Just Saying Something on Subjects and Objects

 

Cambridge Professor of Philosophy, Rae Langton, makes it very clear why she values people over objects. For whilst conceding that the former are a part of the phenomenal world of things, she insists that human beings (as subjects) have a uniquely rich inner life and a moral-rational capacity to make choices. To be an object, she writes, is to be something which isn't free; something that is stabilized and whose movements are all-too-predictable. She continues: 

"It is to be something incapable of the activities of knowledge, communication, love, respect. It is to be something that is merely a sensory appearance, something whose qualities are exhausted by how it can look, feel, sound, and taste to a perceiver. It is to be merely a body, something solid and extended in space. It is to be a tool, something whose value is merely instrumental, something which is a potential possession."

Obviously, as an object-oriented philosopher, I don't agree with this. For me, it's an anthropocentric conceit to believe that we belong to a superior ontological order to all other entities; be they organic or inorganic, natural or artificial, real or virtual objects. For me, our subjectivity is really just a peculiar way of being an object - much as life is simply a rare and unusual way of being dead (to paraphrase Nietzsche if I may). 

The question, I suppose, is why do so many thinkers like Rae Langton continue with this conceit? That is to ask, why do they continue to think of the object with such contempt and dogmatically privilege the position of the human subject?

Baudrillard, who has a far more interesting and philosophically provocative view of the object, provides us with a convincing explanation. Those who continue to support the fiction of an autonomous subject do so because it has "an economy and a history which is quite reassuring; it is the equilibrium between a will and a world ... the balancing principle of the universe". 

If we are more than mere objects, then we are not delivered up helplessly to a monstrous and chaotic universe of chance. Nor are we simply the unfortunate victims of surrounding forms or fascinating and fateful events that exist beyond our control.

In other words, to believe in ourselves as free-wheeling and free-willing subjects makes us feel safe and secure, as well as significant. That's comforting, but it's a lie. Perhaps a necessary lie that allows us to live and which it would be nihilistic to expose as such, but a lie nonetheless.

I'm just saying ...

Notes

Lines quoted from Rae Langton and Jean Baudrillard can be found in:

Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism, (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 329. 

Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski, (Pluto Press, 1999), p. 112.

Sleep and Dreams

D. H. Lawrence says some very amusing things about sleep and dreams in his brilliantly crackpot work of 1922, Fantasia of the Unconscious, which - following another sleepless night - I thought it might be interesting to re-examine here.

For Lawrence, sleep is a phenomenon that relates both to his cosmology and his thanatology; the moon being not only the centre of our individuality and the pole that governs nighttime activities, but a meeting place for cold, dead, angry souls. Each time we lie down to sleep, says Lawrence, we constitute within ourselves a body of death and this body of death is laid in line by the activities of the earth's magnetism or gravitation - what he terms the circuit of the earth's centrality: "It is this circuit which is busy in all our tissue removing or arranging the dead body of our past day."

In other words, for Lawrence, there is a kind of cleansing and terrestrial current moving its way through our nerves and our blood as we sleep; "sweeping away the ash of our days' spent consciousness towards one form or other of excretion". This earth-current, however, whilst an active force, is not strictly speaking a vital one; rather it is death busy in the service of life and which, as it sweeps, stimulates in the primary centres of consciousness "vibrations which flash images upon the mind". 

Somewhat surprisingly, these dream-images should not be a matter of any great concern to us. Indeed, Lawrence views them as purely arbitrary; "as disconnected and as unmeaning as the pieces of paper which the street-cleaners sweep into a bin fro the city gutters at night". They are not prophetic of the future, even if pregnant with the past. Dreams are merely "heterogeneous odds and ends of images swept together accidentally by the besom of the night-current, and it is beneath our dignity to attach any real importance to them". Lawrence continues:

"It is always beneath our dignity to go degrading the integrity of the individual soul by cringing and scraping among the rag-tag of accident  and of the inferior, mechanic coincidence and automatic event. Only those events are significant which derive from or apply to the soul in its full integrity. To go kow-towing before the facts of change, as ... fortune-readers and fatalists do, is merely a perverting of the soul's proud integral priority, a rearing up of idiotic idols and fetishes."

Having said that, Lawrence then concedes that there are in fact some dreams that matter. But this is only when something threatens us from the material world of death: "When anything threatens us from the world of death, then a dream becomes so vivid that it arouses the actual soul. And when a dream is so intense that it arouses the soul - then we must attend to it."

