Postmodern Approaches to Literature 2: From Work to Text

Rodrigo Oliveira: From Work to Text # 4 (2008)

Collage on Fabriano paper, acrylic resin, 146 x 210 cm

artfacts.net

S/Z is an important publication within Barthes's overall body of work. It marks a transitional stage between his structuralist and poststructuralist phases as Barthes the semiologist gives way to Barthes the hedonist. Indeed, Barthes himself will eventually protest that S/Z should not be thought of as a structural analysis, but as a textual analysis - i.e. one which is founded upon a theory of the Text born out of an encounter between structuralism, Marxism and psychoanalysis.

Initially developed by Julia Kristeva, the theory of the Text was embraced by Barthes who set out his thinking on the notion in a short essay entitled 'From Work to Text' which opens with the following claim: "It is a fact that over the last few years a certain change has taken place (or is taking place) in our conception of language and, consequently, of the literary work ..."

This change is due to the encounter between different disciplines in relation to an object - language - which is suddenly seen as crucial to their practice; including disciplines, such as politics, which, as Barthes points out, have not traditionally had any special interest in language: interdisciplinarity is born here. But, importantly, it is not accomplished "by the simple confrontation of specialist branches of knowledge". On the contrary, it requires the effective breaking down of traditional boundaries between genres if it is to be more than the "mere expression of a pious wish" for polite cooperation and intellectual unity.

As former divisions begin to dissolve and disciplines promiscuously consort, the classical idea of what constitutes a work begins to mutate and we are faced with a new object "obtained by the sliding or overturning of former categories" - the Text. This term, the sudden and widespread fashionability of which even Barthes seems a little embarrassed by, stands at the intersection of several key propositions concerning "method, genres, signs, plurality, filiation, reading and pleasure".

Barthes conveniently summarizes each proposition in turn:

1. "The Text is not to be thought of as an object ... It would be futile to try to separate out materially works from texts".

Essentially, the Text is a methodological field and/or a signifying practice; it can be demonstrated, but it can’t be displayed. Thus whilst the work can be held in the hand, the text is only ever held in language and exists in the movement of discourse that cuts across the work (or, indeed, across several works at once). In other words, "the Text is experienced only in an activity of production".

2. “In the same way, the Text does not stop at (good) Literature; it cannot be contained in a hierarchy, even in a simple division of genres. What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary (or precisely), its subversive force in respect of the old classifications.”

The Text is always that which takes writing to the limits (of rationality, readability, etc.). For Barthes, this makes it paradoxical in the literal sense that it is contrary to common sense and received opinion (doxa).

3. "The work closes on a signified. ... The Text, on the contrary, practices the infinite deferment of the signified ... its field is that of the signifier and the signifier must not be conceived of as 'the first stage of meaning’ ... but, in complete opposition to this, as its deferred action."

The signifier invites us to participate in a game that never ends; the symbolic game of language.

4. "The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings ... it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. The plural of the Text depends, that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric)."

This is why it can be undone, or why we can find ‘holes’ (aporia) in the fabric of the Text (in its internal structures, narratives, arguments, theories etc.) no matter how carefully and cleverly (no matter how tightly) it has been woven together. It is in its plurality that the Text offends and disturbs all those monomaniacs who look for One Truth, One Way, One God. For such people the Text is a form of Evil which declares its name to be Legion (Mark 5: 9) and the only good book is a work in which there is a single point of origin and authority: the Author. They have no time for the pagan or demonic plurality of the Text. But for those readers who read in a writerly fashion and who find their pleasure in the Text, the words of Nietzsche come back to them: Love of One is a form of barbarism and man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him.

5. "The work is caught up in a process of filiation."

Simply, Barthes means here that the work - unlike the Text - looks for its parental origin and owner: its Author. It likes to discover its roots and its genealogical determination. The Text, on the other hand, is an orphan and happily deracinated. Barthes writes:

"Here again, the metaphor of the Text separates from that of the work: the latter refers to the image of an organism which grows by vital expansion, by 'development' ... the metaphor of the Text is that of the network; if the Text extends itself, it is as a result of a combinatory systematic ..."

This idea of the text as a network of alliances and connections rather than as a single living organism is interesting and deserves further commentary ...

Anticipating Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics, Barthes is suggesting that the Text-as-network can assume a wide - perhaps infinite - number of forms due to the fact that it can join together any one point with any other and has neither beginning nor end, but only a middle from which it expands and overspills. In contrast to an organism that has a nervous system and a brain acting as an hierarchical centre of communication and coordination, the Text-as-network is an acentred, anarchic, and non-coordinating system that dissolves and refuses any "tripartite division between a field of reality (the world), a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author)" [ATP].

This idea of Text-as-network has, perhaps not surprisingly, been as influential outside of literary studies as it has within it - particularly within the world of information technology and computer studies. The term hypertext, coined by Theodore Nelson in 1965 to refer to a radical new way of organizing information (i.e. non-sequentially), may not be Barthes’s, but as Mireille Ribière points out:

"Some hypertext specialists consider that Barthes’s definition of the 'writerly' text in S/Z ... precisely matched that of computer hypertext. They, therefore, see hypertext as the electronic embodiment of Barthes’s 'ideal' text and they see Barthes’s writings as offering a framework in which to discuss hypertext."

6. "The work is normally the object of consumption ... The Text (if only by its frequent 'unreadability') decants the work ... from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice. This means that the Text requires that one try to abolish ... the distance between writing and reading ..."

We noted earlier Barthes’s notion of reading in a writerly manner and this is simply a furthering of this idea, now coupled closely to the notion of play; a word which can be understood to refer to the Text itself which is ready to play like a machine with a play button and to the reader who can play the Text in the same fashion they might play a game or a musical instrument. The Text therefore requires a reader who will agree to an active collaboration and not be content simply to gobble down works of literature much as they do fast-food and other goods within so-called consumer culture. Barthes concludes:

"The reduction of reading to consumption is clearly responsible for the 'boredom' experienced by many in the face of the modern ('unreadable') text, the avant-garde film or painting: to be bored means that one cannot produce the text, open it out, set it going."

Finally, then, we come to the theme of pleasure, which I'll discuss in Part III of this post. It's clearly an important notion throughout Barthes’s writing, even if it is only in his later works where he developed it explicitly and at length as part of a new hedonistic aesthetics.


Bibliography

Roland Barthes, 'From Work to Text', in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath, (Fontana Press, 1977). All lines and passages quoted from Barthes are taken from this essay.

Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990). 

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996).

Mireille Ribière, Barthes: A Beginners Guide, (Hodder and Stoughton, 2002).

Note: this and the two related posts have been assembled from extensive notes made for a course entitled Postmodern Approaches to Literature, that I taught at Morley College, London, in the Spring of 2010. To read PAL 1 click here. To read PAL 3 (I) click here. To go to PAL 3 (II) click here. 

This post is dedicated to Gail who asked 'Why read Barthes?'

Postmodern Approaches to Literature 1: The Death of the Author

Just as Nietzsche's tragic proclamation concerning the death of God opened a new horizon for thought, so too does the death of the Author announced by Roland Barthes allow an experimental and joyous movement to be made from work to text and for the emergence of a new type of reading pleasure: jouissance.

