The trouble with cultural appropriation.

In recent years, I’ve heard a lot of talk about cultural appropriation in the music industry. Not least about Miley Cyrus and the spectacle of ‘twerking’, but also Macklemore and Iggy Azalea (bog-standard targets). The charge of cultural appropriation alleges that these artists have stolen their style from black performers, and it seems clear that there is more than a hint of truth to this claim. But it shouldn’t be implied that this is just a cultural question.

The more serious cases being the fact that there is a Blues root to almost all music today. Black talent has been rinsed by the music industry for a very long time. It’s a great historical irony that the classical music of the United States, a profoundly racist society, is Jazz music – the rhythms of the oppressed – which emerged out of the Reconstruction period following the civil war. The end of this period came in the form of segregation and the rise of the Klan. As much as culture has always represented the heart of a heartless world the Jazz scene was the vivacity of a world devoid of hope.

All of this confirms the Janus-faced nature of history. So if we’re going to make a distinction it’s worth making one here: there’s the point that the music industry has rinsed Black America for a long time, and then there’s the concept of cultural appropriation and what it brings to this debate. This kind of cultural criticism is worth unpacking. The charge of cultural appropriation can only be asserted on the basis of certain presuppositions. First of all, it takes cultures as homogenous, self-enclosed, static entities; secondly, it implicitly advocates that this should be the case.

Not only is this presupposition wrong, it shouldn’t be the case either. Cultures don’t have borders and never have had borders. Nor should cultures have them. To take an example within a dominant culture: Beowulf, the oldest piece of English literature, was produced in Scandinavia. The English language is composed of many influences, famously so, from Latin, Greek, French, and even Irish; its homogeneity can only arise out of heterogeneous origins. The numerical system employed in the West is Arabic. What we might call cultural transmission can’t be avoided.

We seem to have reached a point where cultural appropriation now extends to criticism of individual conduct. This is especially ironic as the phrase was coined by George Lipsitz, who defined it as a form of strategic anti-essentialism (this was long before the momentous days of Tumblr). He warned against wanton appropriation which could be insensitive. This implies that there is a sensitive way to do so, and that has been lost to the whirlwind of social media. No one seems to have the time of day to look into the terms of debate, which obscures the issue further.

This is the crux of the matter. To suggest white guys with dreadlocks are ‘acting black’ implies a certain amount of identity essentialism (e.g. that there are social attributes belonging inherently to black and white people) which takes essence to precede existence. The contemporary Left can see this problem when it comes to transgenderism and rightly chides the radical feminists who question it. At the same time, it ought to be kept in mind that the gender roles shouldn’t be maintained as a binary in the first place and this also applies to the question at hand.

In its worst moments, the contemporary Left seems to have become preoccupied on interpersonal conduct. The response to every issue comes in the form of regulation, which seems to extend a kind of consumer ethics (in this case at least) and make it business ethics. So it’s at once moralistic, reformist and puritanical. It would be a mistake to characterise this as ‘identity politics’. It’s almost a kind of ‘lifestyle politics’ – it’s about who has the most responsible newsfeed – which is a retreat from organised politics. It belongs to the same family as ‘privilege-checking’ and ‘trigger warnings’.

As if what we need today is a new set of ethics and we can remake the world without power. This criticism shouldn’t be confused with not being a committed anti-racist. Exploitation in the music industry is a political and economic question, it’s not a moral and cultural one, we should respond accordingly without de-politicisation. When we’re talking about race we’re dealing with formations of social control and we shouldn’t forget that the scars and wounds are very deep. Ultimately, we should be looking to move beyond diversity and aim for greater hybridity and immixing – not less.

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.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Victims of Porn.

 

In The Whole Woman (1999) Germaine Greer situates pornography as the "sexuality of the information revolution". If this is the case then we face serious questions. In a more recent debate Greer said "Sex is a blood-sport", she went on to suggest that pornography actually promises to regulate the potential mess of sexual relations. It has no capacity to reject you, nor to disappoint, or to fail in its purpose as an aid to masturbation. After all masturbation is easy compared with building healthy and fulfilling relationships. Pornography enters not as a substitute, but as a means of shifting the problem around. Perhaps too crudely, Greer puts this down to the fear of commitment among men. She notes "Women are not the point of pornography". Instead it is the "flight from women, men's denial of sex as a medium of communication, their denial of sex as the basis for a relationship". On these grounds Greer claims "The victims of pornography are men not women."

 

Somehow I doubt that the masculinists of this world in their campaigns for men's rights will bear this in mind and add 'Defeat the Porn Industry' to the agenda list. Though it wouldn't surprise me if someone out there already has jumped onto this, I suspect they have other priorities. After all A Voice for Men posted an article on 'male vilification culture' (a counter-term for rape culture) featuring this line "Possibly, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the concept of the penis as a machine emerged." Perhaps rape denial could take a back seat for once. Your guess is as good as mine.

Chomsky on Pornography.

This is one of the more maligned of Chomsky's interviews on YouTube. My own view is that we need a more sophisticated debate on pornography, as an industry, and economic model, rather than falling into the dichotomy between free-choice liberalism and moralistic calls for censorship. I don't think Chomsky's perspective falls into either of the above, but I think it falls short of acknowledging the complexity of the issue at hand. Even if we eliminated conditions of degradation and humiliation it wouldn't rule out the possibility of pornographic production beyond such conditions.

Gore Vidal and the Swingers.

As a Vidalophile I'm currently reading Myra Breckenridge (1968), a book Gore described as a masterpiece in bad-taste, which has been good fun so far and I foresee much more fun in this wonderful satire written at the apogee of the sexual revolution. The lead character, of whom the novel is named after, sets out to smash traditional masculinity, or in so many words:

I believe in justice, I want redress for all wrongs done, I want the good life - if such a thing exists - accessible to all. Yet, emotionally, I would be only too happy to become world dictator, if only to fulfil my mission: the destruction of the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood in the race in order to realign the sexes, thus reducing population while increasing human happiness and preparing humanity for its next stage.

