W.I.T.C.H.

In his reading of The Scarlet Letter Lawrence offers an interesting theory of how women like Hester Prynne become witches and fall into a state of moral and sexual corruption, or what religious people call sin.

According to Lawrence, when the female soul "recoils from its creative union with man", it becomes possessed by malevolent forces and starts to exert an invisible and insidious influence in the world. The woman herself may remain "as nice as milk" in her daily life and continue to speak only of her love for humanity, but she becomes subtly diabolic and sends out "waves of silent destruction" that undermine the spiritual authority of men and their social institutions. 

Thus it is, continues Lawrence, that our forefathers were not altogether fools in their fear of witchcraft and the burning of witches not altogether unjustified.   

 

What do I think of this curious contribution to sexual politics? Not much. It's obviously untenable and hateful in its misogyny. One is reminded of the televangelist Pat Robertson, who also claims that women who desire autonomy and independence are intent on practicing witchcraft, smashing capitalism and becoming lesbians. 

The only difference is that Lawrence recognises that evil is as necessary as goodness and that we ultimately need witchcraft as a power of malevolence in order to destroy "a rotten, false humanity" that wallows in its own idealism and phallocratic stupidity.   

Note: for quotes from DHL see Studies in Classic American Literature, CUP, 2003, pp. 89 and 93.

On Taking Flight

Scott Fitzgerald was right about at least one thing: a clean break is something you can never return from as it effectively abolishes the past. And to flee, I would suggest, is to endeavour to make a break of this kind; to leap like a demon from one world into another.

Unfortunately, a lot of people don't seem to understand this idea very well and so fail to value it very highly. They mistakenly believe, as Deleuze points out, that fleeing is a cowardly avoidance of commitments and responsibilities, or marks some sort of retreat into a fantasy life. 

But nothing could be further from the truth and, ultimately, nothing is more active than flight. Furthermore, despite what the good people say, it also takes courage to paint your wagon rather than accept the comforts of home. 

It should be understood, however, that nothing I have just written necessitates travelling to faraway lands, or even having to move: lines of flight involve journeys in intensity and, if you know how, you can run even when standing still.

There's simply no point in heading for a tropical paradise if you are going to be yourself when you get there. And yet leaving your job, your car, and even your friends and family behind, is far easier than abandoning one's own precious ego and losing or escaping from the face.        

On Therianthropes and Furverts

If we ignore the genetic possibilities that are beginning to present themselves, we are left with only two options in our quest to transplant man back into nature and become-animal. 

The first is to experiment with the molecular bestiality outlined in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari which is conducted at the level of forces rather than form, but which is nevertheless a real procedure which has nothing to do with fantasy (even if it's very often tied to literature).

The second, is to continue at the molar level to investigate possibilities of animal transformation subscribed to by those for whom metamorphosis is crucial. For many pagans, for example, this idea is central within the magical world of shamanic religious practise; whilst for many fetishists, costumed pet-play is a popular niche activity within the erotic arena. 

If, in the former realm the sexual element is sometimes played down in order that the spiritual aspect can be emphasized, nevertheless in both these worlds we find people who like to dress up and imitate animal behaviour, often in a heavily stylized and ritualistic manner.

Whatever we might think of this acting out, the key is it seems to enable participants to temporarily escape from the confines of their humanity - and, indeed, their underwear; metamorphosis seems to be a sweaty and somewhat uncomfortable process that invariably involves the violent discarding of clothes at some point.

To transform into an animal is thus not only liberating in that it allows one to live momentarily without bad conscience and to do things that are normally forbidden or frowned upon, but it promises also an altered state of being. Thus some therianthropes take animal transformation very seriously indeed, insisting that they genuinely possess the spirit or soul of an animal and that shape-shifting is far more than a type of role-play.

For me, I have to say, it all gets a bit much. And if, on the one hand, I admire the courage and mania of those who travel to the very limit of what it is to be human and defiantly declare themselves to be beasts, on the other hand I can do without the asceticism and judgemental snobbery of those therianthropes who regard other members of the furry community as frivolous sexual deviants lacking in respect for the animals they like to dress up as. 

When push comes to shove, I'd sooner hang about with those individuals content to make animal noises in the bedroom, rather than those who howl at the moon. That is to say, I prefer those with zoosexual tastes rather than occult leanings; furverts rather than therianthropes. 

Proposition 7

Wovon man nicht spechen kann, 

darüber muß man schweigen 

 

Many years ago, when I used to be harangued on a weekly basis at a pub in Chiswick by an ardent  Wittgensteinian, I used to believe that the aphoristic-sounding proposition 7 of the Tractatus was profoundly true. If any logical tautology came close to the beauty of poetry, this was surely it.

But now I feel very differently and I view proposition 7 as a religious prohibition which is no more subtle than a hand placed over the mouth. Wittgenstein attempted not only to close his own work with this line, but shut down any further philosophical investigation into the manifest 'mystery' of the world. 

