Object-Oriented Ontology and the Joy of Washing Up (With Reference to the Work of D. H. Lawrence)

Einai gar kei entautha theous

One of the reasons that D. H. Lawrence continues to fascinate is because his work is an attempt to construct a queer form of philosophical realism that is very much object-oriented. Even when, as a novelist, he writes of human subjects, he clearly cares more about their impersonal and, indeed, inhuman elements and how they interact within an ontological network made up of all kinds of other things; be they dead or alive, actual or virtual. For Lawrence, art is primarily an attempt to help us understand how all things – including ourselves – exist within this dynamic network of relations.

Human being, we might say, has its belonging in this network and although Lawrence often suggests that the most important of all relations is that between man and woman, there is of course no such hierarchy in reality. All things may not be equal, but they are all equally things and all relations are established, developed and dissolved on a flat ontological playing field. For a man to be rich in world requires more than the love of a good woman. He has to have also a quick relationship to "snow, bed-bugs, sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food, diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightning, and toilet-paper" [SoTH 183].

Thus it is that so many of Lawrence’s characters only really blossom when they enter into strange and startling new relationships with nonhuman objects; objects which, for Lawrence, even if composed of inert matter as opposed to living tissue, nevertheless exist "in some subtle and complicated tension of vibration which makes them sensitive to external influence and causes them to have an influence on other external objects" [SCAL 77].

This is true irrespective of actual physical contact, although Lawrence encourages his readers to establish joyful small contacts with objects, even offering a philosophical justification for doing the washing up:

"If I wash the dishes I learn a quick, light touch of china and earthenware, the feel of it, the weight and roll and poise of it, the peculiar hotness, the quickness or slowness of its surface. I am at the middle of an infinite complexity of motions and adjustments and quick, apprehensive contacts ... the primal consciousness is alert in me ... which is a pure satisfaction." [RDP 151]

When Lawrence advocates climbing down Pisgah, this is an important aspect of what he means; discovering the sacred in daily life. It's not a new idea, obviously. Even Heraclitus standing before his kitchen stove was keen to impress upon visitors that the gods were present everywhere and in all activities. But it remains an important idea that counters all forms of ascetic idealism that advocate separation from the world of things and devotion to a spiritual life of prayer and meditation.   

Critics have often accused Lawrence of contemptuously dismissing modern life as inauthentic. However, in order to make this charge stick they have to glide over passages such as the above which demonstrate that he was eager to relate his ontological vision to everyday existence and those things that lie closest to hand (such as a bowl of soapy water). 

For Lawrence, no chore was too humble that it didn't warrant being done well and he happily absorbed himself in cooking, cleaning, chopping wood, and milking the cow, whilst his wife lay in bed smoking cigarettes. Indeed, far from washing the dishes, Frieda was prone to breaking them over Lawrence's head - though I suppose this too is a way of demonstrating that matter actually exists and that violence can also give pleasure ...      

Notes:

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985). 

In the first version of ‘Morality and the Novel’, Lawrence offers a different – no less surprising – list of things with which it is crucial to have relations. This includes "children, creatures, cities, skies, trees, flowers, mud, microbes, motor-cars, guns, [and] sewers". See Appendix III of the above text, p. 242.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allen Poe' (Final Version, 1923), in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). 

Holy Cow

Kamadhenu (aka Surabhi)

A bovine-goddess described in Hinduism as the Mother of all Cows 

I've been ruminating recently on the bovine figure of the cow; the most common type of large domesticated ungulate - it's estimated that there are almost one-and-half billion of them - in the world today.

Most are raised as livestock for meat, farmed as dairy cattle, or slaughtered for their hides within a multibillion dollar global industry. And many are kept in truly appalling conditions, suffering constant cruelty and abuse before they eventually meet their violent end at the hands of men who often have zero concern for their welfare and even, it seems, regard these poor beasts with udder contempt.

And this is true even in countries such as India, where cows are venerated and their urine (gomutra) used for (crackpot) medical purposes. It may be a religious belief within Hinduism, for example, that life in all its forms is interconnected and that non-violence (ahimsa) towards all creatures is therefore an ethical obligation, but the fact is even the sacred cow is not fully protected and respect for cattle, whilst widespread, is far from universal.   

Thus, whilst most Indian states have some form of regulation prohibiting the sale and slaughter of cows, these laws vary greatly from state to state and the country still produces and exports a lot of beef and a lot of leather. There are also numerous illegal abattoirs operating across the country. In addition, hundreds of thousands of (often stolen) cows are smuggled by criminal gangs across the border each year into Bangladesh, where they are then brutally dispatched and dismembered (not always in that order).  

Europeans like to believe that their expensive leather goods are made in Italy and that the cows who supplied their skins were killed in a humane manner after leading relatively comfortable lives. But this is a mixture of bad faith and bullshit. For a lot of 'Italian leather' originates from the backstreets of Dhaka, where it's processed in makeshift tanneries in which workers, including children, are subject to atrocious conditions.

Unfortunately, that luxurious leather handbag that you're so proud of and paid so much for, is invariably the result of animal cruelty and human exploitation. And, if that weren't bad enough, the unregulated tanneries located not only in Bangladesh, but all over the developing world - from Brazil to Ethopia and Vietnam - produce eye-watering levels of pollution.

At this point, one feels like sighing with despair. But then one remembers Baudrillard's fabulous essay in which he suggests that Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease - the human variant of BSE or mad cow disease - is the suicidal revenge of a sacred animal whom, in our carnophallogocentric arrogance, we have transformed into a meat-milk-and-leather producing machine, and I start to smile again.

However, if it's true that all the gods reside in the body of Kamadhenu, the Mother of all Cows, as Hindu scripture suggests, then perhaps CJD is less an example of bovine terrorism and more a case of divine retribution: whom the gods wish to destroy, must first have their brains softened ...     

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'Ruminations for Spongiform Encephala', Screened Out, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 2002), pp. 171-75. 

For further reflections on human-cow relations, please click here.

Reflections on the Death of a Cow (with Reference to the Work of Damien Hirst)

Figure 1

Along with sharks, skulls and flies, the artist Damien Hirst obviously has a thing for cows ...

One of the iconic works with which he made his name back in the 1990s, for example, Mother and Child (Divided), is a sculpture comprising four glass tanks supported by signature-style thick white frames, containing a cow and a calf, each cut in two and preserved in a translucent turquiose solution of formaldehyde.

