A response to Peter Hitchens.

Well, it was a pleasant surprise to find my short piece on Peter Hitchens has drawn a response from the man himself. You can read his article below, and I’ll now proceed to respond accordingly.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/12/left-wing-person-nearly-says-something-interesting.html

 

The main problem, as he sees it, with my observations is the implication that he yearns for a return to halcyon days, and of course these days never existed. To be fair, I was referring more so to the reactionary press in general when I wrote: ‘Fortunately, it is too late to turn back the clock on the progress achieved in our attitudes to sexuality, gender and race. The malaise of the reactionary press is really down to this harsh reality.’ In retrospect, I should’ve been sharper on this distinction and avoided the conflation.

On an ironic note, it was the socialist movement which emerged out of the despair of the loss of the non-industrial pre-capitalist world, and in that regard it was backward-looking, while at the same time pushing forwards to a better world. It’s perfectly clear to my side that it’s the future we’re fighting over, and that it requires historical perspective to see this era as transient.

I should make clear that the purpose of my article was to convey the reasons why Peter Hitchens stands out from the commentariat - a herd of independent minds if there ever was one. It wasn’t intending to rehash the standard critique of the Hitchens brand of traditionalist conservatism. He’s right on several key issues: the interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria; civil liberties and free-speech. But it’s also the case that he’s wrong in much of his prognosis.

As Mr. Hitchens emphasises, in my article I observe: ‘the way he frames left-wing politics really comes from the position he takes on cultural and socio-moral issues. “It is because the left's ideas – by their nature – undermine conscience, self-restraint, deferred gratification, lifelong marriage and strong, indivisible families headed by authoritative fathers.”

Mr. Hitchens writes: ‘But he doesn’t say whether he accepts or rejects this, or even what he actually thinks about conscience (can he be against it?) or the other things I list as virtues undermined by the strong modern state.’

On conscience, I think moral values have a necessary role in any human community, as I’m a moral realist; but I wouldn’t say this is inherently ‘conservative’. We can still debate what constitutes right and wrong, though I will say that I do not know of any leftist who embraces moral relativism. It would be completely inconsistent as moral relativism cannot be expected to uphold any values, and certainly not egalitarian values.

As for deferred gratification, it was the liberalisation of credit which inverted this ‘deferral’ and left many people to spend first and work off the debt later. Of course, this wouldn’t be the case if the wage share of GDP for the working-class hadn’t been squeezed for the last 40 years. So this is not a monopoly of the middle-classes, but it has been turned on its head in recent decades. The picture is much more complex.

A great many people living on benefits, particularly those trying to raise children on benefits, practice forms of deferred gratification by effectively fasting. I know this because I come from a single-parent household, and I knew many others in similar circumstances, very often the lone parent will eat less and less to save up for Christmas. I don’t expect the Mail to portray this side of so-called ‘dependency culture’, but it’s revealing that they are so blind to it.

When it comes to monogamy, my own view is that it will outlast its competitors (particularly the fad of polyamory) due to its simplicity and mutuality. I don’t romanticise the institution of marriage, its clear strong relationships and families will be formed whether it exists or not.  I was somewhat sceptical of marriage equality because it was clearly a highly conservative proposal. Civil partnerships were the progressive innovation and offered a secular alternative free of a morally bankrupt and increasingly repressive state.

Understandably, Mr. Hitchens found fault with my dismissive remark: ‘He’s wrong on almost all cultural and social issues’. As I hadn’t set out to critique every one of the positions he’s ever taken I didn’t feel the need to go into specifics. But I’ll be forthright and specific here.

A perfect example of where Hitchens goes wrong: addiction. The claim that there is no objective basis for addiction is simply untrue. As medical professionals will tell you, the liver physically changes in the course of prolonged alcohol consumption and this can run alongside a psychological dependency on the drug’s effects. The answer is abstinence and therapy, but there is a very high recidivism rate. The denial of addiction is not only wrong, it is an unnecessary point to make.

The cases for/against the legalisation of drugs can be made without such a point. Likewise, it is possible to question the prevailing culture of hedonism without the presupposition that it is all a matter of ‘free-choice’ (a manifestly liberal point in itself). The only sensible hedonism was advocated and practiced by Epicurus. As long as it remains almost taboo to turn down a drink it will be likely for functioning alcoholics, let alone non-functioning ones, to emerge. But I doubt this will be put right by silly bans and regressive taxes.

