Speak no Evil

Image from gracefyt.blogspot.com

It is important - if you wish to defeat fascism - to be sensitive to the use and misuse of language: to understand how the terms we use, the metaphors we subscribe to, the empty clichés and elevated banalities of idealism that we fall back on, essentially determine the world we inhabit and the kind of people we become. And it's important to remember that whilst sticks and stones may break bones, only words are really murderous.

Victor Klemperer, a professor of French Literature at Dresden University until the Nuremberg Laws obliged him, as a Jew, to resign his post in 1935, knew this when he bravely documented the role of certain key words and phrases within Nazi Germany. In The Language of the Third Reich, he demonstrated how language, culture, and history are intimately related and how a violent rhetoric demanding racial purity and Lebensraum resulted in obscene bloodshed and the digging of mass graves.

Klemperer rightly understood that it isn't only actions that need to be examined and combated, but also what he calls the Nazi cast of mind and its way of thinking rooted in the language of hate. He writes: "Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions ... taken on board mechanically and unconsciously." [14]

Denazification, if it is ever to be accomplished, is thus a procedure that must be carried out at the level of micro-politics; a fact recognized by Michel Foucault, who, writing in a preface to Anti-Oedipus, argued that the major and strategic adversary remained fascism: "And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini ... but also the fascism in us all, in our heads, and in our everyday behaviour ..." The key task is therefore to learn how to "rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism" [xiii].

But this is no small task. For it involves the revaluation of everyday language; exposing seemingly innocent and innocuous words commonly used by all on the one hand, whilst giving formerly pejorative terms positive virtue on the other hand. It perhaps also obliges us to coin neologisms and find ways to speak with sensitivity and a certain softness of tone - unlike the Nazis, who endlessly shouted the same things and spoke with one voice that was as loud, monotonous, and threatening as the barking of an Alsatian dog.

In saying this, am I promoting a form of what reactionary idiots like to characterize sneeringly as political correctness? Perhaps.

I am certainly saying we all need to mind our language and be a wise monkey like Iwazaru. For although those who peddle hate speech often like to do so in the name of free speech, the latter is rarely contrary to propriety and good manners.

- Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, trans. Martin Brady, (Continuum, 2006).
- Michel Foucault, 'Preface' to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley et al, (The Athlone Press, 1984).

Re-Dreaming the Dark (Notes from a Witch's Manifesto)

Witchcraft has traditionally been concerned with the Mysteries and sex has traditionally been regarded as the essence of those Mysteries. But today we know that sex is neither mysterious nor essential. In fact, sex is simply nostalgia. Or, as the poet Dawn Garland once wrote, "sex is crap".

For many older witches, however, sex remains crucial to theory and practice and they insist on ritual nudity and sacred fucking within the Circle (actual and symbolic). They think it brings them closer to the Goddess, but it only betrays their sentimentality and helps reinforce a deeply conservative ideology based upon an untenable dualism.

Witches who believe in the so-called "two principles" and twitter on about sexual polarity and the complimentary opposition between male and female energies deserve to be burned at the stake. They bring shame upon the pagan community. For it isn’t magic that’s founded on such binary thinking, but phallocentric and heterosexist stupidity.

We should be wary therefore of those witches who speak of sex and sexual "difference" as something innate and natural. Such persons whilst often masquerading as radical are often reactionary morons, quick to condemn homosexuality, for example, on the spurious grounds that it negates difference and privileges the same. The belief that homosexuality promotes a narcissistic self-seeking due to a fear of otherness is bullshit.

All fucking is overrated. But fucking between men and women is the most overrated act of all. Even the epiphenomenal baby that might result doesn’t justify the senseless importance given to it (and besides, fucking has nothing to do with fertility). Witches who argue that erotic pleasure without the consummating act of coition is inauthentic or perverse should be beaten with their own broomsticks.