The knack is to distinguish these death-dreams that stimulate and haunt the soul, from the purely mechanical images that often result from some temporary material obstruction in the physical body; perhaps because we have eaten cheese before bedtime, or too many pancakes. 

Finally, Lawrence ends his short meditation on sleep and dreams with a warning against staying up late at night and not rising early enough in the mornings; the twin dangers that threaten us today, for we have, we moderns, "made the mistake of turning life inside out: of dragging the day-self into night, and spreading the night-self over into the day." This is a self-destructive form of evil; an impoverishment of the blood. Unless it's an afternoon nap - Lawrence speaks positively about a quick snooze after lunch; for this is just a necessary readjustment in the blood's chemical constitution and vibration.

But the long hours of morning sleep are very harmful and result in inertia and automatism; we get up feeling shattered before we have even done anything. Thus it is that:

"Every man and woman should be forced out of bed soon after the sun has risen: particularly the nervous ones. And forced into physical activity. Soon after dawn the vast majority of people should be hard at work. If not, they will soon be nervously diseased."

This may or may not be true. Either way, it's disappointing to observe how Lawrence ultimately uses his madly imaginative metaphysics to simply justify a conventional work ethic.      

See: D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (CUP, 2004).  

In an Age of Courtship Disorder

Kurt Freund (1914-1996)

Courtship disorder is a theory first put forward in the 1980s by Kurt Freund; a sexologist who, until then, was best known for his pioneering work in the field of phallometry or PPG.

According to the theory, certain paraphilias are best understood when viewed as related forms of aberrant courtship behaviour in human males. In other words, they should not be examined independently of one another as conditions in their own right, but rather as symptomatic of a single underlying syndrome. These paraphilias are voyeurism, exhibitionism, frotteurism, and biastophilia (or what Freund terms preferential rape) and they can be seen as anomalous expressions of the following species-typical courtship phases: 

(i) looking to find someone to love and making an initial appraisal of their suitability as a partner 

(ii) attempting to catch the eye of the one you fancy via pre-tactile interaction (smiling, flirting, etc.)    

(iii) becoming physically intimate (kissing, cuddling, petting, etc.) 

(iv) engaging, finally, in full sexual intercourse. 

Now, whether perverts with a penchant for the above paraphilias lack the skills to participate in what is often a long and sophisticated game of seduction played between would-be lovers - or simply lack the patience - I don't know.

It might even be that they regard conventional courtship rituals as a form of dishonesty and deceit and therefore see their own behaviour as an attempt to openly bypass social hypocrisy; cutting to the chase by, ironically, cutting out the chase. Again, I don't know.

However, it should be pointed out that their activities are not merely forms of impatience and anti-social behaviour, but also illicit and lacking in any consideration of those whom they perv upon non-consensually and - in the case of the paraphilic rapist - violently.

Having said that, it might be argued that within our pornified culture of Tinder, twerking, and Chatroulette, courtship disorder is now the new norm ... 

Auschwitz and the Question of Evil

Auschwitz by Tana Schubert (2014)

tana-jo.deviantart.com 

This week marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, allowing commentators in the news media to put on their most solemn faces, mouth a series of clichés and broadcast all-too-familiar images, thereby constructing a lazy moral narrative around a place and an event that demands and deserves far more than sanctimonious inanity. 

For a start, we need to face up to the fact that, as Baudrillard points out, the Nazi genocide was not the extermination of a people by evil, but, rather, the attempted extermination of evil by a people acting in the name of Love; the murderous outcome of idealism and an insanely logical order.  

Secondly, we must reconsider the piles of rotting corpses and accept that they are, technically speaking from a camp commandant's perspective, besides the point and profoundly problematic. For the final solution essentially aimed not at the monstrous production of dead bodies; rather, it was an attempt to systematically process death and transform wretched human flesh into bars of glistening, pure white soap. As Nick Land writes:

"We simplify out of anxiety when we conflate the mounds of emaciated bodies strewn about the camps at the point of their liberation - the bodies of those annihilated by epidemics during the collapse of the extermination system - with the reduced ash and shadows of those erased by the system in its smooth functioning. The uneliminated corpse is not a submissive element within this or any other 'final solution', but an impersonal resistance to it, a token of primordial community."