One wonders how much of Vidal is in Myra. Of course, the author created the protagonist so it is natural for one to bleed into another and possibly vice versa. I bet a lot of the sex and drugs of the book comes out of the author's own lived-experience (he's said to have bedded more than 2,000). Gore had bought into Malthusian fantasies of overpopulation, so does Breckenridge. Gore was suspicious of Freudianism and traditional moralism in almost equal spades, so we find the same in Breckenridge. The work is littered with all of this. In a later passage Breckenridge weighs up the cultural mythology against the socio-economic reality when it comes to masculinity:

On the one hand, they must appear to accept without question our culture's myth that the male must be dominant, aggressive, woman-oriented. On the other hand, they are perfectly aware that few men are anything but slaves to an economic and social system that does not allow them to knock people down as proof of virility or in any way act out the traditional role. As a result, the young men compenstate by playing at being men, wearing cowboy clothes, boots, black leather, attempting through clothes (what an age for the fetishist!) to impersonate the kind of man our society claims to admire but swiftly puts down should he attempt to be anything more than an illusionist, playing a part.

As this is a chapter in which the protagonist attends an orgy, the man born Eugene Luther writes:

It is the wisdom of the male swinger to know what he is: a man who is socially and economically weak, as much put upon by women as by society. Accepting his situation, he is able to assert himself through a polymorphic sexual abandon in which the lines between the sexes dissolve, to the delight of all. I suspect that this may be the only workable pattern for the future...

He goes on to remark that the 'rigid old-fashioned masculinity' is bound to end in either "defeat or frustration". Who can blame him for this conclusion? It's somewhat obvious in retrospect. Perhaps it was much less obvious in 1968 when the old conventions seemed to be approaching a precipice in the minds of so many optimists. It made me laugh, but it also reminded me of those swinger ads from the Sixties posted by Sabotage Times about a month ago.

You Got More With Gore.

There is a lot one could say about Gore Vidal so naturally Nicholas Wrathal found himself spoilt with access to rolls of archive footage. That was on top of the footage Wrathal accumulated of the late author over several years. There would’ve been plenty of substance for United States of Amnesia even without the interviews conducted. By this time, Gore Vidal was in what he described as the ‘bright spring of my senility’ though even as an octogenarian he was still confident that there was no problem that could not be solved if people would only listen to him. All in all Wrathal seeks to strike a balance between the personal and the political. Of course, the personal is political but in the case of some the character and private life follow through into politics and chime together in unison.

It would be impossible to cover one and not the other. The film opens with Gore at the grave of his partner – a grave he now shares, as he knew he would then – speaking with some solemnity and distinctive witticism. Vidal was not one to give away too much on private matters, certainly not the five decades he spent with Howard Auster. The word ‘love’ was conspicuously absent in his vocabulary, instead he described his relationship with Auster as a business arrangement and even as platonic. As he himself put it “I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.” And yet we find a very different Gore Vidal penned love letters to Anaïs Nin in his early twenties. “You are quite necessary to me as you know” he wrote before offering marriage and a new life together. This was not a subject included in the film.

In a way this is appropriate as it would go too far in one direction and serve to over-humanise the subject. We are what we pretend to be, as Vidal’s friend Kurt Vonnegut once remarked. This astute observation captured the extent to which the performative fictions we undertake are constitutive of our reality. It’s not just that it was the work he produced and the ideas he kept as a reservoir are what drew people to him. It was that the show he put on – as we all do – was more who he was than the vulnerable and desperate letters of a nascent writer in the 40s. It was more becoming when Gore remarked “I am exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside.” It was this Gore who was on show in the public feuds with William F Buckley, Jr., Norman Mailer and Truman Capote.

The love letters to Anaïs Nin were written around the same time as The City and the Pillar (1948) which shocked readers in its depiction of homosexuality not only as a kind of sexual conduct but as a form of love as well. It was a love affair between two all-American boys, no deviants or fairies to be found. It provoked quite a storm and Gore found himself effectively blacklisted by The New York Times. He would write for television and theatre to make money as he was effectively ostracised by the literary establishment. In his own words Wrathal wanted to look at the US in the last half of the 20^th Century through the eyes of Gore Vidal – a viewpoint often neglected. Rightly then Wrathal includes not just the way in which Vidal contributed to the changing perceptions of homosexuality, but the celebratory inventions he devoted to ‘triumphant women’ in books like Myra Breckenridge (1968) as the prospects of sexual liberation flourished.

Gore Vidal had become a litterateur by this point and was thoroughly embroiled in the American political discourse, especially when it resembled nothing more than a bloodsport. Under the slogan ‘You’ll Get More With Gore’ he ran for office in 1960 and won more votes than any other Democrat in decades. Shocked further left by the Kennedy administration and its depredations in Cuba and Vietnam he became involved in the People’s Party in an effort to break the duopoly. The Party had called for a maximum wage and maintained a tough stance on the Vietnam War. He would later reflect that this made sense given that the last potentially revolutionary moment in the US was in the 1930s. In the end Gore threw his weight behind the McGovern campaign – probably the last liberal progressive campaign to be waged – and once the McGovernites were vanquished Vidal later ran against Jerry Brown in California to challenge the Reagan era as it was ushered in.

The way he had refused to concede any ground to the thuggish anti-Communism of the Cold War was admirable to put it mildly. With this in mind Wrathal arranged for Gore Vidal to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev and take a boat ride in Venice. The film charts Vidal’s opposition to Vietnam through to his historical fiction and the controversial view he takes of Roosevelt’s entry into WW2. To the accusations of being a ‘conspiracy theorist’ on such matters Wrathal lets Gore speak for himself. It is in these clips that the journalist he once considered his ‘dauphin’ appears on screen to contribute. Wracked with cancer Christopher Hitchens gives his viewpoint and we are shown the last meeting between the two of them where Gore shows some reluctance to engage. By then the late Hitchens had broken with his former comrades on the invasion of Iraq and Vidal was among those who denounced him. Not surprisingly we find the passing of Hitchens was much more mourned by the liberal intelligentsia than Gore. The reason is obvious: the Hitch had conceded in principle where Vidal remained stern. Vidal saw the American Republic in ruin, or approaching it at least, its institutions crumbling and an economy heavily militarised. It was a system to be criticised and even condemned, but not defended in such dark times.

