OUR RIOT, for once; although that may depend
on whose you mean, a riot of one’s own
being the latest simulacrum - the multi-
player massive out for antic lulz.
(Check usage with anon. informant; queries
outstanding on rahtid, Abaddon. Feds
is U. S., surely?). Mimesis abounds
like baseball caps or God-talk, un-Promethean
wildfire through hermetic messaging -
burn after reading, and/or disseminate
at your own risk. Risk also of becoming
strange even to yourself, unknown before
the magistrates, plaything of many tongues
reduced to monolingual stammering.

(partly a test of Octopress’s jsFiddle plugin):

While I’m broadly in sympathy with this, and think it’s a useful description of a particular dynamic of desensitisation, my inner Laurent Berlant is whispering in my ear that there’s something a bit odd about assuming that moral consistency is the normal human state and that inconsistency is a symptom of degradation or incipient sociopathy.

I would suggest that the problem with porn is not so much that it exposes its consumers to things that are ab-normal with respect to their own conscious standards, but that it establishes its own normativity, its own rigid template of roles and behaviours, and that it does so for essentially mercenary reasons.

A lot of human culture involves the enjoyment, more or less clandestine and disavowable, of cruel, violent, obsessive or otherwise socially unacceptable passions: crime fiction, horror movies, fairy tales, paintings of martyred saints and so on. Contemporary explorations of the dangerous and illicit usually conjure the monster from its box, let it romp around on stage for a bit, then put it safely away again. We’re not good at dealing with a morally ambiguous cosmos; we compartmentalise, and this compartmentalisation has become culturally normal for us.

Porn fits perfectly into this world, plays entirely by its rules (for all its fake “outlaw” credentials), but at the same time is relatively unusual in that it tries to make the box seem like an attractive place to live, to make its consumers resent their reality for being larger and more complicated than its reality. Porn doesn’t really tolerate moral inconsistency or ambiguity either; it simply ratifies the “forbidden” flip-side of our rather timid consumerist enjoyments.

One of the things I’ve always liked about Andrea Dworkin is that she never imagined that a sexuality free of patriarchal domination and commercial exploitation would be safe: she felt that sex was big enough and bad enough to call on the full humanity of both men and women, and that the task of constructing sexual integrity was a daunting and thrilling one. She hated porn because it was ugly, deceitful, misogynist and cruelly destructive; but also because it was in the way, because it thwarted our attempts to imagine something stronger, wiser and more courageous.

I wonder, therefore, about the usefulness of attacks on porn that play up its morally dangerous and corrupting qualities, that suggest implicitly that we should cling to safety and purity. Much porn is vicious, and it can be vile, but it offers its own securities, its own consolations and imaginary solutions: it has its own privileged place among the mental fetters of our culture, and only in its own imagination is it a wild and lawless force assailing that culture from without.

I’ve been working on a Java RangeSet implementation, which enables you to define a set as a collection of intervals (e.g. Monday to Wednesday, and Saturday to Sunday). This has a direct application in my secret “toposes in Java” project, but may be more widely useful…

The full source is in the localtruth GitGub repository.

If you are a (relatively speaking) ethically aware person, it’s likely that your ethics are focused on the reduction of harm, most particularly to sentient creatures and most generally to the biosphere which supports their existence. A sentient creature is one which can be harmed in a specific way: it can suffer, both acutely (as in the sensations of a sparrow being torn apart by a sparrowhawk) and chronically (as in the sensations of that same sparrow slowly starving to death during the winter).

Both acute and chronic suffering are endemic throughout the world of sentient beings, and human life in technologically advanced societies is quite unusual in the extent to which it is able to keep such suffering at bay, to treat it as something out of the ordinary. When we think about other animals it might be fun to be, we normally choose those which are relatively exempt from being preyed on by jackals, infested with gnawing parasites, paralysed and pox-eaten by myxomatosis, or casually gulped down in their hundreds of thousands by passing whales. We tend to use similar criteria when thinking about which other human beings it might be fun to be: it might be nice to be a dolphin, or a wealthy layabout in Berlin; it would be pretty ghastly to be a vole, or someone poor, weak and undefended in the middle of a warzone.