Traditionally, the Author is seen as a central and all-important figure; in his person resides the very origin of the work and its ultimate truth. The Word belongs to him and he is the Word. Thus, as the Author, he can claim authorship of and authority over a text and its meaning. Readers who wish to give an authentic reading are obliged to know his intention and never allow their own interpretations to stray too far from this. The Author is the father of the text and readers, like children, should be seen to be obediently reading - not heard voicing their own opinions (which would be impertinent), or exposing their behinds in an act of comic defiance (which would be rebellious).

But for Barthes, to tie reading and criticism to the figure of the Author is not only lazy in its convenience, it's slavish in its wilful and passive surrender to authority. To assign an Author to a text is not only to impose a limit on the latter, but on ourselves. Thus to call for (and to celebrate) the death of Author is, like deicide or the beheading of the king, an act of political resistance to tyranny (although the naive belief that we might fully liberate the text and ourselves from power is one that Foucault makes us rightly suspicious of).

This death - and the subsequent move from work to text - allows for the birth of the reader as the source of meaning and the subject of desire. This really rather simple but very beautiful and important idea remains, almost fifty years on, very seductive. For writing (and reading in a writerly manner) cannot commence until this death has taken place. Writing is thus a posthumous activity.

And posthumous writing is also postmodern in the sense that the Author is very much a modern figure, developing, as Barthes argues, out of English empiricism, French rationalism and the unique value afforded the bourgeois individual. Within modern culture, the Author takes on greater and greater importance until, finally, he assumes total control over his work and we are no longer allowed to listen to language, but only to the monotonous voice of the Author confiding in us about "his person, his life, his tastes, his passions".

For Barthes, it was the poet Mallarmé who was one of the first to understand "the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner" and to restore to writing its impersonality - which is to restore also the status (and the pleasure) of the reader. This process of calling into question and ridiculing the authority of the Author continued in the work of Valéry, Proust, and the Surrealists.

However, it was linguistics which provided those interested in disposing of the Author "with a valuable analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors". Barthes continues:

"Linguistically, the Author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a 'subject', not a 'person', and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language 'hold together', suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it."

Acknowledging this, not only frees the reader and the text, but it also liberates the scriptor (Barthes's term for the writer who emerges after the death of the Author). The scriptor is not the father of the book, but a child of language; that is to say, he is not the past of his own work, but rather "born simultaneously with the text" in the immediacy of the present and is not "equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing".

Thus a postmodern approach to literature allows for a different understanding of time or temporality; one primarily concerned with the nowness of the moment and what Nietzsche designates as its eternal recurrence. And it means we have moved beyond the idea of literature as a form of representation. Instead, writing now designates a performative practice "in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered".

Emphasizing the material nature of writing as marks on a surface and the physical aspect of a hand that dances with a pen across a piece of paper, Barthes both echoes and anticipates Derrida. He writes:

"Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe ... that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that consequently ... he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form. For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin – or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which calls into question all origins."

Barthes also echoes and anticipates the work of Julia Kristeva and her key concept of intertextuality, writing:

"We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."

This notion of the text as intertext, obviously helps to further erode the old idea of literature as either representative of a non-linguistic reality, or expressive of the author's original ideas or unique being. The scriptor understands that he or she can only play with and within the field of language and "only imitate a gesture" that is pre-given and pre-rehearsed. They ought also to realise that they essentially work with a "ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words".

Barthes concludes his crucial essay in a series of passages worth quoting at some length:

"Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred."

"Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author ... beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is 'explained' - victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism ... is today undermined along with the Author. In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law."

"Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the text is constituted."

We see how Barthes disentangles a text and runs threads of meaning in his fetishistically detailed structural analysis of Balzac's novella Sarrasine. In S/Z, Barthes demonstrates how even what might appear to be a conventional readerly work written by a classical author can become a renewed source of perverse pleasure once it has been read in a writerly manner and transformed into a complex and ambiguous text.

I’ll say more about this movement from work to text (and the resulting pleasure of the text) in Part II of this post.


See: Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 142-48. All lines and passages quoted are taken from this essay.
 
Note: this and the two following posts have been assembled from extensive notes made for a course entitled Postmodern Approaches to Literature, that I taught at Morley College, London, in the Spring of 2010. To go to PAL 2 click here. To go to PAL 3 (I) click here. To read PAL 3 (II) click here. 

This post is dedicated to Gail who asked 'Why read Barthes?'     

Roland Barthes: Essays and Interviews Vols. 1-5

Roland Barthes, chez lui, en 1970

I once wrote a little verse about how, like a lover at the graveside, I would often go into bookshops and gently straighten up the volumes of work by Roland Barthes assembled on the shelves; vainly hoping for one last word to be forthcoming; one previously unpublished text to magically appear.

Little did I realise at the time just how much material was in fact still to come; articles, essays, interviews, letters and lecture notes which had been available to a French audience ever since the expanded edition of Barthes's Oeuvres complètes, ed. Éric Marty, appeared in 2002 (Éditions du Seuil), but which remained relatively inaccessible and unknown to readers in the anglophonic world. 

So I'm extremely grateful to Seagull Books who have just published the fifth and final volume in their Essays and Interviews series, drawn from the above, and translated (by Chris Turner) into English for the first time.

I strongly recommend to all readers of this blog that they buy, steal or borrow the following:
 
1. Roland Barthes, A Very Fine Gift and Other Writings on Theory, trans. Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2015).

2. Roland Barthes, The Scandal of Marxism and Other Writings on Politics, trans. Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2015).

3. Roland Barthes, Masculine, Feminine, Neuter and Other Writings on Literature, trans. Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2016).

4. Roland Barthes, Signs and Images: Writings on Art, Cinema and Photography, trans. Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2016).  

5. Roland Barthes, Simply a Particular Contemporary: Interviews 1970-79, trans. Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2015).


Notes 

Those readers interested in my poem, 'In the Bookshop', can find it in Abraxas, Issue 3, ed. Christina Oakley Harrington and Robert Ansell, (Fulgur, 2013).  

Those readers interested in a recent interview with Chris Turner in which he discusses his work translating Barthes and other French writers, including Baudrillard, should click here. 

On the Pleasure of the Text and the Politics of Reading

Ever since a young child, I have loved reading and would define myself as a homotextual. That is to say, someone who derives their primary pleasure from books, not from people, and accepts that reading in what Barthes terms a living sense (i.e. homogeneous with a virtual writing) is always perverse in nature and immoral in character.     

I remember at primary school we had to line up and slowly make our way towards the teacher's desk, book in hand. The splendidly named Mrs Horncastle would ask each pupil in turn what page they were on and then request that they read a short paragraph to her.

She was, I suppose, a good woman attempting to be a good teacher. But I fear she understood only dead readings in which the printed word was recognised and mechanically repeated, but failed to produce an inner text or deterritorialize the subject. Her concern was with improving comprehension, not intensifying pleasure or bringing children's relationship with language to a crisis of some kind. 

Once, the line moved so slowly that I finished reading the Ladybird Book I'd been assigned before I'd reached the front of the class. And so, when asked: 'What page are you on Stephen?' I placed the closed work onto her desk and replied proudly: 'I've read it Miss!' in anticipation of praise and a possible gold star.

