Ash to Ashes (In Memory of a Pagan Philosopher)

Steve Ash, the writer and pagan activist who was well-known in occult and counter-cultural circles in London, is dead.

That's not a sentence I expected to be writing, or take any pleasure in so doing. I wouldn't even have known of his passing in the autumn of last year were it not for the kind dedication of a recent book review made by Mr Tim Pendry who, like me, had a somewhat ambiguous, on-off, up-and-down friendship with the deceased. 

I knew Mr Ash via Treadwell's - Christina Harrington's wondrous bookshop - and for a brief period in 2009 we were fairly regular correspondents. He had an MA in philosophy from King's College London and was interested in questions to do with mind and consciousness from both an academic and an esoteric perspective. He also wrote on a wide variety of other subjects including the Knights Templar, Queer Theory, and the work of H. P. Lovecraft.

I can't ever remember agreeing with him on anything and thought that he was fundamentally mistaken on pretty much everything (particularly his reading of Nietzsche), but I always admired his ambition as a writer and his populist touch; here was a man who was unafraid to place the multiverse in a nutshell. 

The last time I heard from him was a couple of years ago when he left a comment on a post written on this blog (see How Even Witches Lose Their Charm). Ever-provocative and desirous of conflict, he accused me of being a crypto-Christian. But, now, in the circumstances, I suppose I can forgive him for this final erroneous insult. 

I'm told he has a loyal following and I'm sure they, as well as his friends and family, will miss him greatly. I won't, but wanted nevertheless to take this opportunity to write something in his memory. 

The Charm of Kink (with Reference to the Case of Mrs. Peel)

The charm of kink is that it has charm. And the nature of this appealing quality is camp.

In other words, whilst it would be wrong to set up a false dichotomy and seek to salvage kink from a more problematically perverse aesthetic with origins deep in the pornographic imagination, it is certainly more playful than pathological; a kind of frivolous form of fetishism in which stylization and mannerism matters far more than actual sexual activity. 

The kinky individual delights in props, costumes, and role playing as pleasures in their own right and not simply as methods of enhancing orgasm and camp perversity is ultimately more about fashion, fun, and theatre than fucking in dreadful earnest which, if it does take place, does so off-stage, as all forms of obscenity should. It relies upon (and is happier with) suggestiveness rather than anything overt; a sophisticated and teasing combination of imagination, irony and innuendo.  

This is perfectly illustrated by the case of Mrs. Peel, played by Diana Rigg in sixties spy-fi series The Avengers. Mrs. Peel is the personification of kinky charm and English cool, whether she's wearing her trademark leather catsuit, fancy dress, or groovy get-ups created by John Bates and, later, Alun Hughes, to emphasise her youthful, contemporary character.    

Perhaps her most notorious outfit was the Queen of Sin costume, worn in the most viewed and much discussed episode entitled 'A Touch of Brimstone'.

As can be seen in the photo accompanying this text, the Queen of Sin costume consists of a black embroidered corset laced tightly at the back and cut straight across the breast. The corset comes with a barely-there, see-through black lace micro-mini that just about reaches the top of her naked thighs and fails to conceal the black satin high-cut bikini briefs worn beneath. The look is complemented with a spiked leather collar (complete with leash), evening gloves, stiletto heeled boots (also back-lacing) and, somewhat lamely, a live snake.     

For many fans of the show, the moment that Mrs. Peel strips away a long black cloak and stands revealed in her Queen of Sin costume constitutes a real highpoint or kinky consummation of some kind. It certainly makes Steed's eyes - and one suspects not just his eyes - bulge with surprise and delight.

But for me, as for the censors at the time, with its explicit visual references to the world of BDSM, 'A Touch of Brimstone' goes too far; the cat is let out of the bag so to speak. I prefer Mrs. Peel kept under wraps and think she is at her most seductive when she manages to combine the perverse with the prim and proper; the deviant with the demure.

Notes

'A Touch of Brimstone', episode 21 of series 4 of The Avengers, written by Brian Clemens and directed by James Hill, was first shown (with cuts) in the UK in February 1966. It was deemed unsuitable for broadcast in the US. As well as starring Patrick Macnee as Steed and Diana Rigg as Mrs. Peel, it also co-starred Peter Wyngarde as The Honourable John Cleverly Cartney, the camp libertine and aristocratic anarchist who is the villain of the piece.

Those who are interested may care to go to the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmxe3ueE9jU

Sottorealism: Beneath Contempt ...?