Wars are not natural events, or at least are not wholly natural events: you can understand the daily slaughter of the wilderness without recourse to political terms; and wars can also give way to ceasefires, cessations of hostilities which would be incomprehensible to a hyena. But by disrupting and dismantling the defenses of society against starvation, pestilence and predation, war brings human beings closer to the state in which other sentient creatures live: setting aside the numberless cruelties of specifically human invention, the horrors of war are most generally the horrors of being a living thing that can suffer and perish, that must fear for its life, that can and will be hurt atrociously and for no reason other than the need for survival of some other living thing.

At what point does the ubiquity and intensity of suffering in the natural world render meaningless the individual effort to reduce the suffering of this or that suffering creature? Perhaps at no point: kindness remains a virtue, no matter how bad things are or how much worse they may get. But it does render one kind of meaning unavailable, and that is the redemptive meaning that the rhetoric of “animal liberation” gives to the task of extricating non-human animals from the grasp of human power, need and appetite. Life on earth without us would not be a paradise, in any sense that we could recognise according to our own preferences for comfort and security over terror and pain. The departure of humanity would, in fact, leave the world devoid of its only remotely ethically attractive feature: the propensity of human beings to try to make parts of it nicer, for each other and for such non-human animals as they elect to care about.

FERAL RATS, racailles, addressed as raca:
virulent emptiness, the scowling void
uncowled before the cameras. Call them eaten
ones; whip up the circus beasts’ starved fury.
Projectionists on double-time, sharp fixers
weaving through the strobed light by which
poet and statistician align their columns.
No soul-gape in Eton boys, no want
of any kind in boozed-up Buller men,
their bladders bulging, slackening at whim;
the stream called purifying which strips flesh
from bone, shows anarchy the skeleton
cavorting with bobby’s helmet, his bleached grin
unflinching before the lawless force of law.

Patrick Mullins, wayward and occasionally vexatious spirit of these and many other parts, has written a book, Illegal Dances of New York City. Graphomanic, self-absorbed and perplexing, it composes a kind of textual mirror-world out of personal anecdotes, cake recipes, opaque glosses on film and dance, fragments of online interactions with various pseudonymous interlocutors, and a kind of insistently bizarre fan-fiction centred on an elusive introject named as “Saint Nick Land”.

The first section was once rejected for publication by the editors of the journal Collapse, who described it as “execrable”. In a sense they were right, at least by their own lights: the instinctive reaction of any cohesive theoretical body to the kind of text Patrick has produced would be to try to expel it, to shit it out. Illegal Dances is frequently concerned with “crawlspace”, with places of refuge from systematically articulated thought and living. Crawlspace makes room for accumulations of junk and clutter, chimerical assemblages of totems and fetish-objects, erotic strange-attractors, items of sentimental value (among the curios exhibited in Illegal Dances is a poem of mine that Patrick liked and that I gave him permission to include; I couldn’t say exactly what it’s doing there, but it doesn’t look out of place as such). Of these, the book attempts to extract the “efflorescences and nectars”.

Is it a good book? It’s beautifully put together, a credit to its publisher. It is also a record, an inscription, of the continual involution of “outer” into “inner” life, of time into image and place into crawlspace. It will not appeal to everyone’s sympathies, but it should be understood as a genuine, if obscure and singular, work of art.

What I get most of all from LvT (watching Antichrist right now) is hatred of intelligence. Intelligence must be humiliated…

Intelligence must learn that it is not intelligent, that stupidity is more powerful than intelligence. Stupidity is the prime mover.

Intelligence cannot accept that stupidity is more powerful than it, and is stupid because it cannot learn the rules of stupidity.

Stupidity rules over beauty, emotion, nature, the depths of things. Intelligence misconstrues the world as intelligible.

Violent grief, perversion, rage, imbecility, self-harm are authentic. Intelligence obstructs authenticity with its inauthenticity.

LvT sees women as fundamentally aligned, simpatico, with the underlying stupidity of things. Men are misaligned, and trust in intelligence.

Cinema, as a sensual art, outruns intelligence: it can tap into reserves of stupidity. Cinematic immersion is a stupor, self-abandonment.

A fundamental identity: for LvT, cinema is feminine. The cinematic subject is woman. Men appear in cinema in order to be eclipsed by women.

Antichrist is extremely beautiful to look at, even if one distracts oneself by tweeting about it. A mad, kitsch, factitious beauty.

