On the Figure of the Fallen Woman

Detail from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 

unfinished painting Found (1869)

Oil on canvas (36 x 32 in) [1]

 

 

I.

 

Due to a pair of unrelated incidents, both involving American women of my acquaintance, the figure of the fallen woman has never resonated more in my imagination than now. 

 

Whilst a woman might literally fall and break her nose on a cobbled street in Soho, or split her lip as she - again quite literally - trips and bangs her head against a wall in Reading, here I wish to remark on the figure of the fallen woman as a conceptual metaphor with theological overtones. 

 

It was a metaphor that was particularly prevalent in 19th-century Britain, where it described a woman who had lost her social and moral standing (often as a result of pre- or extra-marital sex) and was heading on a downward path into poverty and/or prostitution [2].  

 

 

II. 

 

I suppose the original (or prototypical) fallen woman, i.e., the first to lose her innocence and be tempted into sin; the first to fall from God's grace, was Eve, the fruit-picking mother of us all and red-headed ophidiophile.  

 

The question I have, therefore, is this: if modern women are all the daughters of Eve, all inherit her corrupt nature inclining them towards sinfulness, disobedience, and consorting with serpents, then how much further can they fall? 

 

Does it really matter if one has a bad reputation amongst men, when one already exists outside the covenant and under judgement from God? 

 

III.  

 

D. H. Lawrence would say that the Fall wasn't into wickedness, or even carnal knowledge per se, but into self-consciousness.

 

And, in a sense, I agree with him; the real problem - particularly today, in an increasingly narcissistic and solopsistic world - is that we have fallen victim "to the developmental exigencies" [3] of our own consciousness and become enchanted by our own image or reflection, isolating us from everyone and everything else (not just God). 

 

We live according to our ideals of self: and this becomes at last a fatal form of neurosis. 

 

 

IV.   

 

Putting this Lawrentian reading to one side, however, let us return to the Victorian usage of the term fallen which, interestingly, was one that applied to a variety of women in many different settings and circumstances; not just prostitutes (and rape victims), even if the term fallen was most often conflated with unauthorised sexual knowledge and activity.

 

As always in England, class is invariably a consideration: some upper-middle class men regarded all women of a lower socio-economic status to be in some sense fallen (drunk, dirty, disagreeable, and disreputable, even if not actually on the game) [4].    

 

And, although the English sometimes like to pride themselves on their eccentricity, in some cases a woman may have been branded as fallen simply because she was unconventional and well-educated (queer in the old-fashioned sense; meaning not only odd, but ruined as a woman who would one day make a good wife and mother). 

 

Or perhaps she liked to laugh just a little too loudly; or dance just a little too wildly - in each case attracting attention to herself and forgetting the golden rule within bourgeois society of modesty and decorum at all times.     

 

 

V.

 

For a certain type of man, the great thing about a fallen woman is that she needs him to pick her up!  

 

Rescue and rehabilitation were key words in the Victorian era; fallen women needed saving by upright men, motivated by religious conviction, noble intentions, and - no doubt - for the chance to associate with known prostitutes, many of whom were very young girls.   

 

It would, I suppose, be a crass generalisation to label all Victorian men who helped fallen women as perverts - no doubt their motivations were complex and varied, ranging from genuine philanthropic concern to a paternalistic desire to exercise power and authority - but I do have reservations about those, like Gladstone, who seem overly concerned with vice and female sexuality tied to notions of chastity and innocence, etc. [5]    

 

 

VI.

 

As might be expected, male artists and writers also had a penchant for fallen women; indeed, apart from the Bible, it was Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) that most shaped the cultural (and pornographic) imagination on this issue (although the Victorians liked to think of her as more a passive victim or poor unfortunate, than as a woman who actively embraced evil, making her all the easier for them to save).  

 

In Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Mary Barton (1848), the story of Esther - a working class woman living in Manchester who ends up working as a prostitute - illustrates how even good girls go bad in times of great poverty. 

 

Whilst readers were encouraged to recognise how socio-economic factors played a significant part in her downfall, Gaskell doesn't offer us a radical politics, choosing instead to promote Christian values as the way to solve life's problems and remain an upright citizen even when times are hard. Unfortunately, prayer and reciting scripture doesn't feed hungry mouths or put shoes on the feet of children.      

 

Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy also expressed their views on the topic of the fallen woman; the former even went so far as to set up a home for such poor creatures (Urania Cottage) [6], whilst in Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) the latter explores the consequences for a heroine who became a fallen woman as a result of being raped. 

 

Hardy, however, like Gaskell, ultimately couldn't fulfill the revolutionary implications of his own art due to the Victorian moral context he still worked within (whilst attempting to challenge such). D. H. Lawrence would suggest that Hardy's innate pessimism (and fatalism) didn't much help either.    

 

VII. 

 

By the mid-20th century, after the emancipation of women and their sexual activity was no longer associated so closely with moral corruption, the fallen woman as a theme had become irrelevant and, thankfully, faded from the popular imagination (even if ideas of innocence and experience; sin and redemption; vice and virtue, still bedevil us thanks to 2000 years of Christian moral culture). 

 

It's a romantic fantasy I know, but sometimes I long for the day when the snake will coil in peace about the ankle of Eve and the fruit of knowledge be finally digested; for a time when we can 'storm the angel-guarded gates and as victors travel to Eden home' [7], fallen creatures no longer, but risen beyond good and evil.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The theme of the fallen woman was becoming increasingly popular at the time that Dante Rossetti began this painting. Conceived in 1851, it was described by his niece Helen Rossetti as follows: 

      "A young drover from the country, while driving a calf to market, recognizes in a fallen woman on the pavement, his former sweetheart. He tries to raise her from where she crouches on the ground, but with closed eyes she turns her face from him to the wall."

