JG Ballard predicted the rise of the selfie

Upon the release of High-Rise in cinemas, Tom Hiddleston read out chunks of an interview with JG Ballard to highlight the man’s prescience. Here are the excerpts from Jon Savage’s interview with Ballard from 1978. Note Ballard more or less predicts the coming age of social media, digital news and selfies:

“I think the biggest developments over the next twenty, thirty years are going to be through the introduction of VHS systems, and I don’t just mean the cassette thing, playback gadgets – that in itself would be quite revolutionary – but when, say, every room in everybody’s house or flat has got a camera recording what’s going on – the transformation of the home into a TV studio is a creation of a new kind of reality. A reality that is electronic.” 

“… when you at last get a camera, you spend your time photographing children in a paddling pool. But after a while, you get more ambitious and you start taking an interest in the world at large. I think the same thing will happen, beginning with people endlessly photographing themselves, shaving, having dinner together having domestic rows. Of course, the bedroom applications are obvious. But I think they’ll go beyond that, to the point where each of us will be at the centre of a sort of non-stop serial, with all kinds of possibilities let in.” 

“I can see that coming. But I can see a sort of huge extension of video. Live material which will be accessible at the press of a button, so that as now you can dial a poem or a record of the weather, you’ll be able to dial a visual input of, say, all the newsreel material filmed yesterday in Los Angeles – I’m talking about somebody living in a London suburb.”

Brendan O'Neill Gets Genderfucked by Conchita Wurst

Back in May the outcome of the Eurovision song contest provoked predictably unreconstructed reactions from the usual quarters. It was to be expected, so sadly predictable are bigots. Still, for a long time it looked as though the Europeans had traded their tradition of slaughtering one another for a song contest. One such dismally unreconstructed and dim-witted response came from Brendan O'Neill in his blog at The Telegraph. In case you're not acquainted with the O'Neill schtick, Brendan edits sp!ked and claims to hold a Marxist libertarian perspective. About Ms Wurst's claim to womanhood, this soi-disant contrarian had this to say:

News reports tell us that Wurst prefers that people apply the female pronoun to him when he slips his dress on. Okay. But does that mean we all have to comply with this rather strange demand, no questions asked? Does objective reality – the fact that there are biological differences between men and women, and that the vast majority of humankind decides whether someone is a man or woman by those biological attributes – count for nothing in the face of one person's wish to be known as something he is not? By the same token, can I now request that people refer to me as black even though I'm white? Who are you to say I am not black? I might feel black.

Brendan O'Neill fell far short of his libertarian commitment to individual liberty this time. There was no thought for Mill's experiments of living or for the harm principle. The shibboleths of classical liberal thinking were completely absent in O'Neill's tiresome screed. Given that O'Neill claims to filter his libertarianism through Marx it would be easy to expect him to reach for the radical feminist critiques of transgenderism in this case. The paucity of O'Neill's imagination is on full show. He even commits the rookie mistake in conflating a biological distinction (sex) with that which is cultural and performative (gender). He wants to disregard the claims of the transgender movement at the cultural-performative level and assert his own claim to a 'objective reality' which they deny.

Note the use of 'objective' here should be reassessed. In bringing up racial identity O'Neill opens up another can of worms, but not an entirely irrelevant can. Race is objective, but not in the nineteenth century meaning of 'scientific' racial distinctions. Race exists as a social formation, and not just a historical construct, which we've yet to do away with, and insofar as it does it is objective. The same may well be said for gender roles which are not to be confused with differences of sex. O'Neill seems to want to insist on difference at a fundamental level, stand up for individual freedom, all the while reinforcing categories, and challenging those who do not conform. He falls short of his claim to be a coherent libertarian on these grounds.

The irony is that females and males are far more similar, biologically, than in terms of gender roles, which have long been defined by minorities. If O'Neill wants to defend the binary distinction between woman and man he undermines his own reactionary project. He should have little qualm with gender reassignment if he wants to defend a strict dichotomy. The rejection of the automatic sorting of males and females into clear-cut categories of men and women does not necessitate a rejection of gender roles in itself. This is at the level of liberal emancipation, the kind Karl Marx wrote about in his essay on Jewish emancipation. O'Neill would know this if he was as well-versed in early Marx as he pretends to be. He is explicit in focusing in on Conchita's beard and that it is the bending of gender conventions which really irks him.

It's ambiguity which threatens him. He is much too concerned by a possible break in social reproduction posed by men and women jumping from one gender role to another. Yet as an individualist O'Neill should be rejoicing. What could be more appealing to those guardians of untrammeled liberty than a social order determined by free individuals? It's not like a libertarian to see individuals as situated and shaped by existing social conditions. A more radical demand would be why we should accept such conditions in the first place. Of course, abolition is not on the agenda, but rather conservation. In this regard we can see Brendan O'Neill, not as a libertarian provocateur, but as a cultural conservative, in spite of his contrarian appeals.

After the spurious appeal to 'objectivity' we have the casual deployment of right-wing swearwords, 'relativism' being a long-standing favourite. He writes "The bending of gender speaks to today's speedily spreading cult of relativism. We live in such relativistic times, in an era so hostile to the idea that there are measurable truths or concrete realities, that it seems we can no longer even speak of 'men' and 'women'." This is the best he could come up with - half-witted blather at best! He doesn't take the time to justify his own censorious standpoint in the first place. He has no such sense of courtesy, but he does have a salaried platform.

First of all, one could not articulate a coherent position on identity without normative presuppositions (at the very least) as relativism can only function in descriptive terms. One relativism rises above the level of description it ceases to be relativism. If you condemn racism in favour of a society in which migrants can settle and maintain a cultural identity in conjunction with our own you are not a relativist. The same applies to Conchita and her request to be recognised as a woman and not "a beardy bloke in a dress" as O'Neill puts it. It presupposes a set of normative standards. It couldn't be the case that this abandons all sense of 'objective reality'. These are the terms set by O'Neill and should be thoroughly undone if we are to see his opponents as more than straw targets.

