a "Cinderella moment" is a bit creepy.

This time, according to Ms. Bird, those monsters at Dior have gone too far! 

For whilst accepting and delighting in the fact that the fashion industry has always pushed what she calls the moral boundaries (without telling us what these limits are and how designers might be thought to challenge such, although it seems to involve nipple baring, skeletal frames, and overtly sexual posturing), Ms. Bird insists that the appearance of  Miss Mechetner on the runway oversteps the threshold between what is interesting and discomforting. 

In other words, whilst she likes to be intellectually titillated and perhaps just a little scandalized, she doesn't actually want to engage in the dangerous - and yes, often troubling - business of thinking cultural values and social norms, particularly those which revolve around the body of the young girl. 

It's so much easier just to tell us that there was something a little untoward about Miss Mechetner closing (and stealing) the Dior show in what she ludicrously describes as essentially a nightdress - whilst at the same time happily reproducing images of the model in her beautiful sheer white gown that she finds so distasteful. Ms. Bird continues, in a passage full of false outrage and faux concern:

"Even more distasteful, one might argue, is the way some media outlets chose to ignore 14-year-old Mechetner's bare breasts, calling her debut "a Cinderella moment". We can probably all agree, this isn't a Cinderella moment, it's a Lolita moment and it's one that should probably be addressed going forwards"

Ms. Bird seems incapable of imagining that others might have genuinely found Miss Mechetner's debut enchanting. And that others might actually be interested in the clothes and not share her seeming obsession with young flesh and exposed nipples. 

To find something obscene or perverse in Miss Mechetner's debut is in itself a little obscene and perverse. And when the real horrors of child sexual abuse (be it within a pornographic or indeed a religious context) still remain largely unaddressed, one finds it depressing that an undoubtedly intelligent and well-educated woman such as Ms. Bird wastes her time writing such prudish and piss-poor articles.       

Note: For those who might be interested, Natasha Bird's online piece can be read in full by clicking here. 

Artificial Intelligence and the Question of Racism (The Case of Jacky Alcine)

Jacky Alcine and Friend - laughing and posing for selfies 

in a manner that is all too human 

One of the more disconcerting stories doing the digital rounds at the moment concerns Google's amazing new picture service which lets you store (and edit) unlimited images online. So far, so good. 

But Google Photos also automatically stores the images under a wide but predetermined variety of category headings using the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence to identify objects. And this is where the problems begin; including the problem of racism as an inbuilt feature of technology.  

Thus, embarrassingly for Google, the case of Jacky Alcine, an African American, and his female friend, also black, who were both labelled as gorillas! 

Now, whilst there's nothing essentially wrong or shameful with looking like an ape - we are apes! - of course this issue needs to be understood within the cultural context and long history of racism. This is what makes this case of mistaken identification in the words of a Google executive, "100% not okay". 

To their credit, Google acted swiftly to rectify the situation, apologised to Mr. Alcine and his friend, and issued a statement expressing their genuine sorrow at the upset caused. But still the question tweeted by Mr. Alcine, himself a computer programmer, not of how this happened, but why, remains discreetly passed over in silence. 

For whilst we can all understand glitches in the technology involved and accept that more work needs to be done, the key question concerns the kind of image data that was collected and used by Google in the first place. It's here that an unconscious cross-race effect enters in. For when engineers attempt to teach a machine what a human being looks like by showing it the happy white faces that belong to the majority of their fellow employees in Silicon Valley, then unintended (but nonetheless real and just as offensive) racist consequences follow.

Somewhat depressingly, though unsurprisingly perhaps, it seems that just as the White Man is modelled in the image of God, so is Sonny made in the image of his pale-faced creator and comes with bias built in as standard ...                 

Lawrence, Derrida, and the Snake: It's Time for Man to Make Amends

Snake is one of Lawrence's most widely known poems, subject to numerous critical readings. But perhaps the best of these - certainly the one that most interests at present - is Derrida's. For it's a reading in which the question of interspecies ethics is paramount, i.e., how should we behave when confronted by the non-human otherness of the animal. 

The fact that we need to develop a new type of ethics and form a new relationship with animals can, I suppose, be regarded as a given. For the old relationship, determined by an implicitly anthropocentric moral philosophy in which the human subject is granted dominion over all other creatures and can treat them or eat them as he will, is clearly not satisfactory or working very well; unless, that is, one actively desires to continue the industrial slaughter of domestic beasts and further the mass extinction of wild things.