      Cited in Timothy Hilton's The Pre-Raphaelites (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1970), p. 140.  

 

[2] That's not to downplay the significance of actually falling in a physical manner, which, along with poisoning, drowning, and road accidents, is a leading cause of accidental death (and personal injury) worldwide (particularly amongst the elderly). 

      As someone who once had a nasty fall in which I spiral fractured my right leg in four places, I can vouch for the fact that falls can happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere and that whether one slips, trips, stumbles, or faints in a heap, it is never fun to fall (particulary on to a hard surface or from a height of any kind). For bodies are surprisingly fragile and easily cut, bruised, and broken. 

      Interestingly, research shows that women (of all age groups) are more prone to falling than men and one wonders why that is; does gravity exert a greater pull upon them? Does possession of a penis help men stay upright and balanced?    

 

[3] Trigant Burrows, The Socal Basis of Consciousness (1927), quoted by D. H. Lawrence in his (extremely positve) review of this work; see Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 332.

 

[4] The reality in Victorian England was that for many lower class women prostitution was the only way to make ends meet during hard economic times. Most might best be described as transient fallen women, i.e., women who moved on and off the game as financial pressures dictated. See Anne Isba, Gladstone and Women (Continuum, 2006), p. 102.  

 

[5] The British statesman and politician William Gladstone (1809 - 1898) was a man who not only enjoyed his rescue work among prostitutes - many of whom he found physically attractive and knew by name - he also liked to read pornography and indulge in self-flagellation with a whip; we know this from his own diaries. 

      Thus, whilst Gladstone may have insisted on his fidelity to his wife - who bore him eight children - clearly she didn't satisfy his more exotic sexual tastes (which were a source of deep shame to him). And if he frequented the company of many prostitutes over the years, it clearly wasn't just from a sense of moral duty.    

      See H.C.G. Matthew's biography, Gladstone 1809 - 1874 (Clarendon Press, 1997). An excerpt frpm pages 90-95 can be read on The Victorian Web: click here. As Matthew concludes:

      "Gladstone's involvement with prostitutes was [...] in no way casual, nor was it merely charitable work which might equally have taken another form [...] The time spent on it, the obvious intensity of many of the encounters [...] show how at the centre of a Victorian family and religious life was a sexual situation of great tension." 

 

[6] Urania Cottage was what we would now call a women's shelter, but which the Victorians termed a Magdalene asylum. It was established in Shepherd's Bush in 1847 by Dickens and Angela Burdett-Coutts, one of the wealthiest women in England and a well-known philanthropist.

      I don't know what conditions were like at the hostel, but one imagines it was preferable to prison or the workhouse. Dickens explained to the residents - mostly prostitutes - that although they were fallen and degraded, they weren't lost and that they would be helped to return to happiness - provided they were good girls who worked hard and behaved themselves (no bad temper; no bad language; no bad conduct). Dickens also chose the reading material available to the women - and what dresses they should wear.  

       Over time, women admitted to the house became more varied; sex workers were joined girls convicted of crimes such as theft, and those who were guilty of nothing else other than being homeless or destitute. 

 

[7] I'm quoting from memory here from D. H. Lawrence's poem 'Paradise Re-entered', in the collection Look! We Have Come Through! (Chatto & Windus, 1917), which can be read online by clicking here. 

      The poem is found in Volume I of the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence's poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (2013), on p. 197.

 

 

This post is for Lee Ellen and Jennifer.     

      

 

Russ Bestley: 'Turning Revolt Into Style' (2025): Notes on the Introduction

Russ Bestley: Turning Revolt Into Style 

(Manchester University Press, 2025) [a]

 

 

I. 

 

Russ Bestley is Reader in Graphic Design & Subcultures at London College of Communication (UAL) and someone who knows more - and has written more - over the last thirty years about punk, graphic design, and popular culture than Monsieur Mangetout has had odd dinners [b]. 

 

And so, if one is only ever going to read one book on the process and practice of punk graphic design, I would recommend it be Bestley's latest work, Turning Revolt Into Style - a solidly written and nicely illustrated book about which I'd like to share a few thoughts here and in a series of posts to follow.

 

 

II. 

 

Just to be clear at the outset, I don't have a background in graphic design or the visual arts and most of the names mentioned by Bestley mean nothing to me.  

 

However, I've always regarded Jamie Reid as an important member of the Sex Pistols (referring to the wider gang, rather than merely the four-piece group consisting of Cook, Jones, Rotten and Vicious) and a strong case could be made that his designs for the record sleeves are at least as important and as powerful as the black shiny discs they enclose [c].  

 

In other words, the art (fashion and politics) of punk probably means more to me than the music [d], so Bestley's book was always going to attract my attention; especially with a title which both echoes George Melley's celebrated 1970 study of the music business [e] and a line from 'White Man in Hammersmith Palais' (turning rebellion into money) [f].  

 

 

III.

 

Bestley wisely limits his study to the UK punk scene in the late 1970s and early '80s, even whilst acknowledging that punk is now a global phenomenon with a long history behind it; books that try to encompass everything and speak to everyone invariably fail. 

 

And besides, the core elements of the punk aesthetic - or what Bestley likes to call punk's visual language - were formed very early on by the "extreme ideological wing of the Peculiars" [g] who hung around at 430 King's Road. 

 

The book addresses two key questions: "how did a generation of young, punk-inspired graphic designers navigate the music graphics profession in the late 1970s and early 1980s?" and "how did significant changes in printing technology, labour relations and working practices in the design profession impact their work during that period?" [1-2] 

 

Whilst the second question is doubtless important, it doesn't really excite my interest as much as the first question. 

