Swimming Lessons

Photo by Phil Shaw / Barcroft Media 

londonbabyswim.co.uk 

Sometimes, one pulls oneself up short, and asks: What am I doing this for? Three years of blogging, over 540 posts published, and then : What on earth am I doing it for? 

Some bloggers, of course, are writing to earn an income and establish an online reputation. I wouldn't mind a little fame and fortune myself, if I'm honest. Nevertheless, if I were writing for money and a large following of readers I should doubtless write differently, and with far more success.

What, then, am I writing for? There must be some imperative. Is it for the sake of humanity? Hardly. Like Lawrence, the very thought of such makes ones sick: for the sake of humanity as such, I wouldn't lift a little finger, much less write a blog.

But Torpedo the Ark isn't written either just for fun or personal amusement (nor even for spite). So what then?

I suppose I see it as a space of philosophical adventure and an escape from all forms of idealism that promise safety from the elements and end by becoming prisons. I don't want to be part of Noah's menagerie; just another coordinated specimen preserved thanks to the grace of God. I'd rather take my chances swirling about in the flood waters and in the midst of chaos.

Again, to paraphrase Lawrence, the elderly and the cowardly can stay aboard the boat if they wish, or sit tight on heavy posteriors in some crevice upon Pisgah, babbling about salvation and hoping to view the Promised Land. But I encourage my readers to climb down the mountain or abandon ship and ask themselves the critical question that remains at the heart of modern and contemporary philosophy: the question of Aufklärung.

Actually, this is a series of questions concerning not just past experience, but present reality and future possibility. What's at stake is not merely an analysis of the truth, but what Foucault describes as an ontology of ourselves and of the world not as something divinely ordered and full of love and reason, but as a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; "a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back ..."

Ultimately, Torpedo the Ark is an invitation to go swimming ...  


Notes:

See D. H. Lawrence's essay 'Climbing Down Pisgah', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 223-229, which partly inspired this post and which I paraphrase throughout.   

The lines quoted from Nietzsche are from section 1067 of The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, (Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 549-50. 

A Philosophical Postscript on the Paris Attacks

Diesel the police dog who displayed many of 

the virtues associated with nobility of soul

In the wake of the Paris attacks, political leaders in France and elsewhere wrapped themselves in the tricolore and affirmed a predictable set of values, including Egalité, a revolutionary concept which, as Nietzsche points out, has penetrated deeply into the tissue of modernity, providing the prototype for all our moral theories regarding the universality of so-called human rights.

What these politicians cannot see is that, in practice, this false and fatal idea of equality of all souls has allowed the base and resentment-ridden to challenge every order of rank and thereby effectively undermine the very notion of society. It has thus provided our enemies - including the Islamists - with an explosive weapon against which we have no defense.

But then our Christian idealism has of course rendered the very notion of enmity impossible; we are encouraged to not only regard those who hate us and wish to do us harm as brothers and as equals in the sight of God, but love them and forgive them for their crimes committed against us.

Thus, when asked about those killed in Paris, one commentator and cryptotheologian shamefully masquerading as a philosopher, said we should mourn all those who had died - presumably this includes the bombers and gunmen - as the loss of any life is a tragedy and that no one life is of a greater value than any other.

Thankfully, no one in their right mind really believes this. Indeed, sane people everywhere were more upset by the death of Diesel the police dog than of Abdelhamid Abaaoud and his accomplices in mass murder. What’s more, they recognise something that Christopher Hitchens repeatedly pointed out; namely, that it is not only perverse (and suicidal) to love such people, but ultimately immoral inasmuch as it implies an unwillingness to actively confront and engage with the evil they embody and make manifest.

In sum:

Firstly, there is no equality between souls; not because, as D. H. Lawrence argues, each soul is uniquely different and thus incomparable, but, on the contrary, because each soul is perfectly comparable within an ethical context and some lives clearly lack beauty, lack integrity and lack style in comparison to others.

Secondly, it is our duty - as citizens and as men and women who are interested in the care of the self - to combat and destroy the enemies of civilization and of parrhesia.

Aparigraha and Adoxia (Notes on Yoga and Cynicism)

My confidante and muse, Zena, has newly qualified as a yoga teacher after an intensive period of study in the foothills of the Himalayas. She enjoys yoga as a physical and mental practice, but is also excited by it as a philosophy or system of spiritual beliefs, about which I’m naturally curious.

Thus I listened with interest when she told me about the Hindu virtue of aparigraha - an ethical concept that encourages non-attachment to material things, thereby countering the will-to-possess that can so often result in the vulgarity and the violence of greed.

Of course, what we in the West might term temperance is a crucial component of various religious traditions, not just Hinduism. For many people, the true life is not merely a simple life, but one in which poverty is believed to be a good thing and wealth something of a disadvantage for those who hope to enter the kingdom of heaven.

But - as far as I understand it - that's not quite the idea being advanced by the teachers of aparigraha.

Rather, as with the Stoics, the crucial issue is not so much having or not having money, but adopting an indifferent attitude towards riches, so that one does not become fixated by all the trappings of wealth, greedy for all the goods and services that money can buy, or overly worried by the prospect of one day losing one's power and status within society.

In other words, it remains perfectly possible to lead a virtuous and humble life and still have millions stashed in a secret bank account. All that matters is that these millions don’t really matter to you; that you remain morally aloof, so to speak, from your own wealth and unafraid of any reversal of fortune. By liberating the spirit and letting go in the mind, one needn't be deprived per se or physically destitute (which is certainly convenient for those religious leaders and gurus who like to wear Gucci loafers with their robes).

