From Sardines to Anchovies

I. 

 

I've nothing against the humble sardine; that small, oily fish in the herring family, which some people refer to as pilchards and which Aristotle is thought to have loved eating; though presumably not on toast, which is how the British traditionally serve them. 

 

And there's no denying that they do make a tasty and nutritious meal, even when enjoyed straight from the tin, rather than fresh from the sea; full of protein and fatty acids, sardines are also low in contaminants, such as mercury, unlike some other larger fish commonly consumed by humans.

 

However, push comes to shove, and my preference is for the anchovy ... [1]

 

 

II. 

 

The anchovy is another small, oily fish, belonging to the same order as the sardine (Clupeiformes), but to a different family and they have been happily swimming around the world's temperate oceans for tens of millions years; i.e., long before there were any people to catch them in nets and stuff them into jars.     

 

Anchovies are pretty little things; slim-bodied, and silvery greenish-blue in colour, with a stripe running along their backs. But they also come with tiny sharp teeth, so anyone handling a live fish should beware.

 

I'm particularly fond of the European anchovy, which is found in the Med and which has been fished by the peoples fortunate enough to live on the coasts of Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, etc., for untold generations.

 

The place that I mostly associate with them, however, is the picturesque small town of Collioure, on the Côte Vermeille, just over the border from Spain, in the region of French Catalonia where they are known as anchois or anxova depending to whom you speak. 

 

Katxu and I went there once, initially because we wanted to follow in the footsteps of Matisse and Derain and experience the astonishing quality of the light that inspired Fauvism a century earlier, but we soon ended up at the anchovy museum like everyone else who visits [2].

 

After the visit, I was so enchanted by the story of these little blue fish and the folk who depend on them, that I even wrote a short poem on the back of a postcard:

 

  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I know that many Brits do not like anchovies, due to their characteristic saltiness and strong flavour; i.e., pretty much the same objection that is often raised against olives. But then the British are a people who privilege fish fingers and pickled onions over most foreign delicacies.

 

[2] Technically, there are two family-run anchovy businesses in Collioure, rather than a museum as such: Anchois Roque and Anchois Desclaux. Both were established in the 19th century and each is open to the public, so that one can watch as the fish are processed, preserved, and packaged in the traditional way (by hand, not machine). 

      As well as regular tastings, there are all kinds of old objects and photos to look at that allow one to appreciate the historical and cultural importance of anchovies for the inhabitants of the town. Click here, for further details.     

 

 

Oranges and Sardines: Reflections on Art & Poetry (Not Seafood & Citrus Fruit)

Michael Goldberg: Sardines (1955) 

oil and adhesive tape on canvas (80 3⁄4 x 66 in.) 

Smithsonian American Art Museum

 

 

I. 

 

Frank O'Hara's carefully crafted poem 'Why I Am Not a Painter' [1] continues to amuse readers interested in the ambiguous nature of the relationship that exists between those who, like him, choose to type words on a page and those who, like his friend Mike Goldberg [2], prefer to express themselves with oil on canvas.    

 

Whether this reveals O'Hara's conviction that the pen is not only mightier than the sword, but also the palette and paintbrush, I don't know. And even if this is his belief, like many writers, he secretly wishes he could play with colours rather than words (he lets this slip in a casual aside in the short opening stanza).

 

For the latter can never quite capture the red-yellow essence of orange, even if you produce a whole page of descriptive prose or the most exquisite poetry; a picture, they say, conveys a thousand times more information than the word (in terms of size, shape, and colour of a sardine that's doubtless true). 

 

However, sometimes - even on a canvas - images can become too much, too overwhelming, and a string of eight letters spelling out the word S-A-R-D-I-N-E-S is really all you need; particularly when you understand, as poets and philosophers understand, that no word exists in isolation; that each is connected to every other word in the language via a complex network of shared meanings, etymological roots, grammatical functions, figurative associations, and so on - even if, ironically, no word has any essential connection to the object it represents. 

 

Probably most painters understand this too, which is why they still very often give their pictures a title; particularly the more logocentric amongst them for whom the Word remains the origin and most fundamental expression of reality; titles are rarely given purely for practical reasons. 

 

 

II. 

 

The phrase, oranges and sardines, has now become fixed (one is almost tempted to say a cliché) within the arts, as a phrase referencing poetry and/as painting. 

 

Back in 2008-09, for example, the Hammer Museum [3] held an exhibition curated by Gary Garrels with this title, although, somewhat ironically, it allowed six contemporary abstract artists to reflect philosophically and poetically on their own work - their studio processes, their indebtedness to art history, etc. - without the need to consult any actual philosophers or poets (the show really should have just been called Sardines).  