As for 'narcissism', you wouldn't expect a self-proclaimed libertarian to criticise someone for their sense of identity as if free-market individualists have ever sought to disregard selfhood. If a right-wing libertarian is to be consistent on the questions of self-ownership and sovereignty there is no reason an individual cannot choose another gender role. The best of the liberal tradition comes in the praise for experiments in living and takes heed not to trample the lives of others. Leaving people alone has its advantages. It is this basic impulse which is absent in O'Neill's writing. Except, of course, when it comes to the freedom of poor people to starve to death then O'Neill is a lover of liberty. The radical free-marketeers of this world don't stand for freedom, but misery and repression.

Censorship isn't the whole story.

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Hipster Awareness.

I have to be honest. I had no idea what a 'Hipster' was four or five years ago. I was soon alerted to their existence by the Dickhead song of 2010 and since then I have been pretty conscious of Hipsterdom, or at least what we think it is. Ever since I have seen them everywhere and everyone has a disdainful remark to make regarding them. It's worth looking into the history of subcultures to really situate the hipster. Adam Curtis churned out an interesting article on his blog in time for the Mayoral election of 2012. He focused on Norman Mailer, who had been an early proponent and self-described 'Hipster' in the 1950s and 60s. He deemed it a culture of outsiders first pioneered by Black Americans in response to racial oppression, they were the original outsiders, only to overtaken by 'white negroes' as the outsider culture was co-opted. Curtis refers us to this section of Mailer's writing:

"In such places as Greenwich Village a menage-a-trois was completed - the bohemian and the 'juvenile delinquent' came face to face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child was the language of Hip for its argot gave expression to abstract states of feeling which all could share, at least all who were Hip. And in the wedding of the white and the black it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry. 

So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro." 

This seems a far cry from the blokes in Shoreditch somehow. You might want to read Rob Horning's piece if you want something more up to scratch. One suspects the Hipster has come a long way since then, and yet Curtis goes on to tell us:

Mailer also pointed out that this new breed of "psychic outlaw" could be equally a candidate for the most reactionary or the most radical of political movements. And in the film there is a fascinating scene where Mailer takes on the trades unions on one of the avenues in New York. He tells them that in the past they were a heroic movement - but that now they have become a repressive, stultifying force in society - in particular in the way they are refusing to allow blacks and hispanics to move up society. It is an odd moment because as you watch you realise that it was elements of this rebellious individualism that both Thatcher and Reagan would later harness. And that possibly, if the left had got hold of it earlier, then the history of the West might have been very different.

Last year I found another video from Mike Rugnetta on YouTube about Hipsterdom. What provokes hatred against the Hipsters is that they don't disavow what every other subculture do, e.g. that their scene is made up of performance Hipsters wear things for irony whereas Punks and Goths and even wannabe gangsters claim a certain dress code, slang, music and mindset to be authentic to their scene. Actually sticking drawing pins through your flesh or leaving the sticker on your cap is about as 'authentic' as Hipsters are in buying over-sized glasses and growing funny beards. Rugnetta suggests it's a matter of cultural capital, and people feel the flippant appropriation of features of fashions undermines the value of the trend. But that still seems incoherent. The reasons to undertake a certain action are inseparable from it to some extent, but not substantial enough to change the content of the action and its significance. The reasons people smoke are not significant enough to change smoking and its consequences.

A Dirty Old Man.

The poet and self-described dirty old man Charles Bukowski died twenty years ago. He passed after a battle with leukaemia in which he finished his novel Pulp (1993). He gave up the ghost with a sigh of relief. He was the American equivalent of Céline. He lived his work. It was the end of the Beatniks and the Hippies when Bukowski burst onto the scene, having been crowned King of the Little Magazines, and churned an incredible bulk of poems and short stories from the 1940s onwards. It was a hard struggle, writing from the gutter, mainly for others who found themselves there too.

Other poets such as WH Auden had seen structure, order and stability (not to mention hard work!) as the vital components to the life of a writer, Charles Bukowski was the manifest opposite and revelled in it. The writing was meant to be as alive as you are, so it was meant to sweat and bleed and reek to high heaven. It's all on show. As Nietzsche put it "Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them." He had little time for formal questions, and regarded the matter with scorn, as a retreat for the writer, carving out a minimalist body of work instead. He hated rules and regulations and quickly found enemies and friends. The novels were a fictionalised autobiography centred around Henry Chinaski. It is a portrayal of life in the darkest corners of American society, at times absurdly comic, inexplicable, and it all comes with an authenticity in its gritty texture as each word has to carry its own weight.

A friend of mine told me she feels like having shower after reading Bukowski's prose. As readers we follow the travails of Chinaski through dirt cheap apartments, menial work, drunken brawls, gambling, sexual escapades, and eventually to Hollywood. He opened Post Office (1971) with a real hook "It began as a mistake." And with that he reels you in to read a tale of a dozen years as a postie. He had written the book in about a month, after John Martin came to him and made an unconditional pledge. Martin promised to give Bukowski 25% of his earnings for life - it amounted to $100 at the time - every month if he quits and writes full time. Whether or not they succeeded the money would be there. It was this guarantee of a minimal income that gave him the motivation to leave the post office and start work on a novel. It was also what John Martin needed to build up Black Sparrow Books.

It was in the late 60s that Bukowski became a part of the countervailing forces of American culture and society. He had a column in the LA Free Press and Open City - with a column called 'Notes of a Dirty Old Man'. The Beat Generation was on the wane and Lawrence Ferlinghetti was on the lookout for the next big thing when he came across Bukowski. It should not surprise anyone that he was not too impressed with the Hippies. After all, this is the same poet who loathed Walt Disney for creating Mickey Mouse. He shared this disdain for the Hippie with Jack Kerouac, Much like Kerouac the dirty old man would be hoovered up by the prevailing spirit of Western life. It's almost as if there was no escaping it. The Hudson driven by Jack Kerouac in On the Road (1957) now sits in a museum with the same dust on it. There is Jack Kerouac Alley, just as there is Bukowski Court.

In Factotum (1975) Bukowski rails further against the Protestant work ethic and instead preached the refusal to work: "How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?" He was an individualist who hated rules, but he offered a counter-individualism to the pretences of the 'American dream' and its false promise of paradise by hard labour. He spat on its sunny optimism and expressed antipathy towards society at large. Solitude was the alternative. It was a conservative solution in that it had no care for the problems of society, or of people more generally. The solitary alternative was a kind of isolationism, an active policy of non-intervention with the world and its social ills.