This article was originally written for Red Monthly.

Mendieta and Misogyny.

An Earth-Body Dynamic.

 

Looking at the work of Ana Mendieta the cogs in my mind wound back four years to Lars von Trier's Antichrist. The reasons for this I will expand upon soon enough. The body of work she amassed could be taken for sanguineous and morbid if her recreation of rape scenes are misunderstood. The shock value of these pieces is appropriate as they were made in response to the rape of her fellow students. It was certainly the right time and place for a female artist to be engaging with the prevalence of sexual violence. The decline of an array of social conventions regarding the place of women in society was at its beginning in the early 1970s. It is often forgotten that what is described as the Feminist movement came about in the wake of 60s cultural revolution in reaction to its ambiguity on the question of women's liberation. So it was a ripe subject for exploration in art.

The depictions of femininity in Mendieta's work are particularly interesting in this regard. It reminds one of Antichrist where we are told nature is Satan's church, the locus of misogyny being found in suggestions of an absent autonomy: women as subjects of various natural forces outside of their own control. In ancient religion we find this is most overt in the aversion to female genitalia and the rituals imposed around the menstrual cycle. All of which feeds into the controls set on sexual conduct. This is not just the case in the monotheist tradition, it is even true of Eastern religion where, for example, we find the Buddha was born out of his mother's side. It then makes sense that Mendieta's work links together the Catholic and pre-Christian pagan traditions of Latin America with a certain conception of femininity. Not coincidentally Mendieta produced art on sexual violence as she was moving in this direction.

Death seemed to feature heavily as a theme, whether in the form of natural decay and peformative destruction in the burning of trees and killing chickens. Mendieta would later move away from performance art, which she disliked for its immediacy; and she was further exploring her Cuban heritage. Ochún (1981) was named after a water goddess in Santería - an Afro-Cuban religious movement based on a blend of folk Catholicism with Yoruba customs - who also the goddess of love, intimacy and beauty. According to Wikipedia, Ochún is said to be generous, beneficent and kind as well as capable of incredible chaos in the few occasions where she loses her temper. The extent to which she romanticised the syncretic cultural heritage of Cuba may be more of a matter of speculation at this point. Such a romanticisation may run as far as embracing this model of femininity. It would be easy to attribute this to her deracination as a Cuban-American.

Unfortunately, we will never know how her work would have developed if she had not died in 1985. Even with all of this in mind, Mendieta's work could be interpreted as a genealogy of misogynist themes. After all an earthly conception of femininity parallels what is to be taken from the traditional organic view of the family and a woman's position in said social unit. In Mother Jungle we find a portrayal of womanhood synthesised with nature comes across as much darker. The imposing dark figure with its jagged features and womb on display seems charged with angst; but this is an almost genderless depiction at the same time (aside from the emphasis on the womb). As Rachel Spence has noted, Ana Mendieta resisted attempts by American feminists to reduce her work to goddess worship. In a way the body of work she produced was far more ambiguous.

Spence notes that Mendieta claimed her work held to a particular culture and time. So it might be taken as a representation of womanhood in terms relative to a certain culture. The art made in a natural environment, carved out of rock and wood may seem to be a more warm-hearted a view of nature. Around this time Mendieta was becoming much more conscious in terms of a two-front struggle in feminism against racism and capitalism. She did describe her work as pre-industrial and situates herself in line with Neolithic paintings. If she had lived she may have become involved in the anti-globalisation movement, which shares this nostalgia for the pre-industrial past. In her work she situates humankind in relation to nature, life and death; and she condemned Robert Smithson for his brutalisation of nature in his invasive land art. Where this trajectory leaves women is another matter.

Beyond Liberation.

Today we find class politics are all too readily dismissed, and suspiciously so, in the decades since the fall of Communism. Instead it was the newly emergent identity politics which took hold at the wake of socialism’s funeral. In the era of political-correctness we find class politics missing from the discussion, only for its space to be filled by identity – whether it is gender, sexuality or race – in ways which couldn’t possibly threaten the prevailing order. But this isn’t the end of the story. It was Christopher Hitchens who once remarked that “Socialism has been to its own funeral more often than Tom Sawyer.” We may find if we are so inclined, that the majority of the working-class in world terms is female. If class may be abolished through the culmination of the class struggle, then it may be possible to overcome other forms of domination.

This has been the case for a lot longer than we might like to admit. The term ‘proletariat’ is actually derived from the Latin for ‘offspring’ which refers to those who were too poor to serve the state with anything other than their wombs. It denotes to a specific swathe of the masses in the Roman Republic. Too deprived to contribute to economic life in any other way, these women produced labour power in the form of children (who would then be reared by the state as soldiers and sent into battle). What society demanded from them was not production but reproduction. The proletariat started life among those outside the labour process and not from within it. The labour these women endured was a lot more painful than breaking boulders.

In the post-industrial capitalist societies we find that the service sector staffed by vast numbers of women has expanded enormously. And of course, there are those women who have made it in the financial sector – but they are not the proletarians and have little stake in a class-conscious feminism. Even when Britain was the workshop of the world the industrial working-class were outnumbered by domestic servants and agricultural labourers. The sweatshops of the developing world are packed to the brim with female workers, both young and old. And so, we find the politics of class and identity can converge on common material conditions.

The journalist Germaine Greer takes the notion of women's liberation as more than equality, as the achievement of formal equality would mean equality with unfree men and that's hardly emancipation. Liberation from constraints on divorce, abortion, jobs and income are not the end but the beginning. The case of recognising the raising of children and even housekeeping as work with a living wage is an example of what Greer is talking about. Venezuela has gone one step further this year and put aside pensions for full-time mums. This is a much more radical proposal than quotas for women in board rooms, which would just give rise to a few more Thatcheresque women in Greer’s terms. As Lindsey German has written “The talk of glass ceilings and unfairly low bonuses for women bankers misses the point about liberation, which is that it has to be for all working women and not just a tiny number of privileged women.”