Now compare and contrast this with the real and radical poverty that the ancient Cynics actively sought out. Diogenes and his followers didn't just offer an effectively virtual moral teaching based upon a simple detachment of the soul; rather, they stripped existence of even the basic material components upon which it is usually thought to depend (including clothes and shelter). Thus, as Foucault notes:

"The dramaturgy of Cynic poverty is far from that indifference which is unconcerned about wealth ... it is an elaboration of oneself in the form of visible poverty. It is not an acceptance of poverty; it is a real conduct of poverty ... unlimited ... in the sense that it does not halt at a stage which is thought to be satisfying because one thinks one is ... free from everything superfluous. It continues and is always looking for possible further destitution."

- Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 258. 

In fact, the Cynics push their scandalous practice of poverty to the point that they end up leading lives full of dirt, dependency, and disgrace; they become the one thing worse than being a slave in Greek eyes - and that's being a beggar. For the Cynics, the key is not aparigraha - it's adoxia - the seeking out of a bad reputation and the systematic practice of dishonour.  

Now - just to be clear - I'm not saying that I approve of or advocate Cynicism; not encouraging those who have taken up yoga in order to find a certain degree of inner peace and wisdom to suddenly abandon their practices and start leading a naked, bestial life of shameless destitution - I'd hate it if Zena suddenly started barking like a dog and committing indecent acts in public.

Nevertheless, I am saying something and I suppose what I'm saying is that I find the core principles of yoga (the so called yamas, of which aparigraha is a key element) platitudinous; they lack any philosophical bite, or critical edge. Further, I worry that they can lead not only to good karma for the individual (whatever that is), but to a socially conservative politics that reinforces convention and the order of things.

In sum: I don't want to masturbate in the market place, but neither do I want to meditate cross-legged on a mountain top, surrendering myself to the higher power of the universe ...            

Dog Bites: On the Question of Man and Animal (and the Becoming-Animal of Man)

Photo by Eija-Liisa Ahtila from the eight part series 

of images entitled Dog Bites (1992-97)

Like Lou Carrington, I’ve always believed there must be something else to marvel at in humanity besides a clever mind and a nice, clean face and that we might term this something else animality.

And like Lou, I’ve always hoped that were we to conduct what Nietzsche terms a reverse experiment and resurrect the wild beast within us, then we might produce a type of man who would be “as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath”.

But now I’m not so sure about the desirability of this: for clearly there are dangers involved in the process of man’s becoming-animal and no one really wants to see werewolves prowling the streets.

Nor, for that matter, do I think it an attractive prospect to live like a dog, as Diogenes liked to live and as was central to the ancient philosophical practice of Cynicism. I don’t want to shit in the street or copulate in full view of others; don’t want to drink rainwater, growl at strangers, or eat raw meat. Like incest, these provocative acts might be perfectly natural and constitute secret pleasures, but they should only be indulged in with extreme caution.

In other words, unlike the ancient Cynics - and unlike some of the more militant of the animal rights activists and environmentalists campaigning in our own time - I don’t wish to tie the principle of the true life exclusively to the domain of Nature and thus reject all social convention and civilized restraint.

Our humanity may well be something that needs to be reformulated and eventually overcome, but it remains nevertheless a magnificent accomplishment; one that was achieved only after a huge amount of suffering over an immense period of time.

Thus, to adopt a model of behaviour based upon that of our own animality (or, rather, what we imagine the latter to be) simply so we might lick our own balls in public and thereby scandalise those who pride themselves on all that distinguishes them as human beings, seems to me profoundly mistaken.


Notes

Lou Carrington is a character in D. H. Lawrence’s short novel St. Mawr. See St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). The line quoted is on p. 61.

For an interesting interpretation of the bios kunikos and why the Cynics prided themselves on living such see Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 242-43.

Chaturbate and the Question of Cynicism

Georg Viktor: Diogenes in der Tonne (Raku ceramic figure) 

www.viktor-ge.org

For those of you who don’t know, Chaturbate is a popular pornographic website where individuals live-stream themselves engaged in sexual activity, either solo or with a partner or partners. Performers can earn money in the form of tips from viewers, but they are essentially amateurs in the pure sense of the term; i.e. they do it because they love to live an unconcealed and shameless life; a life that is constantly under the watchful eyes of others and before the virtual gaze of the camera.

Some critics argue that such behaviour is unnatural and immoral and I’ll come to this philosophically naive charge shortly. Others suggest it constitutes a way of being that is unique to the age in which we live; one that can only be understood in terms of the technology that facilitates it. But, of course, despite what the posthumanists think, there’s nothing new under the sun, and even so-called cybersex might be seen as nothing more than a digital restaging of life in its libidinally material reality.

As such, Chaturbate constitutes a novel revival of an obscene and scandalous ancient practice - Cynicism. Diogenes masturbated in the market place and his disciple Crates liked to fuck his wife in public; our twenty-first century cynics do these things online. But far from being corrupt or perverse, it’s actually a form of the good life; a type of true love taken to the logical extreme. For as even Plato knew, true love never hides itself away; it’s that which is always happy to reveal itself before witnesses.

Now, this is not to say that Plato would have approved of Chaturbate. He may have taught that truth loves to go naked, but he also subscribed to traditional rules of Greek propriety. There were limits and it was best to exercise caution and moderation. For Plato, Diogenes was beyond the pale; he was a Socrates gone mad. And Plato knew that if you push ideals to their extreme, then you effect a kind of transvaluation.

What Michel Foucault writes of the Cynic dramatization of the unconcealed life, is precisely what we might say of Chaturbate’s interactive community of cam-girls and cam-boys and their attempt to love with complete openness: chaturbating is “the strict, simple, and, in a sense, crudest possible application of the principle that one should live without having to blush at what one does”.

But, as a result of this, all the rules, habits, and conventions of behaviour which this principle initially accepted and reinforced, are now overturned. Cynicism explodes the code of propriety and offers the possibility of a radically different (more brazen, perhaps more brutal) form of life: one that is watched over by the goddess Anaideia.