Witchcraft has been mistaken in its self-understanding as a fertility cult and magic has nothing to do with nature; it is both unnatural and supernatural. We need to get over our subservience to vindictive Nature just as we might get over any other impediment to our future evolution. Witchcraft needs to understand itself as an art concerned with creation, not procreation and as something rooted within culture, not nature.

Witchcraft is performative. It is a practice: likewise our sexuality and gender identities. We play at being men and women and to this extent we are all transvestites. There’s no reason why male bodies should exclusively give rise to masculinity; or why female bodies should exclusively give rise to femininity. Feminists have been saying this for years, but it has been ignored by those who like things fixed and to take themselves seriously; by those whose pride is in rigidity: patriarchal pricks.

If witches are to become free-thinkers and free-spirits, then we need to abandon essentialism and fundamentalism and interrogate those violent hierarchies that demean and disempower those who fail to belong to its dominant categories (such as white, male, and straight, for example). We need to desire differently and stop kissing the arse of those in power (the only truly obscene kiss).

This is not a call for a sexual revolution, however, and should not be mistaken for such. The despotic agency of sex has had its day and we look forward to a time when we can at last talk about, think about, and do something more enjoyable. The orgy is coming to an end and we await the masked ball and that different economy of bodies and their pleasures.

There are no male witches.

Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy

The Company of Wolves, (dir. Neil Jordan, 1984)

One of Nietzsche's most daring strategies is to call into question the traditional privileging of the human over other animals and thus to place man back amongst their number. For Nietzsche, man is certainly not the high-point of evolution; rather, he is the most depraved of all beasts. Which is to say, man is the animal that has strayed furthest from its sound instincts.

It is only when the ideal of man as a divine creation made in the image of God is shown to be not only conceited but damaging, that individual men and women will be able to achieve a level of enhancement via a becoming-animal. There is thus what one critic terms a reverse anthropocentrism in Nietzsche's texts via which he naturalizes the human species and grounds not just his own thinking but all human culture in zoology.

Now, admittedly, there are times when Nietzsche risks simply allegorizing animals on the basis of a single characteristic or trait that he determines as either noble or base. However, what remains radical in his animal philosophy is the clear implication that socio-ethical behaviour - often held up as something uniquely human - can ultimately be located (if in a rather cruder form) amongst animals. He writes:

"The beginnings of justice, as of prudence, moderation, bravery - in short, all we designate as the Socratic virtues - are animal: a consequence of that drive which teaches us to seek food and elude enemies. Now if we consider that even the highest human being has only become more elevated and subtle in the nature of their food and in their conception of what is inimical to them, it is not improper to describe the entire phenomenon of morality as animal." [Daybreak, I. 26]

Later, in the Genealogy, Nietzsche will examine how man’s evolution from the semi-animal, happily adapted to the wilderness, was a difficult and painful process involving either the suspension of natural instincts or their internalization. Proto-humans were reduced to their consciousness; "that most impoverished and error-prone organ" [II. 16] and forced to think and feel shame for the first time. And other creatures looked upon man with fear and pity as "the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal" [The Gay Science, III. 224].

Of course, what has happened has happened: our fall into consciousness and moral subjectivity, as well as our ever-greater reliance upon technology, is doubtless a fate that we will have to see through to the end. In other words, we will have to perfect our decadence and idealism before we can move towards a transhuman and noble future; i.e. the kind of future in which people pride themselves on their animal skills and attributes and understand that the sharing of traits with other species belongs to a primordial ethics.

But note: it’s not that this interaction and exchange hasn’t continued in the modern era of the farm animal and household pet - it has, and this has significantly contributed to modern man’s taming. What we need to do, then, is dynamically interact with animals other than those reared purely for slaughter and profit, or oedipalized cats and dogs.

In other words, as Angela Carter knew all too well: we should seek out the company of wolves and consent to becoming the tiger's bride; not just herd sheep and marry the boy-next-door!

