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.

Man of Gonzo.

The words of Dr Johnson which mark the beginning of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are highly appropriate "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." The image of the swaggering obscene paternal figure comes to mind, Raoul Duke stands as an obvious figure which Thompson equated himself with in a way which he never really did with Paul Kemp. It is worth keeping in mind, when he wrote The Rum Diary Thompson had yet to dabble in psychedelics but he was a seasoned drinker and went on to garner a reputation as an "impervious man" when it came to drugs and alcohol. When he had dinner with George McGovern, who was running for the Presidency in 1972, Thompson ordered three Margaritas and six beers in one sitting. This is the man who became a beast in order to continuously purge himself of an unending source of pain. Are we talking about the burden of masculinist norms here? Perhaps we are talking about masculinity itself? The beginning of The Rum Diary is marked with an eye-opening sentiment from Eileen O'Connell from 1773:

My rider of the bright eyes,
What happened you yesterday?
I thought you in my heart,
When I bought you your fine clothes,
A man the world could not slay.

There is something defiant about the figure conjured up in O'Connell's words, the world could not slay this man. This is not the normal paternal presence, whose symbolic authority is derived from a phallic insignia. Keep in mind that the phallus facilitates the articulation of desire, simultaneously a symbol of sexual difference - the lack of the signifier in the Other - and the object of desire. Desire in the Lacanian sense of the longing which persists even after needs have been satisfied. It is not a case of the wish to simply possess an object, it is a lack of being which signals the split at the heart of the subject. The phallus is symbolic, so it cannot be possessed as an attribute of sorts. In a way desire is an appeal to receive from the Other the complement to what it lacks, so desire is a longing for the desire of an other and so on. It is tempting to designate the figure as not merely wearing the phallus, rather the man is the phallus. But if we accept that to be slain is to be possessed then we can't hardly hold onto this position. Really then it is about the dissatisfaction of desire which is consequent of the unattainable and fleeting quality of the object of desire - objet petit a.

We could continue along this psychoanalytic line for answers to the "bestial" indulgences of man that Thompson advocated as a kind of release from a great pain which seems to be connected with existence itself - perhaps in Schopenhauerian vein. Freud might have designated the bestial drives of man as the Id (to put it in rather crude terms). Think of Harpo Marx as the Id, which is just as ambiguous and silent as him. The strange antics of Harpo were childlike - in the pursuit of mindless fun - but gripped by a primordial evil at the same time. Here we should turn to Nietzsche who reserved great praise for the grand passions, which have often been treated as bestial and animalistic drives in the past. Passion brings meaning to life, it can bring insight, understanding and orientation. This is because of the attachments that are born out of a passionate life: the friendships and relationships we forge, as well as the ideals we hold dear and the creative powers we can exercise through art. The acceptance and love of life is the highest passion, as well as the highest virtue, for Nietzsche. To unleash the passions might be to "make a beast" of oneself.

The passions which gripped Thompson in life ranged from Freak Power and Fitzgerald to motorcycles and mescaline, there were plenty of attachments made to art, music, friends and lovers. He experimented greatly in his life, the indulgence in drugs and alcohol was not just a form of hedonism it was part of the persona he worked to create. The same goes for the passionate lives led by the protagonists of Thompson's books, though the lives they led have been crystallised in fiction for us to enjoy. Most tragically Hunter S Thompson ultimately chose to end his life partly in reaction to the political climate of America. It was a most un-Nietzschean end, Thompson had become a hostage to the persona he had built over the years. It would be easy to paint him as a simple hedonist, but look at the Wave Speech and it is not simply a celebration of hedonism (though there is an element of that involved). Rather it is a joyous eulogy to the 60s zeitgeist, the immense explosion of energy which would prevail over the old politics. Take his words in The Proud Highway "Hopes rise and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday. Life is beautiful and living is pain. The sound of music floats down a dark street."

The Divine Anus of Salvador Dalí.