 

To be honest, I don't mind that so much. Although I'd probably challenge Garrels's slightly ludicrous assertion that "artists look at art with a focus and scrutiny, a criticality and level of engagement that few of us are able to summon with the same intensity" [4]. 

 

I mean, c'mon, I admire greatly those working within the visual arts - and I'm happy to admit that many have "a deep knowledge of art and art history and of the intellectual arguments around art" [5] - but where's the evidence for this particularity of vision? 

 

Having said that, however, I know conceited poets who believe they have a unique sensitivity to language; arrogant philosophers who think they are the only ones who know how to conceptualise ideas; and even affected fashion designers who imagine it is they who are solely responsible for determining our love of cerulean blue.         

 

 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Frank O'Hara, 'Why I Am Not a Painter', in The Selected Poems, ed. Donald Allen (Random House, 1974). Written in 1956, the poem can be found on poets.org: click here.

 

[2] Michael Goldberg (1924 - 2007) was was an American abstract expressionist, known for both his action paintings and still-lifes. He was a key member of the New York School, an informal group of poets, painters, dancers, and jazz musicians living it large in the 1950s and '60s, drawing inspiration from one another and from earlier avant-garde movements, such as the Surrealists. 

      Frank O'Hara was very much at the centre of this group, before his death, aged 40, in 1966, and Gary Garrels is right to note that he was "not only a poet but also a curator and critic who grounded his critical approach to art not in theory or philosophy, but in a distinct appraisal of the artworks themselves, the cultural situation of the time, and the circumstances of the artists". See note [4] below for a link to the essay by Garrels from which I quote.

 

[3] The Hammer Museum is an art museum and cultural centre, affiliated with UCLA. Founded in 1990 by the entrepreneur-industrialist Armand Hammer to house his personal art collection, the museum has since expanded its scope and now hosts a wide array of free public lectures, readings, concerts, and film screenings.    

 

[4] Gary Garrels, introductory essay to Oranges and Sardines: Conversations on Abstract Painting (Hammer Museum, 2009): click here to read the essay on the Hammer Museum website.    

 

[5] Ibid. 

 

 

Bonus video: Frank O'Hara: Why I Am Not A Painter (Optic Nerve Ltd.): click here. This is one of seven excerpts from the film Frank O'Hara: How Terrible Orange Is/& Life (Colin Still / Optic Nerve, 1995).

 

This post is for the American figurative painter SJ Fuerst who kindly sent me O'Hara's poem. 

 

 

Dark Spring: In Memory of Unica Zürn and a Brief Note on a New Exhibition Reimagining Her Legacy

Photo of Unica Zürn by Man Ray (1956) and a flyer for the 

Dark Spring - syzygy exhibition ft. Vicky Wright's V-Effekt (2024) 

 

"There can never have been a spring more beautifully dark than this ..."

 

 

I. 

 

Unica Zürn, for those who might not recognise the name, was a German author and artist, probably most famous for her anagrammatic poetry, automatic drawings, and the notorious nude photos produced in collaboration with her Surrealist lover, Hans Bellmer, in 1958, in which she was bound so tightly with string that it cut into her flesh.

 

Born in the summer of 1916, in the Grunewald district of Berlin, Zürn adored her (mostly absent) father; had a stormy relationship with her (uncaring) mother; and was sexually abused by her older brother. 

 

After leaving school, she began working at the film agency which produced propaganda material for the Nazi Party, although Zürn herself was not a party member (and, besides, a girl has to make a living somehow).

 

She married a much older - and also much wealthier - man during the War and bore him two children. Unfortunately, following a divorce in 1949, Zürn lost custody of both bairns, lacking as she did the means to support them (or indeed herself).    

 

Deciding that she was more suited to a bohemian life rather than one of domestic drudgery and child-rearing, Zürn began to hang around the caberet circuit and frequent the bars and clubs popular with artists, whilst earning what she could by writing short stories for newspapers and dramas for the radio.

 

Zürn also became romantically involved with the painter and dancer Alexander Camaro, although it was her meeting with Hans Bellmer in 1953 that was to prove pivotal; the two of them fleeing Germany and relocating to Paris, where she became his mistress, model, and muse. 

 

Whilst in Paris, Zürn also began experimenting with her own artwork; if Bellmer secretly wished to slice up bodies, she was more interested in how to fragment language and produce a style of writing she termed Hexentexte (1954). 

 

Before long, she and Hans were very much part of the Surrealist in-crowd, mixing with André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray ... and all the other usual suspects. But the good times were not to last and in 1960 Zürn experienced a psychotic episode - which may or may not have been triggered by her experiments with mescaline. 

