On the Political Importance of Making Lists

The list often acts as a manifesto and call to arms: divided into dialectical categories of things loved and things hated, such lists are exemplified by the early McLaren/Westwood t-shirt design entitled: 'You're gonna wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you've been lying on!'

For Malcolm, punk was a form of blackmail and a type of terrorism. It forced a generation into making a fateful choice: you were either for the Sex Pistols or against them - and if you were for them, then your commitment had to be absolute: there could be no passers-by and no part-timers in this revolution. 

Much the same type of list was drawn up by Roland Barthes. However, unlike McLaren, Barthes didn't want to bully anyone with his list or display his penchant for fanaticism and provocation. In fact, with his list of things liked and things not liked, he was attempting to provide grounds for a model of negative liberalism:

"I like, I don't like: this is of no importance to anyone; this, apparently, has no meaning. And yet all this means: my body is not the same as yours. Hence, in this anarchic foam of tastes and distastes ... gradually appears the figure of a bodily enigma, requiring complicity or irritation. Here begins the intimidation of the body, which obliges others to endure me liberally, to remain silent and polite confronted by pleasures or rejections which they do not share.
      (A fly bothers me, I kill it: you will kill what bothers you. If I had not killed the fly, it would have been out of pure liberalism: I am liberal in order not to be a killer.)"

                    - Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard.

A Short Meditation on an Old School Photograph

An old b&w photograph of two little boys, one of whom has said to the other: 'Pretend to be reading and we'll look clever.'

Could it be then that intellectualism is just a pose?

Well, yes. But to realise that as a five -year-old is pretty smart.

As for the third young boy, completely oblivious to the presence of the photographer - and the two girls at the back of the class - who's to say they're not happy and their parents weren't right to love them?

Under the Sign of the Golden Phallus

Because for a long time I dreamed of being Lady Chatterley's lover, ideas of 'phallic consciousness' and 'phallic tenderness'  had a powerful hold on my youthful imagination: I painted the phallus, wrote poems in celebration of the phallus, and religiously revered the phallus as part of a neo-paganism of my own invention. 

Kate Millet would have been at least partially justified, therefore, in accusing me of doing precisely what she famously accused Lawrence of doing: i.e., transforming an already questionable model of masculinity into a misogynistic mystery religion founded upon homoerotic worship of the penis. 

But this isn't entirely fair. What Millet failed to appreciate is that when Lawrence wrote almost obsessively of the phallus in his later work, he was not referring to the penis-as-organ belonging exclusively to a male agent. On the contrary, the phallus, for Lawrence - as for me back in my golden phallic days - was a sacred symbol that cannot be reduced to being 'a mere member of the physiological body'. 

And it's not, for Lawrence at least, even a symbol of male power or cosmic potency, so much as it's a symbol of the relatedness between bodies. Sneering contempt for the phallus, therefore, betrays a horror of being physically in touch with others: this, writes Lawrence, is the 'root-fear of all mankind' since the Fall into idealism. Hence the often frenzied efforts on behalf of moralists to denigrate the phallus and to nullify it - not least of all by wilfully confusing it with the penis. 

What Nietzsche terms the slave revolt in morals begins, arguably, as a revolt against the phallus; the free man or woman - free, that is to say, from fear and from shame - is more than happy to submit before the phallus and accept it as that which unites them into one flesh, or a single phallic body. When the phallic wonder is dead in us, writes Lawrence, then we become wretched and have no sense of beauty or joy.  

Only when the phallic wonder is strong and healthy can men and women come into direct touch with one another and with the world. By acknowledging the phallus as she does, Connie learns how to respond not only to the naked body of her lover, but also to animals, trees, rain, moonlight, and even inanimate and mundane household objects, such as an old kettle. Phallic wonder makes everything sparkle with fresh glamour and allure and enables the heart to enter the fourth dimensional kingdom of bliss. 

This sounds, I know, like the worst kind of occult-metaphysics and romantic fantasy. But I still think there's something important in this phallic philosophy and that it can be read today as a type of speculative realism that would lend itself rather nicely to an object-oriented ontology. 

Thus, without too much embarrassment, I still - all these years later - continue to write under the sign of the golden phallus. Though these days, like Warhol, I like to decorate the phallus with tiny flowers and hearts and tie it with a pretty ribbon to indicate my recognition of the fact that even art, religion, and sex shouldn't be taken too seriously; that they are all, as Susan Sontag suggests, exercises in failed seriousness - and all the more beautiful for their failure. 

Suicide Note

Photo: Adam Rowney, Suicide Rainbow, 2009

I have always been attracted to the idea of suicide. Not because I feel particularly world-weary, or prone to morbid thoughts, but because the act of suicide seems to me to be one that shows tremendous courage and which, paradoxically, takes away life out of a love of life. That is to say, in choosing to die freely and in a manner of their own devising, the suicidal subject offers a form of vital affirmation.  