 

And so, whilst I will certainly read what Bestley says in relation to the latter and offer some commentary, for the most part my remarks here will focus on the answer he provides to the former (even at the risk of thereby missing the point of the book, which is to situate punk's visual aesthetic both within cultural history and the technological, professional, and political contexts that materially shaped it).  

 

 

IV. 

 

Punk, says Bestley, "is a phenomenon that is difficult to define in simple terms" [4]. 

 

And whilst I know what he means, one is tempted to suggest that the word itself has always been a misunderstanding and one that Rotten wisely rejected when asked about by it in a pre-Grundy TV interview with Maggie Norden [h].    

 

At best, the word punk acts as a point of cultural consistency within the chaotic flow of difference and becoming; it does not refer to some kind of essence upon which a stable identity can be fixed (i.e., it's a superficial marker; a convenient fiction). 

 

Personally, I would encourage individuals to break free from the term so as to enter into an anonymous and nomadic state of pure potentiality. Unfortunately, however, the world is full of idiots who identify with the term and spend their days declaring punk's not dead.   

 

Ultimately, the word punk refers to the process by which the radical ideas and images born at 430 King's Road were recuperated by mainstream culture and bourgeois society; the process by which the Sex Pistols were neutered, disarmed, and commercially commodified in exactly the manner parodied in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980) and illustrated by Reid on the cover of Some Product: Carri On Sex Pistols (1979) [i].  

 

V. 

I know Rotten includes a line in E. M. I. about not judging a book by its cover - unless you cover just another - but I've never liked this idiomatic piece of moralism. As D. H. Lawence says, it is born of our dread of intuitional awareness and "if you don't judge by appearances, that is, if you can't trust the impression which things make on you, you are a fool" [j].    

 

So, I smiled when Bestley seemed to lend support to the idea that whilst design "may offer an aesthetically pleasing or appropriately functional window to content" [8] it is seldom the focal point and there are very few people who would "purchase a book or record purely for its cover" [8]. 

 

And I smiled too when he wrote: "books are to be read, records to be listened to" [8]. Because there are some books, such as Deleuze and Guattari's Mille plateaux (1980), which encourage readers to play them exactly as one would a record; starting with your favourite track or chapter, skipping the ones you don't much like, etc. [k]       

 

 

VI.

 

Finally, let me just say that the section within Bestley's Introduction for which I'm most grateful is the one which provides a punk design historiography. It really is an astonishing overview that is immensely useful to one such as myself who knows very little of the literature produced on this topic. 

 

In fact, of all the books mentioned here, the only two I know well are Jon Savage's England's Dreaming (1991) and Griel Marcus's Lipstick Traces (1989); the latter of which Bestley describes as "deeply flawed - and unfathomably influential" [13][l], although I know that Malcolm always loved the book (Rotten, predictably, less so).   

 

  

Notes

 

[a] All page numbers given in the post refer to this text.  

 

[b] Bestley is also Lead Editor of the academic journal Punk & Post-Punk, Series Editor and Art Director for the Global Punk book series published by Intellect Books, a founding member of the Punk Scholars Network, and head of the Subcultures Interest Group at UAL. His research archive can be accessed at hitsvilleuk.com. 

 

[c] For a post in memory of Jamie Reid who, sadly, died a couple of years ago, click here.

      Bestley is right to say that cover art "in many cases plays an intrinsic part in the cultural significance of 'iconic' albums". Never Mind the Bollocks, for example, would not be Never Mind the Bollocks, were it not for Reid's cover. It's the fluorescent pink and yellow cover that offers "special insight into the philosophy and character" of the Sex Pistols and which has a unique appeal "separate from the music" and over and above mere branding. See p. 7 of Turning Revolt Into Style.     

 

[d] Bestly recognises the tension beween "punk as attitude and ideology and punk as a new and distinct form of popular music" [5]. For McLaren, the music was the least important thing and a band that can't play is far more interesting and exciting than one who can. One of the final slogans used by Jamie Reid for his work with the Sex Pistols was: 'Music prevents you thinking for yourself.' 

  

[e] Melly, of course, borrowed the phrase revolt into style from a poem written by Thom Gunn about Elvis and published in his second collection of verse The Sense of Movement (1957). Quoting from memory, Gunn says that Presley peddles 'hackneyed words in hackneyed songs' and 'turns revolt into a style'. 

 

[f] '(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais' is a single by the Clash, released by CBS Records in June 1978. It got to number 32 in the UK charts.  

 

[g] This wonderful description of McLaren and company - the SEX shop people - was coined by Peter York in an article entitled 'Them' which appeared in Harpers & Queen (October 1976) and was quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 329.  

 

[h] The interview I refer to was broadcast on the BBC1 show Nationwide on 12 November 1976. Rotten insists that the word punk was imposed on the band by the press. For my discussion of the word, see the post published on 13 March 2025: click here.

      When I describe the term punk as a misunderstanding, I'm thinking of what Nietzsche writes of the word Christianity; namely, that it is a term derived from a system of beliefs based on a fundamental misinterpretation of the Gospel. In this case, punk is a huge failure to grasp the concept of the Sex Pistols - and this failure becomes nowhere more laughable than in the attempts to somehow sanitise their story and "shoehorn it into a retrosectively 'progressive' narrative that belies its original complexity and inherent contradictions" [4]. 

 

[i] For me, this process of recuperation began - and was completed - much sooner that I think it was for Bestley. He notes, for example, that by the year 2000 the punk movement had been "largely recuperated and institutionalised" and was "ripe for exploitation" [12]. I would date this at least twenty years earlier. 

