On the Philosophical Importance of Zombies

The zombie long ago shuffled out of the West African religious imagination and into popular global culture, where it has been feasting on brains and fucking with the categorical certainties of oppositional thinking ever since. For by inhabiting that indeterminable realm that is also home to queers, vampires, and cyborgs, the zombie occupies the non-space between binaries and is neither dead nor alive, but, paradoxically, both at once, without taking on the full sense of either term. 

Thus the zombie cannot have its status determined within a system of metaphysical dualism. This makes the zombie the stuff of modern nightmare; for we depend for our security and conceptual coherence in a chaotic and threatening universe upon being able to make clear and unambiguous distinctions between either this or that: true or false, good or evil, friend or foe ...etc. 

It's true that within such binaries there is always a privileged term set over and against its inferior opposite and that whilst each term depends upon the other for its meaning and value the nature of their relationship is therefore one of violent inequality. But, nevertheless, these pairings by enabling us to firmly organize people, things, and relations, do make human society possible. 

By disrupting this operational logic, the zombie makes it difficult for us to think straight or think clearly, indicating, if you will, the very limits of our world as ultimately the distinction between life and death is dissolved and the lines between other crucial oppositions are also blurred. 

Obviously, if good order is to be preserved, then the zombie needs to be defeated: but how? It isn't easy to terminate something that is already dead (whilst alive). Addressing this problem, one critic writes:

"You can't kill a zombie, you have to resolve it. It has to be 'killed' categorically, by removing its undecidability. A magic agent or superior power will have to decide the zombie, returning it to one side of the opposition or the other. It has to become a proper corpse or a true living being. At that point the familiar concepts of life and death can rule again, untroubled." 

- Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida, (Icon Books, 2000), p. 23

But of course, we know in our hearts that the zombie can never really be resolved in this manner; that it is always out there somewhere in the shadows or at the margins of this world, ready and waiting to return after dark. Or, as Derrida would say, undecidability is ever present. 

Further - and finally - inasmuch as we too are made from inanimate matter, it might be argued that there's something of the zombie in all of us.

The Masked Philosopher

Illustration by Shorri on deviantart.com

Those who know me well know that I hate the human face. Well, hate is perhaps too strong a word to use; let us simply say that I have a strong philosophical aversion towards the face and a mistrust of all those familiar facial features that so conveniently express emotion and display our conformity to the dominant reality (not least of all the smile). 

For the face is not some kind of natural formation, nor is it uniquely individual as many people like to believe. It is rather a type of social machine that eventually envelops and codifies not just the front of the head, but the entire body, thereby ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance. 

The fact that most people love their own white, grinning faces with the same passion that slaves love their oppression and take every opportunity to shamelessly promote their own profile - not least on Facebook, for example - is a source of no little disappointment and irritation I have to admit. 

On the other hand, I'm full of admiration and respect for those who counter the privileging of the face within Western metaphysics by choosing to veil, mask, hide, or disguise the face in some manner. It takes courage, I think, to willingly lose face or seek to escape the face. I will always love Lady Chatterley not merely for her sexual frolics with her lover in the woods, but for daring to stand naked before a full-length mirror and place a "thick veil over her face, like a Mohammedan woman" in order that she might better know her body "apart from the face with all its complexities and frustrations and vulgarity!" [DHL]

And I will always love Michel Foucault for daring to become a masked philosopher, surrendering both name and face and instructing people: 'Do not ask me who I am and do not expect me to remain the same.' In celebrating anonymity in this manner, Foucault reminds us of something that Nietzsche taught: Every profound spirit loves a mask - and the profoundest of all despise even their own image.   

    

Heidegger and the Thing

To his credit, Heidegger went out of his way to develop a highly singular understanding of the thing in contradistinction to the modern concept which invariably places the latter-as-object in a subordinate relationship vis-à-vis a human subject who represents and determines its nature.

I like it, for example, when he tells us that there is something solid in a work of architecture, coloured in a painting, or sonorous in a musical composition. Such statements may seem trite, or pseudo-profound, but it's important to be reminded of the self-evidently (but nonetheless frequently overlooked) thingly element in art works.