Photo of Aris Kalaizis (2010)
kalaizis.com

Bataille's philosophical and political critique of the elevated, the ideal, and, indeed, of the very prefix sur (as in surrealism) remains, eighty-five years on, pretty much valid and legitimate as far as I can see. He's right to stay - as far as is possible - low down and dirty and to posit the world of things upon a base materialism; right to value those old moles who burrow under the surface and subvert those systems that look to the heavens where angels fly and eagles dare. 

Any revolution or art movement that involves soaring over the everyday with contempt led by those who suffer from an Icarian complex and secretly desire their own downfall, or pathologically delight in the thought of worldly destruction, deserves to be met with suspicion, derision, and contempt. 

But what of sottorealism? Is it a weird form of speculative materialism that interestingly counters the idealistic pretension of surrealism; or is it merely a dubious postmodern return to symbolism? 

The term, sottorealism, was coined by American art critic Carol Strickland in a 2006 essay to describe what she recognized as a new aesthetic approach in the work of Greco-German artist Aris Kalaizis; one which, like surrealism, values dreams and unconscious forces, but attempts to crawl beneath the surface of a reality invested and shaped by such, rather than rise above it. By manifesting these numinous realities in his work (after a lengthy process that first involves model building and photography), Kalaizis hopes to create canvases that are zones of convergence between the seen and unseen.  

We could also describe this practice as mythical realism - a term that the poet Paul-Henri Campbell likes to use with reference to his own work and it's surely not coincidental that the latter has written extensively and enthusiastically about the art of his friend Kalaizis.

According to Campbell, Kalaizis works with the immateriality of boundaries and probes the liminal joints of reality in a unique manner, viewing the world with his inner-eye and demonstrating how the creative process doesn't simply involve skill and toil, but opening oneself to a paramount mystery by which, I suppose, he means some form of divine (or demonic) guidance.

Now, forgive me if I'm being crass or overly hasty here, but doesn't this sound like a return to the language of the old religiosity or metaphysics with which art seems to invariably entangle itself?

Again, it's surely not coincidental that Campbell has studied theology and that Kalaizis's recently completed and monumental canvas, The Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew or the Double Martyrdom (2014/15) presently hangs in the Imperial Cathedral, Frankfurt. It might be that Kalaizis, a self-confessed atheist, maintains a critical and ironic stance towards organized religion, but something seems to whisper here of what Bataille would describe as a predilection for values and a call for some kind of spiritual reinvestment of contemporary society.

In sum, whilst I admire the technical brilliance of his work and concede that looking beneath is something different from looking beyond, I can't help thinking that Kalaizis wants desperately to locate the miraculous beneath the mundane and is unfortunately not quite enough of a dirt-digger to be a true mole.  


Notes

Georges Bataille, 'The "Old Mole" and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist', Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl, (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 32-44.

Paul-Henri Campbell (ed.), Sottorealism, (Imhof-Ed., Petersberg, 2014). 

See also the documentary about Kalaizis entitled Sotto, by Ferdinand Richter (2014): click here.

Pagan Magazine (1983-92)

Pagan: the Magazine of Blood-Knowledge
Issue I (1983)

For some, the way to move beyond the ruins of punk was via a colourful and poppy new romanticism. For others it involved wearing all black and the creation of a queer gothic sensibility; or power dressing for a job in the city and a shameless embrace of Thatcherism. 

For me, however, the natural progression was towards a post-punk primitivism inspired by - amongst other things - D. H. Lawrence's Apocalypse, McLaren and Westwood's Nostalgia of Mud, Killing Joke's Fire Dances, and a second-hand copy of the Larousse Encyclopedia of World Mythology.     

And so, in 1983, I created Pagan: the Magazine of Blood-Knowledge ...

For nearly ten years I single-handedly wrote, illustrated, photocopied, and distributed the above giving full-range to my various obsessions, including those that were not only literary and aesthetic in origin, but esoteric and political in character as the magazine veered dangerously from poetry, art, and nature worship towards the black hole of Nazi occultism.

This is not to argue that the latter is always the fatal outcome of the former. But, in aggressively confronting Occidental reason and Christian morality with its absolute Other and in promoting a pessimistic vitalism tied to an anti-modern, anti-democratic politics of cultural despair, one inevitably runs the risk of encountering and thence succumbing to the temptation of fascism. Habermas is not wrong to argue this.    