In other words, like Kant before him, Wittgenstein sought to preserve a space for faith. As Ray Brassier argues, his attempt to identify and enforce the limits of language and knowledge is ultimately nothing more than a thinly veiled exaltation of mystico-religious illumination over conceptual rationality.

Like Heidegger, that other great crypto-theologian of twentieth century philosophy, Wittgenstein makes so much unthinkable, unspeakable, unquestionable, and hence unanswerable - except to those who receive divine inspiration in such matters - that we can read proposition 7 as no more than a succinct rephrasing of something found in an ancient Hebrew text, the Wisdom of Sirach:  

Do not seek knowledge of the sublime; do not look into things that are hidden from you and are not of your concern; pay heed only to that which is taught unto you by the law-givers.  

- Sirach 3: 21-2 

 

The Human Body Does Not Exist

Chelsea Charms (2009) 

I have been thinking again of Marc Quinn's sculptures of individuals who have magnificently transformed their flesh, their sex, and their humanity via techniques including plastic surgery, hormone treatment, and cosmetic enhancement (tattooing, piercing, skin bleaching, etc). 

If fascinating and rather beautiful as neo-classical objects - particularly those worked in marble of Thomas Beatie and Chelsea Charms - they nevertheless fail to amaze as much as the real bodies upon which they're based. Ultimately, those who have turned themselves into living works of art have little need for statues to be erected in their honour.

That said, Quinn's work nevertheless succeeds in obliging the viewer to consider important questions not simply to do with biology, gender, and sexual artifice, but also celebrity and race: the Michael Jackson pieces, for example, remind us that he was the first truly transracial as well as transsexual superstar - "better able even than Christ to reign over the world and reconcile its contradictions", as Baudrillard put it.

Perhaps understandably, Quinn was keen at the time of his exhibition (SS 2010) that it not be thought of as simply a postmodern freak show. But surely it was the physical abnormality and inherent queerness of his subjects that prompted Quinn to ask them to pose in the first place and Catman, Dennis Avner, now sadly deceased, happily worked within this tradition as a performer.

For me, the only illegitimate response came from those who insisted that the point of Quinn's exhibition was to show that, despite everything, we're all the same under the skin. 

Why I Love the Photography of Sally Mann

Sally Mann: WR Pa 53, (2001)

I recently heard the photographer Vee Speers described as a Sally Mann for the digital age. To be honest, I'm not quite sure I know what this means. But what I do know is that whilst the former has produced some very striking and beautiful images, not least of all those of children contained in the series entitled The Birthday Party, her work lacks the outrageously disturbing and provocative character of Sally Mann's. 

I still vividly recall the shock of seeing a retrospective of Mann's work three years ago at the Photographer's Gallery in London, entitled The Family and the Land. This, her first solo show in the UK, included pictures from Immediate Family (naked children), Deep South (naked vegetation), and What Remains (naked corpses). 

The strange, elementary worlds of childhood, landscape and violent decomposition were all brilliantly captured by Mann using antique cameras and techniques so that the images retained their full and often gruesome black and white immediacy. In this sense - and only in this sense - her work might be branded obscene. For there is nothing teasing or titillating in her work; the pictures don't ask to be read erotically any more than they need to be located within some kind of reductive moral context.

Having said that, it's true that the distance of the spectator's gaze is often abolished as in pornography. But Mann is at her very best when the bodies on display are presented in close-up and there is a total collusion and confusion of elements; when faces quite literally become landscapes, as in the untitled but classified picture WR Pa 53, (2001).

It's been said by those who dislike her work, that Mann's photographs ultimately fail to communicate anything and make no positive contribution to society. And it's true that, if anything, they contaminate and corrupt our world of adult human order. I for one didn't come away from the exhibition feeling that I'd learnt anything about the 'innocence of childhood' or the 'beauty of the swamps' - thank God!

Critics who continue to insist on their right to uplift and enlightenment from art, do so because they don't know what else to say and mistakenly believe that banality is better than an open confession of paralysis in the face of something genuinely shocking.

It is, we might conclude, the virulent anti-humanism of Sally Mann's work that accords it greater potency than anything so far produced by Speers. Only Mann has dared to show us the full horror of the human face as lunar surface to be mapped, rather than kissed. And only Mann reminds us not only that little girls have vaginas, but that the vagina itself is nothing other than a freshly dug grave. 

The Big Rock Candy Mountains

 

I have always been strongly attracted to what we might refer to as the hobo ethic, most beautifully set out in the songs of Harry McClintock or, as he was popularly known, Haywire Mac.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1928) is primarily a bum's vision of an earthly paradise, but its appeal is wide and extensive. For what it offers is not simply a glimpse of a far away and imaginary land full of wonders, but what Deleuze terms an immanent utopia. That is to say, one that exists now/here, rather than nowhere; constituted in the bonds of love and laughter that tie us to other people.

The song thus affirms a radically fraternal politics that Whitman also sings of in his Leaves of Grass and which Lawrence calls a 'democracy of touch'. Such a model exists beyond liberalism, tied as it is to capital and the ownership of property, and it involves more than a sugar-topped apple pie humanism - even if it does have something distinctly American about it. 