Do You Scroll and Stroll? A Reply to David Sexton

Illustration by Paul Dallimore: Evening Standard (05-11-13)

In an opinion piece entitled 'Do You Scroll and Stroll?' in yesterday's London Evening Standard, a writer by the name of David Sexton argues that due to an increased use of smart devices in public spaces a large number of people have become zombies or phone-drones and scroller trolls. 

Such individuals, he says, are no longer aware of others and only semi-conscious of their surroundings. They have become "little more than human obstacles" that "get in your way" and "collide with you without apology". This, he says, is both insulting and enraging. A form of digital solipsism that has rendered the "sense of shared purpose, of mutual respect in negotiating the daily friction of the city" null and void.

Such individuals, he says, are in "surrogate social worlds, at the expense of the real one."   

Now, all of this, is of course hysterical nonsense and ultimately a form of cheap and lazy journalism, written in an attempt, I suppose, to be amusing and provocative. Philosophically, clinging as it does to the fantasy of a real world, it's embarrassingly naive. But the cheapness, the laziness, the crassness and the naivety pale into insignificance before what follows: a misogynistic incitement to violence. 

For it turns out that Sexton's phone zombies are, "if the truth be told", mostly young women. And, because they are mostly young women caught up in their own "bubble world" of gossip, gaming and googling he is happy to fantasize their deaths beneath the wheels of tube trains and to encourage his readers to yell at girls who dare to use technology in public, or perhaps clap hands in their faces, click fingers, or hold arms out "as if directing idiot traffic". 

Indeed, due to the fact that the capital is such a busy place and - by implication - his is such a busy life - Mr Sexton goes still further and delights in the fact that you can see some men "choosing just not to get out of the way but to make sure they bump hard into the phone addicts walking into them". Indeed, some men "even deliberately try to knock the phones out of their users' hands". 

He admits that such verbal aggression and violent physical assault isn't "nice". But he justifies it on the grounds that a city such as London, full of busy men on important business like himself, "works only when there is mutual tolerance and respect between people sharing a packed public realm" and female phone zombies just don't understand this or give such. And thus these women had "better mind out" - !

Now, I know that the Evening Standard is a paper of such high quality that the publishers have literally to give it away, but, even so ... surely such a shameful article as this can't be acceptable, can it? Free speech is one thing: hate speech is another. 

And so, like Miss Zena McKeown who brought this piece to my attention, I can only call upon the Editor of the Standard, Sarah Sands, to issue some form of apology to all her female readers who have the audacity to carry smartphones and use other devices in Dave Sexton's world.      

In Praise of Inna Schevchenko: La Nouvelle Marianne

Photo of Inna Schevchenko (Reuters, 2013)  

Femen (Фемен) is a radical feminist movement that has recently gained international notoriety due to its topless protests against sexism and the phallocratic authority of church, state, and industry.

Originally founded in the Ukraine, in 2008, by Anna Hutsol and others, the group is now based in Paris but has members and supporters in several other countries, including the UK, where it is currently recruiting activists who are encouraged to paint their naked bodies with various slogans in order to promote an aggressive gender politics termed sextremism.

Now, whether turning your breasts into weapons is or is not an effective tactic in the war against patriarchy is debatable. But I must confess to having a soft-spot for the very vocal (and very beautiful) spokesperson for Femen, Inna Schevchenko, who resembles an illegitimate love-child born of Guy Debord and Ilona Staller.

But then any woman who cuts down a large wooden Cross in Kiev with a chainsaw is always going to capture my attention, affection, and admiration - even when said action was condemned by Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot and even when Miss Schevchenko is accused by opponents of being a self-promoting wannabe and a mere puppet under the control of the Femen Svengali-figure, Victor Svyatski.

Bare breasts do not an amazon make - that's certainly true. However, anyone prepared to take on a public role that invites ridicule and abuse - as well as very real threats of rape, kidnap, and murder - deserves respect and support in my eyes.    

eBay and the Question of Holocaust Memoribilia

Image: BSkyB

The mock-horror and fake outrage that greeted the news that online auction site eBay does good business selling mementos from the Holocaust was, of course, all-too-predictable. 