It wasn't just a literary trope as we find if we examine his life. In the days when his father called him Heinrich, the young Bukowski studied at LA City College in the late 1930s just on the onset of the War. Once it had started he had moved to New York City and would explore the East Coast. He worked whatever menial jobs he could - even irking a living in a pickle factory - and filled his spare time with typing and drinking. He was first published at the age of 24 and that same year he was arrested by the FBI on suspicion of draft evasion. Bukowski was held for seventeen days in Moyamensing Prison before going on to fail a mandatory psychological exam. He had escaped conscription. Given the militaristic culture of the US there has been some discussion on whether Bukowski harboured pro-Nazi sympathies in those days. It seems more plausible that the young Bukowski simply evaded the draft because he didn't see any worthwhile effectuality in military service. It doesn't take a Nazi to believe that.

Besides, the most laden prejudice in Bukowski's work is not anti-Semitism by any match. It is misogyny, not racism. If Bukowski had been a fascist it would have been obvious. He had a lot to hide, but he chose not to. He was certainly a male chauvinist. In Post Office Bukowski puts it bluntly "Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love." Misogyny is certainly a major part of Bukowski's writing. The same year that the book came out Bukowski wrote in a letter to a friend "Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell." We got a glimpse into this 'living hell' in The Charles Bukowski Tapes (1985) in which we can witness him verbally abusing and kicking his wife Linda off of their sofa.

We shouldn't turn a blind eye to Bukowski's misogyny even if we do take pleasure in the unexpected exuberance in his melancholic free-verse. It's charged with a life-affirming spark. Unlike the domesticated version of individuality Hank Chinaski finds more life in the bars than in the sweat and toil of the factory. This was at a time when the US was a major industrial and manufacturing hub, yet it was on its way to deindustrialisation. It's not clear where this man would fit in today. It was a different America where Chinaski roamed free. It's plausible he would have much more company in a post-industrial capitalist society. He writes "The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me." Elsewhere the dirty realist invites us to "go all the way" even at great cost to ourselves.

This Card Will Rob You.

Bourgeois individualism is everywhere in its contaminating influence. Its stench in the rotten verbal foliage presented as public discourse. Nevertheless, vast swathes of well-meaning consumers will flood into shopping centres across the land to purchase commodities to stand-in for substantial gestures of selfless affection. This is prompted by Valentine's Day. It can also be prompted by Christmas and other festivities. It is unavoidable in today's world. There is little hope of escaping the rat race of the market in a society built around that rather pernicious little invention.

Out of the cards we may choose to buy the 'Thank You' card is by far the lowest of the low. The 'Thank You' card deprives us of our capacity for altruism and allow us to act as selfishly as possible, freeing us from writing letters of gratitude. It is about negative equality, the falsely level playing field where each participant must not lose anything without their consent and, if so deserving, must be compensated for any selfless action. No one should get something for nothing, likewise no one should give something for nothing. It is what lies behind the slow-motion destruction of the Welfare State: each of us must fend for ourselves in the marketplace, free to fail if we cannot succeed. The presumption that the efforts we exercise will produce reward for ourselves converges with the means to skip such efforts to the reward.

Instantaneous gratification is the promise of the marketplace - so long as you can afford the price! The ensnarement of individuals with the preoccupation with the insignificant things of life carries with itself hefty doses of ideology. In other words, the atomisation of life under neoliberal conditions is not just bodily, it is engendered by the performances we engage in with one another. We live and breathe and enact the precepts of a market society even in our most intimate relations it would seem. The exchange of cards, one card for the occasion, and a compensatory 'Thank You' card, really regulates a basic relation between people. Instead of a phone call, or a letter, or email if you like, expressing gratitude - or none, if needs be - we pay for a piece of card which does it for us. The advantage of this is that it allows you to avoid the awkwardness of feigning gratitude where none is due. Yet new limitations follow every advance made.

'This book is dedicated to mankind.'

There are some novelists who can’t be avoided in the charged instability of their prose. We find this in the literature of extremes, and one such recent case is Michel Houellebecq. In Atomised (1998) Houellebecq portrays a vision of late capitalist society as in the thrall of its own decay. The chaos of the market society and its depredations has blown away the traditional order of morality. Sexual liberalism has prevailed to the extent that the very act has become a commodity in a marketplace, but this has left winners and losers. Elsewhere Houellebecq calls for a ‘sexual communism’ and a ‘sexual social democracy’ where the unattractive are not excluded from the exchange centres of pleasure. The cultural revolution of the late 20^th Century did not leave us all unscathed to enter into a new sexual utopia. Even though Houellebecq seems to accept a conservative thesis on culture he is pessimistic at the possibility of any kind of deliverance from this process. The collapse of the old order is irreversible. It may be better to take what pleasure can be procured from its final twitches than to try and turn the clock back as Evelyn Waugh had wanted so dearly. It may be that the analysis has been prompted by the conditions demanding a response of some kind. No wonder then it has been said that Houellebecq uses the language of the Left to launch a right-wing attack on the soixante-huitards, the Hippies and New Age spirituality.

In his nihilism Houellebecq identifies more so with the decay of culture which he seems to disdain. Even as he identifies the descent into hedonism Houellebecq does not call for a return to the conventions of monogamy. He seems to prefer the idea of turning the sexual marketplace into a more democratic mechanism which everyone can enjoy. The pages of Atomised (1998) are littered with philosophical conundrums, scientific theory and the historical pre-conditions for modern society. He focuses a great deal on the emergence of sexual freedom in the 1960s, its origins in the Hippie scene and the spread of the Commune movement around Europe and America. His protagonists Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Clément endure the explosion of new possibilities before even reaching pubescence: abandoned by their Hippie mother, only to drift through the years reared by their grandmothers and then through numerous encounters and non-encounters with members of the opposite sex. It is a deeply tragic tale, but not one without any hint of sentimentality. In the same way that Houellebecq gives the middle finger to a whole host of liberal assumptions and beliefs he cannot get away from this plain of thought. It could’ve been an even more despairing work in some respects.

