Showing posts with label georges bataille. Show all posts
Showing posts with label georges bataille. Show all posts

22 Mar 2024

André Masson and the Sex Pistols

The Surrealist and the Sex Pistol:
 André Masson and Malcolm McLaren
Photos by Man Ray (c. 1930) and Joe Stevens (1976)
 
 
I. 
 
When asked shortly before his death: Which living artist do you most admire? 
 
Malcolm McLaren answered: 
 
"When I was 18, I studied for three months under the automatist painter André Masson in France. Every day I would buy him tomatoes, a baguette and a bottle of côtes du rhône, but he never spoke. On my last day he bought me a drink and wished me well. He's dead now, but I remain haunted by him." [1]
 
I don't know how true that is, but it's an amusing story [2] and forms an interesting connection with an artist whose relation to surrealism is much discussed, but whose influence on punk is - as far as I know - rarely mentioned. 
 
 
II.
 
My knowledge of Masson is mostly limited to the period when he worked on the journal founded by Georges Bataille - Acéphale (1936-39). 
 
His cover design for the first issue featuring an iconic headless figure with stars for nipples and a skull where his sexual organ should be, has resonated with me ever since I first saw it in the mid-1990s and I'm disappointed that Malcolm didn't ask Jamie or Vivienne to adapt this pagan image on a design for the Sex Pistols.
 
To identify as an anti-Christ is an important start. But equally important is to declare oneself in opposition to the ideal figure of the Vitruvian Man embodying all that is Good, True, and Beautiful - and to repeat after Bataille: "Secrètement ou non, il est nécessaire de devenir tout autres ou de cesser d'être." [3]
 
Wouldn't that have made a great punk slogan? 
 
I think so.

And I think also that the sacred conspiracy involving Bataille, Masson, Klossowski and others, anticipates McLaren's idea for SEX as a place which might bring together those sovereign individuals who didn't belong to mainstream society or wish to conform to the dictates of fashion, but wanted to violently affirm their singular being above all else.
 
And so, again, I think it a pity that the dark surrealism of Bataille and Masson - which not only set itself in opposition to all forms of fascism but also all forms of humanism, including André Breton's surrealism - wasn't explored (and exploited) by McLaren; especially as, in Sid Vicious, punk rock had discovered its very own Dionysian superstar [4]; someone who, as Malcolm liked to say, never saw a red light and enacted the primordial powers of instinct and irrationality.  

And, like Masson's acéphalic figure, Vicious even had a penchant for carrying a (sacrificial) knife ... [5]



 
Notes
 
[1] Amy Fleming, 'Portrait of the artist: Malcolm McLaren, musician', in The Guardian (10 Aug 2009): click here
      This is an interesting short question and answer piece, which also reveals McLaren's favourite film to be David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962). However, I don't think the description of McLaren in the title as a musician is one he would recognise. Sadly, McLaren died eight months after the piece was published (on 8 April 2010). 
 
[2] McLaren's biographer, Paul Gorman, tells us that prior to beginning life as a student at Harrow Technical College & School of Art, Malcolm was "sent by his mother to a summer school in the south of France" and that this (apparently) involved an internship with André Masson and not just enjoying life on the beach at Cannes. 
      See The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 45.
 
[3] I would translate this into English as: "Secretly or not, it is necessary to become wholly other, or cease to be." Often the original French phrase tout autres is translated as 'completely different'.
      The line is from Bataille's essay 'The Sacred Conspiracy', which can be found in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 179. Masson's Acéphale can also be found in this book, illustrating the essay on p. 180.       
 
[4] See ' Sid Vicious Versus the Crucified' (3 Feb 2024) where I develop this idea: click here.
 
[5] See 'I'll Put a Knife Right in You: Notes on the Case of Sid and Nancy' (30 Dec 2020): click here
 
 
This post is dedicated to the Danish art historian and curator Marie Arleth Skov, author of Punk Art History: Artworks from the European No Future Generation (Intellect Books, 2023). Her paper at the Torn Edges symposium held at the London College of Communication (20 March 2024) - 'Berlin Calling: The Dark, Dramatic, and Dazzling Punk Art Praxes of a Divided City' - was inspirational.


21 Mar 2024

On the Nature of the Ridiculous (and the Ridiculous Nature of the Sex Pistols)


Sex Pistols
Photo by Richard Young (1976)
 
"We have passed beyond the absurd: our position is absolutely ridiculous." [1]
 
 
I. 
 
Gavin Butt is a professor at Northumbria University and someone who knows more than most - certainly more than me - about the connections between visual art, popular music, queer culture, and performance [2].

So when he privileges the term ridiculous in his work I'm confident he has very good reasons for doing so. 
 
However, that doesn't mean I can't briefly reflect upon this concept myself in contradistinction to what some regard as the more profound (and serious-sounding) philosophy of absurdism and then say something about the Sex Pistols. 
 
 
II. 
 
The crucial aspect of the ridiculous is that it solicits, incites, or provokes laughter; often of a mocking or cruel nature, but not always. If you're someone like Georges Bataille, then you'll probably find everything ridiculous - one recalls the following short poem:
 
Laugh and laugh 
at the sun 
at the nettles 
at the stones 
at the ducks 
 
at the rain 
at the pee-pee of the pope 
at mummy 
at a coffin full of shit [3]  
 
For Bataille, this laughter is liberating; by viewing the entire universe as ridiculous - including death and the excremental nature of the decomposing corpse - he feels able to escape from what Zarathustra terms the Spirit of Gravity.
 
This may seem synonymous with the sublime philosophical idea of absurdism, but, actually, it's not the same thing at all. Finding existence laughable is very different from finding it meaningless; one is expected - as a creature of reason - to be angst-ridden by the latter idea, not gaily indifferent to the fact or able to smile when standing before the nihilistic void [4].

