Behind the Red Fence

Objectum-Sexuality Internationale

Objectum Sexuality continues to fascinate me. In no small part, this is because I find human subjects ever-more boring and tiresome. One increasingly realises that happiness is to be found in the love that transcends humanity; the love of things that sparkle with their own thingly glamour. This might include objects that belong to the natural world, such as flowers and heavenly bodies, but it also includes the manufactured objects of everyday life, such as tables, chairs, and the red brick floor upon which they stand.

For love (should we choose to continue using the term) is fundamentally a question of forming ever-changing relationships; not just with people or other living beings such as next door's cat, but with objects of all kinds, be they inorganic, artificial, or virtual. And the duty of art, philosophy, or science is ultimately one and the same; to reveal the relation between us and the world of which we are an intrinsic part - but not a determining factor. For the relationship between us and the universe is not based upon some form of correlation between consciousness and being; the world exists as a mind-independent reality with or without Man or God as witness. 

Whether this relationship needs to be erotic in character, as objectophiles seem to believe, is debatable. But I can't see why it shouldn't be conceived of as such within the framework of a perverse materialism. Certainly it's a form of touch first and foremost and not an abstract or ideal relation. Love allows us to feel the world and not just think it - to know it in a carnal sense via what Lawrence would term 'direct vibrational contact'. 

And so, as I said in an earlier post, whilst I have problems with some of the statements made by  those within the OS community, still I feel they have something important to teach  any one hoping to develop an object-oriented ontology and a find a new form of happiness. For just as the American author Dana learnt how to attune himself to a non-human reality during his two years before the mast, so too has Erika Eiffel achieved something similar. Thus we might paraphrase what Lawrence writes of the former in order to say this of the latter (in tribute):

Erika's soul is not human in the ordinary sense. She is not looking for human things, nor listening to human sounds. Her adventure is not an adventure of a being among beings: it is an adventure into the material universe. In this twilightly place where integral being ceases, she stares lovingly at the Tower and encounters it in all its reality, abandoning her personal self in order to experience the joy of loving a non-living yet amazingly potent object.

Sexual Solipsism

Clive Barker, The Happy Masturbator, (1997)

Recently, I attended a very interesting research seminar at Senate House. The paper, presented by Professor Marco Wan of Hong Kong University, examined the obscenity trial that resulted from publication of Paul Bonnetain's novel Charlot s'amuse in 1883 - the story of a serial masturbator told in a naturalist style much influenced by Zola. 

Despite causing a huge scandal at the time, the work is little read today outside of French literary circles and the author, who died in 1899 aged just forty-one, is mostly a forgotten figure. Interestingly, however, 130 years after Charlot s'amuse, the subject of masturbation is one that still attracts moral condemnation from philosophers who place themselves in a feminist Kantian tradition in order to critique pornography; philosophers such as Rae Langton, for example.

Langton has two main concerns, which she relates to the question of pornography: the first is the sexual objectification of women (pre-given as a bad thing per se in her work); the second is the sexual solipsism that men, as the primary consumers of pornography, fall into via the solitary vice of masturbation. In brief, Langton argues that in a pornified world of objectified women, men too pay a heavy price; i.e. by mistaking women for things and substituting things for real women, they ultimately isolate and dehumanise themselves.

Now it could be that there is something in this argument. But Langton overlooks the fact that men are not quite alone in a world of objectified women. For not only do they still have one another to form relations with of a social, fraternal, and, indeed, sexual nature if they so desire, but they also have their animal companions and, as everybody knows, a man's best friend is his dog. 

Further, as Simone de Beauvoir was obliged to concede, not all men would regard an isolated and solipsistic existence as problematic. Indeed, for many it would be a more attractive option than a supposedly authentic relationship with another human being. The world of the masturbator may not be deeply fulfilling, but it's by no means unhappy and perhaps a little superficial physical pleasure means more today than vague promises of spiritual satisfaction and the soul's consummation via union with another.  

Langton, however, insists - and this is never a good sign in someone who claims to be a philosopher - that there has to be an escape from solipsism, as if it were the worst kind of trap to fall into. And she insists that in order to make this escape "some of the beings with whom one interacts must be people (not things); and one must treat them as people (not as things)" [Sexual Solipsism, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 312]. 

Ultimately, for Langton, this is a matter of moral duty: one must not fuck dolls, or jerk off over on-line images. Rather, one must seek out a real lover to hold in one's arms. For when sex is something you do with a thing, you reduce your own ontological status and become self-objectified. Kant has no sympathy for those 'worms' who violate themselves in this manner. And neither does Langton much care for those who remain shut up inside their own heads, alone with their own fantasies, when they could (and should) be sharing with others in a paradise of love and total transparency.

And here, we arrive at the crux of the matter: for Langton, there is a fundamental human need to unburden the heart and communicate the self. To articulate the body, she says, rather than masturbate it, "enables us better to learn what we think and feel and desire" [361].

This, in my view, is not only optimistic and naive, it is also highly sinister. For we know now how confession serves ultimately to better enable correction; that we have been encouraged to speak the self  historically in order that our thoughts and feelings may be judged and corrected by others. Humanists like Kant and Langton always promise to lead us out of our solipsistic and fallen condition into communal bliss, but they just as invariably end up marching us into drab social conformity and ugly moral convention.