On the other hand, just as Dionysian philosophy can lead you into the abyss, so too can it lead you out and I would say that it was ultimately Nietzsche and those thinkers often derided as postmodernists - not Jürgen Habermas - who helped me see that irony, indifference, and incredulity are preferable to the faith, fanaticism, and fervour that I valorised and called for in my younger days.

I can still look back at Pagan Magazine with some pride and amusement. But I have to admit there are also feelings of shame, embarrassment, and even horror. Anyway, for the record - and for those few readers who may be interested - here's an index of the issues:


I: Dark Sex (1983)
II: Pan (1983)
III: Pagan Poetry (1983)
IV: The Cult of the Plumed Serpent (1984)
V: Pure Sex (1984)
VI: Rejuvenate! (1985)
VII: The Priest of Love (1985/86)
VIII: Erotic Art (1986)
IX: Once Upon a Time (On Folk and Fairy Tales) (1986)
X: Death to Democracy - Long Live the Folkish State! (1986)
XI: Ragnarok: Twilight of the Gods and the Coming of the Wolf (1986)
XII: The Ithyphallic Issue (1986)
XIII: We Shall Remain Faithful ... (1987)
XIV: Women (1987)
XV: And Time is Running Out ... (1987)
XVI: The Summer Edition (1987)
XVII: Transformation (1987)
XVIII: European Folk Dress Fashion Special (1987)
XIX: Poetry for the New Age (1987)
XX: Killing Joke: A New Day (1987)
XXI: The Tarot (1987)
XXII: Alchemy and the Transference Phenomenon (1988)
XXIII: Astrology (1988)
XXIV: On Magick and Witchcraft (1988)
XXV: Retrospective: the History of Pagan Magazine 1983-88 (1988)
XXVI: An Illustrated Miscellany of Curious and Interesting Items (1988)
XXVII: The Dead Kennedys Issue (1988)
XXVIII: Expressions (1988)
XXIX: The Green Issue (1989)
XXX: Farewell to the 80s ... And Welcome to the 1990s (1989)
XXXI: Modigliani: Le Peintre Maudit (1990)
XXXII: Vincent Van Gogh (1990)
XXXIII: Vive Picasso! (1990)
XXXIV: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: On the Life and Work of William Blake (1990)
XXXV: Dreams, Nightmares, Visions (1990)
XXXVI: The Pagan and Occult Roots of National Socialism (1991)
XXXVII: Adolf Hitler (1991)
XXXVIII: The New Order (1991)*
XXXIX: Blood and Soil: Race, Nationality, and Eco-Mysticism (1991)*
XL: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pagan: The True Confessions of Stephen Alexander (1991/92)*
XLI: New Poems and The History of Pagan Magazine (Part II): 1988-1991 (1992)


Note: The issues marked with an asterisk were not completed and so never circulated. Three further issues were also semi-assembled after issue XLI: one on the figure of the prostitute, one on Nietzsche, and, finally, one entitled 'Bits' that was a celebration of fragments and leftovers. 

The Object is Poetics

Jean Dubuffet, Personnage Hilare 

(Portrait de Francis Ponge), 1947

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 

In a text entitled The Object is Poetics, Francis Ponge correctly points out that the relationship between man and object is not at all limited to possession or use. Our soul is transitive, writes Ponge. By which he means it needs "an object that affects it". For man is a curious body "whose centre of gravity is not in itself". 

We have our being, in other words, in the infinite number of things outside ourselves. There are thus as many ways of being as there are objects and relationships. Arguably, the artist understands the multiple and decentred nature of man best of all; understands that the world is not only populated with other human beings, but with birds, beasts and flowers - and, indeed, with objects belonging to the inanimate world:       

"The world is peopled with objects. On its shores, we see their infinite crowd, their gathering, even though they are indistinct and vague. Nevertheless, that is enough to reassure us. Because we also feel that all of them, according to our fancy, one after the other, may become our point of docking, the bollard upon which we rest."

But, in order for this to be true, we must choose true objects, says Ponge. By which he means real objects that exist as such, with their own weight, mind independently. All too frequently we become enthralled by our own ideas: "Most often, man only grasps his emanations, his ghosts. Such are subjective objects". 

These pseudo-objects endlessly sing the same dreary song - the song of a triumphant humanity. True objects, however, exist outside of our own thoughts and desires and are not merely decorative or background features. They emit a black noise, inaudible and alien ... 

