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 the Splendour of Greco-Sicilian Superficiality

 D. H. Lawrence: Fauns and Nymphs (1927)

  

I. 

 

"Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live: what is needed for that is to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin; to worship appearance, to believe in shapes, tones, words - in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial - out of profundity!" [a]

 

If I had to choose the one passage by Nietzsche that has most significantly shaped my own thinking as a philosopher, both on and off the catwalk, it would be this one. 

 

And, interestingly, despite his onto-theological penchant for indulging in what Nietzsche would characterise as beautiful soul twaddle [b], D. H. Lawrence also seems inspired by this idea of Greek (and Sicilian) superficiality in his 'Introduction to Mastro-don Gesualdo, by Giovanni Verga' [c] ...

II.

 

Regrettably - and unlike Lawrence - I've never lived in Sicily [d], nor even visited this "sun-beaten island whose every outline is like pure memory" [148]. But I'm happy to accept the literary consensus and regard it as a magical location, which provides a clue not only to understanding modern Italy, but also the ancient Mediterranean world. 

 

For according to Lawrence, not only are the Sicilians marked by an ironic fatalism, like the ancient Greeks, but they also lack psychic depth. In other words: 

 

"The Sicilian has no soul, except that funny little naked man who hops on hot bricks, in purgatory, and howls to be prayed into paradise [...] He can't be introspective, because his consciousness, so to speak, doesn't have any inside to it." [151].      

Developing his theme, Lawrence continues:

"The Sicilians today are supposed to be the nearest descendants of the classic Greeks, and the nearest thing to the classic Greeks in life and nature. And perhaps it is true. Like the classic Greeks, the Sicilians have no insides, introspectively speaking." [152] 

 

Unfortunately, however, unlike the classic Greeks, the Sicialians have no external gods. This, for Lawrence at least, is a problem and represents a great loss.

 

Why? Because, says Lawrence, people who live in the sun like flowers - i.e., beautiful but soulless - still need "the bright and busy gods outside" in order to make them feel heroic in the old Homeric sense with "the same easy conscience, the same queer openness [...] and the same ancient astuteness" [152].

 

Whilst the more soulful - more Christian - races of Northern Europe "have got over the old Homeric idea of the hero, by making the hero self-conscious, and a hero by virtue of suffering and awareness of suffering" [151], the Sicilians only feel this sort of thing in short spasms and it is unnatural to them. 

 

In fact, Lawrence concludes, it's pointless to suggest that a Sicilian learn how to develop northern (or Russian) inwardness: "You might as well say the tall and reckless asphodel of Magna Graecia should learn to be a snowdrop." [153]

 

 

III. 

 

Of course, even if the modern Sicilians have lost the bright and busy gods, still they possess the undying beauty of the island itself:

 

"And we must remember that eight-tenths of the population of Sicily is maritime or agricultural [...] and therefore practically the whole day-life of the people passes in the open, in the splendour of the sun  and the landscape, and the delicious, elemental aloneness of the old world. This is a great unconscious compensation. But what a compensation, after all! [...] and you can't read Mastro-don Gesauldo without feeling the marvellous glow and the glamour of Sicily, and the people throbbing inside the glow and the glamour like motes in a sunbeam. [...]

      And perhaps it is because the outside world is so lovely, that men in the Greek regions have never become introspective. They have not been driven to that form of compensation. With them, life pulses outwards, and the positive reality is outside. There is no turning inwards. So man becomes purely objective. And this is what makes the Greeks so difficult to understand: even Socrates." [154]

 

These, then, are the three key words of Greek profundity: superficiality, externality, and objectivity. And these the three key words of the ancient Greek character: singleness, carelessness, dauntlessness [e]. 

 

If you want to become an artist or practice la gaya scienza - if you want to become heroic in the old sense - then you must abandon ideas of salvation or retreating inside yourself in order to twist the soul into knots; instead, concentrate on care of the self as an aesthetic and ethical project that aims for splendour (becoming what Lawrence elsewhere terms an aristocrat of the sun) [f].   