Whatever one may think of the work - whatever may one think of Hirst himself - there's no denying it has a certain devastating beauty coupled with a terrible sense of sadness and loss. For not only is the calf fatally isolated from its mother, but both animals are also bisected and thus self-divided as well as separated from one another. 

Hirst seems to suggest that just as individual integrity is rendered impossible by death, so too is the hope of some kind of heavenly reunion or renconciliation between the generations. Further, Hirst wants the viewer to question why it is that corpses seem to often have a greater fascination and mystery than living beings - and even, once you overcome your initial horror, a greater beauty.

Cattle standing around in a field, he once said, lack the aesthetic interest of his cows suspended in formaldehyde. For the former are little more than soon-to-be beef burgers; dead beasts walking, chewing the cud whilst waiting for slaughter. In other words, they are organic components within an industrial food system that Heidegger describes as essentially genocidal in character and which Derrida brands as carno-phallogocentric.

The violence and injustice of our treatment of nonhuman life, particularly those animals reared on farms exclusively for food and for profit, is powerfully brought home in another of Hirst's works, The Promise of Money (2003):

Figure 2

Now, I'm not sure what Hirst is protesting with this work (if anything). But, to me, it speaks powerfully about the ongoing animal holocaust that many vegetarians, vegans, animal rights activists, and even ethically concerned carnivores are rightly sickened by. Eating well, may involve the sacrifice of animals, but it needn't involve appalling systematic cruelty, nor the symbolic cannibalistic sacrifice of other human beings (due to the voracious greed of those who thrive on such).     

I think Derrida is right to argue the crucial importance of determining a more caring and respectful (almost reverential) way of relating to the living animal in its otherness. If Hirst's sensational strategy of shock and awe can help provoke this, then that's great. Personally, however, I prefer the attempt by D. H. Lawrence to equilibrate with a black-eyed cow called Susan in all her cowy wonder:

"She knows my touch and she goes very still and peaceful, being milked. I, too, I know her smell and her warmth and her feel. And I share some of her cowy silence, when I milk her. [...] And this relation is part of the mystery of love: the individuality on each side, mine and Susan's, suspended in the relationship."

Notes

Figure 1: Damien Hirst, Mother and Child (Divided). This is a photo of the exhibition copy that Hirst created for the Turner Prize retrospective at Tate Britain in 2007. The original work (1993), is in the Astrup Fernley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. For more details, click here.

Figure 2: Damien Hirst: The Promise of Money (2003), Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates  / © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. For more details, click here.  
 
D. H. Lawrence, '...... Love Was Once a Little Boy', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 329-46.

To read more on Lawrence's relationship with Susan the cow, click here.

This post is dedicated to David Brock and Thomas Bonneville.

D. H. Lawrence and Susan, the Black-Eyed Cow

Alexandra Klimas: Susan the Cow (2016)

Oil on canvas (70 x 120 cm)
plusonegallery.com 

As David Brock reminds us in his most recent column in the Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser, whilst living on his ranch in New Mexico, Lawrence acquired a cow which he named Susan.

He happily milked her twice a day and was able to produce a couple of pounds of butter each week. But he was also obliged to spend a good deal of time chasing after her on horseback, as Susan was prone to wandering off into the surrounding hills; something he was less pleased about.
 
For the American James Joyce scholar, William York Tindall, Susan is best thought of as a symbol rather than as an actual cow. For it is as a symbol that she provides the critic with a key to Lawrence's philosophy and art. Indeed, symbolic Susan might even help us, says Tindall, come to a better understanding of some of the wider problems within literature and society. Thus it is that in his 1939 study of Lawrence and Susan, Tindall has very little to say about the latter.

This is disappointing - and also, I think, mistaken. For Lawrence himself makes it very clear in his own writings on Susan that she is not to be thought of as a symbol, or metaphor, or a piece of livestock whose function is simply to produce milk like a machine, but as a living creature with her own non-human reality.

For Lawrence, the fact that birds, beasts and flowers - indeed, all things - exist independently of man is the essential point to make. And the great challenge, this being the case, is to find a way to come into touch with things without compromising their integrity or falling into anthropomorphism and projecting one's own characteristics and values onto them.

Thus it is that Lawrence is desperate to discover how, as a man, he can equilibrate himself with black-eyed Susan in all her cowy mystery. It isn't easy. For although there's a sort of relation between them, neither can ever really know the other (certainly not in full). But still they can sense one another and she can swing her tail in his face when he sits behind her, making him mad.

And this physical relationship hinges, like all relationships, on a form of desire:

"She knows my touch and she goes very still and peaceful, being milked. I, too, I know her smell and her warmth and her feel. And I share some of her cowy silence, when I milk her. [...] And this relation is part of the mystery of love: the individuality on each side, mine and Susan's, suspended in the relationship."

Tindall refers to these lines from '... Love Was Once a Little Boy' in the preface to his study, but seems more than a little embarrassed by them; explaining that whilst "it cannot be denied that [Lawrence] sounds foolish", he was a genius and genius "is not always reasonable".  

Well, I don't think Lawrence sounds foolish here; in fact, I think he's being perfectly reasonable and that the lines quoted are not only very beautiful, but also philosophically of great interest. It's Tindall, I'm afraid, who is being crass and displaying a remarkable non-affinity with his subject.  


See:

David Brock, 'D. H. Lawrence and his well-loved pet cow named Susan', Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser, (1 Dec 2017). 

D. H. Lawrence, '...... Love Was Once a Little Boy', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 329-46.

William York Tindall, D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow, (Columbia University Press, 1939).

For a related post to this one, click here.

Lipstick Traces: Lessons for Lucia

Lucia Pica photographed by Daniel Jackson 

Vogue (Sept 2015)

Like many people, when I heard a couple of years ago that Italian-born, London-based Lucia Pica had been appointed creative director at Chanel cosmetics, I was very happy for her and very hopeful of what we might expect; for she is undoubtedly a makeup artist with a bold and brilliant understanding of colour and unafraid of taking risks.

Expectations were further raised when it was revealed that her first collection for the label would in part be inspired by the work of Jean Baudrillard; that we could finally delight in nail polish and lipstick that pops with hyperreal playfulness.  