      But arguing over dates as to when punk 'died' has always been a bit tiresome, so I'll not make a big deal of this and I agree with Bestley that this process of recuperation was largely achieved via the "cementing of a set of visual and musical tropes that could be picked up and regurgitated in the affectation - if not the performance - of a generic 'punk' identity" [235].    

 

[j] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 192. 

      In Chapter 2 of his book, Bestley refers us to the cover of the XTC album Go2 (Virgin Records, 1978) which states that anyone who buys (or doesn't buy) an album 'merely as a consequence of the design on its cover' is FOOLISH. For the record, they were precisely the kind of band riding the crest of the new wave that I very much despised at the time. See Turning Revolt Into Style, pp. 86-87.   

 

[k] In a Foreword to his translation of this text, Brian Massumi, writes: 

      "How should A Thousand Plateaus be played? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you cold. You skip them. You don't approach a records as a closed book that you have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again. They follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business." 

      See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (The Athlone Press, 1988), p. xiii-xiv.

 

[l] Later in the work Bestley will say: "Greil Marcus attempted (and largely failed) to make connections between the Sex Pistols, Dada, Surrealism and the philosophies of much earlier political agitators" [57]. That might be true, but it's often the case that we learn more from such failed attempts to form rhizomatic connections than we do from successful, self-contained books based on arborescent models that are proud of their own organic interiority, etc. 

      See what Deleuze and Guattari have to say on this in their Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 3-25. 

 

 

The following post in this series - Notes on Chapters 1 & 2 - can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

On the Politics of the Mob

The angry mob confront the Monster (played by Boris Karloff) 

in Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1931)

 

'Madness is something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, 

and ages, it is the rule.' [1]

 

 

I. 

 

The term mob was a late-17th century slang abbreviation of the Latin phrase mobile vulgus, referring to an excitable and disorderly crowd of people who would often seek out a target or scapegoat on whom they could vent their fury and frustration over some matter or other.    

 

Even as a young child, long before I knew anything about mass psychology, I had an instinctive aversion to the mob. 

 

I remember, for example, watching Frankenstein for the first time and - without feeling particularly sorry for the Monster - intensely disliking the torch-bearing villagers who formed an angry mob in order to hunt him down [2].    

 

I may not have had the language at ten-years-old to articulate how I felt, but I could see there was something far more frightening - far more monstrous - about mob justice (i.e., vengeance) than about the Creature in all his otherness.     

 

 

II. 

 

And today, when I do possess the language (and know a fair bit about mass psychology), I still don't like to see any individual - whatever crimes they are accused of - being intimidated and, on occasion, torn limb from limb or burnt alive by the mob (again, this doesn't necessarily mean my sympathies lie with them). 

And that's why I cannot support any populist political movement or join in with any act of indecent bullying. As D. H. Lawrence writes, any man or woman who would affirm their own starry singularity must refuse to identify with the baying mob. It is not sentimentalism: it is just abiding by one's own feelings no matter what [3]. 

 

It's unfortunate, therefore, that today politicians on all sides seem intent on making an appeal to the masses (manipulating their concerns, their fears, their insecurities, etc.) and, on account of this intention, are compelled to "transform their principles into great al fresco stupidities" [4] and start waving flags (which, to my mind, belong in the same category as burning torches and pitchforks).  

 

To paraphrase Voltaire: As soon as the mob gets involved, then all is lost ... [5]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1990), Pt. IV, §156, p. 103.  

 

[2] The famous scene of Frankenstein's monster being chased by an angry mob of peasants (eventually being trapped and burned alive inside an old windmill) belongs to the 1931 cinematic adaptation of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel; such a scene does not occur in the book.

      To be fair to the villagers, the Creature was responsible for the drowning of a young girl, Maria, whom he throws into a lake (albeit in playful innocence rather than with murderous intent). Click here to watch the formation of the mob. And here for the terrible conclusion to mob justice (what Jean-François Lyotard terms paganism).  

 

[3] See the famous 'Nightmare' chapter of Lawrence's 1923 novel Kangaroo in which the protagonist Richard Somers refuses under any circumstances to acquiesce in the vast mob-spirit that prevailed during the years 1916-19 when, in his view - thanks to the War - so many lost their individual integrity. 

      The Cambridge edition of this work, ed. Bruce Steele, was published in 1994. The long 'Nightmare' chapter is on pp. 212-259.     

 

[4] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1986), Vol. I, Pt. 8, §438, p. 161.

[5] The actual line written by Voltaire reads: Quand la populace se mêle de raisonner, tout est perdu. It can be found in his Collection des lettres sur les miracles, Vol. 60D of his Œuvres complètes, ed. Olivier Ferret and José-Michel Moureaux (Voltaire Foundation / University of Oxford, 2018). 

      The original work of this title - a 232 page volume composed of various short writings from the period - was published in 1766.   

 

Notes on Jean Baudrillard's 'Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?' (Part 2: Sections VI - XII)

Cover of the paperback edition 

(Seagull Books, 2016)

  

This is a continuation of a post the first part of which can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

VI.

 

The human subject - that product of power, knowledge, and history - with its free-willing moral agency, is also, says Baudrillard, disappearing today, but leaving "its ghost behind, its narcissistic double, more or less as the Cat left its grin hovering" [27].

 

Freed from an actual subject, this ectoplasmic remnant of subjectivity is to be found everywhere today (just like sexuality, freed from the biological reality of sex, is found everywhere but in bodies); enveloping and transforming everything; remaking the world in its own image, ensuring that there's no outside, no otherness, no objective world.  

 

Consciousness has been smashed to smithereens and dispersed into "all the interstices of reality" [28] producing a smart world of interconnected systems and artificial intelligence; a digital utopia. And in such a world, who needs human subjects in the old-fashioned sense? They have become superfluous and so may as well disappear ...