However, I don't like it when Heidegger begins to discriminate between things and mere things; with the latter described somewhat pejoratively as the lifeless beings of nature. He might mean to simply suggest that clods of earth and pieces of rotten wood are things in their purest state, but you can sense the contempt (just as when he tells us the stone is without world).

And when he hesitates to call God a thing, or to consider man as a thing, it profoundly disappoints.

Ultimately, Heidegger is a correlationist. And so, whilst not anthropocentric in the traditional sense, he continues to assign Dasein a special role and insist that it be taken as the final standard of reference. Thus, for all his talk of hammers, jugs, bridges, and shoes etc, Heidegger fails to provide the thingly-oriented ontology that he teases us with.

Whether his somewhat unorthodox disciple Graham Harman will succeed in this - or whether he'll become entangled in his own fourfold project and polypsychism - remains to be seen.

On the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dickon Edwards, by Sarah Watson

In a brilliant and typically gnostic manner, Baudrillard observes: 

"In the end, all figures of otherness boil down to just one: that of the Object. In the end, all that is left is the inexorability of the Object, the irredeemability of the Object."

                           - The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 1996), p. 172

And so, at the close of Dorian Gray, all that remains is the picture. Having fulfilled its symbolic destiny and  taken its revenge, the portrait hangs upon the wall in immaculate triumph. Dorian lies dead because he mistakenly surrendered up all his secrets. But the picture-as-object remains an insoluble enigma outside of human reflection. 

Stare long enough at any image and it is not you who looks at it, but it which looks into you. Such is the abysmal nature of art: it exposes the illusory and superficial nature of subjectivity. Ultimately, despite all his crimes, passions, and perversities, Dorian bores us. The truth of the matter is that after many centuries of tedious and often painful self-confession and analysis, we know all that there is to know about the soul of man. There are no more mysteries of the human heart left to explore.

So it is that only the object excites our interest, as it leads us away from psychology towards a speculative materialism concerned not with feelings and desires, but the alien world of things, forces, and strange phenomena. We can forget human being and being human - or forms of literary analysis that talk endlessly about character and agency. 

It was - to reiterate - the picture of Dorian Gray that was the source of all that was most curious in Wilde's book. Only in the picture and in the actual events of the novel as events, were elements of genuine queerness assembled; not in the bi-curious world of Dorian, Basil and Lord Henry. 

And so, next time you take a picture of a friend or loved one, be honest enough to admit that what really excites you is the resolution of the image rather than their stupid smiling face. Dare to acknowledge that today, for us, identity is not something divided against itself as it was for the Victorians who worried endlessly about the beast or the queer within, but something to be produced, multiplied, circulated, broadcast, and consumed. 

For this is not an age of full-length portraits, or even mirrors. It is, rather, an age of screens and photoshopped personas encountered on-line. And so, if you really want to know all about someone, don't bother looking into their souls, or fingering their sex, just check out their Facebook profile and there they are in all their obscenity. 

Dogging

 Illustration by Captain Shame: redlionstreet.blogspot.co.uk 

The County of Essex, we are told, is a hot spot  for dogging; that peculiarly British pastime in which strangers meet up - often randomly and in masked anonymity - in fields, woodlands and lay-bys, in order to casually exchange sexual favours whilst observed by voyeurs happy to derive their own delight from the car shaking activities on display.

I'd perhaps not quite go so far as to describe dogging as idyllic, but, nevertheless, there is something romantic about such semi-pastoral (and semi-illicit) pleasures. 

Others, however, quickly resort to the language of moral outrage and tabloid journalism which, for some reason, has a particular penchant for words beginning with the letter 'd' - such as disgusting, degrading, and depraved, for example. 

And Lawrence too - for all his enthusiasm for alfresco eroticism - would also have been quick to condemn dogging I'm sure. One has only to recall what he wrote in his extraordinary essay on John Galsworthy to find evidence for this. Here, he vehemently attacks 'doggish amorousness' as something profoundly shameful and as a sign of social decadence. He writes:

"When the individual remains real and unfallen, sex remains a vital and supremely important thing. But once you have the fall into social beings, sex becomes disgusting, like dogs on heat. Dogs are social beings, with no true canine individuality. Wolves and foxes don't copulate on the pavement. Their sex is wild, and in act, utterly private. Howls you may hear. But you will never see anything. But the dog is tame. And he makes excrement and he copulates on the pavement ...