See: Francis Ponge, 'The Object is Poetics', in The Sun Placed in the Abyss, trans. Serge Gavronsky, (SUN Books, 1977). 

Note: this post forms part of a longer (as yet untitled) project on Ponge, poetry, and object-oriented philosophy being worked on in collaboration with Simon Solomon.  

   

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.   

Fleurs du Mal

Obscenity (2015)
Photo by Stephen Alexander

The sight of a flower always gives a certain superficial joy in the appearance of things. 

But the symbolic language developed both to describe flowers and to express human emotions in floral terms is often entirely inadequate, limited as it is by cultural convention and oozing with sentimental cliché. Our love might be like a red, red rose, but a red, red rose is nothing like our amorous ideal.         

For at the core of every flower burns something obscene and evil like a tiny black sun that, in truth, poets and philosophers - who nearly all remain theo-humanists at heart - have never been very comfortable with. Georges Bataille is one of the few writers who dares to stare into the heart of vegetal darkness, affirming the inexpressible real presence of the plant and rejecting the symbolic descriptions traditionally offered as puerile absurdities that are sexless and sunless in character.

Flowers, admits Bataille, are undeniably beautiful at first glance. But, look closer, and you'll note that most of them are badly developed and barely distinguishable from foliage; "some of them are even unpleasant, if not hideous. Moreover, even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centres by hairy sexual organs."

The interior of a tulip for example, as pictured above, doesn't correspond with its exterior loveliness; tear away the petals and you're left with something sinister and alien. Even the most elegant of stamens is rather satanic and there are plants so diabolical that "one is tempted to attribute to them the most troubling human perversions".

In a passage that emphasizes just why it is that ultimately flowers are not an expression of some divine ideal, but, on the contrary, a base form of sacrilege, Bataille writes:

"Even more than by the filth of its organs, the flower is betrayed by the fragility of its corolla: thus, far from answering the demands of human ideas, it is the sign of their failure. In fact, after a very short period of glory the marvellous corolla rots indecently in the sun, thus becoming, for the plant, a garish withering. Risen from the stench of the manure heap - even though it seemed for a moment to have escaped it in a flight of angelic and lyrical purity - the flower appears to relapse abruptly into its original squalor: the most ideal is rapidly reduced to a wisp of aerial excrement."   

This, if you like, is the first aspect of the revenge of the flowers; they undermine and mock our emasculated idealism with their obscene reality, reminding us that beauty and desire have nothing to do with permanence or purity. And this is why metaphysicians prefer the never-fading blooms of heaven or the immortal pensées of some great thinker, to the delicate weeds that grow by the road side.       

See: Georges Bataille, 'The Language of Flowers', in Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl et al, (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 10-14. Note that the translation of the final paragraph quoted has been slightly modified.

An Interview with Malcolm McLaren (August 1984)

After recently going through a box of treasures from the past, I came across the above photo of myself with Malcolm McLaren and a copy of a taped interview recorded in the offices of Charisma Records, above the Marquee Club at 90 Wardour Street, back in the summer of '84. 

Malcolm was signed to Charisma at this time and I acting as an assistant to his very lovely Press Officer, Lee Ellen Newman, whilst (unsuccessfully) chasing a job as a presenter on a new cable and satellite TV channel. McLaren's new album, Fans, which fused opera with contemporary urban sounds was due for release in the autumn. 

As a means of marking the fifth anniversary of his death which passed earlier this month (April 8), I thought it might be nice to post an edited transcript of this short conversation with my mentor from over thirty years ago:

J: It's been a while since we've heard from you on record, but I'm pleased to know you have a new single out at the end of the month called Madame Butterfly. Would you like to say something about this song and the ideas behind it?

M: [Laughs] Oh dear! So what d'you wanna know then?

J: Just tell me anything about the single; or tell me a bit about opera ...

M: It's marvellous, opera. Because opera is about the most irrational art form ever in the sense that it gets to your emotions better than anything else. It combines drama with music - and it's live. It's one of the most difficult things to actually record. But it wasn't that which intrigued me, so much as the actual drama created with the music in someone's voice and I chose certain stories that were obvious classics, like Madame Butterfly, because they seemed to lend a certain emotion to people now that you could construct as something very sincere and without any cynicism.

J: I'm sure Madame Butterfly is a moving story, but it all sounds a long way away from the Sex Pistols. Do you think that you've changed personally over the years - mellowed ...?