The love story between Michel and Annabelle stands as evidence of Houellebecq’s sentimentality in that he couldn’t just have them never come together in the first place. Some of the saddest pages tell of Michel and Annabelle growing up, failing to get together as teenagers and ultimately depart on the cusp of adulthood in the middle 70s. Funnily enough, Michel lost Annabelle (not that he had had her yet) to a wannabe rock-star in a communal setting and partly with the help of Bruno. Take from that what you will. Many years later, Michel bumps into Annabelle by chance and falls limply into a relationship with her. She too had been failed by the world in which she was born to. Throughout the relationship Michel remains indifferent even to her affections, only taking enjoyment in their embraces in the most intellectualised way. Even still, this was as close as it came to the two of them making a ‘go of it’ as they should have as twenty-somethings. In a fit of desperation Annabelle had bluntly asked him to procreate with her – for fear that he was going to Ireland to leave her for his research project – and characteristically the good scientist agreed with a murmur. During the sexual act Michel remains distant and envisions a cell splitting, before describing the brink of orgasm as ‘a little suicide’. Afterwards Annabelle finds not only can she not have the child but she has uterine cancer and has to have a hysterectomy. Not too many pages later Annabelle commits suicide and Michel moves on with his research in Ireland only to disappear himself. We might say Houellebecq takes love deadly seriously, just not the prospects of finding and holding onto it in a world like this one.

It was quite something to flick from page to page, but it is revealing of the French poet who is a recovering Stalinist and former agronomist. Houellebecq could have opted for another version where Michel and Annabelle briefly meet again, only for them to never follow each other up. That would have led to the same conclusion, especially as it would still be twinned with Bruno’s doomed love affair with Christiane. Bruno goes mad after Christiane is left paralysed and chooses suicide as he had stopped seeing her. That was a much less sentimental series of events. And yet Houellebecq can’t resist the temptation of Michel and Annabelle coming together; it reminds one of the most overused lines of Tennyson “‘Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all.” Bruno represents the failed attempts at hedonism divorced from the utopianism of the '68 Generation; whereas Michel languishes in an anhedonic and rationalist distance from human relations to prioritise the life of the mind. The dichotomy is set between the unsated and the undesiring to lead us from the 1960s to the 90s. Like the society in which we live the brothers are forever shaped by the events of the 60s. Both of the siblings are heirs to unfettered freedoms. The hedonist Bruno is ensnared in a culture which he cannot extricate himself from and he wouldn’t want to if he could just get laid more. On the other hand, Michel would probably have liked to have been left alone to his scientific inquiry – which was impossible given the obligatory nature of the relations so alien to him – we shouldn’t be surprised that he may have jumped at the opportunity to finally exit this world. By the end of the book there was nothing binding him to this life, he had completed his project and heralded a biogenetic revolution to outmatch the legacy of sexual liberation in expunging its pre-conditions.

It was that legacy which Bruno found himself so entangled with. Never sated by the amount of pornography, prostitutes, masturbation, sex shows, girlfriends and orgies he could ever muster the energy to find. It brings to mind Freud’s point that satisfaction is distinctly unsatisfactory. We can’t just do it, and nor can Bruno, but not want of trying; Houellebecq seems to retain the hope in the market of sexual exchange if only it can be transformed into a more democratic space. Only then will the bulbous and desperate Bruno, with all of his emotional baggage, find a scintilla of contentment. The affair with Christiane may have been a glimpse of such a life, where Clément finds a partner willing to take the lead and indulge in his insatiable appetites in courting nude beaches in search of swingers. Retrospectively we have the incident with Adjila, an Arab student, whom Bruno finds irresistible – to the point of exposing himself to her in a lesson and subsequently being sectioned. The girl standing as the nexus between the man’s sexual voracity, his misogyny and his racial ressentiment; in later interviews Houellebecq (partly defending himself against accusations of racism) draws a distinction between Arabs and Muslims insofar as the former can be assimilated. The author is right to locate in Bruno unending lust in conjunction with an immense dissatisfaction, which lends itself to sexual jealousy and racism ultimately. The obsession with Adjila is not to be disassociated from Bruno’s loathing of a black male student in his class and interprets his behaviour as rivalling him in the capacity to regress to ‘our animal selves’. He even goes as far as penning and trying to publish a racist pamphlet and contemplates joining the Front National.

In the end Bruno gives up on the written word (unlike Houellebecq) and finds some brief fulfilment with Christiane before losing his mind. It is apt that Michel Djerzinski not only diagnoses the condition but provides a cure, not for Bruno but for the human species. The biogenetic revolution amounts to the transcendence of the human species with a new race of clones (who are free of this unceasing desire). It means the end for mankind, but the book stands as an ode to humanity written in the mid 21^st Century partly looking at Djerzinski’s follower and successor Hubczejak. It is wonderfully satirical in this sense, in that the book charts the decline of Western civilisation only to cheer it on, and even welcome the end; then present the record of cultural decay as the only homage humanity deserves. It’s in this darkly amusing way that Houellebecq intends the words “This book is dedicated to mankind.” It is an appropriate frame for the events of the sad lives of Bruno and Michel, as well as the pages on scientific theory, social and cultural issues. It may be backward-looking in some respects, as well as outright reactionary in other moments and even be an extension of Houellebecq’s bitterness over the women in his life. I would contest the claim that Houellebecq should be dismissed for these reasons. As the man himself remarked in a BBC interview “Perhaps the mistake is to think of me in actual fact…” We may do better to bear in mind that we may not be able to prefigure the long-term legacy of a writer like Houellebecq. Somewhere in Atomised Houellbecq writes “Death is a great leveller.”

On Suicide.