See: Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), The line quoted is on p. 255 of this paperback edition. 

On Queerness, Cynicism, and the Question of True Love

The notion of true love is central within Western culture. It's a concept founded upon the four values identified by Foucault as belonging to aletheia:

“True love is first, love which does not conceal ... because it has nothing to hide ... it is always willing to show itself in front of witnesses ... Second, true love is an unalloyed love ... in which sensual pleasure and the friendship of souls do not intermingle. Third, true love is love in line with what is right, with what is correct ... It has nothing contrary to the rule or custom. And finally, true love is love which is never subject to change or becoming. It is an incorruptible love which remains always the same.” [220-21]

You can find this ideal model of love developed in both Plato and what Nietzsche derided as Platonism for the people (Christianity). It’s a straight and straightforward form of love without subterfuge, disguise, or even curiosity; love that prides itself on its sincerity and its naturalness, rather than a sense of playfulness or sophistication. There’s simply nothing queer about it. It’s what normal, healthy, men and women share and upon which the sanctity of marriage is based.

Homosexuality, on the other hand, is, at its best - that is to say, at its most defiantly queer - the love that refuses to speak its name; the love that likes to stick to the shadows and hide in closets; the love that finds pride in its perverse, plural, and promiscuous character; an ironic, gender-bending, form of love that delights in artifice and in camp; a love that doesn’t conform to the heteronormative rule, or give a fig either about the judgement of God or what Nature dictates.

One might describe this queer radical style of homosexuality, as separatist. It certainly doesn’t want to fit into straight society and doesn’t keep banging on about equal rights; doesn’t long for a lifestyle involving monogamous marriage and the prospect of breeding. It isn't even particularly gay ...

In fact, we might best characterize it as Cynical in the ancient philosophical sense. That is to say, a type of practice which has a very militant idea of what constitutes the truth (of love and of life) and which has been “stamped by a scandal which has constantly accompanied it, a disapproval which surrounds it, a mixture of mockery, repulsion, and apprehension in reaction to its presence and manifestations” [231].

If Cynicism was the disgrace of ancient philosophy, then queer-cynical homosexuality is the travesty of true love; holding up a funfair mirror before Eros so that the latter can recognise himself, whilst, crucially, at the same time see himself outrageously distorted and made multiple.

See: Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Page numbers given refer to this paperback edition.

It's a Gay Life - But is it also a Good Life?

After recently presenting a paper on the politics and psychopathology of homophobia, somebody emailed to ask if I could provide a more philosophical explanation why gay men and lesbians are often viewed negatively by those who identify as heterosexual and belong to the straight majority.

In order to do this, we need to think back to a much older question - one that is central both to ancient philosophy and Christian spirituality - namely, the question of what constitutes a good life. The answer, of course, is all to do with one’s relationship to the truth (aletheia).

For the good life is also the true life, which means that the respectable citizen is one who not only speaks the truth, but manifests it in their daily existence (in what they do and don’t do). This crucial idea is one that has deeply ingrained itself within Western culture and continues to shape our thinking today. Thus we are obliged to ask - as Pilate famously asked Christ - what is truth?

If I remember correctly, Jesus replied that he was the truth, which doesn’t really answer the question. Michel Foucault, however, rather more helpfully supplies us with four key components: the truth is that which is unconcealed, unalloyed, unchanging, and - most significantly for us here - perfectly straight. The true life is never bent or crooked; never deviates from a direct and narrow path to God in accordance with what is revealed, pure, eternal, and upright.

And so it quickly becomes clear why those men and women who are thought to lead secretive, mixed-up, and irregular lifestyles - who are said to be either inherently queer or wilfully perverse - can never be fully trusted or respected within a heteronormative (and heterosexist) society; for they can never lead a good life or a true life.

Nor, for that matter, can they lead a natural life, in the Classical or Christian-moral sense. For the gay life, having historically been lived on the margins of society and in defiance of certain laws, conventions and agreed customs, is also a life which undermines a value system indexed to Nature. 

Thus, homosexuality is doubly false and doubly threatening to those who, rightly or wrongly, pride themselves on being straight and who see the world in black and white, rather than as rainbow-coloured. 

Happy Birthday to the Hai Karate Girl

Valerie Leon as Paula Perkins in Carry On Girls (1973)

Valerie Leon is an actress who imposed her curvaceous figure onto British popular culture and the pornographic imagination throughout the sixties and seventies. 

Appearing in Bond films, Carry On comedies, Hammer horror movies and numerous classic TV shows of the period, she is perhaps best remembered - and much loved - for her role as the girl in the ads for Hai Karate aftershave (be careful how you use it).  

Born on November 12, 1943, Miss Leon worked as a trainee fashion buyer at Harrods after leaving school, before becoming a chorus girl and eventually making her West End debut alongside Barbara Streisand in Funny Girl at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1966. She then, as indicated, went on to become a regular and alluring screen presence.

Never quite a star - although she memorably took the lead role in Blood from the Mummy's Tomb as a reincarnated Egyptian queen - Miss Leon is something rarer and, in a way, far more interesting; what is often described as a cult figure; a fetishistic icon amongst those in the know and fully deserving of the many fan letters she receives from around the world.

I wish this glamourous and intelligent woman a very happy birthday.


Note: those readers interested in knowing more about Miss Leon and finding out about her present activities should visit www.valerieleon.com

On the Metaphysics of the Soul Contra the Aesthetics of Existence

In the end, as a philosopher, one has a choice to make: to concern oneself either with inner being, or outer beauty; the metaphysics of the soul, or the aesthetics of existence. 

Of course, it may be that these questions are constantly linked. But there is no necessary relationship; rather, it's contingent and variable. Thus, push comes to shove, one is obliged to think the care of self primarily as a question of ontology, or as a question of style; two very different projects, even if they have a common starting point and common goal (what is known as the good life). 

