This Be the Post

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. 
They may not mean to, but they do. 

From my mother I get: 

My urgency, my phobias, my obsessive character, my estrangement from the world and my prejudices (I do not eat tins of tuna, buy things from a market stall, or trust Cockneys). In a word, from my mother I get my complexity.

From my father I get:

My passivity and lack of worldly desire or ambition, my inability to prosper and almost Christ-like unconcern for those things belonging unto Caesar. In a word, from my father I get my saintliness.

Perversion Makes Happy

Someone recently asked me why I no longer characterize my work as a form of libidinal materialism, preferring instead to now label it as a perverse materialism. Well, firstly, I wanted to move away from the whole politics of desire shtick, particularly as associated with Deleuze and Guattari. 

Secondly, the concept and practice of perversion, understood as a quest to find joyful thoughts and feelings not made profitable by any social end and which deviate from the straight and narrow, is something that has always appealed. Even as a young child, I hated any kind of norm or convention and would often wear my clothes inside-out.

I think Barthes is right when he argues that the pleasure potential of perversion is always greatly underestimated by moralists who fail to understand that it does not corrupt or make sinful, but, quite simply, makes happy. 

     

Dare to See the World Through Deaf Eyes

Sometimes, I like to pretend that I'm deaf and I try to imagine what it would be like not to be able to hear ... 
It's not so bad.

Perhaps we should all try like Larry to imagine what it would be like not to be able to hear and dare to see the world through deaf eyes. Perhaps we'd find the silence beautiful. And liberating as well as instructive.

For to live in a soundless, speechless world without birdsong or the insistence of the human voice, is not to live without contact or to be loveless: we do not become fish simply because we surrender our ears and enter a mute but amazingly dexterous world of sign and physical gesture.

But, of course, most people will never concede the point that the profoundly deaf are neither disabled nor stupid. For audism is deeply-rooted within our culture and draws philosophical support from what Derrida has identified as phonocentrism: i.e. the belief that the voice is the privileged medium of truth and meaning and that hearing is the deepest of all the senses, sound acting directly upon the great affective centres of being.

Until we deconstruct, or, if you prefer, curb our enthusiasm for this metaphysical prejudice, then we will continue to remain enthralled by orality and continue to discriminate against those who cannot hear and find the idea of reading lips offensive and humiliating. 

A Short Lesson in Queer Theory

One of the things that Lawrence disliked Whitman for was the latter's obsession with the notion of One Identity. That is to say, Whitman's compulsion to embrace everyone and weave everything into himself until, at last, the entire universe had been absorbed and personalised and made Walt Whitmanesque.

Whitman's great mistake was confusing his watchword Sympathy with the Christian Love-ideal. Thus, rather than respect the pathos of distance between things and celebrate otherness and plurality, Whitman calls for universal merger. Instead of feeling with, he tries to feel for and, in this way, compassion gives way to egoism. 

Broadly speaking, I agree with Lawrence's reading of Whitman and think we should remain alert to the danger presented by the will-to-merger. But, having said that, one of the joys of queerness is that it enables one to cruise and drift transpositionally between  fixed subject-formations, so that one might indeed become-Eskimo or become-woman: not in an historical or ethno-biological sense, obviously, but as a question of style.

I'm really not interested in assimilating anyone's soul. And I'm not asserting, like Whitman, that I am X, Y, or Z. Rather, I'm saying: I am not I and that X, Y, or Z are never truly themselves either. Thus we should not fetishize, eulogize, or ontologize notions of self or identity; be they based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever else. 

This, of course, brings me into clear opposition with Lawrence, as well as Whitman. But that's okay. For if Lawrence once meant so much to me, these days I can't help feeling his will-to-integrity is as suspect as Whitman's will-to-merger. For me, utopia begins when we stop talking about souls and refuse to be bound by stupid binaries.    

On Irony

Nietzsche warns that habituation to irony, like habituation to sarcasm, can spoil the character and turn one into a snapping dog 'which has learned how to laugh, but forgotten how to bite'.

No one wants that to happen. So we must therefore exercise caution and be alert to the dangers of cynicism. But I'm certainly not prepared to abandon irony, as many advocate, in the name of a new sincerity. For irony remains not only an important means of gaining critical distance from the object of analysis, but is also, as Barthes writes, 'the question which language puts to language' and that expands the latter by playing with its forms.

In other words, irony need not make one smug and superior and it need not be the narcissistic product of a thought which has collapsed inwardly and become fatally self-enclosed. At it's best, irony can make happy and set free. And it can help us recover something mistakenly believed to be its very antithesis: passion. For in becoming playful, we find once more the lost intensity of childhood.