 

As far as I can see, it is only the monotheistic, that is to say Jewish, religions whose members regard self-destruction as a crime. This is all the more striking in that neither in the Old nor in the New Testament is there to be found any prohibition or even definite disapproval of it; so that religious teachers have to base their proscription of suicide on philosophical grounds of arguments lack in strength they have to try to make up for by the strength of the terms in which they express their abhorrence; that is to say, they resort to abuse. Thus we hear that suicide is the most cowardly of acts, that only a madman would commit it, and similar insipidities; or the senseless assertion that suicide is ‘wrong’, though it is obvious there is nothing in the world a man has a more incontestable right to than his own life and person. Let us for once allow moral feelings to decide this question, and compare the impression made on us by the news that an acquaintance of ours has committed a crime, for instance a murder, an act of cruelty, a betrayal, a theft, with that produced by the news that he has voluntarily ended his life. While the former will evoke a lively indignation, anger, the demand for punishment or revenge, the latter will excite pity and sorrow, which are more likely to be accompanied by admiration for his courage than by moral disapproval. Who has not had acquaintances, friends, relatives who have departed this world voluntarily? – and is one supposed to think of them with repugnance, as if they were criminals? In my opinion it ought rather to be demanded of the clergy that they tell us by what authority they go to their pulpits or their desks and brand as a crime an action which many people we honour and love have performed and deny an honourable burial to those who have departed this world voluntarily – since they cannot point to a single biblical authority, nor produce a single sound philosophical argument; it being made clear that what one wants are reasons and not empty phrases or abuse. If the criminal law proscribes suicide this is no valid reason for the Church to do so, and is moreover a decidedly ludicrous proceeding, for what punishment can deter him who is looking for death? If one punishes attempted suicide, it is the ineptitude of the attempt one punishes.

The only cogent moral argument against suicide is that it is opposed to the achievement of the highest moral goal, inasmuch as it substitutes for a true redemption from this world of misery a merely apparent one. But it is very long way from a mistake of this kind to a crime, which is what the Christian clergy want to call it.

Christianity carries in its innermost heart the truth that suffering (the Cross) is the true aim of life: that is why it repudiates suicide, which is opposed to this aim, while antiquity from a lower viewpoint approval of and indeed honoured it. This argument against suicide is however an ascetic one, and is therefore valid only from a far higher ethical standpoint than any which European moral philosophers have ever assumed. If we descend from this very high standpoint there no longer remains any tenable moral reason for damning suicide. It therefore seems that the extraordinary zeal in opposing it displayed by the clergy of monotheistic religions – a zeal which is not supported by the Bible or by any cogent reasons – must have some hidden reason behind it: may this not be that the voluntary surrender of life is an ill compliment to him who said that all things were very good? If so, it is another instance of the obligatory optimism of these religions, which denounces self-destruction so as not to be denounced by it.

But the terrors of death offer considerable resistance: they stand like a sentinel at the exit gate. Perhaps there is no one alive who would not already have put an end to his life if this end were something purely negative, a sudden cessation of existence. But there is something positive in it as well: the destruction of the body. This is a deterrent, because the body is the phenomenal form of the will to live.

The struggle with that sentinel is as a rule, however, not as hard as it may seem to us form a distance: the reason is the antagonism between spiritual and physical suffering. For when we are in great or chronic physical pain we are indifferent to all other troubles: all we are concerned about is recovering. In the same way, great spiritual suffering makes us insensible to physical pain: we despite it: indeed, if it should come to outweigh the other it becomes a beneficial distraction, an interval in spiritual suffering. It is this which makes suicide easier: for the physical pain associated with it loses all significance in the eyes of one afflicted by excessive spiritual suffering.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The Cult of Free-Choice.

Liberals have a lot of sacred cows worth taking to the abattoir. The fetish of free choice, the cult of progress and its place at the shrine to individualism. Fortunately not all of this has to be served for dinner after the slaughter. The battle for secularisation is the last mission of liberalism. This has taken the form of going after everything from 'In God we trust' on the dollar bill and the availability of funds for Christmas trees to Muslim headscarves and veils. The liberal values of secular pluralism, progress and freedom are often the lynchpin for these campaigns. Similarly the advent of political correctness and the collapse of competing political systems to liberal democracy (don't mention the c-word!) has led the old forces of reaction to try and undermine the few protections for minorities on the grounds of 'sameness'. There is only the liberal framework of rights and liberties, anything beyond that is illiberal. No one is special and no difference can be acknowledged.

Infamously the French have banned the Islamic veil, known as a 'burqa' though it's actually a niqab, out of the secular principles of republicanism. Out of the French Muslim population (estimated at 5 million people) only 2,000 women wear the veil. The opposition to the veil is supposedly derived from a concern for women's rights and the secular values of French society. Even though it could be argued that the bill is unconstitutional. There is no such legislation on the veils worn by nuns, but that could be because the majority of the masses are Catholic. It's not necessary for France to have a Christian state precisely because it is predominantly Catholic. This is the sales pitch of secularists in the Middle East incidentally. Thankfully the use of legislation against a religious minority to soak up the racist vote couldn't save the Rat Man from electoral oblivion. Yet the West remains enthusiastic with chatter of criminalising Muslim life.


The Swiss have banned any further construction of minarets. It would seem that the notion of secularism as conceived by St Augustine has been lost. There is no room at all for religious influence or institutions in a secular society under the new conception. It has gone further now to ban male circumcision in Cologne and there are now calls to impose the ban over the rest of Germany. The case was not made along the lines of secularism this time. Instead it was the rights of the child, who could not give their consent to be circumcised. These are not calls from brownshirts, but from the liberal guardians of the Enlightenment legacy. This particular ban has brought greater controversy (and rightly so) because it strikes at a fundamental tradition of Jews. Once the secular line to ban minarets and veils runs dry then the accusation of child abuse can be hurled at Muslims. Not content with limiting the choices open in society the Right can stress free choice opens a new front of persecution.


The target is not Judaism, but Islam. It is a slant against Jews too because it would be too crude to stipulate that Muslims be barred from practicing their religion. Giles Fraser has written a defence of circumcision in relation to Jewish identity. It was the Holocaust survivor and philosopher Emil Fackenheim who added the 614th commandment: thou must not grant Hitler posthumous victories. This mitzvah insists that the abandonment of one's Jewish identity was to do Hitler's work for him. Fraser adds "Jews are commanded to survive as Jews by the martyrs of the Holocaust." It's not really about the harm principle, the liberal framework only has room for an individual and not for an identity that reaches beyond its confines. The condition of consent functions to break apart a community into individuals who each must choose from a set of lifestyle options. The liberal society doesn't really know how to deal with categories beyond atomised individuals.