      The same with human beings. Once they become tame, they become, in a measure, exhibitionists ... They have no real feelings of their own. Unless somebody 'catches them at it', they don't really feel they've felt anything at all."

- D. H. Lawrence, 'John Galsworthy', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, CUP, 1985, p. 217 

How Bridges Love the Gap Between Objects

For many objectophiles, as for many Heideggereans, bridges remain privileged structures. Whilst they are not dwelling places, nevertheless they exist in the domain of our dwelling and we have great admiration and affection for them as buildings: buildings that are determined by dwelling and retain dwelling as a goal. Which means the following:

"The bridge ... does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. ... It brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighbourhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream."

- Heidegger, 'Building Dwelling Thinking', Basic Writings, (Routledge, 1993), p. 354

More than this, the bridge allows the waters that flow beneath it to do so beneath the heavens and for the men who cross it to do so before the gods; whether we explicitly think of their presence and give thanks, or whether we care only about crossing from A-B. The bridge, as Heidegger writes, "gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals" [355].

It is this gathering of the fourfold that constitutes the thingness of the bridge and which stops it from simply being a human construction serving a purely mundane purpose. Now, obviously, most people continue to think of the bridge primarily as something with functional convenience; and, after that, perhaps as some kind of symbol. I know that and have to accept it. However, to those rare men and women who are attuned to objects as things (and who perhaps take them as their lovers), the bridge is never just a mere bridge and it is always more than just a symbol: it's a gathering - and it's also a location. 

For just as the banks of the river do not exist prior to the bridge, neither does the location. As Heidegger notes:

"Before the bridge stands, there are of course many spots along the stream that can be occupied by something. One of them proves to be a locale, and does so because of the bridge. Thus the bridge does not first come to a locale to stand in it; rather, a locale comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge." [356] 

Similarly, the bridge doesn't take up space; on the contrary, just as it determines locales, so too does it allow for spaces. Building is the creation and joining of spaces and just as love bridges the gap between objects, so do bridges love the space between things.   

How Love Bridges the Gap Between Objects

Even when, in a gesture of democratic ontological realism, you accept that all objects can be posited on the same plane of existence, with no one object determining the being of any other object, still the problem remains of the essential gulf that exists between things.

Which is why the forming of relationships in a world of withdrawn and autonomous objects, each with their own unique powers and capacities, is not easy; it requires that all things discover a way in which to translate one another across the void that separates them. 

But translation is not the same as representation. Human subjects qua subjects might metaphysically relate to the world by attempting to form truthful representations of reality, but this all-too-human way of knowing things doesn't really interest me; even if it has been the central concern of philosophy since Descartes. I tend to agree with Levi Bryant that questions concerning objects are misconceived if they are turned into purely epistemological ones of how we might know them. 

In other words, philosophy must be more than a type of anthropocentric conceit and posthumanism, if there is ever to be such a thing, must begin with the admission that subjects are objects and that human being is not a privileged category to which everything can and must be referred. Further, it must be acknowledged that the gulf between us and other objects is not something uniquely significant; that there is equally such a gap between, for example, a pineapple and a knife, as there is between us and items of cutlery.

Thus, as I say above, all things need to find a way to translate one another, or relate across the ontological divide - which is something of an art, something of a science, and something of a mystery. How do objects translate other objects, especially when all objects remain constitutively withdrawn not only from one another but from themselves? 

The answer, perhaps, is via a form of onto-erotics, or what Baudrillard terms in an somewhat different context, the seductiveness of things. For withdrawal is never total and entities as entities always manifest and expose themselves to a greater or lesser degree; they like to tease one another with the staging of their appearance-as-disappearance. Objects, if you will, are like those lovers who know how to delight us with their presence and then torment us with their absence. Timothy Morton describes them as 'strange strangers' whose existence we can never anticipate and being we can never fully know.

Philosophical theories of ontological immanence and weird realism might help us to better translate these strange strangers by remaining open to the possibilities of seduction and surprise, but so too do we need our poets and our objectophiles to help us proliferate unnatural alliances and establish a democracy of touch between entities of all kinds (be they dead or alive, natural or artificial, actual or virtual). Ultimately, existence is fucked into being.

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.