'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.”

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.

Culturale Hedonia!

Take your Desires for Reality.

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


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

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

Live without Dead Time.

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

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

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

Enjoy without Chains.

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

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

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

Man of Gonzo.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Divine Anus of Salvador Dalí.

The Great Masturbator (1929)

 

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

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

Cabaret Scene (1922)

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

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

Portrait of Paul Éluard (1929)

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

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

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

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

The Latest Series from Adam Curtis.

Here are the three episodes of the latest series by documentarian Adam Curtis, in full wholes and not in tedious 10 minute chapters, along with the articles I wrote on each episode and the series in recent weeks. I strongly recommend the work of Adam Curtis, whether it be his documentaries, his blog or his articles in the press. The commentary he has to offer is related to the areas of his focus back in Oxford, specifically: genetics, evolutionary biology, psychology, politics, sociology and elementary statistics. In his latest series of films he looks at the way we have come to believe that the old hierarchies of power can be supplanted with self-organised networks from the internet to the global economy. Today we dream of systems which can balance and stabilise themselves without the intervention of authoritarian power. In reality this is the fantasy of the machines, it is not indicative of nature and it is an insufficient means of changing the world for the good.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Ayn Rand, Computers and Capitalism

Adam Curtis has offered a consistently fascinating and intelligent alternative to the realm of acceptable commentary in the mass-media. With the standard BBC accent Curtis comes across as just another Oxbridge liberal and, in all fairness, Curtis studied and worked at Oxford before he went to work in television which means he was born into a bourgeois background. But it is not the case that Curtis is a part of the Establishment and has been routinely attacked by the commentariat for his more controversial documentaries. In Pandora's Box he explores the dangers of the use of technocratic and supposedly rational theories in politics to run society, whether it be the social engineering of Bolshevik Russia or economic science in Britain. The acceptable commentary on monetarism in Britain is that it has been a successful way of controlling inflation and Curtis challenged this and pointed out that the money supply was actually on the rise by the time inflation was brought down to less than 3% in the 1980s.

In the conclusion of The Trap Adam Curtis calls for the reformulation of positive liberty in order to pursue radical change, which will not necessarily lead to tyranny and oppression as Isaiah Berlin argued. Before that in The Century of the Self Curtis argued that the average citizen has become a slave to their own desires, just as politicians have as well, in doing so we have forgotten that we can be more than that and that there are other sides to human nature. In The Power of Nightmares he concludes that the politics of fear will not last forever and leave the political class where it was left to concede that it has no ideas to offer the masses. For him the "War on Terror" is a grand narrative which was used to make sense of the world, it served the interests of politicians, journalists and terrorists in this way. The view of terrorism Adam Curtis put forward in The Power of Nightmares was criticised on the false grounds that he "implied" that al-Qaeda did not exist. It is clear that these are not the projects of just another Oxbridge liberal.

Social Networks, Resistance and the New Capitalism

Holism, White Whines & Multiculturalism

As a commentator Curtis is primarily concerned with the way ideas can effect the world, which would distinguish him from classical Marxists who would stress the role of the economic system in relation to ideas and the way the world is run. He is concerned with the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few. The latest series of films challenges the ideas of the Left which originate in the counter-culture of the 60s. Since then have been fused with the ideas of the libertarian Right, so to eliminate race, gender and class in a radically individualistic conception of the world. For him there is a dire need for leadership and inspirational visions of a better world on the Left, to challenge power we need to go beyond self-organised networks of individuals. There is a lack of a grand alternative to capitalism right now, there are plenty of alternatives which are not articulated well and are left to stew in academic circles for a long time.

The thesis is reminiscent of the Žižekian call for serious collective acts, as well as an examination of old ideas like communism, critique of ideology and the reactualisation of Lenin. We should not be so fearful of power, but rather be willing to use power. Slavoj Žižek would also emphasise that there are times when we can and should just sit still. He has also suggested that the contemporary Left should "begin from the beginning over and over again." In other words, we should not attempt build further on the revolutionary epoch of the 20th Century and descend to the point at which we started and rethink what we are doing. After doing so we can once again attempt to ascend the High Mountain, to borrow a simile used by VI Lenin. Even after the disaster of the 20th Century we should reorganise and make another serious attempt at radical change, just as Samuel Beckett once wrote "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Africa, Barbarism & Civilisation

The Post-Politics of the Selfish Gene

Ayn Rand, Computers and Capitalism.