It is also very much a queer model of democracy: one that is not, as I have indicated, anticipated as some kind of future historical development won through revolutionary struggle or social reform. The democracy of touch is, rather, fucked into existence between comrades and lovers - just as the flower is fucked into being between earth and sky; born, that is to say, of a new economy of bodies and their pleasures.

Anyway, I'll see you all this coming fall in the Big Rock Candy Mountains ...

The Hour of the Star

To think is to confine yourself to a 

single thought that one day stands 

still like a star in the world's sky.

And what is this single thought? 

Arguably, it's the thought of death: death is the single thought of philosophy. And it's the single thought also of Clarice Lispector's great work, A hora da estrela, to which this Heideggerian verse could very fittingly serve as an epigraph. 

The hour of the star is the hour of death. And although Macabéa doesn't choose death (she certainly never contemplates suicide), death nevertheless chooses her and is present throughout the story. When she is killed at the end of the novel, it is something towards which she and we, as readers, are long prepared.

The Hour of the Star also happens to be Lispector's final work; published in 1977, the year of her death. It is thus a profound meditation upon her own mortality and that plunge into the void which is death. It is not easy to think death honestly and courageously; to make of death something uniquely one's own rather than belonging to the world of biological fact and universal extinction. 

'Everything in the world began with a yes', says the narrator of the work. That is to say, with an affirmation. And that includes death. For the same promiscuity of molecules which gave rise to life also gives birth to death and knowing how to die means also knowing how to live. If you have never lived, then you can never truly die: merely break down like a machine. Thus it isn't nihilism to affirm our own mortality, but, on the contrary, an anti-nihilism; the active negation of the idealism which would deny life and refuse death. 

Macabéa is representative of the millions of young girls to be found like her living in poverty, working a dead-end job, unwashed, uneducated and uncared for. But she is also a singular creature and, in death, she paradoxically comes into her own being at last; she is the star whose hour has arrived.

She might be empty-headed, but she has a strong inner-life and, without knowing it, Macabéa spends most of her time meditating on nothingness whilst listening to Radio Clock count away the minutes. Almost, she might be said to embody the fatal secret of the void; she is a black hole, hardly existing in human terms, as well as a tiny sun.

And so, when lying by the roadside with her eyes turned towards the gutter and the blades of grass that grow near the drain down which her blood trickles away, Macabéa thinks to herself: 'Today is the dawn of my existence: I am born.'

People gather around and whilst they do nothing to help the poor girl, they are finally obliged to acknowledge her presence in the world. It is a scene strangely reminiscent of one in Dickens, much loved by Deleuze, wherein someone held in contempt by society is found on the verge of death; for a brief moment their life takes on singular import.

"As she lay there, she felt the warmth of supreme happiness ... There was even a suggestion of sensuality ... Macabéa's expression betrayed a grimace of desire", writes Lispector, thereby overtly eroticizing the moment of death. For in death, Macabéa surrenders not just her life, but her virginity. Death fucks her into full being as well as non-being and it is an experience she finds "as pleasurable, tender, horrifying, chilling and penetrating as love".

She manages to speak one final sentence. In a clear and distinct voice, Macabéa says: As for the future. It is not understood by any of the onlookers present. But we know, of course, as readers of Heidegger, precisely what this means.

[Note: quotations taken from The Hour of the Star, trans. Giovanni Pontiero, Carcenet Press, 1992.]

How Even Sade Becomes Boring

Marquis de Sade by Delphine Lebourgeois   

Sade asks of his readers precisely what he asked of his countrymen: one more effort in order to achieve an unprecedented level of freedom. His work is thus a call for permanent revolution and self-overcoming. And, arguably, within the mad dialogue that he constructed between love and death, Sade not only made good his own escape from captivity, but opened up a line of flight for us all. 

However, as Foucault points out, in a sense Sade doesn't go far enough and he remains at last a transitional figure shaped by the Age of Reason, even as he points a way beyond it. Thus whilst he succeeded in introducing the frenzy of desire into a world dominated by law and order and made evil attractive to us, he remained trapped within certain conventions of thought.

So it is that Sade's pornographic fantasies of crime and cruelty begin to bore us and we ask of his texts what Lawrence once asked of all those works that forever turn on an ideal of transgression: 'If we can only palpitate to murder, suicide, and rape in their various degrees, however are we going to live?'  

May Day

It's May Day. And I'm feeling a little miserable and irritable (a bit menstrual, as Z would say).

For one thing, I've started to resent the fact that a pagan spring festival has become mixed up with Marxism and transformed into an international day of labour; the maypole being replaced as it were by a giant clocking-in machine.

In an age of universal wage slavery, there's no dignity in paid work and the red flag is just another symbol of tyranny. I would advise those who can avoid or postpone employment that they do so for as long as possible and keep moving from place to place in a headless and homeless manner. 

In the end, there is nothing to do but flee and seek out new lands and strange regions; departing from every gate and refusing to belong to any job, country, creed, political party, or trade union, exercising a decisive will not to be governed or bossed about.