And so there is, I think, something to be said for those who want to keep themselves to themselves and indulge private fantasies behind closed doors; better the solipsist and the solitary masturbator than the fascist who compels speech, or the moral exhibitionist exposing themselves in the name of Love.  

Raise the Scarlet Standard High

Sartre declared that anyone who isn't a communist is a filthy swine. 

I don't think that's true. However, it's undeniably the case that there is shit in the hearts of all Tories, extending from members of parliament to those who vote for them or offer financial support.

And it also includes those useful idiots in the Liberal Democrats who collaborate with and, indeed, maintain the present government and its shameful policies.   

David Bowie

One of the people I've always quite liked but have never quite allowed myself to quite like, is David Bowie. I was perhaps just a little too young to fully appreciate the artful androgyny of Ziggy Stardust and had no concept of a concept album as a nine-year-old.

But there was also something else. No matter how alien and avant-garde he attempted to make himself, he never quite convinced and his stage show was too theatrical for my tastes. The make-up, the costumes, the choreography, were simply too much; by which I don't mean too outrageous or excessive, but full of drama school pretension. 

Even as a child, I never liked what I perceived to be pretension - particularly in pop stars - and so I  was attracted more to the glam-rock silliness of Marc Bolan rather than Bowie and cared more for Sweet than the Spiders from Mars. 

However, it's all a long time ago and I have since revised my views somewhat. Thus I'm now happy to admit that, for a while, in the early-mid seventies, Bowie was the most beautiful man on the planet who managed to achieve a  rare moment of perfection - but I still prefer Gary Glitter.

The Escaped Cock

The Escaped Cock is Lawrence's revaluation of the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. He provides a convenient summary of the first part of the tale in a letter to Earl Brewster:

"I wrote a story of the resurrection; where Jesus gets up and feels very sick about everything, and can't stand the old crowd any more - so cuts out - and as he heals up, he begins to find out what an astonishing place the phenomenal world is, far more marvellous than any salvation or heaven - and thanks his lucky stars that he needn't have a 'mission' any more."  

- The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, VI. 4009, CUP, 1991.

So far, so blasphemous. But it's in the second part of the tale, however, that Lawrence attempts something far more daring and philosophically profound; namely, the transformation of the man who died via desire and sexual contact with a pagan priestess into a potent and affirmative man of flesh and an entirely different type of man-god assemblage to the Christ-figure given us by St Paul.

The man who died, we might say, gets back his body and rises into anonymity and forgetfulness by coming down from the Cross, losing the face of the pale Galilean, and surrendering his Crown of Thorns. Lawrence effectively subsumes Jesus into a much wider tradition of sacrificed gods; one which would include Dionysus and which, as Keith Sagar points out, has none of Christianity's bitterness towards the earth and fear of the flesh.

By so doing, Lawrence teaches us all a lesson: we must each be willing to let go of our own egos and histories; must each be willing to accept that resurrection into new life can only follow once we have been dipped into oblivion. This is a hard lesson, but such a thanatological teaching can be found in many great thinkers, including Heidegger, for example, who insists on the vital importance of Dasein facing up to its own mortality, if it is to have full access to the meaning of being and discover its own authenticity.

Thus, we might conclude, in The Escaped Cock, Lawrence carries the death and resurrection of Jesus to its highest point; for he offers us an interpretation in the profound sense that Nietzsche means by the term; i.e. not merely a development of uninterrupted symbol with which, according to Deleuze, the dialectic invariably confuses interpretation.

Further, Lawrence provides us with a philosophical fiction that is both truer to the spirit of the gospels and to the great pagan traditions out of which Christianity in part grew. Indeed, so successful is Lawrence in what he does, that I would suggest that were his tale of the man who died to be accepted and taught within our churches and schools, it would serve not only as an important foundation for a wider revaluation of values, but also, ironically, as a means by which Christianity could achieve its own self-overcoming and resurrection.

Of course, this is unlikely to happen: the Church of the Crucified prefers to go on funking and wilfully perverting the story of Jesus, preventing us from knowing him as a bringer of glad tidings and nailing us all to the Cross for all eternity. Still, you never know: the world is full of surprises and if I can't hope for resurrection and the life of the Greater Day at Easter then when might I do so?

Apocalypse Now

Lawrence's relationship to Christianity, like Nietzsche's, grows ever less ambiguous and ever more hostile over the years; he moves from simply thinking Jesus mistaken with his monomaniacal insistence on Love, to explicitly siding with the anti-Christ.

Thus it comes as no surprise that in his final work, Apocalypse, Lawrence takes up Nietzsche's opposition to the Crucified as his own. Lawrence, however, chooses to pin the blame for the negation of the gospels on John of Patmos rather than St Paul and argues that it is only in the Book of Revelation that we hear at last the cry of slave revolt and discover the hidden power-spirit within Christianity which lusts for final judgement and world destruction.