Being ridiculous makes one in the eyes of those who insist upon moral seriousness at all times an inferior being; shallow and lacking dignity. But I would counter this by saying it makes us Greek in the sense understood by Nietzsche: i.e., superficial - out of profundity! [5].
 
 
III.
 
One might also view punk - in its more playfully anarchic manifestation as given us by Malcolm McLaren - as an attempt not merely to challenge authority, but to escape from enforced seriousness. 
 
The Sex Pistols - and those closely associated with them, such as members of the Bromley Contingent - were ridiculous because they advocated for a Lawrentian revolution:

If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don't make it in ghastly seriousness,
don't do it in deadly earnest,
do it for fun.

Don't do it because you hate people
do it just to spit in their eye. [6]

Po-faced punks concerned about social justice might recoil from this, but, for me, the idea of tipping over the apple cart simply to see which way the apples will roll, is crucial. McLaren encouraged the youngsters under his spell to be childish and irresponsible - to be everything this society hates - to make themselves ugly and grotesque: in a word, ridiculous [7]
 
 
Notes
 
[1] I'm slightly misquoting the American actor, director, and writer Ronald Tavel, who coined the phrase Theatre of the Ridiculous in 1965 initially to describe his own work. Tavel himself ends this sentence with the word 'preposterous'. 
 
[2] I had the pleasure of listening to Butt speak at the Torn Edges symposium held at the London College of Communication on 20 March 2024 - an event exploring the points of contact and crossover between punk, art, design, and history. 
      Although his paper was rather more Pork than punk, that was fine by me and his discussion of Warhol's 1971 play in relation to the Theatre of the Ridiculous - a genre of queer experimental theatre - was fascinating.  
 
[3] The original poem by Bataille, entitled 'Rire' ['Laughter'], can be found in volume 4 of his Oeuvres complètes, (Gallimard, 1971), p. 13. The English translation is from the Preface to Nick Land's The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, (Routledge, 1992), p. xvii.
 
[4] In a sense, I'm following Hobbes here who distinguished between the absurd and the ridiculous, arguing that the former is to do with invalid reasoning, whilst the latter is simply about laughter. For non-philosophers, however, the absurd and the ridiculous are pretty much now regarded as synonymous. 
      As for the sublime - with which the ridiculous is often juxtaposed - it's interesting to note just how quickly one can pass from the former to the latter; one small misstep is all it takes.
 
[5] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Preface to the second edition (4).
 
[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'A Sane Revolution', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 449. 
 
[7] Not only ugliness, but deformity is considered by some to be essential to the ridiculous; one recalls that Johnny Rotten in part based his hunched over stage persona on that of Richard III and would perform in an exaggerated physically awkward manner.    


7 Dec 2023

Dead Men Make Good Mould

Decay is the Laboratory of Life
(SA/2023)
 
 
Because so much of my thinking has been informed by the work of D. H. Lawrence - and because, as the author of a book of essays on thanatology, all aspects of death are a matter of continued philosophical interest - it means I can never see a pile of fallen wet leaves slowly decomposing without recalling the following lines from Fantasia of the Unconscious:
 
"Old leaves have got to fall, old forms must die. And if men at certain periods fall into death in millions, why, so must the leaves fall every single autumn. And dead leaves make good mold. And so dead men. Even dead men's souls." [1]   
 
That's quite a hard teaching from the materialist school of general economics - one that Bataille would happily affirm - but its apparent callousness in the face of some kind of huge event that results in the mass destruction of human lives doesn't detract from the essential truth that life is rooted in and thrives upon death, and that "the whole universe would perish if man and beast and herb were not putting forth a newness" [2] out of the decay of the old.
 
Or, as the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani puts it: "Through decay, life and death multiply and putrefy each other to no end." [3] 
 
So, next time you see a pile of rotting leaves - or, indeed, contemplate a mass grave of human bodies - try to overcome your horror and console yourself with the knowledge of how compost enriches the soil with organic nutrients and provides sustenance for a range of detritivores on both the macro and micro level; for dead men make good food as well as good mould.    
 
 
Notes
 
[1] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Ch. XV, p. 266. 
      For readers who prefer to consult the 2004 Cambridge Edition of Fantasia, published jointly with Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and ed. Bruce Steele, see p. 189.   

[2] Ibid.

[3] Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, (re:press, 2008), p. 184. 


28 Aug 2023

Black Sun Flower

Black Sun Flower (SA/2023)
 
 
Is it just me, or is there not a suggestion in the flower on the left of the sun-wheel symbol [1] that Nazi occultists had such a fondness for? 
 
I think there is: and it makes one wonder whether it serves to illustrate Oscar Wilde's anti-mimetic contention that life imitates art [2]; or, alternatively, proves that even a flower can be fascist?  
 
Either way, I think we can all agree that at the core of every flower burns something obscene and evil, like a tiny black sun, and that this is something that many poets, philosophers, and gardeners remain deeply uncomfortable with. 
 
In fact, Bataille is one of the few writers who dares to stare into the heart of vegetal darkness, affirming the inexpressible reality of the flower and rejecting the sexless and sunless descriptions traditionally offered [3].
 
 
Notes
 
[1] The schwarze Sonne symbol originated in Nazi Germany and is now employed by neo-Nazis and other far-right individuals and groups. 
      The symbol consists of twelve radial sig runes and was used as a design element in Heinrich Himmler's SS castle at Wewelsburg. It is uncertain whether it held any particular significance for Himmler, but the black sun later became linked with neo-Nazi occultism and used as a substitute for (or variant of) the classic swastika design. 
      For a Lawrentian take on this concept of the black sun, see the post entitled 'Excessive Brightness Drove the Poet into Darkness' (3 Oct 2021): click here
 
[2] See Wilde's essay 'The Decay of Lying', Intentions (1891). An earlier version of the essay was published in the literary magazine The Nineteenth Century, in January 1889.