A beauty that mocks intelligence, which seeks to see truly. Antichrist’s beauty is the beauty of things that are not there.

This is also a formula for cinema: the beauty of things that are not there.

“You’re just so damn arrogant!” “Your thoughts distort reality, not the other way around”.

“I’m cured! You’re so clever!”. Everything must necessarily go to shit from this point on. “You can’t just be happy for me, can you?”

“Chaos…reigns!” And then it….rains. Reality puns.

Writing degenerates to a childish scrawl.

Let’s role-play nature, nature against reason. Nature appears to reason as a role in reason’s role-play.

“Women do not control their own bodies. Nature does”. “You were supposed to be critical of those texts!”

You are not supposed to be critical. Critique masters, neutralises, subordinates to reason. Nature’s stupidity is beyond critique.

Nature’s answer to phallogocentrism is blunt trauma with a block of wood.

Willem Defoe battering a small bird to death, having crawled backwards into a dank hole. Now he gets it. Silly man!

“A crying woman is a scheming woman”. Nature projects its schemes through abjection.

OUCH.

“None of it is any use”. Grim and frosty hail. Improvidence, inutility, loss and waste: pure expenditure without return.

Foraging, watched by woodland creatures. Typical LvT fake-out ending, equivalent to bells in Breaking The Waves: jarring false resolution.

Well, that was indeed both grim and tr00.

I think of LvT’s false resolutions as final farts in the face of intelligence. He knows what he’s about.

Antichrist less aggravating than Breaking The Waves because largely void of pathos, which acts as a kind of apologetics for the worldview.

I don’t object to a work of art’s being the product of a sick mind. Most interesting ones are. I object to apologetics, special pleading.

What non-Catholics see as Catholic sentimentality is just this form of special pleading, a way of circumventing rational evaluation.

You are supposed to be terribly moved; you are supposed not to argue with what moves you so terribly.

Antichrist is what it is: you can enter and leave its world, which has its own integrity and consistency as depressive worlds generally do.

It also - as I said about Xasthur - shows you the facticity of depressive thinking, the bare circularity on which it depends.

Tweets from June 10th:

Thinking about consent as disposition vs consent as speech act. Compare “like” and “Facebook like”. I can FB like things that I do not actually like. I can give consent (speech act) without consenting (willing, being disposed towards).

Earlier on, I’d been talking about “being (an) intellectual” as being somewhat like “being (a) homosexual” - an analogy that has to break down somewhere, but which captures a particular tension that interests me: that between “extrinsically defined” and “intrinsically motivated” identification. The basic idea is that while both “intellectual” and “homosexual” are socially-created categories (hence “extrinsically defined”), you can’t account for the existence of either intellectuals or homosexuals purely in terms of the power of “society” to call them into being in order to fill out arbitrary categorical distinctions. If no-one had the particular “structure of feeling” that characterises the intrinsic motivation of the intellectual, there would be no intellectuals. Such structures of feeling are aetiologically obscure, and there is no obvious mapping from large-scale social distinctions (notably class) to whatever it is that differentiates intellectuals or homosexuals from others around them.

Now, pretty much the entire point of a concept like Foucault’s “subjectivation” is that “intrinsic motivation” is produced by an outside working its way in: it doesn’t gush spontaneously out of some hidden well-spring in the individual, but is produced under intense local pressure as a result of a kind of “fold” (as Deleuze’s reading of Foucault has it). Lacan’s observation that my desire is the desire “of the Other” has a similar bent: we aren’t dealing with some inalienable personal property here, but rather with something aggravatingly and irrevocably alien, something in me that does not altogether belong to me and can never be fully integrated into who and what I imagine myself to be.

It’s here that the analogy between sexuality and having an intellectual bent seems most suggestive: in both cases, we have to do with a kind of unscratchable itch, something that nags at you and drives you out of hiding, out of conformity, even while the “extrinsic definition” of that itch and the means for its satisfaction continues to invent new ways of giving in, new things to settle for.

The “intrinsic” here is primarily that which resists external normalising pressure, that insists on going against the flow. It’s about being “unbalanced”, in some particular sense. Or maladjusted, as they used to say.