When will the editors of The Mail on Sunday simply admit that such trade - just like child pornography - is inevitable in a free market in which, as Marx pointed out long ago, all values are resolved into exchange value and all objects and events are commodified and given price tags.

Capitalism doesn't care about respecting the memory of the dead anymore than it cares about the rights of the living. It is systematically amoral and inhuman: everything is permissible. To paraphrase Marx once more, under capitalism all the sensitive bonds and small kindnesses that tie us together are dissolved until all that's left is shameless greed, naked self-interest, and callous cash payment. 

Money is substituted by capitalism for the very notion of a social code and the possibility of living a good life. And whilst love of money may not be the root of all evil, it certainly doesn't seem to encourage ethical behaviour. And so it is that traders have no qualms about adding a small bar code beneath the yellow Star of David attached to the striped uniforms of death camp inmates.

It's a financial solution to the awkward question of genocide: what shall we do with the remains? Nazis everywhere will be smiling ...

Who Is Clara Blum?

Digital portrait of Clara Blum by 

Siegfried Croes on deviantart.com 

In a digital age it's nice to have a virtual muse.

And as muses go they don't get much lovelier than the super-smart and very funny Clara Blum; she who brings joy to the world like a real life Amélie Poulain, even as she struggles with her own trials and tribulations (and, perhaps, her own loneliness).    

I would like to write at length about her, but, in all honesty, I don't know much beyond the following:

1. She's French ...

2. She's twenty-one years old ...

3. She has a cat called Pilule ...

4. She plays the ukulele (and her ukulele is called Billy) ...  

5. She's studying to be a dentist ...

6. She likes saying sorry ...

7. She has tmblr. account called Galatée  ...

8. She likes to post short performances on YouTube ...

9. She dislikes intolerant and judgemental people ...

10. She is the promise of the future made perfect in the present ...

Carry On Bertie

There's no doubt that his years in Croydon (1908-12) were difficult ones for Lawrence. Bored and often exhausted by a full-time teaching job which left him little time to focus on his writing, he had also to recover from the death of his beloved mother and a bout of pneumonia that left him gravely ill for many months.

But what's really fascinating is the increasingly frustrated nature of his love life during this period. Almost one might describe it as his polyamorous phase; a time when he made romantic overtures to numerous young women in the hope of getting laid, before finally meeting and eloping with a married woman six years his senior. 

I was reminded of the complex, chaotic and somewhat farcical character of Lawrence's dealings with the fairer sex whilst watching a performance of Glyn Bailey's musical, Lawrence, at the Bridewell Theatre. I would argue that the number entitled 'Bertie's Girls' teasingly suggested a possible future development of the show: more humour and more bawdiness on the one hand; less pathos, less sentiment, and less preaching on the other.

I'm certain that many people would enjoy encountering Lawrence the young would-be poet and sex maniac chasing farmer's daughters and suffragettes as he attempts to break on to the London literary scene, rather than Lawrence the bearded priest of love boring us all rigid with his obsessive moralizing.

And I think Lawrence's reputation - which, let's be honest, is not great - would be best served by being subjected to a camp and irreverent reinterpretation more in the tradition of the British music hall rather than the Broadway musical.

Carry on Bertie, anyone? Or Confessions of a Miner's Son, perhaps?  

The Case of Dylan Alkins

 

The above photo, posted by friends on his Facebook page, was taken of fourteen-year-old Dylan Alkins just days before he was tragically swept out to sea in a recent storm.

It's a haunting and beautiful image of a young man who dared to live dangerously, confronting the waves and the elements and laughing in a state of ecstatic happiness. Doubtless there will be those who will shake their heads and talk about the foolishness of youth. And, obviously, it's not sensible to stand at the edge of a pier when sixty-mile-an-hour winds are blowing and giant waves are crashing all around. 