In Revelation, there is no longer thought of forgiveness or of developing a Christianity of tenderness; this has been supplanted once and for all by hatred and a Christianity of self-glorification on behalf of anarcho-nihilists masquerading as the meek and humble. The noble and almost Stoical teachings of Jesus, meant for the ears of the discerning individual, are substituted by a form of moral idealism aimed at the masses - or 'Platonism for the people', as Nietzsche amusingly describes it.

Central to this hideously mutated popular Christianity, is the lie of personal immortality. This, along with the conceit of equality of all souls, serves only to flatter those who imagine themselves to be the great measure and meaning of the entire universe. Lawrence argues it is a mixture of fear and egoism that sits behind this exaggerated inflation of the person and positing of an immortal I. The Church, shamelessly, manipulates this fear and does what it can to intensify it whilst promising salvation to those who accept its authority.

The enemy, therefore, is not Jesus nailed to the Cross, but those who would keep him there as bait and who find in this grotesque symbol a sign of their own triumph and moral superiority. The last book of the Bible is their book; a book of lies which is full of the "vast anti-will of the masses" [69]. Deleuze describes it as an example of zombie theology and he's right; it's an obscene work by and for the unclean, the unforgiving, and the undead.

And yet, due to John the Divine's decision to reactivate and redirect certain pagan symbols and forces, Lawrence can't help having a degree of sympathy - even admiration - for the author and the book. This, however, in no way lessens his horror for a work that displays an almost insane desire for cosmic annihilation and the "reign of saints in ultimate bodiless glory" [146].

Unfortunately, there are still religious lunatics in the world today who long for the end of days. And that is why Lawrence's Apocalypse remains an important text. But it is not merely a crucial insight into the politics and psycho-pathology of ressentiment, it is also one last glad tiding in its own right, as Deleuze notes. For Lawrence's posthumously published final work is a passionate call for a new way of living that stays true to the earth and the body.

God is dead, taught Nietzsche. But we are not, says Lawrence. And so we might, if we wish, find a way to develop an entire range of new ideas and feelings, beyond good and evil. Obviously, this cannot be achieved overnight; the revaluation of all values is a project of generations. But the key word remains the great word of the unborn day: Resurrection.

Easter with the Anti-Christ

In an early note, Nietzsche writes that the only appropriate attitude towards Christianity is kindly forbearance, since mockery, cynicism and animosity have all been exhausted as options. And yet, by the end of his philosophical life Nietzsche is styling himself as the Anti-Christ and aggressively condemning Christianity as an extreme form of spiritual and physiological corruption.

Rather than see this as a sign of incipient madness, I think Nietzsche's later more negative and more clinical appraisal of Christianity is a valid and legitimate reading due to a more profound philosophical analysis of morality in relation to questions of sickness, health, and modern European nihilism. 

Unfortunately, in a post such as this, I can't trace out the development of Nietzsche's fateful (but non-dialectical) opposition between Dionysus and the Crucified at any length or in any detail. But, since it's Easter, I'd like to make a few remarks on this topic - if only to make my own implacable opposition to the Church quite clear.

In the retrospective and revisionary 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche is keen to persuade us that his uncompromising opposition to Christianity is already evident in this first published work. But it's actually not until Human, All Too Human that his attitude begins to decisively harden. For by 1878, he has realized that one cannot simply turn one's back on a pathological phenomenon such as Christianity. Rather, one must make an attempt at treatment and seek out a cure: that is to say, if one wants to live and be strong, then one must learn how to actively negate the negative. This is not only a matter of hygiene, but of good conscience; for to be a Christian today, says Nietzsche, is not only to be sick, but also dishonest.

The idea of Christianity as a crisis of health is one that Nietzsche fully explores in the Genealogy of Morals. Here, he offers us a diagnosis of both society and the modern soul via the construction of a symptomatology based upon his theory of ressentiment and an aetiology that looks for causes in terms of reactive forces. In this work, arguably, Nietzsche becomes the physician of culture that he believed a philosopher should aspire towards being.

Finally, we arrive at Nietzsche's most sustained polemic against Christianity, The Anti-Christ. It is vital to note that in this text Nietzsche's real opponent is not Jesus (whom he continues to think of as noble), but that "genius of hatred" St. Paul. For it is the latter who would keep Christ nailed to the Cross for all eternity and turn his teachings into what Deleuze terms a mortuary enterprise; and it is Paul who invents a new type of priest who foists ideas of guilt, judgement, and punishment upon mankind in the name of Love. 

It is precisely this vicious desire to condemn and seek retribution, that reveals just how shamefully ignorant those who call themselves Christians can be of the glad tidings given us by Jesus; indeed, as Nietzsche points out, even the very term Christian reveals a profound misunderstanding.

Thus, although Nietzsche describes Jesus as an idiot and a holy anarchist, he acknowledges that the gospels contain no trace of ressentiment or any will to revenge. Jesus might be immature and a decadent - he may suffer from a pathological horror of being touched - but he is also, in a sense, an anti-Christian.

The Post of Proper Names

Recently, at a party, I overheard what seemed an undeniably bitchy but nonetheless interesting remark: when told by a young Australian woman, who happens to be married to quite a famous Catalan designer, that they intended to name their unborn baby girl Bacardi, the hostess gave a superior little snort and declared that they were condemning the child to a future that would involve stripping and low-paid bar work.