Maybe she didn't believe me - or maybe she wanted to punish what she regarded as impudence - but I was unjustly sent to the back of the line and told to begin the book again from page one. This taught me an important early lesson about the exercise of authority and that within a culture of institutionalised stupidity, it doesn't pay to be too clever ...              
 

Post 666: Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia

As numerical phobias go, fear of  666 - the number of the Beast - is certainly right up there within the cultural imagination; perhaps only the number 13 frightens or discomforts more people.    

Let those who have understanding reckon with this number, entreats the author of Revelation. And trying to puzzle out the precise nature and identity of the Beast has been something generations of scholars, theologians, artists and occultists have spent their lives doing. Aleister Crowley famously declared himself to be the Beast 666 and the number is key within his magickal system of Thelema.

According to Crowley, it's an important solar number; though whether this refers to the Ideal sun of Plato radiating Truth, Beauty and Goodness, or the malevolent sun of Bataille that decays and incites acts of sacrificial madness, I don't really know and, if I'm honest, don't really care - 'cos Crowley always rather bored me.     

Thus if, when young, I painted the number 666 on the collar of a shirt emblazoned with the words I am an anti-Christ / I am an anarchist, I was being more Rotten than Beastly ...       

On Writing

I have often been asked: Why write? 

I don't think there's a definitive answer to this. Ultimately, each writer is free to offer their own reasons for picking up a pen. But it seems to me that Roland Barthes is right to emphasise the need for pleasure. Writing isn't always easy or a great deal of fun, but it does strangely gratify (which is why it's essentially an erotic activity and not a moral or scientific one).     

And it does this both in a negative fashion - by warding off boredom, for example, or provoking enemies - and in a more positive manner; writing pleases because it enables one to become-other. By decentring language and deterritorializing the individual, writing produces not only new meanings, but new selves.

Writing, therefore, has a crucial task to perform; it generates difference and contributes to smashing the Stereotype and the hell of the Same (i.e. society's fixed symbolic order). Writing lets us lose face, waste time, and think dangerous new thoughts. 

This is why writing is also a distinctive politico-philosophical activity; it lends substance to the idea that there is greater value in playful poetic musing or posting bits of theory-fiction on a blog, than there is in an honest day's work.

Notes on the Kelvin MacKenzie and Fatima Manji Controversy

Let me say at the outset: I really don't like Kelvin MacKenzie. He's the sort of red-faced, reactionary bigot who brings British journalism (and white masculinity) into such disrepute.

Let me also say that I have nothing but respect and admiration for the Channel 4 reporter Fatima Manji, who's the kind of intelligent, courageous young woman that I find particularly attractive. If I were to be shipwrecked on a desert island or trapped in a lift with one of the above, it wouldn't be the former editor of The Sun that I'd choose for company. 

However - and it pains me to say this - I think Mr MacKenzie has a fair point when he objects to a hijab-wearing woman (i.e. one who proudly identifies herself as a Muslim) being deliberately used to front the news of yet another terrorist outrage (the Nice massacre) carried out by someone who also declares himself to be a member of her faith.

I understand perfectly the politics at play here and certainly don't think it was done "to stick one in the eye of the ordinary viewer" as MacKenzie suggests. It was, rather, a clumsy and patronising attempt by C4 to show unity and demonstrate that there are plenty of good Muslims, like the lovely Miss Manji; not an attempt at malicious provocation or insult.

And yet, in truth, there was something inappropriate about her staged appearance; in the same way that, for example, it wouldn't have been quite the done thing to have news of an IRA bombing reported by a newsreader dressed as a leprechaun, or to be told during the Blitz of another Luftwaffe attack by a reporter wearing lederhosen. It's a question of semiotics; of being sensitive to the ambiguity of signs and meaning.

It's also a question of style and the language of fashion, since it wasn't Miss Manji's onscreen presence as such that caused unease in certain viewers, but the fact that she was wearing a veil, thereby overtly signifying where her ultimate loyalty lies; not to the men, women and children killed in Nice, but to a God who is at best indifferent to human suffering and at worst fully complicit with it.

It would have been touching I think - and incredibly powerful as a symbolic gesture - if Miss Manji had dispensed with her hijab for one night and read the news as a woman of flesh and blood and not a woman of faith.            

The Case of Qandeel Baloch

How em looking?

The murder of 26-year-old model and social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch by a sibling attempting to restore and secure his family's honour, has succeeded only in elevating her status and bringing genuine shame onto himself, his religion and his nation.   

Whether by accident or design, Miss Baloch transformed herself from just another Kim Kardashian wannabe and pouting selfie-queen, into a political activist and pop-feminist icon within the deeply depressing Islamic dystopia that is Pakistan today.    

Her death, far from being senseless - as some liberal commentators like to claim - actually makes perfect sense within the misogynistic logic of a phallocratic regime. As Afiya Zia writes, it's simply a continuation of the "historic and routine act of eliminating female bodies that are defiant of the male-defined socio-sexual order".

She continues: "The more threatening that fitna-potent women in Muslim contexts are, the more chances that they will be physically eliminated to prevent rupture of the order." There was, thus, a grim inevitability that Miss Baloch's fate would be a tragic one. And hardly surprising that it would be at the hands of a close male relative. 

Obviously, something needs to change: we need to stop thinking of young girls as symbols of family honour, or pieces of family property; we need to dispel the fear and loathing that continues to surround female bodies; and, as Afiya Zia, suggests, we need "more women like Qandeel to scale up the discomfort of those privileged hypocrites and morality-mongers who fear sexual women more than murderous men".


Note: I am grateful to Pakistani feminist and critic Afiya S. Zia for sharing her recently written and as yet unpublished article, 'A Problem Called Qandeel', with me and consenting to my quoting from it.

 

Reflections after the Atrocity in Nice

Marianne à bout de souffle face à la terreur ...

swahacartoons.blogspot.co.uk 

After Nice, a lot of people are calling for something to be done beyond putting out the candles and teddy bears once more or creating caring hashtags on social media; some are even calling for an act of reprisal not just against the Islamists, but the wider Muslim community itself. 

Such an act would, of course, not only violate international law, but effectively mark the end of how we in the West morally define ourselves; as Christians who forgive and turn the other cheek; as liberals who subscribe to notions of due process and human rights; as modern individuals who pride themselves on being such and having abandoned ancient notions of collective responsibility and collective punishment.  

This has nothing to do with Islam means, among other things, that we - as ideal individualists - find it barbarous to associate causal responsibility and guilt with an impersonal and collective form of agency. We want to hold individual terrorists to account, not blame an entire religion, because we need to believe in the autonomous subject who exercises moral choice and free will.  

But perhaps we should examine more closely the group mindset of a people who identify (and act) primarily as Muslims, unconditionally submitting to a faith in which God's will matters a whole lot more than free will. This is not to incite hatred or provoke violence. It is merely to raise the crucial question whether a whole community can be held - at least in part - responsible for the harms produced by particular members. It seems unfair, but that doesn't necessarily means it's illegitimate.