 

 

VII. 

 

But again the question will be raised: have there not been some positive disappearances? Certain diseases, for example, and other threats to human health and safety. 

 

Well, yes, that's true - although it should be remembered that things we thought had gone for good often come back with a vengeance; "we know", writes Baudrillard, "that everything repressed or eliminated [...] results in a malign, viral infiltration of the social and individual body" [30-31] sooner or later.  

 

Disappearance is never the end of the matter any more than appearance is the beginning of the matter: things come and go and eternally return and life itself is nothing other than this vital game of appearance, disappearance, and reappearance [g].

 

 

VIII. 

 

Moving on, Baudrillard brings the discussion around to the image, behind which, he says, something has always and already disappeared: "And that is the source of its fascination" [32]. 

 

In other words, it's not virtual reality that excites us - is anything more boring at last? - it's the fact that behind it lies a vital dimenson of existence, albeit one that is withdrawn and concealed. It's the real - or, more precisely, the disappearance of the real - that excites everyone. 

 

(Baudrillard often seems at pains to stress the total ambiguity of his own position on this issue, which throws up paradox after paradox and "cannot, in any way, be resolved" [32].) 

 

 

IX. 

 

The destiny of the image is to make the revolutionary move from the analogical to the digital. Baudrillard thinks of this as an irresistible process which leads to a world which "no longer has need of us, nor of our representation" [34]; for when "software wins out over the eye" [37] who needs the photographer?  

 

When the photograph is liberated "from both the negative and the real world" [34], this has consequences for objects too; who needs them to be present when they can now be digitally generated (and erased) by AI? 

 

Baudrillard writes:

 

"The traditional photograph is an image produced by the world, which, thanks to the medium of film, still involves a dimension of representation. The digital image is an image that comes straight out of the screen ..." [ 37] [h] and lacks punctual exactitude. 

 

Again, for anyone who cares about the art of photography - "conceived as the convergence of the light from the object with the light from the gaze" [38] - this is not merely an advance in technology, it's a disaster; "the sophistication of the play of presence and absence, of appearance and disappearance" [38] is abolished with the arrival of the digital age. 

 

The world - "and our vision of the world" [39] - is changed forever. It seems you cannot liberate photography via digitalisation, only destroy it with violence inflicted upon the "sovereignty of images" [59], subjecting them to a single perspective.   

 

Now, non-photographers might shrug their shoulders and ask so what. But what is happening in the world of photography is "just one tiny example of what is happening on a massive scale in all fields [...] The same destiny of digitalisation looms over the world of the mind and the whole range of thought" [39-40], so philosophers had better beware too!

 

 

X. 

 

When you replace the "entire symbolic articulation of language" [40] with an endless flow of information, then there are no silences or spaces suspended between illusion and reality in which to pause and think. 

 

Just as photography is about more than the proliferation and circulation of images, thinking is about more than word processing and fact checking - and the further we advance in the direction of digitalisation the further we shall be from "the secret - and the pleasure - of both" [43]. 

 

The brain is not a type of computer. And AI is not a form of thinking and knows nothing of the intelligence of evil [i]. 

 

 

XI. 

 

Should we save silence? 

 

Obviously, as someone who has argued that silence, stillness, secrecy, and shadows should be central to the practice of occultism in an age of transparency - click here - I'm going to answer yes to this question. 

 

But I also think we should preserve the absence; i.e., the nothingness that lies at the heart of the world and which is "as essential to life as are air and wind to the flight of the dove" [j]. 

 

 

XII. 

  

However else we might describe Baudrillard's thinking on the triumph of the machine, it's certainly pessimistic. 

 

Human beings, he concludes, may now be free to "operate within an integral individuality, free from all history and subjective constraints" [62], but it comes at a price: "it is clear that mankind exists only at the cost of its own death" [62]. 

 

In other words, our immortality is achieved only via our own technological disappearance and our "inscription in the digital order (the mental diaspora of the networks)" [92]. 

 

Lawrence would agree: Heidegger would agree: Byung-Chul Han would agree: and I think, ultimately, I agree too (even though I like taking snaps on my i-Phone - many of which end up here on TTA).  

 

And who knows, perhaps if we push the process of digitalisation all the way to its outer limits something surprising will happen and all that has disappeared will reappear in brutal solidity once more (just as impressionism's escape into pure light and colour gave way to post-impressionism and the return of great lumpy bodies and landscapes that made one nostalgic for mud and substance [k]).    

 

Perhaps objects will rediscover their singularity and we'll rediscover our analogue duality on the other side of digital integrity; i.e., the most radical - most demonic - element of human being that is also the most necessary and from which we derive our antagonistic vitalism.  

 

For as Zarathustra said, "'man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him'" [l].  

 

  

Notes 

 

[g] Any Heideggerians reading this might be mumbling the word Unverborgenheit to themselves at this point and I suppose that Heidegger's concept might be borrowed (and adapted) in order to discuss the appearance (disclosure) and disappearance (concealment) of beings and worlds, although Baudrillard makes no such attempt to do so.

 

[h] Later in his text, Baudrillard will describe CGI as an ultimate form of violence committed against the image; one which "puts an end even to the imagining of the image" [45]. 

 

[i] For Baudrillard, the intelligence of evil is a dualistic principle of reversability which underlies the world operating outside of moral reason and challenges the integral reality (and hegemony) of the digital world. In other words, it's a force of instability and conflict that reveals the cracks and contradictions in a system which thinks itself whole and perfect. 

 

[j] Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles, Exiles from Dialogue (Polity Press, 2007), pp. 134-35.