The first in the series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace was brilliant and marked with the intellectual characteristics of Adam Curtis. The focus of the series is the way in which machines have risen and led us to believe that we could create a stable world that would last forever. Admittedly it is a strange story, it all began with an even stranger woman called Ayn Rand and a philosophy she called Objectivism. The philosophy might be described simply as a highly rigorous form of individualism, essentially meaning that man should put his own happiness first and spend his time improving himself to his utmost potential. He should use common sense and reason in every instance, whilst finding motivation in his own existence. There is no room for altruism and charity in this philosophy. The ideological procedure of Objectivism is an identification with capitalism which is so stringent that it actually undermines the ruling ideology. So we must understand Ayn Rand as part of the tradition of over-conformist authors.

Rand's masterpiece was Atlas Shrugged (1957) was trashed by the critics, even conservatives like William F Buckley called it "ideological fabulism" and distinguished it from The Fountainhead (1943) which he considered to be an engaging book. In spite of this Atlas Shrugged became the bestseller of the century and the most influential book in America second only to the Bible. In the book Rand attacks the idea of altruism head on, she depicts an America in which all aspects of life are controlled and regulated by the government. But then all of the creative individuals who have made America great go on strike and hideout in a remote valley whilst American society collapses. The creative geniuses only emerge to rebuild society after political power has collapsed and the country has descended into an apocalyptic hellhole. The new world which would be born from this would be built without politics and would be based upon the virtue of selfishness.

For the book Ayn Rand returned to a moment from her childhood, when her father went on strike to protest against the Bolsheviks and she imagined the super-rich in America going on strike against the rate of taxation in the US on high-earners. At the time it was 91% on incomes over $400,000 and would be chiseled down to 70% within Rand's lifetime. Though she would not live to see it chopped down to 28% under Ronald Reagan. In her lifetime she saw the rise of social democracy in the US and Bolshevism in Russia, the latter of which left her in an almost permanent state of post-traumatic stress disorder. In fact it could be said that as an intellectual Rand developed in the footprint of the Bolsheviks and only to oppose the fundamental ideals of socialism in order to defend the status quo. Thus, the thorough rejection of equality and descriptions of the masses as "refuse". The influence of Ayn Rand runs deep in American society, her writing has shaped the politics of people like Rand Paul, Glenn Beck and Jimmy Wales. Many of the nouveau riche of Silicon Valley see themselves as Randian heroes and some even name their children after Rand.


In California the idea emerged that political power was no longer needed, instead with the help of computer technology we could all become heroic individuals and an order could be maintained through the networks established by computers. With each individual totally free to follow their desires and each a component in a intricate system. The feedback of information between all individuals connected through computer networks could lead to a system which can stabilise and regulate itself. The experiment by Loren Carpenter supported the thesis that stability and order could be maintained without hierarchy and interference. This meshed well with the Californian ideology which is a combination of the anti-authoritarianism of the Hippie counter-culture with Yuppie techno-utopianism. Nation-states were rendered meaningless as the world had become an interconnected system of individuals and governments should leave the system to spawn a new kind of democracy.

In the first episode it appeared that Adam Curtis is taking a good hard look at fundamental aspects of capitalism, as he has in previous films like The Trap in which he examined freedom in the negative and positive conception. In this series the partial focus is on the idea of a stable system which is self-regulating and has no need for government. The notions of stability and perpetuity are fundamental to capitalism, for it requires 3% compound growth forever and it requires a way of managing crises as it is crisis-prone. Similarly important is the theoretical equilibrium between supply and demand as a direct result of the inherent efficiency of markets. Though supply and demand are actually in a state of perpetual flux. So even if the economists could initiate a change in aggregate supply to balance with aggregate demand it would never meet a perfect balance because demand would have already changed by the time supply had been altered. There is always a disequilibrium in the system.

