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.

On D. H. Lawrence's Objection to Pirated Books and Counterfeit Emotions

I. 

As Michael Squires reminds us, A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" originally consisted of a brief expository essay in which Lawrence takes on the pirates who had moved quickly to produce various counterfeit editions of his controversial novel, which had been published privately, in July 1928.   

Later, Lawrence radically expanded the essay in order to defend the work from critics and censors - whom he despised more than the pirates - and offer a "final, eloquent statement of his belief" [1] in an authentic model of sexuality and the importance of what he termed phallic marriage.

I'll comment on these ideas shortly, but I'd like to begin by discussing Lawrence's skirmish with Jolly Roger ... 

II. 

Towards the end of 1928, Lawrence became aware that Lady C. had been pirated, as unauthorised versions of the work began appearing in New York, London, and Paris, much to his irritation. 

He decided the best thing to do as a countermeasure would be to bring out a new, inexpensive paperbound edition of his own. This French edition, which came with the original short introduction mentioned above ('My Skirmish with Jolly Roger') - appeared in May 1929 and quickly sold out. 

But what, we might ask - apart from the loss of royalties (and Lawrence wasn't indifferent to this issue) - was his problem with the pirate books? 

 

In A Propos, he objects at first purely on aesthetic grounds; they are either cheap and inferior or gloomy and depressing looking. But that's rather unconvincing coming from someone who, just five years earlier, had written of his contempt for the "actual corpus and substance" of the book as an actual object; i.e., as a published volume that is marketed and put on sale:

"Books to me are incorporate things [...] What do I care for first or last editions? I have never read one of my own published works. To me, no book has a date, no book has a binding.

      What do I care if 'e' is somewhere upside down, or 'g' comes from the wrong fount? I really don't." [2]  

So there's obviously something else going on ... And that something else is to do with the question of authenticity: In brief, Lawrence hates the pirate books because they're forgeries and facsimiles. In other words, they're not the real deal as authorised (and signed) by him; they're counterfeit copies, or replicas as he calls them. 

And that's what troubles him: just as, later in A Propos, it becomes clear what troubles him most of all about modern expressions of sexuality and human emotion is that they are, in his view, fake and fraudulent. Lawrence contrasts emotions as (false) mental representations with real feelings that belong to the body: 

"Today, many people live and die without having had any real feelings - though they have had a 'rich emotional life' apparently, having showed strong mental feeling. But it is all counterfeit." [3]

Above all else, it's love that is a counterfeit feeling today and reduced to a stereotyped set of behaviours. Which means, says Lawrence, that there is no real sex - it's been killed, or, at the very least, perverted into a thing that is cold and bloodless. And that's a catastrophe because, for Lawrence, sex is an impersonal, cosmic principle that not only keeps men and women in balance, but holds the very heavens in place.    

III.

What, as readers in 2019, are we to make of this?

Personally, I can only echo Michel Foucault who ends the first volume of his History of Sexuality with a quotation from Lawrence's A Propos calling for the "full conscious realisation of sex" (i.e. sex thought completely, honestly and cleanly). [3]

Foucault responds to this passage, in which Lawrence would have us believe our ontological future is at stake, with amused irony:

"Perhaps one day people will wonder at this. They will not be able to understand how a civilization [...] found the time and the infinite patience to inquire so anxiously concerning the actual state of sex; people will smile perhaps when they recall that here were men - meaning ourselves - who believed that therein resided a truth every bit as precious as the one they had already demanded from the earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought ..." [4]

Notes

[1] Michael Squires, Introduction to A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press,1993), p. lv.

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Bad Side of Books', Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 75-6.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 311 and 308.

[4] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, (Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 157-58. 

Readers interested in this topic might like to read an earlier post on Lady Chatterley's postmodern lover: click here.

See also: Chris Forster, 'Skirmishing with Jolly Roger: D. H. Lawrence, Obscenity, and Book Piracy', Ch. 3 of Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity, (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 61-88. Forster cleverly - and, in my view, rightly - argues that Lawrence "frames his critique of piracy as one more expression of the corrupt state of [inauthentic] modernity" [71]

Musical bonus: Adam and the Ants, 'Jolly Roger', from the album Kings of the Wild Frontier (CBS, 1980): click here.  

D. H. Lawrence and the Novel (Part 2)

Rhea Daniel: Portrait of D. H. Lawrence (2017)

doodleaddicts.com

D. H. Lawrence was acutely concerned with the (moral) question of the novel: its conventional limitations and future possibilities.