To conclude, it’s only possible to rail against conventional wisdom once it has become convention. Mr. Hitchens is sincere in his wish to reorder society, but if he were to succeed he would not only make his work defunct, he would also provide the basis for it to be torn down all over again. That being said, I don’t see anything ‘radical’ in extolling fashionable hedonism.

Should anyone want to ask me a direct question, you can email me at: cainmosni@hotmail.co.uk

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.

'This book is dedicated to mankind.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Proper Task of Life.

 

The anti-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche deemed art “the proper task of life.” He had moved on much farther than the view of Schopenhauer's, where art is a means to deceive the Will and escape from the treadmill of its domination. Nietzsche advocates a radical acceptance of the imperfection of the world and this life in resistance to the otherworldly. He associates art with this embrace of the domination of the Will. This is far from a glum acceptance of a horrible existence. He wants us to rejoice in existence and laugh at the world in all of its absurdity. The knowledge of our existence beyond the precepts of religion provides us with a certain freedom. It is not that man should be freed from emotion, rather life is made meaningful by the passions - which are a source of insight, orientation and understanding. The attachments we build through our passions provide meaning, whether it be the attachments we form with people, ideals or aspirations. The creativity involved in art is particularly important here, especially the attachment forged with a work of art.

It is in this light that the Will to Power is to be understood as a celebration of the passionate life rather than in terms of metaphysics or motivation. Art is not just an escape route but an affirmation of existence, as it can even serve as the process of revaluation insofar as art allows us to participate in the nature of things. This is the development of culture out of the unfolding of human capacities. It is not simply instrumental, works of art may be seen as ends-in-themselves. For this very reason culture is not undermined by heterogeneity, far from it. It is homogeneity which leads to culture going stale and even becoming a lifeless scroll rolled up in the canon. Before you know it, we are to impart this stale culture to the next generation without reflection. Yet high and low culture are not fixed in stone. As Terry Eagleton has observed, there are works once considered canon-worthy which are much less brilliant than the early episodes of The Simpsons. Culture is not ahistorical or unchanging, it is forever transient.
 

 

Loving Decay

 

Too often culture is taken to be ahistorical and unchanging. Only for change to be received as deeply threatening to the artefacts preserved in formaldehyde by a cultural elite. To presuppose this is to accept a rather narrow conception of culture. Even still it is a widespread understanding of culture. We even find it in the work of Michel Houellebecq, a new self-styled Céline, in his nihilism. In Atomised (1998) Houellebecq portrays a vision of late capitalist society as in the thrall of its own decay. The chaos of the market society and its depredations has blown away the traditional order of morality. Sexual liberalism has prevailed to the extent that the very act has become a commodity in a marketplace. Even though Houellebecq seems to accept a conservative thesis on culture he is pessimistic at the possibility of any kind of deliverance from this process. The collapse of the old order is irreversible. It may be better to take what pleasure can be procured from its final twitches than to try and turn the clock back as Evelyn Waugh wanted.

In his nihilism Houellebecq identifies more so with the decay of culture which he seems to disdain. The pages of Atomised (1998) are littered with philosophical conundrums, scientific history and the material pre-conditions for the society which we inhabit. He focuses a great deal on the emergence of sexual freedom in the 1960s, its origins in the Hippie scene and the spread of the Commune movement around Europe and America. His protagonists Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Clément endure the explosion of new possibilities before even reaching pubescence: abandoned by their Hippie mother, only to drift through numerous encounters and non-encounters with members of the opposite sex. Bruno represents the failed attempts at hedonism divorced from the utopianism of the '68 Generation; whereas Michel languishes in anhedonic distance from human relations to prioritise the life of the mind. The dichotomy is set between the unsated and the undesiring to lead us from the 1960s to the 90s. Like the society in which we live the brothers are forever shaped by the events of the 60s. 

 

Grand Catastrophes


The cultural revolution of the 1960s had an undeniably profound impact on the people who lived amidst its birth pangs. In 1986 a film crew came to make a short documentary about the writer JG Ballard. In the interview, Ballard pointed out that the world which we inhabit requires a certain amount of oil to make the cogs go around and keep the wheels turning. For Ballard it was sex which played such a role in the 1960s, but now sex is no longer a new frontier and increasingly violence has become the oil which keeps the wheels turning. The media landscape of narratives thrives on sensation and requires sensation to go on, like a drowsy beast we find ourselves in need of constant electric shocks just to stay awake. Ballard suggests that the electric shocks are provided more so by violence today.