The Great Masturbator (1929)

 

"[Lorca] was homosexual, as everyone knows, and madly in love with me. He tried to screw me twice. I was extremely annoyed, because I wasn’t homosexual, and I wasn’t interested in giving in. Besides, it hurts. So nothing came of it. But I felt awfully flattered vis-à-vis the prestige. Deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dalí's asshole. He eventually bagged a young girl, and she replaced me in the sacrifice. Failing to get me to put my ass at his disposal, he swore that the girl’s sacrifice was matched by his own: it was the first time he had ever slept with a woman." - Salvador Dalí

When beholding the Great Masturbator which Dalí painted in 1929 around the time he met Gala it is worth noting that as a young man he flicked through his father's book of explicit photos of the "advanced effects" of untreated venereal diseases. The photos of grotesquely damaged diseased genitalia fascinated and horrified young Salvador, and he continued to associate sex with putrefaction and decay into his adulthood. He later pinned his "impotence" on his father, as well as his mother, and naturally Dalí went on to fantasise of sodomising his dying father. This also might explain the direct kind of gynophobia Dalí later developed. It has been suggested that he was molested by a teacher who used to have Dalí sit on his lap while he stroked him. That would explain the artist’s lifelong hatred of being touched. The subject of twelve of his early paintings was Dalí's sister Ana Maria, a number of which tellingly depict her from the rear, which has led some to conclude that the relationship between them may have been incestuous. The sex life of Salvador Dalí was not a common one to say the least.

Cabaret Scene (1922)

When he was 18 Salvador Dalí met Luis Buñuel and Frederico Garcia Lorca, who was 23 at the time, both of them weaved odes to one another into their work. Dalí and Buñuel lived to mourn the death of Lorca at the hands of Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, later Dalí betrayed Buñuel. For Dalí the obsession with Lorca would last a life time. At 25 Dalí was still a virgin (in heterosexual terms) when he met Gala and she was a sexually adventurous 35 year-old looking for a way out of a relationship. Gala had been married to Paul Éluard, it was a marriage characterised by free love as a rule and possessiveness as taboo. The old conventions and repressive traditions were washed away for this lot. Group sex was high up on the menu so Gala and Paul would often share their bed with Max Ernst. When Lorca got the news of Dalí's new found love he said "It’s impossible! He can only get an erection when someone sticks a finger in his ass." The two were together for 53 years, Gala filled the roles of a muse, a business manager and a lover. 

The relationship between them was hardly a faithful monogamy that lasted over half a century, throughout there were staged orgies and plenty of "gifts" for youthful lovers. Gala kept a castle for a summer retreat to which Dalí could only visit if invited by letter and there in the piano room Jeff Fenholt would play music in the middle of the night. The rockstar was in his twenties at the time and Gala was in her seventies, the "gifts" to him included several paintings and a million-dollar home. Fenholt is now one of those vultures which we might describe as right-wing televangelists. For $6,000 Dalí had bought a castle in Púbol in '69 that would serve as a fuck-nest rather than a love-nest. There was plenty of drama at the house of Salvador Dalí, in 1980 Gala attempted to poison him with a dangerous cocktail of medicine that badly damaged his nerve system. Some believe it was an attempt to kill him. When Gala died in 1982 Salvador first attempted to induce suspended animation by deliberately depriving himself of fluids, it was possibly the first of two suicide attempts. Dalí had to be rescued from a blazing fire that he started in his bedroom at the castle.

Portrait of Paul Éluard (1929)

Mind you Dalí had his own indulgences, candaulism for one. He developed a penchant for persuading youths to drop their trousers and masturbate as he watched. He hoarded thousands of photos with many different lads. There has been a long speculation over the exact sexuality of the exhibitionist painter. We might be able to trace the misogynistic, or more accurately gynophobic, tendencies of Dalinian art down to Dalí's fear of a particular part of the female anatomy. To put it more bluntly, Salvador Dalí was a self-professed worshiper of the female posterior. The extent of this obsession drew the concern of his fellow Surrealists, he denied he was coprophagic one minute and in the next instance would state "true love would be to eat one’s partner’s excrement." Perhaps we should keep in mind that the Catalonians are a very scatological people, for it is custom before eating to exclaim "Eat well, shit hard." The specific preference he had was for hermaphrodites, which he never encountered and only ever fantasised about. Not masculine or feminine, androgyne was the order of the day.