Similarly, there are calls from reactionaries to ban halal and kosher meat because it's cruel to animals. This agenda has led to French proto-fascists have been setting up soup kitchens that only sell pork-based slop to drive away homeless Muslims. As Mehdi Hasan has pointed out that 80-90% of halal meat sold in Britain comes from animals that were stunned before being slaughtered. So much for the claim that it's really about the harm inflicted on the animals. The gutter press continues to pursue this campaign against the savagery with which Muslim (and Jewish) customs are practiced. Of course, there isn't a word about animal rights in other spheres. The media loves to stir up moral panics about the "foreign" menace eating away at our society. Now they're looking to get people worried about the meat in their fridge. Throw out the cruelty argument and you're left with the free choice argument. The real point is that halal meat should be labeled so that an informed choice can be made.

In his polemic against liberal individualism Giles Fraser writes "Informed consent lies at the heart of choice and choice lies at the heart of the liberal society. Without informed consent, circumcision is regarded as a form of violence and a violation of the fundamental rights of the child. Which is why I regard the liberal mindset as a diminished form of the moral imagination. There is more to right and wrong than mere choice." The idea of a cohesive community which is more than an arrangement of self-interest and bound by more than consent has no place in the liberal society. Fraser is correct in his assertion that the religious threatens liberalism because it suggests that it's not all about the individual. Any doctrine which makes such a suggestion could be a totalitarian in the liberal mind. And the moralists are just prudes clinging on in the permissive society, a clogged pipe to flushed clear.

Culturale Hedonia!

Take your Desires for Reality.

In the mid 1960s Herbert Marcuse had reached a conclusion about capitalist society which went against the position he took in Eros and Civilization. He had reached back to utopian socialism for an alternative to the models of bourgeois capitalism and Soviet communism. In the work of Charles Fourier he had hoped to find a way of unlocking the instincts of human beings as part of the transition to a post-capitalist society. It was Fourier's view that capitalism compounds sexual repression in society with exploitation, driving down wages generating poverty. It's a fine system for the few, but it's disastrous for the many. The repression of sexuality is what led to perversions, if the passions were unleashed then we would be able to create a harmonious society. Fourier wanted to build a utopia with love and sex as the primary mechanisms of this new order. This is the origin of the leftist penchant for sexual liberation and the opposition to repressive norms.


Of course, there are various different variations on this cause. Fourier dreamed of a utopian society based on a primary unit, a communal block known as a phalanx in which as many as 1,800 people could live together. It would be a community built on solidarity without any of the repressive taboos of capitalist society. There would be complete sexual freedom and people would be able to change partners frequently. Radical stuff in the 18th Century. The family would be done away with as the phalanx would take its place as the centre of loyalty and affection. Fourier thought that entire countries could be organised in this way with these set up as councils where all participate in decisions. The phalanxes would form chains of councils across nations and coordinate through cooperation grand civil projects with volunteer armies. This was the material base of a vision that came with a metaphysical superstructure, a new religious order where priests advised congregants on sex.

At the heart of this utopian vision was the idea of Love, in which sex is just one aspect, the priests who would manage the dynamics of Love would 'cure' you of your unhappiness in the midst of rejection. We can see how this vision may have tapped into the hedonistic utopianism of the 1960s. All the different impulses of human beings require a diversity of roles suited to the variety of human nature, even potential murderers will be welcome and be put to work as butchers to work-off their own homicidal urges. Of course, Charles Fourier was written-off as a lunatic in his day. He conceived of a theory of history comprised of 32 stages, each ordained by God, beginning in savagery before passing through civilisation to socialism and Harmony. The advent of Harmony would herald an age of 70,000 years which would end in savagery as humanity approached the end of times. Civilisation could be shortened to bring on socialism much earlier and Harmony could then be extended in its duration.

Live without Dead Time.

As you might expect Fourier was an opponent of the authoritarianism and moral righteousness he detected in the Jacobins. He had little faith in governments and preferred a grass-roots oriented approach to socialism. Change was to be achieved from the ground-up and not from the top-down. After first entertaining the tenets of utopian socialism Marcuse had become pessimistic by 1964 when he wrote One-Dimensional Man. As part of his thesis Marcuse rethought the revolutionary project of socialism. The proletariat could not be relied upon to overthrow capitalism in Marcuse's view. The tensions were mounting to the point that the black under-class would be a better revolutionary agent. The capitalist system had no real focus on the manipulation of their desires at the time. The same goes for the exploited workers of the Third World. Then there are the student radicals of the West who have the power to see beyond false consciousness. We can see how both works related to the 1960s zeitgeist.

In the authentic socialist society women and men could live without fear and without being compelled to spend their lives in alienated performances. Marcuse thought that this element had been lost in the 20th Century with the advent of the Soviet Union. The Soviet project of socialism in one country necessitated Stalinism due to the material conditions of Russian society. The New Left sought to carve out a new project to do away with the old conventions that bound women to men as well as crushed gays and ethnic minorities. To some extent this was the beginning of identity politics and the post-materialist Left. But the line was drawn from the imperial adventure in Vietnam to economic exploitation at home in America. The early 1970s were an optimistic time for the American Left and there were a lot of radical ideas around. The commune movement sprung up as part of a utopian attempt to build an alternative model for society devoid of hierarchy, authority and power. It was a retreat in part from what the participants saw as the failure of the student movement.

The communal ideal was of nature, which they saw as a self-stabilising eco-system. It continues to serve as an effective means of organisation on the Left, but it fails to provide a positive vision. It was one of the biggest migrations in American history with over 500,000 participants. There were no alliances and no politics inside the communes, but there were sessions in which the communards would express themselves. This was meant to be the source of stability in the community, a sort of feedback system for the organism of many who act as one. In a set up without any factions allowed soon the strong bullied the weak. All of the communes failed, most lasting less than 3 years. Power could not be abolished and the self-organised system removed any obstacles to the domineering personalities of a few. So new hierarchies sprung up out of the egalitarian model, patriarchical power returned without any leashes at all. This is where Feminism emerged as a reaction to the catastrophic failures of the commune movement.

Enjoy without Chains.