In other words, it is only because our bodies are weak and prone to disease - only because our flesh is mortal and life is fundamentally immoral - that fascism of whatever variety can never triumph: Evil makes free.

In Memory of Egon and Wally

 Egon Schiele, Portrait of Wally (1912)

 © Leopold Museum, Vienna

One of the most heartless lines ever written was written by the painter Egon Schiele in a note to a friend  in February 1915: 'I intend to get married advantageously. Not to Wally.'

And so it was that on June 17th of that year, despite opposition from her family, Schiele wed the socially superior and more acceptable figure of Edith Harms, rather than his young model, muse, and girlfriend, Wally, whom he had met in Vienna in 1911 when she was just seventeen, and who had inspired some of his most beautiful and erotically striking pictures. 

Apparently, Schiele was hoping to retain Wally as a mistress after his marriage to Edith - suggesting, for example, that they might go on holiday together once a year - but she was having none of this and, having been cruelly informed of his plan to walk down the aisle with another woman, she immediately abandoned him and decided to start her life anew, training as a nurse. Sadly, they never saw one another again; she dying of scarlet fever on Christmas day, 1917, and he succumbing to a flu pandemic the following year.

Walburga ('Wally') Neuzil was born in August 1894, in the small town of Tattendorf. She was the daughter of a labourer and a school teacher. After the family moved to the Austrian capital following the premature death of her mother, Wally became a model for Schiele's mentor, Gustav Klimt, before becoming fatefully involved with the younger artist, to whom she was clearly devoted. 

Thus when, for example, Schiele was thrown in jail in April 1912, for seducing a girl below the age of consent (a charge that was eventually thrown out of court - although he was found guilty of producing and exhibiting obscene works likely to corrupt minors), Wally stuck by him. Not only did she regularly visit her lover in prison, but she supplied him with painting materials and fresh fruit (Schiele noted in his diary that an orange, given to him by Wally, provided his only happiness during his 24 days in custody awaiting trial).  

 

Such loyalty makes me very fond of Wally. On the other hand, however, I'm rather disappointed in Schiele; who would have thought he'd have been such a little shit worried about marrying to his own advantage and content to social climb in this manner?

But then, as Nietzsche points out, there's nobody more corrupt and more conventional at heart than an artist!

Anja Niemi: Photography Degree Zero

 

 'The Terrace', Darlene and Me, by Anja Niemi (2014)

Norwegian photographer, model and stylist, Anja Niemi, has a new exhibit of work at The Little Black Gallery, here in London, entitled Darlene and Me and this is simply a short post to encourage torpedophiles to visit if they have the opportunity to do so as she's a talent greatly deserving of attention. 

Her flawless compositions leave one breathless, not only because of their beauty, their coldness, and their cruelty, but due to their vacuum packed, entirely self-contained character; what we might call their lack of atmosphere. 

In other words, Ms Niemi has a genius for creating a unique photographic space about herself (in both senses of the phrase); one that is anonymous, alien and uninviting. Lovely scenes to look at, but not to step into or dream of inhabiting. (Besides, the last thing anyone in her pictures is looking for is a little company.)

There is, somewhat regrettably, a narrative tacked onto each series of photos, including this one; Darlene is an unsuccessful salesgirl and beauty counselor ... Darlene is carrying around a case full of unsold lipsticks and make-up samples ... Darlene is living in a rented house in sixties California ...  Blah, blah, blah.

None of this matters and, thankfully, the images don't merely seek to communicate an all-too-human story, or invite a banal interpretation. For this is photography degree zero; an ironic and indifferent exercise in style that is neither defined by nor confined within a conventional social or ethical context of meaning.  

Note: Darlene and Me is exhibited at The Little Black Gallery, 13A, Park Walk, London, SW10 0AJ until March 10th, 2015. Admission free. Opening hours: Tuesday and Thursday 11am - 1pm and 2 - 6pm. Saturday 11am - 4pm, or by appointment. 

Eroticism in Man and Bed Bug

A pair of bed bugs sharing affections

Sexual conflict is not uncommon within the animal kingdom; male and female organisms often having violently antagonistic reproductive strategies, particularly when it comes to the mode and frequency of fucking. This has resulted in the evolution of weaponized genitalia, toxic sperm, forced copulation, and a particularly unpleasant practice known as traumatic insemination.  