I would happily kill myself tomorrow were it not for the fact that a very great deal of time and effort is required to produce an originally stylish suicide and I am, alas, fundamentally lazy. Thus whenever I begin to imagine the meticulous preparation that is required - arranging all the details, finding all the right ingredients, shaping the entire enterprise into a true practice of joy - then too do I think: 'Well, maybe the day after tomorrow ...'

And I remember also the following verse by Dorothy Parker:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren't lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

Torture Garden

I'm not a great lover of fetish fashion as it has developed within the BDSM community: it's a little too black, too shiny, and too tied to old-fashioned notions of sex and power for my tastes. And, as so often amongst those who pride themselves on being queer and looking extraordinary, there's a surprising conformism and rubbery-sameness amongst the kinky crowd. This became clear after a visit to Torture Garden (TG), the world's leading fetish venue.

The owners and founders of TG, Messrs Pelling & Wood, like to portray it as an achieved utopia wherein people are free to play, perform, and experiment with practices that challenge norms of social and sexual identity - which they are, just so long as they adhere to the club's strict dress code: No jeans! No trainers! No natural fabrics! 

Of course, it's not street wear or casual clothing that really threatens the TG aesthetic. Rather, it's the kind of inexpensive fancy dress worn by fun-loving girls on a hen-night. Pelling & Wood understand how their up-market fetish business risks being made ludicrous by a bawdy counter-aesthetic that delights in exaggerated bad taste and self-mockery. Thus, whilst they insist that TG's dress code strives to avoid narrow limitations and is primarily in place to encourage "individual imagination and diversity", they nevertheless concede that it ultimately serves to protect the club's status as "edgy and avant-garde".

As good capitalists, Pelling & Wood might want to see their business expand and sell as many pairs of latex knickers to as many people as possible, but they also need to protect their brand image. And so they bemoan the fact - without the slightest hint of irony - that as the fetish scene becomes more mainstream "there has been a commercial element creeping into sections of the crowd".

Continuing, in a paragraph that betrays the full extent of their snobbery and moral allegiance to the principle of the Real, they declare:

"This looks shit and makes TG look shit ... If you have the bad taste to wear ... cheap and cheesy fancy dress please go somewhere else, we don't want you at TG! ... We want the diversity and the fun, but we want authentic costumes that are real ... not cheap fancy dress copies."

www.torturegarden.com

They further warn that Dress Code Staff will ensure that everyone inside TG is dressed "appropriately at all times". What this means is forget about wearing whatever might turn you on and just make sure your outfit conforms to the aesthetic and commercial ideal of the owners - or watch out for the fashion police!

Clearly, Pelling & Wood need to lighten up a little: they should, if you like, smile and say cheese. For as long as they remain faithful to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, TG will remain a haven of art school pretension rather than superficial delight.  

Houellebecq Variations

I'm not really a poet, even if I'm interested in the possibilities and limits of language. Nor am I a qualified translator. 

And so the verses that follow should probably best be thought of as idiosyncratic transformations and deformations of the original poems written by Michel Houellebecq and published in the 1996 collection, Le Sens du Combat. 

I post them here only because I wish to bring greater attention to Houellebecq as a poet in the English-speaking world and in the belief that any embarrassment they might cause will be mine alone.

[Untitled]

Whenever she saw me she'd push her pelvis in my direction
And say with suggestive irony: 'It's kind of you to come ...'
I'd glance vaguely at the curve of her breasts
And then leave. My office was bare.

Last thing Friday I would bin the old files only to
Receive an identical work-load on Monday.
And I liked her very much: she was pitiful; as a piece
Of secretarial meat she had passed her use by date.

She lived somewhere or other near Cheptainville
With a red-haired child and some video tapes.
She was unaware of the rumblings of the city
And on Saturday nights she rented porn films.

She typed the mail and I liked her face:
She very much wanted to be down on her knees.
She was thirty-five or maybe fifty,
She journeyed towards death without concern for her age.


Differentiation, Rue d'Avron

Scattered across the table like droppings are all
The usual signs of life: soiled tissues, spare keys,
And elements of despair reminding me that you
Were once desirable.

Sunday shrouded the local chippy and the bars
Full of immigrants with the same stickiness.
We strolled for a while, happy, before returning home
So as not to know, preferring to stare at one another.

You stripped naked in front of the sink and
If your face lacked the taut beauty of Botox,
Still your body remained firm and seemed to
Cry: 'Look at me! I'm still in one piece -

My limbs are still attached and death hasn't yet
Closed my eyes like those of my brother.
You taught me the meaning of prayer,
Look at me, look! Fix your eyes on my flesh!'