Under capitalist conditions the wage a woman receives as a sex worker or indeed a performer in pornography is no different than the wage received by a waitress. Not in the narrow sense that the rate of pay is the same per hour, but rather in the sense that in each case the worker’s labour is still exchanged for a wage. The labour contributed remains disproportionate to the wage received in order to guarantee profitability. It’s about the extraction and the accumulation of profit on the backs of other people’s labour. The advocates of decriminalisation should take note that the content of the labour is not what matters in a society where free-choice and markets prevail. Indeed, in a society of free-choice sex work would be an option among many. A moralising ban on pornography and prostitution seems somewhat futile in light of this. It misses the point.

Objectification is a part of capitalist society; it is a part of the productive process, with the role of wage labour and the commodities resulting from it. Being paid for sex is no different than being paid to smile as a waitress. Wage labour is not a category with any moral precepts or implications, it is merely functional. It's not immoral as much as amoral, relativist and pragmatic. The moves by David Cameron to impose an ‘opt-in’ mechanism over the internet inflow of pornography are contrary to the thrust of a market society. It often seems as though Conservatives want to unleash all of us to the freedom to fail, at least when it comes to the economy. Yet when it comes to social questions the Right wade into our personal lives in order to reassert ‘traditional values’ over us.

The case for feminism has to be made from the ground up, the same with socialism, beginning with the conditions already prevalent in society. In this way we can see that there is a point of divergence between the feminist mission and the structure of capitalist society insofar as the objectives crash against the pillars of market ideology. This may be a terrifying prospect for middle-class liberal feminists, but it’s the way it should be. Women can't just be as free as unfree men. The attainment of civil rights and liberties is only the end of one kind of struggle, which is certainly not at odds with class society and the capitalist system. It’s the aim of human emancipation, not mere liberation under capitalism, to which this cause must be welded.

Originally written by Ellie Crowe and JT White on August 10th 2013 for Pulse.

No Values Left.

 

 It is often assumed that the conservative Right has the monopoly over social values, culture, tradition and the family. Like the liberal pretension to a monopoly on free-speech, democracy, human rights and civil liberties, it should not go unchallenged. This will come as a shock to Americans, the politics of whom may be described as an oscillation between liberal and conservative positions. On the battlefield of the culture wars it may seem curious to postulate that the Left can challenge the Right on its own turf. For it was none other than Leon Trotsky who put forward the claim that we leftists have always lived in tradition. It's just a difference of which traditions the Left values (such as the right to vote, honouring the struggles of the past) over right-wing fetishes for fox-hunting and the Queen. Broadly, the radical Left aim to challenge the economic forces which dominate and shape life in all sorts of ways. Conservatives aim to preserve tradition and culture in the midst of the very same economic forces, which they themselves defend.

 

 The culture wars are merely the externalisation of the conflict internal to conservatism: social control versus economic freedom. It's worth noting that the socialist movement, itself a tradition, was born out of Christianity as well as a conservative disposition towards the horrifying consequences of industrialisation. The Left was defined early on by its conflict with liberalism, in a way which conservatives have yet to really get over - mainly because it's fundamental to their constitution. Take note of Rousseau's scorn for the market society favoured by such classical liberals as John Locke. The leading fetish of liberals is for the market, whether it is embodied in the arenas of culture, ideas or economics. The nihilist writer Michel Houellebecq writes about the dating scene as a sexual marketplace where all sorts of pleasures and relations are readily available. It then follows that the primary exit from the precarity of the market is monogamy and marriage. Those who scorn marriage as a social construct forget that everyone except for John Zorn buys into social constructs.

 

 The founding fathers of Marxism contributed plentifully to left-wing criticism of the family as a social unit with its own structural tendencies towards oppression. Though it could be said that Karl Marx in his critique of capitalism really left feminism for Engels to engage. In his mammoth magnum opus Marx notes that the family as a social unit has the capacity to hold property in common. Though the wise dialectician notes this in the same breathe that he notes this characteristic can also be found in the primitive epoch of feudalism. It's worth noting that the dialectical current that runs through the Left from Hegel. In this sense socialism should be a more radical advance on the advancements of bourgeois society, its legacy of human rights and civil liberties. Capitalism is an obvious advance on feudalism and slavery, while socialism takes the best of capitalism - its material surplus and social freedom - as its origin. This is worth keeping in mind with the points we'll explore next.

 

 The late Christopher Hitchens articulated his own brand of left-wing humanist arguments for limiting the right to an abortion. It boils down to a pragmatic balance of conflicting values, life and choice. If we first accept that there is such a concept as an 'unborn child' then we can debate at which point a cluster of cells becomes a person. It then follows that that person has rights, specifically to its own bodily integrity. This is the point of the whole debate over how long the window should remain open for an abortion to remain optional. There used to be much more of a division on this question on the Left and among feminists than there is today. It's not so much anti-feminist as non-feminist. The Right definitely has no monopoly over this position, often cultural reactionaries undermine themselves in their opposition to contraception. The left-wing proponents of limited abortion rights are often much more consistent and thorough-going when it comes to women's liberation. By contrast, self-proclaimed 'pro-lifers' are seldom concerned with women's oppression.

 

 As for same-sex marriage it really comes down to the question of equality. If we're talking about an equality of 'sameness' then it follows that the homosexual couple should enjoy all the social possibilities as the heterosexual couple. The best argument against same-sex marriage, and by 'best' I mean non-homophobic, is that the 'difference' of homosexuality is worth preserving. It's a case that Philip Blond has caved out. Furthermore, the 'difference' of homosexuality can be defined insofar that the sexual identity of the individual opens up an array of cultural options for them. The gay community hardly has to worry about the less beautious side of marriage, its deathknell of joy and its fragility. Until recently the average gay man has always been free from divorce, child-rearing, shared bank accounts and alimony payments. There are obvious advantages for those who aren't partial to marriage (which doesn't equate to commitment) and adoption.