[3] I'm paraphrasing here form an earlier post entitled 'Fleurs du Mal' (25 April 2015): click here
 
 
Readers might like to see a related post to this one on how Jamie Reid's Cambridge Rapist motif haunts the natural world: click here.


7 Jun 2023

In the Bullring With Simon & Simone

André Masson: Bullfighting (1937)
 
 
I. 
 
In response to a recent post [1], the Irish poet and playwright Síomón Solomon asks:
 
"I wonder how you square your squeamishness and selective sentimentality when it comes to bursten bowels and the suffering of animals, with your professed admiration for Bataille's Histoire de l'Oeil - a work which powerfully illustrates the (Nietzschean) idea that, in saying Yes to life in all circumstances and under any conditions, one must ultimately give even the most terrible aspects of existence one's blessing?"
 
 
II. 
 
It's a fair question. And I'm grateful to Solomon for raising it - and also for reminding me of the following passage from Bataille's short novel:
 
"There were actually three things about bullfights that fascinated [Simone]: the first, when the bull comes hurtling out  of the bullpen like a big rat; the second, when its horns plunge all the way into the flank of a mare; the third, when that ludicrous, raw-boned mare gallops across the arena [...] dragging a huge, vile bundle of bowels between her thighs in the most dreadful wan colours [...] Simone's heart throbbed fastest when the exploding bladder dropped its mass of mare's urine on the sand in one quick plop." [2]
 
Sixteen-year-old Simone, then, is the literary antithesis of forty-year-old Kate Leslie, the protagonist of Lawence's Plumed Serpent, who is utterly ashamed and nauseated by what she witnesses at the bullring. Having expected a display of bravery and a gallant show, Kate is shocked by the human cowardice and beastliness - not to mention the sight of blood and smell of bursten bowels [3].
 
But Simone loves everything about the bullfight; the heat, the noise, the cruelty, and not least the possibility of seeing a toreador injured by a monstrously lunging bull. 
 
When her wealthy English patron, Sir Edmund, informs her that at one time it was customary to serve the roasted testicles of the slaughtered bulls to guests seated in the front row of the arena, she begs him to obtain for her the balls of the first beast killed - only she insists they be served raw on a white plate, so that she might lift her dress and sit on them.
 
Unfortunately, this last part proves tricky to accomplish unobserved in a crowded arena. And so Simone simply holds the dish containing the two peeled testicles on her lap, until the opportunity arises to bite into one of them and then slowly and surely insert the other into her cunt - a lewd act which coincides with a handsome young bullfighter having an eye gauged out by a bull "with the same force as a bundle of innards from a belly" [4].                  
 
 
III.
 
What, then, are we to make of this - and how, then, are we to answer Síomón Solomon's question?
 
Firstly, I concede that it takes an almost inhuman effort to affirm even a single moment or joy, when it's in the knowledge that by so doing we affirm also every pain, every sadness, every cruelty, and every obscenity. But that's precisely what we are challenged to do by authors, like Bataille, who subscribe to the idea that all things are tied together beneath the same dark sun. 
 
However, affirming the fact that all things are part of a general economy of the whole, does not, as far as I can see make one morally complicit with evil, nor does it oblige one to participate in wrongdoing. 
 
I can affirm, for example, the pride of the peacock and the lust of the goat, without being a preening narcissist or a licentious libertine; I can affirm the vital cruelty of the natural world, without wanting to watch or make animals suffer in the bullring; and I can even read works of transgressive literature without wanting to act out ... 

 
Notes
 
[1] See the post entitled 'I Don't Know as I Get What D. H. Lawrence is Driving at When He Writes of Bursten Bowels ...' (6 June 2023): click here.   

[2] Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschal, (Penguin Books, 1982), p. 47.
      For readers unfamiliar with this classic work of the porno-philosophical imagination (originally published in 1928), Simone is a sixteen-year-old erotomaniac with a perverse penchant for inserting soft globular objects - be they eyes, testicles, or boiled eggs - into her vagina or between her arse cheeks. Half-way through the novel, she and her lover - a distant cousin who is the tale's anonymous narrator - run away to Spain in order to escape a police investigation in their native France. Here, they are supported by a fabulously rich (and depraved) Englishman, Sir Edmund, who enthusiastically lays on obscene entertainments for the young couple.  

[3] See Chapter 1 of D. H. Lawrence's novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), 'Beginnings of a Bull-Fight'

[4] Bataille, Story of the Eye ... p. 54.


22 Feb 2022

On the Politics of Disgust

Disgust makes her revulsion clear in Disney Pixar's 
Inside Out (dir. Pete Docter, 2015)
 
'Nothing is more important than for us to recognise that we are bound
and sworn to what provokes our most intense disgust.' - Georges Bataille
 
 
I. 
 
Arguably, disgust - as an expression of taste - betrays a high level of sensitivity and culture; an African dung beetle, for example, may be able to navigate by the stars, but it knows nothing of disgust. 
 
But then neither does a Sadean libertine, who has vanquished all emotional responses that might be regarded as all too human and all forms of pleasure rooted in the senses over which they lack control. Sade terms this form of asceticism or Stoic indifference to the natural passions, apathy and it is central to his philosophy in the bedroom. 
 
