On the Metaphysics of the Soul Contra the Aesthetics of Existence

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

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

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

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

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

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

         

Margaret Nolan: Artist, Actress, Object

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret Nolan: My Divided Self 

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

margaretnolan.co.uk 

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

On the Art of Speaking Without Speaking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         

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

The Death of Socrates - Jacques Louis David (1787)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statue of Diogenes the Cynic (Sinop, Turkey)

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Halloween

Cover of the Dead Kennedys single Halloween 

(Alternative Tentacles, 1982)

Another Halloween approaches ... 

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

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

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

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

One almost wishes for a real zombie apocalypse ...       

After the Orgy: Rise of the Herbivores

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

Simon Schama Versus Rod Liddle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- This Week, BBC One, 24 July 2006

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

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

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

A model for Vivienne Westwood wearing an Exhibition Tartan Bondage jacket 

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

viviennewestood.com 

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

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

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

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

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

Portrait of the artist as a young punk (1985) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

              

Worse Than Hitler

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Dance as a Method of Becoming-Bird

 Anorexic Ballerina by Mexxkid 

deviantart.com 

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

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

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

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

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

Nick Land and the Dark Enlightenment

Old Nick himself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

     

ISIS Threaten Sylvania



Detail from ISIS Invade a Sylvanian Picnic (2014)

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

The Case of Maryam Namazie

maryamnamazie.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

European Ghost Dance

Ghost Dance of the Sioux (1891)

The Ghost Dance was a last, desperate attempt by Native Americans to resist the White Man and preserve their own way of life. Performance of the dance was thought to unite the living with the spirits of the dead and enlist the latter in the fight for survival against those who came from far away with their strange customs and alien gods.

Essentially, it was a type of circle dance in which the men moved in unison with a soft, yet heavy-footed shuffle around a drum; a traditional form used by many tribes for millennia. But the ghost dance had new and deadly serious ceremonial significance and quickly spread at the end of the 19th century throughout much of the Western United States, with different peoples synthesizing aspects of the ritual dance with their own tribal beliefs.  

Of course, as we know, the dance failed to work its magic and halt white expansion; mystery religion, it seems, is ineffective in the face of guns and railways. For all their sacred and heroic effort, the Indians were doomed and their day passed.

What intrigues me, however, is this: in the face of the threat posed to their traditional culture by the mass influx of foreign bodies, will the indigenous peoples of Europe soon be the ones enacting their own version of the ghost dance (and will it be any more effective)? 

On the Human Atmosphere

Redheylin: The Human Aura 
(after a diagram by Walter J. Kilner)

Some people are convinced that all living things possess what they call a vital aura composed of psychic energies that sensitive individuals who are attuned to such can not only see - as a spectrum of colours - but also interpret; each colour being associated with some inner state of being or emotion. 

It's an attractive idea as these ideas often are, but it's nonsense, of course; as all such pseudo-scientific ideas to do with the subtle body are mystical nonsense.            

What each individual does possess, however, floating about them in a miasmatic manner, is a microbial cloud composed of the millions of microscopic particles that human beings continually shed from their hair, skin, and clothes and each cloud has a unique signature that can be read via a genetic analysis of the bacteria. In other words, investigators can identify an individual by sampling their personal germ cloud - which is pretty amazing. 

And it's equally amusing to think that - contrary to what the beautiful souls believe - we don't leave a shimmering astral imprint behind us when we exit an environment, or even a pretty, silvery trail of slime in the manner of a slug; but merely a puff of bad air like a stale fart.          

Note: readers interested in the latest scientific research on how humans differ from one another at the level of microbial clouds should click here. 

On Homeopathy

Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843): founder of homeopathy 

a practice based on the magical idea that like cures like 

(similia similibus curentur)

One of the more amusing definitions of homeopathy and the often crackpot conditions it is thought to magically cure, is given by Rod Liddle: Homeopathy, he writes, is the practice of treating a non-existent ailment with a non-existent remedy. 

This is a bit harsh inasmuch as some of the ailments are sometimes real enough, but it's spot on about homeopathy as a non-remedy (i.e., not even an honest sham cure, like snake oil); something - to again quote Liddle - of no fucking palliative use at all.