 

Notes

 

[a] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff, (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Preface to the second edition (4), pp. 8-9.  

 

[b] This amusing phrase can be found in note 951 (Spring-Fall 1887) of The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufman, (Vintage Books, 1968), p. 499.  

[c] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Mastro-don Gesualdo, by Giovanni Verga', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 145-156. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the text. Readers are encouraged to also read the two earlier versions of Lawrence's Introduction which appear as Appendices II and III (pp. 369-378 and 379-389). This passage from Version I is particularly Nietzschean-sounding in its vision of the Greeks: 

 

"The Greeks were far more bent on making an audacious, splendid impression than on fulfilling some noble purpose. They loved the splendid look of a thing, the splendid ring of words. Even tragedy was to them a grand gesture, rather than something to mope over. Peak and pine they would not, and unless some Fury pursued them to punish them for their sins, they cared not a straw for sins: their own or anyone else's. 

      As for being burdened with souls, they were not such fools." [376-77]    

[d] Lawrence and his wife Frieda spent two years living in Sicily in the early 1920s, at the Fontana Vecchia, on a hill above Taormina. Like many others before him, including - perhaps most famously - Goethe, Lawrence was captivated not just by the island, but also its people, flora, and fauna and he wrote some of his loveliest poetry on the island. In Version I of his Introduction to Mastro-Don Gesualdo, he confesses: 

 

"Perhaps the deepest nostalgia I have ever felt has been Sicily [...] Not for England or anywhere else - for Sicily, the beautiful, that which goes deepest into the blood. It is so clear, so beautiful, so like the physical beauty of the Greek." [378].     

[e] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction [Version I] to Mastro-Don Gesualdo, by Giovanni Verga', Introductions and Reviews, Appendix II, p. 378.

[f] See the poem 'Aristocracy of the sun', in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 457. See also the related verses 'Sun-men' and 'Sun-women', p. 456.  

Why I Love Richard Avedon

Selfie in the Manner of Richard Avedon 

Stephen Alexander (2015)

New York has been home to many great photographers. But perhaps the greatest of them all remains Richard Avedon whose magnificent portraits continue to resonate within our cultural imagination.

Like Warhol, whom he famously photographed alongside members of the Factory in 1969, Avedon understood how art, fashion, sex, and commerce have an intimate and sophisticated relationship within modern society.

Further, Avedon knew that the non-essential essence of these things is revealed not at some underlying ideal level, but in the accessories, poses, and small personal gestures of his models and can thus easily be captured on catwalk, canvas, film, and face.

He wasn't interested in revealing the hoary soul, but fascinated rather with how photography creates profoundly stylish images that grant access to the greatest of all truths (which is the truth of masks):

"My photographs don't go below the surface. I have great faith in surfaces."   

This remark alone makes me love him dearly and recognise Avedon as a comrade-in-arms in the never-ending struggle against depth and interiority.   

Intimacy Issues

After a recent presentation at the 6/20 Club in which I discussed the seductive and disturbing character of Kawabata's sleeping beauties, I was informed by a woman who believes passionately in love, humanity, and her rights as a sexual subject, that my interest in object-oriented ontology and objectum sexuality betrays the fact that I have underlying intimacy issues. 

This has amused me all week: for the fact is that rather than manifesting an all-too-familiar psychological disorder, I'm advancing a far more radical philosophical objection to the very concepts of interiority, depth, and essential being, of which intimacy is but one aspect.

In brief, Vivienne, I don't think we have an authentic inner self in need of discovery, expression, or liberation; I don't think we have a soul to be saved, a sex to be proud of, or a psyche that is mysteriously unconscious and revealed only in dreams and secret desires in need of analytic interpretation by a therapist. 

To put this in even briefer Nietzschean terms, I remain, madam, superficial out of profundity ...