However, most of us are not Sadean libertines and do not posit apathy as an erotic ideal, nor strive to overcome our disgust for shit-eating (coprophagy) and corpse-fucking (necrophilia), for example, as signs of our superiority. We might even view apathy, in the end, as the way in which a madman seeks to justify his lack of remorse or compassion for others.    
 
 
II. 
 
Disgust, as Tina Kendall rightly says, "has long been a subject of anxious speculation" [1]
 
And as she also reminds us: 
 
"Recently, there has been a revitalisation of debates pertaining to disgust from across a range of disciplines, as witnessed by publications in the fields of philosophical aesthetics, phenomenology, cognitive and moral psychology, literary theory, and feminist and queer theory." [2] 
 
Continuing: 
 
"What unites much of this interdisciplinary work on disgust is a shared concern with thinking through the relations between bodily sensation, emotion, and cognition [...] and with probing the political, moral, and ethical implications that arise from those particular conditions of embodiment." [3]
 
That's true, I think, though I also agree with Martha Nussbaum, who suggests that what is most interesting about disgust is that it often acts as an intensifier of other negative emotions, such as anger or hatred. 
 
But what is the origin of disgust: is it rooted in evolutionary biology, or is it primarily an emotional phenomenon - with an added moral dimension - that is determined culturally?
 
Darwin famously wrote on the subject and seemed to believe that disgust is an evolved response to potential dangers, such as rotten meat, or body products that can spread disease (such as excrement). This identifies disgust - mostly associated with our sense of smell and taste - as an important defensive mechanism, protecting us from pathogens, etc. It's not, therefore, the wholly irrational reaction that some people imagine.   
 
But, of course, we can experience disgust for things we don't like the look or feel of too - and some people with particularly sensitive ears can even find certain noises disgusting (readers can provide their own examples, many of which will doubtless involve bodily functions).
 
There's extensive research evidence that women experience greater levels of disgust - including self-disgust and sexual disgust - than men. Again, there may well be physiological reasons for this, but it's surely something that has been socially reinforced.

There's also evidence that forms of visceral prejudice, such as racism and homophobia, are rooted in disgust and not just in ignorance, as many idealists like to believe - which is why education isn't the solution they hope it will be. In some cases, disgust for others is so overwhelming that it prevents individuals from self-examination or ever learning to love their neighbour. 
 
Ultimately, the greater one's level of disgust, the greater one's level of hate for those who inspire such and the greater one's desire to do away with them; we recall once more the case of Gregor Samsa. Fascism is the collective political expression of disgust which denies not only the rights of other citizens, but their humanity, and this results (ironically) in the most disgusting acts and scenes imaginable. 
 
And yet, disgust may also be the strong vital sensation that Kant said it was; one that prevents us from committing acts of atrocity or vile crimes. 
 
Besides, as Walter Benjamin concluded, no one is ever completely free from disgust; not even the Sadean libertine, who never really overcomes their instinct of revulsion, merely redirects it, so that, for example, they feel disgust for conventional forms of love and moral behaviour. 
 
In sum, and to quote Tina Kendall once more, disgust's complex and "distinctly polymorphic nature" [4] as both a visceral reflex and a leared emotional response, makes it a "uniquely privileged concept" [5] and critical tool for thinking through a number of important issues. 
 
The philosopher, therefore, can never just say eww! and look away from that which (rightly perhaps) revolts the non-philosopher living in Tunbridge Wells.    
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Tina Kendall, 'Tarrying with Disgust', an Introduction to Volume 15, Issue 2 of the journal Film-Philosophy, ed. Tina Kendall, (Edinburgh University Press, Oct 2011), p. 1. 
      Click here to read Kendall's Introduction; or click here to read the entire issue on academia.edu 

[2] Ibid.  

[3-5] Ibid., p. 2. 


19 Feb 2022

Reflections on Venus Emerging Slowly From an Old Bathtub


The Venus of Willendorf [1]
Image: Naturhistorisches Museum Wien
 
 
I.
 
I recently reflected on how the figure of a woman emerging from the sea allows us to glimpse something of the goddess Aphrodite in her flesh; and how, in turn, this invites us to consider the relationship we have with our own bodies and the bodies of others (as well as the nature of the divine) [2]
 
Of course, such meditations are made easier when that woman is, for example, Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder, or Ana de Macedo skipping among the fishes and rock pools, like a Portuguese Venus; one could spend all day happily musing on lithe and lovely limbs and firm young breasts, etc. 
 
It is not so easy, or so pleasurable, however, to consider what we might collectively term vile bodies - i.e., old bodies, ugly bodies, obese bodies, deformed bodies, mutilated bodies, and, at the extreme, dead bodies (there is surely nothing more repulsive than a decomposing corpse, which is why necrophilia remains such a rare phenomenon).
 
The problem, as Nietzsche pointed out, is that everything ugly weakens and saddens the spectator [3]. Thus, reflecting upon vile bodies has a dangerous psycho-physiological effect; it actually depresses and deprives one of strength. 
 
Ugliness, like sickness, is therefore not only a sign and symptom of degeneration, but a cause of such; which is why healthy happy souls prefer to be surrounded by beauty and turn to art when such is lacking in reality; for art, as Nietzsche says, is the great stimulant of life - a counterforce to all denial of wellbeing [4]
 
However, having said all this, the philosopher, as Nietzsche understands them, is one who lives dangerously and who can not only embrace more of human history (in its entirety) as their own, but, like the artist or great poet, find beauty in those individuals, things, and events where most people would see only horror and look away in disgust. 
 
 
II. 
 
And so we come to Rimbaud's poem, Venus Anadyomène (1870); one that I think important, but which critics often overlook, or dismiss as less serious than his later (more mature) verses. 
 
