On the Art of Destruction and the Creative Potential Within Chaos

Agents of Chaos: Messrs. Rotten and Lawrence

 

 

I. 

 

If, like me, you are keen to promote the idea of D. H. Lawrence as a Sex Pistol, then one of his texts that you might discuss in order to lend credence to such a thesis is his introduction to Harry Crosby's volume of poetry Chariot of the Sun [1]. 

 

Entitled 'Chaos in Poetry', this short text develops the idea not merely of creative disorder that Malcolm McLaren and his young punk protégés will later inject into the moribund UK music scene of the mid-1970s, but of chaos as a realm of infinite possibilities and strange becomings [2].  

According to Lawrence, poetry is not merely a matter of words: essentially, it is an act of attention and the attempt to discover a new world within the known world. 

 

But this discovery of a new world involves an act of violence; the slitting of what he terms the Umbrella and by which he refers to all that is erected between ourselves and the sheer intensity of lived experience (our ideals, our conventions, and fixed forms of every description) [3]. 

 

The poet, then, as Lawrence understands them, is also a kind of terrorist; an enemy of human security and comfort. One whose concern is not with safeguarding the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, or merely experimenting with form and technique, but who wishes rather to unleash the inhuman and forever-surging chaos that punks, animals, and flowers all live within [4]. 

 

 

II. 

 

On 12 February 1976, the Sex Pistols were due to play at the famed Soho music venue the Marquee, supporting the pub rock band Eddie & the Hot Rods. 

 

Shortly before the gig took place, they were interviewed by Neil Spencer from the NME and extracts from this accompanied a review of the above performance, including what has since become a famous quote from guitarist Steve Jones: 

 

"Actually, we're not into music. We're into chaos." [5]    

As Bill Grundy later discovered, Jones always did have a nice turn of phrase. However, I think we can safely assume that he'd picked up this particular term - chaos - from Malcolm, as - along with the word ruins - it had a privileged place within McLaren's thinking.

 

For McLaren, as for Nietzsche, one must always retain a little chaos in one's character if one wishes to give birth to a dancing star [6]; and for McLaren, as for Lawrence, an originary chaos is what lies beneath the ruins of culture and its fixed forms erected to keep us safe and secure, though which in the long run cause us to become deadened. 

 

 

III. 

 

In sum: of course we require "a little order to protect us from chaos" [7], as Deleuze and Guattari recognise. 

 

But so too do we need a little chaos to protect us from the monumental dead weight of civilisation. 

 

And so we need our agents of chaos and angels of destruction - whether they come with red beards like D. H. Lawrence, or spiky red hair like Johnny Rotten.   

 

Sous les pavés, la plage!

 

And surely that's not simply a cry for freedom, so much as for the joy that comes when we smash those structures and systems, narratives and networks, that enframe us within a highly-ordered (and boring) world of discipline, convention, and common sense and get back to chaos.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lawrence wrote the introduction in 1928. A revised version was published under the title 'Chaos in Poetry' in the magazine Echanges in December 1929 (the same month in which Crosby committed suicide). Another version was used for the Black Sun Press edition of Chariot of the Sun (1931). 

      The text can be found in D. H. Lawrence, Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 107-116. 

 

[2] I am, of course, indebted to the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari who, in their final work together, argues that philosophy, science, and art all have the essential task of confronting chaos and that each discipline does so in a manner specific to itself as a way of thinking and creating. 

      If philosophy adventures into chaos via a plane of immanence and science via a plane of reference, then art constructs a plane of composition; indeed, this, for Deleuze and Guattari is definitional of art. But by this they refer not merely to technical composition, but an aesthetic composition concerned with sensation. Thus art is a unique way of thinking and of opening a plane within chaos, which, whilst related to science and philosophy, should not be thought of as merely an aestheticisation of these practices. 

      See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (Verso, 1994). And see also my post on this book dated 23 May 2013: click here.   

 

[3] See the post entitled 'On Poetry, Chaos and the Great Umbrella' (10 June 2013): click here.

 

[4] Unfortunately, unlike animals and flowers, even punks can't live within chaos for very long and that is why they soon topple into cliché and become stereotypical; why they parade up and down the King's Road pretending that they are revolutionaries breathing the wild air of chaos, when they are all the while living and dying beneath the Great Umbrella.

 

[5] Neil Spencer's piece in the New Musical Express (21 Feb 1976) was entitled 'Don't look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols are coming'. It was reproduced in The Guardian to mark the 30th anniversary of its publication in 2006: click here. 