Broadly speaking, those who choose to be soulful naturally tend towards mysticism and notions of God and immortality. They often allow their asceticism to flourish negatively as a contempt for the body and things belonging to the material world and this is why they frequently end up badly dressed, marginalized from society and prone to violent fundamentalism. Like Jesus or Osama Bin Laden.    

Those who choose to be stylish, on the other hand, tend towards materialism and notions of artifice and superficiality; they have no time for thinking about the soul when there are flowers to look at, wardrobes to furnish, and bodies to penetrate. However, they often allow their cynicism and irony to make them apathetic, which is why they can end up looking good, but devoid of feeling or enthusiasm, and this can make them attracted to cruelty and perversion. Like Sade or Dorian Gray.

There are dangers, therefore, in either affirming the soul as an ontological reality distinct from physical existence, or affirming the latter - bios - as something to be shaped and disciplined according to a set of elaborate procedures. But each attempt to account for the self takes a certain courage; those who choose to live in desert caves are not to be sneered at, but nor are those who prefer to practice their philosophy either in the bedroom or on the catwalk.

Having said that, I obviously prefer the libertine or the dandy and their modality of truth-telling, to the prophet or holy fool who would sacrifice the entire world for the sake of saving his own precious soul.        

         

Margaret Nolan: Artist, Actress, Object

Margaret Nolan (IMDB)
Photo © 2011 Silver Screen Collection 
Courtesy of gettyimages.com 

The case of Margaret Nolan, the London-born glamour model turned actress become artist, interests for a number of reasons, not least of all because she is a woman who has struggled to take control of her own image and personally confront the issue of sexual objectification.

Miss Nolan started her career - as many aspiring young actresses do - by stripping for the camera and she soon became a popular pin-up within the amorous imagination of the early 1960s, often featuring in magazines under the name of Vicky Kennedy (her pseudonym serving to disguise her identity, preserve her modesty, and distance her from the industry in which she worked; she wasn't a nude model per se, but merely playing the part of such).

Gradually, her more legitimate acting roles increased in number and importance and she appeared in many theatre productions, films, and television shows, under her real name. This famously included playing a masseuse called Dink in the James Bond movie Goldfinger (1964).*

For some of us, however, Miss Nolan is most fondly remembered for her roles in several of the Carry On films, including Carry on Girls (1973), in which she (predictably) plays the buxom beauty Dawn Brakes and is involved in a rather convincing - and at the time controversial - catfight with the Barbara Windsor character, Hope Springs.

But of course, such scenes are now long behind her. Today, Miss Nolan works as a visual artist, producing interesting (sometimes vaguely disturbing) images assembled from cut-up publicity pictures; a somewhat naive attempt to deconstruct the socio-sexual stereotype she embodied and challenge the male gaze to which she was made subject throughout her modelling and acting career. Naive, but something for which she should nevertheless be applauded.

Margaret Nolan: My Divided Self 

This and other works can be found on her official site: 

margaretnolan.co.uk 

* It might also be noted that it was Miss Nolan - and not Shirley Eaton - who appeared in the film's title-sequence by Robert Brownjohn, wearing a bikini and painted gold. This image immediately became iconic within popular culture, but, unlike some (mostly male) art critics and film theorists, Miss Nolan denies there was - or is - anything liberated or liberating about it. The fact that it served simply to secure her a shoot for Playboy would seem to confirm her view.

On the Art of Speaking Without Speaking

A speaker presenting work in an approved manner; i.e., staying resolutely 
with the script and making no attempt to engage or interact with the audience

Although I frequently present work in public, as a rule I never speak without notes and prefer where possible to read without deviation or interruption from a carefully prepared text - much to the annoyance of members of the audience who subscribe to the metaphysics of presence and feel they are entitled to my fully being there in the capacity of speaker. 

I do this for a philosophical reason; namely, to counter the Socratic prejudice that speech is superior to writing and that thinkers should pride ourselves on their ability to memorize information and chat freely in an impromptu manner, thereby demonstrating a lively intelligence and an essential depth of true knowledge or wisdom. 

Put simply, I don't want to speak from the heart, or reveal the secrets of my soul. Like Derrida, I think it's perfectly legitimate - and important - to challenge the privileging of speech over writing (something that remains crucial to the structural presuppositions of philosophy). Indeed, if I had my way I'd use one of those voice synthesizers made famous by Stephen Hawking to depersonalize the whole performance still further and counter the pernicious stupidity of phonocentrism in this manner.

Thus, for me, writing is never a mere supplement to speech and the spoken word is not sovereign, or in a superior (because in a more direct and immediate) relationship to thought itself. And, although I'm quite happy to read a script in public, if invited to do so, I insist on my right to somehow absence myself from the whole event (cloaked, as it were, in anonymity, ambiguity, and invisibility) and to speak in a voice that is not necessarily my own.

I'm not then what might be thought of as a parrhesiast - a free-speaker of the truth without concealment. Nor am I one who says what he means and means what he says. Rather, I offer perspectives, not personal opinions or beliefs, and I attempt to move about in a transpositional manner without attaching myself anywhere.

That said, I would like to think that, as a philosophical provocateur, I share something with the parrhesiast and that is the courage to risk offending my listeners; of irritating them, of making them angry and provoking them to conduct which may be abusive (You're worse than Hitler) or even violent.

In sum: there's no fundamental bond between what I say and what I may (or may not) think, but I am prepared to piss people off. Mine is a modality not of truth-telling per se, but of enigmatic provocation. Or perhaps - as one woman said following a presentation at The Hospital Club - a form of mental illness ...        