I have a Jewish friend, for example, who insists that it's entirely appropriate to hold all Germans responsible for the Holocaust, not just those who were high-ranking and fanatic members of the Nazi Party. Like Karl Jaspers, he's not really concerned with who did what, but with assigning Kollectivschuld on the basis of what one is.*

And, like Jaspers, he argues that if you belong to a group - be it a race, a class, or a religion - that is committing atrocities in your presence or with your knowledge - though not necessarily with your approval or support - then you too are tainted by association and, at some (metaphysical) level, responsible.  

I have to admit, the above argument is deeply troubling to me; where can it lead other than to a principle of Sippenhaft, i.e. group liability and brutal collective punishment? I know that some philosophers argue that punishment might take the relatively mild form of reducing the strength of group bonds or de-institutionalizing group norms, but I also know that it can become terroristic in its own right and lead to acts of genocide.

So ... what to do then, after Nice?

Well, I don't think we should simply mourn and then carry on regardless. And I certainly don't think we should resign or even accustom ourselves to such events. If we choose to reaffirm the values of the Enlightenment that France embodies - including, let us not forget, laïcité - then let us do so actively ...        

* See: Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. by E. B. Ashton, (Fordham University Press, 2001). 

Be Kind to Bees

Yesterday, struggling along the garden path, came an exhausted bee ...

Fond as I am of honey-producing insects, I decided to try and revive the poor thing with a spoonful of sugar dissolved in water. Happily, after a few sips of this simple but remarkably effective remedy the little creature seemed to perk up, so I left it to crawl among the flowers ...

In a world of climate change, habitat loss, disease, pesticide and colony collapse disorder, we should all be kind to bees ...  

On Masturbation as Sex in the Head

I: Opening Remarks

Whilst archetypal psychologists such as James Hillman and pagan feminists such as Starhawk may pleasure themselves and fantasise about invoking Pan or calling up doubles, D. H. Lawrence rages against masturbation as a fatal form of idealism, or what he terms sex in the head.

In fact, for Lawrence, almost nothing is as evil as jerking off. Not only, he writes, does it harm the individual, but so too is it socially destructive; perhaps the deepest and most dangerous sexual vice that society can be afflicted with in the long run.           

Ironically, Lawrence's views are ultimately rooted in the same metaphysical beliefs as those of Hillman and Starhawk - which obviously makes them just as untenable and just as fallacious - but nevertheless it's interesting to see how and where he differs from the above and why he ends up in such stark opposition ...

II: It's All That Lady of Shalott Business

There's an extraordinary scene in Women in Love between Rupert Birkin and his then girlfriend, Hermione, in which he savagely condemns the latter for her pornographic desire to see all and to know all regarding her naked animal self.

Hermione suggests that children shouldn’t be stimulated into consciousness; that to do so leaves them emotionally crippled and incapable of spontaneity. It sounds like a perfectly respectable Lawrentian viewpoint, but it infuriates Birkin who rages:

"'Knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. You don’t want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary - and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism … Passion and instincts - you want them hard enough, but through your head, in your consciousness.'"

Birkin continues - tellingly in relation to the practices advocated by Starhawk: 

"'It’s all that Lady of Shalott business … You’ve got that mirror, your own fixed will, your immortal understanding, your own tight conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it. There, in the mirror, you must have everything.'"

Like Starhawk, Hermione thinks of herself as a woman of great sensitivity and passion, but she has exchanged real substance for shadows and falsehood:

"'Your passion is a lie … It isn’t passion at all, it is your will. It’s your bullying will. You want to clutch things and have them in your power. And why? Because you haven’t got any real body, any dark body of sensual life. You have no sensuality. You have only your will and your conceit of consciousness, and your lust for power, to know.'"

Birkin then goes on to dismiss the spontaneity claimed by Hermione and her kind:

"'You and spontaneity! You, the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled! You’d be very deliberately spontaneous … Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness … If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography - looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.'"

For Birkin, then, as for Lawrence, it is clear that genuine sensuality is an affair of the blood and belongs to the darkness; something that marks the death of our voluntary, day-time selves. Masturbation is the antithesis of this; idealistic and head-bound. A distinction can be drawn between sensual reality and being and mere sensuousness or sensationalism: the former involves letting go of what we are and what we think we are; the latter is an affair of wilful narcissism and acute self-awareness.

Sensationalists, like Hermione and Starhawk, are so conceited that "'rather than release themselves and live in another world, from another centre'", they prefer to masturbate before mirrors and fool themselves that they are working magic.


III: The Great Danger of Masturbation: Our Vice, Our Dirt, Our Disease

For Lawrence, modern man has fallen into collective insanity and a crucial aspect of this is the tendency of the individual to see himself as a little absolute. This has resulted in sexuality (whatever the mode) becoming a form of self-seeking, rather than an attempt to experience otherness:

"Heterosexual, homosexual, narcissistic … or incestuous, it is all the same thing … Every man, every woman just seeks his own self, her own self, in the sexual experience."

Lawrence encourages us to shatter the great mirror before which we all wank entranced and form new relations with the outside world and with one another. This clearly has particular pertinence to those practitioners of solo sex-magick and Lawrence cleverly reminds his readers of a famous occult image which shows a man standing, before a flat table mirror, which reflects him from waist to head. "Whatever it may mean in magic," writes Lawrence, "it means what we are today; creatures whose active emotional self has no real existence, but is all reflected downwards from the mind."

This introversion of the modern individual, in which the lower centres of psycho-sexual energy and being are aroused and dynamically polarized by the spiritual upper-voluntary centres of consciousness and will, seems to be precisely what Starhawk advocates. But the result of diverting the deeper sensual life of the body upwards is, first and foremost, acute self-consciousness.

"Then", writes Lawrence, "you get the upper body exploiting the lower body. You get the hands exploiting the sensual body, in feeling, fingering, and in masturbation. You get a pornographic longing with regard to the self … eyes and ears want to gather sexual activity and knowledge. The mind becomes full of sex …"

He continues:

"The thought of actual sex connection is usually repulsive. There is an aversion from the normal act of coition. But the craving to feel, to see, to taste, to know, mentally in the head, this is insatiable. Anything, so that the sensation and experience shall come through the upper channels. This is the secret of our introversion and our perversion today. Anything rather than spontaneous direct action from the sensual self. Anything rather than merely normal passion. Introduce any trick, any idea, any mental element you can into sex, but make it an affair of the upper consciousness, the mind and eyes and mouth and fingers. This is our vice, our dirt, our disease."

As much as Lawrence may loathe the phenomenon of sex-in-the-head, we should be clear, however, that he is not arguing for sexual ignorance; nor a return of what he terms the dirty little secret. He wants men and woman to be able to think sex "fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly" - even if it is impossible for them to act sexually to their complete satisfaction. Only when we learn how to both think and act our sex in harmony, neither interfering with the other, will we, says Lawrence, get to where we want to be; a state of accomplished bliss.

For Lawrence, this is a state of grace wherein we learn how to have "a proper reverence for sex, and a proper awe of the body’s strange experience"; neither fearing the body, nor going to the other extreme and treating it "as a sort of toy to be played with".