[Untitled]

A sun-exposed soul is threatened
By coastal waves that crash and
Reawaken the dull ache of
Underlying pain.

What would we do without the sun?
Grief, nausea, suffering and all of
Life's stupidities vanish beneath it.

The blue of noon purrs with the
Bliss of physical inertia; the joy
Of death and forgetfulness as
Eyes close in sensitive sleep.

Pitiless, the sea stretches
Like a rousing animal; this
Universe has no law.

What would we do without the sun?

The Woman Who Married the Eiffel Tower

"Things are not only structures with closed contours that lend themselves to manipulation and whose consistency constrains us. They lure and threaten us, support and obstruct us, sustain and debilitate us, direct and calm us. They enrapture us with their sensuous substances and also with their luminous surfaces and their phosphorescent facades, their halos, their radiance and their resonances."

          - Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common.

Thus it is that when we encounter the Eiffel Tower, for example, standing so tall and magnificent amidst the city landscape, what we see before us is not just a large metal structure onto which we might hang all kinds of personal attributes like so many Christmas tree baubles. Rather, amidst the urban chaos of Paris and the noise of the traffic, we encounter an object with its own irresistible imperative, "radiating over us like a black sun, holding us in its orbit, demanding our attention", as Graham Harman rather nicely puts it.  

The object, therefore, is primarily and above all else a force and our love for the object is an effect of this force and not something freely entered into and determined by the amorous subject. And so, when Erika Eiffel speaks of her love for the Tower she indicates she has submitted directly to the sensual power of the latter. For just like living organisms, inanimate objects also have something commanding about them which compels us to acknowledge their uniquely seductive presence and understand them for what they are: actual entities, or real things-in-themselves that exist independently of us.

For this is what the world is: an inhuman arena of innumerable objects that encounter and affect one another in a violent and immoral orgy of existence. To believe that we play a decisive role in this is, of course, merely anthropocentric conceit. Dasein might possess unique ontological insight and so be 'richer in world' than a lizard or a rock, but all objects exist equally within what Lawrence might term a democracy of touch.

To be clear, I've nothing against experiencing the world through the eyes: it's lovely to look at the Eiffel Tower glittering in the sunlight. And it's wonderful to write about the Tower in the manner of Roland Barthes, as sign and symbol. But it's fatally mistaken to think of it as something that exists only as an effect of photons on retinal cells, or within language.

Graham Harman is on the money once more when he writes that the essential being of an object is a "capital X that forever recedes from all contact with human meaningfulness". It cannot, therefore, be seen, or snapped with a camera, or known in full - not even if you love the object dearly and have a  long-term romantic relationship with it.

All objects - including our human lovers - withdraw into the darkness of their own primal reality and even our most brilliant thoughts, intimate fantasies, or tender kisses can ever fully reveal their truth or exhaust their being. The desire for total transparency and the dream of ultimate union with those we love is futile and mistaken.

Even Erika Eiffel seems to me a little greedy in her love. It would be nice if she could just learn to let the Tower be and show a little more respect for the pathos of distance that separates her and the object of her affection, rather than seek some kind of pan-psychic identification or merger into matrimonial oneness.

That said, I sincerely wish her and the Tower all the love and luck in the world.  

Sexy Eiffel Towers

Photo by Petter Hegre: Anna S Eiffel Tower Park (2009)

I'm on the top, with the jump,  jumping to my death,

It's Paris - La Tour Eiffel - the sexiest building left.

Located on the Champ de Mars, La Tour Eiffel is a 320-metre puddle iron construction, weighing some 10,000 tonnes. Erected in 1889, it was named after the engineer, Gustave Eiffel, who oversaw the design and construction.

Initially, many critics - including artists and intellectuals - opposed the building of the Tower. Some feared it would dominate the Parisian skyline and overshadow other much-loved monuments; others derided the proposed structure on the grounds that it lacked any serious purpose or function. Indeed, the Tower's uselessness and frivolity was felt by many to be something of a scandal in an age which prided itself on its utility and seriousness. However, once built it proved an immediate success with the French public and quickly became a global attraction. 

As one of the most recognisable objects on earth, this empty monument has received millions of visitors, served as the architectural inspiration for at least thirty similar towers around the world and featured in numerous films and photographs as an iconic and romantic symbol of the city in which it stands.

Indeed, in a very real sense, La Tour Eiffel is Paris and Paris is La Tour Eiffel and wherever you are in the city you must, as Roland Barthes points out, take endless precautions if you don't wish to see the Tower: whatever time of day, whatever season of the year, whatever might obscure your view and isolate you from it, the Tower is always there. Silently persisting, "it is as literal as a phenomenon of Nature whose meaning can be questioned to infinity but whose existence is incontestable."