Unfortunately, however, if you take time to read interviews with Ms Pica, you discover that she subscribes to a disappointing model of aesthetic idealism, in which beauty is something essential and makeup merely a method of enhancement that should never be allowed to mask the natural character of a face, so that the real woman can shine through.

In other words, the ultimate personal expression is that of your own true self.   

Having resisted the urge to vomit, I'd like - at the risk of repeating what I've said elsewhere on this blog - to provide some lessons for Lucia on artifice and nature (and the nature of artifice), in relation to the question of Woman conceived in terms of style and seduction ...  

1. Woman is a myth activated through a system of signs encoded, for example, in art and fashion.

2. Those things which serve to construct her femininity, such as her shoes, her makeup and her lingerie, matter more than her biology. For whilst the latter determines her as a female belonging to a species of domestic animal, it does not determine her as a woman. In other words, her being is not naturally given; she is not born a woman, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, but becomes such via culture.

3. Because of this, woman fully understands the need for illusion and defends the right to lie. She uses cosmetics not because she wishes to conceal an essence or a hidden reality beneath appearance, but because she has no inner self and only wants to make us think she does. To mistake the exceeding of nature for a crude camouflaging of the truth, is to commit a cardinal error. Makeup isn't false - it's the falser than false and so recuperates a kind of superior innocence.       

4. Further, via a confident and sophisticated use of clothes and cosmetics, a woman can strike a blow against the puritanical drabness of the world with its neutral tones and sensible footwear, rediscovering the power of witchcraft known as glamour. As Baudelaire writes:

"Woman is quite within her rights, indeed she is even accomplishing a kind of duty, when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural; she has to astonish and charm us; as an idol, she is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored. [...] It matters but little that [her] artifice and trickery are known to all, so long as their success is assured and their effect always irresistible."

5. If this means that woman risks surrendering to emptiness and reification on the one hand, whilst becoming commodified and fetishized on the other, this need not necessarily be such a bad thing; models, actresses and prostitutes, for example, have all cleverly turned their object status and vacancy into an art, exploiting what Walter Benjamin termed the sex appeal of the inorganic (i.e. that pale power of seduction and stillness founded upon the ecstasy of a blank gaze and a Pan Am smile).   

6. Finally, Lucia, you might like to consider how it is only at the symbolic level of appearances that systems become fragile and only via enchantment that the power and meaning of these systems becomes vulnerable. In other words, the idiosyncratic feminism of Coco Chanel - in which you profess an interest - needs to be understood as a politics of style that is all about a light manipulation of appearances, rather than a politics of desire and identity that still concerns itself with libidinal and psychological depths.

Why become fixated on true feelings and ontological foundations, when you can just add more lipstick and attack?

See:

Stephen Alexander, Philosophy on the Catwalk (Blind Cupid Press, 2011).

Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life' in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne, (Phaidon Press, 2006).

Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer, (St. Martin's Press, 1990).

Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow, (University of Chicago Press, 1979).

Lipstick Traces (with Reference to the Case of Cleopatra)

Zabrena: Historically Accurate: Ancient Egypt / Cleopatra Makeup Tutorial

YouTube (8 Oct 2014): click here. 

One of the questions I find endlessly fascinating is that of nature and artifice and the nature of artifice in relation to femininity.

It's a question that invariably takes us back to Baudelaire who suggests that without makeup Woman - as a figment of the pornographic imagination and not merely as a lump of flesh with distinct reproductive organs from the male - not only fails to excite or interest, but is less than human. It is only as a cultural-cosmetic effect that she elevates herself above her animal biology and captures the hearts and minds of men who would otherwise happily make do with other pleasures.      

For as Baudelaire admits, woman is not an animal whose component parts - even when pleasingly assembled and proportioned - provide a perfect example of harmony; "she is not even that type of pure beauty which the sculptor can mentally evoke in the course of his sternest meditations". In order to cast her complex spell of enchantment, she needs to adorn and thus enhance her physical attributes. 

Take the mouth, for example: who in their right mind would ever have dreamt of kissing the lips of a mucous-lined orifice with two rows of sharp teeth - and, indeed, exploring such with their own tongue or virile member - were those lips not first painted in an irresistible shade?

For whilst a smile, betraying as it does a certain vulnerability, may attract the attention of a man, I doubt that alone would be enough to persuade to perversion. And, let's be clear about this, oral sex - which includes French kissing - is an obvious abberation, involving as it does a form of what Freud terms anatomical transgression.

Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, Isis Reborn, and a skilled fellatrix, knew exactly what she was doing when she applied crushed beetle juice in a beeswax base to her lips in order to stain them deep carmine red.

As Adam Ant once put it: She was a wide-mouthed girl ...    

See: 

Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life' in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. by Jonathan Mayne, (Phaidon Press, 1995): click here to read online. 

Sigmund Freud, 'The Sexual Aberrations', in Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory, trans. A. A. Brill (NY, 1910): click here to read online.

Play:

Adam and the Ants, 'Cleopatra', Dirk Wears White Sox, (Do It Records, 1979): click here to listen on YouTube.

Reflections on Wittgenstein's Rhino

Albrecht Dürer: The Rhinoceros (1515)

Even many non-philosophers know two stories concerning Wittgenstein's time at Cambridge: the first, an amusing confrontation with Karl Popper in October 1946 involving a poker, was the subject of a best-selling book by David Edmonds and John Eidinow; the second, an encounter between Bertrand Russell and his young Austrian student thirty-five years earlier, involving a discussion that centred on the question of whether or not there was a rhinoceros in the room ...

In brief, Russell wanted Wittgenstein to concede that we can have empirical knowledge of the world by admitting that there was, in fact, no rhino present. But the latter refused to do so - even after Russell amusingly began looking for the beast under the desk to no avail. Whilst Wittgenstein may have had a point, one can't help thinking he was, in this instance (as in others), being a bit of a dick.

Indeed, I'm not sure I understand the point he's trying to make or why he can't simply accept the factual non-presence of the rhino, given that in his early work he maintains that only such propositions can legitimately be asserted. But then, my understanding of Wittgenstein's thinking is limited (and probably inaccurate) due to its having been shaped primarily by drunken discussions in the Barley Mow pub many years ago.        