Lawrence, then, rejects the popular liberal line that posits masturbation as harmless, or positively a good thing for the health and well being of the individual. He writes that whilst in the young a certain amount of auto-erotic activity is inevitable, it becomes a destructive habit once formed and induces in the adult practitioner only a "secret feeling of futility and humiliation". In a particularly important passage, Lawrence argues:

"The great danger of masturbation lies in its merely exhaustive nature. In sexual intercourse, there is a give and take. A new stimulus enters as the native stimulus departs … And this is so in all sexual intercourse where two creatures are concerned, even in the homosexual intercourse. But in masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change, only a deadening. Two people may destroy one another in sex. But they cannot just produce the null effect of masturbation."

Lawrence also refutes the claim made by James Hillman and Starhawk that masturbation is a means of raising psychic energy which can then be put to creative usage:

"The only positive effect of masturbation is that it seems to release a certain mental energy, in some people. But it is mental energy which manifests itself always in the same way, in a vicious circle of analysis and impotent criticism, or else a vicious circle of false and easy sympathy ...”

We might conclude that the thing that characterizes the work of both Hillman and Starhawk is this mixture of conceit and egoism. As authors, they seem incapable of escaping from the lie of themselves and their writing is nothing more at last than an exercise in self-promotion.

Of course, some might say the same of Lawrence ...


Notes

The lines quoted from D. H. Lawrence were taken from the following works:

Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

Readers interested in James Hillman on masturbation and the invocation of Pan should click here.
Readers interested in Starhawk on the role of masturbation within the practice of sex-magick should click here.   

This post is a revised and edited extract from an essay on masturbation in The Treadwell's Papers 1: Sex/Magic (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). 

On Masturbation as a Form of Sex-Magick

According to Starhawk, a leading figure within the earth-based spirituality movement, esoteric teachings about sex identify a quality called polarity, the currents of which "are very powerful forces" and magical training "often focuses on learning to recognise and channel those currents".

The simplest polarity flow is between male and female principles and many Craft groups make this central to working magic. According to Starhawk, however, polarity can also be created internally within the individual via a process of magical masturbation. She writes: "If a woman creates an inner male, or a man creates an inner female, polarity can flow between the person and what we call the companion self".

Starhawk explains the procedure: Firstly, remove your clothes and stand naked before a full-length mirror. Secondly, study your reflection, taking pleasure in every part of your body; "do not diet or attempt to change the way your body looks", says Starhawk, "work on learning to love it the way it is" (for Starhawk the body is not only always beautiful, but also always innocent; a natural object outside of culture and history).
 
Finally, it's time to invoke the double by imagining one’s reflected image to be someone both to love and be loved by: "let a feeling of warmth and affection flow from you to your double", says Starhawk; "you can talk with your double, or, if you like, make love with him/her. When you are done, thank your double".

This process of amusingly courteous occult ritual and magical masturbation is taken a stage further when the double becomes a full companion self - no longer just a reflection, but a virtual other of the opposite sex. Again we are instructed to feel "affection and attraction for the person you have created in the mirror". Starhawk also suggests naming the companion self: "Have a conversation. Play. Make love."

She further advises that mutual masturbation between flesh-and-blood partners is also a valuable way of building a "deeper-than-superficial bond between lovers", before advocating a form of al fresco masturbation with plants that, apparently, enables us to get closer to the natural world. Let’s briefly examine each of these options in turn ...

Firstly, mutual masturbation between partners. Not only does Starhawk insist that a partner should be carefully chosen and preferably be someone with whom one has already established a close relationship built upon trust and affection (Starhawk doesn't approve of promiscuous, irresponsible, or anonymous sex), but she says that both parties involved should also "be familiar with the workings of polarity".

I have to say I find the latter point particularly curious. I can’t help wondering why it needs to be the case; either there’s a cosmic law of polarity that exists independently of man or there isn’t. How can knowledge or lack of knowledge of it make any difference to its working?

Anyway, let us return to our masturbating couple:

"Retire to a warm and private place. Sit opposite each other. Look into each other's eyes and call up the current you felt with your double or companion self … When you are ready, trade. Let your lover send while you receive. Lie down next to each other. Place your hands on each other’s bodies - in whatever places please both of you. Call up the current of polarity … Then you can both send and receive simultaneously. As the currents build, make sounds or movements that help them. Let the process reach its natural conclusion".

Although Starhawk doesn’t explicitly say what this natural conclusion is, we can only assume she means (in a rather banal and functional manner) orgasm. She also adds an amusing end note to the above in which she once again insists that magical masturbation works best “in a long-standing love affair or partnership”. Such curious moralizing is, alas, all too typical of many writers within the Wiccan world.

Having briefly discussed mutual masturbation in the context of sex-magick, it’s time now to examine outdoor auto-erotic activity or loving nature as Starhawk both euphemistically and all too literally puts it. Perhaps we find here elements of the invocation of Pan that archetypal psychologist James Hillman celebrates (click here). Writing in those short, often two-word non-sentences that she seems to favour, Starhawk instructs us to:

"Go outside. Find a plant (or you can do this with a tree … or some other natural object) … Call up the current you felt with your double or companion self … Let the current flow into the plant until you feel its energy radiating back. Enjoy it."

Again, rather coyly, she doesn’t actually use the word masturbate here - but what else can it be that one is encouraged to do but wank with the vegetation?

Now, let me say at this point that I have no problem with any of this; not the wanking, the floraphilia, or the elements of objectum sexuality. However, one does worry that what's being advocated here is no more than an intellectual game played with smoke and mirrors; a deliberate and wilful prostituting of the body to the mind or what Lawrence terms sex in the head. And for me, it's disappointing that pagan occultism should be complicit in exchanging the sheer intensity of libidinal pleasure for mere representation.

Disappointing, but not surprising. For as the great Gardnerian witch-queen Doreen Valiente readily admits: "Practitioners of magic have always emphasized that … in the last resort it is the mind that holds the power of magic".


See: 

Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark, (Beacon Press, 1982) 
Doreen Valiente, An ABC of Witchcraft, (Phoenix Publishing, 1988). 

Note: this post is a revised and edited extract from an essay on masturbation in The Treadwell's Papers 1: Sex/Magic (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). Readers interested in two related posts, also extracted from the above essay, should click here and here.

On Masturbation and the Invocation of Pan

According to archetypal psychologist James Hillman, masturbation is a universal practice which is legitimate as a form of sexual behaviour in its own right and not to be considered a poor substitute for coition. What's more, masturbation is not for Hillman merely a simple pleasure; it exemplifies rather the important relationship between mythology and pathology and is divinely sanctioned by the great god Pan whom it invokes and enacts within the flesh.

It would, of course, be easy to laugh at this line of thinking - a line that I know all too well and followed all too closely in my youth - but where I think Hillman is to be commended is in his insistence that masturbation is not an eruptive sexual urge and that the association with Pan is therefore not merely a means of dressing up the old idea of the uncontrollable beast in man.  

Despite the language used, Hillman's analysis is sophisticated enough to allow for the fact that both the will to masturbation and the will to inhibition which accompanies and diverts it, belong to the same instinctual matrix; i.e. that the latter is not merely socially constructed in order to frustrate a more primal desire.