A major focus of Ballardian fiction is a secondary world which has been constructed on the media landscape of television, film, radio and the press etc. For Ballard we live in an environment saturated to the extent that we live in a two-tier world, we inhabit a dual reality. The immediate reality of everyday life and the secondary reality forged as the media acts as a map in search of a territory. It is a search for something in ordinary reality which meshes with this secondary reality, only to magnify disasters, confrontations, personal tragedies and so on. At once this secondary world is the subject matter of Ballard's novels, it is described and developments within it are predicted. Too often do we assume that the violence on television is bad for us, the truth about violence is good for us and cannot be repressed. The edge is a cautionary one, e.g. “Dangerous Bends Ahead, Slow Down!” with the paradox being Crash (1973) in which Ballard bellows “Dangerous Bends Ahead, Speed Up!” All in an appreciation of the chaos underneath the surface of modern civilisation. Ballard may have basked in the fires of this chaos, but he was ultimately on the side of it.

Living the Dirt

 

 

If we turn to the post-Beat scene of writing from the American West Coast we find another noteworthy literary creature. The poetry of Charles Bukowski stands in contrast to Houellebecq's nihilism. Bukowski's dirty realism pulsates with the same themes as Houellebecq albeit with much more in the way of exuberance. He doesn't so much languish in complacent affluence as live and breathe the filthier side of life. Bukowski remains an essentially American writer in his unabashed individualism, which serves to complement the reservoir of squalor and misanthropy in his prose. He has no coherent social message to convey only defiant exultation in the decline of civilisation. Take the closing lines of Dinosauria, We “And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard” only to add “Born out of that./The sun still hidden there/Awaiting the next chapter.” Thereby Bukowski turns the Apocalypse into another twisted turn in the anfractuous road of progress. We are to be superseded, along with the transient stage which we have made for ourselves. Perhaps Bukowski and Houellebecq share an appreciation of the flux of this world because they were both poets.

In his reasoning Bukowski derided other writers for starting out with pretentious attempts at setting a captivating scene for the readers. It was dead prose, no longer wriggling with life. Instead Bukowski went for the jugular and opened Post Office (1971) with a real hook “It began as a mistake”. He was a working-class poet, often unemployed, usually drifting and forever inebriated. He found the bottle analogous to a fine symphony - something he knew plenty about in his love of classical music. His publisher John Martin considered Bukowski the Walt Whitman of the 20th Century in putting pen to paper in the gutter. He conveyed the grittiest of experiences in his own melancholic brand of free verse. Black Sparrow Press marketed Bukowski as the poet who wrote for the average man in contemporary America. Yet Bukowski was much more misanthropic and self-centred in his alcoholism to be concerned with the wants of the masses. Even still the dirty old man chewed up Wagner and Kant only to spit them back out in his portrayals of a life lived in the darkest corners of American society.

Beautiful Chaos


As Ballard was the middle-class doctor who ventured into bohemian territory after the death of his wife, Bukowski yearned for a normal life and Houellebecq accepted that it would never be found. With Chuck Palahniuk it seems more so that there is more joy to be found in the absurdity of modern society. Picking fun at society by highlighting its more obscure and obscene side is not a new method for satirists. Neither are the themes developed in Palahniuk's work particularly earth-shattering. If you haven’t read Chuck Palahniuk then you should rush out and obtain, possibly by violent means, a copy of Survivor (1999) or Fight Club (1996) as soon as possible. He originally set out to emulate much more conventional modes of writing, but ended up in Tom Spanbauer's workshop. There Chuck took on a radical minimalism which has become the form for the transgressive content of his novels. Though transgressive in content Palahniuk's corpus contains thematic links reaching back to the origins of English literature. You can find courtly love in the deliberate variations made on the boy-meets-girl frame of events in his writing. The foreground stories with their dysfunctional and deranged characters falls against a background worth further examination. Fight Club is not just a tale of madness, or even the love story concealed within it, there is the emergence of an anti-capitalist terrorist network working to bring down America's credit system.

Unlike Houellebecq and Bukowski, Chuck Palahniuk is not a nihilist for he still clings to modernism and romanticism at heart. He may have much more in common with the existentialist tradition. He sets out to carve out a unique place as a writer, dismissing the likes of Martin Amis as a purveyor of “beautifully padded sentences”. It is not enough to try and posture as a living classic as Amis and McEwan does. To put it as Chuck has “We're living in a different world than Charles Dickens lived in”. A radical minimalism strips down the prose for all to view, but this is not a reductionist task as the battle is to build deep layers into the narrative in themes, allusions, symbolism and ideas. To this end Palahniuk may have recycled old themes and fed them into his projects. The mission of dangerous writing is to seek out and cover those aspects of life most uncomfortable, embarrassing and unsettling for us to confront. That is the locus of transgressive fiction and its purveyors. This is the flux of culture before our eyes.