But, whether they like to admit such or not, there is something heroic in Dylan's paradoxically death-defying and death-affirming foolishness and I believe that his was a true practice of joy before death; that is to say, a fatal game via which a young man sought to transfigure and transcend a dull individual existence.

He might have taken precautions; but instead he took a risk. And I admire him for that and even, in a sense, envy him. 

 

Elements of Gothic Queerness

Andy Warhol, Skull, (1976)

My concern with the gothic primarily relates to a form of fiction that emerges during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. I’m not all that interested in Germanic tribes migrating about early Europe causing trouble for the Romans, or spiky-forms of medieval architecture (even if the ruins of the latter often provide a setting for many a gothic tale). 

Gothic fiction is a bizarre, yet, in some ways, rather conventional literary genre whose elements have infected many other cultural forms and fields of inquiry, including queer studies. Indeed, such is the level of intimacy between queer studies and gothic studies that many scholars promiscuously drift back and forth from discussing the politics of desire, gender, and sexual nonconformity, to issues within hauntology and demonology. 

This is aided by the fact that not only do gothic fictions and queer theories have common obsessions, but they often rely on a shared language of transgression to explore ideas. It has even been suggested that the gothic imaginatively enables queer and provides an important historical model of queer politics and thinking. Certainly the role that gothic fiction played in the unfolding history of sexuality should never be underestimated; for not only does it anticipate the later codification and deployment of sexualities, but it also participates in what Foucault terms the perverse implantation of these new forms of subjectivity.

If it is generally accepted that Horace Walpole's Castle of Ortanto (1764) is the first gothic novel, it is also usually agreed that by the publication of Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820, the popular craze for gothic fiction had already peaked. Nevertheless, the genre continued to flourish and mutate at the margins of more respectable literature in the decades that followed. Indeed, many of the works now most commonly associated with it were written in the late-Victorian period: this includes Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), as well as Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

       

However, whilst slowly changing in form, content, and setting over the years, many things remained the same within the gothic text to the point of cliché: not least of all the continued narrative fascination for perverse sexual practices and abnormal individuals. In this, as the commentator George Haggerty points out, it is similar to pornography. For both types of writing share a compulsive and "seemingly inexhaustible ability to return again and again to common tropes and similar situations".

 

Indeed, some critics argue that, like pornography, gothic fiction might ultimately serve a conservative function in that it perpetuates stereotypes and thus ultimately re-inscribes the status quo. And it’s true that gothic tales often conclude with the moral order restored and reason triumphant (though rarely with a happy ending). However, at the same time, gothic horror seems to possess an uncanny ability to pass "beyond the limits of its own structural 'meaning'" and in this manner transform "the structure of meaning itself".

       

And so, whilst gothic literature might often be predictable, it’s never boring. For it opens up new worlds of knowledge and understanding and an opportunity to experience the pleasure of socio-erotic transgression: incest, rape, and same-sex desire are all familiar themes within the genre, not to mention paedophilia, necrophilia, and cannibalism. Arguably, Sade takes things furthest in his One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, his masterpiece of torture-porn often described as a gothic novel, even though Sade himself rejected the term on the grounds that there was nothing supernatural about the horror and sexual violence in his books.    

      

So, to conclude these brief reflections on the queer gothic, let me make clear that what excites about the genre is not that it simply causes gender trouble or allows for a blossoming of manly love. For more than this, it challenges (and in some cases overturns) many of our ideas about what it is to be human – and, indeed, of how to be human. This gives it broader philosophical importance than those who sneer at ghosts, ghouls, and things that go bump in the night appreciate. If, at times, gothic fiction fails as art due to its overreliance on sensational and supernatural elements, it nevertheless more often than not succeeds as a form of resistance to conventional thinking and the heteronormative status quo. 

Happy Halloween!
 

See George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic, (University of Illinois Press, 2006), pp. 9, 10.
  