For one thing, the poem - written when Rimbaud was just sixteen - challenges static and traditional ideals of feminine beauty [5] and dares readers to glimpse some aspect of the divine even in an ulcerated anus (which, admittedly, isn't easy). 
 
Wherever the poet might be taking us, we're a long way from Botticelli and moving towards Bataille territory; this hideously beautiful Venus in an old bathtub serves as the vehicle of love in much the same manner that a drunken woman vomiting - or a dog devouring the stomach of a goose - perform the role [6].   
 
Ultimately, not being a scholar of French literature or a Rimbaud expert, I'm unsure what he intended with this verse; is it a serious (slightly disturbing) attempt to revalue beauty, or simply an adolescent parody of the Venus myth - who knows? 

Anyway, readers can decide for themselves by clicking here to access Venus Anadyomène as found in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a bilingual edition trans. Wallace Fowlie and revised by Seth Whidden, (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
 
 
Notes
 
[1] The Venus of Willendorf is a small figurine, carved from limestone tinted with red ochre, and believed to have been made almost 30,000 years ago in the Paleolithic period (i.e., the Old Stone Age). It was found in 1908, during archaeological excavations at a site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria. Anyone wishing to see it should get along to the Natural History Museum in Vienna. 
 
[2] See the post entitled 'And Venus Among the Fishes Skips' (18 Feb 2022): click here
 
[3] See Nietzsche, 'Expeditions [or Skirmishes] of an Untimely Man', §20, in Twilight of the Idols.  
 
[4] See Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), §853 (II), p. 452.    

[5] For more on the challenge to these ideals presented by Rimbaud's poem, see the essay by Seth Whidden, 'Rimbaud Writing on the Body: Anti-Parnassian Movement and Æsthetics in "Vénus Anadyomène"', in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 27, no. 3/4, (University of Nebraska Press, 1999), pp. 333–45. This essay can also be accessed online via JSTOR: click here.
 
[6] See Georges Bataille, 'The Solar Anus', in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Alan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 5-9. The lines I refer to are on p. 6. 
 
 

11 Aug 2021

Notes on The Life of Plants by Emanuele Coccia

(Polity, 2018)
 
I. 
 
As torpedohiles will be aware, I'm a big fan of plants and trees. And interested also in the latest philosophical speculation concerning our CO2-loving friends. Thus, I'm delighted to have the opportunity to discuss - having finally read - a recent book by Emanuele Coccia, published in English as The Life of Plants (2019) [a]
 
One of Coccia's main points is certainly not new, but remains something that needs to be repeated as loudly and as often as possible: human exceptionalism is scientifically untenable - it's a theological prejudice. Thus, any system of rank that places mankind above all other animals is one that needs scrapping. 
 
Further, we should also abandon the idea that animals are a superior form of life than plants - or even radically distinct. 
 
For example, I don't know if plants have consciousness as conventionally understood. But, as a Deleuzean, I can happily subscribe to the idea that there are forces working through them that constitute microbrains, enabling plants not only to process information and make decisions, but contemplate the world by contracting the elements from which they originate [b]
 
Anyway, let's now look at Coccia's book in more detail ...
 
 
II.
       
Plants - like a lot of other things - have mostly been overlooked in philosophy, "more out of contempt than out of neglect" [3]
 
So it's an encouraging development that there has lately been a bloom of interest in them by philosophers such as Coccia and Michael Marder, who reject the metaphysical snobbery that would keep plants "in the margins of the cognitive field" [3] and forever outside the gate. 
 
In other words, the return of the photosynthesising repressed is to be welcomed. I particularly like the fact that this represents a challenge to the chauvinism of the animal rights brigade and is one in the eye of holier-than-thou vegans, who never stop to question their own positing of animal life over plant life.   
For what is animalism if not merely "another form of  anthropocentrism and a kind of internalized Darwinism [which] extends human narcissim to the animal realm" [4] ...? 
 
Not that plants care - they just keep on doing their thing with sovereign indifference, living a form of life that is "in absolute continuity and total communion with the environment" [5]. To imagine that they are poor in world is laughable: 
 
"They participate in the world in its totality in everything they meet. [...] One cannot separate the plant - neither physically nor metaphysically - from the world that accommodates it. It is the most intense, radical, and paradigmatic form of being in the world." [5]
 
Ultimately, we need plants to live; but they don't need us: "They require nothing [...] but reality in its most basic components: rocks, water, air, light" [8], which they transform into life and into the world we inhabit. We call this god-like ability autotrophy - the capacity plants have "to transform the solar energy dispersed into the universe into a living body" [8].   
 
This is why it makes much more sense to worship a tree, than a deity made in our own image; we owe plants everything (something that the man next door, forever spraying weedkiller on his drive, should think about, as well as those who are wilfully destroying the world's rainforests). 
 
As Coccia writes, botany might be advised to "rediscover a Hesiodic register and describe all forms of life capable of photosynthesis as inhuman and material divinities [...] that do not need violence to found new worlds" [10]
 
 
III.   

For Max Bygraves, hands were crucial. 
 
But plants, as Coccia reminds us, don't have hands, they have leaves. But then plants don't need to brush away a tear or want to stop a bus, and the absence of hands "is not a sign of lack, but rather the consequence of a restless immersion in the very matter they ceaselessly model" [12] [c]

To think like this is, essentially, to revive the ancient Greek tradition of philosophy as a discourse not on ideas, but on nature [peri physeos]; i.e., philosophy staged as a confrontation with the objects of the natural world (something that plants do every moment of the day). 