M: I don't think it's mellow. I think that what is great about opera and the story of Butterfly in particular is that it's so poignant; it's the absolute opposite to anything that's bland. Most emotions are packaged today in pop music and they don't have that kind of irrational element. That's what's so great about opera; you don't know why you're feeling what you're feeling, but it makes you cry and it makes your heart thump!
      That, combined with something black and tough and real rootsy - something I suppose that you could say is still happening in New York - is why the record is so great. It's the combination of those two forces; something tough and rootsy with something that's melodic and very majestic and full of emotion.
      When you listen in the discotheques today all you hear are lyrics that have very little meaning other than to get up and dance, or make love and have sex without any particular slant, or any real purpose. This record demonstrates that all that is, I suppose, very happy and schlocky. What's good about this record is that it doesn't have anything that schlocky in it.

J: In the past you've made some memorable videos, such as the ones for Buffalo Gals and Soweto, which are very fast and breathless. Is that how you think a good pop video should be and is that how the video for Madame Butterfly is going to be?

M: No, the video for Madame Butterfly is actually gonna be very cinematic and has no mimed playback whatsoever. I wanted to create a moment and an expression that would enhance the record and allow you to listen, rather than be bamboozled by a variety of images. I think the content is in the record and the content's in the vocals mainly. The vocals are what you want to listen to and you don't want to be completely disillusioned by seeing my face on screen and burst out laughing, so I've just opened it up to a lot of girls sitting about in a Turkish bath, waiting, and crying their eyes out.

J: Do you welcome the emergence of music TV which obviously relies on videos as much as records?

M: I don't know, I suppose it's a good thing in a way - but only if it actually has a different policy from Top of the Pops and some of the other more format programmes that exist on ordinary television. Cable is great only because perhaps it can be less censorial and allow a bit more experimentation. Also, it provides an opportunity to people who don't necessarily warrant being categorised as musicians or filmmakers. The great thing about video is that it's a technology that most people - who may be brilliant sellers of raspberries or great horse riders - can go off and use and I think cable TV may accept that more readily than the record industry or the national TV stations.
      I think what's happening today is that we're creating a very new way that people receive music and culture generally. The future really lies in technology being given to people that normally would not be able to make a record, play an instrument, or shoot a movie and that's the most exciting thing.

J: You mention the future: what else have you got lined up?

M: I'm just finishing off my commitments [laughs]. I made this record only because I was tired of making another straight ahead rock 'n' roll record. I don't think I've done too much of that, but I decided to venture into something that was, for me, badly needed; something more dramatic and emotional, more personal. The sort of record I've never made. I've either made very politically-orientated, sloganistic records - such as when I managed the Sex Pistols - or, thereafter, I started to get involved as a mercenary manager managing various pop groups and creating good antics and good visual ideas, but, at the end of the day, the delivery wasn't as profound as it should have been.
      When I finally made a record on my own, Duck Rock, that was really very much to do with ethnic music and the discovery of dance and looking at the world with the eye of rhythm. This time, I haven't thought about rhythm at all and have gone for what I would just declare emotion - it's purely emotional music.    

J: Finally Malcolm, why do you think I would make a perfect presenter on the Music Box?

M: [Laughs] Maybe because you're more daft than I think you are [laughs].
    

In Memory of Lorrie Millington (Artist, Model, Dancer, Writer)

Lorrie Millington: Artist-Model-Dancer-Writer

I first met Lorrie Millington in a tiny nightclub in the centre of Leeds city centre called Le Phonographique, famous for playing a fantastic mix of post-punk tunes by the likes of Bauhaus, The Psychedelic Furs, The Cramps, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Killing Joke, The Cure, Soft Cell, Theatre of Hate, and The Sex Gang Children. 

It was 1982 and everyone wore black clothes and eyeliner and had a penchant for the Gothic. That said, I was more often than not still dressed in tartan bondage trousers and Lorrie had her own unique look; one that made her well-known but unpopular with regulars at Le Phonographique some of whom called her 'Duck' because of her unusual dancing style. Others suspected her of being a transsexual.  