At this very early stage in their relationship, Russell worried that Wittgenstein was a crank, rather than a philosophical genius. I can imagine how he felt, for I experience the same concern whenever I correspond with a friend of mine, let's call him Mr X, who also likes to deny - or at least contest - the propositions of natural science and refuse to accept that there is a mind-independent reality about which we can speak with confidence.

For Mr X, the world consists neither of facts nor of things, but only of interpretations and all descriptions are essentially metaphorical. He thus posits a daemonic ontology that is mytho-poetic rather than material-scientific in character. Rather than agree there was no rhino in the room, Mr X would sooner insist on its invisibility, or point out that imaginary objects are also real even if physically not present as actual entities; thus his (psycho) logical belief also in supernatural beings.

For Mr X, as for Wittgenstein (though for different reasons), Russell's seemingly commonsensical proposition is questionable on the grounds that it doesn't meaningfully assert anything about the world - certainly nothing upon which we can ever be completely certain - and is, therefore, what Wittgenstein terms in the Tractatus a 'nonsensical pseudo-proposition' [4.1272] (i.e. one that refers us only to the logic of language by which we talk about the world and not to things in themselves). 

And so, perhaps Wittgenstein wasn't being a dick after all ... Perhaps, as J. F. Macdonald argues, it was Russell who profoundly misunderstood matters and who, by attempting to ridicule the younger man, was the one acting like a dick. Wittgenstein, says MacDonald, wasn't rejecting empirical propositions; rather, he was rejecting propositions that posed as such, but were not, and discreetly "making a point about what can be meaningfully said, not about what we don't know".

And perhaps I too should learn to listen more carefully to what it is Mr X is saying and not be so quick to dismiss it as absurd, or him as foolish ... For I fear this reveals merely my own philosophical arrogance and limitations. 


Notes

Details of the conversation between Russell and Wittgenstein on the rhinoceros can be found in Russell's letters from the period to Lady Ottoline Morell (reprinted in Ray Monk's biography, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, (Vintage, 1990), pp. 38-40), and in Russell's article in Mind Vol. 60, issue 239 (July 1951), pp. 297-98, which served as an obituary notice for Wittgenstein who died in April of that year.

Click here to read the above article online, noting how Russell misremembers the conversation concerning a hippo, not a rhino.

The essay by J. F. MacDonald from which I quote, 'Russell, Wittgenstein and the problem of the rhinoceros', is in the Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 31 (4), (1993), pp. 409-24, but can also be found in full online at the Rhino Resource Center (the world's largest rhino information website): click here.   

The book by Edmonds and Eidinow that I mention at the beginning of the post - Wittgenstein's Poker: the story of a 10-minute argument between two great philosophers - was published by Faber in 2001.

Finally, readers interested in directly engaging with the early Wittgenstein should either get hold of a copy of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), or click here to read the original 1922 edition as an ebook trans. C. K. Ogden, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

This post is for Mr X and Andy G.

Cut the Crap: In Praise of Occam's Razor

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem

Occam's razor is a convenient problem-solving principle attributed to a 14th-century English monk, scholastic philosopher and theologian, William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347), which states that among competing theories, the simplest (i.e., the one with fewest underlying assumptions) is, more often that not, likely to be correct and that complexity should not be valued for its own sake or unnecessarily fetishised.

Obviously, all events are open to interpretation and for any accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there will be a large number of alternative (often ad hoc) hypotheses. Thus we need something that helps us cut the crap and cut to the chase and Occam's razor does the job - although it should be noted that it functions more as a heuristic guide, rather than an irrefutable method for determining what's right.

It does, however, encourage and enable us to choose between competing truth-claims by opening them up to falsification and for that I'm grateful; just as I'm also grateful that it serves as a weapon in the fight against occultists, conspiracy theorists, and crackpots of every description for whom nothing is ever easy or as it appears and there's always a darker, deeper, more diabolical level of meaning to be uncovered. 

When hearing the sound of hooves on cobblestone outside your window, it's reasonable to assume it's someone on horseback and not that there's a unicorn passing by, or that a member of a sinister cult or secret government agency must have released a zebra from the local zoo in order to spread panic and confusion amongst members of the general public.

The law of parsimony helps us understand and appreciate this by taming the wildness of our imagination and curbing our enthusiasm for the elaborate and fanciful. As Bertrand Russell put it in his own reworking of Occam's razor: "Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities."         

Having said that, I realise that Occam's razor is itself a metaphysical assumption; that there's little empirical evidence that the world is actually straightforward and transparent, or that simple accounts are more inherently true than weirdly complex ones. 

I also concede that Occam's razor is an inherently conservative device that tends to reinforce the general consensus of opinion and cut out opportunities to speculate, fantasise, and poetically re-imagine events. Artists, and those who like to daydream and listen to the (irrational) murmurs of their unconscious, as well as pataphysicists for whom knowledge is not only complex, but ambiguous, paradoxical and radically inconsistent, will naturally have an instinctive dislike for it.    

But, nevertheless, I think the scientific method and the axioms upon which it's based - there's an objective reality that is subject to natural laws which we can understand - is something worth defending, particularly in this present time of resurgent religiosity. And Occam's razor generally lends support to these axioms (although, of course, it doesn't prove them).

Afternote

An article by Chris Chatham that shows the limitations (or bluntness) of Occam's razor - particularly within a scientific context - has been brought to my attention by Simon Solomon: click here. It seems that Whitehead offers us the best perspective on this topic: "The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.'" 

Unravelling the Mystery of the Sweater Girls 2: The Strange Case of Francine Gottfried

Francine Gottfried being escorted by two plainclothes police officers

through crowds of men on the way to work in September 1968

Photo: New York Daily News / Getty Images

Francine Gottfried, a former clerical worker in New York City's financial district, isn't remembered by many people today. But, for a fortnight in September 1968, she was the talk of the town and dubbed by the press as Wall Street's Sweater Girl after increasing numbers of men began watching and following her as she walked to work, dressed in a manner that emphasised her curvaceous figure.

And when I say increasing numbers of men, I mean a lot of men; crowds of men forming spontaneously, like bees round a honey pot, in what we would today term flash mob fashion, all hoping for the chance to perversely gaze upon Francine's ample bosom.

Miss Gottfried had started work at a data processing centre of a large bank in May of '68. By late August, a small group of voyeurs had noticed her and the fact that she always passed them at the same time each day. Word soon spread amongst their friends and colleagues and the number of men who came to observe her grew exponentially larger. By mid-September, an estimated 2,000 men were waiting to catch a glimpse of the 21-year-old Jewish girl.