Just as moralists mistakenly branded masturbation an evil because it seemed to serve no biological or social purpose, so too have sex radicals confused the shame which accompanies masturbation with an internalised authority in need of overthrowing. Hillman recognises the traditional moral standpoint to be misguided, but so too does he interrogate the attempt to liberate masturbation from the restraining prohibition which is such a crucial element of the compulsion itself. For Hillman, sex radicalism and secular humanism ultimately risk making masturbation meaningless:

"Deprived of its fantasy, shame and conflict, masturbation becomes nothing but physiology, an inborn release mechanism without significance for the soul".

In other words, in seeking to make masturbation a harmless activity, we reduce the mystery of Pan - and for Hillman this is a bad thing. For Hillman wishes to re-enchant the world via a "re-education of the citizen in relation to nature". However, he's keen to stress that this re-education "goes deeper than the nymph consciousness of awe and gentleness" and that a Romantic love of the countryside is not enough:

"The re-education of the citizen would have to begin at least partly from Pan’s point of view … But Pan’s world includes masturbation, rape, panic, convulsions, and nightmares. The re-education of the citizen in relation to nature means nothing less than a new relationship with these ‘horrors’, ‘moral depravities’, and ‘madnesses’ which are part of the instinctual life …"

Rightly or wrongly, Hillman insists that by intensifying interiority with a complex mix of joy and shame, masturbation “brings genital pleasure, fantasy, and conflict to the individual as psychic subject" and ultimately opens the way towards a neo-pagan future ...    


See: James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare, (Continuum, 2000).

Note: this post is a revised and edited extract from an essay on masturbation in The Treadwell's Papers 1: Sex/Magic (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). Readers interested in two related posts, also extracted from the above essay, should click here and here.

Heidegger's 'Letter on Humanism'

If there's one essay by Heidegger to which I still regularly return, it's his Letter on Humanism. First published in 1947, Heidegger provides a robust and brilliant defence not only of his own thinking, but of all those authors with whom he shares philosophical affinities.

In a crucial section that could almost act as a foreword to this blog, he writes:

“Because we are speaking against ‘humanism’ people fear a defense of the inhuman and a glorification of barbaric brutality. For what is more ‘logical’ than that somebody who negates humanism nothing remains but the affirmation of inhumanity?
      Because we are speaking against ‘logic’ people believe we are demanding that the rigor of thinking be renounced and in its place the arbitrariness of drives and feelings be installed and thus that ‘irrationalism’ be proclaimed as true. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever speaks against the logical is defending the alogical?
      Because we are speaking against ‘values’ people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more ‘logical’ than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless?
     Because we say that the Being of man consists in ‘being-in-the-world’ people find that man is downgraded to a merely terrestrial being, whereupon philosophy sinks into positivism. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever asserts the worldliness of human beings holds only this life valid, denies the beyond, and renounces all ‘Transcendence’?
      Because we refer to the word of Nietzsche on the ‘death of God’ people regard such a gesture as atheism. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever has experienced the death of God is godless?
      Because in all the respects mentioned we everywhere speak against all that humanity deems high and holy our philosophy teaches an irresponsible and destructive ‘nihilism’. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever roundly denies what is truly in being puts himself on the side of nonbeing and thus professes the pure nothing as the meaning of reality?
      What is going on here? People talk about ‘humanism’, ‘logic’, ‘values’, ‘world’, and ‘God’. They hear something about opposition to these. They recognize and accept these things as positive ... they immediately assume that what speaks against something is automatically its negation and that this is ‘negative’ in the sense of destructive. ...
      But does the ‘against’ which a thinking advances against ordinary opinion necessarily point toward negation and the negative? This happens ... only when one posits in advance what is meant by the ‘positive’ and on the basis makes an absolute and absolutely negative decision about the range of possible opposition to it. ...
...
      To think against ‘logic’ does not mean to break a lance for the illogical but simply to trace in thought the logos and its essence, which appeared in the dawn of thinking ...
      To think against ‘values’ is not to maintain that everything interpreted as ‘a value’ ... is valueless. Rather, it is important to finally realize that precisely through the characterization of something as ‘a value’ what is so valued is robbed of its worth. That is to say, by the assessment of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object for man’s estimation. ... Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing.”

In other words, valuing does not let things be in their own right; it allows them only to be valid when useful to man. This is what Nietzsche thinks of as nihilism and what Lawrence describes as blasphemous living. It is this they challenge via their work and in this challenge one can locate a new ethic (of letting be); something that their critics claim it is impossible to find within an irrationalist ontology and/or an anti-humanist politics of evil.

Thus, despite what these critics say, there clearly can be a post-moral ethics - just as there was a pre-moral ethics in the ancient world. As Nietzsche says on a number of occasions, beyond good and evil does not mean there are no conceptions of what constitutes good (noble) and bad (base) conduct.

Indeed, there could even conceivably be post-moral or neo-pagan religions, should we desire to formulate such on the basis of a newly affirmative will to power. But Zarathustra insists that any such religion would have to be one that stays true to the earth and to the flesh. This is not to posit a spurious form of blut und boden idealism in the manner of the Nazis, rather, it is to acknowledge that “Mortals dwell in the way they safeguard the Fourfold in its essential unfolding”.

In other words, mankind secures its destiny by tending the earth, receiving the sky, awaiting the gods, and by initiating an unfolding into being. This may not be humanism in the classical sense, but, as George Steiner says: “There are meaner metaphors to live by.”


Notes

Heidegger's 'Letter on Humanism' can be found in his Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994).

The line on the dwelling of mortals comes from Heidegger's essay 'Building Dwelling Thinking', which can also be found in his Basic Writings. 

The line from George Steiner is taken from Heidegger, (Fontana Press, 1989), p. 150. 

Waiting for the Migrants (After Cavafy)

Portrait of C. P. Cavafy: the Onassis Cultural Centre

www.sgt.gr

More than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe by sea in 2015, sparking a crisis as countries struggled to cope with the influx. And, according to new figures published this week, the situation is only getting more desperate as the number of people seeking safety, shelter, and opportunity continues to rise ...

I don't know what can be done or what should be done about this. But, as a poet, I feel myself entitled to comment on events and express all kinds of thoughts and feelings which others might repudiate (though whether anyone should pay the slightest attention to the musings of a poet in a time of social and political upheaval is of course debatable).

And so here's a few lines of verse in relation to the above chaos of peoples; lines which rely upon (and play with) Cavafy's famous poem, Περιμένοντας τους Bαρβάρους.

I am grateful to Dr Maria Thanassa for providing me with a new translation of the original Greek text.


What are we waiting for gathered on the beach
and looking nervously out to sea?

Haven't you heard? The migrants are arriving today …

Why is nothing being done to stop them?
Why are the politicians arguing about quotas and not acting?

Because it’s already too late: what laws are they to pass now?
Besides, when the migrants arrive, they’ll legislate anew.

Why did Frau Merkel throw open the gates to Europe?
Who gave her the right to lecture others on their Christian duty?

I don’t know. But the migrants are arriving today  
and we must receive them with smiles and open purses.
We must bestow universal rights upon them.

Why have so many news crews arrived on the scene,
with solemn reporters pushing cameras into the faces
of crying women and children?

Because the migrants are arriving today
and journalists have a moral obligation to bring us their story ... 

Why are so many celebrities holding signs that read:  
Refugees Welcome?

Because the migrants are arriving today
and bleeding hearts have never looked better
than when stitched onto designer sleeves ...