 

Following this, dissociative states, severe depression, and suicidal thoughts became the norm and she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic (and not in the positive sense that Deleuze and Guatarri would later thrill to). If, on the one hand, she continued to produce new work, on the other, she destroyed many of her earlier drawings and writings.  

 

Long story short: in October 1970, 54-year-old Zürn committed suicide by leaping from the window of the Paris apartment she had shared with Bellmer, while on a five-day leave from a psychiatric hospital. She was buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and, at his request, Bellmer was buried next to her upon his death in 1975.

 

One of Zürn's final written works was the semi-autobiographical Dunkler Frühling (1967) [1], which tells the story of an obsessive young woman as she has her first sexual encounters and experiences the onset of mental illness. 

 

Somewhat disconcertingly, Zürn's death seems to be foreshadowed in the text as the protagonist of Dark Spring also tops herself by jumping out of a window, although, as it rather poignantly says in the book: She was dead even before her feet left the windowsill.

 

This book has since acquired cult status, particularly amongst feminists, female artists, and those who find her life (and death) fascinating (even romantic). Thus it is, for example, one can wander around Hoxton on a sunny afternoon and come across a contemporary gallery space on Vestry Street running an exhibition entitled Dark Spring - syzygy [2] ...    

II.

There were only eleven paintings on show - two from each of the five artists featured in the exhibition, with an extra one for luck by Sadie Murdoch thrown into the mix - but I struggled to see how some of the pictures repurposed and re-routed the principles of Zürn's work, as promised in the exhibition press release (though I'm perfectly willing to concede this might be a failure on my part). 

 

I liked Murdoch's Pass-Way Into Where To (2022) - an ink-jet printed digital montage, operating, it is claimed, in "the field of power and absence, via the partial, the incomplete, the crop and the edit" (see Figure 1 below).

 

And I also really liked a canvas by Petra Williams entitled Floating Man (2024); not so much for the questions it posed re identity, isolation, relationship to others, the need to create one's own space, etc., but because the colours were so lovely (see Figure 2 below).

 

But perhaps my favorite work was a pair of pictures by Vicky Wright in her V-Effekt series (2024). For these at least gave us amorphous figures with distorted bodies and a layering of faces that one might expect and hope for in an exhibition inspired by Unica Zürn.

 

The writer of the exhibition press release describes them as anti-portraits and speaks of how their woozy painterliness troubles subjectivity, thereby obliging the viewer to reconsider the idea of the human self in relation to non-human elements, both demonic and animal (see Figure 3 below).        

 

Fig. 1 Sadie Murdoch: Pass-Way Into Where To (2022)

Fig. 2 Petra Williams: Floating Man (2024)

Fig. 3 Vicky Wright: V-Effekt II (2024)

Notes

 

[1] This short novel by Unica Zürn has been translated into English by Caroline Rupprecht and was published by Exact Change in 2000. 

 

[2] The exhibition at Cross Lane Projects (1st floor, 6-8 Vestry Street, London N1), runs until 19 April, 2025, and features work by Vicky Wright, Josephine Wood, Petra K. Williams, Sadie Murdoch, and Tracey Owusu. For full details and to download the press release from which I quote in this post, please click here.   

Disrhythmy: A Tale of Two Mothers

'La subtilité du pouvoir s’opère par la disrythmie ...'

 

 

I. 

 

I was amused by the fact that Roland Barthes was a little shocked by witnessing the following scene:

 

"From my window (December 1, 1976), I see a mother pushing an empty stroller, holding her child by the hand. She walks at her own pace, imperturbably; the child, meanwhile, is being pulled, dragged along, is forced to keep running, like an animal, or one of Sade's victims being whipped. She walks at her own pace, unaware of the fact that her son's rhythm is different. And she's his mother!" [1]   

 

For Barthes, this was a clear abuse of power. 

 

But for me, it brought back happy memories of my own early childhood, when I used to walk to the local shops with my mother, holding her hand, as she hurried down Daventry Road and along Hilldene Avenue, obliging me to to keep up as best I could and adapt my rhythm to hers.

 

Happy days: I didn't in the least feel dehumanised or victimised at the time and, it seems to me now, that it's right for a parent to set the pace; modern mothers are mistaken in thinking it is they who should adapt themselves to their child's rhythm and give in to their every demand; that it's they who should be dragged about. 

 

That's how to spoil a child.

 

 

II. 

    

What didn't amuse me, however, was something I witnessed yesterday when taking a stroll:

 

A mother, holding her daughter by the hand. The young girl dawdling to look with wonder at some large yellow daffodils growing in one of the very few front gardens yet to be concreted over. Suddenly, the woman sharply yanks the child's hand and tells her to hurry up: "We haven't got time to look at some stupid flowers!"   