By this point, the crowd itself had become the phenomenon, drawing more and more people to it. On September 19, it was estimated that a crowd of over 5,000 financial district employees spent their lunchtime waiting for a 5' 3" brunette to exit the BMT station dressed in a tight yellow sweater and a miniskirt. Such was the chaos, that the police were obliged to close the streets and escort Francine to work. Trading on Wall Street was virtually suspended and the press reported that dignified brokers had seemingly lost their minds.

The following day, the crowd had doubled in size and over 10,000 spectators waited for Miss Gottfried. Unfortunately, their wait was in vain, as her boss had called her and requested she stay home until the mania passed. Publicists attempted to find a suitable replacement for Francine, including the stripper, Ronnie Bell, who worked at a local burlesque house. But the magic spell was broken and the fuss died down as quickly as it had arisen.

Sadly, Francine's hopes of landing a modelling contract and possible movie career came to nothing and she faded back into obscurity; though not before she got to have dinner with the Apollo 10 astronauts and Esquire magazine presented her with a Dubious Achievement award. Accounts of the crowd-gathering phenomenon she triggered also appeared in a number of sociological studies.

What this tells us about sexual politics - and male sexual behaviour in particular - I'll leave for readers to decide. Instead, I'll close, if I may, with a line from Bob Hope, who, when asked to comment on the mysterious appeal of the Sweater Girl, replied: "I don't know, but that's one mystery I'd sure like to unravel."

To read part one of this post, please click here.

Unravelling the Mystery of the Sweater Girls

Lana Turner as Mary Clay in They Won't Forget 

(dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1937): the original Sweater Girl

When fondly recalling those busty beauties of the 1940s and 50s, in their tight cashmere sweaters worn over highly structured, conically shaped bullet-bras designed to lift and separate, we often think of movie stars such as Jayne Mansfield, Jane Russell, and - of course - Lana Turner (described by one critic as the most glamorous woman in the history of cinema).

But the Sweater Girl was by no means merely a figment of the Hollywood imagination.

In fact, the above actresses were merely adopting what was already a popular look amongst bobby-soxers who desired maximum projection; a youthful fashion trend viewed with alarm by those who saw aggressively pointed breasts as a sure sign of moral decline. As a concerned police chief famously asked: What kind of wives and mothers would these girls become? 

Of course, no one thought to ask at the time what kind of husbands and fathers breast fetishizing men might make; they were allowed and encouraged to indulge their culturally sanctioned mazophilia and carry on ogling young women in the streets, in the pages of pin-up magazines, and on screen.

Indeed, this all-American obsession and national pastime wasn't to peak until the autumn of 1968, when a young office worker named Francine Gottfried briefly achieved celebrity status as Wall Street's Sweater Girl ...


Click here to go to part two of this post on the strange case of Francine Gottfried.

Notes on Identity Politics and Intersectionality

Marc-Édouard Nabe: Lawrence assis (2007)

Ink and watercolour (24 x 32 cm)

marcedouardnabe.com

The ideal man! And which is he, if you please? 

There are other men in me, besides this patient ass who sits here in a tweed jacket. 

I'm not a fan of identity politics whose adherents, it seems to me, start off by affirming their difference, only to end by reinforcing a narrow, narcissistic and needy conception of self based upon a reactive morality that fetishizes victimhood and reinforces the very marginalization that they complain about via a process of auto-segregation. Thus, whenever I turn on the TV and hear some politician or activist begin a sentence with the words 'Speaking as ...' X, Y, or Z, I immediately want to throw something at the screen.

It's not that I demand people think of themselves as impersonal abstractions founded upon some fantasy of a universal subject. But I don't want them to speak either as if they were not only defined but determined by some piece of bio-cultural fate and had entirely forgotten the strategic (and ironic) nature of their essentialism. 

What, then, do I want?

I suppose it's a kind of ontological intersectionality. That is to say, I want individuals to acknowledge that the self is a crossroads amidst a dark forest; that the grammatical unity of the 'I' disguises a vibrant plurality of often competing forces. Of course, this is something that many poets, philosophers, and theorists have acknowledged, including D. H. Lawrence in his astonishing Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) ...

From the opening line of his chapter on Benjamin Franklin, Lawrence makes it clear what his theme is going to be: I am many men. And because his self is multiple (and non-ideal) in nature, he can never be perfected. At the very least, we are all of us double and the self we like to think we are and present to the world is twinned with "a strange and fugitive self shut out and howling like a wolf".

This, I think, calls for a queer politics; but it problematizes any naive (single-issue) identity politics. Those who would speak as if they were destined only by their race, gender, or sexuality, for example, deny their own complexity and, in so doing, restrict their own freedom; for how can anyone be free, without an illimitable background? 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Benjamin Franklin', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 

The original 1923 text is available online thanks to the University of Virginia and can be accessed by clicking here.

Readers interested in the theory of intersectionality as conceived by Kimberlé Crenshaw and in how it's currently used - and misused - within contemporary debate, might like to read Eleanor Robertson's article 'Intersectional-what? Feminism's problem with jargon is that any idiot can pick it up and have a go', in The Guardian, (30 Sept 2017): click here. 

I realise, of course, that I would probably be one of the idiots that Robertson refers to; i.e. one who has appropriated a term without really caring about its origin, or showing due fidelity to its original meaning. 

Becoming-Other (Part 2): Alien Sympathy and the Poetic Imagination (With Reference to the Work of D. H. Lawrence)

Marc-Édouard Nabe: Lawrence sauvage (2009)

marcedouardnabe.com

In an essay entitled 'On Being a Man', Lawrence argues that it's very easy to know and to understand the other person as a person, but not so easy to know and to understand them as an impersonal Other who exists as a force of pure alterity and as an actual being in the world, independently of one's self.

For this requires what he calls a thought-adventure - an instinctive-intuitive process that starts in the blood and not in the mind and involves the taking of a double risk: "First, [one] must go forth and meet life in the body. Then [one] must face the result in [one's] mind."

To illustrate what he means, Lawrence asks us to imagine him sitting on a train. A stranger enters the compartment and is instantly recognizable as a white, middle-class, middle-aged, Englishman. With just a quick glance, says Lawrence, he can tell a great deal. The strangeness of the stranger - and thus the adventure of knowing him - is therefore strictly limited.