Why all of a sudden is there such restlessness and such confusion?
Why are the streets and the squares emptying so fast, people heading
home in horror?

Because darkness has fallen.   

What shall become of us in a land occupied by immigrants?
We were told they'd provide a solution ...

Steve Taylor's Softness Contra Nietzschean Hardness

According to best-selling author and academic Steve Taylor - a man who prides himself on having a Ph.D in transpersonal psychology and the fact that for the last four years he's been included in a list of the world's most spiritually influential living people - we should allow ourselves to be soft in order to:

(i) avoid conflict with others or creating unnecessary friction -

(ii) make ourselves invulnerable "so that disappointments and insults don't bruise" and life is as painless as possible -

(iii) become a good liberal able to "pass through the world" without damaging anything.   

Amusingly, this is a man who - I'm told - once made a pilgrimage to Nietzsche's birthplace!

But Nietzsche didn't tell his readers to calm down and he sneered at philosophies about which the best that can be said is that they don't hurt anyone. Indeed, for Nietzsche, it is modern man's excessive sensitivity and decadence that lies at the heart of so many of the problems facing us today. Zarathustra famously speaks of the diamond who asks of the charcoal:

"Why so soft, so submissive and yielding? Why is there so much negation and abnegation in your heart? Why is there so little fate in your look?"

He insists that creators are of necessity hard; that they impose and impress themselves upon others and upon life with cruelty and innocence. And he laughs at the weaklings who think themselves good merely because their claws are blunt ... 


Notes 

Readers interested in Dr Taylor and his work should visit: stevenmtaylor.com 
His poem, Be Soft (for Russel Williams), Dec. 2015, can be found directly by clicking here. 

Readers interested in Nietzsche's thought can consult the digital critical edition of his complete works and letters based on the G. Colli and M. Montinari text, ed. by Paolo D’Iorio: click here. 

The above painting of Nietzsche, by Angela Vera Concha (2010), can be found here along with other interesting stuff.

Big Mac Amongst the Bramble

Nothing says Essex more than this image of a Big Mac box discarded amongst the bramble: the perfect juxtaposition of brash and noisy consumer culture and a largely lifeless countryside rendered silent beneath the onslaught of the former.

The futile attempt to keep Britain tidy has largely been lost in an age of litter. Indeed, paper bags, plastic bottles, tin cans, cigarette butts and other manufactured objects are now such an ever-present part of the natural environment that many people seem not to notice, or passively accept the fact.   

And whilst the fast food industry isn't entirely to blame for this, it's certainly a major producer of rubbish. Several recent studies have shown that packaging from their products is a significant percentage of national litter, with McDonald's the chief culprit. For despite priding themselves on their corporate efforts to ensure responsible disposal of trash, waste from McDonald's continues to make up almost a third of the junk food litter in the UK.

Beneath the Golden Arches and the promise of hamburger heaven lies a landfill site ... 

Reflections on the Death of a Rat

SA 2016

When exiled in Essex looking after an elderly parent in need of extensive and intensive care due to a serious neuro-cognitive impairment, it can quickly become isolating: friends fall away and family members stay away. And it's virtually impossible of course to communicate with the natives, or get to know the next door neighbours. 

And so, like Dr Doolittle, one turns to the animals for companionship; whistling to the little birds, observing the slugs and snails in all their soft beauty, and attempting to befriend a very timid but rather fierce looking local cat who likes to sit under a big bush at the top of my back garden, disappearing through a hole in the fence whenever he's approached. 

I've been leaving him a small tin of Gourmet Gold chicken and liver chunks in gravy at night for several weeks now, which, judging by the emptiness of the tin each morning, he seems to enjoy. Indeed, in what I like to interpret as a gesture of gratitude the cat today left a freshly killed (and semi-eaten) rat on the lawn for me to find.       

Now I know that many people find such feline behaviour gross, or might raise a moral objection to cruelty (it's amazing how many self-professed animal lovers are in denial about the murderous and carnivorous nature of reality). But I must admit to feeling rather touched by this attempt to reciprocate kindness and share food.     

I understand that domestic cats have an effect on wildlife numbers, killing many millions of birds, rodents, and other small creatures each year. However - and this might surprise many readers - there is no scientific evidence that predation by moggies is having any serious impact on other species here in the UK.

What the research does show, however, is that rapid loss of natural habitat due to human activity is the major factor in why biodiversity is shrinking; over 60% of British species have significantly declined in recent decades and 10% face extinction. And it's we - not our pets - who are to blame ...

Thoughts on D. H. Lawrence (Stephen Alexander in Conversation with David Brock)

                                   

Back in the far-off summer of 2014, I was interviewed by then Editor of the D. H. Lawrence Newsletter, David Brock, who wanted to know my thoughts on a number of questions that were then troubling him in relation to his hero poet.

As most torpedophiles are not members of the D. H. Lawrence Society and will not therefore have read the published interview, I thought it might be helpful to reproduce extracts of it here, thereby making my own rather ambivalent relationship to Lawrence a little clearer ... 


DB: In her guide to the life and work of D. H. Lawrence entitled The Country of My Heart (1972), Bridget Pugh argues that Lawrence looked deeper into the human soul than any of his contemporaries, concerned as he was with the hidden and unconscious sources of the self. Do you feel that any writers today look as deeply?

SA: Probably not. But then this metaphysical notion of subjective depth is no longer one that greatly troubles us in an essentially non-essential age of irony, inauthenticity, and insincerity. We are far more Wildean in this regard than we are Lawrentian and have become - in Nietzschean terms - superficial out of profundity. Personally, I think this is a good thing and much prefer Lawrence when he sticks to the surface, writing about the importance of fashion for example, than when he indulges in folk psychology and starts speculating about fundamental human desire, feeling, and belief.

DB: Bridget Pugh also writes that Lawrence "saw the invasion of the landscape by the ugliness of industrialism as a reflection of the destruction of natural man removed from his instinctive communion with the rest of the universe ..." Other than by reading and re-reading Lawrence, how do you feel we can regain that vital communion? What hope is there for humanity?

SA: Well, hope isn't something I cling to or seek to offer others; not only does it encourage optimism, but it's one of the three theological virtues upon which Christianity is founded and, like Lawrence, I am, in a sense, with the Anti-Christ, rather than with Jesus and all the saints and angels of heaven. As for humanity, that's something to be overcome, is it not? A form that is restrictive and no longer tenable. Sorry to be so Nietzschean about this once again.

As for the quotation from Bridget Pugh, I'm afraid that doesn't interest me in the least. That's not to say it's wrong: Lawrence clearly subscribed to certain romantic and neo-pagan narratives regarding nature, industrialism, and the vital character of the cosmos. But it's very difficult for us to share his beliefs without sacrificing intellectual integrity. We can have an immensely exciting understanding of the universe we inhabit - thanks to modern science - but we cannot enter again into any kind of religious communion with the earth and stars in good faith. Or, as Lawrence concedes when face to face with the religious rituals of Native America: Sorry, I can no longer cluster at the drum. This might seem like typical English reserve in the face of genuine otherness, but it is rather one of the most honest admissions that Lawrence makes anywhere in his writings. He knows there’s no going back to an earlier way of being.