The communal model spread to Europe, where the same failures were even more realised. The avant garde artist Otto Mühl set up the Friedrichshof commune as a kind of anti-society. The central aspect of this is a war against monogamy, he sought to replace fidelity with promiscuity in the extreme. This is where the tendencies towards sexual liberation going back as far as Fourier seemed to converge with the commune movement. The communards were forbidden to have sex with the same partner more than once a week and yet each were obligated to have sex five times a day. Fourier had developed a card-indexing system that would have facilitated casual sex for his communards - it would've been handy in Vienna! The commune outlasted its American precursors as it lingered for nearly 20 years when Mühl was thrown in jail for sex offences against children. A hierarchy had sprung up where the most attractive extricated themselves from the ugly herd, while Mühl laid claim to the virginity of the young members.

The commune had descended into the abusive exercise of power through desire. It was an extreme failure that came out of the one of the leftist modes of a politicization of sex as identified in Nina Power's book - it mistakenly took sex to be innately emancipatory and egalitarian. Desire isn't fair at all, inequality, hierarchy and anxiety are more normal than not. Certainly not all members of the commune were desirable and desire became literally tyrannical. There were other attempts at a sexual critique of bourgeois morality among the radicals. The Weather Underground had sessions where members were required to have sex with comrades they were not attracted to. Boyfriends were expected to watch other men sleep with their girlfriends. There was to be no more romance, only a destitution of the subjective and the sexual. This was the darker side of sexual liberation, the underbelly of the counter-cultural revolution of '68 which has been victorious in the destruction of stuffy conventions and rigid traditions.

As Badiou points out, one of the ways that a revolutionary movement can fail is to be defeated in its own victory in that it only takes over the old mantle of the enemy it vanquished. The utopian hedonism of the 1960s did fail in its youthful triumph over the old, it now constitutes the prevailing culture and there is barely anything left to rail against. The irony is that after this great liberation we find any lack of desire impermissible and intolerable. And yet we may live in a time of greater impotence and frigidity than we like to admit. The real problem seems to be love rather than lust. We can screw around as much as we want but the real difficulty is in long-lasting relationships. This is really what is behind the emergence of dating sites. The conservatives have no answer here, but to reinstate the old superstructure and hope that we enjoy cheating on the partners we pretend to love. There doesn't seem to be a clear answer here. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that the Japanese invention of love colleges will catch on in the West.

Condemned to Freedom.

No Excuses.

As we will see the Sartrean conception of freedom is quite distinct, even from the rest of the existentialist line of thinkers, from its psychological starting-point to its moral outgrowth. The starting-point Sartre takes with consciousness marks him out from his precursors, Nietzsche saw consciousness as quite overrated.¹ There is an interesting convergence between the particular route Sartre would eventually take on moral questions and the critique of traditional morality Nietzsche had put forth in the late 19^th Century. Not to mention the highly different ideas of selfhood which emerge from Sartre's framework and from Nietzsche's thought-processes. To both the authentic self is something that has to be created through a rejection of the inauthentic, which may be constituted as a set of social norms or moral values.² We will explore Sartre's view of human freedom with critical reference to Nietzsche where the conception seems to fall short of its aims.

The notion of consciousness as freedom is the vital element of Sartre’s existential phenomenology.³ It fits in with his general project that places freedom as the central dimension of human existence. This is where the existential themes of responsibility, commitment and notions such as bad faith and authenticity fit into the picture as well. The modes whereby we may relate our being to Being can be authentic and inauthentic. For Heidegger there was more truth in authenticity as it was a self-directed rather than a moral ideal. This is where freedom enters with the existentialist focus on the actions we undertake and, by extension, the way we choose to undertake them. Sartre went as far as to claim that the actions which we undertake can have consequences that we did not foresee and which we are responsible for insofar as we are solely responsible for own actions. The motivations we may hold are irrelevant insofar as they may provide ‘excuses’ which allow us to avoid our own responsibility. This is the reason that we fear and often shirk from the acceptance of our condition as radically free.⁴

When we look at Sartre’s conception of freedom we have to keep in mind that his body of work was a reaction to Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology. As part of Sartre’s reaction to Heidegger he reverts to some extent back to Husserl – in that the focus of phenomenology should be consciousness – and brings with him modified vestments of Cartesianism which Heidegger wanted to ‘throw out’. This conception of freedom is predicated on consciousness as nothingness because freedom is consciousness it is detached from the causal forces of the external world. At the same time, there is literally nothing which traps the self ‘inside’ consciousness because there is nothing there.⁵ Nietzsche had noted that this particular kind of selfhood is detached from the world of causes and that it meshes well with the purposes of morality for this reason. Sartre may not have disagreed, his notion of consciousness precluded it being determined.

The Ethics of Ambiguity.

It may even be that this version of selfhood was put forward to generate a particular kind of moral conduct. It certainly led Sartre in a particular direction. In an attempt to craft an evaluative moral code Sartre reached out to Kantianism with which he was very familiar. The aim was to get away from the instability inherent in the radical subjectivism that seemed to be built into existentialism. Even as Heidegger preferred authentic modes of being over inauthentic modes. It's all too clear that authentic behaviour can have consequences of the moral and immoral kind. The amorality of authenticity in Heidegger’s work meant that there was nothing about it which ruled out Heidegger dabbling in the politics of the Third Reich at a moral level. This was something that had to be rectified for the philosophers who emerged on the other side of WW2. Especially for the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who had been embedded in the French resistance.

Sartrean thought seems far removed from Kant at the outset. It may testify to the need for a kind of moral realism, even as Sartre rejected Christianity and traditional modes of morality he found that he had to go back to Kant in the end. It was the categorical imperative which interested Sartre, it stipulated that there are objective demands on us. It is an impersonal moral duty which takes two forms and we have access to it through reason. Firstly, that we should "act only on a maxim or rule that you can will to be a universal law". And secondly that, we should "treat others as an end in themselves, as opposed to a means to an end".⁶ The imperative is relentless in its universalism, cutting through all wants, desires and circumstances. This may seem completely at odds with Sartre's framework. But the emphasis in his conception of freedom on responsibility is compatible with Kant's insistence on universality.