I certainly don't want this and, contrary to what some readers mistakenly believe, torpedo the ark doesn't mean exterminate all life forms. Rather, it means destroy the human coordination and exploitation of animals - the making them march two-by-two into captivity and containment within a system described by Derrida as carnophallogocentric; a system in which they are turned into just another natural resource to be processed and negated in their uniqueness of being.  

In his poem, Lawrence as narrator attempts to approach and to know a real snake - not merely an idealized construction or symbol - with a mixture of respect and due reverence. He's not entirely successful, but he tries. Thus he accepts that he is ethically accountable for his behaviour, including his cruelty, towards the snake and this is what fascinates Derrida in his reading. This and the fact that Lawrence openly challenges Judeo-Christian fears regarding snakes that are biblically rooted within our culture. As Anna Barcz notes:

"Derrida does not treat the poem as a challenge to literary criticism; he reads it, paying attention to details, as a sort of guidebook, a summary of human and other species' history of complex relationships and emerging problems. This results in a philosophical interpretation ... [that] sheds light on the issue of human and animal rapprochement and distance, not directly but also not far from the vantage point  of many critical, anti-speciesist and anti- or post-humanist accounts." 

Derrida is convinced that Lawrence's short verse effectively anticipates and contains his own animal philosophy in poetic form, as it touches upon just about everything that he himself is concerned with in a lecture series entitled The Beast and the Sovereign. Like Lawrence, Derrida concludes that we as humans have something to profoundly regret in the history of our relationship to the animal; a pettiness to expiate. 

This healing process begins when we recognise both the victimhood and the sovereignty of the snake; that he has been unfairly persecuted and that he is, in fact, an uncrowned king - one of the true lords of life.

Notes:

Anna Barcz, 'On D. H. Lawrence's Snake That Slips Out of the Text: Derrida's Reading of the Poem', Brno Studies in English, Vol. 39, No. 1, (2013), pp. 167- 82. Lines quoted are on p. 170.  

Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Vol. I, Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (eds.), (Chicago University Press, 2009); see the 'Ninth Session' for Derrida's discussion of Lawrence's poem Snake.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'Snake', Birds, Beasts and Flowers, in The Poems (Volume. 1), ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 303-05. 

 

Save the Chimps of Monkey Island!

Yes! We have no bananas, we have no bananas today.

One of the more upsetting stories in recent days concerns the threat of starvation facing the chimps of Monkey Island. 

The colony of over sixty individuals, is composed of ex-lab animals who played a vital role for many years in biomedical research for the New York Blood Center. Amongst other things, they helped scientists discover a vaccine for hepatitis and gain an international reputation for their work in the field of viral infections.

The NYBC, which established the apes in their idyllic new retirement home a decade ago, deep in the jungle of southern Liberia, has shockingly reneged on a promise to provide lifelong care by suddenly withdrawing the funds needed for supplies of fresh food and water, thus effectively leaving them to die.

This action has - not surprisingly - been condemned by numerous groups and charities and prompted a letter of moral rebuke from Jane Goodall. But, for me, it's not merely a matter of animal welfare; it's also a class issue to do with workers' rights in retirement, ensuring they can live out their days in freedom and security. It should thus also solicit full union support. 

These chimps are not wild animals; most spent decades as test subjects and part of an involuntary labour force. Some were born and raised in captivity. All are therefore fully deserving of compensation in my view, or a decent pension - particularly when this is essentially just the provision of a few bananas and maybe the odd mango. 

The $30,000 monthly cost of care is peanuts for a prestigious (and profitable) institution such as the NYBC which has hundreds of millions in revenue each year. They should not only be reminded of the written commitment made in 2005 by then director Alfred Prince to provide a sanctuary and look after the chimps, but legally obliged to honour such.

And it shouldn't require the evolution of a Caesar figure to ensure this ...

Note: those interested in the chimps of Monkey Island might like to view a short documentary from the makers of 20th Century Fox's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes available on YouTube: click here.

Those interested in the campaign to end the use of chimpanzees in biomedical research should click here.

  

Ours is the Day of Realization

Cover (detail) of the 1961 Penguin edition

The latest news from the Lawrence world is of a new adaptation of Lady C. made by the BBC and to be broadcast this autumn. Do we really need such? I don't know: it's debatable. What was once a vital and necessary book no longer seems so today. Nevertheless, the news has made me want to rethink the novel and, here, look again at Lawrence's surprising defence of it in the opening pages of his posthumously published essay A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'. 