 

 It's certainly true that the reform of marriage laws to extend religious ceremonies to gay couples is conservative in that it will preserve the institution of marriage - itself something that the Left has criticised plenty. Notice this isn't an argument against homosexuality in terms of moral conduct and human rights. It doesn't even take a side on the rather absurd claims made against homosexuality on 'moral' and 'natural' grounds. Part of this comes out of the same attitude that can be found in the morose works of conservative John Gray when he writes "[Christian] Morality has hardly made us better people; but it has certainly enriched our vices." In this frame of mind the greatest aphrodisiac is moralism, in any case conservatives are the real perverts. You have only to listen to the rants of Rick Santorum to notice that he has been thinking about homosexual relations just a bit too much. Only a real deviant could see the male anus as a gateway to bestiality.

 

 I may not endorse these positions myself, but it can't be said that the Right has the monopoly over these arguments. It's always worth keeping in mind there are a great many overlaps between the Old Left and the conservative Right when it comes to cultural questions. That was well demonstrated in the debate last year between Terry Eagleton and Roger Scruton.

Sectarianism be Praised!

The Left has long been prone to sectarianism, and famously so, due to its fissiparous condition and natural inclination to the narcissism of fine distinctions - to borrow Freud's words. Socialism comes in about a thousand different shades of red. The same can be said of anarchism, communism and feminism. It's probable that the sectarian tendency will never be overcome, partly this is because there has to be disagreement and debate. Dissensus rather than consensus. It's clear that there is a need for discussion over serious issues in practice as well as theory. This is true of morality as well as the organisation of government. In such areas there is a need for a lot more dissensus and not less. The same can be said of the refinement of principle and development of theory itself. This isn't to endorse the destructive strain of sectarianism which tears apart groups and grinds away at mass-popular movements. It's this which has helped to further the Left's decline around the world since the end of the Cold War. We can't blame it all on the CIA, I must concede. But it's important to always insist on a subtle distinction.

It's the problem is the shift to an intolerant variety of sectarianism which is so troubling, and with good reason too. The point at which the disagreement becomes a hindrance to a social movement. To borrow the words of the late Alexander Cockburn "The Left's idea of a meeting is to form a circle, point the guns inward and then fire." This is exactly the kind of sectarianism that the majority of people find problematic. It can drive a wedge right into a movement, first causing friction and then leading to schismatic bursts that threaten the whole thrust of the organised efforts. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the successes of a movement in its commitment to a cause often in turn produce greater unity and solidarity. The sectarian elements are usually marginalised in this way, as it becomes more important to unify around a cause which is more important than our petty differences of theory. The victories of a movement are self-propelling in this way. This could go against Gramscian sequential schemas about the primacy of politics, in that the material conditions may come before the political - likewise, theory very often struggles to keep up with practice.

Sadly it's also true that the destructive sectarian streak of the Left is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Very often the Left is in a state of paralysis thanks to its own bitter squabbles and petty infighting, which would embarrass the Church of England - it truly does come down to a narcissism of fine distinctions! The inability of some to build alliances within the Left has even been matched by those who find it easier to coalesce with the Right. Alexander Cockburn received no end of criticism for consorting with Pat Buchanan over the Iraq war, yet it was a pragmatic move of a committed anti-imperialist. Though it's worth saying that the left-wing worry of a descent into a state of affairs where we take the side of anyone who is critical of US foreign policy is not an confused one. Many conservatives saw Fascism as a "lesser evil" to socialism, even libertarians thought Mussolini was a "moderate" who had saved private property from the red plague. No such calculation would go uncriticised on the Left. One of the reasons why the Right is not as sectarian, and not in the same way, as the Left is that leftists are better than rightists. It's about questions of action.

The rigorous assessment of principle and practice among leftists is not a reason for despair in every instance. The Left ought to be sectarian in this sense, in its commitment to outmatch liberals and conservatives when it comes to democracy, equality and liberty, as well as art, culture and even tradition. This requires a certain refinement and maintenance of principle. It is often overlooked that the conservative claim to a monopoly over culture and tradition is as ludicrous as the suggestion of a liberal monopoly over freedom. Notably it was Leon Trotsky who said "We Marxists have always lived in tradition." He wasn't speaking as a conservative, because there is an alternative conception of tradition to be found in radicalism. It is a cultural body which is constantly remade, as well as opening itself to the participation of ordinary people. At the same time it's not just conservatives who want to preserve the great canon of literature, whereas radicals are about accessibility and dissensus. But it's a fetishistic tendency of conservatives to take something as good just because it stood the test of time. Quality control is something the Left does better.

The Left's disarray over the Assange case.

Over the Assange case the Left has found itself once again divided, once again schismatic, sectarian and ultimately unable to articulate itself in the midst of a state-media consensus on the extradition of Assange to Sweden. The liberal commentariat has reacted with a cretinous apologetics for the government's hysterical threat to raid the Ecuadorian embassy to forcibly seize a whistleblower for allegations he isn't charged with yet. The BBC have set the agenda, the debate has been limited to just two positions: you either take the side of law and order to extradite Julian Assange to face the allegations in Sweden, or you believe that the allegations against Assange are illegitimate. It is the case that there are three main positions on the Left, but only one can be acknowledged by the mainstream media:

- It's about Justice: Assange needs to answer to these allegations given their serious nature, for the sake of a consistent commitment to transparency and accountability he should be extradited. The threat of extradition to the US has been greatly exaggerated by his supporters to justify his refusal to face these serious allegations.

- Bad Sexual Etiquette: The allegations of rape/molestation are illegitimate, possibly cooked up in order to vilify WikiLeaks and detain Assange for revealing secret information. It's purely a political matter, the allegations are a cover to extradite Assange to Sweden and then to the US. We have to stand beside Assange at this time.

- Don't underestimate the US: It isn't the definition, or even what constitutes, rape that we should be debating. The allegations are extremely serious. But it is a matter of the extradition purely. The Swedish government could question him in Britain, possibly by video link, and has the power to veto any extradition to the US that might come up. Yet the Swedish government refuses to do either. Surely then it makes sense for Assange to seek refuge in Ecuador to avoid a similar fate as Bradley Manning.
Of course the only line that the bourgeois media are interested in is that of 'bad sexual etiquette' - it was irresistable - given the hysteria WikiLeaks seems to have provoked even among liberal news outlets. And the Left has been in an almost perpetual state of crisis for a long time. There isn't much of a coherent Left left, though there never was a unified Left. It seems that this is a symptom of the decline and disarray of the Left.