 

Now that's what I call dysrhythmy and shockingly bad parenting ...   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Roland Barthes, How to Live Together, trans. Kate Briggs, (Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 9.

 

Idiorrhythmy

D. H. Lawrence: untitled ink drawing (1929) [1]

 

I. 

 

In a series of lectures in the academic year 1976-77, French philosopher and critic Roland Barthes explored the idea of how individuals might productively live with others in a manner that preserves the right of each to exist at their own pace and maintain a necessary degree of solitude. 

 

He discussed this in his own singular and imaginative fashion - i.e., as a form of fantasy [2] - in relation to the fascinating concept of idiorrhythmy [3]; a term that first appeared in the early middle ages in connection with certain orders of monks whose members although existing alongside one another in the same space, were free to work and prayer each according to their own specific rhythms  [4].

 

For Barthes, idiorrhythmy thus provides the clue as to how we might live together in a society, but, at the same time, respect the character quirks and behavioural idiosyncrasies of members - no matter how strange, irritating, or offensive we might find these things.

 

It sounds good, but, unfortunately, there's the very real danger that such an ultra-liberal (almost anarchic) model for social coexistence risks fragmentation into a chaos of self-sufficient, self-interested, and self-absorbed egoists, caring for nothing for anyone as they spin contentedly on their own axis. 

 

And whilst I might not fancy being a member of a really tight-knit community in which the interests of the individual are stricty subordinate to those of the collective, neither do I wish to live in a world of atomised individualism. 

 

II. 

 

Sometimes, like Barthes, I imagine myself living somewhere by the sea - or perhaps in the mountains - in a little house, "with two rooms for my own use and two more close by for a few friends" [5], as well as somewhere we might gather with our neighbours for celebration.

 

But then, like Barthes, I quickly snap out of this longing for Rananim [6] and realise that it's ultimately just a "very pure fantasy that glosses over the difficulties that will come to loom like ghosts" [7].

 

Indeed, it's hard enough living at times with just one person and one is obliged to ask: is there such a thing as an idiorrhythmic couple? 

 

Barthes doesn't seem to think so. In any case, he's expressly uninterested in such a model per se, preferring to only talk about couples in the context of wider groups. His main objection is not only that the couple offer a model of domesticated and legitimised desire, but that such a model "blocks any experience of anachoresis" [8]; i.e., it doesn't allow for a vital retreat into one's own peace and quiet [9]. 

 

But surely that depends; not so much on who that person is as a person with their various interests and ideas, but on their impersonal rhythym. 

 

Provided the latter isn't too disruptive of one's own and they don't, like Madonna, insist that you get into the groove in order to prove your love [10] - for this invariably means falling into line with their rhythm - then I can't see the problem with individuals forming a monogamous couple (on the condition that they are separated sometimes and don't become "'stuck together like two jujube lozenges'" [11].   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This astonishing ink drawing of two nude figures by Lawrence illustrates the unique rhythms of the body and how these individual rhythms interact in a pattern of relationship.

 

[2] In his late work, Barthes loved to use the term fantasy, by which he understood "a resurgence of certain desires, certain images that lurk within you, that want to be identifed by you [...] and often only assume concrete form thanks to a particular word [... that] leads from the fantasy to its investigation".       

      See Roland Barthes, How to Live Together, trans. Kate Briggs (Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 6.  

 

[3] The term idiorrhythmic is a combination of the Greek terms for personal and distinct, ἴδιος (ídios) and rule or rhythym, ῥῠθμός (rhŭthmós). In modern English, it therefore means something like self-regulating, or independent. 

[4] Barthes refers to these loose-knit religious communities as idiorrhythmic clusters. Sadly, they were eventually replaced by cenobitic orders of monks who lived according to a single model; we might say that individual rule and rhythm were replaced by centralised law and order. Or, as Barthes writes: "Power - the subtlety of power - is effected through disrhythmy ..." How to Live Together ... p. 9.    

[5] Roland Barthes, How to Live Together ... p. 7.

 

[6] Rananim was the name for a small utopian community dreamed of by D. H. Lawrence; a place where he, Frieda, and a few friends could escape the modern world and create a more fulfilling way of life founded upon the assumption that members were fundamentally good at heart and shared his vision for mankind.

[7] Roland Barthes, How to Live Together ... p. 7.

 

[8] Ibid., p. 8. 

 

[9] Barthes also claims that the history of modern communes has demonstrated that things quickly fall apart "from the moment that family groups are reestablished - due to the conflict between sexuality and the law". See How to Live Together ... p. 8.  