DB: As Lawrentians, Stephen, how do we justify our joy and our continual celebration of his creative genius? Would Lawrence prefer to have loyal readers, or active followers who put his ideas into practice?

SA: Nietzsche once said that there was only ever one Christian and that he died on the Cross; that for others to call themselves Christians was a fatal misunderstanding. I think we can - and should - feel something similar whenever the term Lawrentians is used. Thus I would answer your question this way: we don’t need to justify our pleasure in reading his books and celebrating his life; there’s no need for apology or explanation here. Those who seek to make others feel guilty about their pleasures are the kind of censor-morons sitting in judgement on life that Lawrence despised and so courageously fought against.

Lawrence would prefer unashamed readers, rather than loyal ones. Like Zarathustra, he would quickly lose patience with followers and tell them that ultimately their task is simply this: Lose me and find yourselves. That’s the key. Unashamed readers must be prepared to challenge Lawrence and recontextualise his ideas; which isn’t the same as simply putting them into practice as if Lawrence supplied a convenient set of dos and don’ts. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze - who happens to be one of Lawrence’s great readers - says the task is to pick up the arrow that he fired into the world and then shoot it anew into the future, in a new direction and at a new target. As a reader - particularly as a reader of a writer like Lawrence - you remain loyal by an act of infidelity.

DB: Do you think that Lawrence Society members should oppose factory farming and care about animal rights?

SA: In principle I’m tempted to say yes. Obviously the question of the animal and its suffering is an important one, although I’m not sure it’s one that is best addressed in terms of ‘rights’. I’d like to think we might develop an altogether different relationship with non-human forms of life - and it’s here that Lawrence might perhaps prove useful.

To be clear on this: I don’t think we should plead the case for animal liberation, or argue that they have specific interests that give rise to certain moral claims; rather, I’m interested in the becoming-animal of man and undermining the singular status of the human. We need to find a post-metaphysical way of thinking man and animal both; one that does away with anthropocentrism and deconstructs the violent hierarchy that places us in opposition to the animal and accords us superiority.

Having said this, whilst you have every right to imagine Lawrence as an ardent animal activist, I’m not sure you’re entitled to imply that those members of the Lawrence Society who don’t concern themselves with the exploitation of animals and who don’t think meat is murder, are somehow morally deficient or missing the point of his work. It should always be remembered that Lawrence was primarily a writer and his concern was language and thus, even when seemingly celebrating the otherness of the animal, be it a bat, snake, or fish, it might be argued that Lawrence is really still just playing textual games on the page. Amit Chaudhuri makes a very powerful argument that even in the famous poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers Lawrence doesn’t accurately describe such things at all, or directly touch on them as things in themselves. Rather, he recreates and imitates them for his own amusement and that of his readers, assembling an exhibition of stuffed creatures; “his collection of textual mannequins, his pantomime of nature”.

DB: You once reminded me that Lawrence thought there was nothing romantic about madness - that it was a tragic waste of sane consciousness. Do you consider that we have an insane and romantic view of the importance of human life and are we wasting our consciousness in this respect?

SA: We certainly have a conceited and somewhat sentimental view of our own importance and one of the things I love most about Lawrence is that, for the most part, he avoids (and combats) anthropocentric vulgarity. Unfortunately, he doesn’t go far enough in his attempt to thoroughly dehumanize nature and remains trapped within what Quentin Meillassoux terms correlationism - i.e., Lawrence continues to make a link between thinking and being and so can never quite accept the possibility of a mind-independent reality.

This is a great shame and a great failing in his work; one which keeps him within a theo-humanist tradition. Ultimately, he’s not really interested in the stars, animals, trees, or other objects, but only in their relation to man, who, in turn, cannot be considered outside of his relation to the world. That’s the contradiction or paradox at the heart of his writing. For whilst he repeatedly insists that he wants to know the great outside - that inhuman space of the savage exterior - like all critical thinkers after Kant Lawrence too is fundamentally more interested in consciousness and language and these concerns keep him tied to a form of correlationism. 

DB: Despite all Lawrence's best efforts, one has a strong sense that most people are still only half alive. Should this concern us, do you think?

SA: No, I don’t think so. As is perhaps clear from some of the earlier answers, I’m not a vitalist and don’t fetishize or privilege being alive over being dead. As Nietzsche pointed out, being alive is only a rare and unusual way of being dead. Death is ultimately a welcome return to material actuality and an escape from complexity and, as Heidegger argued, all being is a being-towards-death. I think Lawrence recognised this as is clear in his late poetry.

Perhaps the undead fascinate more, philosophically-speaking, than the half-alive. The zombie, for example, embodies the Derridean notion of undecidability which so threatens the traditional foundations of Western metaphysics and so-called common sense. Like the vampire, or, more recently, the cyborg, the zombie cannot be classified as either alive or dead. Rather it belongs to the indeterminable realm of the neither/nor whilst also being, paradoxically, both at once.

Zombies not only indicate the limits of our thinking on life and death, but help to subvert all of those other binary oppositions upon which we establish conceptual coherence and build a stable world - but also a world of violent inequality. It might be stretching things a bit, but might we not read the story of The Man Who Died as a piece of zombie fiction?

In Defence of the Slug

I knew the slugs in the garden ate the vegetation and had a particular liking for Maria's flowers (much to her chagrin and my amusement). But until last week I didn't know they feasted also on the dead baby birds that occasionally litter the lawn after a summer downpour.

In other words, whilst I was vaguely aware these naked snails whom many gardeners delight in killing with salt and pellets played a crucial role in the ecosystem by disposing of decaying plant matter, I had no idea they were carrion feeders. Nor did I discover until very recently that some species of slug are predatory and necro-cannibalistic; devouring not only earthworms, but even their dead brethren.               

Nevertheless, I remain sympathetic towards these slimy-bodied hermaphrodites as I am to other animals deemed to be horticultural pests by human beings. Slugs, it seems to me, are more sinned against than sinning, mercilessly preyed upon as they are by a multitude of better-loved garden creatures including frogs, newts, blackbirds, and hedgehogs.      

So leave 'em alone Little Greek: we can always grow new daisies ...

On Non-Referential Aesthetics and the Politics of Silence

Lawrence writes that, as a novelist, it's his primary task to conduct a molecular exploration of the feelings and not comment on molar politics and the great social issues of the day. Besides, other people understand these things much better than him. 

In other words, like Richard Somers, the apolitical protagonist of his novel Kangaroo, Lawrence wants to fight out something with mankind in order to make an opening into the future, but he doesn't want to become hopelessly entangled in history and great events.

Thus Lawrence comes to an understanding that - as a man of letters - his alienation from public life is something he has no choice but to actively sustain; particularly if he wishes to secure a degree of intellectual freedom and transmit in his thinking something that does not and will not allow itself to be codified within conventional political discourse.

Of course, Lawrence is not the only author to display ironic indifference (or insouciance as he calls it) to the world at large. Jane Austen is another novelist whom I admire precisely because she chose to write about the micropolitics of daily life and affairs of the heart whilst staying wonderfully silent on the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, or the massive upheaval caused by industrialization. 

Push comes to shove, I'd rather re-read Pride and Prejudice than War and Peace. And hopefully this explains why I've not written a post on the EU referendum being held in the UK today ...