Which, again, is not so far from Deleuze’s Foucault, notably Deleuze’s allegation that Foucault’s analysis of biopower culminates in a kind of “vitalism” in which “life” is that which “resists” the power of death carried by the outside in its pacifying, normalising aspect. But Foucault’s point would be that this “resistance” is produced by, and as a kind of eddy or cross-wind within, the very nexus of forces it resists, and is not really a resistance of the inside (my “true inner nature”) against the outside (what “society” wants me to be). It’s rather an extremely localised, and locally intensified, skirmish in a wider conflict that starts before I do, and continues beyond the point where I leave off.

In any case, something like the opposition “intrinsic” / “extrinsic” came into play a couple of days later when I started thinking about consent in terms of a distinction between speech acts, public signals of consent, and the kind of inward disposition we might know as willingness, voluntary agreement, consensuality and so on. A “disposition”, as Gilbert Ryle puts in, is a propensity to act in certain ways in certain situations, whether out of habit (being a smoker, for instance, or a worrier) or through acquired expertise (being very good at playing pool, or “instinctively” knowing when and how to comfort someone in emotional distress).

Ryle argues in The Concept of Mind that dispositions are not the shadowy contents of some internal mental theatre, but ascriptions we make to actors, including ourselves, whose actions are reliable or predictable in some respect. So consensuality as a disposition is less a distinct inward sentiment (“I feel really consenting tonight”) and more a tendency to go along with something, to promote it by one’s own efforts, to anticipate feeling satisfied by the outcome, and to experience satisfaction if the anticipated outcome is reached. There is obviously more to sexual desire than this, but one thing we would say about a truly consenting sexual partner is that they were not merely someone who had “given their consent” (i.e. signed the waiver), but whose behaviour towards us was a continuing donation of consent, consensual in its very drift or willed direction.

The merit of “no means no” as a sexual maxim is that it arms the speaker with an instant power of veto, an ability to jam on the brakes without having to engage in further (presumably unwanted) sexual negotiation. This is particularly important if there is an imbalance of power between the negotiating parties: “no means no” for men too, but they are perhaps more often in the position of being able to rebuff sexual advances without having to issue a flat and uncontestably final refusal of this kind (there is less hazard, for example, in pretending - for reasons of politeness or vanity - to entertain an offer one isn’t really taking seriously). If both parties are equipped with reasonable tact and good sexual manners, then one will generally be able to put the other off, or let them down, comparatively gently. It would be nice to be able to rely on such mutual delicacy all the time; but people have an alarming tendency to stop being delicate when they stop getting what they want.

In any case, I’m less sure of the usefulness of “yes means yes”, simply because it seems to conflate the speech-act notion of consent (clicking “like” on someone’s Facebook status) with the kind of willing consensuality that only really manifests itself in and as a pattern of behaviour over time (if I actually “like” someone, I’m disposed to seek out their company and to try to remain in their good graces). Why is this a problem? It becomes a problem for me when, for example, the English Collective of Prostitutes maintains simultaneously that prostitution is both consenting and driven by economic necessity. It’s possible for performative consent - saying “yes” or “that’ll be thirty quid, then” - to co-exist with being motivated by economic necessity; but I don’t see how the kind of willing consensuality that most non-rapists want from a sexual partner can do so.

What the person working as a prostitute wants is not to be poor: they have a (perfectly rational, and morally blameless) disposition to avoid poverty and seek ways to escape from it. I don’t think anybody bar a few deluded punters believes that the prostitute wants the “client”, or that their sexual minstrelsy (feigning desire, willingness, urgency and so on) is anything other than a sales pitch. This being so, there is a real sense in which the prostitute’s “yes” means “yes, but not really”: yes, but not in the sense that I want this, or anything about this besides the fact that I will be able to put money in the electricity meter when it’s over. How is it that anybody finds this tolerable? It seems to me that the ability of punters to tolerate it, to be satisfied with a “yes” that means so little, is as significant an attribute of “rape culture” as the ability of rapists to disregard the “no” that means so much.

i)

a black swan he says
give us a black swan
easy
easy now
no need to stir up the agon

over what very well might
be nothing
a white
swan on black water
drifting

through late evening
as the light
ebbs
and shadows lie down across
the way you came

ii)

soundtracked with low strings
with tremelo
portentous
or bearing portent
sinister modulation

of the air
enclosing stillness
the clouds’ high striated
cirrostratus
rippling in convection

as the white neck bows
and horses in the next
grey field
start and trample
shaking themselves loose