[10] I'm referring to the track 'Into the Groove' by Madonna, which featured in the film Desperately Seeking Susan  (dir. Susan Seidelman, 1985). Written and produced by Madonna and her then boyfriend Stephen Bray, the song was latter added to the 1985 re-issue of her second studio album, Like a Virgin (Sire Records, 1984). It was a number 1 hit and remains her best-selling single in the UK.     

[11] D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 91. This is Rawdon Lilly speaking. He continues: "'Everybody ought to stand by themselves, in the first place [...] They can come together, in the second place, if they like. But nothing is any good unless each one stands alone, intrinsically.'" 

 

Musical bonus: 'I Got Rhythm' composed by George Gershwin, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin (1930). Originally sang by Ethel Merman in the stage musical Girl Crazy, it has been recorded on numerous occasions by a variety of artists ever since. Click here for a version by Ella Fitzgerald from 1959. 

In Gentle Praise of the Neutral

Cover of the audio CD MP3 (Seuil, 2002)

 

 

I. 

 

In a recent post, I described the excluded middle as the evil realm of fuzzy logic, dark limpidity, and what Nietzsche terms dangerous knowledge [1].

 

But it's also of course, far less dramatically, the zone of what Roland Barthes termed the Neutral ...

 

 

II. 

 

Le neutre was the title and theme of a lecture course delivered by Barthes at the Collège de France in 1977-78 [2]. He defined the concept as that which bafflles the paradigm, i.e., that which both bewilders and frustrates the system of binary opposition that structures and determines our thinking.  

 

For Barthes, to gently mock the above system and throw a velvet spanner in its works - thereby disrupting its smooth operation - has significant philosophical implications. For opening a gateway to the excluded middle and the possibility of speaking the world differently, also allows one to imagine new ways of relating to others. 

 

Thus, the Neutral has vital ethical and political import, which is why we should embrace Barthes's ideas - drawn from a diverse set of writers and intellectual traditions - on those figures, traits, and twinklings which illustrate or embody the Neutral; such as silence and uncertainty, for example.

 

Better these things, I think, than the arrogant loud conviction of those who would bully with the anti-Neutral blackmail of Either/Or. 

 

I may not always achieve the degree of neutrality [3] in my writing that Barthes dreamed of - I may at times fall back into the kind of violent and assertive language full of judgement and doxa that he loathed - but I do my best on Torpedo the Ark to find a rhetorical form of fiction-theory that avoids imposing its meaning on the reader.

 

  

Notes

 

[1] See the post entitled 'On Traversing the Excluded Middle' (22 Mar 2025): click here. 

      What I'm attempting to do here is further illustrate how the excluded middle might be thought of as a small space for nonpolarised phenomena. 

 

[2] Barthes's lecture course was published in book form as Le Neutre: Cours au Collège de France (1977–1978), ed. and annotated by Thomas Clerc (Seuil/IMEC, 2002). It was published in English as The Neutral, trans. Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier (Columbia University Press, 2007). 

 

[3] I use the term neutrality with reservation; for Barthes was keen to stress that the Neutral - or what I'm referring to as the excluded middle - doesn't simply refer to a space of impartiality or indifference, but, rather, to a space for destabilising and experimental activity. The desire for the Neutral is, as Barthes says, born of an intense passion.     

 

 

Readers interested in this topic might like to see a post published on TTA entitled 'Sing if You're Glad to be Grey (On the Desire for the Neutral)' (16 Oct 2015): click here. 

On Jasmine Howard's Granny, My Mother, and the Likely Lasses

Two girls in Newcastle (1970)

Photo by Laszlo Torday 

 

I. 

 

The other day, on a sunny afternoon, as Ray Davies would say, I attended a meeting of the Subcultures Interest Group (SIG), held in a fifth floor room at the London College of Fashion, located, for those who don't know, on the East Bank of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford. 

 

After discussing the graphic design of Dave King - the one who designed the Crass symbol; not the one who designed the Anti-Nazi League logo - and the contents of an upcoming issue of SIG News, there were three short presentations, including one by a canny lass dressed in a vintage outfit called Jasmine Howard; a Fashion Cultures and Histories student, writing her MA dissertation on class and clothing in the North East of England in the mid-late 1960s [1].

 

 

II. 

 

More interested in the women who lived and worked and raised families in the small towns and villages rather than big cities such as Newcastle, Ms Howard argued that her grandmother was not only a long way geographically from Swinging London and its youth-driven cultural revolution, but essentially belonged to a different world from the one inhabited by Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton.