      Readers will note that no mention is given to the headlining Eddie & the Hot Rods, who had some of their equipment smashed by the Sex Pistols when the night descended (appropriately and not atypically) into chaos (they, the Sex Pistols, were booed off stage and subsequently banned from playing at the Marquee in future).

 

[6] See section 5 of the Prologue to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 

 

[7] Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 201.

 

 

For related posts to this one, please click here, here, and here.   

Sur la terre et le terrorisme: A Brief Sadean Response to Rebecca Solnit

According to the American writer Rebecca Solnit, it was no coincidence that the Christchurch mosque massacre took place on the same day and in close vicinity to a climate protest by youngsters with hope and idealism in their hearts: "It was a shocking pairing and also a perfectly coherent one".

Was it? Surely such perfect coherence - or synchronicity - is in the mind of the beholder ... 

But then Solnit is an idealist who specialises in discerning causal relations and meaningful connections between events; a woman who believes in harmonious global unity, which she describes as "the beautiful interconnection of all life and the systems [...] on which that life depends".

Other than the murderous racism, the thing she really dislikes about white supremacists is that they refuse to care about climate change and thus threaten to destroy or disrupt the above systems, making the world not just warmer, but more chaotic, "in ways that break these elegant patterns and relationships".  

This chaos, according to Solnit, is essentially an extension of terrorist violence; the violence not of guns and bombs, but of "hurricanes, wildfires, new temperature extremes, broken weather patterns, droughts, extinctions, famines" that the poor Earth is coerced or triggered into unleashing.

And this is why climate action, she says, has always been and must remain non-violent, in stark contrast to the actions carried out by men like Brenton Tarrant. For environmentalism is a movement to protect life and restore peace and harmony; protesting against global warming is "the equivalent of fighting against hatred" and disorder. In other words, it's a form of counter-terrorism. 

Personally, I think such claims are highly contentious, to say the least. But who knows, perhaps Ms. Solnit is right. After all, not only does she know a lot of climate activists, but she also knows what motivates them ... Love! Love for the planet, love for people (particularly the poor and vulnerable), and love for the promise of a sustainable future.

How many people at the opposite end of the political spectrum from herself and her friends she also knows isn't clear. Presumably not many. But that doesn't stop her from dismissing them all as irresponsible climate change deniers, unwilling to acknowledge that "actions have consequences", and full of the kind of libertarian machismo and entitlement that ultimately ends in violence.    

What Solnit doesn't seem to consider is that the Earth is a monster of chaos and indifference; that it's not a living system or self-regulating organism and is neither sentient nor morally concerned with the preservation of life.

I think it's mistaken to think of the planet as some kind of home, sweet home and to ascribe the world with some sort of will. But, if we must play this game, then it's probably best to take a neo-Gnostic line and accept that all matter and events are imbued with the spirit of evil.

Indeed, push comes to shove, I'm inclined to think that human agency and geological catastrophe conspire not because innocent Nature has been groomed by terrorists or provoked into taking her revenge due to man-made climate change (as some followers of Lovelock like to imagine), but because they are both expressions of what is a fundamentally immoral existence. 

Finally, Solnit might like to recall this from Sade writing in Justine: "Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power."

See:

Rebecca Solnit, 'Why climate action is the antithesis of white supremacy', The Guardian (19 March 2019): click here to read online. 

Marquis de Sade, Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, trans. John Phillips, (Oxford University Press, 2012). 

See also the excellent essay by David McCallam entitled 'The Terrorist Earth? Some Thoughts on Sade and Baudrillard', in French Cultural Studies 23 (3), (SAGE Publications, 2012), 215-224. Click here to access as an online pdf via Academia.edu.

Amongst other things, McCallam indicates how eighteenth-century discourses on revolutionary politics and the aesthetics of the sublime provide the conceptual framework for the contemporary idea of the Earth as terrorist; an idea, developed by Jean Bauadrillard, that allows us to think terror attacks and natural disasters interchangeably.   

Note: The photo of Rebecca Solnit is by John Lee: johnleepictures.com

On Poetry, Chaos and the Great Umbrella

Like Heidegger, Lawrence understands the essential task of poetry as safeguarding the mortal being of man in relation to the fourfold and, indeed, to all of those birds, beasts, flowers and silent objects which exist and unfold into being alongside us. 

Thus, like Heidegger, Lawrence crucially relates the duty to safeguard Dasein to the question of language and thought, with the latter understood not merely as the manipulation of already existent ideas, but the welling up of unknown life into consciousness. Poetry might thus be defined as an act of attention and the attempt to discover a new world within the known world.