It reminded me that many people still strongly believe that names are of crucial significance; that they not only determine an individual destiny, but also reveal the essential character of the person to whom they belong. 

I'm pretty sure that both women I mention above - the expectant mother and the hostess - subscribed to this same line of thought, which, of course, can be traced back to the ancient Athenian philosopher Cratylus; he being the most famous exponent of this popular form of linguistic naturalness.

The mother-to-be, for example, is doubtless convinced that by giving the child such an unusual name she is securing for her an exceptional future, in which the horizon of possibility will remain wide open. Like Plectrude's mother, Lucette, this woman thinks that to assign a child a common first name is the same as wanting to give them a mediocre world of grey skies and low-ceilings in which to grow up.

The acid-tongued party hostess would surely agree, in part at least. For the only real difference between the women is over what the name Bacardi implies and here there are clearly social and cultural factors involved and it is not simply a question of onomastics.  

In Praise of the Swan Princess

Like Zarathustra, I have always been a fan of girls who choose to devote themselves to the harsh discipline of classical dance: how could I be an enemy of the blessed feet and fair ankles of ballerinas?

And, like Zarathustra, I have always loathed the Spirit of Gravity; that which weighs life down and stops us learning how to fly like birds and love ourselves with a degree of supersensual coldness that the all-contented know nothing of as they hurriedly gobble-up and digest anything that is placed before them like swine.

Honour should be given only to those who are fastidious in their tastes and have learned how to say No to a soft existence of lard-arsed laziness, spreading everywhere, but leading nowhere. As Plectrude comes to realise: "Putting one's health on the line meant nothing at all as long as one could know the incredible sensation of taking flight." Ultimately, nothing tastes as good as playing Odette feels.

Nothing Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels

Ivonne Thien: Thirty-Two Kilos (2008)

Ours is an anorexic culture, writes Baudrillard; that is to say, a size-zero culture of self-loathing, bulimia, and the ecstasy of emptiness and organic annihilation. 

Ivonne Thien's digitally altered photographs of models wrapped in medical bandages were intended to both illustrate this and, at the same time, offer a point of resistance to the use of  underweight (and often underage) girls in the fashion industry.

She was inspired to create the series of fourteen pictures, entitled Zweiunddreißig Kilo, after her attention was drawn to the proliferation of pro-ana websites that argue for anorexia as a lifestyle choice and dispute the belief that it is actually a life-threatening medical condition. 

Ironically, however, her photos themselves have now become sources of 'thinspiration' to many within the pro-ana community. One suspects that Baudrillard won't be spinning in his grave at this all-too-predictable development, but perhaps gently smiling ...

Supposing Truth to be a Woman ...

The title for this post was to have been the question of style. 

However - it is woman who will be my subject. Still, one might 

wonder whether that doesn't really amount to the same thing ... 

Indeed, like Derrida - who I'm paraphrasing here - we might easily decide there is a strong level of correspondence between women and style and, in turn, between the question of style and that of seduction. All three questions deserve to be thought philosophically; which is to say, in relation to politics, ethics, and notions of what constitutes Truth, developing Nietzsche's supposition concerning the latter along the way (i.e. feminizing what has traditionally been erected as an exclusively masculine concept). 

The first thing to establish is the following: if Truth is supposed to be a woman, then Truth would not love to go naked as Rousseau naively believed. Rather, Truth-as-woman would insist on being veiled: "And only through such a veil which thus falls over it could Truth become truth; profound, indecent, desirable." [59] 

In other words, her being is not a natural pre-given, but something artificially constructed and woman forms an indivisible unity with everything that serves to show off her beauty. Thus she understands not only the need for illusion, but practises the right to lie. It is therefore pointless to speak about the essence of woman, for she "distorts all vestige of essentiality, of identity, of property" [51] and this is why she's the very ruin of philosophy and politics as traditionally conceived in the grandiose and deluded terms of phallic stupidity.

This is not to deny - today of all days - the need for an "organized, patient, laborious" form of feminism, that takes account of "the real conditions in which women's struggles develop" [94]. However, as Derrida rightly points out, whilst these struggles often require the strategic maintenance of metaphysical presuppositions and forms of agency, anyone concerned with effecting radical change must eventually interrogate such ideals precisely because they belong to and uphold the very system one is attempting to deconstruct. 

A constant process of negotiation is therefore required between organized movements and those schizo-nomadic women of style who lay their own singularity on the line and appreciate that their strength relates not to agency, but to seduction, witchcraft, and the art of the dressing table.   

Note: all quotes are from Jacques Derrida, Spurs, trans. Barbara Harlow, The University of Chicago Press, 1979.

On Being a Bit of a Jew (Part Two)

As an American sit-com loving child of the 1970s, I grew up with Valerie Harper as Rhoda Morgenstern and mentioned her only a couple of days ago in a post. Which is why the news that she has been diagnosed with an incurable form of brain cancer and given only three months to live is so sad to hear.

Ms Harper was born in New York in 1939. She grew up with many Jewish friends and always regarded them as her chosen family. It's not surprising, therefore, that she'd be so convincing in the role for which she is famous and that she would not only win four Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe for her performance, but make so many young boys of my generation want to grow up and marry a nice Jewish girl.