After briefly detailing the various pirated editions, Lawrence claims that he wrote and published his most notorious novel in good faith as an honest, healthy book containing an obscene litany of four-letter words that shock at first, but "don't shock at all after a while". Is this because we as readers are rapidly depraved by familiarity? No, says Lawrence, it's because such words only ever troubled the eye and ear and never really disturbed the mind which has evolved far beyond the body and its overly-sensitive organs prone to "violent and indiscriminate physical reactions" that threaten culture and society.

This, it has to be said, is a rather astonishing argument coming from Lawrence of all people. For it implies our sensory organs work independently of consciousness and that their perceptions are superficial, dim-witted, and dangerous. Lawrence thereby not only reinforces a damaging mind/body division, but unexpectedly opts to come down squarely on the side of the former. Indeed, he says quite openly in this astonishing essay that individuals without minds don't interest him and don't matter.

Modern men and women, he continues, are superior to the people of the past precisely because they are capable of a more sophisticated and relaxed relationship with language; they can assign to words "only those mental and imaginative reactions which belong to the mind" and thus not respond like crude savages to every provocation and stimulus without thinking. 

Thus, whilst Lawrence wants us to act, "the great necessity is that we should act according to our thoughts" and not allow ourselves to be so feeble-minded  that we are incapable of contemplating our own bodies (and the words that relate to bodily functions) without "getting all messed up" and carried away. In particular, Lawrence wants us to be able to think sex. 

This, he writes, is the real point of Lady Chatterley's Lover. It's neither a manifesto for sexual liberation nor an apology for adultery. Rather, it's a bold - and puritanical - attempt to realise sex in the head; "fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly". Lawrence knowingly aims at an explicit literary representation of desire; that is to say, he wants to transform the intensity of physical experience and erotic sensation into a pure piece of knowledge. 

Indeed, it's his conviction that a large number of people are happiest "when they abstain and stay sexually apart, quite clean: and at the same time, when they understand and realize sex more fully". He continues, in a startling passage that anticipates Baudrillard's thinking on the world that exists after the orgy:

"Ours is the day of realization rather than action. There has been so much action in the past, especially sexual action, a weary repetition over and over, without a corresponding thought, a corresponding realization. Now our business is to realize sex. Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more important than the act itself. After centuries of obfuscation, the mind demands to know and know fully. The body is a good deal in abeyance, really. When people act in sex, nowadays, they are half the time acting up. They do it because they think it is expected of them. Whereas as a matter of fact it is the mind which is interested, and the body has to be provoked. The reason being that our ancestors have so assiduously acted sex without ever thinking it or realizing it, that now the act tends to be mechanical, dull, and disappointing, and only fresh mental realization will freshen up the experience."

Lawrence, we might conclude, ultimately encourages us to spend less time in the bedroom and more time in the library. Lady C. is a book for thinking, nothing else: a call for a new form of chastity, it belongs to those thought-adventurers for whom the pleasure of the text is the greatest pleasure of all. 

I'll be extremely impressed if Jed Mercurio's new BBC adaptation manages to get this point across and isn't merely another lame and ludicrous work of pretentious soft-porn. We'll see ...


Notes

A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' can be found in the Cambridge Edition of  Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (CUP, 1993), pp. 303-35. The lines quoted from this essay here can be found on pp. 307-08. 

Readers might be interested and amused to know that later in the same essay, Lawrence flagrantly contradicts what he says here by arguing the complete opposite and indulging in a far more familiar anti-mind, pro-body rant; calling for greater harmony between the two, whilst still keeping them separate within a system of metaphysical dualism. As with Nietzsche, you can find textual support in Lawrence for almost any position; the challenge is not to determine the author's genuine view, but to critically examine all perspectives and realise that truth can never be fixed or given absolute moral-logical consistency. 

   

Nietzschean Notes on the Question of Power

The question of power is, for Nietzsche and those who write within his shadow, one of primary importance and the attempt to formulate and advance a critical conception of power beyond the reactive representations of moral idealism remains a real concern. That is to say, a conception free from what Lawrence describes as the superficial contempt for power which most of us experience due to the fact that we moderns only know dead power. Live or active power is worthy of esteem. It is not brute force, which is base and tied to bullying authority or what Deleuze identifies as emaciated forms of prohibition.