         

On Owing a Cock to Asclepius (The Death of Socrates)

The Death of Socrates - Jacques Louis David (1787)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY)

I have long accepted Nietzsche’s interpretation of the last words of Socrates in The Gay Science (IV 340); accepted, that is to say, that the latter passes a final terrible judgement on life characterized as a disease from which one is cured by death. This despite the fact that such an interpretation obliges one to overlook everything else that Socrates said, or suspect that beneath his cheerfulness he was secretly a pessimist and a decadent.

But Foucault has persuaded me to reconsider this issue and give Socrates the benefit of the doubt; to accept that the above interpretation simply doesn’t hold good philosophically, even if it’s a wicked and polemical pleasure to think it true. If we examine the textual evidence carefully, then we simply cannot go along with Nietzsche and imagine that Socrates has, at the very last moment, broken down and suddenly revealed his hidden nature.

Rather, Socrates is affirming what has always been manifest in his teaching: the disease for the cure of which Asclepius is owed a cock, is that of false (often popular) opinion – not life; a disease of thinking that corrupts the soul. He tells his friends and followers who ask for posthumous instruction: ‘Don’t do anything new or different, just do what I’ve always told you to do: take care of yourselves.’

But then he adds one further remark; acknowledging his debt of gratitude to Asclepius and the need for the sacrifice of a cock. Contra Nietzsche, Foucault reads it thus: Socrates wants to give thanks for the god’s assistance, as a healer, to all those who have undertaken care of the self “For we should not forget ... that if we are concerned about ourselves, it is to the extent also that the gods have shown concern for us.” 

In an important and persuasive (rather moving) passage, Foucault continues:

“So you can see that Socrates’s death, the practice of his parrhesia which exposed him to the risk of death ... the practice of his truth-telling, and finally this devotion to inducing others to take care of themselves just as he took care of himself, all form a very closely woven ensemble ... whose threads come together for the last time in the sacrifice of the cock. It is the mission concerning the care of oneself that leads Socrates to his death. It is the principle of ‘caring for oneself’ that, beyond his death, he bequeaths to the others. And it is to the gods, favourable towards this care of oneself, that he addresses his last thought. I think that Socrates’s death founds philosophy ... as a form of veridiction ... peculiar precisely to philosophical discourse, and the courage of which must be exercised until death as a test of the soul ...” 

  - Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 113-14. 

However, there are of course many other readings of the final section (section 118) of the Phaedo - including that by Eva C. Keuls, who, in her 1985 study of sexual politics in ancient Greece entitled The Reign of the Phallus, understands the last words of Socrates as a crude joke; a reflection upon one final death-defiant erection, caused by the action of the poison, that he uncovers to the amusement of his friends.

If Nietzsche's is the most malicious and Foucault's the most touching, perhaps this interpretation by Keuls is the most amusing and in keeping with Socrates's reputation as a bit of a satyr.

I Wanna Be Your Dog (On Cynicism and Modern Art)

Statue of Diogenes the Cynic (Sinop, Turkey)

I don't want to live in a barrel, carry a lamp, masturbate in the market place, or even spit in the faces of the rich (well, maybe sometimes). But, nevertheless, one is repeatedly drawn back to the figure of Diogenes and to Cynicism; a philosophy constructed in direct opposition to Platonic Idealism with its transcendent forms and characterized by Michel Foucault as a courageous method of truth telling, public provocation, and ascetic sovereignty.

I suppose, above all, Diogenes provides us with a model not so much of the good life, or a beautiful existence - he leads a dog's life and is prone to ugly behaviour - but of extreme honesty. Honesty not as a matter of policy, but as something fundamental upon which we can build a distinctive ethics and politics; "connected to the principle of truth-telling ... without shame or fear ... which pushes its courage and boldness to the point that it becomes intolerable insolence" [165].

In other words, Cynicism is a form of punk philosophy and the Cynic can be characterized as a man of parrhesia; a free-speaker, but also someone who can be outspoken and a bit of a loudmouth. Indeed, when asked what was the most attractive virtue in a man, Diogenes replied the ability to speak candidly (without rhetoric or the shadow of a lie).     

But Cynicism is more than this, for it also has a decisive relationship to nihilism. That is to say, it's a form of realism, but the relationship it establishes to reality is not one that flatters or augments the latter; rather, it lays it bare (it strips and exposes the world and violently reduces human existence to its material components).

This, according to Foucault, is why artists of the avant-garde have long been attracted to Cynicism and willingly allowed their work to serve as a vehicle for the latter in the modern world, establishing a "polemical relationship of reduction, refusal, and aggression to culture, social norms, values, and aesthetic canons" [188].

We can think of this as both the anti-Platonic and the anti-Aristotelian character of modern art; a Cynical attempt to reveal and speak the truth (regardless of who it offends) and to change the value of the currency ...


See: Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Halloween

Cover of the Dead Kennedys single Halloween 

(Alternative Tentacles, 1982)

Another Halloween approaches ... 

And the groaning you can hear is nothing ghostly or ghoulish, but the sound of weariness from people like me who dislike the manner in which the supermarkets and other forces of corporate-media spectacle have co-opted the Day of the Dead and transformed it into a vapid and vacuous celebration of fake blood, phony horror, and false festivity. 

For what is Halloween today other than an opportunity for happy shoppers and law-abiding citizens to dress-up and behave like pretend monsters? Their costumes, no matter how elaborate, fail to cover up their conventionality and conformity; their masks and make-up don't disguise the fact that they have the same white faces smiling sheepishly underneath that they pride themselves on for the rest of the year. 

As Jello Biafra once sang: "I can see your eyes / I can see your brain / baby nothing's changed!"

And on the morrow, when the plastic pumpkins are put away and their all too human mold goes back on, then the real horror begins again; the recurrent nightmare of their daily lives full of fear of otherness, self-loathing, social-regulation, and the judgement of God. 

One almost wishes for a real zombie apocalypse ...       