Rhoda taught us that becoming-Jewish is something that affects Jews and non-Jews alike; that anyone can be deterritorialized culturally-racially, which is to say swept up and carried off along a line of flight towards a minoritarian position. In other words, in becoming-Jewish, one is removed from the majority (which refers not to a greater relative quantity, but, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, the determination of a norm or standard in relation to which everything else can be said to be minoritarian).

As Deleuze and Guattari also write, we can be thrown into a strange becoming by anything at all - a book, a piece of music, or even, as in this case, a TV show. But perhaps it always requires an element of love. That is to say, one doesn't deviate from the majority unless there is something (or someone) that attracts and captures ones desire and affection.

And so, like Valerie Harper, if I have become-Jewish it is in my heart as much as in my thinking.

Angela Carter and Lorenzo the Closet Queen

Portrait of Angela Carter by Tara Heinemann in which 

she brings out the almost spectral beauty of the subject

Used with permission

Since her death in 1992, there has, I think, been a marked falling off of interest in the work of Angela Carter amongst readers and critics - even those of a feminist persuasion. Tastes change and her writing now seems a bit too gothic and too queer; the language used is just too rich in an age of austerity (i.e. meanness and fear).

Of course, she still has her fans and loyal supporters and I might even be numbered amongst them, for her books meant a very great deal to me in my youth. But the fact remains that she's now a somewhat less mainstream and thus more marginal figure than she used to be and this is unfortunate, as she is not only a great novelist and teller of tales, but a brilliant journalist and critic.

Her study, The Sadeian Woman, for example, remains one of the best exercises in cultural history and sexual politics produced by an English author and her pieces collected in Nothing Sacred (Virago, 1992) also deserve to be read and re-read; not least of all the essay 'Lorenzo the Closet Queen', which combines two of her great loves and two of my own obsessions, namely, the novels of D. H. Lawrence and the sociology of fashion. 

In the above, Carter offers an all-too-brief sartorial critique of Women in Love - a novel which, as she amusingly says, is "as full of clothes as Brown's". She also argues that if Lawrence catalogues the wardrobes of his heroines with such a loving eye for detail, he does so in order to convince his readers that he possesses a "hot line to a woman's heart by the extraordinary sympathy he has for her deepest needs, that is, nice stockings, pretty dresses and submission" [208].

This, she says, is a piece of literary fraudulence. And yet, as she goes on to add, Lawrence at the same time clearly enjoys being a girl and has a genuine and somewhat touching (if pathologically fetishistic) interest in female apparel. Lawrence, she writes, "is seduced and bemused by the narcissistic apparatus of femininity", even if he only wanted to be a woman "so that he could achieve the supreme if schizophrenic pleasure of fucking himself" [209].

As I noted in an earlier post, Lawrence is particularly fascinated in Women in Love by the thought of brightly coloured stockings and they become a kind of leitmotiv running throughout the novel. Carter writes:

"Stockings, stockings, stockings everywhere. Hermione Roddice sports coral-coloured ones, Ursula canary ones. Defiant, brilliant, emphatic stockings. But never the suggestion the fabric masks, upholsters, disguises living, subversive flesh. Lawrence is a stocking man, not a leg man. Stockings have supplanted legs; clothes have supplanted flesh. Fetishism.
      The apotheosis of the stockings comes right at the end of the novel, where they acquire at last an acknowledged, positive, sexual significance. ... Indeed, the stockings appear to precipitate a condition of extreme erotic arousal in Gudrun; she touches them with 'trembling, excited hands'." [209-10]

The question is, what is Lawrence playing at in this scene of camp ecstasy and girliness? Carter is in no doubt:

"I think what Lawrence is doing is attempting to put down the women he has created in his own image for their excessive reaction to the stockings to which he himself has a very excessive reaction indeed, the deep-down queenly, monstrous old hypocrite that he is." [210]

This seems a bit harsh: but deadly accurate. Lawrence allows himself the "licence to mock the girls for parading about in the grotesque finery he has forced them to don" [211]. He is at once fascinated by female dandyism and the seductive allure of fashion and repulsed by it. If he depicts Gudrun as a kind of whore, then Hermione is turned into a terrifying witch figure by the exotic, aristocratic and self-conscious strangeness of her dress.

Whilst Baudelaire loved women for their unnaturalness, Lawrence hates them for it and many of his female characters end up like drag queens, defined and confined by their own clothing. Carter concludes that for most of the time in Women in Love, Lawrence is like a little boy dressing up in his mother's clothes and attempting to fool us into thinking he writes with the hand (and the eye) of a woman:

"The con trick, the brilliant, the wonderful con trick, the real miracle, is that his version of drag has been widely accepted as the real thing, even by young women who ought to know better. In fact, Lawrence probes as deeply into a woman's heart as the bottom of a hat-box." [214]

On Being a Bit of a Jew

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

I think I know what she means. 

And I think that, like Sylvia, I might also confess to being a bit of a Jew. 

How could it not be so when I have spent a lifetime under the influence of (amongst others) Malcolm McLaren, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Derrida and Larry David and grew up believing Rhoda Morgenstern to be the most beautiful woman in the world?