This is the key: to rethink power outside of currently accepted values and as more than that which restricts, prohibits, and denies. For power, as Foucault pointed out, has somewhat ironically been made subject to a repressive hypothesis and conceived as poor in resources, sparing in its methods, and incapable of invention. Only when we liberate our thinking on power will we see that what makes power so intoxicating is the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no; rather, "it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasures, forms of knowledge, produces discourse". 

In other words, power keeps us alive and in touch with one another acting as it does as the great productive network running throughout the social and political body. This is why Lawrence insists that power is not only prior to love, but that the latter is ultimately called into being by the former; "the first and greatest of all mysteries". 

Jesus failed because he didn't understand this; didn't experience the joy of an erection on a sunny day. Indeed, rather than thinking of power as a form of eternal delight, he taught that goodness is a form of impotence and passivity and evil is the active springing from energy which violates all human attempts to stabilize the free movement of life. 

Nietzsche was having none of this. Like Blake (and like any other poet worth his salt), he recognised that man needs what is most evil in him if he is to develop what is also best and most beautiful in him. Be happy, he says, and you will be good (once more reversing Christian teaching). But one is only happy when one feels oneself powerful and a little bit demonic via an expenditure (not an accumulation) of energy - shining like a tiny star with brilliant intensity, but to no end. 

Power is thus not something one can consciously seek out or seize and possess; power, rather, is that which can only be accepted as a gift flowing into us from behind and below - and flowing just as vitally away from us forever beyond our control. And humanism is everything that would limit this and accustom us to see the figure of Man behind every event and phenomenon.

Nietzsche's anti-humanist philosophy doesn't consider goodness or pleasure as its primary aim. Nevertheless, as indicated, his notion of joy connected to his concept of power allows for a new ethic to emerge. Or perhaps not so new: ethos anthropoi daimon, as Heraclitus would say ...

Note: this post is an extract taken from my study of Nietzsche's project of revaluation entitled Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010) and those who are interested in reading more on the subject of power and the politics of evil - as well as tracking down references - might like to consult part II, chapter 5 of this text. 

In Defence of the Cleft of Venus

 
Camel toe is an ugly name for a beautiful thing; what is known and revered within more enlightened cultures as the cleft of Venus or, if you prefer the pudendal fissure; i.e., the groove at the base of the mons pubis where it divides to form the lips of the labia majora. 

Personally, I would like all women to be proud of their genitalia - or even cheerfully indifferent. 

But, unfortunately, there is a constant and concerted effort to make them ashamed of their bodies and remind them that they are forever being scrutinized, ridiculed, and judged (both by men and by other women who have learned how to view themselves and members of their own sex in a perversely puritanical manner).   

The jeeringly misogynistic term camel toe plays a significant role in this, letting women know that all eyes are fixed on their most intimate areas and that their cunts - even in outline - ought to be a source of acute embarrassment; an obscene fashion faux pas far worse than visible panty line.

But the same people who invent this false concern for women to worry about, also provide a solution: a pair of knickers designed by Maggie Han and sold under the name of Camel No. 

Ms Han, after suffering from the problem herself and fearing that it might make people think she had a huge vagina, has created a new form of polyester and spandex underwear fitted with a modesty enhancement panel composed of odourless medical-grade silicone to prevent all unsightly creases or the impression of faulty anatomy. Now all women can be as smooth as a Barbie doll between the legs! 

One surely doesn't have to be a radical feminist or a courageous vulva activist to find this strangely depressing and offensive ...?

For whilst I don't mind if some individuals aspire towards plastic perfection and opt for designer vaginas neatly tucked away, I do object when this ideal is extended into a categorical imperative within a pornified and photoshopped culture obliging women and ever-younger girls to find their flesh dirty and inferior and confuse anatomical self-loathing with empowerment (i.e., when sexism and misogyny become internalized and normalized across gender).  

The Case of Farah Ann Abdul Hadi (and Her Pudendal Cleft)

Twenty-one-year-old gymnast Farah Ann Abdul Hadi recently won six medals, including two gold, for Malaysia in an international competition and one might have thought that this would be cause for universal celebration in her Southeast Asian homeland. 

Alas, 'twas not the case ...