 

And, after looking at a photo of her grandmother on her wedding day in comparison to a London model wearing one of the lastest Mary Quant designs, one has to agree. 

 

But that's not to say that Jasmine's granny didn't look lovely; futuristic minimalism and space-age fashion is all well and good, but there's nothing wrong with looking neat and tidy in a more traditional sense and wearing garments that are a little more down to earth and designed to last. 

 

My own mother, who was from the North East, but moved south after marrying in 1948, never had much money to spend on clothes and wasn't very much interested in fashion. Nevertheless, she always made sure she looked respectable when she left the house; always with makeup and never with bare legs or bare head. 

 

Back then, people would refer to themselves as working class and proud, which, amongst other things, implied they took care of their appearance, but didn't necessarily feel the need to wear silver miniskirts and go-go boots.          

 

 

III.

 

Having said that, as the North East fashion historian Caroline Whitehead [2] reminds us, there were young women (and young men) in the North East during the sixties - certainly in the large cities, but also, I suspect, in the smallest towns and villages - who were bang on trend and keen to keep up with all the latest fashions from London, even if they couldn't afford to buy such and had to make their own outfits or buy cheap knock-off designs by mail order.

 

I can't imagine, for example, that if you were a student at the Newcastle College of Art and Industrial Design [3] in the 1960s, you were dressed either like Jasmine's granny or my mother and, if one can judge from the clothes worn by Thelma and all the other likely lasses [4], by the early-mid 1970s many women in the North East were now wearing colourful outfits, often with very short hemlines.    

 

  

Notes

 

[1] The two other presentations were made by Nael Ali and Eylem Boz; the former spoke on the symbol of the wolf within black metal; the latter, on the way in which social media and other forms of digital communication transformed emo in the early 21st century. My thoughts on these papers can be read here and here.    

 

[2] Whitehead organised an event celebrating local history month on 1 May, 2010, at Newcastle City Library, which examined the impact that the 1960s had on the North East. She gave an illustrated talk entitled 'The Sixties Revisited: Dedicated Followers of Fashion'. Tony Henderson's article on this event in the Chronicle can be found online by clicking here.

 

[3] Newcastle College of Art and Industrial Design was a key institution in the NE region in the 1960s. It eventually merged with other colleges to form Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University).

 

[4] I'm referring here to the female cast of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads (BBC TV 1973-74), led by Brigit Forsyth as Thelma Ferris (née Chambers). See the post dated 2 December 2023: click here. 

Joining the Black Parade: Brief Reflections on Emo

 Portrait of the Scottish poet, philosopher, and founder 

of Emo, Thomas Brown (1778 - 1820)  [1]

 

 

I. 

 

The other day, on a sunny afternoon, as Ray Davies would say, I attended a meeting of the Subcultures Interest Group (SIG), held in a fifth floor room at the London College of Fashion, located, for those who don't know, on the East Bank of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford.

 

After discussing the graphic design of Dave King - the one who designed the Crass symbol; not the one who designed the Anti-Nazi League logo - and the contents of an upcoming issue of SIG News, there were three short presentations by post-grad students, including one by a vivacious young woman called Eylem Boz, who was writing her MA dissertation on the way in which social media and other forms of digital communication have transformed emo - an alternative music genre - in the 21st century.

 

Now, I have to confess that my knowledge of emo is pretty limited, although I am aware of the fact that it has existed not only as a sound but as a fashion - and not only as a look, but as a lifestyle - since the early-mid 1990s, so I was keen to listen and learn a little more from someone who was clearly speaking with an insider's knowledge, experience, and passion, whilst still viewing things with a degree of academic objectivity [2].

 

 

II. 

 

If I'm not mistaken, Ms Boz was arguing that emo, as a subculture, radically developed (and mutated) as an online phenomenon - particularly in the early 2000s - in a way that earlier youth subcultures had not had the opportunity to do so. 

 

So, whilst some emo bands - such as My Chemical Romance [3] - found a level of mainstream success during this period, that's kind of irrelevant. What really matters and what really interests, is the way that emo was a fan-driven phenomenon; they made their own rules, relationships, and values, etc. [4]

 

And so, whilst emos may or may not be overly-sensitive and prone to mental health issues, they are also highly creative and tech-savvy and one can't help feeling a mixture of admiration and affection for them. 

 

What ultimately struck me during Eylem's presentation, however, was that emo is something of a paradox. For what she revealed is not that members of this community have a rich and complex inner life, but that their authenticity is a game of artifice and their model of selfhood is something created, stylised, and performed, rather than something to be known via philosophical reflection.