I didn't care; I thought she was beautiful and we were immediately attracted to one another. Unfortunately, we were also both very shy (she even had a slight stutter). And so it took a considerable amount of time before we plucked up the courage to speak. After our first brief conversation, she slipped me her card on which was written: 

Lorrie Millington 

Artist-Model-Dancer-Writer

I later found out her real name was Lorraine Gatford and that she was from York. She borrowed the name Millington from seventies porn star Mary Millington and had moved to Leeds to escape her mother and a boring job as a printer of some kind. As a child she had been run over and this left her with both physical and mental scars. She lived alone with just a mannequin for company called Lady Christabel and often signed the many letters and poems she sent me as the Girl in the Mystery Castle.

The first time she came to visit me at the house near Kirkstall Abbey that I shared with three friends and fellow students, she galloped around the kitchen on all fours mid-dinner pretending to be a horse. Although never officially dating, we became something of an odd couple. We would spend nights listening to an Ennio Morricone soundtrack and Adam and the Ants. I found no evidence to support the rumour that she was secretly a boy.

In 1984 she suffered a severe breakdown and was committed for several weeks to High Royds psychiatric hospital. I left Leeds for London in July of this year, but we kept in touch by mail for many years after this. The last time we met was, I think, in 1988 when she was pregnant and living with a bass guitarist called Keith. 

Sadly, most of the poems and letters and pictures she sent me over the years have been destroyed. And, tragically, her health continued to deteriorate as she grew older and, about ten years ago, our correspondence terminated. 

I don't suppose her daughter, Faye, who was given up for adoption, will ever read this post, but, if so, I'd like her to know that her mother was a funny, intelligent, talented young woman who I still think of often and very fondly.  

Mario Perniola: Il sex appeal dell'inorganico

 Mario Perniola: Professor of Aesthetics,

University of Rome

It soon becomes obvious when reading Mario Perniola's Sex Appeal of the Inorganic that what he most wants is to have his cock sucked for all eternity; that is to say, in a perpetual manner in which all feeling is suspended and orgasm forever deferred. 

For where other men would simply find frustration, Perniola hopes to locate the beginning of a new and neutered sexuality that is entirely divorced from nature and freed from all metaphysical notions of telos, or vital fantasies of carnal fulfilment. He neither wants to love like an angel, nor fuck like a beast. But most of all he doesn't want to come: "To free oneself of orgasmomania," he writes, "is the first step towards the neuter, suspended and artificial sexuality of the thing" which promises to open up a world "where the difference between the sexes, form, appearance, beauty, age and race no longer matter" [3].  

Other steps towards this pornotopia without a happy-ending include: 

(1) Reading philosophy, which Perniola interestingly characterizes as a form of speculative extremism (even if it still tediously refers back to Kant and Hegel). Above all, read Heidegger; Heidegger looks for Being not in Geist (like Hegel) or in Life (like Nietzsche), but in the thing (and the thingliness of the thing) and although he never directly speaks of sexuality in his work, it is only with Heidegger "that the path of thinking and the sex appeal of the inorganic ... reveal their essential belonging together" [108].    

(2) Understanding the body in terms not of flesh, but of clothing, furniture and upholstery; "the folds of the female sex are no different from the depressions of a seat cover, the skin that runs along the rod of the male sex is similar to the covering of an arm rest" [11]. I'm not sure that's the case, but Perniola insists: "As long as we remain prisoners of the idea that living bodies excite us more than clothes, we will never escape the organicistic aestheticism that considers sexuality in terms of life" [45].
      This sounds like fetishism, but Perniola is ambiguous on the subject of fetishism; if, on the one hand, it is the category via which modernity has traditionally thought the erotics of the object, on the other hand it constitutes a grotesque and extravagant "caricature of the sex appeal of the inorganic" [53].           

(3) Recognizing that addiction to opium-based drugs, such as heroin, provides an exemplary experience in dependency "analogous to the neutral feeling of becoming thing" crucial to the development of an inorganic sexuality [14].

(4) Moving beyond the BDSM crowd; it would be very much mistaken to consider Perniola's model of impersonal sexuality in terms of a master and slave relationship and even the apathy of the Sadean libertine or the peculiar mixture of coldness and cruelty so loved by the masochist, belong to an entirely different universe.

(5) Developing a taste for cybersex and science fiction, a genre that understands more than most "how the organic and inorganic, the anthropological and technological, the natural and the artificial overlap and blend in one another" [28]. Neutral sexuality can be considered both posthuman and virtual - not in the sense of simulated reality, but, more radically, a real simulation that offers access to an ontologically different order. Perniola further advises we study vampires as well as philosophical-cyborgs; for the undead also embody the sex appeal of the inorganic and provide access to another world which is "radically different from everyday life" [77].   