After writing three earlier essays on this theme - two of which we discussed in the first part of this post - Lawrence wrote a further couple of essays on the novel in 1925, neither of which were published in his lifetime (or even typed). They first appeared in print in Phoenix (1936), along with other posthumous texts, edited by Edward D. McDonald. 

III. Why the Novel Matters

For Lawrence, the novel matters because it teaches us to recognise and to revere the life of the body; to know that "paradise is in the palm of your hand" [194], which - if you put it in Latin - would make a fitting motto above the door of a school of masturbation, were such an institution ever to be established.

Priests and philosophers may prefer to talk of the spirit - or the soul, or the mind - but the novelist knows that every individual ends at their own finger-tips. It's a simple truth, says Lawrence, but one that it's difficult to get people to agree on and stick to. It's also the core idea of his vitalism and for Lawrence, nothing is more amazing than life which exists nowhere but within the living body; be that the body of a man or even a cabbage in the rain.

One of the reasons that Lawrence hates modern science is because, in his view, the latter has no use for living bodies; it is only interested, rather, in the organism, which is a metaphysical overcoding of the body and its organs and the establishment of a bio-logical hierarchy within it. Great novelists are interested in dis-organ-ising the body and building what Deleuze and Guattari term (after Artaud) a body without organs, or what Lawrence describes as "a very curious assembly of incongruous parts" [196]. 

Novels, of course, are not actually alive; they are "only tremulations on the ether" [195]. But the novel can make the living body of man tremble and unleash strange forces and flows of becoming. That is why the novel is "the one bright book of life" [195] and can help prevent readers from joining the legions of the undead (according to Lawrence, there are many men and women walking about like zombies and eating their dinners like masticating corpses).   

Thus, the novel doesn't teach you how to be good: it does, rather, something far more important than that; it cultivates an instinct for life ...

IV. The Novel and the Feelings

Lawrence isn't impressed with civilised humanity, always harping on the same old note: "Harp, harp, harp, twingle-twingle-twang!" [201] The note itself is okay; it's the exclusiveness (and repetition) that becomes unbearable. He also thinks that we are poorly educated concerning the self, despite the fact that, as a species, we have "combed the round earth with a tooth-comb, and pulled down the stars almost within grasp" [201].

Ultimately, most individuals know more about the composition of celluloid and the latest fashion in shoes than about the stormy chaos within. But, says Lawrence, the times they are a-changin' and "wild creatures are coming forth from the darkest Africa inside us" [202]. If you listen carefully, you can hear them calling, although some are completely silent, like slippery fishes. Lawrence calls these wild creatures feelings, which he contrasts with emotions:

"Emotions are things we more or less recognise. We see love, like a woolly lamb, or like a [...] decadent panther [...] We see hate, like a dog chained to a kennel. We see fear, like a shivering monkey. We see anger, like a bull with a ring through its nose, and greed, like a pig. Our emotions are our domesticated animals, noble like the horse, timid like the rabbit, but all completely at our service." [202] 

For the feelings, we do not as yet even have a language - and most often do not even allow that they exist, despite the fact that we only exist "because of the life that bounds and leaps into our limbs and our consciousness, from out of the original dark forest within us" [203].

Coming over all Nietzschean, Lawrence argues that man is the only creature who has deliberately - and successfully - tamed himself, fatally mistaking tameness for civilisation. The problem is that tameness, like an addictive drug, destroys us in the end, by robbing us of self-control and the power of command.

We thought tameness would lead to happiness - and, in a sense, maybe it has; albeit the happiness of the last man. But, ultimately, it leads to madness and an orgy of destruction, and unless we "connect ourselves up with our own primeval sources" [204] we shall degenerate inside our own enclosures.

We have, says Lawrence, to un-tame ourselves and learn to cultivate the feelings. But, of course, that's not easy: "It is nonsense to pretend we can un-tame ourselves in five minutes. That, too, is a slow and strange process, that has to be taken seriously." [204]

Psychoanalysis won't help - for the Freudians show the greatest horror of all when confronted by the Old Adam, whom they regard as a monster of perversity. We have to listen, rather, "to the voices of the honorable beasts that call in the dark paths of the veins of our body" [205].

And if we can't hear their voices within ourselves, well, then, we can do the next best thing: "look in the real novels, and there listen in" [205]. Not to the didactic assertions or personal opinions of the author, "but to the low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny" [205].

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Why the Novel Matters' and 'The Novel and the Feelings', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 191-98 and 199-205.

Readers interested in part one of this post on 'The Future of the Novel' and 'Morality and the Novel', should click here.