Women Who Hum Are the Hope of the Future

Un Colibri

The troubling thing about living in a fully digital age is that whilst technology has been consummated, men, women and children have all effectively been disqualified; they have lost not only their independence but also their imagination. For who dares to daydream or fantasise when they have movies on demand; who needs to whistle a happy tune when they are connected to an i-Pod which streams non-stop music into their ears? 

Baudrillard refers to this as a form of existential unemployment and fears that the obsolescence of our species is racing towards a terminal phase in which our fate will no longer be in our own hands, but determined exclusively by machines to which we have transferred decision-making in a symbolic act of capitulation:

"In the end, human beings will only have been an infantile illness of an integral technological reality that has become such a given that we are no longer aware of it ... This revolution is not economic or political. It is an anthropological and metaphysical one. And it is the final revolution - there is nothing beyond it. In a way, it is the end of history, although not in the sense of a dialectical surpassing, rather as the beginning of a world without humans."

- Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2010), p. 80. 

This pessimistic conclusion contrasts starkly with the laughable idealism of those who retain their faith in the future and believe in the unlimited morphological adaptability of our species and its becoming-cyborg. Faced with an obvious inferiority to their own smart phones, transhumanists accept voluntary servitude; rather than disappear altogether, they choose to be biologically engineered and cloned. In other words, ashamed of their own mortal imperfection, the machine-ticklers are prepared to make themselves sexless and loveless; beings who pass through life knowing nothing of joy or sorrow and whose nights are no longer shaken by terror or ecstasy.  

At this point, as Nietzsche would say, I cannot suppress a sigh and one small hope; a hope that there might still be others in this world like the young French woman I met recently who, when sitting quietly and contentedly in the corner of a book-filled room, thinking her own thoughts, almost inaudibly started to hum ...          

On the Agony of Power II: The White Terror of World Order

Jean Baudrillard by Guillem Cifré

www.artisopensource.net

According to Baudrillard, domination becomes hegemony when the slave internalizes the master. But for this to happen, power must also absorb the negative - and that's problematic. For whilst the negative can certainly be swallowed, it can never be fully digested; rather, it starts to eat away at power from the inside in a cannibalistic manner. Justice is served in the form of auto-liquidation.    

Meanwhile, the external remnants of negativity - those things which have not yet been swallowed by hegemonic power, or have perhaps already been spat out - mutate into forms of evil that include chaotic weather events and suicide bombers.

The victory of the New World Order is, therefore, only ever apparent. It is obliged to fight a continual war on terror; at a military level, but, also, on a symbolic level as it seeks to liquidate all remaining values and to achieve a humiliating and nihilistic final consensus in which all is revealed as equally worthless and there is literally nothing left to disagree on. Baudrillard writes:  

"The terrorist's potlatch against the West is their own death. Our potlatch is indignity, immodesty, obscenity, degradation and abjection. This is the movement of our culture ... truth is always on the side of unveiling ... exhibition, avowal, nudity - nothing is true unless it is desecrated, objectified, stripped of its aura, or dragged onstage."

"This confrontation is not quite a 'clash of civilizations', but it is not economic or political either, and today it only concerns the West and Islam in appearance. Fundamentally, it is a duel, and its stakes are symbolic ... a universal carnivalization ... against all the singularities that resist it." 

Obviously Baudrillard is not advocating the most violent and reactionary forms of singular resistance, but invoking rather the most poetic of possibilities. However, there's still something troubling about his critique of Western modernity; one which is clearly related to a Romantic and irrationalist tradition of German philosophy that would include Nietzsche at his most Dionysian and Heidegger at his most politically compromised.
          

Indeed, I feel compelled to say that I infinitely prefer a demoralized and disenchanted world to one of sacrificial violence and fundamentalism and would much rather live in a hyperreal and extraterrestrial zone that has devoured its own logic and values than in those primitive regions of the world still living under strict religious law and the mythological authority of God.

Better the euphoric banality of the last man than the stupidity and savage cruelty of those who have yet to even enter history, let alone pass through it.

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'The White Terror of World Order', essay in The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2010), pp. 67, 69.