But what if the stranger is none of the above; what if, for example, they belong to a different race? Then, says Lawrence, he is unable to proceed quite so confidently with his characterization of the stranger:

"It is not enough for me to glance at a black face and say: He is a negro. As he sits next to me, there is a faint uneasy movement in my blood. A strange vibration comes from him, which causes a slight disturbance in my own vibration. There is a slight odour in my nostrils. And above all, even if I shut my eyes, there is a strange presence in contact with me.

      I now can no longer proceed from what I am and what I know I am, to what I know him to be. I am not a nigger and so I can't quite know a nigger, and I can never fully 'understand' him. 

      What then? It's an impasse.
      Then, I have three courses open. I can just plank down the word Nigger, and having labelled him, finished with him! Or I can try to track him down in terms of my own knowledge. That is, understand him as I understand any other individual. 

      Or I can do a third thing. I can admit that my blood is disturbed, that something comes from him and interferes with my normal vibration. Admitting so much, I can either put up a resistance, and insulate myself. Or I can allow the disturbance to continue, because, after all, there is some peculiar alien sympathy between us."

When it comes to the question of race relations, this, I think, is an absolutely crucial passage. If we wish to overcome common prejudice and the urge to stereotype, then, like Lawrence, we must allow our sense of self to be disrupted by the otherness of the Other and admit the peculiar alien sympathy between us.

This doesn't mean cultural appropriation, wearing black face, and pretending we are all one and the same under the skin, as idealists such as Boglarka Balogh pretend when they posit an ahistorical model of Humanity. It means, rather, exercising our poetic sensibility - as Lawrence exercises in an extraordinary verse found in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), in which he effects a becoming-negroid beneath the radiation of a dark, tropical sun:


Behold my hair twisting and going black.
Behold my eyes turn tawny yellow
Negroid;
See the milk of northern spume
Coagulating in my veins
Aromatic as frankincense.


The mistake that Balogh makes is that instead of peculiar alien sympathy, she substitutes an ideal form of moral sympathy that is rooted in her own ego. In other words, whilst she genuinely feels very sorry for people who are less privileged than herself, she lacks the ability to feel with them or be radically altered by the otherness of others. She can only see her own smiling face reflected in everyone and everything.

Ultimately, black people don't want white people to love them; for it's not a question of eros. And they don't care if white people fail to understand them; for neither is it a question of logos. They simply want a little respect and to be accorded what's proper to them as men and women; in other words, racial ethics is a question of thymos. 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'On Being a Man', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 214-15. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Tropic', Birds, Beasts and Flowers, (1923). This poem can be read in full online by clicking here.

Those interested in Lawrence's important concept of sympathy might like to see the essay on Walt Whitman in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), in which he critiques the idea of merging into One Identity and exposes the danger of confusing sympathy with the Christian ideals of love and charity. The passage concerning the right conduct of a white poet with regard to a negro slave, obviously has particular relevance to our discussion above. Click here to read online.

To read part one of this post on the case of Boglarka Balogh, click here.

Becoming-Other (Part 1): The Case of Boglarka Balogh

Seven types of digital blackface produced by Boglarka Balogh 

(with the assistance of graphic artist Csaba Szábó)

boredpanda.com

I'm sure that some readers will recall the amusing case of Boglarka Balogh, the blonde, blue-eyed Hungarian idealist, who naively published a series of self-portraits in which she had digitally transposed her own facial features on to those of seven African tribal women, instantly provoking a furious online reaction. 

The project was intended to raise awareness of the difficulties faced by such women and to celebrate their unique beauty and cultural diversity. But Balogh, a human rights lawyer and journalist, was swiftly - often brutally - informed that, despite her good intentions, the images were offensive, degrading, and narcissistic.

It seems no matter how woke you may be - and no matter how skilled you are with the latest photo editing software - blackface is never acceptable and white people should stay in their own lane.

Not wanting to add insult to injury, Balogh made no reply to her critics and removed her work from the Bored Panda blog on which she'd posted it (though not before it had already received over 130,000 views), advising everyone to keep calm and love all humanity.

Obviously, such advice is inadequate as well as nauseating. But how then should one respond to this case and the issues raised? The answer, I think, has to do with a queer form of alien sympathy and the poetic imagination. And we can discover why by turning to the work of D. H. Lawrence ...

Click here to read part 2 of this post.

Jews of the Wrong Sort: Notes on D. H. Lawrence and Anti-Semitism

Honor Blackman as Mrs Fawcett in The Virgin and the Gypsy 
dir. Christopher Miles (1970)

An angry email arrives in my inbox (not for the first time):

"Dear Stephen Alexander,

I was extremely disappointed to find the expression 'Jews of the wrong sort' appearing in one of your recent posts (Orophobia, 16 Nov 2017), without any word of commentary or any condemnation of this racist phrase borrowed from D. H. Lawrence, a well-known antisemite. This kind of indiscretion brings shame on you and what is, in many respects, an excellent blog."*    

There are several things I'd like to say in response to this ...

Firstly, like Sylvia Plath, I'm someone who writes and identifies as a bit of a Jew, as I make clear in an early post where I reveal that key influences on my thinking include Jacques Derrida, Malcolm McLaren, and Larry David: click here. I'm certain that, for some, these three figures would also represent Jews of the wrong sort, i.e. provocateurs who gaily deconstruct the metaphysical illusions and sentimental ideals by which the majority choose to live.

Secondly, Lawrence - if it is in fact Lawrence speaking in The Captain's Doll and not an anonymous narrator offering either an indirect rendering of the thoughts of the protagonist or their own (ironic) commentary - is, like me, clearly in favour of sardonic individuals who seek to curb the enthusiasm of Bergheil romantics, such as Hannele, and encourage the difficult descent into the what Heidegger terms the nearness of the nearest (even if this risks a fall into gross materialism).

Thus Lawrence's attitude with reference to this question, as to many others concerning race, is ultimately complex and ambiguous (sometimes outrageously inconsistent) and The Captain's Doll is a text that remains highly resistant to any final interpretation.

Personally, I would argue that, for Lawrence, Jews of the wrong sort are people very much of the right sort. That is to say, very much his sort (just as they are my sort). And this is so because his status as an outsider obliged him to identify with groups and individuals whom society often holds in contempt; not just Jews, but also Gypsies, for example.