Prince Charles, Gandhi, and newly elected leader of the Labour Party, the sainted Jeremy Corbyn, may believe in the miraculous power of homeopathy and advocate its availability on the NHS - and they may have many supporters who share their faith in complementary medicines and natural alternatives to the drugs provided by the pharmaceutical industry on the back of years of scientific research and extensive clinical trials - but I would hope and trust that readers of this blog do not. 

I wouldn't want to argue that belief in homeopathy is a moral failing, as the political journalist Ian Dunt insists - stupidity isn't a sin and irrationalism doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, even if it does often lead you to make bad choices and say foolish things - but I agree that this is a serious issue and that the rebellion against Western reason, of which it's a symptom, needs to be met face on.          

Torpedo the ark means having done with judgement; but it certainly doesn't demand a sacrifice of intellect, or call for a leap into faith and superstition.   

Notes: 

Rod Liddle, Selfish, Whining Monkeys (Fourth Estate, 2015), pp. 196 and 199. 

Those interested in reading Ian Dunt's post arguing that belief in homeopathy is a moral test should click here.  

Federico Campagna: A Man of Faith and Folly

Federico Campagna identifies himself as a Sicilian philosopher based in London. Unfortunately, I'm not sure this is entirely true. He is Italian and he does work and live in London, but is he a philosopher or is he not merely a moral and political idealist who uses philosophy whenever it's convenient to do so simply to underpin his metaphysical and, indeed, quasi-mystical search for what he describes as a fundamental architecture of emancipation?

At any rate, his current work revolves around the question of contemporary nihilism, viewing the latter as something that we need to move beyond in order that we might reconstruct reality - and not merely reality as understood by science, but an enchanted or magical reality that is more originary and which supports the ontological primacy of Dasein or mankind's manifest self-understanding. 

Thus, Campagna's dreary, dated, and clichéd characterization of nihilism as a deep crisis of truth that paralyses all human action and imagination is one which I would decisively reject. If we must talk about a topic that has been so overly-discussed, then it seems to me the starting point has to be with Ray Brassier and not Ernesto de Martino, the anthropologist and historian of religions whom Campagna refers us to.     

For unlike Campagna, I don't think nihilism is something to be overcome and I certainly don't think we should attempt to do so in the name of values which, he says, reside in some kind of ethical core and stretch from the gates of Being into our everyday lives, constituting one of the mysteries of existence of which he is so fond. Rather, like Brassier, I think nihilism is a speculative opportunity, not an existential dilemma or disease; a chance to think (even if it turns out thinking has interests that do not coincide with human welfare or happiness). 

Ultimately, Campagna, by his own admission, is a man of faith. In an article published earlier this year, he explicitly tells us that faith is what we need today to accompany an ontological awakening. Faith in what? Faith in life and the intrinsic value of life, which cannot be objectively determined by science, only subjectively affirmed by the faithful individual. Only faith in life transforms Dionysian chaos into Apollonian harmony; noise into music. He writes:

"It is only the interplay of the forces of Being and faith that empower and ... will realize our new architecture of values ... And [result in] the establishment of ... an oasis of limit and freedom, where the chorus faithfully sings for its own glory and Apollo benignly looks on from beyond."  

To which we can only shout hallelujah and not know whether to laugh or cry ...


Notes: 

Federico Campagna was speaking at the 6/20 Club on Sunday the 20th of September, 2015. His paper was entitled On Magic and the Reconstruction of Reality After Nihilism. A version of this paper was given to the Art/Work Association earlier in the year and details of this presentation can be found by clicking here. 

The other paper by Campagna  to which I refer and from which I quote, is entitled After Nihilism, After Technic: Sketches for a New Philosophical Architecture. It was published in the online journal e-flux and can be read by clicking here. 

For Ray Brassier's brilliant discussion of nihilism in terms of enlightenment and extinction, see Nihil Unbound (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Reflections on The Holy Virgin Mary (1996)

Chris Ofili: The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) 

When thinking about images of the Virgin Mary - particularly images of the so-called Black Madonna - one must invariably consider Chris Ofili's controversial work of 1996.
 