To put it simply, when we act as individuals we act as we would expect others to act and this is the key to morality for Sartre.⁷ This is consistent with the Sartrean notion of freedom insofar as it can be seen as an extension of the claim that we are responsible for the extent that we act in accordance with our evaluative capacities. It could be seen as built on Sartre's idea of radical choice, which comes out of Nietzschean influences on his thinking. It was Nietzsche who put forward the suggestion that we create values. There aren't actually any out there for us to latch onto as the myths which supported our values are destroyed in nihilism. The only way out is to put man where God once was.⁸ For Sartre we have to choose rather than create our values and this begins with a radical choice, the act which opens up a new space of moral conduct. But it seems that the universality Sartre wants to go for would have the effect of instituting conformity at a self-directed level.⁹ This would seem to be too tight a constraint on Sartre's radical notion of freedom. Then again it has always been the case that this tradition has given preference to certain behaviour and attitudes, we can see this in Nietzsche's own favouritism for master-morality.

The Radical Self.

Perhaps then the emphasis on universality is what's wrong here and not the framework itself. Instead morality may be about particularity, it always boils down to a matter of interest.¹⁰ But it's unclear where this takes us, if anywhere else other than a return to the instability of moral subjectivism. It may be more in accordance with the creation of values rather than the simple choosing of them. Nietzsche would prefer to confront us with the idea of the Eternal Return of the Same than a set of duties.¹¹ The Eternal Return functions as a test for one's attitude towards life and our ability to live as ourselves without any evasive behaviour. The test is to imagine that you would have to live your life as it has gone so far and as it will go on over and over again indefinitely. So any moment of life is one which we could dwell on for all eternity. To meet this test is to affirm life and to failure is something quite pathetic. In part this functions to push us. Eternal Recurrence can force us in part to accept life as imperfect it is, so that we can 'become' who we are.

Although the alternative to moral universality seems flawed and impractical, much more in line with being-toward-death than any code of conduct, it seems clear that the venture into Kantian ethics may have been a poor manoeuvre on Sartre's part.¹² Freedom may be the primary dimension of human existence for Sartre, but its symptoms include abandonment and responsibility. Existence itself is factical because we are transcending beings, the way we exercise our freedom can transform the circumstances under which we live. We can remake the world and ourselves in accordance with our ideas, in doing so our facticity is recreated. And yet we are condemned to restlessness where we are never satisfied with our accomplishments. Each instance of facticity cannot be taken on its own to represent who we are, for we still have the capacity to act once again and redefine ourselves. The real problem may lie with the elements of Cartesianism that Sartre brings into his framework.

As it's not clear that the certainty which Descartes attributed to consciousness characterises it at all. For Nietzsche knowledge involves a finite entity with finite abilities engaged with a world of infinite becoming. The extent to which 'I' can refer to something autonomous and total is highly suspect, as Cartesian selfhood relies on an unsustainable dualism which cuts mind from body. Similarly Sartre cuts the world from consciousness. Descartes would have placed consciousness at the centre of his notion of selfhood and we can pick up an element of this in Sartre too. But Nietzsche did not reject the notion of a self. For Nietzsche the self is indistinguishable from the person and the body, which are in turn embedded in a socio-cultural context and inseparable from all sorts of contingent natural forces.¹³ Thus the importance of culture in Nietzschean thought. The self is always contextualised and cannot be broken-off from the world, to pretend it can be completely detached is illusory.¹⁴ The self is not 'I' rather 'I' is just the development of the self.

1 Solomon, RC; Nietzsche on Freedom, Fate & Responsibility 2/3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GaO7wvRLsU

2 Wartenberg, Thomas: Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.125-145

3 Solomon, RC; Sartre’s Phenomenology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vGzpEqKK-Y

4 Wartenberg, Thomas: Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.37-46

5 Solomon, RC; Sartre’s Phenomenology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vGzpEqKK-Y

6 Kant offered four examples of the categorical imperative in play: we should not commit suicide, we should not break our promises, we should be lazy but develop our talents and we should not ignore the happiness of others but help them.

7 Wartenberg, T; Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.140-143

8 Richardson, J; Heidegger (2012, Routledge) pg.324-325

9 It could be argued that Sartre never really found an easy way to adapt existentialism for the moral and the political. Simone de Beauvoir may have come closer to a practical ethics, the ambiguous condition of the human being as a part of a world that their consciousness is not. It is this ambiguity which makes ethics difficult for existentialists, de Beauvoir's answer was to insist that 'every man needs the freedom of other men and, in a sense, always wants it, even though he may be a tyrant'. Human freedom presupposes the possibility of inter-subjectivity, taking the individual to the social realm.

Wartenberg, T; Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.143-145

10 Sedgwick, PR: Nietzsche, The Key Concepts (Routledge, 2009) pg.69-72

11 Solomon, RC; Nietzsche on Freedom, Fate & Responsibility 3/3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7skKQHGTdFE&feature=related

12 Wartenberg, T; Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.40-46

13 The limits of knowledge are what give it meaning and concreteness to knowledge. It is absurd to claim that ‘I think’ has any immediate identification with thought. The neglect of human capacities for creativity by this conception is intolerable, such capacities are not extensions of a ‘pure intellect’ above the body. Rather the self and the intellect can be best grasped in the drives of the body. The individual as a nexus of drives, instincts and passions is central to Nietzsche’s vision, with the self as the realm where such drives can be refined.

Sedgwick, PR: Nietzsche, The Key Concepts (Routledge, 2009) pg.137-142

14 The talk about free-will confuses causes and effects, we shouldn't talk about our behaviour as though there is first an act of will (cause) and then comes an action (effect). As every effect must have a cause we might say that the preceding cause is a mental one to action, but for Nietzsche there is just action. We just do things most of the time, it is only every so often that we have to push ourselves and will something. Most of our lives are not so reflective and deliberative, we just do things because of the kind of creatures we are. It is a matter of necessity. This is consistent with Nietzsche's attitude towards consciousness, which Sartre seems to elevate by contrast. Nietzsche puts aside the focus on justifying actions in favour of explaining actions in terms of motivation and who we are. Character is constituted by a set of automatic actions which we cultivate.

Solomon, RC; Nietzsche on Freedom, Fate & Responsibility 2/3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GaO7wvRLsU