Thus, in The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930), it's clear where Lawrence's sympathies lie; with a 36-year-old Jewish woman, Mrs Fawcett, who has abandoned her husband and two young children in order to be with a much younger man; and a good-looking traveller, called Joe Boswell, who takes a shine to the 19-year-old daughter of an Anglican vicar.

It's the narrow domesticity and mean-spirited authority of the familial regime that imposes moral restrictions on life in the name of propriety, which Lawrence despises and mercilessly lampoons throughout the novel. He instinctively sides with all those who are, due to their marginalization and difference, implicitly opposed to such. This makes him a far more radical figure than many of his critics wish to concede ...            

See:

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Virgin and the Gipsy', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones, and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Ronald Granofsky, '"Jews of the Wrong Sort": D. H. Lawrence and Race', Journal of Modern Literature (Indiana University Press), Vol. 23, No. 2 (Winter, 1999-2000), pp. 209-23. 

Judith Ruderman, Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence: Indians, Gypsies, and Jews (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
 
*Note: The author kindly gave me permission to quote from her email, but asked that she remain anonymous.

Peter Sloterdijk and the Question of Anthropotechnics

Polity Press (2013)

Anthropotechnics is a term widely used today across numerous fields of study and with many different meanings. For some, it simply concerns the close interaction of man and machine. For others, however, with more of a background in Nietzschean philosophy, it refers to the manner in which bios (i.e. the raw material of the flesh) is given shape by a combination of culture and cruelty, or what Peter Sloterdijk likes to think of as existential acrobatics.

That is to say, learning how best not only to live, but to achieve a level of physical and mental agility via extensive training techniques that enable one to perform extraordinary feats as a human being (to dance, to tumble, and to walk on tiptoe). 

If this poetics of being can be furthered via a little genetic tinkering here and there or some form of selective breeding, then Sloterdijk seems fairly relaxed about this. In Rules for the Human Zoo, for example, he suggests that in a transhuman era in which traditional methods of enhancing the self - such as reading the right books - are losing their power, then biomedical engineering might be embraced as an exciting new opportunity: Vorsprung durch Technik ...

Unfortunately, Sloterdijk's eugenic speculation was regarded by some - including the grand old man of German critical theory Jürgen Habermas - as politically and philosophically pernicious and Sloterdijk was accused of wilful provocation and crypto-fascism (the fact that the above text was written in response to Heidegger didn't help matters).

To his credit, however, Sloterdijk stuck to his anthropotechnical guns and a decade later published a book translated into English as You Must Change Your Life - a work in which he again takes up the idea of human being not as something one is born, or as a fixed essence, but as something one becomes; an ever-changing work-in-progress subject to individual and collective techniques of transformation.    

Ultimately, says Sloterdijk, human beings are self-creating, self-disciplining animals and the history of human evolution is a vertical history of anthropotechnics. Again, it's impossible not to hear echoes of Nietzsche and those who have written in his shadow, such as Michel Foucault, in all of this; indeed, one might ask why read Sloterdijk when one can read Nietzsche and Foucault, both of whom write more beautifully in my view. 

Perhaps Keith Ansell-Pearson provides an answer to this in the effusive opening paragraph of his review of Sloterdijk's work:

"Peter Sloterdijk must be the most erudite man currently dwelling on the planet. He has fresh and novel insights into whatever he’s discussing at any particular moment. His recently translated book You Must Change Your Life is a tour de force that engages the history of philosophy, religion, and thought, both Western and Eastern, in ways that make you think deeply about the evolution of the human being these past few thousand years. As if this weren’t already enough, Sloterdijk is also concerned with the future, and on a planetary scale. [...] Sloterdijk thinks there is a new global ecological and economic imperative facing us today, and to this we need to respond with a new sublime."

And so, if you want an ambitious, complex, rather sprawling but at times amusing 21st-century spin on the care of the self in terms of aesthetics, asceticism and athleticism, inspired by Nietzsche, but which also takes in the work of Rilke, Kafka, Wittgenstein, and L. Ron Hubbard along the way, then this may very well be the book for you.    

Personally, however, I continue to have reservations; not least with the text's grandness of narrative and Sloterdijk's authorial grandiosity. For me, a little modesty would have been nice - and, for the record, I really don't like to see the word mußt in a book title (even if it is a borrowing from a poet).   

See:

Peter Sloterdijk, 'Rules for the Human Zoo: a response to the Letter on Humanism', trans. Mary Varney Rorty, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 27 (2009), pp. 12-28. Click here to read as a pdf online.

Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics, trans. Wieland Hoban (Polity Press, 2013).

Keith Ansell-Pearson, 'Philosophy of the Acrobat: On Peter Sloterdijk', Los Angeles Review of Books, (July 8, 2013): click here to read the online version from which I quote. 

Orophobia (With Reference to the Case of Alexander Hepburn)

Casper David Friedrich: 

Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1818)

[Oder typischer romantischer Bullshit]

I don't like mountains and can never decide whether it's more depressing to be stuck at the foot of one, or atop the highest peak; the crushing claustrophobia of steep rock looming naked and inhuman, contra the radiant spiritual uplift of ice and snow - which is worse?

Either way, I suffer from a form of acute mountain sickness which has more to do with a philo-pathological disposition than with a lack of oxygen or trouble adjusting to altitude. I don't like being made to feel small and insignificant before what is ultimately just an elevation of the earth's surface, pushed up by tectonic activity (i.e., a large bump when all's said and done); but neither do I like submitting to Alpine ecstasy and being whooshed away into another world and another (higher) life and the promise of icy immortality.   

This is why I'm very sympathetic to the sceptical - some would say orophobic - reaction of Alexander Hepburn when he is taken by his German mistress, Hannele, to the popular Tyrolean resort of Kaprun, in order to experience the majesty of God's mountains.

Despite her strident insistence that the latter are wonderful and empowering, Hepburn soon expresses his disillusion and distaste. For, in his heart of hearts, he loathed the mountains, which seemed to him almost obscene in their unimaginably huge weight and size. As he tells Hannele, he is no mountain-topper or snow-bird, preferring to live as close as possible to sea-level at all times.

Lawrence writes:

"A dark flame suddenly went over his face.
     'Yes,' he said, 'I hate them, I hate them. I hate their snow and their affectation.'
     'Affectation!' she laughed. 'Oh! Even the mountains are affected for you, are they?'