After the Orgy: Rise of the Herbivores

Édouard Manet: Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1862-3)* 

When asked, twenty-five years ago, to characterize the present, Baudrillard described it as after the orgy. It was then and remains now a brilliant characterization.**  

Although the orgy in question doesn't refer merely to a feast of the flesh, but, more widely, to modernity's explosive liberation in every sphere, this obviously includes a sexual component and it's this that I wish to comment on here, with reference to what are known in Japan as the herbivore men. 

The problem with revolutions, says Baudrillard, is that they never turn out as expected or as hoped - and this includes the so-called sexual revolution. By freeing sex from its containment within bodies and their organs and thereby allowing it to enter into a state of pure circulation and incessant commutation, it has become increasingly subject to indeterminacy and virtual indifference (in all senses of the word).  

Thus, rather than the promised utopia dreamed of by the priests of love who thought they could fuck their way into the future, we witness a gradual fading away of sexual beings, of men and women, of what we had mistakenly believed to be natural desire, and even of biological function. And we end up with asexual beings and celibate grass-eaters, who have little or no interest in dating, marrying, and reproducing (if pushed, they might express an interest in cloning or parthenogenesis).

And so to the land of the rising sun ...      

Sōshoku danshi is a term coined by the writer Maki Fukasawa to describe those young men who express no wish for a conventional love life, or, indeed, to struggle in the macho world of business. Recent surveys conducted amongst single Japanese males in their twenties and thirties found that two-thirds were happy to be considered herbivores (a figure large enough to seriously concern a government which was already worried about falling birth rates).

According to Fukasawa, such men are not entirely sexless, but they have a non-assertive and casual attitude towards pleasures of the flesh; many choose to have exclusively on-line relations, for example, or to masturbate with pornography; others enjoy the company of actual women, but prefer loving friendships that are free from sexual imperatives and conjugal duties.

Of course, this trend is observable in many advanced societies and is not exclusively a Japanese phenomenon; who hasn't inwardly groaned on occasion with displeasure and boredom at the thought of having to groan with sexual pleasure and excitement; what man (or woman for that matter) hasn't resented the pressure to perform and conform to gender stereotypes?

After the orgy, one just wants to chat over coffee, go for a stroll in the park, order a salad, or roll over and sleep ...

Notes

* For me, Manet's picture provides evidence that there have always been young dandies more interested in discussing fashion and philosophy, oblivious to the appeal of naked female flesh. Arguably, the rather bored young woman peers out of the canvas in the hope of catching the eye of a carnivore.   

** See: Jean Baudrillard, 'After the Orgy', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993). 

This post was suggested by Katxu, to whom I'm grateful.

Simon Schama Versus Rod Liddle

A furious Simon Schama finger-points at Rod Liddle on BBC's Question Time 

(15 Oct 2015) and tells him to stick to writing his hack journalism 

and turn his "suburban face from the plight of the miserable". 

I've no reason to dislike the historian and art critic Simon Schama: he's clever, good-looking, cosmopolitan, and compassionate; he's even born on the same day as me (13 Feb). But in his recent clash on the BBC's Question Time with Rod Liddle, Schama did reveal a side of himself that is perhaps not quite so admirable or attractive; a proneness to dismiss those who don't share his moral and sentimental humanism on the subject of Syrian refugees as suburban.  

It is, of course, a term of disparagement with a long and unedifying history amongst English intellectuals; one that is loaded with class contempt for those upon whom they look down and regard as crude, common, and narrow-minded.

And so, whilst I'm perfectly happy for Schama to discuss the European migrant crisis with feeling, he's wrong (and disingenuous) to characterize those who prefer to address the issue as an urgent political problem that requires a practical solution which considers the needs not only of the displaced, but of the native populations asked to absorb a huge influx of people foreign in language, culture and tradition, as provincial and uncaring, or in some way prejudiced. 

Indeed, one is tempted to remind Professor Schama of what he said a few years ago when defending Israel's right to take military action against Hezbollah (including the bombing of cities in Lebanon): "Of course the spectacle and suffering makes us grieve. Who wouldn't grieve? But it's not enough to do that. We've got to understand."

- This Week, BBC One, 24 July 2006

Precisely! And that requires a cool head and what might seem to those who can afford to enjoy the indulgence of tears, a certain hardness of heart.              

Note: those interested in seeing the Question Time clash between Mssrs. Schama and Liddle (as well as reading the latter's take on it in his blog for The Spectator) should click here.

Oh Bondage Up Yours! (A Slice of Punk Nostalgia)

A model for Vivienne Westwood wearing an Exhibition Tartan Bondage jacket 

and Lyon Tartan Bondage trousers (Anglomania, A/W 2015)

viviennewestood.com 

I'm not entirely convinced by the Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence, but it's certainly true to say that within the fabulous world of fashion everything comes around again; yesterday's daring new looks so outmoded today will be marketed as avant-garde all over again tomorrow. 

Even designers who think of themselves as radical and revolutionary, invariably return to their old designs and recycle ideas. So it is, for example, that Vivienne Westwood is once again flogging her tartan bondage lines first seen all those years ago at Seditionaries. 

Of course, ripping garments out of their cultural and historical context robs them of their fetishistic power and subversive potential; transforming clothes for heroes into items of fancy dress for those who long for a past they didn't experience, or those who vainly wish to relive their youth. 

But, well, there you go: even ageing punks are prone to nostalgia and a certain wistfulness; just like the old rockers and hippies before them whom they so scorned. It's nothing to be proud of, but nothing to really feel so ashamed of either. 

Indeed, when I saw one of the models on Westwood's website wearing her mismatched tartan bondage jacket and trousers, even I couldn't help remembering with a certain poignant joy those years gone by when I would hobble around the streets of Soho still thinking of myself as a sex pistol and still fiercely loyal to Malcolm and his project of pop-cultural provocation:

Portrait of the artist as a young punk (1985) 

Sing if You're Glad to be Grey (On the Desire for the Neutral)

Last night, at dinner, a woman told me I was a colourful character. She meant it as a compliment (I assume), but if there's one thing I don't wish to be it's a character. 