      This line is quoted by François L'Yvonnet in his Foreword to Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? and he reminds readers that this is a reference to (and rejection of) Kant's idea that a bird would fly even faster and higher were it free of all resistance. For L'Yvonnet, nihilism isn't the affirmation of nothingness, but the forgetting (or negating) of nothingness in order to bring everything to full presence.  

 

[k] I'm paraphrasing D. H. Lawrence writing in 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 182-217. See pp. 197-199 in particular for Lawrence's analysis of impressionism and post-impressionism. 

 

[l] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (Penguin Books, 1976), p. 330. The line comes from the section entitled 'The Convalescent', in Part 3 of Zarathustra.  

 

 

Screened Out: The D. H. Lawrence Birthday Post (2025)

D. H. Lawrence Screened Out 

(SA/2025)

 

Sat at home, surrounded by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once, 

in the midst of a universal banality. - Jean Baudrillard 

  

We are surrounded - some might say imprisoned - on all sides by screens. Screens upon which the entire world is flattened and made immediately present, so that what was once separate and distinct is now merged and made the same; "distance is abolished in all things" [1].

And this process of digital nihilism means that when a meeting is held online in real time, it is stripped "of its historical dimension" [2] and no longer made available to memory. Participants are immersed not in the event itself, but in the image of the event in all its seductive fluidity. 

  

The danger is that at a certain level of immersion, we lose ourselves as flesh and blood beings; our corporeality is effectively screened out and we are rendered null and void; just smiling faces and talking heads on a screen (although, of course, even these smiles and voices are merely machine generated representations) [3].   

 

Ultimately, staring at a screen - no matter what it is you watch or who it is you listen to - only teaches you one thing: and that's how to stare at a screen. There is no possibility of discovering anything new online. The internet "merely simulates a free mental space [...] of freedom and discovery" [4] whilst operating on known elements and established codes of meaning. 

    

And, before you realise it - so comforting is it to be online where every question has an answer and there is no Other - your whole life has zoomed by in a game of "closed-circuit interactivity" [5] and one finally sees that the technology which promised to give us everything, has, in fact, deprived us of more than we'll ever know.     

 

 

II. 

 

Now, because all of the above is quite literally true - and not merely of vague philosophical interest - imagine my astonishment when, a few days ago, I received an email from Prof. Adam Parkes, Chair of the Co-ordinating Committee of International Lawrence Conferences, inviting me to join a Zoom meeting in order to share ideas for a conference in 2030 to mark the centenary of Lawrence's death.  

 

He signed off the email by writing: I look forward to seeing you on screen ...! 

 

Notes

 

[1] Jean Baudrillard, 'Screened Out', in Screened Out, trans. Chris Turner (Verso, 2002), p. 176.   

 

[2] Ibid. 

 

[3] In an extraordinarily prescient essay written in late 1929, D. H. Lawrence wrote: 

      "The amazing move into abstraction on the part of the whole of humanity [...] means we loathe the physical element [...] We don't want to look at flesh-and-blood people - we want to watch their shadows on a screen. We don't want to hear their actual voices: only transmitted through a machine."

      See 'Men Must Work and Women as Well', in Late Essays and Articles, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 283. 

 

[4] Baudrillard, Screened Out ... p. 179. 

 

[5] Ibid. 

 

 

For a related post to this one entitled 'Zoom: What Would D. H. Lawrence Do?' (23 Jan 2021), please click here.    

 

And for a much earlier discussion of Lawrence's reaction to the silver screen, see the post entitled 'At the Pictures with D. H. Lawrence' (13 June 2013): click here. 

 

 

This post is for David Brock and all the other rogue Lawrentians who refuse to have their thinking screened and reject the ecstasy of communication.  

 

Reflections on Genocide in Fairyland

Stephen Alexander (1994) [1]

 

'It is time to speak of the fairies. In order to escape from the intrepid melancholy 

of expectation, it is time to create new worlds.' [2]

 

I. 

 

My friend Jennifer has written a fairy tale about a young woman and an enchanted fish. 

 

Reading it reminded me that, once upon a time, I too wrote a short collection of tales to which I gave the title Genocide in Fairyland ... 

 

 

II. 

 

Motivated by my deep green ecological concerns, my enthusiastic reading of Jack Zipes, and my love for the stories of Angela Carter - not to mention my abiding hatred of Disney - I decided, in the words of Borges, that it was time to speak of the fairies in order not simply to create new worlds of the imagination, but voice support for this world and the creatures that inhabit it. 

 

And so, I set about writing a collection of stories (numbering eight in all) and an introduction that began:

 

"Fairies symbolise the frailty of the flesh as well as the beauty and magic of the natural world. Their plight dramatises the struggle of peoples the world over to retain a traditional way of life when confronted by modernity (i.e., the world of money and machines). 

      Further, the destruction of Fairyland parallels the destruction of our own environment and our ability to dream and envision a different way of relating to one another and to the Earth."  

 

And concluded: 

 

"What I've attempted with this short collection of stories is not new; the fairy tale has long lent itself as a genre to those interested in political issues and philosophical concerns to do with identity, otherness, sexuality, interspecies relations, etc. 

      Unlike realist narratives that attempt to tell it as it is, or didactic moral fables that instruct us how it should be, folk and fairy tales, at their best - which is to say, at their most violent, most anarchic, most crude, and most comical - give a glimpse of how things might have been (once upon a time), or could possibly be (in a time to come that is already now/here)."

 

Genocide in Fairyland, then, was a book of dysfunctional creatures in a disenchanted land. Little people looking, just like the rest of us, to build up new little habitats and have new little hopes (no matter how many skies have fallen) [3].    

       

 

III.       