 

That's not to denigrate those who identify as emo, or mock them for their concern with clothes, haircuts, and makeup; I'd be the last person in the world who would wish to rain on their black parade, so to speak.

 

I'm simply suggesting that it would be a good idea for Ms Boz to acknowledge in her dissertation that that the emotions are things that demand expression, always pushing towards a surface [5], and that the ancient Greeks were wise to adore appearance, believe in forms, and courageously remain, as Nietzsche says, superficial out of profundity [6]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This image features an engraving by William Walker based on a painting of Thomas Brown by George Watson (1806) and a ghostly-looking version of an Emo Girl by the graphic designer and illustrator Manuela Zamfir. Her original can be viewed (and downoaded for a fee) on vecteezy.com. 

      Brown, for those who don't know, has been described as the 'inventor of the emotions'. For more details, see Thomas Dixon's post dated 2 April 2020 on the History of Emotions Blog, operated by the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions: click here. 

 

[2] Eylem Boz certainly looked the part, though whether she would identify herself as an emo girl I don't know and, amusingly, her lively and outgoing character seemed to be somewhat at odds with the popular idea of the latter as someone a bit reserved and introverted (though perhaps this popular idea of an emo girl is a misconception and stereotype).    

 

[3] My Chemical Romance rejected the label after the UK press whipped up a moral panic surrounding the cult of emo and accused them (and other groups) of promoting social alienation, self-harm, and suicide amongst their young followers. To play their huge hit single, 'Welcome to the Black Parade', taken from the album The Black Parade (Reprise Records, 2006), click here.  

 

[4] As the character Dewey Finn would say: "That is so punk rock."

 

[5] The English word emotion was coined in the early 1800s by Thomas Brown - arguably the first emo - and derives from the French term émouvoir, which means to stir up (i.e. to move things towards the surface). It is arguable that whilst people before this date experienced certain passions and affections, no one felt emotions in the modern psychological sense.

      It is also arguable, that our emotions (like our ideas) are entirely constructed by external regimes of power, which is why I would like to close this post with the following (non-emo) track from the American punk band the Dead Kennedys; taken from the album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (Cherry Red Records, 1980), 'Your Emotions' amusingly suggests that our emotions betray our monstrous nature and that our scars only begin to show when we confess how we're feeling or what we're thinking. To play, click here.  

 

[6] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, preface to the second edition (1886), section 4. 

 

 

For a related post to this one, in which I offer some Deleuzean reflections on the symbol of the wolf in black metal, click here.  

 

For a related post to this one on the politics of female fashion in the NE of England during the 1960s, click here.

Deleuzean Reflections on a Black Metal Wolf

Rune Wolf - a black metal logo by Monkeyrumen (2011) 

deviantart.com

 

"The wolf is not fundamentally a characteristic or a certain number of characteristics; it is a wolfing." 

- Deleuze & Guattari

 

 

I. 

 

Yesterday, on a sunny spring afternoon, I went along to another meeting of the Subcultures Interest Group, this time held in a fifth floor room at the London College of Fashion, located, for those who don't know, on the East Bank of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford; directly opposite the London Stadium, which is where West Ham now play their football, having left Upton Park in 2016 (c'mon you Irons!). 

 

After discussing the graphic design of Dave King and the contents of the upcoming issue of SIG News, there were three short presentations by post-grad students, including one by Nael Ali, whose work on the figure of the goat within the genre of music known as war metal I briefly mentioned on Torpedo the Ark back in July 2024: click here.  

 

This time, however, there was nothing caprine about Ali's work. Instead, he spoke about the wolf as symbol within black metal; a topic which has special resonance for me as someone who has long been fascinated by the wolf within Norse mythology, folklore, and Nazi ideology [1]; as well as within the work of Deleuze and Guattari ...  

 

 

II.

 

As far as I'm aware, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were never fans of black metal, but they did like wolves. Thus, in Mille Plateau (1980), for example, they tie their theory of multiplicities to the wolf pack and, later, illustrate their section on becoming-animal with a pair of Etruscan images of a wolf-man.  

 

Wishing to distance themselves from psychoanalysis, they insist that Freud, being myopic and hard of hearing, knew nothing about wolves, but only about domestic pets and puppy-dog's tails (how fair and how accurate that is, I don't know). 

 

Although we often speak of the lone wolf, D&G insist that you can never be such a thing; that individuals even of the most solitary or independent kind are always still part of the pack; i.e., one wolf among others. 