Also known as hypodermic insemination, this potentially fatal mating practice is one favoured by some species of invertebrates, including the common bed bug. The unfortunate female insect is penetrated through her protective exoskeleton by the sharpened penis of the male who then injects his sperm through the gash directly into her abdominal cavity. 

Although this might result in a successful fertilization of her eggs, the procedure is, as might be imagined, detrimental to the well being of the female. For not only does it leave an open wound which is susceptible to bleeding and infection, but the ejaculation of fluids into the hemocoel can trigger a serious immune reaction.

Why bed bugs have evolved to reproduce in this manner is uncertain. It has been suggested that traumatic insemination may have arisen as an adaptation amongst males looking to circumvent female resistance and eliminate the need for time-consuming courtship rituals; or that it evolved as a means to deposit sperm as close as possible to the ovaries.    

Whatever the cause of this practice, the result, ultimately, is a significantly increased mortality rate amongst female bed bugs. And, eventually, this results in the extinction of entire colonies. 

Not that male members of the genus Afrocimex seem unduly worried about this. Indeed, if there are no females to fuck, then they resort to same sex penetration; the injected seminal fluid migrating to the testes of the feminized male where it is absorbed and thus, if nothing else, giving them a nutrient-rich meal for their pains. 

And the point of this post ...?

Well, it's always fun to show how God moves in mysteriously cruel ways. Further, it's important to remember the violent and malevolent truth of sex; that it's never really good, clean, healthy fun, no matter what doe-eyed lovers with their scented candles may care to believe. Ultimately, love is war by other means.

As for my friend who is currently pestering her boyfriend to have genital beads inserted along the shaft of his penis so that his cock might better resemble her favourite vibrating dildo, I say: Be careful what you wish for ...

Eroticism in Man and Slug

 Two banana slugs sharing affections and looking to exchange sperm

For Nietzsche, eroticism is a physical rejoicing of the body in its own strength and vitality; an exhibition of its beauty and perverse strangeness. "In animals", he writes, "this produces new weapons, pigments, colours, and forms; above all new movements, new rhythms, new love calls and seductions. It is no different in man."

Eroticism, then, regardless of the species, might be thought of as an organic function of the will to power. Those who subscribe to the anthropocentric conceit that whilst sexual activity is common to birds, beasts and flowers, only man has had the wit to transform love into a fatal strategy and an art form, are therefore profoundly mistaken.

In fact, having just spent most of the day reading about the mating habits of slugs, I'm inclined to think that when it comes to fucking it is we - and not they - who are poor in world. 

This has been recognised by many researchers in the field, one of whom wrote that the sight of a courting pair of hermaphroditic slugs majestically circling one another and displaying their disproportionately large penises before entwining in a great ball of slime for hours on end, makes human sexual activity seem severely restricted and diminished in comparison. 

Perhaps this is why so may couples resort to the use of toys in the bedroom - their own bodies failing to excite much interest.  

Note: See Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, (Vintage Books, 1968), section 808.

Miley Cyrus Meets Roland Barthes

Miley Cyrus by Cheyne Thomas / V Magazine 

I'm not a great fan of the 22 year-old American performer Miley Cyrus, but I am very much taken with this snapshot of her in a bathtub currently doing the rounds on social media. 

Why? Because, in Barthesian terms, it strikes me as a genuinely erotic photograph which produces the key element for disturbing the more general field of interest or studium. That is to say, the picture affords that which projects out of the image like an arrow and pierces me as viewer with a certain poignant fascination or delight. This is what Barthes terms the punctum. He writes:

"Many photographs are, alas, inert under my gaze. But even among those which have some existence in my eyes, most provoke only a general and, so to speak, polite interest: they have no punctum in them: they please or displease me without pricking me: they are invested with no more than studium." [27]

I know exactly what he means: when one glances casually at the many images of Miss Cyrus available online, one feels at most a rather flaccid degree of vague desire; she's alright, but, in or out of her clothes, it makes very little difference. There's no real surprise or delight; I might like the pictures or find them interesting, but I do not love them.  

This, in fact, is very often the problem with pornographic images; they are too homogeneous or unary. That is to say, they transform reality without making it vacillate. The erotic photograph, on the other hand, is a pornographic image that has been fissured and which gives us troubling details and untimely objects to distract our attention from the otherwise banal and exclusive presentation of sex. 