 

Unfortunately, I don't have copies of the eight stories (nor do I have the rejection letters from the handful of publishers I sent a proposal to) [4]. 

 

However, I do have short outlines of each tale that expose my thinking at the time and which I would like to share here:  

 

 

Come Not with Kisses 

 

A tale set in the land of the Great White Swan concerning a young princess's attempt to preserve an egg entrusted to her by a dying swan and which, she is told, contains the future. 

      Discovered by her swan-hating soon-to-be husband attending to the bird, the princess in a moment of panic hides the egg in the safest place she can think of, inserting it into her vagina. 

      Time passes: her wedding to Prince Renée goes ahead as planned, but all the while she thinks of the swan and his promise that he would one day return to her. Shortly after their honeymoon, she announces her pregnancy and he is delighted with the news. 

      However, he has a surpise awaiting him: 

 

"Won't it be strange, when the nurse brings the new

- born infant 

to the proud father, and shows its little, webbed 

greenish feet 

made to smite the waters behind it?" [5]

 

 

The Tower of Love 

 

We all know that, in the name of love, there was once a king who locked his only daugter in a tower without a door on the day she began to menstruate, so that she would never wed and be lost to him.

      The princess, however, had other ideas and let down her long hair, thereby allowing any passing stranger to climb up to her room in the tower, should he so please. 

      Less well known, however, was that in the fomer Soviet Union tales were told of a group of female inmates in a high security prison who, in order to be transferred to jails with less brutal conditions, would impregnate themselves with sperm obtained from the single male prisoner confined below. 

      Using a long piece of thread, they would lower a condom to him from their cell window and sing a song of encouragement as he jerked off into it. Once he had finished, they would then retrieve the condom and attempt to self-inseminate. 

      As the prison guards were deeply religious - despite years of communism - they regarded any pregnancies that resulted as miraculous events.  

 

Curdled Milk 

 

This is the story of a simple-minded giant accused of inappropriate conduct when playing with a group of children. What concerns here is exactly what concerned Michel Foucault with reference to the 1867 case of Charles Jouy in the village of Lapcourt, France:      

      

"The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become [...] the object not only of collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration." [6]

 

 

Home Sweet Home (Revenge of the Unhappy House-Spirit)

 

A house-spirit is a bit like a hob; very hairy, but fully clothed and a wee bit more human looking. Usually, a house-spirit will live on the top shelf above the stove, where it is nice and warm and he can enjoy the smell of the cooking. 

      In the middle of the night, long after the people of the house have retired to their beds, a house-spirit will clean and tidy up the kitchen and help himself to some milk and cheese. The house-spirit also regards child minding as one of his duties and the thing he likes to do above all else is to rock a baby in its cradle.   

      But where does a house-spirit fit into a fitted kitchen? Into a world of dish-washers and microwaves and baby monitors and disinfectants that kill 99.9% of all known germs? 

      The answer, of course, is that he doesn't. 

      Angry and plunged into depression, the house-spirit in this story decides to extract a terrible revenge upon the modern couple who have robbed his life of purpose and the tale develops into a tragic one involving domestic violence and cot-death.  

 

 

Night of the Moon-Beam Folk

 

This is the story of the moon-beam folk and their revenge upon modern city-dwellers, whom they blame for polluting the clean fresh air that they provide [7]. 

      As the latter sleep in their beds in rooms kept artificially warm in winter and artificially cool in summer, the moon-beam folk visit and weave a web of moon-beams across their faces, covering their mouths and nostrils, and thereby ensuring that they go on breathing the same stale air all night long and wake feeling drowsy and fatigued. 

      Aware of his own increasing lack-lustreness, Jack sets out to discover its cause. Medical science providing no satisfactory answer, he consults a gypsy woman from the old country, and it is she who tells him of the moon-beam folk and how he might appease them.               

 

 

Hob

 

Acculturation refers to the way in which one group of people is obliged by another group of people - usually dominant, but not necessarily superior - to assimilate and surrender their beliefs, habits, customs etc. Often this is done in the name of some grand ideal, such as material and moral progress,

      Loosely based on the story of the Yanomami - the so-called fierce people of the Amazon rainforest bordering Venezuela and Brazil - this is the tale of the Hob; a horrible, ungodly, unwashed, uneducated race of hairy little people living in the last great forest of Fairyland. 

         

     

When Jack Went Back Up the Beanstalk

 

The story of Jack - the poor boy who, with only a handful of beans, makes good by slaying a giant - is the quintessential English folk tale. 

      But surely it's wrong to steal and murder; even if one is stealing from and murdering a being regarded as a cannibalistic monster or ogre ...? And surely there are social consequences of rewarding such a youth as Jack - lazy, dishonest, violent - with wealth and celebrity ...?  

      In this tale, I pick up Jack's story several years after his initial adventure and reimagine what happened atop the beanstalk. 

 

 

Bait 

 

One of the more shameful methods employed by hunters to trap and kill wolves was to tie a female dog in heat to a tree in the forest and then wait for a male wolf to pick up her scent, locate her position, then mount her. Once inside the dog, and having ejaculated, the wolf's penis swells up and is gripped by the contracting muscles of the female dog's vagina (effectively acting as a plug to trap the semen). 

      This results in what is known as a copulatory bond (or breeding tie), locking the the two animals together for a period up to 30 minutes and, during this time, the hunter will come out from his hide and club the defenceless wolf to death.   

      With this in mind, here is my version of La Belle et la Bête, involving a cruel hunter who plans to use his own adolescent daughter as bait in order to trap and kill the Beast. Unfortunately for him, however, Beauty falls in love with the Beast after discovering that she rather enjoys his sexual embrace and so the two of them turn the tables on her father and it is he who falls victim to them.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Proposed design for book cover incorporating a black and white version of William Blake's frontispiece for Songs of Experience (1794).   