 

They write:

 

"In becoming-wolf, the important thing is [...] the position of the subject itself in relation to the pack or wolf-multiplicity: how the subject joins or does not join the pack [...] how it does or does not hold to the multiplicity." [2]

 

The key thing is: don't reduce the many to the one; don't flatten wolf packs and machinic assemblages and molecular multiplicities. And understand that becoming-wolf has nothing to do with representing oneself as such, or believing oneself to be a wolf; wolves are "intensities, speeds, temperatures, nondecomposable variable distances" [3]. 

 

In other words, becoming-wolf is all about shooting a line of flight or deterritorialisation; not becoming hirsute, growing large carnivorous fangs, and howling at the moon like a lunatic. Sometimes, alas, I fear that our friends in the black metal community do not understand this; they seem readily seduced by medieval symbols, but to lack any knowledge of particles.        

 

Perhaps if you're the member of a black metal band then that doesn't matter too much. But if you're a doctoral research student, like Nael Ali, then you really should have an understanding of this and be able to refer to the reality of wolves within the libidinally material unconscious; they are not just imaginary or mythical in such a manner that allows us to extract from them structures of meaning or archetypal models, and lycanthropy is not simply a fantasy [4].  

 

I don't want to criticise the above too much - he is, I believe, just starting his research into the topic of black metal wolves - but it's important, sooner or later, that Ali recognise that becoming-wolf is not a game of correspondence between relations; "neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification" [5].

 

Finally, it's interesting to note in closing just how black metalheads often think like theologians; in their Satanism, for example, and when it comes to the question of the werewolf. For like theologians, they seem to regard the idea of human beings becoming animal as profoundly immoral on the grounds that essential forms are inalienable. 

 

Notes

 

[1] This fascination can be traced all the way back to Pagan Magazine issue XI: 'Ragnarok: Twilight of the Gods and the Coming of the Wolf' (1986). 

      Later, in 2007, I as part of the Bodil Joensen Memorial Lectures at Treadwell's, I gave a paper entitled 'In the Company of Wolves' which discussed lycanthropy and other forms of animal transformation with reference to the work of Angela Carter. 

     Finally, see also the post 'Operation Werewolf' published on TTA (6 Aug 2019), which dealt with the Nazi use of wolf mythology and symbolism: click here.

 

[2] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988), p. 29. 

 

[3] Ibid., p. 32.

 

[4] As Deleuze and Guattari write:

      "Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real.  But which reality is at issue here? For if becoming-animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal, it is clear that a human does not 'really' become an animal [...] Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false narrative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that becoming passes."

      In other words: "The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not ..." See ATP, p. 238.  

 

[5] Ibid., p. 237. 

 

 

Surprise musical bonus; proto-black metal from 1933: click here. 

 

For a sister post to this one in which we follow the black parade and reflect on emo, click here. 

 

And for another SIG-inspired post, this time on the politics of female fashion in NE England during the 1960s, please click here. 

 

Joy is Deeper Than the Heart's Agony: On Nietzsche and the Concept of Confelicity

A young Nietzsche looking joyful in 1869

Image via The Mindless Philosopher 

 

"The lowest animal can imagine the pain of others.

 But to imagine the joy of others and to rejoice at it is the greatest privilege of the highest animals ..." [1]

 

 

Many English-speakers know the meaning of the German term Schadenfreude. 

 

But very few know the antonymic term Mitfreude, coined by Nietzsche in 1878, and referring to the feeling of joy felt when learning of the happiness or good fortune of others [2].

 

Interestingly, Nietzsche also contrasts Mitfreude with Mitleid (pity) - and even Mitgefühl (compassion) - viewing an ethic of shared joy rather than shared suffering as more noble (and less Christian).    

 

It is shared happiness, not shared pain, he argues, from which bonds of friendship best develop [3] and allow for a future democracy of joyful exuberance to develop [4].  

 

 

Notes

 

The phrase used in the title of this post - 'Joy is deeper than the heart's agony' - is from section 8 of 'The Intoxicated Song', found in part 4 of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  

 

[1] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, volume 2, part 1, section 62. 

      I am consulting R. J. Hollingdale's translation from the 1986 Cambridge University Press edition of this work, p. 228, but I have slightly modified it. 

 

[2] Usually, in English, we use the term confelicity to describe this feeling, although this is not a word one hears very often.

[3] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I. 9. 499.

 

[4] It might surprise some readers to discover that Nietzsche writes of such a future democracy; one that will create and guarantee as much independence as possible and which is in stark contrast to the model of liberal democracy founded upon a mixture of fear and herd morality (i.e., modern humanism). See Human, All Too Human, II. 2. 293. 

 

 

Musical bonus: Killing Joke, 'We Have Joy', from the album Revelations (E.G. Records, 1982): click here for the 2005 digitally remastered version. 

 

This post is for my frenemy Síomón Solomon.