The large canvas (244 x 183 cm) depicts an African woman staring directly at the observer and wearing a blue robe on a pretty, shimmering yellow-orange background. The work employs mixed media, including oil paint, glitter, and animal excrement. The central figure is surrounded by images taken from pornographic magazines of female arses and genitalia. A varnished ball of dried elephant dung forms the figure's bared breast; the painting also stands on two lumps of elephant shit, decorated with coloured pins that spell out the words Virgin and Mary.      
 
Ofili's painting was included in Charles Saatchi's Sensation exhibition; first in London (1997), then Berlin (1998), before finally moving to New York (1999), where Mayor Giuliani described it as sick and disgusting and where, despite being displayed behind a protective screen, one protester managed to smear the work with white paint; a tellingly symbolic gesture, I think, but one which thankfully caused no lasting damage.

It's easy to see why some - perhaps most - people might initially find this work offensive and even blasphemous, combining in what the artist describes as a hip hop manner religious and artistic ideas of what constitutes the sacred with secular political concerns (to do with race, for example) and the basest of base materials. Is he having a laugh? Yes, he probably is; one is very aware of the wilful absurdity in his work.

But Ofili is also offering us a profoundly serious and sophisticated picture, in which the white-faced Queen of Heaven is transformed back into a black-skinned woman of the world; she whose immaculate heart beats beneath a warm breast of flesh and blood.    

The Holy Virgin Mary may not be his best work, but it is for me his most philosophically important; a reminder that everyday life is neither lacking in value nor authenticity and that even in a handful of elephant dung the divine is manifest.   

On the Black Virgin and the Question of Racial Fetishism

Nigra sum sed formosa 

The statues and paintings of Mary created in medieval Europe are all fascinating, but none more so than those in which the Mother of God has dark skin; the so-called Black Virgins (or Black Madonnas), of which there are several hundred located in various churches and shrines, venerated by their devotees and associated with miracles by pilgrims who come to receive a blessing.     

If I'm honest, however, what really interests is not the significance of the figure within Catholic theology, or the pagan roots of her worship, but the sexual allure of black femininity for white heterosexual males. Obviously, this is a controversial topic - perhaps more so now than ever.

In the past, the concern was with miscegenation and only decadent individuals openly flaunted their love for women of colour and were excited by the idea of transgression. Today, mixed race relationships are more commonplace and relatively accepted, but there is now a real (and legitimate) concern with racial fetishism; that is to say, with the manner in which white men view the non-white women whom they subject to their eroticized and imperial gaze.

For women of colour are not merely objectified sexually, but racially stereotyped. Their exotic otherness is not so much exaggerated and distorted as it is invented within the pornographic imagination, before being circulated and sustained within wider popular culture (via art and advertising, for example).

Angela Carter understands how this game works. In her short story, Black Venus, she describes the illicit affair between Baudelaire and his mistress Jeanne Duval (who was of mixed European and African origin), perfectly capturing the essence of the relationship and how, for the poet, this Creole woman symbolizes primitive sensuality and the promise of faraway lands.

Thus, when he's not asking her to take off her clothes and dance naked for Daddy except for the bangles and beads he loves so much - his eyes fixed upon the darkness of her skin - he's whispering like a madman into the ear of his pet:

"Baby, baby, let me take you back where you belong, back to your lovely, lazy island where the jewelled parrot rocks on the enamel tree and you can crunch sugar-cane between your strong, white teeth ... When we get there, among the lilting palm-trees, under the purple flowers, I'll love you to death. We'll go back and live together in a thatched house with a veranda over-grown with flowering vine and a little girl in a short white frock with a yellow satin bow in her kinky pigtail will wave a huge feather fan over us, stirring the languishing air as we sway in our hammock, this way and that way ... think how lovely it would be to live there." [10]

Jeanne recognises this pervy and racist fantasy for what it is: Go, where? Not there! Not the bloody parrot forest with its harsh blue sky which offers nothing to eat but bananas and yams and the occasional bit of grizzled goat to chew!

And many women of colour are rightly appalled by the way in which racism is smuggled into the bedroom disguised as something romantic and a form of positive discrimination. The young black feminist, Mysia Anderson, is quite right to say there's a history of oppression here that simply must be taken into account.