As Susan Sontag notes, the Jews are (along with homosexuals) the greatest creative minority in contemporary urban culture; creative, that is, of a sensibility - an admittedly old-fashioned and problematic term, by which she means an emotionally and aesthetically informed way of looking at the world and thinking about the self. 

I suppose I would call this a style. And whereas Sontag identifies moral seriousness as being the crucial component, I think for me Jewishness is about an abrasive, provocative, sometimes vulgar often anarchic humour that is fundamentally anti-deutsch (with German also being understood as a style, characterized by a sluggish digestive system and an Aryan eye, bright blue).

Dying Game

We regret to announce the death of Mr. D. H. Lawrence, novelist and poet, which occurred 83 years ago today in Vence, in the South of France.  

  

Mr. Lawrence was a writer who exercised a more potent influence over my youthful imagination than any other and I have continued to find inspiration and interest in his work to this day, even if I tend to use him as a leaving point, rather than as a figure of ultimate authority.

For I realise now that his was not the final word and that one best expresses loyalty to his memory via acts of infidelity and deconstructive criticism. Lawrence challenges his readers in precisely the same manner as Zarathustra challenges his listeners: to lose him, so that they might find themselves. But losing a teacher does not mean forgetting all that they have taught and I will never forget above all the courage that Lawrence showed in the face of suffering and death: 

"One wishes things were different. But there's no help for it. One can only do one's best, and then stay brave. Don't weaken or fret. While we live, we must be game. And when comes the time to die, we'll die game too."   

- Letters, V. 3951

Notes on the Lolita Case

Lolita, it is often said, is a beautiful book about an ugly thing. Nabokov writes in a manner so as to groom and demoralize his readers, making us complicit in the crimes that the novel describes. Thus, as Martin Amis says, Lolita leaves us 'ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent'.

But just what is it that we say Yes to: deceit, murder, and child abuse; or simply to the event of literature?

It's arguable that, ultimately, we are encouraged to say Yes to all of the above - and to everything - as belonging to what Nietzsche terms a general economy of the whole. For the world is as it is and the strongest individuals are those who not only accept it, but affirm it, as it is; embracing the tragic character of life and loving fate.

That said, from somewhere comes a growing dislike for Humbert Humbert and an increased sympathy not only for the girl-child, but for her mother, the Haze woman. One doesn't want to become John Ray Jr., full of paper mâché pieties, but perhaps Richard Rorty might have a point when he suggests that Humbert is a monster not only of perversity and of cruelty, but of incuriosity. 

That is to say, Humbert is not merely nymphet-desiring, but intensely self-obsessed and self-idealizing; he is very little interested in the thoughts and feelings of others, even those he claims to love. Thus, writes Rorty, despite the author's insistence to the contrary, the novel does have a moral in tow:

"But the moral is not to keep one's hands off little girls but to notice what one is doing, and in particular to notice what people are saying. For it might turn out, it very often does turn out, that people are trying to tell you they are suffering." 

                                           - Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (CUP, 1989), p. 164. 

(Of course, Sade might well point out that there is no good reason why someone else's suffering should in any way infringe upon or prevent one's own pleasure; indeed, it might usefully serve to heighten the latter. Or, as Nietzsche would say: pain is not an argument.)

Alice in the Empire of Signs

The loss of personal identity and of those things that secure such is central to the story of Alice. But if she loses her name, her face and even her body (Deleuze insists that to pass through the looking glass is to become incorporeal), still, just like the Cheshire Cat, she leaves something behind; not a smile in this case (Alice hardly ever smiles), but a look. 

And this is why Alice remains a crucial fashion icon and why Kiera Vaclavik's current research project is of such great interest. For if, somewhat naively, she isn't entirely ready to abandon her analysis of the fictional girl-child in relation to conventional notions of age, gender, and biology, she seems nevertheless to appreciate that what really matters is the fact that Alice can be best understood as a question of style.

That is to say, Alice can be separated from all of those attributes that are usually understood to exist as natural pre-givens, but not from her hooped stockings, blue dress, white apron, and hair band. These items of adornment do not simply serve to make her look pretty, but to display her non-essential essence; they conceal the fact that there is nothing to conceal beneath appearance. Alice forms an indivisible unity with her own image.

It's an image, however, that many have chosen to adopt (and adapt) as their own; not least those breathtakingly beautiful and super-stylish Japanese girls who, around the area of Harajuku, have created their very own Wonderland, free from any weight of meaning or moral seriousness. In this empire of empty signs and artifice, fashion, forms and femininity are triumphant and Alice is Lolita Queen.          

Tentacle Erotica

I was thinking again the other day of that rather queer exchange in Women in Love when Birkin tells Gerald about his experience of wrestling naked with a Japanese housemate in Heidelberg, presumably during his student days:

"He was very quick and slippery and full of electric fire. It is a remarkable thing, what a curious sort of fluid force they seem to have in them, those people - not like a human grip - like a polyp ... They are very repulsive when they are cold, and they look grey. But when they are hot and roused, there is a definite attraction - a curious kind of full electric fluid - like eels." [WL, CUP, 1987, 268-69]

This - as far as I'm aware - is as close as Lawrence comes to exploring the interesting world of what is now commonly termed tentacle erotica and which refers to a type of pornography, popular in Japan, in which people engage in sexual activity with monsters who have come from either the ocean depths or outer space and either are or resemble octopuses, squids, and similar though unrelated creatures, such as eels and sea-serpents.