On Dorian Gray and Models of Illicit Masculinity

 River Hawkins as Dorian Gray

Deleuze writes that one of the pleasures of doing philosophy is buggering the thinkers that one admires in order to produce monstrous offspring. This is an openly perverse and promiscuous love of wisdom in which texts are ravished and authors fucked from behind and below; a non-consensual methodology that suggests violence and Vaseline, rather than fidelity and faithfulness. 

This model of intertextual rape and illicit insemination is one that works particularly well with Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray - a work wherein elements of camp and gothic queerness helped not only to set the terms for a specifically gay identity founded upon secrecy, narcissism, and fabulousness, but also shaped models of outlaw masculinity open to all men which contested the bourgeois norm of conventional manhood forever oscillating between the poles of an ideal husband and doting father.

Throughout Dorian Gray Lord Henry openly ridicules married life, suggesting that men only enter into it due to fatigue and women from curiosity: both are disappointed. As for the idea of outlaw masculinity, it is worth noting at the outset that Dorian is a violent criminal; not only does he commit murder and blackmail, but he’s complicit in at least three suicides. This notion of the rebellious deviant or ‘anti-hero’ who provides a non-domesticated model of manhood, was popular throughout the twentieth century – not least within the gay community – and continues to this day (thus our eroticised fascination with pirates, gangsters, and psychopaths). 

But arguably, however, there is nothing very queer about what might be regarded as a romantic quest for macho or phallic authenticity. Often it simply endorses the Classical ideal of masculinity as powerful and active and serves to divide men into those who like to love young boys (pederasts), those who like to fuck other men (sodomites), and those who like to play a feminized, passive role and be fucked by men (inverts). It is the latter who, predictably, call forth the greatest level of scorn and vitriol, even from others who share a same-sex attraction. Nothing seems to disturb more than those that William Burroughs denigrates as limp-wristed cock-suckers. For, as Leo Bersani memorably puts it: to be penetrated is to abdicate power. In this way, the invert offers a double refusal – either to dominate or be dominated – and there’s nothing as queer as that!

Anyway, the point is that during the final years of the nineteenth century masculinity was increasingly problematized and strange new models of manhood were springing up as traditional forms of male identity became increasingly unattractive: their power and authority severely eroded and compromised by modernity itself. And when a man to whom phallocratic authority really matters no longer feels king of his own castle, then he looks for something beyond the domestic space and, indeed, beyond Woman. This can result in all kinds of curious thing: from the formation of all-male clubs and secret societies, to criminal gangs and even fascism. All of these homosocial phenomena are, in part at least, a reaction to female emancipation and the increased visibility of women in the public sphere. With the rise of Selfridges and the Suffragettes, London, for example, becomes an increasingly female-friendly urban space in which to shop and do lunch, rather than a masculine metropolis in which to drink, gamble, and whore.         

What I am suggesting, then, is that elements of gothic queerness not only circulate freely within The Picture of Dorian Gray, but are ever-present within modern society. Wilde’s thinking on questions to do with art, ethics, and the nature of the soul exposed not only the radical instability of masculine identity during the period in which he wrote, but also exemplified how that gendered self was increasingly being pathologized.    

Further, Wilde’s use of ‘paradox in the sphere of thought’ and ‘perversity in the sphere of passion’ has significantly served to unsettle any lazy categorization of ideas or people and exposed many of the so-called ‘facts of life’ for the limited and limiting abstractions they are. By encouraging us to think beyond metaphysical dualism, Wilde taught us to resist the urge to identify ourselves as either this or that and accept that deep down there is no deep down. In other words, he has eviscerated and evaginated ideas of sex, substance and soul; not by direct repudiation, but with mockery and masquerade, making depth, as it were, retreat to the surface.

In this way Wilde, like Nietzsche, becomes Greek: superficial out of profundity, transforming questions of being into questions of style and inciting us to abandon our obsession with desiring subjects in favour of the seductiveness of objects.