But this discovery of a new world involves an act of violence; the slitting of what he terms the 'Umbrella' and by which he refers to all that is erected between ourselves and the forever surging chaos of existence (our ideals, our conventions, and fixed forms of every description). 

The poet is thus also a kind of terrorist; an enemy of human security and comfort.

But we needn't worry: for no matter how many times a poet manages to make a tiny hole in the painted underside of the Umbrella, the emergency services are on hand to ensure things are speedily repaired. The majority of us, if we're honest, prefer a patched-up reality and virtual chaos to the sheer intensity of lived experience.

And we prefer that poetry is annotated with notes that insist on the importance of form and technique, but discreetly remain silent about acts of vandalism and the mad desire for inhuman chaos.

D&G: What is Philosophy?

Image by Dick Whyte

One of the things I like about Deleuze is that he never gave up on philosophy. That is to say, he never had any problem with calling himself a philosopher and of happily subscribing to an intellectual tradition stretching back to the Stoics. 

This, by his own admission, didn't make him better than others of his generation who seemed slightly embarrassed by the title of philosopher, or felt guilty if their work too might be shown to belong to the history of Western metaphysics, but it did make him the most naive or innocent.

But what is philosophy for Deleuze? He answers this question very clearly and very beautifully in his final book written in collaboration with Félix Guattari, entitled - appropriately enough - What is Philosophy? In this text, Deleuze argues that philosophy, science, and art all have the essential task of mediating chaos and that each discipline does so in a manner specific to itself as a way of thinking and creating.

First and foremost for D&G, philosophy is neither concerned with the contemplation of ideas, or their communication; rather, it is concerned with the creation of new concepts. This is its unique role and why the philosopher might best be described not as the lover of wisdom, so much as the creator of concepts. 

This is not to deny that the sciences and arts aren't equally creative. But only philosophy creates concepts in the strictest sense of the term (as singularities or events, never as universals). In giving philosophy such a distinct history and role, D&G are not claiming any pre-eminence or privilege for their own work; they fully acknowledge that there are other equally important, equally profound ways of (non-conceptual) thinking. Science and art are not inferior modes of ideation, but they mediate chaos differently (with the latter defined not as a void of disorder, but a virtual realm of infinite possibilities).

Science, for example, in contrast to philosophy, is concerned with inventing functions that are then advanced as propositions in discursive systems to be reflected upon and communicated as such. It wants to find a way to give chaos fixed points of reference and to slow things down; to make chaos a little more predictable and, if you like, a little more human. Philosophy might like to give style to chaos (i.e. a level of consistency) via the construction of a 'plane of immanence', but it is happy to retain the speed of birth and disappearance that is proper to chaos.

Again, this is not to denigrate the work of physicists and mathematicians and D&G are at pains to stress that they find as much admirable experimentation and creation within Einstein as within Spinoza.

As for art, it takes a different approach: if philosophy is all about concepts and science all about functions and their elemental components known as functives, then art is concerned with percepts, affects, and sensations. D&G write:

"Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent ... of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves ... They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work of art being a sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself."

- Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Graham Burchell & Hugh Tomlinson, (Verso, 1994), p. 164.

Obviously the work of art is created by the artist, but it stands or falls on its own; i.e. it exceeds the life of its own creator. Further, it draws the artist (and the viewer, reader, listener) into a strange becoming - producing them as much as they produce it and giving everyone a little chaos back into their lives.

If, as we have noted, philosophy adventures into chaos via the plane of immanence and science via a plane of reference, then art constructs a plane of composition: this, for D&G, is definitional of art. But by this they refer not merely to technical composition (which could just as well be the concern of science), but an aesthetic composition concerned with sensation. Thus art, like science and philosophy, is a unique way of thinking and of opening a plane within chaos. It is obviously related to science and philosophy, but should not be thought of as an aesthetic mish-mash of these practices. D&G conclude:

"The three routes are specific, each as direct as the others, and they are distinguished by the nature of the plane and by what occupies it. Thinking is thought through concepts, or functions, or sensations and no one of these ... is better than another ... The three thoughts intersect and intertwine but without synthesis or identification."

- Ibid., pp. 198-99. 

Ultimately, we should be grateful for the gifts that they bring us: unlike religion, which has done nothing except open a great umbrella between us and reality in an attempt to protect mankind from chaos. But that's another post ...