  

On the Agony of Power I: From Domination to Hegemony

Design Office with Kim Gordon - Since 1980

I think Baudrillard was right to carefully draw a distinction between traditional types of domination - characterized by the master/slave relationship - and what he terms hegemony; the latter being the terminal phase of the former in which there are neither masters nor slaves, just cybernetic organisms who have internalized the operational rules of the New World Order and mistake this for their freedom and happiness:

"Caught in a vast Stockholm syndrome, the alienated, the oppressed, and the colonized are siding with the system that holds them hostage. They are now 'annexed', in the literal sense, prisoners of the nexus, of the network, connected for better or for worse."

Whereas classical forms of domination imposed a system of values, hegemony relies on the liquidation of all values, including the principle of the real; it is a virtual masquerade and a parody of power. As such, it is beyond criticism. But this doesn't mean we should just accept it. We can still offer what Baudrillard calls a double refusal - i.e. a form of resistance based upon the intelligence of evil. This doesn't involve class struggle or a fight for liberation, it is rather a new type of confrontation specific to the era of hegemony:

"In other words, a confrontation that is no longer precisely political but metaphysical and symbolic in the strong sense. It is a confrontation, a divide that exists not only at the heart of the dominant power, but at the heart of our individual existence."

   

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'From Domination to Hegemony', in The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2010), pp. 37, 56. 

  

In Defence of Gwyneth Paltrow

The question is not why so many people find Gwyneth Paltrow irritating, but why so many people hate her with such violent and shameful ferocity.

Reading through some of the vile comments written about her this week following the announcement of her conscious uncoupling from husband Chris Martin, one predictably comes across not only misogyny and anti-Semitism, but what Nietzsche terms ressentiment and by which he refers to a poisonous will to revenge on behalf of the disprivileged and those who continue to advocate and enforce slave morality. 

Ms Paltrow is hated not because of any pretentious aspects to her character or quirky affectations of speech, but because she is a very wealthy, very successful, very talented, and very beautiful individual who, despite the deep sadness caused by her separation, dares to present the world with a healthy, happy face.

I may not wish to subscribe to her goop lifestyle, but better even that than living with scabies of the heart.        

Hello Dolly: On the Life and Work of Hans Bellmer

Hans Bellmer: Die Puppe (1936)

Despite the recent creations of the Chapman Brothers in this line, it seems to me that the dolls of German artist Hans Bellmer, constructed and photographed during the 1930s, still retain a greater power to disturb; they are somehow less comical and more creepy, more uncanny.

Opposed as he was to Hitler, Bellmer determined to make no work that could be appropriated by the Nazis or which might be interpreted in any way as supportive of fascist aesthetics. Thus his dolls, with their deformed and mutated bodies arranged in provocative poses, were consciously designed to challenge the prevailing idea of what constituted Aryan beauty and physical perfection.

This is not to deny, however, other sources of inspiration for his dolls project, both artistic and personal, including his love of pubescent girls and his pygmalionism. But it was undoubtedly his politics as much as his perversity which eventually brought him to the attention of the Nazis, who classified his work in a category designated degenerate art - i.e., work which insulted German sensibility and attempted to corrupt or confuse the forms of nature. To be fair, that's exactly what Bellmer wanted to do.

Forced to flee to France in 1938, Bellmer was welcomed with open arms by the Surrealists who had already published photographs of his dolls several years earlier. Briefly imprisoned as a German national during the early months of the war, he later aided the French Resistance during the occupation by making fake passports.  

Choosing to remain in France after the war, Bellmer lived in Paris until his death in 1975. Although he made no more dolls, he continued working into the 1960s, creating sexually explicit drawings, photographs, paintings and prints (mostly of young girls). Bellmer said of his own work during this period that it constituted an attempt to produce images that it would be impossible to think or describe in words.  

His place in 20th century art history is secured and his cultural influence has not been insignificant.

One final note: in 2006, the Whitechapel Gallery removed twelve of Bellmer's works from a retrospective exhibition. Ostensibly on the grounds of spacial consideration, the rumour persists that the action was due to the organizers concern that the pieces might be particularly offensive to the local Muslim population. Again, to be fair, Bellmer's work doubtless would upset Islamofascists for much the same reasons and in much the same manner as it did the Nazis, but one sincerely hopes there is no truth in this story ... 