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.

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.

Too Rare to Die, Too Weird to Live.

“We were two miles outside of Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.” Thus begins the first line of the book which serves as the handshake, for most, with Hunter S Thompson, the masterpiece Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972). It is 40 years after that book was written and 6 years after he decided to call it a day with a bullet to the head. The suicide in 2005 was inevitable.  Thompson had made no secret of his decision to commit suicide for years before he actually did.  The reasons were many and varied, but the main reasons were due to his failing health, his idealisation of youth and his resolute refusal to grow old gracefully. The funeral had been planned years before and Thompson’s old friend Johnny Depp was responsible for the funding of the ceremony – the good doctor’s remains were fired out of a cannon at his compound in Colorado.

The stereotypical image of Hunter S. Thompson is not actually one of Thompson himself; most think of his alter ego, the drug crazed, babbling lunatic Raoul Duke. This is the persona in which Thompson was able to write such insane tales of unbelievable excess such as the aforementioned Fear and Loathing. But Thompson himself was less of a caricature, and more of a thoughtful, darkly angry crusader against all that he saw was wrong with America. His targets included the decadence of the 70’s, pro football, and his arch nemesis Richard Milhous Nixon.  Nixon personified everything that Thompson thought had gone awry with the United States, for he was the gutless war-monger who bombed Indochina into the stone-age for nothing more than political capital and when the students at Kent State came out in protest Thompson connived to have them slain by the National Guard. Years before Woodward and Bernstein blow open the Watergate scandal, Thompson was already decrying Nixon as a crook, a blowhard and the bastard who would plunge America into a decadent, depraved parody of every truth and principle on which it was founded, as indeed he did.

But it is for Gonzo that Thompson is so fondly remembered. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Gonzo journalism, here’s a quick primer to save you the trouble of checking Wikipedia. Gonzo journalism is the antithesis of “fly on the wall” journalism, being more “fly in the ointment” in its style. It approaches any given subject material from a subjective viewpoint, exacerbating details to a ridiculous proportion in an attempt to give a more sympathetic view of the material in question. It was invented and pioneered by Thompson in his article The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved, in which he described his own experience of the Derby rather than in the traditional sports-writer style – he covered the crowd and not the derby. He did this purely because of a looming deadline and he had no time to write up his notes. The resulting article is by turns grotesque, informative and utterly hilarious, and gives a far more accurate portrayal of Kentucky horseracing than would have otherwise been shown by a traditional writer. Gonzo grew from there, and is now aped by innumerable writers across the world (one of these writers being a particularly persistent perpetrator of this style). 

The aforementioned Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas is undoubtedly his most famous work,  a monolith of excess and depravity seared across America's most grotesque altar to consumption and vice. It is the starting point for most into the world of Hunter S. Thompson, and is also his funeral eulogy for the spirit of the 60's. The nihilistic search for a thrill that Thompson (masquerading as Raoul Duke) and his unnamed Samoan attorney (a comic exaggeration of Thompson's real life friend and confidant Oscar Acosta) undertake in Nevada is born out of a sadness that the hippy spirit of the decade before did not bring about universal peace and love, but instead opened up America to the "grim meathook realities" of what absolute freedom really meant. The famously Herculean consumption of narcotics undertaken in the book is also inspired by the death of the  60's, a sly comment on how the spiritualistic nature of drugs as preached by Timothy Leary descended into the hedonistic need for a chemical buzz that fuelled the 70's, and as it remains to this day. The book came as a howled requiem for the Beat Movement, the generosity and revolutionary zeal of writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg replaced with a scowling, dark commentary on how the world failed to live up to the promise of the Hippy Dream, and wistfully looking back on how pathetic and futile the whole movement had been.

We must remember him as a man with one face looking back at John F Kennedy, the closest a politician could get to an everyman, and looking towards George McGovern with his other face as he asks for three margaritas and six beers for lunch. There are few ways to summarise the man's viewpoint without giving way to his own words, as he was more eloquent than we can ever be: "There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die."

Written by JT White and Josh Ferguson, December 6th 2011, for the Heythrop student newspaper the Lion originally.