People often like to say that nature is a cultural construct; but, actually, culture is a natural construct and, as readers of Nietzsche will recall, he always stressed that the former must be understood in terms of φύσις
 
For Nietzsche, culture possessed a spiritual quality, lacked by civilisation, which develops organically from within the conditions of existence and he affirms nature as a world of difference and constant becoming. As for man, the flower of culture: Der Mensch ist eine Mischung aus Pflanze und Geist ... [d]
 
Unfortunately, for centuries now - and certainly since the time of German Idealism - philosophy (with a few rare exceptions) stopped contemplating nature and left it up to other disciplines to speak of "the world of things and of nonhuman living beings" [18] [e].
 
Coccia, following Iain Hamilton Grant, calls this forced expulsion from philosophy of all traces of the natural world physiocide and suggests that it has had terrible consequences for philosophy, turning it into an "imaginary struggle against the projections of its own spirit" [19] and the ghosts of its past:
 
"Forced to study not the world, but the more or less arbitrary images that humans have produced in the past, it has become a form of skepticism - and an often moralized and reformist one at that." [19] 
 
Thus, Coccia's little book has a big goal: to rebuild philosophy as a form of cosmology via an exploration of vegetal life. In other words, he wishes to learn from the flowers, roots and - arguably the most important parts of the plant - the leaves ...  
 
 
IV.

As this passage makes clear, for Coccia leaves are key:
 
"The origin of our world does not reside in an event that is infinitely distant from us in time and space [...] It is here and now. The origin of the world is seasonal, rhythmic, deciduous like everything that exists. Being neither substance nor foundation, it is no more in the ground than in the sky, but rather halfway beween the two. Our origin is not in us - in interiore homine - but outside, in open air. It is not something stable or ancestral, a star of immeasurable size, a god, a titan. It is not unique. The origin of our world is in leaves [...]" [28]
 
But, on the other hand, Coccia also loves roots - "the most enigmatic forms of the plant world" [77] - which are hidden and invisible to most animals as they move across the surface of the earth. Interestingly, roots are relatively a recent development in the evolution of plant life, which seems not to need them "in order to define itself, exist, or at least survive" [78]
 
Indeed, for millions of years, plants lived perfectly happily without roots and their origin is obscure:
 
"The first fossil evidence dates back to 390 million years ago. As in all forms of life destined to last for millions of years, their origin is due to fortuitous invention and bricolage more than to methodical, conscious elaboration: the first kind of roots were functional modification of the trunk or horizontal rhizomes deprived of leaves." [78]
 
That is fascinating, I think, and it gives one a new interest in roots; particularly in their extremely variable morphology and physiology. 
 
I know Deleuze always hated roots - primarily because Plato and Aristotle thought of them as analogous to the human head (and hence reason) and this idea was to have "an extraordinary success in the philosophical and theological tradition from the Middle Ages and up to the modern period" [79] - but nous somme ne pas Deleuzean [f]
 
Thus, we are free to say that roots rock and are perhaps not as bad as we thought they were, although Coccia's suggestion that roots "make the soil and the subterranean world a space of spiritual communication", transforming the earth into "an enormous planetary brain" [81] is not something I would write and doesn't help matters.
 
Personally, I prefer it when Coccia reminds us that roots are ontologiclly nocturnal and "swarming under the surface of the soil, nauseating and naked like vermin", as Georges Bataille so memorably put it [g]. Flowers face heavenward; but roots have no superterrestrial dreams or hopes; they remain true to the earth:
 
"The root is not simply a base on which the superior body of the trunk is based, it is the simultaneous inversion of the push toward the upward direction and the sun that animates the plant: it incarnates 'the sense of the earth', a form of love for the soil that is intrinsic in any vegetal being." [85] [h]


V.
 
Finally, having discussed leaves and roots, we come to Coccia's theory of the flower, or, if you prefer, his erotics, which posits sex as "the supreme form of sensibility, that which allows us to conceive of the other at the very moment when the other modifies our way of being and obliges us [...] to become other" [100] - which is as boring a definition as you could wish for.
 
And the flower? A flower is a cosmic attractor - "an ephemeral, unstable body" - which allows the plant to "capture the world" [100]. And thanks to flowers, says Coccia, "plant life becomes the site of an explosion of colours and forms and of a conquest of the domain of appearances" [100]
 
Flowers are not only beyond good and evil, they are beyond any "expressive or identitarian logic: they do not have to express an individual truth, or define a nature, or communicate an essence" [100] - they just have to look pretty and smell nice.   
 
But the flower isn't, for Coccia, just sex on a stem: it is also reason; "the paradigmatic form of rationality" [110], echoing Lorenz Oken, a leading figure within Naturphilosophie in Germany in the early 19th-century who wrote: 
 
"If one wishes to compare the flower - beyond sexual relation - to an animal organ, one can only compare it with the most important nerve organ. The flower is the brain of plants [...] which remains on the plane of sex. One can say that what is sex in the plant is brain for the animal, or that the brain is the sex of the animal." [i]  
 
What does that mean? It means, says Coccia, that "anthropology has much more to learn from the structure of a flower than from the linguistic self-awareness of human subjects if it is to understand the nature of what is called rationality" [117]
 
And on that note, I think I'd like to close the post ... [j]  
 
 
Notes
 
[a] Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari, (Polity Press, 2019). All page references given in the post are to this edition of the text.
 
[b] Even Darwin speculated that plants might have tiny brains in their roots; see The Power of Movement in Plants (John Murray, 1880). 
      Michael Marder, meanwhile, is adamant that plants do, in fact, have consciousness - albeit in a radically different way to ourselves; see Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013). Readers may recall that I published a three-part discussion of this book on Torpedo the Ark in November 2019: click here for part one and then follow links at the end of the post for parts two and three.
      Readers interested in this topic might also like to see F. Baluška, S. Mancuso, D. Volkmann, and P. W. Barlow, 'The "Root-Brain" Hypothesis of Charles and Francis Darwin', in Plant Signaling and Behaviour, 12 (Dec 2009), 1121-27. Click here to read online. 
 