Four Legs Good: In Memory of Lisa Bufano

Lisa Bufano (1972 - 2013)
 Photo by Gerhard Aba

www.lisabufano.com

Part Queen Anne table, part Louise Bourgeois spider, part Hans Bellmer doll, American performance artist Lisa Bufano remained at all times completely fabulous and wholly inspiring to those with or without prosthetic limbs. 

Born in Connecticut in 1972, Miss Bufano lost both legs below the knee (as well as her fingers) due to a bacterial infection at the age of twenty-one. As a bilateral amputee, she could have chosen to just sit on her arse and weep - as I suspect I would have done - but, instead, this former child gymnast and go-go dancing college student, decided to bravely explore the freaky possibilities opened up by disease and disability for corporeal experimentation.

Fascinated by a combination of elements that included the creepy, the cute, and the erotic, Bufano developed an uncanny valley aesthetic that was not only deeply disturbing at times, but also very beautiful and strangely seductive. Admired by the LGBT community for her work to do with sexual identity, she was also a pin-up for acrotomophiles and photographed by Gerhard Aba who has made a career from taking pictures of female amputees.  

Ultimately, despite her own terror and discomfort in being looked at, Bufano found it empowering to be a model and performer who used her body to produce a magnetic tension between herself and the audience. Exaggerating her physical difference and celebrating abnormality of form, she left us all open-mouthed and persuaded that whilst two legs aren't bad, in some contexts four can be even better.

On the Need for a New Enlightenment

"One should never miss an opportunity to celebrate the Enlightenment ..." 

Christopher Hitchens

 

What is Enlightenment? For over two centuries this has been a question central to modernity; one which philosophy has, according to Foucault, never quite been able to answer, but never quite able to ignore either. From Kant and Hegel, through Nietzsche to Habermas and, indeed, Foucault himself, hardly any serious thinker has failed to confront this question, directly or indirectly.

And still today, the question was ist Aufklärung continues to resonate; in fact, it might even be said to have renewed urgency in a world that some describe (either with triumphant glee or horrified concern) as not only postmodern, but post-secular; i.e. a world that seems to be creeping at pace towards a new age of fundamentalist stupidity, having rejected the exit from superstition and prejudice offered by reason.

Having, briefly, dared to think and to question, we are once more asked in all seriousness to place faith in those who claim spiritual authority and would rule by divine right. All that social, cultural, and political upheaval and transformation in Europe and the New World - all that great work by men of science and men of letters to liberate themselves from the moral absurdities and disgusting bigotries of religion - and we end up in 2014 having to worry about offending the sensibilities of those who call for the implementation of sharia law.

It's deeply depressing to say the least. But it's also why one is obliged, as an atheist and anti-theist, to fight once more on all the old grounds: Marx was right, criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism and they key to all freedom. To have done with the judgement of God is always the ultimate goal.

But, in order to achieve this objective, we need a new way of thinking and feeling, of acting and behaving - i.e. what the Greeks called an ethos - that in some manner refers back to the complex historical events that took place in the 18th century and which became known as the Enlightenment. 

This is not, as Foucault points out, a matter of subscribing slavishly to some kind of doctrine, or resurrecting a facile model of humanism; rather, it's the permanent reactivation of a philosophically critical and experimental attitude that interrogates everything and allows nothing to pass as self-evidently true (not even the Rights of Man).               

    

All Hail the New Flesh! (On D. H. Lawrence's Impure Pictures)

D. H. Lawrence: The Rape of the Sabine Women (1928)

D. H. Lawrence's great faith is in the flesh, to which he makes an insistent appeal throughout his writings. 

His paintings too, as critic Keith Sagar rightly points out, were a bold - not entirely successful - attempt to capture something of the meaty reality of the body and to make manifest the invisible flows that model and shape the flesh, sometimes cruelly, via a non-representational depiction of their effects. 

But Sagar is mistaken to think of this, as he does, in terms of an art of human anatomy. For in attempting to paint the fleshiness of the body and its forces, Lawrence does everything he can do to paint out those personal and ideal (all too human) aspects which overcode the corpo/real and establish the familiar hierarchical structures of the organism.

Lawrence does not wish to reduce his figures to the level of optical cliché; he is not trying to capture a likeness! Rather, he's attempting to express an objective (albeit intuitional) perception of substance. His painting is therefore, if nothing else, consciously post-Impressionist; a refusal, as he puts it, to be transmuted into the purity of light and colour.   