Although sometimes the sexual activity is of a consensual nature, frequently the horror is intensified due to the non-consensual elements and shokushu goukan or 'tentacle rape' is frequently a key component of the genre, particularly when there is a woman involved. 

Whilst most tentacle erotica tends to be animated, there are a number of live action films for those who like this kind of thing. It's a theme, however, that can be traced back in Japanese porn long before cinema, anime, or manga. Doubtless, the best known illustration of such is that by Katsushika Hokusai entitled The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (1814). 

This image, taken from the book kinoe no komatsu, which has since been reworked by many Western artists, is really rather beautiful I think, even for those of us who don't share the sexual fascination for lecherous cephalopods. And, crucially, it would seem that the woman, a pearl diver, has not fallen victim to a pair of sexually predatory octopuses, but is rather fully enjoying their attention - just as Birkin enjoyed his naked wrestling with a hot and roused Japanese gentleman.     

In Memory of Malcolm McLaren

Just as when my father passed away, when Malcolm died it was appropriately enough my mother who rang to tell me. For, in a sense, as Julie Burchill once rightly acknowledged, we are all his children; he was the man who spawned an entire generation.

I miss him. And it has taken me almost three years to finally find the heart to make the trip to Highgate Cemetery in order to pay my respects at the graveside of a man who ordered the first champagne I ever tasted, encouraged me to smash a window in L'Escargot, taught me the importance of narrative in interpersonal relations, and once suggested that I should move to Paris in order to seduce the novelist Amélie Nothomb.

When Serge Gainsbourg died, flags in France were flown at half-mast and President Mitterand gave a eulogy in which he described the singer as a poet who elevated the pop song to the level of art. Perhaps the same or something similar could be said of Malcolm; he transformed the ugly into something beautiful and base matter into gold. 

But there was no state recognition for McLaren, who died, like his hero Oscar Wilde, in exile and, in a sense, in the failure he always celebrated over and above any benign success. Instead, there was a rather crass and vulgar funeral in which his life was reduced to a few slogans and several of those who genuinely loved him were either not invited, or told to stay away. 

And now there's just a grave without flowers, a contested will, and Dame Vivienne selling her story to The Mail on Sunday ...   

Why I Love Joan Miró's Woman and Bird

Dona i Ocell (1983) 

There are doubtless many reasons to love Joan Miró's 22-metre high concrete sculpture known in English as 'Woman and Bird' and located in the park named after the artist in his hometown of Barcelona, not far from the Plaça d'Espanya; not least of all the brightly coloured ceramic tiles added by his friend and collaborator Joan Gardy Artigas. 

But for me, what interests and amuses most is that this work deconstructs conventional gender binaries as well as the phallogocentric pretension and arrogance of the steel and glass office blocks that have since been erected by the architects of global capitalism across from where Miró's now tiny-in-comparison sculpture stands in all its pagan and primitive - yet modernist - perfection. 

The Repsol Building (1993), the Allianz Tower (1993), and the Edificio Tarragona (1998) might all be taller and shinier - and they are certainly more functional - than Miró's final piece of public sculpture, but they lack the fourfold unity that Heidegger identifies as belonging to the really great works of art.

Miró's Dona i Ocell gathers together earth and sky, divinities and mortals, and it sets something free within us in a way that the aforementioned sky-scrapers do not. For they simply bring together a work force and liberate flows of money. If they tell us something about the truth of commerce, they don't tell us much, if anything, about the truth of being.

That said, Miró was certainly not averse to accepting paid commissions from big business, as his famous logo for "La Caixa" illustrates.  

A Birthday Post on Becoming-Child

Inner Child Doll, by Beth Costello

Deleuze and Guattari are right: knowing how to age well does not mean attempting to remain young; it means extracting the molecular elements, the forces and flows, that constitute the youth of whatever age one happens to be.

In other words, it's not about diets, skin care, exercise regimes, or cosmetic surgery, but producing within oneself that child of innocence and forgetfulness, whom Zarathustra spoke of.  

Such a metamorphosis of the spirit is not easy and it has nothing to do with regression, imitation or identification. As Picasso once confessed, it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. 

All this on the occasion of yet another birthday ...

Revenge of the Flowers

  The triumph of vegetation is total

The revenge of the flowers is an idea that has long fascinated me. I like the thought that plant life continuously conspires to challenge the supposed superiority of animals and defeat attempts on behalf of humanity to create a full idealized and mechanized world; that one day, the weed will conquer.

It is certainly worth remembering that not only do plants have ancestral reality, but we remain absolutely dependent upon them to provide the air we breathe and the food we eat. Man might dream of one day paving over the entire world with concrete and tarmac, but it's grass - that most unassuming of all plants - that provides the foundation for our continued survival and success.