[c] This is not to downplay the importance of hands; see my post of 1 June 2019: click here.
 
[d] See Zarathustra's Prologue, 3, in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.    
 
[e] Of course, it was Socrates who first insisted that philosophy should disregard the physical universe and confine itself to a rational study of moral questions.   

[f] In other words, Deleze has a metaphysical objection to roots, which, as Coccia notes, are often still thought of in ordinary speech as "what is most fundamental and originary, what is most obstinately solid and stable, what is necessary" [80] - i.e., the plant organ par excellence. And yet, as Coccia goes on to point out, roots are actually the most ambiguous part of the plant. 

[g] Georges Bataille, 'The Language of Flowers', Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr., (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 13. 
      An interesting post written by Michael Marder on Bataille and his vegetal philosophy, can be found on The Philosopher's Plant (his blog for the LA Review of Books): click here
 
[h] Having said that, Coccia warns against blind fidelity to the earth if that means forgetting the sun: "Geocentrism is the delusion of false immanence: there is no autonomous Earth. The Earth is inseparable from the Sun." [91] 
      That's true, of course, but I'm not sure I understand what he means when he goes on to argue that to "the lunar and nocturnal realism of modern and postmodern philosophy, one should oppose a new form of heliocentrism, or rather an extremization of astrology" [92] - with the latter understood as a universal science. Coccia seems to think there's a correlation between us and the stars; that because we are of an astral nature (and the earth a celestial body), that we can influence the stars (just as they influence us). 
      Predictably, this way of thinking very quickly leads to a theological conclusion: "Everything [...] that occurs is a divine fact. God is no longer elsewhere, he coincides with the reality of forms and accidents." [94] 
      Ultimately, it's important to realise that whilst Coccia loves plants, he's not an ecologist, he's a sky-worshipper. That is to say, for Coccia it's not the soil or the sea that is the ultimate source of our existence, it's the sky, and what plants teach us is not to remain true above all else to the earth, but to make life "a perpetual devotion to the sky" [94], whilst, of course, remaining rooted in the earth. 
      He concludes: "The cosmos is not the inhabitable in itself - it is not an oikos [a home], it is an ouranos [a sky]: ecology is no more than the refusal of uranology." [96]   
 
[i] Lorenz Oken, Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie, 3rd edition, (Friedrich Schultheisse, 1843), p. 218. Quoted by Emanuele Coccia in The Life of Plants, p. 108. The quotation is trans. Dylan J. Montanari.
  
[j] Readers should note that The Life of Plants does have an epilogue, consisting of two short chapters; the first on speculative autotrophy and the second on philosophy as a kind of atmospheric condition, rather than a distinct discipline. To be honest, as interesting as his remarks are, I'm not sure why he felt the need to add them to this particular text (unless attempting to fend off criticism of his work from more traditional philosophers).  


18 Apr 2021

Reflections on Milo Moiré's PlopEgg Painting (With a Note on Heide Hatry's Expectations)

Milo Moiré: PlopEgg (2014)
Photo by Peter Palm
 
 
I. 
 
British art critic Jonathan Jones really doesn't like performance art and he wants the world - or at any rate his Guardian readership - to know it:  

"Performance art is a joke. Taken terribly seriously by the art world, it is a litmus test of pretension and intellectual dishonesty. If you are wowed by it, you are either susceptible to pseudo-intellectual guff, or lying." [1]

Obviously - and by his own admission - he's overstating things for polemic effect. But still it's clear that he's not a fan of contemporary performance art which, in his view, lacks power, fails to take any real risk, and reveals the extent to which today's practitioners are distanced from "real aesthetic values or real human life". 
 
Practitioners, for example, such as Swiss artist Milo Moiré, whom followers of Torpedo the Ark will recall I have discussed in earlier posts which can be found here and here
 
 
II. 
 
Performed at Art Cologne 2014, Moiré's PlopEgg, involved the expelling of paint filled eggs from her vagina on to a canvas, thus creating an instant abstract work of art. At the end of the performance, the canvas was folded, smoothed, and then unfolded to create a symmetrical image resembling one used in a Rorschach test.    
 
Dismissing Moiré as simply "the latest nude egg layer from Germany" [2], Jones denies that PlopEgg is an interesting feminist statement about female nudity, fertility and creativity; it is, rather, "absurd, gratuitous, trite and desperate"
 
The thing is, even if Jones is right, and Moiré's conceptual work uniting painting and performance is all these things and succeeds only in perfectly capturing "the cultural inanity of our time", what's wrong with that?            
 
And, actually, Jones is not right: PlopEgg resonates in many ways on many levels for many of us; we think, for example, not just of female genitalia as represented in the history of art and of relatively recent contributions to this tradition by Judy Chicago, Annie Sprinkle, Jamie McCartney, et al, but also of Bataille's astonishing novella L'histoire de l'œil (1928) and the famous scene in which Simone inserts a soft-boiled egg into her cunt (as she does later with a raw bull's testicle and, finally, a priest's eyeball). 
 
We think also of Leda, the Aetolian princess, who was raped by Zeus in the form of a swan; the union resulting in an egg plopping out of her vagina, from which the beautiful Helen was hatched. And we even recall with a smile the beautiful jade eggs that Gwyneth Paltrow encourages women to insert in order that they may gain a greater experience of ther own bodies and increase their feminine energy [click here].      
 
 
 
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Jonathan Jones, 'The artist who lays eggs with her vagina - or why performance art is so silly', The Guardian (22 April, 2014): click here to read the article in full online. All quotes that follow from Jones are taken from this piece.  
 