 

[2] Jorge Luis Borges with Margarita Guerrero, Book of Imaginary Beings, trans.  Norman Thomas di Giovanni (E.P. Dutton, 1969).

 

[3] The last line borrows from the famous opening passage to D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) - a passage which may well have influenced my thinking more than any other passage in any other novel.    

 

[4] And nor, sadly, do I have the letter from Tony Juniper, then at Friends of the Earth, who agreed to write a foreword to the book, after I had promised that a percentage of any monies that it might make from sales would be donated to FoE and/or other green organisations and causes.  

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Won't it be Strange -?, Pansies (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1929), p. 23. 

 

[6] Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Pengun Books, 1998), p. 31. 

      Probably I would be a little more cautious about writing this tale today, in light of what we now know concerning Foucault and the sexual exploitation of minors. See the post dated 9 January 2021 in which I discuss this problematic issue with reference to Foucault and Gabriel Matzneff: click here. 

      And see the post of 11 June 2021 on child sexual abuse accomodation syndrome with reference to the case of Norman Douglas and Eric Wolton: click here.     

 

[7] A tale inspired by a scene in D. H. Lawrence's novella St. Mawr (1925); see p. 108 of the Cambridge University Press edition - published as St. Mawr and Other Stories - ed. Brian Finney (1983). 

 

 

Theoscatology in Nietzsche and Lawrence

Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence Skibidi Toilet style [1]

  

 

I. 

 

Philosophers, eh? The shit that sometimes comes out of their mouths!

 

Take Nietzsche, for example; did he really say that men must defecate in order to become divine?

 

Sort of. 

 

Only he wasn't talking about the discharging of faeces from the body, so much as the elimination of sin - i.e., spiritual rather than biological waste; the toxic consequence of bad conscience rather than the semi-solid remains of last night's dinner.  

 

That becomes clear if we look at what he writes in an unpublished note from late 1883:

 

Many things about man are not very godly: whenever a person excretes faeces, how can he be a god then? But it is even worse regarding the other faeces we call sin: man still surely wants to retain this, and not excrete it. Now however, I must believe it: a person can be a god and still excrete faeces. Thus I teach you, excrete your faeces and become gods. [2]

 

 

II.

 

Like Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence is also concerned in his theoscatological musings with the elimination of certain adverse emotions. Our great task, he says, is to liberate the mind from its "fear of the body and the body's potencies" [3], before we fall ever further into madness [4].

 

Both authors, in other words, are concerned with the collapse of the primary instincts and the way in which internalised cruelty produces a moral subject [5]. And both wish for man to elevate himself by accepting those things which make us ashamed: 

 

"If we are ashamed, instead of covering the shame with a veil, let us accept the thing which makes us ashamed, understand it and be at one with it. If we shrink from some sickening issue of ourselves, instead of recoiling [...] let us go down into ourselves, enter the hell of corruption and putresence, and rise again, not fouled, but fulfilled and free." [6] 

 

This may involve an act of anal sex [7], or it may simply involve building a less hysterical relationship with language - particularly the so-called obscene words that cause us embarrassment; i.e., all the old words "that belong to the body below the navel" [8].

   

Lawrence continues:

 

"Myself, I am mystified at this horror over a mere word, a plain simple word that stands for a plain simple thing. 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God and the Word was with God.' If that is true, then we are very far from the beginning. [...] Because today, if you suggest that the word arse was in the beginning and was God and was with God, you will just be put in prison at once. [...] Now that sort of thing is idiotic and humiliating. Whoever the god was that made us, he made us complete. He didn't stop at the navel, and leave the rest to the devil. [...] If the Word is God [...] then you can't suddenly say that all the words which belong below the navel are obscene. The word arse is as much god as the word face. It must be so, otherwise you cut your god off at the waist." [9] 

  

Notes

 

[1] Skibidi Toilet is a machinima web series created by Alexey Gerasimov in 2023 and released via his YouTube channel, DaFuq!?Boom! Featuring toilet bowls with human heads emerging, it has become hugely popular amongst the kids of Generation Alpha.

 

[2] See The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche Volume 14: Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Summer 1882–Winter 1883/84), trans. Paul S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley, ed. Alan D. Schrift and Duncan Large (Stanford University Press, 2019). 

      Or, if one wishes to check the original German text, see KSA 10:635-37:23. 

      Richard Perkins discusses this fragment in his essay 'An Innocent Little Story: Nietzsche and Jesus in Allegorical Conjunction', Nietzsche Studien Volume 26, Issue 1 (1997), pp. 361-383. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 309. 

 

[4] Lawrence famously attacks Swift for making his mistress Celia feel terrible about her own natural functions, including defecating. See the post entitled 'Celia Shits! Notes on Jonathan Swift's The Lady's Dressing Room and (Alleged) Coprophobia (2 April 2024): click here.  

 

[5] Nietzsche famously discuss this in the second essay of the Genealogy (1887). 

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 35. 

 

[7] I have published several posts dealing with the subject of anal sex in Lawrence's work: click here.  

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Pansies', Appendix 6 in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 664. 

 

[9] Ibid.  

      Of course, there are some - like Sir Clifford Chatterley, for example, who delight in this idea of cutting God off at the waist; see chapter XVI of Lady Chatterley's Lover, where he reads to Connie from one of the 'latest scientific-religious books' - Whitehead's Religion in the Making (1926) - about the manner in which the universe is physically wasting and spiritually ascending. 

      Connie has no time for such nonsense, but Clifford insists that "'whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being'" (see p. 235 of the 1993 CUP edition, ed. Michael Squires).