Pussy Riot's Challenge.

"Holy Mother, Blessed Virgin, chase Putin out," they sang only to receive 2 years for less than 2 minutes of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. Out of the convicted Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich have participated in performances staged by Voina. In one such instance Samutsevich released Madagascan giant cockroaches into a courtroom and went on to kiss on duty female police officers. Tolokonnikova took part in an orgy staged in the Biology Museum in Moscow. Pussy Riot could be seen as an off-shoot of this movement in its devotion to shock and challenge the assumptions of conservative Russians. Predictably Pussy Riot has come up against the cursed spirit of Russian chauvinism in its personification of a pallid dwarfish man-beast. This hardline strain of intolerance ought to be a source of shame for a country that produced so many great artists - from Dostoevsky to Mayakovsky - and particularly great in literature with which the West can hardly compete to this day. Now art has become a battleground for the faithful and the political in present day Russia.

In defence of the trial and sentencing Alexander Nekrassov pointed to the cathedral as an anti-Stalinist monument. Except Nekrassov conveniently forgets that the parodic punk prayer was meant to strike at age old pillars of Russian authoritarianism. The first target was Putin's Kremlin, the secondary target was Russian Orthodoxy as a superstructural spectre of the conditions in Russian society. It has to be said that the Orthodox Church has long served to legitimise the status quo in Russia. This was true in the days when the Tsar stood as the semi-divine head of the Church and it's unfortunately true in the present Mafia state. It was the Russian Orthodox Church which fabricated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, blaming the evils of the world on the Jewish people, and in doing so contributed greatly to the Judeophobia rife in Europe at the time. Indeed, it became Hitler's "warrant" for genocide. Today it is the bedtime reading of neo-Nazis everywhere, it has been distributed by Henry Ford and Hamas while David Icke has cited it as a 'factual document'.

 

Even Nekrassov's claim that the Church can be taken as an anti-Stalinist symbol shouldn't be taken too seriously. Although the Church had flirtations with oppositional activity, the suicidal regime of Stalin's creation fell back on religiosity as well as nationalism to support the war effort. The campaigns against religion in the 1920s and 30s were put on hold until Khrushchev began to close churches once again in the 60s. Indeed, it made sense given that the war with Germany was a bloodbath for Russia – leaving in excess of 20 million dead. The breach left open after the fall of the Tsar was filled by Stalin as he took on the guise of a god-king complete with an era of heresy hunts, miracles and even an inquisition. It was the Orthodoxy that had worked to instil a cultural credulity among Russians to the benefit of the Tsars and later Stalinism. This isn't to say that the Soviet Union was a religious state, but the Church can hardly be taken as anti-Stalinist so totally. We should turn to the question of Russia's politics and the rudderlessness of organised religion.

The real test is whether or not the Orthodox Church will rise to its stated commitment to the principles by which Christ lived by. As Giles Fraser points out "The legal case against Jesus was that he violated the holy. He was criticised for allowing his disciples to eat without washing properly and for picking corn on the day set aside as holy. He said he was God yet he was born in a filthy stable and willingly laid hands on lepers. He had no problem with being touched by menstruating women or eating with those regarded as unwholesome." This constituted a thoroughgoing deconstruction of the holy, as Fraser notes, that had become an alibi for political injustice. The same challenge was made by the Hebrew prophets, being profane is precisely the point. This should be taken as an opportunity for Russia's progressive Christians to reassert themselves as an alternative to the Kremlin's mascot church. Right now, the Russian Orthodoxy is just another rod with which Putin can kosh dissidents. But the Church will survive as a weapon for future administrations. So it's vital that there be an alternative Christianity to the established Church.

Barbie Doll feminism.

In a debate earlier this year on feminism Louise Mensch responded to Laurie Penny's suggestion that she may be a feminist but she's not the right kind. Defence for right-wing feminism was fought from the trenches of relativism. There are just different feminisms as opposed to a correct feminism. This is the force of the market on show, the limit of equality is 'sameness' and meandering populist strikes against institutions such as the BBC. The Mensch formula for a feminism of feminisms corners the convergence of class and women's rights in a convenient blind-spot. This helps to sustain a much narrower conception of women's liberation within capitalism. It's less fine to talk about women's rights with class war in mind. It might even get scarier when we start to talk about oppression with its multiple fronts - what about race? You can forget about Africana womanism! The irony is that the leftist Laurie Penny has since reverted to relativism on a different case.

With the explosion of Fifty Shades of Grey onto the shelf of literary history there has been a great deal of thundering criticism against the book. In reaction Laurie Penny found the time to pen a defence of Fifty Shades as porn for women. She made it clear that she couldn't care less about snooty liberal critics who seem so enraged at the prospect of millions of women masturbating. It's just a defence of the likeability of the likeable. There are over 2.3 million women reading Fifty Shades of Grey in Britain, so it's easy to play populist firebrand against the cultural elites. Elsewhere Victoria Coren observes: "Romantic heroes have always been stern and bossy, for obvious reasons: their autocracy relieves the female fantasist from any responsibility for the filth that's going to ensue. She can remain nice, sweet, ladylike and marriageable. If she ends up naked over a tree stump with her pants between her teeth: not her fault! Just following orders!" Thus the appeal of Christian Grey and Edward Cullen.

Sylvia Plath's poem Daddy comes to mind in which she writes "Every woman adores a fascist." Especially as Grey seems to be the poster boy for dangerous signs to look for in a boyfriend: jealous, controlling, stalking, sexually sadistic behaviour, hypersensitivity to any perceived slight, mood swings and relationships with less powerful women. Given that Fifty Shades grew out of Twilight fan fiction, it could be that it is the repressed filth beneath the Mormon veneer of Twilight's chastity. The bondage of Grey is the implied side of Edward's abusive relationship with Bella. It would be ideal for Robert Pattinson to play Christian Grey for this reason, this would swiftly lure the target market of the Twilight films to the Fifty Shades films. For Penny there is no issue here, it's just a matter of defending the fantasies of women - even if that amounts to being spanked by a multi-millionaire. The critics are simply prudes looking to make women feel guilty about their fantasies, about sexual pleasure and masturbation. This fits in with Penny's odd thesis that capitalism hates women's bodies.