These supplements are what seduce us and they are often contained in the picture purely by accident (they attest neither to the photographer's intent nor technical ability). Often, we cannot even say what it is that arrests our gaze and constitutes a punctum: "What I can name cannot really prick me", says Barthes [51].

And so - returning to the above photo of Miss Cyrus - I'm not entirely sure what it is I find so captivating and loveable about the picture; is it her eyes, the position of her arms, the towel on her head, the bracelet, the smallness of her breasts, the stick-out ears, or is it the soap bubbles?

"The effect is certain but unlocatable, it does not find its sign, its name; it is sharp and yet lands in a vague zone of myself; it is acute yet muffled, it cries out in silence. ... Nothing surprising, then, if sometimes, despite its clarity, the punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it. I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum." [51-3]

Miley looks so lovely and fresh-faced, so innocent and defiant in her nakedness, that it's distressing to realise at last that there exists another type of punctum - one not of form, but of intensity and which is related to time. For no matter how young and vital the subject, every photograph tells the same story: she is going to die. 

That's the final challenge of every photograph: however brilliantly they seem to capture the moment and the excited world of the living, each picture contains the imperious sign and certainty of future death. They excite our fascination and our desire, but, ultimately, they make us want to cry ...      

 

See: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, (Vintage, 2000).

All Is Forgiven, But Nothing Learnt in The Case of Charlie Hebdo

The so-called survivors' edition of Charlie Hebdo has been published in a print run that numbers in the millions and in several languages, including English and Arabic. What was once a small, struggling, French satirical magazine is now a global phenomenon.

The cover of this eight page issue features a new drawing of Mohammad which, sure enough, has managed to offend and provoke many Muslims - with the more extreme elements, in Pakistan for example, calling for further revenge killings in order to defend the honour of the prophet and punish those who, in their eyes, are guilty of blasphemy and wilfully insulting 1.5 billion people. 

Interesting as this reaction might be, that's not really my concern. Rather, what worries me is not the image, but the text that accompanies the image: above the crying cartoon figure is written tout est pardonné - all is forgiven.

I must confess to finding this outrageously sanctimonious; an attempt by the staff of the magazine to position themselves on the moral high ground by offering their own rather cheap and unconvincing imitation of Christ. They'll be telling us next that the twelve members of staff who died did so that we all might live in a more tolerant, more peaceful, and more loving world. It's a bit rich to say the least.

Equally galling - and further evidence of Charlie Hebdo's arrogance and inability to learn anything of import from what has just happened - is the fact that the figure also holds up a sign saying Je suis Charlie. The fanaticism of the political idealists who produce the magazine blinds them to the fact that, clearly, not everyone subscribes to or identifies with a universal model of secular humanism wrapped in the colours of the tricolore or star-spangled banner.

Charlie Hebdo can only conceive of a future in its own image; it cannot conceive of terrorism as the emergence of a radical antagonism at the very heart of globalization and as a malevolent force that is irreducible to the New World Order. One would suggest that the editors, writers, and cartoonists at the magazine - as well as their supporters - read Jean Baudrillard who, writing in 2002 after the attack on the Twin Towers, argues that the problem is we in the West have grown so powerful, so smug and self-satisfied, that we no longer care even to admit that there remain others in the world who do not share our dreams and our values:

"It all comes from the fact that the Other, like Evil, is unimaginable. It all comes from the impossibility of conceiving of the Other - friend or foe - in its radical otherness, in its irreconcilable foreignness. A refusal rooted in the total identification with oneself around moral values and technical power. ... How can the Other, unless he is an idiot, a psychopath or a crank, want to be different, irremediably different, without even a desire to sign up to our universal gospel?" [62-3]
                                                     
This brilliant - but largely ignored - insight means that Muslims are right to be offended by the cover of the latest edition of Charlie Hebdo - but are offended for the wrong reasons. What's offensive is not a silly little drawing, but the arrogant assumptions and ideological certainties behind it; the inability to contemplate for even one moment that the Islamists "might commit themselves entirely freely, without in any way being blind, mad or manipulated" [67] to their own moral laws, customs, and beliefs.

This kind of offends me too. And although I obviously don't call for the magazine to be burned, or the publishers murdered, I do wish the team at Charlie Hebdo would think about what they do with a little more subtlety and concern.   

 

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'Hypotheses on Terrorism', in The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, trans. Chris Turner (Verso, 2003).