In fact, far from being proud of her sporting achievements and sharing in her joy, the country's religious lunatics are up in arms about the revealing nature of her leotard and the fact that they could clearly see her pudendal cleft beneath the material.

For whilst most of us are perfectly happy when watching gymnastics to marvel at the lovely curves of the body, the supple young limbs, and, indeed, the tightness of the outfits worn, it seems that senior clerics are deeply concerned about female athletes exposing their aurat. 

And so the MP for Islamic Affairs has announced there is to be a thorough review, making it very clear that he too expects athletes in future to wear clothing that complies with the standards of decency required of all Muslims.

Added to his voice, was that of Roszida Kamaruddin, head of the girls' division of the National Muslim Youth Association, who in a statement said that whilst women should not be stopped from competing in sports, it's imperative that they cover up their nakedness and allow no risk of camel toe under any circumstances. To be modestly attired, she argued, needn't restrict an athlete's chances of success - although she was obliged to concede that it might be difficult to perform gymnastics in a burka.

Happily, not only has Miss Abdul Hadi bravely - and humourously - stood up to these idiots, but thousands of her fans and members of the Malaysian public have also taken to social media to express their support. 

Many in the media have also mocked the grey-bearded religious authorities for their mixture of puritanism and pervyness, with one journalist expressing his shock that men of such learning cannot seem to tell the difference between a professional athlete performing with skill and grace and a pole-dancing stripper wilfully shoving her genitalia into the faces of her audience.       

The Case of Helly Luv

Whether one chooses to think of her as a Kurdish Vera Lynn - sweetheart of the Peshmerga forces - or as a Middle-Eastern Shakira shaking her booty in the face of the Islamic State, the case of Helan Abdulla or, as she is better known, Helly Luv, is one that raises some problematic issues.

Let me first say this: the 26 year-old actress, singer and dancer displays real courage in the face of mortal danger. For this, she deserves our respect. Miss Abdulla is a beautiful young woman prepared to risk life and limb in order to achieve chart success and a film career. And she's someone who has experienced hard times; born in Iran during the Gulf War, she and her family were forced to flee first to Turkey before then seeking asylum in Finland where they were eventually granted citizenship. 

At eighteen, Miss Abdulla moved to LA in order to pursue her dream of stardom. One thing led to another, and, in 2013, she released a single under the name of Helly Luv. Risk It All synthesized Latin and Middle-Eastern rhythms into a catchy contemporary dance track that highlighted the plight of the Kurdish people. The song and accompanying video garnered a good deal of critical attention and millions of YouTube views. It also - predictably - brought death threats her way from Islamic militants.

Rather than back down in the face of these threats, however, Miss Abdulla released a follow-up single in 2015 entitled Revolution for which a still more controversial video was shot in an abandoned village near Mosul, where Kurdish militia were engaged in combat with IS fighters. In the video, Helly Luv is seen painting the word 'revolution' on a shell in red lipstick before personally firing it towards the IS front line just a few kilometres away.

I suppose it's this kind of thing that ultimately causes me problems. For the packaging of warfare inside a slick and glossy music video undoubtedly glamourises violence and has something worryingly fascistic about it. I'm perfectly happy for performers to express political views (even if such views are often naive and misguided), but I don't really want to see them posing with petrol bombs and surrounded by dancers carrying AK-47 automatic rifles.

Nor even, for that matter, do I want to see wild animals being exploited; so please, Helly, no more lions ...


Notes:

To watch the video for Risk It All click here.  

To watch the video for Revolution click here. 

To visit the Helly Luv official site click here.

In Defence of Weeds and Wildflowers

Bill and Ben The Flower Pot Men, with much loved friend Little Weed

If the word vermin is one that I find offensive and problematic (as explained in a recent post), so too is the term weed - and for similar reasons. For like vermin, weed is not simply a neutral term which objectively describes; taxonomically, it lacks any real botanical meaning or reference. 

Weed, rather, is a qualitative noun used to classify certain plants thought to be growing out of place and in a manner that opens the way for the discriminatory practice of weeding, or the use of herbicides by those green-fingered fanatics who insist on human order and the coordination of life (or what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung).

Like vermin, weed is therefore a morally pernicious term that passes judgement; a form of fascist death sentence passed on any wildflower that threatens to encroach upon our intensively farmed agricultural spaces, or dares to blossom in our well-maintained, lovely-looking, but essentially joyless gardens and parks.