Living Dolls

Thanks to the work of American Pygmalion Matt McMullen, sex-dolls have come a long way during the last two decades. In his obsessive desire to recreate as closely as possible the appearance and feel of  living female bodies, he has developed a range of silicone love companions complete with articulated skeletons, synthetic skin, real hair, and three fully penetrable 'pleasure portals'. 

But, ironically, just as McMullen's RealDolls become ever-more life-like, so real women are becoming ever-more doll-like, due to advances in cosmetic surgery and pressure exerted by our culture for conformity to a deep-throated and large-breasted, but small-waisted and pubicly-hairless ideal formulated within the pornographic imagination.  

And so we come to the case of Valeria Lukyanova; the 21 year old Ukrainian model and internet sensation. Miss Lukyanova - or the Russian Barbie doll as the press like to describe her - is, for us in 2013, what La Cicciolina was for Baudrillard in 1993: a marvellous incarnation of sex in pornographic innocence. 

With her customized body and "realer-than-real curves worthy of an inflatable doll", Miss Lukyanova is both transsexual and transhuman and, as Lawrence would say, she exists beyond desire, cut off from any mystery or allure: even her nudity is no more enticing than that of a dolls. 

All of this casts an interesting light upon the sexual revolution espoused with such passion and conviction by an earlier generation. We were promised that "the bursting forth of the body's full erotic force" would be particularly favourable to women and yet they've ended up having silicone implanted into their breasts and submitting to Hollywood waxing, labiaplasty, and anal bleaching.     

  

Anti-Oedipus

Blood is thicker than water, so they say. Which is true enough, but why should viscosity and a certain heavy stickiness be privileged over fluidity and sparkle? Why should family bonds be thought of as so much more vital and important than friendships formed?

There is always something suspect about those who fetishize the blood and pride themselves on their genetic inheritance. I would never put siblings before strangers simply on the grounds that I share parental DNA with the former and it seems to me that non-familial connections are the source of real joy in this life.

And so when she said her sister was dearer to her than anyone else, I had to conclude that she was all too human in her incestual primitivism and probably a fascist at heart.  

Feathered Friends

Luce Irigaray writes some very lovely lines concerning the precious and mysterious assistance she has received in her life and work directly from birds:

"Birds are our friends. But also our guides, our scouts. Our angels in some respect. They accompany persons who are alone, comfort them, restoring their health and their courage. Birds do more. Birds lead one's becoming. The birds' song heals many a useless word ... restores silence, delivers silence. The bird consoles, gives back to life, but not to inertia."

                                                               

      - 'Animal Compassion', trans. Marilyn Gaddis Rose, in Animal Philosophy, (Continuum, 2004), p. 197.

All of this is true. Which is why feeding the pair of pigeons who have set up home on my balcony - and even cleaning up the mess they make - is never a chore, but always a source of happiness. I like the fact that they live their lives on one side of the glass and I live mine on the other and that we have, over the years, become familiar and established a bond of trust and affection. 

People who don't like birds, or who are unkind to them - who call pigeons vermin and argue for their removal from our public spaces - have something wrong with them I think. To close your ears to birdsong is ultimately to close your heart to love.

Me and Zena x Saatchi Gallery Paint Can Ring

Zena McKeown's Paint Can Ring, which features as part of her Saatchi Gallery Collection, is a tiny piece of perfection: smart, witty, and lovely to look at, it puts to shame many of the expensive artworks displayed in the gallery itself and reinforces my belief that today what really excites our imagination can invariably be found in the gift shop, rather than the main building; that the latter merely serves as an alibi for the former.

In other words, we traipse round art galleries and museums bored out of our skulls, merely because it affords us the opportunity and the pleasure of shopping. Who needs aesthetic transcendence or edification when you can purchase postcards, t-shirts, and novel designer items that brilliantly capture and express who and what we are as a people?    

Coincidentally, the ring - in my mind at least - also nicely anticipates the Yves Saint Laurent campaign for Manifesto, featuring Jessica Chastain, that I love so much. Miss McKeown is thus to be commended for not simply being on trend, but ahead of the game with this design.  

Epilation

The policing and removal of female body hair is practised in every phallocratic society for a number of reasons - from religious phobia to cultural fashion - using a wide variety of methods. 

In the Western world, women have been obliged to shave legs and underarms for over a century. But it is only recently that they have also been expected as a matter of porno-social convention to remove hair from the pubic region like an Arab woman; not as an act of Fitrah, or in the name of hygiene, but due to changing ideas of what constitutes desirability.

I have to confess, I remain a little troubled by this trend. 

For whilst I understand the appeal of the hairless pussy on grounds that range from the aesthetic to the practical and perverse, still I can't help regretting the universal Brazilianization of women as I recall the words of Henry Miller: 'It doesn't look like a cunt anymore; it's like a dead clam or something. It's the hair that makes it mysterious.'