Indeed, once we abandon our anthropocentric conceit, it becomes arguable that not only is our life dependent upon plants, but is in a very real sense determined by them. Like the birds and the bees and other insects, we exist - as far as the plants are concerned - to disseminate their DNA. At best, we have entered into a mutually beneficial co-evolutionary relationship with flora which renders conventional and convenient distinctions between subject and object meaningless: we shape their unfolding and they shape ours.

If you're a humanist, this is a little disconcerting and hard to admit. For it means acknowledging the fact that plants are just as complex, just as cruel, and just as exploitative as us and that in comparison to the daisy, the greatest monuments of mankind are transitory and insignificant. Plants have been evolving for millions of years and have in that time been endlessly inventing new strategies for survival and perfecting their designs. Thus, to say that we are a more advanced form of life is more than a little presumptuous. We can walk and talk and think, but, in the absence of chlorophyll, we can't photosynthesize nutrients directly from water, soil, and sunlight.

All this being said, it's surely important not to simply fall back into one of the three traditional narratives about man and nature with which we are all too familiar: (i) the heroic narrative, in which humanity is depicted as struggling against nature; (ii) the romantic narrative, in which paradise is regained and man emerges into some kind of spiritual unity with nature; (iii) the eco-apocalyptic narrative, characterized by Michael Pollan as an "environmental morality tale, in which Nature pays man back for his transgressions".

Contrary to these tired mythological storylines, I propose a speculative and realist narrative in which all forms of flora and fauna are regarded primarily as objects - not necessarily equal objects, but equally objects nevertheless, caught up in the same orgy of sex, violence, and random mutation that we like to call life.

Two Formulas for Happiness

Nietzsche once gave us his formula for happiness: A Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal. It's simple: but also a little surprising and disappointing. 

For whilst we might share his need for something to love and affirm and share too his delight in having something (or someone) to oppose and negate, there's something functional and all too German about this metaphysical ideal of the straight line and the positing of a fixed goal at the end of such. It has the unfortunate effect of transforming a formula for happiness into a sort of business plan, or recipe for success. 

Such linear thinking is certainly at odds with the picaro's idea of wandering aimlessly but joyfully in a kind of schizonomadic manner; or the flâneur's love of strolling through city streets and arcades; or the pervert's desire for deviation, aberration, and waywardness. 

None of these happy souls stick to the straight and narrow; none of them have aims, objectives, or plans of accomplishing anything. Neither, in truth, do they affirm or deny anything. At a push, they might want what Earl Butz believed to be the three things that the coloureds looked for in life - tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit - and even then they might sneer at the bourgeois notion of comfort implied by the last of these things. 

Still, as competing formulas for happiness go, this latter, for all its sexism, racism, and vulgarity, just might have the beating of Maxim 44.

Thank Heaven for Little Girls

What are little girls made of: sugar and spice and all things nice?

Whilst it's possible that these are their material elements, according to Deleuze and Guattari's reading of Proust, their individuation, be it collective or singular, doesn't proceed via subjectivity, but by pure haecceity. Which means, I think, that they shouldn't be understood as molar forms, or defined by the functions they fulfil. Rather, we should think of girls in terms of their movements and the intensive affects of which they are capable. 

Little girls, in other words, are not just young female human beings that grow up into women (although, obviously, this is true in a banal organic sense); they are something other than this and something more than this. At their best - which is to say at their most phenomenal - they are extraordinary events and so do not belong to any age group or sex.

Joan of Arc, Anne Frank, and here, with us, right now, recovering from her surgery, Malala Yousafzai, are singular beings via whom molecular politics unfolds. For these girls teach us something vital about life understood in terms of immanence, virtue and virtuality. We should be grateful to the heavens that send them our way. 

Theme Tunes in a Man's Life

In an essay written towards the end of his life, Lawrence reflected on the fact that certain hymns he heard and sang as a child continued to resonate more potently within him than many of the finest poems he had since become familiar with. It didn't matter that, lyrically and musically, these hymns were often banal and rather horrible on the ear; what counted was that they had delighted and inspired his childish imagination and so retained for him a more lasting value. 

Geoff Dyer feels the same about the Marvel comic books he read as a child and this is something he and I share, in addition to our love of Lawrence. But I also feel the same about all of those TV theme tunes that I would tape on my primitive - but precious - cassette player and then listen to over and over again.

For some reason, I was particularly fond of American detective shows and must have recorded the openings to all of them, including Kojak, Cannon, McCloud, Ironside, Starsky and Hutch, Hill Street Blues, Police Woman, Police Story, Hawaii Five-O, Harry O, The Streets of San Francisco, and, my favourite, The Rockford Files. 

These tunes suggested and still suggest a whole world of action and adventure; there has been "no dwindling into actuality, no hardening into the common place" - they excite the same feelings of joy and excitement now as then. In a sense, my childhood was as much a Quinn Martin production, as it was the result of a comprehensive school education and growing up in Essex.

But I also loved American sit-coms, such as Rhoda, and still to this day know the words to the opening song from Laverne and Shirley better than I do the lyrics to either the Lord's Prayer or the national anthem (this as a matter of pride, not shame):  

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight!

Schlemiel! Schlemazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!  

We're gonna do it!