The fact that the line "My very own Christian Grey-flavoured popsicle" may soon be one of the most read sentences in history does not confine it to the greats of the literary canon. This is not a position that Laurie Penny would have a problem with. But she seems unaware that the problem is not snobbery, but that this work should be taken for more than it is. If it is just pornography for millions of dissatisfied married women with children, why should it be made into a Hollywood film? It's not a matter of equivalence that the archives of RedTube are not about to be transformed onto the silver screen. The question of what counts as art is totally absent from Penny's argument, never mind what constitutes 'good art'. Instead there is only a reactive position to the critic who yearns for a great novel. Bentham's famous words come to mind "Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry."

The defence of this book is a highly bourgeois fixation for a feminist. Especially as we live in a world in which women remain largely subjugated in one form or another. There hasn't been much progress in this world. The practice of wife-selling is long gone in Europe along with the advocacy by doctors of female genital mutilation of the late 19th Century. In many of American prisons women have to give birth in shackles, meanwhile the soldiers of God are still fighting to place more and more limits on the right to choose. It seems everywhere women are still waiting for economic justice, which means more than equal pay. It shouldn't be forgotten that the working-class has long been predominantly female since proletarianization. This is what we might call 'Menschian' feminism - or Barbie doll feminism - can never acknowledge let alone put right. Feminism can be embraced as a liberal populist means of flushing clear the clogged pipes of capitalism. But it is stunted from the beginning.

To be exact Barbie doll feminism is at its core about an equality of 'sameness', a process of colour-blind transcendence which subsumes every group - race, gender, sexuality etc. - and overcomes every boundary by eliminating difference. The only 'difference' which can never be overcome, or even acknowledged, is that of class. The populist battering-ram of bourgeois liberalism emanates as relativism from the mechanisms of capitalism. This process of relativisation is partly what constitutes capitalist ideology, its nihilism is found in its capacity to negate any set of values within reach. The capitalist system can function with a shift away form old forms of chauvinist domination. The machine thrives not just when the cogs are well oiled but when the cogs are actually cleaned to run smoothly. The means of overcoming each barrier secures the system from its overthrow. The ruling-class knows full well that the best way to hold off revolution is through reform.

Womb Wars.

Since the beginning of 2012 we have heard the usual blather about welfare 'reform' (a most dodgy word in political language) with the defenders of family values reserving a particularly cold place for single-mums. The Conservative Party have pushed for a cap housing benefit at £26,000 on commonsense grounds of "fairness". Of course, this isn't nearly enough for the gutter-press which would like to see the whole benefits system scrapped followed by the swift return of workhouses. It would hit large families hardest even if they have managed to find cheap housing outside of London. There are now pushes in Newham to boot the poor out of London altogether. Clearly the London City-State is just for the ultra-rich to swan around in limousines. The next kick was to single-mothers in a bid to make them pay for trying to get child support from their former partners.

Even though it makes far more sense to cap private rents in London, at least in the short-term, as everyone knows that the rent is too damn high! Of course it isn't enough to cap rents, there needs to be serious public investment in affordable housing. And yet the Conservatives have no time for this discussion. It's just assumed that the problem is that they haven't gone far enough. But there's plenty of ink and phlegm to be wasted on calls for an end to dependency culture. There's even been time to entertain nonsense about morality legislation. We've seen Nadine Dorries, that arch-custodian of the sacred foetus, go after sex education in the wake of failure on her campaign to sledgehammer the right to choose. This is the politics of reaction at work again, it has nothing to do with any moral values. Whenever politicians talk of 'family' you should expect an attack on women to follow.

This is where class and sex converge, where feminism and leftism are conjoined at the hip. Everyone knows the word "proletariat", but not every rascal with a Marxian phrase book know that the term is derivative of the Latin for "offspring". Terry Eagleton reminds us that it referred to those who were too poor to serve the state with anything other than their wombs. Too deprived to contribute to economic life in any other way, these women produced labour power in the form of children. Society demanded reproduction, not production from these women. The proletariat was originally outside the workplace, not within it, just like the single-mother living on benefits. But the work these women endured was a lot more painful than breaking boulders. The average worker is a woman in the world today, as it was in the days of Marx and Engels when Britain was the workshop of the world.

As the workers' movement suffers in this time of regression, so do women. We can see this in America. The Georgia House has passed a 'foetal pain' bill that stipulates women must continue to carry to term a stillborn baby as pigs and cows do. The lot who think its proper that a women should die in back-alley abortion clinics to save a foetus have seen victories recently with 'Let woman die' bills. There are businesses spying on potential employees and judge them in accordance with their use of birth-control. This is the nation partly founded by Aaron Burr who hung a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft in his office and insisted that his daughter be educated at the same standard as a man. And we expect this of women for no reward. It's not like we recognise motherhood as work, so many of us don't think the raising of children has any worth at all that we support cuts to child benefit. It's just something women do for free, like a lot of wonderful things.

We've seen people like Rick Santorum pop up, an Opus Dei Republican who believes that life begins at erection. The sort of lunatic who is opposed to abortion in cases of rape. This comes from a man with no kind of social conscience at all. He wants to legislate what consenting adults do in the bedroom. The state can intrude into that area, but not emancipate individuals from wage labour. Santorum's rotten mind fixated on the rigidity of hierarchy and the strength of authority. It is no coincidence that Santorum's politics consist of a return to theoconservative values with the state as a nanny for the rich, a bludgeon of the poor and of the foreign. It isn't coincidental, the opposition to the vital freedom, for women, over their rate of reproduction fits neatly into this platform of sadism. It's about making sin fun again for a privileged few in a way.

As noted by Peter Singer if abortion was illegal then it would be poor women who die from botched abortions in droves whereas well-off women can travel to another country in search of the treatment. Think of the number of people who travel to Switzerland in order to commit suicide. Clearly, the value of life only applies to some in the world of Nadine Dorries. The sacred foetus trumps mummy almost every time I'm afraid to say. Of course, when mummy can fly out to another country and hire a doctor to perform the procedure without a coat-hanger then a blind eye will be turned. Furthermore, as women gain greater control over their lives economically then they're less likely to get pregnant. In a society where there are greater opportunities, better education and better pay for women there will be less children born but there will be less abortions too. Primates like Mr Santorum are unable to see this, men like this have no right to claim to be "pro-life".