People who have character, don't need to be characters; in the same way that people who have a certain vital intensity don't need to be seen to be larger than life. Characters, and individuals who are larger than life, are invariably just dullards behaving in a loud and boorish manner; the sort of people I try to avoid. 

As for being colourful, even that's something I find troublesome. These days, I aim for a certain achromatic neutrality or greyness and to be a man without qualities, like the mathematician Ulrich, in Robert Musil's (appropriately unfinished) novel; ambivalent, indifferent, lacking any essential self and viewing the world in all its vulgar excess of colour and violent enthusiasm with cool analytical passivity.

Those of a philosophical disposition have always appreciated that grey is the most beautiful - for most noble - of colours. During the Renaissance, it played an important role in fashion and art; Rembrandt, for example, had a palette made up almost entirely of complex shades of grey. 

Those who associate grey with boredom and conformity and perceive only an absence of colour, lack sophistication and subtlety. Let them wear their blues and browns in order to display their character; men in the know and men of style still favour a grey suit (light in summer, dark in winter) and understand like Roland Barthes that it is the Neutral alone which escapes and deconstructs the black-and-white binaries that structure meaning and produce the arrogance of certainty in Western thought and discourse.   

              

Worse Than Hitler

Several years ago, I gave a paper to the Philosophy For All crowd entitled Carry on Nietzsche: How One Becomes as Queer as One Is. Concerned primarily with the question of style and camp aesthetics, the paper was a playful comparative study of the German philosopher and Oscar Wilde and a promotion of what the former called die fröhliche Wissenschaft.   

At the end of the presentation, however, an East European woman stood up and accused me with a voice full of rising and righteous emotion of being morally bankrupt and politically suspect; she, she said, had seen for herself where my kind of nihilism leads (for she had visited Auschwitz). With tears in her eyes and a tremor in her voice - and all the while jabbing a finger in my direction - she concluded her case against me with the almost insane accusation that I was worse than Hitler. Not as bad, or in some way similar - but actually worse!

Thinking about this incident now, I see that her attempt to dismiss my work and shut-down discussion of it by playing the Nazi card is a classic example of what Leo Strauss termed reductio ad Hitlerum; an association fallacy which marks her intellectual desperation or lack of legitimate counterargument. She was simply attempting to distract people from what I had said, rather than debate the work.  

Further, one might wonder if it is in fact possible to be worse than Hitler - for doesn't Hitler serve as the absolute last word in evil within secular culture, much as the Devil used to serve when we were more religiously minded? Nick Land comments precisely - and brilliantly - on this:

"Hitler perfectly personifies demonic monstrosity, transcending history and politics to attain the stature of a metaphysical absolute: evil incarnate. Beyond Hitler it is impossible to go, or think. ... In this regard rather than Satan, it might be more helpful to compare Hitler to the Antichrist, which is to say: to a mirror Messiah, of reversed moral polarity. ... Hitler is sacramentally abhorred, in a way that touches upon theological 'first things'. If to embrace Hitler as God is a sign of highly lamentable politico-spiritual confusion (at best), to recognize his historical singularity and sacred meaning is near-mandatory, since he is affirmed by all men of sound faith as the exact complement of the incarnate God ... and this identification has the force of 'self-evident truth'. (Did anybody ever need to ask why the reductio ad Hitlerum works?)

- Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment, Part 4: Re-running the race to ruin

On Dance as a Method of Becoming-Bird

 Anorexic Ballerina by Mexxkid 

deviantart.com 

What, ultimately, is dance, if not a method of becoming-bird; that is to say, a way in which the human being learns how to experience the incredible sensation of taking flight? This is why the connection between the ballerina and the swan is more than a delightful metaphor and why ballet is more than merely a form of entertainment. 

Spectators are right to be amazed by what they see on the stage, but if they press on beyond their astonishment at what young bodies can do, they'll discover that within classical dance is a profound experimental and ascetic practice, or what Amélie Nothomb describes as a fearsome ideal - one capable of ravaging the flesh and acting upon the mind like a drug.

Nothomb is right to understand ballet as a becoming-bird of the human being (although mistaken to think of this in the molar terms of species transformation). She's right also to stress the elements of violence and delirium, discipline and madness. Which is why it's not entirely outrageous to describe ballet training as a form of child abuse, involving psychological terror and physical maltreatment; a regime in which injuries are routinely ignored, eating disorders discreetly encouraged, and young dancers placed under constant pressure to push themselves beyond their own limits in order to develop wings.

As Nietzsche says, if you would teach young girls to fly in defiance of the spirit of gravity, you must first hollow out their bones and remove all obstacles to their becoming-bird: it is better to live in freedom with nothing to eat, than un-free and over-stuffed. 

However - crucially - Nietzsche also counsels taking things slowly: She who wants to learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and to walk and to run and climb ... and for these things you need strong legs and a healthy body. You can be thinspired, but anorexia is not the answer and there's no virtue in physical deprivation (no salvation through starvation). 

Nick Land and the Dark Enlightenment

Old Nick himself

I knew Nick Land, briefly and not very well, in the mid-1990s, whilst I was in the Philosophy Department at Warwick as a Ph. D. student. In fact, Land was assigned to monitor my progress and act as someone to whom I could turn for guidance other than my official supervisor, Keith Ansell-Pearson.

Unlike many others, however, I failed to fall under his evil spell. In fact, if I'm honest, I found him somewhat unsympathisch and don't recall anything he ever told me that particularly amused or struck a chord, apart from the fact that it was, in his view, preferable to sell burgers from the back of a van than to build a conventional academic career. 