But, the problem is - for me, in my whiteness and heterosexual maleness - it still seduces. For ultimately, of course, it's a fetishistic fantasy designed to appeal to readers such as myself and not the black-thighed woman smelling of musk smeared on tobacco to whom it's spoken.

Thus, despite knowing better, I still find myself at the feet of a black goddess and still singing like Solomon about she whose beauty radiates from a skin darkened by the sun. 

Notes:

Charles Baudelaire's most famous work, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), contains several poems believed to have been written about (or inspired by) Jeanne Duval, including Sed non Satiata, Les Bijoux, Le Serpent qui danse, Parfum Exotique, and Le Chat.

Angela Carter's Black Venus was first published by Chatto and Windus (1985), but I'm quoting from the Picador edition (1986).

Mysia Anderson is a student at Stanford University majoring in African and African American Studies. Her online article entitled 'Avoid racial fetishism on Valentine's Day' was published on Feb 11, 2015 on stanforddaily.com and can be read by clicking here. 

The photo, by Barron Claiborne, was found on Lamatamu.com the site for "everything exotic", edited by Biko Beauttah.

 

Thoughts on the Proposal for a New Lawrence Statue

Greek terracotta statue of Priapus, Hellenistic period 

(c. late 4th-3rd century B.C.)

There's already a life-size bronze statue of D. H. Lawrence, by Diana Thomson, standing in the grounds of Nottingham University; a barefoot figure with his trousers rolled up (don't ask me why) and rather awkwardly holding a blue flower. In addition, there's a bronze bust of Lawrence, also by Thomson, situated in the Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery. 

However, increasingly proud of their local boy - or, rather, increasingly hopeful that such works attract visitors and that they might capitalize on his controversial reputation and continuing popularity - plans are being made for a new work to be erected in his hometown of Eastwood.

Lawrence scholars, members of the D. H. Lawrence Society, and staff at the Lawrence Heritage Centre, all met recently with representatives of the borough council to discuss ideas. Also present - and spearheading the campaign for a new statue - was super-glamorous local MP, Gloria De Piero, who, according to a press report, thinks it ridiculous that the Lawrence name isn't being exploited to the maximum; never mind what he contributed to English letters, just think what he can do for jobs and business!       

My own view on this matter is rather closer to that of Lawrence activist David Brock, who argues that if there's to be a new statue, then it needs to be a creatively challenging work that isn't there simply to attract tourists and amuse the locals. If it were up to me, I would go for a Classical style nude terracotta figure, sans fig-leaf, but with an erection of priapic proportions from which hung a sign saying: The phallus is the bridge to the future.  

This, I think, would be true to the Lawrence who wanted to shock what he described as people's castrated spirituality and remind us that the phallus is a great sacred symbol of potency and the active life which has been denied to us within Christian moral culture.

Rod Liddle: My Enemy's Enemy

Cover of the paperback edition (Fourth Estate, 2015)

I suppose, in many ways, I have quite a lot in common with Rod Liddle; we belong to the same generation and the same class and, although both born in the South, our hearts belong to the North of England, where our families originated. I even think we had the same (or at any rate similar) tinplate aeroplane to play with as children. 

These things don't necessarily make me like him, but they make me at least want to like him; to find in him a comrade of some sort; a brother-in-arms. Also, the fact that physically he suggests something of my friend Simon, albeit an older, greyer, even more disheveled version, also makes me gravitate towards him (without necessarily wishing to cruise his body, as Barthes would say).

But what of his work, I hear you ask: and what of those nasty prejudices that are said to poison his writing and ultimately make it little more than the sometimes witty but mostly just offensive and tedious ranting of an unusually erudite pub bore - Richard Littlejohn with a social degree (to paraphrase Jaz Coleman).

Well, to be honest, I'm not very familiar with his work; either as a journalist or a writer of fiction. But I have just finished reading his most recent book - Selfish, Whining Monkeys (2014) - and I enjoyed it very much. What's more, I found myself pretty much in agreement with its central argument that, for all the many things we have gained during the last fifty years, we have unintentionally lost something - and something pretty important at that; something which you rather suspect he would like to call our soul, but describes instead as social cohesion and cultural unity. 