                              

But just as every Parisian is obliged to encounter and acknowledge the Tower, so are we all: for it has become present to the entire world, in our dreams and fantasies. Almost the question arises not why some individuals are sexually attracted to the Tower, but why isn't everyone aroused by this virtually pure signifier that paradoxically means everything? 

For La Tour Eiffel excites like no other structure on earth. It is the supreme object and it affords us a multiplicity of pleasures: we can fall in love beneath it and we can fall to our deaths from the top of it. One way or another, it thus promises bliss and stands in all its mysterious thingliness forever beyond human reason. 

In Memory of St Sebastian

The artist and punk-dandy Sebastian Horsley may no longer cruise the streets of Soho, but he continues to haunt my imagination and memory. I miss seeing him sat outside a cafe on Old Compton Street, or strolling along the Charing Cross Road in one of his lurid and ludicrous suits, stovepipe hat, and wide-collared Turnbull & Asser shirts. He was one of the most beautiful and courageous men alive. And he remains so in death. 

For whilst Sebastian never quite mastered the art of painting, he certainly mastered the far more difficult art of dying at the right time. Some die too soon: most die too late. Or so Zarathustra says. But the individual of genius always times their exit to perfection. Thus at the very moment his life became dramatized on stage, Horsely took his leave. He knew that once his persona had become a pure piece of fiction - a role that could be performed just as well, if not better, by actors other than himself - then there was really no need to hang around. It was time to get his coat.

To scorn the thought of one's mortality in this manner - to insist, as Sebastian always insisted, that death doesn't really matter (that it's not the end of the world) - is also to refuse to take seriously all those other judgements of God that weigh down and make gloomy.

And it is precisely this refusal of moral seriousness which so irritates the ascetic idealists who hate dandyism and have no patience with characters such as Horsley. For as long as fashion is concerned only with clothes, bodies, and hairstyles, then there's no problem. But once its playful and perverse indeterminacy begins to affect (and infect) the essential world of values, then there's panic on behalf of those who take these things and themselves very seriously indeed.  

Horsley recognised that what most alarms about dandyism is the fact that it repudiates models of depth. That it is, as he once wrote, a lie which reveals the truth and the truth is we are what we pretend to be. He also knew he was a preposterous and vulgar figure with no social status or role whatsoever: just a futile blast of colour, in a futile colourless world. One of the damned, if you like: but it's better to go to hell well-tailored, than to heaven in rags.

   

Revolt into Style

In an age of terror and impending global catastrophe, there is nothing for it but irony, indifference, and insouciance. What we really don't need right now is a greater degree of earnestness. For fanaticism is always marked by its moral sincerity and is, as Wilde pointed out, the world's original sin: 'If only the caveman had known how to laugh, history might have been different'.

The central argument of any philosophy on the catwalk must surely be that what matters most is that we look good, live dangerously, and love fate; pouring scorn upon all those who fail to recognise their own dullness. D. H. Lawrence provides us with our manifesto:

"It is time we treated life as a joke again, as they did in the really great periods like the Renaissance. Then the young men swaggered down the street with one leg bright red, one leg bright yellow, doublet of puce velvet, and yellow feather in silk cap. 

      Now that is the line to take. Start with externals, and proceed to internals, and treat life as a good joke. If a dozen men would stroll down the Strand and Piccadilly tomorrow, wearing tight scarlet trousers fitting the leg, gay little orange-brown jackets and bright green hats, then the revolution against dullness which we need so much would have begun. ... But it takes a lot of courage to sail gaily, in brave feathers, in the teeth of a dreary convention."  

                                        - 'Red Trousers', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (CUP, 2004), p. 138.

This sailing gaily in brave feathers and the refusal to care is what I understand by the phrase 'revolt into style' - a transpolitical revolt that teaches us to become superficial out of profundity and to appreciate how both society and self are ultimately founded upon cloth, not nature.

Fashion, above all else, is a passion for artifice. This, coupled to its love of empty signs and cycles, is what most alarms the puritan in his grey suit and sensible shoes and not so much its overtly erotic element. For in our culture, tethered as it is to a principle of utility and meaning, the fact that fashion is futile and pointless - and prides itself on such - means that those who like to dress up and mess up are always going to be branded immoral. 

Thus the young man cruising through Soho in brightly coloured clothes for no reason in the middle of the afternoon may well be sexually disconcerting to some people, but this is secondary in comparison to the outrage he causes because of his perceived flippancy, flamboyance, and aristocratic disdain for the world of work.

Ah Sebastian, I miss you!