Having said that, and to be fair to Land, his Thirst for Annihilation (1992) is a book to which I often return and that's not something you can say of many other (if any) theoretical studies of Bataille and for a long time I characterized my own work as a form of libidinal materialism.

But it's not this text from long ago that I wish to comment on here; rather, I'm interested in his more recent (neoreactionary) writings and his provocative notion of a Dark Enlightenment which seems to involve people waking up to the fact that democracy is incompatible with liberty, equality is a theological conceit, human biodiversity something to be affirmed and capitalism something to be accelerated.

Now, to me, this sounds simply like a form of post-Nietzschean anti-modernism; for others, including Jamie Bartlett, it's a sophisticated neo-fascism spread online by over-educated, often angry white men worried about a coming zombie apocalypse and looking for an emergency exit.

Bartlett describes Land as an eccentric philosopher, which, obviously, he is; but then all genuine thinkers are eccentric, are they not? To be a conventional individual who upholds orthodox opinion and subscribes to moral common sense is to be a bien pensant, but never a truly perverse lover of wisdom.   

Bartlett also complains that Land's thinking is difficult to pin down. But again, I might suggest that it's not usually a sign of lively philosophical intelligence when one's ideas have all the vitality of dead butterflies.

As to the charge that Land is a racist (the worst form of heresy to those who subscribe to and enforce a universal humanism), well, if he is, it's certainly not in the ordinary or banal sense. Indeed, Land is at pains to demonstrate how the latter rests on a grotesquely poor understanding of reality and utter incomprehension of the future that is unfolding (a future in which genomic manipulation will dissolve biological identity in an as yet inconceivably radical manner making the concern over miscegenation and skin-colour seem laughably old-fashioned).

So, without wishing to defend Land from his critics - something he is perfectly capable of doing for himself - I would nevertheless like to encourage readers of Torpedo the Ark to invest the time and accept the challenge of reading Land's work on Dark Enlightenment by clicking here.


Note: Jamie Bartlett is a journalist and the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos (i.e. part of the Cathedral). He regularly writes about online extremism and the perils of the dark web. His blog post for the Telegraph on Nick Land, Mencius Moldbug, and the Dark Enlightenment can be read by clicking here. 

     

ISIS Threaten Sylvania



Detail from ISIS Invade a Sylvanian Picnic (2014)

Part of the series ISIS Threaten Sylvania (2014/15), by Mimsy



ISIS Threaten Sylvania is a series of humourous (yet deadly serious) light-box images created by London-based artist Mimsy, featuring the loveable toy animals who make up the Sylvanian Families universe; rabbits, mice, hedgehogs and other woodland creatures all living in peace and harmony as they happily go about their daily lives. 

Until, that is, armed jihadis show-up and threaten to execute every individual of any species that doesn't submit to their extreme vision of the world.    

It's a piece of political satire, obviously, but the joke is more on us, in our cosy complacency, than it is the Islamists possessed by religious mania.

And the joke has only been intensified after the organizers of the Passion for Freedom exhibition at the Mall Galleries gave in to police pressure to remove the work on the grounds that its inflammatory content might offend Muslim sensibilities, incite religious hatred, and potentially result in violence.    

The police - those well-known guardians of public morality and aesthetic judgement - informed the organizers that if they went ahead with their plans to display the work (which, in their view, had little or no artistic merit), then they would have to pay the £36,000 cost of extra security for the six-day show.    

It's a lot of money; enough at any rate to serve the purpose of effectively blackmailing the organizers and gallery owners into an act of self-censorship. Mimsy, the daughter of a Syrian father whose Jewish family had experienced religious persecution, was discreetly asked to withdraw her work, thereby legitimating it, of course.  

Despite being acutely aware of the danger of speaking out against Islamofascism, Mimsy has bravely declared that she has no intention of pandering to such, or attempting to justify her darkly funny work. Clearly, as Jonathan Jones has noted, if we cannot laugh at IS then the terrorists and black clad puppets of intolerance have already won.

Thus the suppression of these images - as of so many other images and texts - is not only absurd and cowardly, but sinister: "To let fear of bigots and maniacs rule our art galleries is a betrayal of the civilisation we claim to uphold."    

Notes

Those  interested in knowing more about the artist Mimsy and seeing further images from ISIS Threaten Sylvania should click here.

Those interested in reading Jonathan Jones's Guardian review of ISIS Threaten Sylvania should click here.

The Case of Maryam Namazie

maryamnamazie.com

As a graduate of Warwick University, I feel obliged to say something about the case of Maryam Namazie - the Iranian-born activist and campaigner against religious violence and stupidity - who has been barred from speaking on campus by the student union on the grounds that she's a highly inflammatory figure likely to incite hatred.

This ludicrous and deeply shameful attempt to suppress the right of a woman who receives vile death threats on a regular basis to challenge Islamofascism and defend the values of secular society is justified on the grounds that Muslim students have the right not to feel insulted or intimidated.

Ms Namazie is right to be angry about this; to be labelled as an extremist for opposing those who would veil half the world's population and behead a large number of the other half if they could, is peculiarly offensive and, what is more, does a great disservice to those men and women who are living under Islamic regimes and have no opportunity to dissent or speak out.  

Clearly, the University needs to step in and ensure that a few hypersensitive and politically ultra-orthodox students (or useful idiots as Richard Dawkins describes them) do not bring a highly respected centre of learning into disrepute.

The only heartening thing is to see many academics, feminists, and intellectuals come to her defence and, hopefully, with their public support, Ms Namazie will get to address the Warwick Atheists, Secularists, and Humanists' Society in October as planned. 

Afternote (28-09-15): After the University powers-that-be stepped in, the student union was forced to back down. An unequivocal apology was offered to Ms Namazie and she will now address the WASH Society as planned. Further details can be found in the Warwick SU News (click here).