That's, when you think about it, quite a conservative claim to make - and, inasmuch as its one that I suspect a majority of people would agree with, pretty uncontroversial too. This professional provocateur may like to swear and throw around terms designed to outrage those who are always looking to police language and correct those ways of thinking they deem unacceptable, but, actually, he's a nostalgic moralist at heart who regrets the passing of values that his parents - and my parents - lived their lives by (although, importantly, he at no time advocates a return to the past, or a getting back to basics).

This makes him sound a bit like Tony Parsons, but he's so much funnier and more interesting - and so much less prone to sentiment - than the latter (who I might also be said to have a fair bit in common with, but for whom I feel no affection).

Of course, I don't share Liddle's nominal Christianity which underpins this book and, for me, the trouble with atheism is that unless it becomes a fairly aggressive anti-theism it doesn't go far enough. That said, I can understand why Richard Dawkins might irritate with his pomposity and smiled at Liddle's disdain for the ridiculous Alain de Botton and his 'Tower of Arse'. 

And what I certainly do share is Liddle's insistence on returning to the subject of class - and, if I'm honest, a good many of his hatreds; of those who have had their struggles too, the super-smug London elite and those on what he describes as the faux-left.

We might not, were we to meet, ever become true friends in a positive sense; but, in desperate times, my enemy's enemy ... 

Submission (On Christianity, Islam and the European Migrant Crisis)

Cover of the Hungarian edition of 

Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission (2015)

These are strange times indeed! 

So strange, that one even finds oneself in agreement with Peter Hitchens - yes, the slightly younger, much less lovable brother of Christopher Hitchens - on an increasing number of questions, including the European migrant crisis. 

For he's right, surely, to argue that we in the West will not solve this apparently insoluble problem, or be in a position to help anyone, if we destroy our own continent with its own unique history, culture and system of values in the process, or simply give it away, as he writes, "to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves". 

Unfortunately, Hitchens doesn't examine this emotional spasm gripping the political leaders of Europe, the media, bleeding-heart celebrities, and, apparently, large numbers of the British public who were moved by a single photo. And, of course, the reason he doesn't examine it is because it's rooted precisely in the Christian moral tradition of which he is such a vocal exponent. Thus Hitchens is on tricky ground and his analysis of current events is compromised ultimately by his own faith. 

In other words, what I'm suggesting is that it is our own idealism - particularly the ideal of self-sacrifice - that is at play here; we are still attempting to imitate Christ hanging on the Cross and commit one final auto-da-fé en masse so that we too can whisper with our dying breath and face turned towards heaven consummatum est. 

It is finished; meaning, our time as a people is finally over; we give up, let those who are younger, stronger, more devout, more numerous, have a go at running things. Michel Houellebecq understands this suicidal and sentimental fatigue and how our will to love has effectively undermined our will to survival. In his novel, Soumission (2015), he writes perfectly convincingly of how a near-future France easily transforms into an Islamic society.   

It's a book that Hitchens has read and admires. But, again, I don't think he quite understands the work or sees why it is Europe has adopted this submissive position; how what he describes as weakness and cowardice is, in fact, the result of our corrosive and toxic virtues including: pity, charity, and humility.

The sad and terrifying fact is that we would rather turn the other cheek and love our enemies, even when they want to murder us, than be seen to be unkind or unjust in any way. Just as Jesus died for our sins, we want to die for the sins of others. And so we hold open the gates and meekly smile and clap hands as hundreds of thousands of migrants push past and give thanks to Allah for the soft stupidity of the kuffar. 

          

Notes: 

Peter Hitchens's recent Mail on Sunday piece entitled 'We won't save refugees by destroying our own country' can be read here. 

Michel Houellebecq's novel has been translated into English as Submission, by Lorin Stein, (William Heinemann, 2015). 

Obviously, Nietzsche - not an author I suspect Peter Hitchens has much time for - identified Christianity as more harmful than any vice over a century ago and predicted what would happen to Europeans as a result of adopting this slave morality and attempting to put it into practice. That we have not repudiated this creed once and for all not only does us no credit, but it brings down a curse upon us. And if Islam despises the Christian West, writes Nietzsche, "it is a thousand times right to do so: for Islam presupposes men ..." [The Anti-Christ, section 59.]