The conservative art critic Brian Sewell was led into an olive grove where Dalí had constructed a "debris Christ" and talked into posing for a round of photos. Sewell ended up lying down in the fetal position, trouser-less, in the armpit of the "debris Christ" and masturbating for Dalí who fumbled in his own trousers as he took photos. The photographs he hoarded along with dildos and his most sordid drawings. All the while Gala sat in a giant model egg shell in another part of the garden. It doesn't end there. Rumour has it that Salvador Dalí financed the sex-change operation for the man who is now known as Amanda Lear. After he divulged this rumour  Mark Fisher went on to write:

"The Sadean imagination quickly reaches its limits when confronted with the limited number of orifices the organism has available for penetration. But the Masochist - and Newton is in this respect, as in so many others, a Masochist through and through, as is Ballard - distributes libido across the whole scene. The erotic is to be located in all the components of the machine, whether liveware - the soft pressure of flesh - or dead animal pelt - the fur coat - or technical. Masochism is cyberotics, precisely because it recognizes no distinction between the animate and inanimate. After all, when you run your fingers through your beloved's hair, you are caressing something dead."

Originally the art served as a vent for the eccentricities, fetishes and obsessions that lurked beneath the surface of a shy Catalonian boy. But as he crafted a persona through which he could express these same things with almost the same level of impunity, then the standard of his art went into a steep decline in his later years. The sexual ambiguity, explicit paraphilia and vivid androgyny found so exuberant in Dalinian artwork in tones which drew the approval of Sigmund Freud. These were supposedly liberated from the subconscious and onto the canvas through his paranoiac-critical method. The 20th Century leitmotifs of sex and paranoia are conjoined twins in Dalí's work where we find he anticipated the psychic crises out of which came our paradise and in which lurks uncertain jouissance for the living to discover. We find some of the worst nightmares of the 20th Century conjured up by the more sinister works he churned out, while the juxtaposition with sex introduces a sadomasochistic element into the situations portrayed. That in itself carries a hidden truth of the many horrors of the 20th Century, the functions and dysfunctions of the libido.

WAD.

 

Western affluence disease, also known by the acronym WAD, is contagious and has not been contained to the West where it originates in the 18th Century. The symptoms are as follows:

1. Politicised cynicism - an inclination to believe that all governments are corrupt because the party-system is motivated by self-interest, no politician can ever solve our problems and we need to resolve our problems outside of the state. We might as well not vote, nothing will ever change and we should just accept that.

2. Obligatory jouissance - the injunction to enjoy, you can therefore you must, to indulge. This is not the realisation of freedom as it lacks the freedom from enjoyment. Instead it leaves you trapped on a hedonic "hamster wheel" constantly chasing gratification.

3. Commodity fetishism - to derive meaning, value, status or identity from possessions and money. Products seem to take on a life of their own, there value determined by "mysterious forces" and not by the market, leaving people working to attain them.

4. Permitted rebellion - hedonistic escapism, e.g. raving, which does not defy the confines of our so-called "permissive society" but remains embedded firmly in the dominant ideology. A rebellion which is permitted, controlled and provided at a price.

5. Sport-enhanced jingoism - aggressive nationalist tendencies evoked by sport events, which act as a substitute for warfare, in a controlled area and is usually characterised by an overtly homoerotic drinking session in which there is a distinct absences of gays.

6. Liberal communism - the tendency to seek a progressive outcome from a system which undermines such an outcome, in accordance with a logic of private vices reap public rewards. For instance, you cannot end world poverty within capitalism as the economic system is partly driven by poverty.

If you suffer from any of the symptoms above notify a dialectician (preferably one with a beard) as soon as possible.