     'Yes,' he said. 'Their loftiness and their uplift. I hate their uplift. I hate people prancing on mountain-tops and feeling exalted. I’d like to make them all stop up there, on their mountain-tops, and chew ice to fill their stomachs. I wouldn't let them down again, I wouldn't. I hate it all, I tell you; I hate it.'"

 Perhaps not surprisingly, Hannele is a little taken aback by this outburst:

"'You must be a little mad' she said superbly 'to talk like that about the mountains. They are so much bigger than you.'
     'No', he said. 'No! They are not.'

   'What!' she laughed aloud. 'The mountains are not bigger than you? But you are extraordinary.'

     'They are not bigger than me' he cried. 'Any more than you are bigger than me if you stand on a ladder. They are not bigger than me. They are less than me.'
      'Oh! Oh!' she cried in wonder and ridicule. 'The mountains are less than you.' 
      'Yes,' he cried, 'they are less.'"

Hannele mistakes this for megalomania, but, actually, it isn't that. It is, rather, a noble refusal to be intimidated by grandeur, be it divine or natural in origin, and a rejection of romantic idealism founded upon notions of transcendence and the sublime. In other words, Hepburn is attempting to curb his - and Hannele's - enthusiasm; something which I think a (pretty) good thing.

Indeed, for me, Lawrence is at his best not when indulging his penchant for theo-poetic speculation (sorry Catherine), but, rather, being sardonic and stubbornly down-to-earth; like one of those Jews of the wrong sort whom Hepburn encounters at his hotel; imparting a "wholesome breath of sanity, disillusion, unsentimentality to the excited Bergheil atmosphere".

Ultimately, as much as Lawrence wishes to make life seem glamorous and rich with cosmic significance, he doesn't want men and women to sprout wings of the spirit too often; nor pose as solitary superhuman beings on mountain summits, as if belonging to a glacial world sufficient unto itself and devoid of cabbages.

His great teaching, rather, is to climb down Pisgah and for man to affirm the horizontal limitations of his own flesh and mortality.  

Notes

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll' in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, edited by Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 2002), chapters XIV-XVIII. 

Note: The Captain's Doll (1923) can be read online as an eBook thanks to Project Gutenberg of Australia: click here.

See also the fascinating article by Catherine Brown, 'Climbing Down the Alpine Pisgah: Lawrence and the Alps', which explores Lawrence's relationship to the mountains in much more detail: click here. 

Torpedo the Ark Means: Everything's Funny (5th Anniversary Reflections on the Death of a Parakeet)

Sorry about your bird ...

The phrase torpedo the ark - borrowed from Ibsen - is polysemic. That is to say, it has multiple meanings within a semantic field and thus invites fluid interpretation, rather than fixed definition.

Having said that, when originally conceiving the blog, I wanted a title that would first and foremost sloganise the idea of having done with the judgement of God. This, for me at least, remains the core meaning of the phrase that underlies all others. Understand this, and you understand that torpedo the ark is opposed to all forms of coordinating authority and does not mean destroy all species of life.

Those who like to read it in the latter sense are welcome to do so, but it's mistaken to describe this blog as ecocidal, even if it is often anti-vitalist in its nihilism and ultimately regards the epiphenomenal occurrence of life as a very rare and unusual way of being dead. What's being negated here isn't bios in all its evolutionary variety, but the lie of salvation.

Crucially, torpedo the ark also means having the freedom to criticise everything under the sun - even if this risks offending others. Nothing is sacrosanct or off limits; everything can be targeted and everything can be ridiculed, mocked, or scorned because, as Larry David rightly informs his friend Richard Lewis, everything's funny - even the death of a beloved parakeet ...  

Note: I am referring to a scene in the first episode of the ninth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm entitled 'Foisted!', dir. Jeff Schaffer, written by Larry David and Jeff Schaffer (2017): click here to watch on YouTube.  

Anger is an Energy: On the Politics of Thymos

Thymos 2 (from a series of 50 mixed media images) 

Alejandro Tarantino

Most people are familiar with the ancient Greek terms for love (eros) and for reason (logos).

But many are unfamiliar with another crucial component of the psyche that the Greeks termed thymos and by which they referred to the desire of the male subject not merely to be found sexually attractive and in full possession of his senses, but acknowledged as one who is worthy of respect.

It is this need to be shown due regard that often leads to anger and violent confrontation within patriarchal and phallocratic society. For example, one might recall the powerful scene from A Few Good Men (dir. Rob Reiner, 1992), in which Jack Nicholson as Col. Jessep addresses Tom Cruise as US Navy lawyer Lt. Daniel Kaffee:

"You see, Danny, I can deal with the bullets and the bombs and the blood. I don't want money and I don't want medals. What I do want is for you to stand there in that faggoty white uniform and with your Harvard mouth extend me some fucking courtesy!"

Staying in the cinematic universe if I may, I would suggest that it's this same (irrational) aspect of the male soul we are obliged to consider in Joel Schumacher's 1993 thriller Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas as alt-right poster boy William Foster (D-FENS).

The movie suggests that, ultimately, even an average man can be pushed too far and that nobody likes to feel they've been lied to, or made a fool of. And nobody likes to feel they're invisible and thus able to be totally ignored. It makes the blood boil. One seeks justice; or some form of revenge.

Deleuzeans might dream of becoming-imperceptible. But they are a very rare and very unusual type. Most people - particularly most men - want to be seen and want to be listened to; want the world to recognise that they too have rights, including the right to freely express their views and affirm their values, whether these coincide with the views and values of a gender-neutral liberal elite or not.      

Idealists who subscribe to a philosophical fantasy of universal love and reason, will never really grasp what motivates men like Jessep and Bill Foster. If this makes them poor film critics on the one hand, so too does it make them poor political commentators on the other; people, we might say, who can't handle the truth.

And so, whilst they might write for The Guardian or appear on Dateline London, not one of them seems able or willing to conceive of why it is that reactionary and/or fascist ideas to do with cultural identity and national greatness that tap into white male rage not only persist, but have renewed appeal amongst sections of even the most prosperous and peaceful democratic societies.  


To watch the scene referred to above between Nicholson and Cruise in A Few Good Men, click here. 

To watch the official trailer to Falling Down, click here.