It should be noted that the term weed is also applied to those people thought to be feeble, effeminate, or perhaps too bookish; those who might not only be regarded as poor physical specimens, but politically suspect and socially undesirable - persons in need of weeding out ...

It is thus another thoroughly vile term; one that I never use and do not like to hear used - unless it's by Bill and Ben, The Flower Pot Men, and with reference to their friend Little Weed whom they obviously love dearly, as do I. 


This post is dedicated to David Brock.

Vermin (With Reference to the Case of Gregor Samsa)

 Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, 

fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.

The word vermin is an ugly term for an ugly phenomenon; a qualitative noun that doesn't innocently describe a type of unclean animal or a class of sub-human subject, but identifies, classifies, and characterizes as such. 

A morally pernicious term that is effectively a mortal judgement passed; a death sentence. For to designate as vermin is to make fit for extermination. 

It includes wild birds and beasts that are thought to carry disease or in some other way endanger or threaten to disrupt human enterprise with their destructive activities; pesky insects and parasites that swarm and infest; and, lastly, people perceived as dirty, despicable, and problematic (Jews, gypsies, immigrants, the homeless, the unemployed, and the poor in general). 

Thus, if when applied to animals the term betrays mankind's innate sense of supremacy or speciesism, when applied to our fellow men and women it manifests our murderous racism and xenophobia. 

The Nazis, of course, had a particular penchant for portraying their opponents and those they feared and despised as Ungeziefer and Untermenschen - i.e. not worthy of sacrifice or society; Lebensunwertes Leben. 

And so vermin is a word that makes me particularly uncomfortable; one that I would never use and do not like to hear used. It reminds me at last of poor Gregor Samsa; what happened to him might happen to any of us, so there's surely a lesson to be learned here.

On Fossils and Fundamentalists

Reconstruction of Tiktaalik rosae by Obsidian Soul (2012)

In 2006, a team of scientists announced their discovery of Tiktaalik rosae, a fossilized creature from 375 million years ago that soon became known as the fishapod, combining as it did features and characteristics of both water-living and land-dwelling animals.  

Tiktaalik was one of those rare and astonishing things: a fantastically well-preserved transitional species (or so-called missing link) and thus a highly significant find. Not surprisingly, therefore, Tiktaalik's discovery was greeted with great excitement within the scientific community and received extensive media coverage. 

In fact, the only people who weren't amazed and captivated by Tiktaalik were those individuals who, for crackpot religious reasons, reject not only the theory of evolution, but even the observable facts upon which the theory of evolution is based. Individuals who describe themselves as young earth creationists. 

Creationism, as the name implies, is the belief that the universe originates from an act of divine creation, as described in Genesis. This includes all life on earth. Whilst some creationists read this biblical creation narrative symbolically and vainly attempt to reconcile it with modern science, others, the so-called young earthers, prefer to take it literally and thus fervently deny evolution and insist that the world cannot be more than 10,000 years old - whatever the empirical evidence may be to the contrary.    

Young earth creationism is thus religious fundamentalism at its most unabashed and its most wilfully stupid. It's tempting to simply look away and pretend that such people are few in number and small in influence. Unfortunately, however, creationism - particularly in the United States - is a genuine concern and presents a very real threat to scientific education and innovation. The Institute for Creation Research, the Creation Research Society, and Answers in Genesis (which, in 2007, established the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky) have more money and more power than one might like to think.

And so, one is obliged to confront and to challenge such stupidity; not in the hope that one might persuade creationists themselves to examine the known facts and reconsider their views in the light of such, but in the hope that some of those who might be swayed by the pseudo-science of intelligent design and the reassuring rhetoric of the faithful (God loves you and you are made in his image and living in a divinely ordered universe with purpose and meaning, etc.) will dare to keep their minds open and always ask for evidence.

Torpedo the Ark means valuing intellectual integrity over and above religious ignorance. And it means learning to love your inner fish in preference to the Jesus fish ...         

Notes:

Those who are interested in reading clear and concise counterarguments to the sort of nonsense put forward by creationists might like to see John Rennie's article in the July, 2002 edition of Scientific American - click here. 

Alternatively, click here for a transcript of Brian Dunning's podcast 'How to Debate a Young Earth Creationist' (Skeptoid # 65, September 11, 2007).

 

Those who would like to know more about Tiktaalik rosae should visit the University of Chicago website dedicated to this extraordinary fossil: click here.