Male Mythology in Gonzo.

The Americans based in Puerto Rico as journalists, businessmen and soldiers are depicted as a horde of corrupt, perverted and sex-crazed sociopaths. There is Moberg who is obsessed with cannibalism (a twisted form of the unfulfilled longing) and Zimburger who is described as "more beast than human". Then there is the reckless Yeamon and the inexplicably unfuckable Sala, between them we might situate Kemp as a kind of "moderate witness" who is never as passive as Sala nor as rebellious as Yeamon. Paul Kemp participates and observes the mayhem, but manages to pull-back from the edge and gets to walk off towards the sunset as it were. This is a standard lesson of literature, the passive will destroy themselves and the rebel will be destroyed by the system. It is being able to participate and pull back from the edge just in time that makes for a great story. Especially when we're talking about Gonzo journalism, the journalist is a participant in his story in the full subjective sense. With all of this mind we should look at when Paul Kemp finds himself on a beach after a night of festivities with a woman called Lorraine:

We talked for a while, drying off as best we could, and suddenly she reached over and pulled me down on top of her. “Make love to me,” she said urgently.

I laughed and leaned down to bite her on the breast. She began to groan and jerk me around by the hair, and after a few minutes of this I lifted her onto the clothes so we wouldn’t get full of sand. The smell of her body excited me tremendously and I got a savage grip on her buttocks, pounding her up and down. Suddenly she began to howl: at first I thought I was hurting her, then I realised she was having some sort of extreme orgasm. She had several of them, howling each time, before I felt the slow bursting of my own.

We lay there for several hours, going at it again when we felt rested. All in all I don’t think we said fifty words. She seemed to want nothing but the clutch and howl of the orgasm, the rolling grip of two bodies in the sand.

Paul Kemp promised to call Lorraine - the lie we all know so well - and never does, as far as we know, whereas Kemp later returns to the US where Chenault waits for him. She had left Yeamon for Paul soon after she reappeared after the incident at the carnival, in which she was almost certainly gang-raped at a party - a trauma never fully explored or resolved in the book, it just happened. After turning up at Kemp's place Chenault asks Paul Kemp to get in the shower with her and then comes a flash of impure Gonzo "I heard a gong somewhere in the back of my brain, and then a melodramatic voice saying, 'And this concludes The Adventures of Paul Kemp, the Drunken Journalist. He read the signs and saw it coming, but he was too much of a lecher to step out of the way.' Then there was organ music, a sort of feverish dirge, and then I was stepping out of my shorts and into the shower with Chenault." It is clear that our hero did not go celibate between the chapters, but the sex scene with Chenault is significant in its difference to the earlier tryst on the beach.

I felt totally defeated. For a while I paced around the apartment, barely hearing her happy chatter, then I gave up entirely and went over to the bed and took off my clothes. I fell on her with such a violence that her smile quickly disappeared and it became a desperate business.

She kicked her feet in the air and shrieked and arched her back and she was still trying when I exploded inside her and collapsed with exhaustion. Finally she gave up and locked her legs around my hips and her arms around my neck, and started to cry.

I leaned on my elbows and looked down at her 'What's wrong?' I asked.

She kept her eyes closed and shook her head. 'I can't,' she sobbed. 'I get so close, but I can't.'

We might reach for the term 'courtly love' to denote the way in which Chenault was pursued by Paul Kemp simply because she was forbidden to him as Yeamon's girlfriend. It began on the plane over to Puerto Rico where he was desperate to see to it that she could sit next to him and ended up getting into a fight with an elderly man over his seat. Keep in mind that the perpetuation of the 'courtly love' structure hints at the ongoing attempts of man to compensate for his reduction of women to mere vehicles for his fantasy.In turn woman comes to inhabit this fantasy as her 'femininity' and she is deprived of her particularity as a woman. As the pursuit moved beyond 'loving' her (for lack of a better phrase) for something in her more than herself - as an object - to seeing her as a subject of lack. If we continue along this Žižekian line we find that this leads us to the conclusion that sexual difference retains the Real which cannot be symbolised and lovers are fated to settle for a relationship that is a "non-relationship".

Then again we might be tempted here to accept the conclusion that the point of the tryst on the beach with the "dark skinned" Lorraine was to stand as the exotic Other with a certain authenticity in contrast to the anemic and inhibited whiteness of Chenault. A racism turned on its' head where Lorraine was an exotic and wild lay on a beach by comparison with Chenault. So the only point of Lorraine was to point us towards Chenault's deficiency, once she has served her purpose on the beach she can disappear. It is only after Kemp beds Chenault that the narrative can reach a conclusion - the return to home - so we might designate Puerto Rico as a vanishing mediator on it's own. But then what might we read into Chenault's disappearance as she heads onwards to New York? A rendezvous in the Big Apple remains a genuine possibility for Paul with Chenault. It is never fully resolved what happened at the carnival, through Paul's eyes it is as if Chenault was "asking for it" in the standard misogynist contours of rape as in some way the fault of the woman.

As Žižek has pointed out there is a sense in which the excessive desire of female fantasy and male fantasy fails in a bid to overcome such an excess. It poses a threat to male identity and the woman has to be erased as it were. One way to escape from the excessive Real encountered in fantasy is to 'make love', not to reenact the fantasy but to escape from it. Perhaps this is the reason that Chenault has to 'disappear' from the narrative in order for it to be able to reach any conclusion. What might that say about her appearance in the narrative as a whole? Effectively she was only present as her desire for phallic enjoyment. In the note she leaves for him to find Chenault writes "I can't stand it anymore. My plane leaves at six. You love me. We are soul-mates. We will drink rum and dance naked. Come see me in New York. I will have a few surprises for you." This is the only space which opens up for Chenault's subjectivity, yet she can only express what we already know and expect of her. There is no active part to play and in actuality woman "therefore does not exist" in the Lacanian formula.