[2] Jones doesn't specify who else he is thinking of when he refers to these egg layers from Germany, but one possible candidate might be Heide Hatry and her ambiguous performance piece entitled Expectations (2006-08), in which she too squeezes an egg out of her vagina. 
      In one variation of the work, Hatry, dressed as a businesswoman and carrying a laptop, throws the egg directly at the lens of the camera which is filming her, almost as if she wants the viewer to look foolish or feel embarrassed by what they're waching (i.e. to know what it's like to have egg on their face). To discover more about this work, click here
 
  

14 Feb 2021

La Chronique Scandaleuse 2: The Case of Denise Poncher and Her Vision of Death

Denise Poncher before a Vision of Death
 Illumination from The Poncher Hours (c. 1500)
by the Master of the Chronique scandaleuse
(Tempera colours, ink and gold on parchment) [1]
 

I. 
 
As Bataille once said: Nothing is more scandalous than death ... 
 
So it's not so surprising that the anonymous artist known as le Maître de la Chronique scandaleuse should contribute a terrifying vision of death to an illuminated manuscript called The Poncher Hours that he collaborated on with several other artists in or around 1500. 
 
 
II. 
 
Born some date after 1487, Denise Poncher was a member of an elite French family; her father served as a treasurer for the crown and her uncle was the bishop of Paris. Like many young women of her class, she desired her own personalised prayer book (or book of hours); items which were very much in vogue during the late Middle Ages, particularly in the French capital which was famous throughout Europe for producing the most exquisite works.  
 
Probably commissioned as a wedding gift - there are numerous references to marriage and motherhood in the text - The Poncher Hours is written in French and Latin and contains some astonishing illuminations, beginning with a full-page vision of the Virgin enframed by a mandorla and flanked by St. Barbara and St. Catherine.   
 
But the most striking and, as I have said, most scandalous image, is the vision of death showing a fashionably dressed Mlle. Poncher kneeling, prayer book in hand, before a skeleton with bits of rotting flesh still hanging from the bones and - in full grim reaper mode - holding several scythes. 
 
Just to complete the nightmare scenario, three persons whom Death has already claimed lie on the ground nearby, "covered with bloody wounds and staring with wide, sightless eyes" [2].
 
Doubtless the picture was intended to serve as a stark reminder of human mortality and of the importance of saying one's prayers in order to ensure the soul's salvation. But, to a modern mind, it's of highly questionable taste and not the sort of thing a young woman on her wedding night should have to worry about. 
 
Unless that is, like Bataille, you happen to believe that death and sex are intimately entwined and that eroticism is a saying yes to life conceived as merely a very rare and unusal way of being dead ...
 
 
Notes 
 
[1] The Poncher Hours was acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2011: click here to visit the Getty website from which I gleaned much of the information used in the writing of this post.    

[2] Elizabeth Morrison, 'Marriage, Death, and the Power of Prayer: The Hours of Denise Poncher', in The Getty Research Journal, Vol. 6, (University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 143-50. Click here to access via JSTOR. Morrison is senior curator of manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum.   
 
To read part one of this post - on the case of Claude Le Petit - click here.  
 
This post is for the artist Heide Hatry; a woman with her own distinctive vision de la mort.   


13 Feb 2021

La Chronique Scandaleuse 1: The Case of Claude Le Petit

 
 
The French phrase chronique scandaleuse was one that captured my youthful imagination back in the Blind Cupid days and whilst plans for a little magazine with that title came to nothing, I did once incorporate it as a slogan into a hand-painted shirt design. 
 
I seem to recall that I picked up the phrase from Claude Le Petit; a debauched and free-thinking libertine poet and lawyer who, in 1661, published a satirical work entitled Le Bordel des Muses which included a collection of verse called La Chronique scandaleuse, ou Paris ridicule. The work not only maliciously mocked the rich and powerful, but blasphemed against the Virgin Mary whilst honouring a notorious sodomite (Jacques Chausson) for his strength of character. 
 
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this did not go down well: Le Petit was arrested, tried, and condemned to death for gravely insulting God and the French State. He was burned at the stake, in Paris, on the 1st of September 1662, aged 23, having first had the offending hand with which he wrote the text cut off by the public executioner. 
 
Although his work had been seized from the printers and destroyed, a copy survived and his writings were republished posthumously. It was a good while, however, before they became widely available; for as a result of this affair, all works regarded as being of an obscene, immoral, and politically subversive nature were suppressed in France until well into the 19th-century.  
 
It was said by those who sat in judgement upon him that his was a fine but wasted talent - and who knows, perhaps they were right. Though what else is there to do with talent - with life - but to waste it? As Bataille says: "Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us ..."*
 
Anyway, here's one of Le Petit's poems - Sonnet Foutatif - which anticipates not only Sade and Bataille, but Serge Gainsbourg ...
 
 
Foutre du cul, foutre du con, 
Foutre du Ciel et de la Terre, 
Foutre du diable et du tonnerre, 
Et du Louvre et de Montfaucon. 
 
Foutre du temple et du balcon, 
Foutre de la paix et de la guerre, 
Foutre du feu, foutre du verre, 
Et de l'eau et de l'Hélicon. 
 
Foutre des valets et des maistres, 
Foutre des moines et des prestres, 
Foutre du foutre et du fouteur.
 
Foutre de tout le monde ensemble, 
Foutre du livre et du lecteur, 
Foutre du sonnet, que t'en semble?
 
 
I'm not even going to try to translate the above. But readers who feel tempted to do so are welcome to give it a go ...  


* Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood, (City Lights, 1986), p. 170. 
 
To read the second entry in this short history of scandal - on Denise Poncher and her vision of Death - click here.