(6) Listening to rock music; a sexually inorganic form of sound that has nothing to do with "the sentimental conception of music, which considers it as the expression of an emotional interiority, and from the vitalistic one which sees in it the animal cry" [65]. Schelling would understand perfectly why it is that prog rock in particular "constitutes a paradigm for the cultural operations to come" [66]. He means it man! Frank Zappa rules!

(7) Exploring plastic landscapes and appreciating architecture as an inorganic art divorced from construction that brings into question all attempts to harmonize "form and function, nature and culture, country and city" [83]. Not only can architecture be compared to tailoring, but it can be understood as an erotics; as if drifting in and out of buildings or through the city streets was a sexual act not dissimilar to strapping a tiny camera to your penis and penetrating the interior landscape of the vagina, generating "a quite different excitement to the natural one" [90].
      As well as the internal spaces of the body, Perniola also gets excited by the possibility of entering cyberspace; a new dimension opened up by computer technology that "radicalizes contemporary architectural experience". But cyberspace, albeit a "spatialized visualization of information", must not be understood as "a dematerialization or, worse, a spiritualization of reality". Rather, it's the creation of a liquid environment that allows the cybernaut who navigates it to "perceive his own real body as a sentient thing not essentially different from the sentient landscapes of electronic architectures" [91]. 

(8) Rejecting all notions of desire. But - and this is important to note - neutral sexuality is not simply a form of erotic mysticism or a tantric practice to delay orgasm in order to thereby intensify the moment of climax. And unlike Zen Buddhism which aims at a state of spiritual elevation and detachment from the world, the sex appeal of the inorganic wants to abolish the distance between man and world; to absorb the human into the realm of things. Perniola writes:

"Neutral sexuality is not a state of inertia, of reducing excitement to zero, eliminating all tensions, is not Nirvana, or Freud's death drive, and not even lethargy ... Quietism, fatalistic and defeatist renunciation, paralysis, are more indirect affirmations of desire than actual suspensions of it. The sex appeal of the inorganic is more an after-desire than a without-desire." [98-9]        

(9) Privileging hermaphroditism over androgyny; the latter, says Perniola, is "as remote as one can imagine it to be from the sex appeal of the inorganic"; a victory for the metaphysical dream of organic unity. But hermaphroditism, on the other hand, "implies the best possible way in which the characteristic of both sexes are contained in a figure, namely a man with breasts or a woman with a penis" [115]. Rather than place emphasis on unification and the harmonious co-presence of masculine and feminine elements, hermaphroditism promotes indetermination and neutralization.
      However, even hermaphroditism fails to reach the sex appeal of the inorganic. For that you need to push on far beyond the sexual dichotomy of male and female - to sexual infinity in which there are an innumerable number of sexes. The inorganic lover loves the thought of endless division and of tearing into ever smaller pieces the dress worn by his bride on their wedding night and then carefully putting together one by one the tiny shreds on her naked body:

"In the transit that goes from the cloth to the skin, and from the skin to the cloth, one can re-establish the experience of a neutral and inorganic sexuality. It is sympathetic ... with an abstract excitement that never tires of operating infinite divisions on one's own body and that of one's partner." [120]       

(10) Learning to hear the expression inclusive metawriting as "more loaded with sexual intensity than most obscene words" [126]. Because - wouldn't you know it - it's philosophically-informed literature that is the crucial "accomplice of neutral and impersonal experience" [121]. Perniola is then, like Barthes, a homotextual. But whereas the latter affirms and delights in the pleasure of the text, Perniola hates pleasure and wants to free sexuality from such vulgarity. There is nothing in pleasure, he insists, that inevitably binds it to sexuality - and particularly not to a model of sexuality that is "not content with staying natural and organic" [132].

Follow these ten steps and you too can enter the inorganic realm. But don't think that this makes you in anyway superhuman; on the contrary, it might just betray the fact you are spiritually sick or physically disabled in some manner - perhaps thanks to the fact that you've read too much philosophy or written too much poetry!

It certainly signifies you're abnormal and perverse; someone who "derives excitement from inadequate stimulation ... such as concepts, numbers, sounds, spaces, objects, writings, all things that normal people keep immersed in a functional-utilitarian boredom, or in an aesthetic-formal tedium" [144].  


Mario Perniola; The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, trans. Massimo Verdicchio, (Continuum, 2004). All page numbers supplied refer to this edition.