On occasion, it might be said (somewhat generously) that Lawrence almost pulls off what it is he believes only Cézanne amongst the moderns has achieved and what he terms appleyness - that is to say, the partial revealing of the thingliness of the thing, be it a piece of fruit, a wooden table, or the body of a naked woman.

However, at other times his less-than-subtle attempt to rub our faces in the obscene beauty of the flesh via a continuous parade of ample breasts, round buttocks, and giant limbs simply becomes tiring. Only one of his paintings is called Close-Up, but many of them lack what is usually considered appropriate perspective and their shocking character lies precisely in this as much as the actual content (as Lawrence was well aware).

His Rape of the Sabine Women, for example, ironically fails for much the same reason that he suggests Van Gogh's landscapes fail; too wilful and too much of a surging assault upon our sensibilities. Of course there's a certain comic aspect to this particular picture (made clear by the alternative title suggested by Lawrence: A Study in Arses), but this unfortunately fails to compensate for its somewhat repulsive subjectivity. 

This is not to say that painting shouldn't be joyous and even a little vulgar. Nor is it to argue that there is no place for ugliness and obscenity in art. Indeed, as Deleuze points out, it is never enough simply to reveal the flesh, one must ultimately push it in the direction of deformation and disfiguration, producing monsters and abstraction - and monsters of abstraction - in the process.

The Omphalos Hypothesis

The Omphalos hypothesis - named after the title of a mid-19th century work written by Philip Henry Gosse which proposed, in keeping with a biblical time scale of events, that God created the earth at some point within the last 10,000 years - is one that some creationists in our own time still bizarrely cling to.

Indeed, not only have they accepted Gosse's argument that natural indicators of a significantly more ancient world history, such as fossils, were faked by God, but they have also extended the argument to cover cosmic phenomenon - such as light originating from far-off stars and galaxies - that suggest the universe to be many millions of years old.

Despite the desperately insane aspect to Gosse's notion - which, as Stephen Jay Gould points out, is a classic example of an utterly untestable theory - I have to say I like the idea that the world is fundamentally false and based on appearance; that God, the father of all Truth, is also a great deceiver.

 

So too do I like Bertrand Russell's sceptical attempt to push the Omphalos hypothesis to its logical extreme, by proposing a five-minute hypothesis which argues that the universe could, in fact, have  just come into existence, with all human memory, all signs of history and all ancestral evidence included.

Oh those young earthers! In attempting to untie the geological knot, they have entangled themselves in all kinds of foolishness. It's cruel to mock them, but almost impossible not to: Forgive them Father, for they know not what they say ...

Fascism May Be Fascinating, But Do Not Become Enamoured of Power

Designed by Hugo Boss, who was an active party member and not simply a collaborator with the Nazi regime, the SS uniform was, as Susan Sontag writes, "stylish, well-cut, with a touch (but not too much) of eccentricity". 

Close-fitting and all black in colour, the uniform suggested not only malevolent authority and the legitimate exercise of violence, but also the aestheticization and eroticization of power. It was an outfit designed to make its wearer not only feel superior, but look supremely beautiful. 

Little wonder then that this menacing but seductive uniform - complete with various items of regalia, cap, gloves, and boots - has continued to have a place within both popular culture and the pornographic imagination; filmmakers, fetishists, and fashionistas, for example, are united in their fascination for this ultimate fascist ensemble.       

But of course, as Sontag also points out, most people who fantasise sexually about being dressed to kill and go a little weak at the knees when they see an SS uniform are not signifying their approval of what the Nazis did ("if indeed they have more than the sketchiest idea of what that might be"). They are simply interested in the staging of their own desire and the acting out of their own fears and obsessions.

And perhaps this is a good thing. For perhaps, as Foucault said, in order to rid our hearts and dreams of fascism it is necessary to say and do shameful, ugly things not because we believe in their truth, but so that we won't have to believe in their truth any longer. Perhaps the aim is not ecstasy, but innocence; the fantasy is not death, but freedom (from that which causes us to love power and revere authority in the first place).

Note: Susan Sontag's essay, 'Fascinating Fascism', from which I quote in the above post, can be found online at: www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/feb/06/fascinating-fascism/