The future chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan was a devotee of Ayn Rand and a loyal member of the Collective - a carefully policed group of intellectuals which had grown around Rand. Years later as chairman of the FED Greenspan met with Bill Clinton and told the President that his election promises of social reform could not be carried out without increasing the deficit, which would lead to higher interest rates and lower rates of growth. Greenspan advised the Clinton administration to slash spending in order to lower interest rates and leave the markets to boom. A boom began in the 1990s and it was believed that it would not end because the rise of computers enabled banks to predict the risk of particular investments and loans. The chaos of the markets might finally be brought to a stable and instantaneous order characterised by unending increase in the rates of productivity and economic growth.

By 1996 it appeared that the US economy had lapsed into irrational exuberance, there was no increase in productivity but profits continued to increase and it appeared that a speculative bubble had been created. But Greenspan buckled to political pressure and argued that the computers were increasing productivity in ways that were so innovative that the data was not picking it up. Around the same time, under pressure from the US countries like South Korea and Thailand jettisoned all constraints on the flow of capital. From the flood of Western capital that followed a huge speculative bubble in property emerged and the capital would flee as the crisis began, leaving the countries devastated. Just as the bubble burst in 1997 and the 'Asian miracle' came to an end the sex scandal engulfed the White House. Here the forces of power and love converged, the dream of a stable world was assaulted. The IMF flew in to the affected countries and stipulated market reforms in the economies in exchange for loans.

After 9/11 and the Enron debacle Alan Greenspan took action to stabilise the economy by repeatedly slashing interest rates to bolster consumption. The consumers would be the mechanism by which the system would be stabilised. In the past such an influx of cheap money into the economy had led to inflation, but it did not in this case and there was a boom over the next several years. The illusory boom gave Western leaders reason to believe that the system can stabilise itself without state-intervention. The Chinese Politburo had come up with a way to manage America, the Politburo deliberately held the exchange rate at a low level to ensure that exports would remain cheap. America was flooded with Chinese goods whilst dollars flooded into China, which were then lent back to the US by buying American bonds. The flow of cheap goods and cheap money created a false stability in America, whilst an orgy of lending and speculation spiraled out of control. The vast property bubble which emerged in the US as a result led to the Crash of '08 and in doing so the dream of perpetual stability were revealed to be totally deluded.

Faith in computers had led the politicians and bankers to believe that the boom would just go on and on no matter what. The machines had brought stability to the system, risk had been removed entirely. The fantasies of Alan Greenspan were exposed as just that in 2008, fantasies predicated on a wave of speculation. The market democracy had not emerged from financialisation and stability had not actually emerged. The banks mobilised political power to receive bailouts and the price for the boom would be paid by the Americans who were least capable of doing so. This also generalises to the austerity measures in Britain and other countries. The total wealth of Britain adds up to around £9 trillion, with the majority of that wealth concentrated in the top 20% of the population and the richest 10% holding £4 trillion in wealth. The cuts will hit the affect of forcing the bottom of 50% of the population, who hold less than 10% of the total wealth, to pay for it. The bottom 10% have less than nothing, negative wealth in the form of debt.

In the midst of the crisis we found ourselves incapable of imagining a better world or even a different system, instead we have opted to recreate the system as it was before the Crash and we have handed our public services the bill to do so. Capitalist realism is the only phrase to describe this state of affairs in which we are embedded. Capitalism is the only realistic system for us and all we can do is adjust to it. A business ontology has become all pervasive, so all areas of social reality are to be reorganised along corporate lines and this extends to everything from forests to health-care. This might help us understand the reawakened fascination in Ayn Rand as the crisis hit in 2008 which, as Slavoj Žižek has noted, came about around the same time that social democratic thought was partially unearthed. We can't even begin to imagine a better world so we merely reinvent the current order in a more radical way, perhaps this is the only message Rand offers to us.